Out of machine age?: complexity, sociotechnical systems and actor network theory

J. Eng. Technol. Manage. 18 (2001) 253–269

Out of machine age?: complexity, sociotechnical systems and actor network theory William N. Kaghan a,∗ , Geoffrey C. Bowker b,1 a

b

Management Science Department, University of Washington, School of Business, Seattle, WA 98195-3200, USA Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503, USA

Abstract This paper compares sociotechnical systems (STS) theory and actor network theory (ANT) as developed by Latour, Callon and Law. We examine how STS and ANT can be viewed as responses to rationalist/functionalist research on large sociotechnical systems and as extensions and elaborations of pragmatist/culturalist frameworks developed in sociology and anthropology. We reexamine, from an actor network perspective, Trist and Bamforth’s seminal article in which the concept of a sociotechnical system was introduced. We also discuss how STS ideas on interactive planning can be combined with concepts from ANT to investigate interdependent processes of invention and innovation in large sociotechnical networks. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. JEL classification: O31; Innovation and invention; Processes and incentives Keywords: Sociotechnical systems; Actor network theory; Complexity; Tacit knowledge; Communities of practice

The attempt to deal holistically with a system of problems is what planning, in contrast to problem solving, should be all about. In the Machine Age, a great deal of effort went into the development of effective methods of problem solving but little thought was given to planning. In the Systems Age, more attention is being given to development of effective methods of planning (Ackoff, 1997).

∗

Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-206-526-1128. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (W.N. Kaghan), [email protected] (G.C. Bowker). 1 Tel.: +1-619-534-4410; fax: +1-619-534-7315; URL: http://weber.ucsd.edu/∼gbowker. 0923-4748/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S 0 9 2 3 - 4 7 4 8 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 3 7 - 6

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1. Introduction The interdependence of the social and technical systems of organizations was one of the core insights of the sociotechnical systems (STS) tradition associated with the Tavistock School (Trist and Murray, 1990, 1993; Trist et al., 1997). Though this basic insight is now routinely accepted in organization and management theory, in recent years, several authors have questioned the usefulness of the STS tradition as a source of continuing theoretical and practical insight into problems associated with stability and change in complex STS. These authors have argued that the STS tradition — because of an outdated focus on industrial production and industrial relations — has been difficult to apply to the study of topics such as organizational learning and sociotechnical innovation in the emerging organizational forms of the information age. These authors offer a variety of suggestions for updating the STS tradition to make it more applicable to these problems. For example, Matthews (1997) argues that the STS tradition would benefit by incorporating new “rationalist/functionalist” approaches associated with institutional and evolutionary economics and “neo-rational choice” approaches to the study of complex adaptive systems (e.g. Teece, 1986; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Anderson, 1999). Rationalist/functionalist approaches, following Simon (1976), assume that human rationality is bounded and argue that modern economic institutions are structured so as to ensure greater economic efficiency and productivity. Neo-rational choice approaches envision agents with different kinds of cognitive maps or schema operating in and adapting to particular local environments by making “rational choices” within the constraints presented by these local environments. Spender (1996), on the other hand, argues that though these new “rationalist/functionalist” approaches are promising beginnings, they are hampered by their oversimplified assumptions about the production and maintenance of “knowledge assets” within organizations and about the routine operation of large STS. Rather, Spender (along with others such as Barley (1990, 1996), Weick (1990) and Orlikowski (1992, 1996)) argues for the importance of incorporating into the STS tradition the more complex “pragmatist/culturalist” approaches to the study of institutions and institutional processes that have been developed in sociology and anthropology. 2 Pragmatist/culturalist approaches recognize the situatedness (i.e. cultural specificity) of human intelligence. In this view, human individuals and human groups act pragmatically rather than rationally. That is, people tend to act in a way that they (and others) view as sensible in a particular situation though their behavior may not represent “optimizing” behavior in some universal sense (and may thus be irrational). In particular, the sensibility of people’s behavior is mediated in important ways by the culture or cultures — both symbolic and material — that they operate in. These cultures are continually constructed and reconstructed through interaction. Furthermore, local and global “sensibilities” are thoroughly intermixed among all the actors involved in any particular situation. For all this interest in developing the STS tradition, there has been very little explicit comparison of the different approaches to the study of large STS. In this paper, we argue that for the study of large-scale STS to move “beyond STS theory”, it is important that explicit 2

These approaches include those associated with Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Giddens (1984), the Chicago School of Sociology (Hughes, 1971; Becker, 1982; Strauss, 1993; Abbott, 1997) and the ANT tradition (Latour, 1987, 1993; Law, 1994; Callon, 1995).

