The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in the mechanization of mental labour (Minsky, 1967), embodied in the computer as a universal information machine, with the computer theoretically conceptualized in the mid‐1930s, transformed into an invention in the early 1940s, and subsequently diffusing as an innovation. The special purpose information machines, such as the typewriter, which were brought into use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, could be regarded as the accumulation of contradictions preceding a revolution, or, by analogy with evolutionary processes, as the transitional forms associated with the punctuation of an equilibrium. Mental labour, the possibilities for and constraints on its mechanization, the idea of universality, and the concept of computability, have all been poorly understood, with limited communication between relevant scholarly communities.

Computer scientists and system designers have engaged in the mechanization of mental labour, with necessarily regarding their activities in this way. From the socio‐technical perspective developed within information systems, and endorsed in the book under review, they have neglected the social nature of the contexts in which their designs were intended to be used. Information systems as a discipline has been concerned with harmonizing processes of systems development with their use. As processes of development have been displaced over time by products available for adoption, and as technologies have been progressively naturalized, and valuable systems selected through continuing use, information systems has lost some of its immediate utility, resorting to theory partly to ensure its collective survival.

The socio‐technical approach emerged partly in reaction against the dominance of technical and managerial perspectives in the study of information and communications technologies (ICT) and from an awareness of discrepancies between design intentions and system performance in use. A counter proposition is developed, that:

… action that is political, unintended, and inexplicable by techno‐economic logic stands out as being at least as significant as action that is designed, planned, and derived by the normative models of professional control (p. 2).

The increasing familiarity of the socio‐technical perspective can disguise the difficulty of its historical legitimatization (p. 129) and its still limited diffusion. It is difficult to speak clearly about the deployment and management of ICT infrastructures and this is ascribed to the ungrounded expectations of ICT created by widely‐used managerial and consulting models (p. 17). Other disciplines concerned with communication have found it equally difficult to formulate ideas simply. Saussure, for instance, complained that it would be:

…absolutely incomprehensible if I were not forced to confess that I suffer from a morbid horror of the pen, and that this work is for me an experience of sheer torture, quite out of proportion to its relative unimportance.In the case of linguistics, the torture is increased for me by the fact that the more simple and obvious a theory may be, the more difficult it is to express it simply, because I state as a fact that there is not one single term in this particular science which has ever been based on a simple idea, and that this being so, one is tempted five or six times between the beginning and end of a sentence to rewrite (Starobinski, 1979, p. 3).

The difficulty of articulation may point to a deeper difficulty, possibly connected with the simultaneous ubiquity and elusiveness of the communication phenomena studied. The socio‐technical perspective has developed a form of ethnographic positivism – the “revenge which empiricism takes on theoretical imagination” (p. 145) – whose very closeness of focus can obscure significant but not immediately observable, aspects of reality. Saskia Sassen, in “Towards a sociology of information technology” (pp. 77‐99), notes that many sociologists see technology as the impetus for fundamental social trends and transformations, conceptualised as impacts, and partly qualifying this, argues:

The challenge for sociology is not so much to deny the weight of technology, but rather to develop analytic categories that allow us to capture the complex imbrications of technology and society (p. 77).

The introduction also notes that the “humanistic ideas of the socio‐technical pioneers had paid too little attention to the problems of power imbalance between difference classes of stakeholders” (p. 4). A classic Marxist formulation of the relation of technology, although of productive rather than information technology, to the material basis of being could have been informative:

… the purely technical aspect is seen only as a moment of the overall socio‐economic processes … reciprocal interaction by no means surpasses the real historical and methodological primacy of the economy over technique (Lukács, 1973, p. 56).

Some contributors to this collection remain partially arrested at the level of reciprocal interaction, without fully recognizing that they are concerned with reciprocal interaction, isolating those aspects of the material basis of being which gave rise to modern ICTs, or fully comprehending the theoretical possibilities and constraints of the technology itself.

