Abstract
We explore the appropriation of a self-management administrative system from the perspective of diagnostic reasoning. The case study, based on documents, ethnography and videotapes, concerns the appropriation of a travel management system in a major university in Finland. To explore this process from a user-centric view, we focus on the diagnostic work required in the appropriation of the new system, analyzing both the generic diagnostic reasoning of how the users navigate in the system and their individual and collaborative problem-solving strategies. This approach reveals the interaction between the users and the technology, which incorporates inbuilt models of users, administrative work and work processes. Our analysis concerns interactive instances which resulted from misdiagnosis of the functions of the system. For example, the orchestration and labeling of items in the application pose diagnostic challenges to end-users and may eventually be resolved in collaboration with administrative personnel. The individual and collaborative diagnostic reasoning sheds light on the hidden organizational embeddedness of self-management solutions, providing suggestions for developing the design and deployment of administrative self-management systems. The appropriated self-management system should finally be based on the end-user’s diagnostic reasoning so that the employees can base their actions on their taken-for-granted competence and the skills gained during the appropriation of the system.
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Notes
We want to thank anonymous reviewers for insights concerning the notion of ‘diagnostic work’.
Training tends to be regarded as a part of the ‘overhead’ of the development project, worth only a marginal investment. Further, the end-users may lack motivation to attend courses that they may see as “extra workload”. In our case, only a small minority of end-users had attended the course on the travel management system—seemingly, not a key area in the academic work.
Most of the data is originally in Finnish. As the study is not about language per se, we provide the English translation only. The analysis can be followed with the help of the translated data. The originals are available from the authors.
Grammatically ‘travel’ in English is uncountable, so the forms “a travel” and “travels” should not be used. Similarly, “row” is a semantically problematic term. However, we have obeyed the terminological choices of the system, and departed from that terminology only if the terms used in the Finnish version of the system are relevantly different, and then tried to find equivalent to the Finnish terms. Here the terms in English seem to be direct translations from the Finnish version of the system, and have resulted into broken English. We have not corrected the grammatical errors by the system designers.
The language appears to be specific in collaborative problem-solving discussions. There are many truncated forms and sentences, and deviations from the standard grammar. Many of the grammatically incomplete items are references to features of the system. Though the language may seem careless, it may also be a feature of the collaborative problem-solving, a “language game”. Wittgenstein (1958) was one of the first to point out that language games may reflexively constitute the social practices they are a part of. Some language games, such as those of builders, may sound grammatically incomplete, e.g., “Hammer”, “Nails”, etc. being composed of single words used as imperatives, but it may serve the social practice it is a constitutive part of. Here the language use appears to form a part of the collaborative problem-solving, and it may differ from language games used for other institutional tasks (see Levinson 1992; Arminen 2005).
During the old practice, the employee made first a “travel proposal”; if accepted, s/he could be reimbursed costs after the trip using a travel claim. The term “travel plan” is part of the new configuration; the term was not used during the old practice. The user’s terminological confusions seem to be related to her inexperience with the new system, and her weak reconfiguration.
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Arminen, I., Poikus, P. Diagnostic Reasoning in the Use of Travel Management System. Comput Supported Coop Work 18, 251–276 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9086-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9086-3