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comparisons between these different traditions be made. In making these comparisons, we explore how the STS tradition can inform and be informed by insights from more recently developed pragmatist/culturalist approaches and how both the STS tradition and more recent pragmatist/culturalist approaches differ from rationalist/functionalist approaches. We focus particular attention on the framing concepts of one current pragmatist/culturalist approach: ANT. We claim that these framing concepts provide a way of studying important aspects of (to use Ackoff’s words from the quote above) “effective planning” in large STS that are simply ignored or assumed away in rationalist/functionalist approaches and have been poorly developed within the STS tradition itself. At the same time, we acknowledge that both rationalist/functionalist traditions and the STS tradition (viewed as an early pragmatist/culturalist approach) address some management-oriented aspects of coordination and change in large STS that have not been fully addressed in ANT or related pragmatist/culturalist traditions. Rather than promoting ANT as a replacement for the STS or the rationalist/functionalist tradition, we argue that ANT is a natural outgrowth of basic concerns that are very close to those of both the STS and rationalist/functionalist tradition. Moving beyond STS requires sensitivity to the strengths and limitations of each approach and consideration of how the different approaches might supplement (as well as conflict with) each other. We present our argument in three sections. In the first section, we provide a brief comparison of “rationalist/functionalist” and “pragmatist/culturalist” approaches that focuses on the way the two perspectives treat the relationship between tacit knowledge, communities of practice and complex sociotechnical networks. We then expand on this comparison by explicating some of the central concepts of one recent pragmatist/culturalist approach — ANT and how this pragmatist/culturalist framework differs from more rationalist/functionalist frameworks. Having established the contrast between these two ideal-typical approaches, we begin in the second section by arguing that the STS approach, as a critique of rationalist/functionalist perspectives of the 1950s and 1960s — is an important (and often unrecognized) precursor of pragmatist/culturalist approaches such as ANT. We claim, however, that the concept of culture in STS and ANT when applied to the scientific and managerial cultures of large organizations are quite different. We illustrate the similarities and differences between the two frameworks by presenting a reinterpretation of Trist and Bamforth’s classic article (Trist and Bamforth, 1951) on long-wall methods of coal-mining from an actor network perspective. In the third section, we generalize the discussion of the second section by exploring how a combined STS/ANT perspective can be used to investigate how the “messy” processes of invention and innovation are linked in planning/managing the “creative destruction” of large-scale sociotechnical networks. We illustrate these arguments with a brief discussion of Latour’s book Aramis (Latour, 1996), an ethnography of an unsuccessful attempt at technological innovation.

2. Tacit knowledge, communities of practice and complex sociotechnical networks Researchers in the STS tradition have traditionally emphasized the connection between the functional requirements of any STS and the particular sociotechnical networks through