Some particular insights are generated. The diffusion of innovations by imitation and adoption destroys the comparative advantage initially derived from those innovations (p. 20), although the dynamic reducing comparative advantage was formulated by Marx, again for productive, rather than information, technology:

As machinery comes into general use in a particular branch of production … the following law asserts itself: surplus‐value does not arise from the labour‐power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour‐power actually employed in working with the machinery (Marx, 1976, p. 530).

Inventions are characteristically introduced to increase efficiency but may subsequently be enhanced, in various ways, and yield a somewhat serependitous further advantage (p. 239). Analogously, in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the discursive components of the fiction concentrate on the reduction in human labour or increased efficiency enabled by new technologies, in accord with the then current labour theory of value, while the stark narrative contrasts emerge from the increased power of modern technologies, for instance counterposing the revolver to medieval chivalric weaponry: “Bang! One saddle empty. Bang! another one. Bang‐bang! and I bagged two” (Twain, 1996, p. 507; Warner, 2005). “Technology is rendered human through hospitality” (p. 28) and the insight could have been enhanced by alluding to hospitality as distinguishing civil humanity, with forms of technology, including ICTs, from brute biological men, to the tradition of the stranger guest, and to the linguistic connection between hospitality and hostility.

Some insights, although historically valuable in assisting rebellion against the dominant managerial and technical perspective, lead to distortion or have limitations. Actor network theory (ANT), reported rather than fully recounted here, was a valuable corrective to the conflation of the intentions and realisation of technological systems drawing attention to processes of negotiation and translation, but, by “deny[ing] any essential differentiation between humans and non‐humans” (p. 214), obscures the possibility of recognizing technology as a human construction but not human in itself. A discussion of the destructive effects of information systems, where they prevent or inhibit organizationally cohesive social activities (p. 263), implies the significance of direct oral communication without fully exploring it.

The diffusion of ICTs has eroded the gestalt of the computer, in the sense of a mysterious object held within relatively enclosed communities, and some contributors both reflect, and advance, the process of disillusion. Robert Galliers argue for a return to the original terminology for information systems, as data processing systems, with a further hierarchy from information to knowledge (pp. 252‐253). Steve Smithson and Prodromos Tsiavos recognize the limitations of information systems evaluation techniques (p. 225), although they do not fully introduce the idea of the market as a selection mechanism between systems, with choices informed by the multiple and distributed intellects of consumers (Swanson, 1980, p. 128).

Knowledge is variously understood, contrasted to data and information as tacit and embedded, “‘justified belief’ – a belief that allows them [the holders of the belief] to interpret and take purposive action in the world around them” (p. 253), and, for ANT, as “a ‘non‐human actor’ that may be rather autonomous and powerful, playing important roles in the emerging knowledge society” (p. 104). A counter understanding, consistent with the differentiation from data and information, but free from the elements of abstract objectivism in ANT, is of knowledge as a social construction, a social relation among humans which may be embodied in particular material forms, specifically, “an ideal reproduction of the external world serviceable for cooperative action thereon” (Childe, 1956, p. 54). From this perspective, the technological stance can result in knowledge, linking specific procedures to system, although not human, effects, while the social‐technical perspective stands between information and knowledge, yielding an informed awareness of processes of social negotiation and translation. But “stripped of its details, social constructivism would seem to deliver a rather trivial message”, and, “the assumption concerning the social character of technology does not appear particular innovative” (p. 143).

In conclusion, the interest of the richness of detail and thickness of ethnographic description which may have given vitality to an impoverished theoretical position may be declining as modern ICTs are diffused and naturalised, received primarily as products rather than engaged with as processes. The socio‐technical approach has been valuable as a reaction, essays are well written, with evidence of authorial and editorial care, and there are emerging signs of self‐critique and further development. As the surface empirical interest of the study of ICTs declines, theoretical and historical interest may begin: “technology's involvement in human affairs could be studied in ways that allow for the abstract and general to be tied to the concrete and specific” (p. 157). The most significant element of the approaches developed and advocated may be the aim at understanding rather than prescription:

We claim that the way to thrive in the current ambiguous, complex, and chaotic world is not to search for solutions, but to recognise what is there, is – and will inevitably change (p. 39).