Abstract
It is perhaps stating the blindingly obvious when we say that technologically, organisationally, and socially, we are experiencing rapid change. Whether, however, our analytic approaches have kept up is an open question. In these concluding remarks, we examine the changing face of social, organisational, and work practice as a dynamic sociotechnical phenomenon and present an argument for a modest and productive approach to generalisation which will allow us to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, case studies which can be narrowly focused and short-term and, on the other, decisions about the appropriate level of generality which might allow us to transfer insights and be a basis for technological design. We use the word ‘modest’ advisedly here for some part of what we have to say will be avowedly polemic. Many of the problems we discuss are not new. Issues around participation, the politics of design, the role of the reflexive researcher, and so on have been discussed ad nauseam. Our main contention, however, is that we have yet to provide a systematic alternative to more conventional approaches to the investigation and design relationship. We see this to be the focus of an emerging discourse on socially embedded technologies. In the following, we will elaborate on such a research agenda, developing it out of a critical evaluation of the state of the art in the CSCW discourse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This is not to argue that decomposition is unnecessary or irrelevant. Large-scale design problems more or less necessitate a common approach to documentation and the language used within it. The point is rather that decompositional strategies rely utterly on the quality of the initial steps, and the CSCW position has been that ‘requirements’ analysis has been relatively neglected as a problem (see Jirotka and Goguen).
- 2.
We are only too aware that even the most narrowly construed qualitative study will produce some kind of generalisation – to the effect that, for instance, respondents ‘typically’ report X or Y. That isn’t the point, of course. Comparison from one setting to another is.
References
Bannon, L., Schmidt, K., & Wagner, I. (2011). Lest we forget. In Proceedings of ECSCW’12. Seattle: Springer.
Bonsiepe, G. (2007). The uneasy relationship between design and design research. In R. Michel (Ed.), Design research now. Basel: Birkhauser.
Brannigan, A. (2004). The rise and fall of social psychology: The use and misuse of the experimental method. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage.
Corbin, J. M., & Strauss, A. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). The basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques (3rd ed.). London: Sage.
Dourish, P. (2004). Where the action is : The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Emery, F. E., & Trist, E. (1965). The causal texture of organizational environments. Human Relations, 18(1), 12–32.
Emery, F. E., & Trist, E. L. (1973). Towards a social ecology: Contextual appreciation of the future in the present. London: Plenum Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine.
Gold, R. (1958). Roles in sociological field observations. Social Forces, 36, 217–223.
Greenbaum, J., & Kyng, M. (1991). Design at work: Cooperative design of computer systems. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hevner, A. R., & Chatterjee, S. (2010). Design research in information systems: Theory and practice. New York: Springer.
Hevner, A. R., March, S. T., Park, J., & Ram, S. (2004). Design science in information systems research. MIS Quartertly, 28(1), 75–105.
Hodges, B., & Geyer, A. (2006). A nonconformist account of the Asch experiments: Values, pragmatics and moral dilemmas. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 2–19.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kaptilinen, V., & Nardi, B. (2012). Activity theory in HCI: Fundamentals and reflections. San Rafael: Morgan and Claypool.
Kuutti, K., & Bannon, L. (2014). The turn to practice in HCI: Towards a research agenda. In CHI’14 proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Paris: ACM Press.
LaLancette, M.-F., & Standing, L. (1990). Asch fails again. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 18(1), 7–12.
Lieberman, H., Paterno, F., & Wulf, V. (2006). End user development. Berlin: Springer.
Mumford, E. (1981). Participative systems design: Structure and method. System Objectives, Solutions, 1(1), 5–19.
Mumford, E. (1995). Effective systems design and requirements analysis: The ETHICS approach. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Mumford, E., & Henshall, D. (1983). Designing participatively: A participative approach to computer systems design: A case study of the introduction of a new computer system. Manchester: Manchester Business School.
Okasha, S. (2003). Philosophy of science: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perrin, S., & Spencer, C. (1980). The Asch experiment: A child of its time. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 32, 405–406.
Perrin, S., & Spencer, C. (1981). Independence or conformity in the Asch experiment as a reflection of cultural and situational factors. British Journal of Social Psychology, 20, 205–210.
Pipek, V. (2005). From tailoring to appropriation support: Negotiating groupware usage. PhD thesis, Faculty of Science, Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland.
Pipek, V., & Wulf, V. (2009). Infrastructuring: Toward an integrated perspective on the design and use of information technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10(5), 1.
Randall, D., Harper, R., & Rouncefield, M. (2007). Fieldwork for design. London: Springer.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263.
Rohde, M., Stevens, G., Brödner, P., & Wulf, V. (2009). Towards a paradigmatic shift in is: Designing for social practice. In DESRIST 09. Malvern: ACM Press.
Schmidt, K. (2014). The concept of practice. Proceedings of COOP, Nice, France.
Simonsen, J., & Robertson, T. (2013). Routledge international handbook of participatory design. New York: Routledge.
Stevens, G. (2010). Understanding and designing appropriation infrastructures: Artifacts as boundary objects in the continuous software development. PhD thesis, University of Siegen.
Stevens, G., Pipek, V., & Wulf, V. (2011). Appropriation infrastructure: Mediating appropriation and production work. Journal of Organizational and End User Computing (JOEUC), 22(2), 58–81.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whyte, W. F. (1948). Human relations in the restaurant industry. Oxford: Mcgraw- Hill.
Wulf, V. (1999). Evolving cooperation when introducing groupware: A self-organization perspective. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 6(2), 55–74.
Wulf, V. (2009). Theorien sozialer Praktiken zur Fundierung der Wirtschaftsinformatik. In J. Becker, H. Krcmar, & B. Niehaves (Eds.), Wissenschaftstheorie und Gestaltungsorientierte Wirtschaftsinformatik (pp. 211–224). Heidelberg: Springer/Physika.
Wulf, V., Rohde, M., Pipek, V., & Stevens, G. (2011). Engaging with practices: Design case studies as a research framework in CSCW. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011) (pp. 505–512). New York: ACM Press. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/11/why-electronic-health-records-failed/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer-Verlag London
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wulf, V., Schmidt, K., Randall, D. (2015). Concluding Remarks: New Pathways. In: Wulf, V., Schmidt, K., Randall, D. (eds) Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6720-4_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6720-4_17
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-6719-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-6720-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)