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which those functions might be accomplished. Crucially, these researchers have also recognized that the accumulation and synthesis of tacit knowledge about functional role behaviors during work activities plays an important role in insuring that organizations are able to respond robustly to a turbulent environment (Emery, 1993, p. 174). Nevertheless, the manner in which this tacit knowledge is developed within and outside of organizations and the alternately cooperative/competitive behavior of members of the occupational groups out of which organizations are constructed and through which tacit knowledge is often transmitted has received relatively little investigation in the STS tradition. Typically, the solution to problems involving the communication and coordination of tacit knowledge among different occupational groups was held to involve the development of organization-wide social norms that integrated the needs and desires of all organizational stakeholders (Emery, 1993). In Martin’s (1992) terminology, they clearly subscribed to an integrationist concept of organizational culture that stressed the importance of upper management responsibility for rational organizational design and involvement in supporting a common set of organizational values. In taking this position, researchers in the STS tradition combined a pragmatist (rather than rationalist) social psychology with a functionalist-tinged view of culture. In recent years, both rationalist/functionalist and pragmatist/culturalist approaches that attempt to examine the interrelation of tacit knowledge, competitive/cooperative behavior and the structure and operation of sociotechnical networks have been developed. New rationalist/functionalist approaches have been built on insights from cybernetics, general systems theory and decision theory in the 1950s and 1960s into what Simon (1996) termed the “architecture of complexity.” Generally, these new approaches have attempted to apply recent advances in complexity theory to the study of STS operating in turbulent environments (McKelvey, 1997; Anderson et al., 1999). In these perspectives, adaptive STS are held to be self-organizing networks composed of purposeful agents with schemata (i.e. “automata”) in which interdependent social and technical systems are able “co-evolve” to the “edge of chaos”. The evolution of the STS itself comes about through the development and incorporation of new building blocks and a recombination of existing system building blocks (Anderson, 1999). However, like the cybernetic approaches on which they build, these more recent rationalist/functionalist approaches have traditionally been associated with an image of professionals (including professional managers and corporate executives) as the mind of organizations. In this role/function, professionals are responsible for insuring that the organization continually adapts to its environment (Morgan, 1986, Chapter 4). More generally, rationalist/functionalist approaches rest on an image of organizations as “automata” (i.e. self-actuating machines) constructed from smaller “automata.” In this image, the “passive” body of the organization (composed of both humans and non-humans) is controlled by the “active” brain of the organization (composed of professionals of various sorts). Information flow between body and brain is channeled to facilitate this control (Bowker, 1993; Latour, 1999b, Chapter 1). Rationalist/functionalist approaches all rely on a strong notion of a hierarchy of functions with management at the top. Although in more recent approaches, intelligence and discretion are sometimes distributed to lower levels (i.e. non-management functions) of the organization, professional managers are viewed as setting the rules through which the

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different parts of the organization interact with each other and with the environment outside the organization. Non-management elements of the organization act only within the boundaries set by management. Furthermore, there is often an implicit assumption that management-driven organizational innovation is fundamentally adaptive and beneficial for the organization itself and for society more generally (Becker, 1970). What has been acknowledged less often in rationalist/functionalist approaches is that some of the “tacit” knowledge required for satisfactory organizational performance is not necessarily within the purview of managers or professionals (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985; Barley, 1996). In contrast to the rationalist/functionalist emphasis on a hierarchy of functions, pragmatist/culturalist approaches have relied on the concept of sociotechnical structure as a negotiated order (Strauss et al., 1964). In this view, there is not one dominant or authoritative function to which all other functions are subordinate. Rather, each function within an organization is associated with a local set of routines and a more global set of routines through which the different functions are brought together in organizational action. Crucially, these routines are not formulated, designed and implemented. Rather they are constructed, tested and reproduced in the performance of organizational activities and through on-going negotiations among the different organizational functions and the organization and its environment. In particular, pragmatist/culturalist perspectives hold that the routines of non management “communities of practice” (i.e. those communities that are not formally responsible for organizational action) are grounded in tacit knowledge that is, at some level, inaccessible to top management. This tacit knowledge has both local (i.e. functional) and global (i.e. system-wide) impacts (Dougherty, 1992; Vaughan, 1996; Orr, 1996). It is important for satisfactory organizational performance but, at the same time, provides non-management functions with a source of power for resisting “unreasonable” or “illegitimate” initiatives of management and other professionals (Dalton, 1959; Van Maanen and Barley, 1984; Abbott, 1988; Thomas, 1994). In this regard, ANT is a particularly relevant pragmatist/culturalist framework. ANT was developed to facilitate the study of large sociotechnical systems as negotiated orders and the work that scientists and engineers perform in the construction and maintenance of this sort of negotiated order (Latour, 1988; Law, 1994; Callon, 1992, 1995). However, the ANT tradition, like a number of approaches in the sociology of science and technology, deliberately moved past earlier conceptualizations of negotiated orders (e.g. Strauss, 1978; Clarke, 1991) by putting a much greater emphasis on the active role that the non-human material world played in shaping negotiated orders. 3 This focus can be seen in the basic ontological unit of ANT.

