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From Artefacts to Infrastructures

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Abstract

In their initial articulation of the direction of the CSCW field, scholars advanced an open-ended agenda. This continuing commitment to open-ness to different contexts and approaches is not, however, reflected in the contents of the major CSCW outlets. The field appears to privilege particular forms of cooperative work. We find many examples of what could be described as ‘localist studies’, restricted to particular settings and timeframes. This focus on the ‘here and now’ is particularly problematic when one considers the kinds of large-scale, integrated and interconnected workplace information technologies—or what we are calling Information Infrastructures—increasingly found within and across organisations today. CSCW appears unable (or unwilling) to grapple with these technologies—which were at the outset envisaged as falling within the scope of the field. Our paper hopes to facilitate greater CSCW attention to Information Infrastructures through offering a re-conceptualisation of the role and nature of ‘design’. Design within an Information Infrastructures perspective needs to accommodate non-local constraints. We discuss two such forms of constraint: standardisation (how local fitting entails unfitting at other sites) and embeddedness (the entanglement of one technology with other apparently unrelated ones). We illustrate these themes through introducing case material drawn on from a number of previous studies.

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Notes

  1. We have assumed 5 papers pr. issue. There are 71 issues in the first 20 volumes. The number of papers on ‘awareness’ was identified using the search function at the journal’s home page.

  2. Localist accounts were crucial two decades ago as a response to the dominance of deterministic or structuralist accounts. Turning the focus on the local was to a large extent a reaction to the dominant engineering approaches to software development, which ended up with a large percentage of failed projects or ill-fitting solutions. Researchers focusing on the local diagnosed the problem with the traditional approaches to be an all too strong belief in universal solutions combined with a gross underestimation of the complexity and specificity of local work practices. We are in complete agreement with this. Accordingly, a motivation behind II research has been not to replace local approaches with ones focusing on generic software solutions, but to make use of the insights and approaches of the localist perspective when addressing so called ‘universal solutions’. This more integrated approach has already been flagged as important by scholars—see for instance Timmermans and Berg’s (1997) notion of ‘local universalities’. Our II perspective both acknowledges this and calls for a supplementary research agenda tuned to the contemporary problem domain.

  3. For example, the in-vitro fertilization clinic needed a system that allowed them to consider a couple as a unit, as well as allow tracking of information from both semen and egg quality tests through all procedures involved, up to the birth of the child. The intensive care unit acquired a system that allowed them to harvest digital data from a vast array of medical equipment and thus eliminate the specialized paper forms previously used to document events and actions. Moreover, new digital instruments in use in many different departments included software components with medical record functionality. The number of such specialized systems had grown from 5 in 1996 to 135 in 2003.

  4. In 2003 at Rokshospitalet they decided a dramatic change of strategy. In the new strategy, the central element was loose coupling of the various systems through a portal which was giving various user groups coherent interfaces to the systems they needed to access. This strategy has been much more successful—but not without its own challenges.

  5. In the US the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 has driven the need for effective internal control systems built on heightened requirements for documentation of key organizational decision points (cf. paragraph 404 of SOX).

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  1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Eric Monteiro, Neil Pollock, Ole Hanseth & Robin Williams

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  1. Eric Monteiro
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Correspondence to Eric Monteiro.

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Monteiro, E., Pollock, N., Hanseth, O. et al. From Artefacts to Infrastructures. Comput Supported Coop Work 22, 575–607 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9167-1

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