• Enrollment
• Access to reading materials for course
• Questions about assignments for course?
• Our initial ideas for “starter kits”

Plan for class:   :   transition from last class    discussion of readings

Coda from last class

Epigraphs to Today’s Class

What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a “thing.”

Analytically, infrastructure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use.

Other works of interest beyond the readings for today’s class (for the way the ethnographical approach to infrastructure intersects with other social science, science-technology studies, and organizational studies approaches):

• Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory P. Knobel. “Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design: Report of a Workshop on ‘History & Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures’” (2007)
• Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces” (1996)
• Technology Studies & Sociology — Neoinstitutionalism, Structuration Theory, Organization Studies

This article is in a way a call to study boring things.

* This article is for the other members of the Society of People
Interested in Boring Things. (Star 377)

Inverting our commonsense notion of infrastructure means taking what have often been seen as behind the scenes, boring, background processes to the real work of politics and knowledge production and bringing their contribution to the foreground. (Bowker and Star 234)

Etymology of “bore”

Of potential related interest:

• Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
• ___________,  and the Fluid Analogies Research Group. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought (1995)
• J. J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances.” Chapter 8 in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (2015)
• Pierre Bourdieu on habitus
• Michel Foucault on dispositif:
  

  a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Power/Knowledge 194)

• “Medium” as environment

We will take a ‘classification’ to be a spatial, temporal or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A ‘classification system’ is a set of boxes, metaphorical or not, into which things can be put in order to then do some kind of work — bureaucratic or knowledge production. We will not demand of a classification system that it has properties such as:

 the operation of consistent classificatory principles (for example being solely a genetic classification (Tort, 1989) classifying things by their origin);
  mutual exclusivity of categories;
 completeness (total coverage of the world being described).

No working classification system that we have looked at meets these ‘simple’ requirements and we doubt that any ever could.  (Bowker and Star 233)

CIstudies.org Bibliography

The fieldwork in this case transmogrifies to a combination of historical and literary analysis, traditional tools like interviews and observations, systems analysis, and usability studies. (Star 382)

To generalize this, one can read information infrastructure either as:

• a material artifact constructed by people, with physical properties and pragmatic properties in its effects on human organization…
• a trace or record of activities….
• a veridical representation of the world. Here, the information system is taken unproblematically as a mirror of actions in the world, and often tacitly, as a complete enough record of those actions…. (Star 387-388)

One way to begin to get at these questions is to begin to take quite literally the kinds of metaphors that people use when describing their experience of organizations, bureaucracies, and information systems.  (Bowker and Star 237)

Neoinstitutionalism

• Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W Powell, “Introduction.” The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991: 1-38. [an online PDF of the introduction]
  
  Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W Powell, editors. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1991) [table of contents — colloquially known as the “Orange Bible” of neoinstiutionalism]

   

• W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities. Fourth edition. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2014.

Structuration Theory & Technology Studies

• Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
• Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Polity Press, 1984.
• Wanda J. Orlikowski, “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations.” Organization Science 3, no. 3 (1992): 398–427. [an online PDF]
  

  “Structuration is posited as a social process that involves the reciprocal interaction of human actors and structural features of organizations. The theory of structuration recognizes that human actions are enabled and constrained by structures, yet that these structures are the result of previous actions.” (404)

  “Technology is the product of human action, while it also assumes structural properties. That is, technology is physically constructed by actors working in a given social context, and technology is socially constructed by actors through the different meanings they attach to it and the various features they emphasize and use. However, it is also the case that once developed and deployed, technology tends to become reified and institutionalized, losing its connection with the human agents that constructed it or gave it meaning, and it appears to be part of the objective, structural properties of the organization.
  Agency and structure are not independent. It is the ongoing action of human agents in habitually drawing on a technology that objectifies and institutionalizes it. Thus, if agents changed the technology—physically or interpretively—every time they used it, it would not assume the stability and taken-for-grantedness that is necessary for institutionalization. But such a constantly evolving interaction with technology would undermine many of the advantages that accrue from using technology to accomplish work. We do not need to physically or socially reconstruct the telephone, elevator, or typewriter every time we use it. However, there clearly are occasions where continued unreflective use of a technology is inappropriate or ineffective. While we can expect a greater engagement of human agents during the initial development of a technology, this does not discount the ongoing potential for users to change it (physically and socially) throughout their interaction with it. In using a technology, users interpret, appropriate, and manipulate it in various ways.” (406)

Organization Studies  & Technology Studies

• Barley, Stephen R. “Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments.” Administrative Science Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1986): 78–108. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392767.