3

A vast research literature has accumulated in the past 20 years in the sociology of science and technology. It is beyond the scope of this paper to review this literature. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Jasanoff et al., 1995) provides an invaluable overview. Bijker et al. (1987), Bijker and Law (1992), Pickering (1992) and Star (1996) are useful collections of articles. Latour (1987, 1999b), Lynch (1993), Pickering (1995) and MacKenzie (1996) provide helpful syntheses of research in science and technology studies from somewhat different “pragmatist/culturalist” perspectives. Latour and Woolgar (1979), Hughes (1983), Pinch (1984), Lynch (1985), Suchman (1987), Star (1989), MacKenzie (1990), Bowker (1994), Bijker (1996), Fujimura (1996), Vaughan (1996), Galison (1997) and Bowker and Star (1999) are good examples of the ethnographic and historical research conducted by this research community.

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An actor network is most simply defined as any collection of human, non-human, and “hybrid” human/non-human actors who jointly participate in some organized (and identifiable) collective activity in some fashion for some period of time. Thus, actor networks might be an exotic maritime society inhabiting an isolated Polynesian archipelago (Malinowski, 1922), an inner-city slum neighborhood (Whyte, 1943) or a large technological community such as the one that developed around electric power networks (Hughes, 1983). What distinguishes the exotic society or the slum neighborhood from the technological community is the size and scope of the activity encompassed by the actor network. In this view, understanding large STS involves understanding how collective activities are created and sustained over great distances and long spans of time and across a diverse set of interacting communities made up of both humans and non-humans. In ANT as developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and others, the problem of constructing and sustaining these large-scale networks in which a variety of human, non-human and “hybrid” actors can routinely circulate is called the problem of action-at-a-distance. Black-boxing and translation are key processes through which the problem of action-ata-distance is addressed. ANT, in contrast to many rationalist/functionalist perspectives, pictures networks as always open (i.e. interdependent and liable to change) and focuses on the work that goes on and the mechanisms used to effect closure (i.e. erecting boundaries and promoting stability and order) in a network. The process of effecting closure in a network is called black-boxing. Black-boxing involves drawing a boundary around a particular sub-network, specifying the inputs and outputs at the interfaces between the sub-network and the remainder of the actor network and specifying the expected performance of both the sub-network and the consequent performance of the entire network of which it is a part. When a sub-network is successfully black-boxed or closed, it can be treated as a simple input/output device that performs in accordance with a clear and unambiguous set of specifications. Little or no additional work is necessary to demonstrate how the sub-network can be connected with and will interact with the remainder of the network. The output of one black-box is readily transferred to another black-box. How the actors inside the black-boxes transform or translate inputs into outputs becomes unimportant unless the connections to the larger network come to be challenged in some fashion. The black-box can simply be treated as another actor in the network. Crucially, black-boxes are always the outcome of socio-technical negotiations — it takes continuing work both to create them and to hold them in place. Closure is neither complete nor final. An intermediary is an actor (of any type) that stands at a place in the network between two other actors and serves to translate between the actors in such a way that their interaction can be more effectively coordinated, controlled, or otherwise articulated. That is, depending on the sort of performance expected (March and Sutton, 1997) and the specific context in which activities must be performed, intermediaries help the different parties involved in a situation to “improvise” a response that is both sensible and acceptable under the circumstances (Weick, 1998). The need for intermediaries comes directly from the picture of actor networks as irreducibly open to some degree, since black-boxing processes are never totally successful in controlling the boundaries and standardizing the organization of work of a selected sub-network. Intermediaries operate along the borders between black-boxes and help the actors who make up each black-box negotiate with each other when routine interaction between the black-boxes breaks down for some reason. If negotiations are

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successful, the adaptation and accommodation of the black-boxes to each other is facilitated. If negotiations fail, interaction is disrupted and intermediaries may become involved in forging new connections with other black-boxes. ANT thus provides a set of framing concepts that usefully elaborate the way in which the tacit knowledge of the various communities of practice out of which large sociotechnical networks are constructed is articulated in the course of routine organizational operations. Researchers drawing on ANT recognize the “stability” that both formal structure and material technologies bring to large sociotechnical networks while focusing attention on the disjunctions that develop between formal organizational structures, material technologies and tacit knowledge in the on-going work of system/network-building. At the same time, ANT enjoins researchers to resist falling back on presuppositions about rationally designed and functionally optimized systems or the primacy of management in a hierarchy of organizational functions. As discussed in the next section, these concepts also help to illustrate how ANT goes farther than the STS tradition in providing a pragmatist/culturalist critique of rationalist/functionalist approaches to the study of large STS.

3. The configuration of work in coal-mining operations: revisiting Trist and Bamforth’s “Some social and psychological consequences of the long-wall method of coal getting” Just as ANT can be viewed as a pragmatist/culturalist alternative to more rationalist/functionalist approaches to the study of complex adaptive systems, so too can the STS tradition can be viewed as an earlier and more tentative pragmatist/culturalist alternative to earlier rationalist/functionalist approaches such as cybernetics and decision theory. Nevertheless, we argue that the responses of STS and ANT to rationalist/functionalist approaches are distinctive and that ANT is more thorough going in its critique. In the remainder of this section, we illustrate these similarities and differences through a reexamination of Trist and Bamforth’s (1951) classic article “Some social and psychological consequences of the long-wall method of coal getting.” Like early rationalist/functionalist approaches such as cybernetics or decision theory, STS accepts that humans and non-humans are joined together in workplace settings. However, STS objects both to the reduction of human beings to the status of thinking machines and the conflation of human and non-human systems that was an characteristic of much cybernetic theorizing. This general STS critique can be clearly seen in Trist and Bamforth’s article. This paper — grounded in extended field research — examines the work of the ‘filling shift’ in semi-mechanized long-wall coal production in the late 1940s at the Haighmoor seam in South Yorkshire. The authors argue against the prevailing view that workers must adapt to the exigencies of the economic/technological imperative implicit in cybernetic models. They demonstrate how a more sensitive rethinking of the sociotechnical organization of work as a whole can lead to genuinely productive innovations in which the social and psychological costs incurred by coal-miners can be reduced while concurrently improving organizational efficiency and productivity. Coal-miners are no longer viewed as subordinate “automata” whose only job is to adapt to the work system designed by upper management but as social beings who derive meaning and some level of psychological well-being from their

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interaction with other human beings in the workplace. Later research in the STS tradition elaborated on this basic insight and made it a central aspect of STS principles of task and job design (Cherns, 1976; Emery, 1993). However, though STS researchers clearly called “economistic” rationalist/functionalist approaches to work design into question, they were much more circumspect about questioning the technological expertise of the scientists and engineers involved in designing the coal-mining equipment. In their view, scientists and engineers understood the nature of coal seams better than the miners that mined the seams. In addition, they seemed to accept (sometimes grudgingly) the rationalist/functionalist characterization of the nature of hierarchy in formal organizations and the coordinating and controlling role of professional management within these organizations. They thus accepted the idea that organizations could be designed out of reasonably well-defined organizational sub-units by professional management with some informed input from the workforce. In effect, STS researchers emphasized the role of upper management in shaping organizational culture in line with a common set of “humanistic” (as opposed to “technocratic”) values to facilitate a more effective organizational response to on-going scientific progress and the turbulent organizational environments that resulted from that progress. In contrast to STS, ANT’s central critique of rationalist/functionalist approaches focused on challenging presuppositions about the “invisible work” involved in the construction and maintenance of large sociotechnical networks such as formal organizations (Star, 1991). For rationalist/functionalists such as Simon, organizations could be constructed (and subsequently operated, maintained and possibly reconstructed) from a set of relatively autonomous “black-boxes” (as represented on an organization chart) under the general direction and control of a managerial and technological elite. From the perspective of ANT, this view of formal organizations helped to mask much of the translation work (often performed by scientists, engineers and managers) that actually went on within and between the black-boxes out of which organizations were constructed. This image also masked the work of many of the intermediaries involved in keeping a large sociotechnical network intact (Law, 1992; Star, 1992). To the extent that the technological expertise of scientists and engineers and the blackboxing work involved in the construction of formal organizations was taken for granted by Trist and Bamforth, researchers in the ANT tradition would suggest that additional questions might have been raised during their research. The action research carried out by Bamforth did succeed in strategically reopening a work design process that had been effectively “black-boxed” by the designers of the semi-mechanized system of long-wall mining and the upper management that endorsed their design. By black-boxing the design process, the designers and the management team had attempted to authoritatively define the task of coal extraction, leaving the coal-miners (especially the fillers) and their psycho-social problems out of the loop. By challenging this claim, Trist and Bamforth were able to show that other work configurations that involved new networks of interaction between technology designers, management, miners, non-human technologies and coal would better serve the organization’s goals of efficiently extracting coal and effectively supporting the worker’s social and psychological needs. Nevertheless, Trist and Bamforth did avoid opening other “black-boxes”. For example, they did not openly challenge the claims of professional management working in

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rationalized bureaucracies to have scientific (and therefore superior) management knowledge and a legitimate right to control the design of the labor process (Braverman, 1974; Noble, 1977; Rose, 1990). Rather they accepted the claim of upper management — on the basis of their control over managerial expertise and their central involvement in organizational goal-setting — to represent the interests of organization as a corporate entity. In addition to this basic critique, ANT researchers would emphasize the importance of investigating the work that the STS researchers did in the context of the larger actor network in which they were entangled in order to produce the knowledge that they produced. In particular, the ANT framework suggests the importance of investigating the apparent attempts of STS researchers — on the basis of their superior insight into the social psychology of workers — to insert themselves as intermediaries between coal-miners, management, technology designers and the material technology itself. Based on their own claims to expertise, they could come to play a role in translating organizational requirements into superior (and eventually black-boxed) organizational designs that would better insure the ready acceptance by coal-miners of superior coal-mining technology. Rather than taking these claims to expertise for granted, ANT would ask about the negotiations outside of the research project proper that allowed STS researchers to insert themselves in a mediating role between management and labor. (Gillespie’s (1991) study — influenced by Latour and ANT — of the Hawthorne experiments and the activities of Elton Mayo and other members of the “human relations” school in those experiments provides a good model of how such a study might be conducted). By insisting on the importance of asking about how knowledge was produced, an ANT approach might also help to surface another important player in the coal-mining story — the designers of the machinery — who would otherwise remain in the background. The emphasis on the close interrelationship between the process of technology design and the process of technological adoption has always been a central feature of ANT (e.g. Latour, 1996; Berg, 1997). In particular, empirical work (e.g. Callon (1986), MacKenzie (1990) and Bowker (1994)) in science and technology studies suggests that the designers of the technology can be expected to make claims to having greater expertise about coal seams and coal extraction than do the miners directly involved in the work process. However, Trist and Bamforth have little to say about these claims and restrict their attention to the social and psychological needs of the miners. The success of the technology designers in making use of a seemingly inexorable “scientific and technological imperative” constrained the sort of network-building that could go on between Bamforth and the coal-miners. Yet clearly, there was some space — outside the control of the technology designers — within which the miners with or without Bamforth’s help might resist the introduction of the technology into the work process. 3.1. Differences between ANT and STS The discussion above emphasizes three important differences between ANT and STS. First, ANT consistently refuses, in the last analysis, to rely on either large-scale (and black-boxed) social forces or small-scale (and similarly black-boxed) rational agents to explain the nature of stability and change in any aspect of large-scale sociotechnical systems. STS, on the other hand, is much more willing to “black-box” both the technical and

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social aspects of organizations and try to coordinate the two black-boxes in some fashion. Secondly, ANT draws attention to the role of the non-human elements (coal and coal-mining technology) in the network and how scientists and engineers (and the technologies that they design) work to make these non-human elements perform to expectations. Though STS argues against economic/technological imperatives, it does not provide a suite of tools — conceptual and methodological — for examining the work of scientists or engineers. Thirdly, ANT disputes Trist’s assertion (1993, p. 40) that “not all social systems are socio-technical.” To the contrary, ANT would argue that it’s sociotechnical “all the way down” to the lowest levels of the workplace and the most subjective parts of human experience (Latour, 1993, 1999a). Rather than restricting discussion to an examination of life in the mine, it would suggest the importance of asking about the technological and material settings outside the workplace (the pub, the working man’s club, the corporate boardroom, the research laboratory) that may influence interaction within the coal-mine itself (Law, 1994). In the final section, we generalize on these points by looking at how the interactive planning/managing of the messy process of what Schumpeter (1947) termed creative destruction involves the disorganization and reorganization of routines across large sociotechnical networks.

4. “Messes,” planning and the creative destruction of complex sociotechnical networks . . . if calculations are to be performed and completed, the agents and goods involved in these calculations must be disentangled and framed. In short, a clear and precise boundary must be drawn between the relations which the agents will take into account and which will serve in their calculations, on the one hand, and the multitude of relations which will be ignored by the calculation as such, on the other (Callon, 1999). In the previous two sections, we have implicitly tried to suggest that the quote from Ackoff (a prominent STS researcher) at the head of the paper can be (and probably should be) understood as the expression of a pragmatist/culturalist perspective rather than a rationalist/functionalist perspective. In particular, Ackoff (1997) suggests (in the article from which this quote was taken) that the effective methods of “problem-solving” characteristic of what he termed the Machine Age were almost purely analytic while the effective methods of planning characteristic of the Systems Age were both analytic and synthetic. In Machine Age approaches, well-formed problems were analyzed and solved by formally-trained experts working in places far removed from the workplace in which the solution would actually be implemented and who were often unfamiliar with the daily routines of that workplace. In Systems Age approaches, on the other hand, responses to what Ackoff terms “messes” (i.e. ill-formed systems of interrelated problems) involved both analysis and synthesis and close involvement with and reflective distance from the workplace in which the mess existed. Ackoff was less explicit, however, about the ways in which planning might be used to respond to “messes” in one part of an organization that overflowed into other parts of an organization and become “organization-wide” messes. Similarly, he did not really address how “messes” that arose outside the organization might be imported from the environment

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into various parts of the organization (Emery and Trist, 1965). When “messes” overflow from one part of the organization to another or flow in from the environment in this fashion, conflict of some sort is almost certain. As with many researchers in the STS tradition, Ackoff tends to rely on the construction of common set of organizational values as a way to avoid these sorts of organization-wide conflicts. The quote from Callon above suggests how ANT can be used to elaborate on Ackoff’s concept of planning. From the perspective of ANT, these overflowing “messes” may become occasions for “network-building” where new and novel role systems and role cultures may be constructed over the remnants of older understandings (Fujimura, 1987, 1992; Star and Griesemer, 1989; Henderson and Clark, 1990). In Callon’s words, network-building involves disentangling (and possibly disassembling) humans and non-humans from old sets of ties within a large sociotechnical network and reframing (and possibly reconstructing) these in a new sociotechnical network. Arguably, Trist and Bamforth’s study of long-wall coal-mining was prompted by just such an overflowing mess and their research helped to spur new and novel accommodations between technology designers, technology, management, miners and action researchers. Combining Ackoff’s conceptualization of planning and messes with ANT’s conceptualization of the activities involved in network-building suggests the shape of a pragmatist/culturalist approach to the process of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1947) termed the process of creative destruction. More particularly, these combined concepts suggest a new way of interpreting Schumpeter’s ideas about how the processes of invention and innovation were encompassed within the process of creative destruction. Schumpeter (1934, p. 88) was careful to distinguish between the process of invention and the process of innovation. Invention involved the development of new technological artifacts by inventors and provided the basis on which economic transformation might proceed. Innovation on the other hand involved introducing these new technological artifacts into a routine economic cycle of production and consumption and thus reorganizing the world around these new inventions. In his view, invention without innovation was not interesting from an economic perspective while innovation without invention would not lead to economic growth. Both invention and innovation involved dealing over time with “messes” (i.e. systems of ill-defined but interrelated problems) and resolving the messes in some fashion (Stinchcombe, 1990, Chapter 5; Hughes, 1992). Yet all too often, as research in the sociology of science and technology has emphasized, the messes created by the work of invention have been considered the exclusive realm of scientists and engineers. Conversely, much research in organization and management theory has suggested that the messes created by the process of innovation have been considered the exclusive realm of entrepreneurs and managers. STS represented an important step forward because it was recognized that these two realms had to be coordinated in some fashion. But, as argued in the previous section, the STS tradition tended to look to top management (perhaps with the help of STS researchers) to mediate between the demands of a self-contained technical system and a self-contained social system. The ANT approach is distinctive because it demands, in principle if not always in practice, that researchers studying the process of creative destruction of large sociotechnical network investigate how this process unfolds in all the different workplaces — laboratories, executive suites, factory floors — caught up in the process. Thus Latour’s (1996) study of a French point-to-point automatic transit system (Aramis), provides a powerful model of how ANT

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can be used to guide empirical research. Aramis and the worlds that were constructed around the Aramis project are quintessential examples of what Latour refers to as “quasi-objects.” The Aramis technology and the worlds involved in the Aramis project were constantly in flux. Though Aramis approached a “stable” sociotechnical configuration at several points in the process of development, ultimately the Aramis technology was — despite the resources expended in its development — abandoned and the project was written off as a failure. Latour demonstrates two important points. First, he demonstrates that there was no single problem in the design and development of Aramis that could be pointed to as a fatal flaw (though different players in the project might try to point to a variety of fatal flaws). Rather, as the project developed, the Aramis system and the configuration of the Aramis project was changed in the face of various sorts of resistance or, in Ackoff’s terms, in response to particular “messes”. Originally, the Aramis system was conceived as a series of magnetically coupled individual carriages, which could form virtual trains on long segments of a trip, and peel off individual programmable carriages to deliver the user to a remote location. As it developed, security considerations, technical considerations and political considerations each caused fundamental design changes. Latour demonstrates that the technology became more or less stabilized (or alternately more or less structured or more or less real) as more or fewer actors become committed to its development. The process of securing commitments involved changing the nature of the invention and the organizational innovations built around the invention. The planning activities observed in the process involved not so much pushing through a given vision of the future as trying to articulate the often conflicting understandings of designers, producers and customers/users about both the developing technology and the developing socio-technical network in which it would be entangled. Second, Latour suggests that this sort of process is as characteristic of successful as of unsuccessful inventions/innovations such as Aramis. More pointedly, he suggests that there is a strong tendency to write the inevitability of the success or failure of any particular invention/innovation back into the record after the invention/innovation has become black-boxed as a success or as a failure. The appearance of inevitability in any particular change dynamic — whether the inevitability of success or the inevitability of failure — is itself a construction that is built as the technology and the sociotechnical network around the technology is built up. This appearance of inevitability does in fact help to stabilize both the design of the technology and the routine operation of the sociotechnical network that is built up around the technology. However, this appearance of inevitability, though a formidable barrier to change, does not prevent successful inventions/innovations from being challenged (often on apparently foolish grounds) or the remnants of failed inventions/innovations from being picked up and being deployed in new contexts. (Latour ends his study by noting that after the failure of Aramis the idea of a similar point to point automatic transit system received favorable press reports in California — with no apparent awareness of the Aramis experience.) In terms of core ANT concepts, the argument in this section can be summarized as follows. The interdependent processes of invention and innovation involve attempts to construct a stable (i.e. self-sustaining) actor network around some particular technology. Because of the resources required both to build and to sustain this network, a number of different “actors” (both human and non-human) have to be mobilized and become committed to the project

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in particular ways. For the construction and maintenance of large-scale sociotechnical networks, the various actors involved in a network often have to “act-at-a-distance” and the structure of the network has to facilitate this sort of action. To build a network on this scale, a number of actors responsible for different sets of interrelated activities (e.g. the technology, support technicians, security personnel, accountants) have to be connected in such a way that their activities serve to maintain the network. In the case of Aramis, this translation work was unsuccessful and all the pieces in the network could not be fit together and the network could not be provisionally closed or black-boxed. In other cases, this on-going translation work results in networks that can be provisionally black-boxed.

5. Conclusion: crossing boundaries and building bridges Design is a reiterative process. The closure of options opens new ones. At the end we are back at the beginning (Cherns, 1976, p. 791). This quotation from a prominent researcher in the STS tradition captures an important intellectual bond between the STS tradition and ANT (and related pragmatist/culturalist approaches). In particular, this quotation fits well with ANT’s emphasis on the inescapable “openness” of actor networks, of the inevitability of unanticipated contingencies and of the innumerable ways in which messes can overflow the frames constructed to contain them. In this respect, where STS (at least as practiced by the Tavistock School) and ANT have differed has more to do with emphasis and focus. STS researchers have been more concerned with the social and psychological issues faced by employees in increasingly automated workplaces and committed to promoting the active participation of employees in designing desirable workplaces. STS researchers saw themselves as intermediaries acting between machine designers, upper level management and the workforce to insure that sociotechnical systems took both social and technological factors into account in the design of organizations. ANT researchers, on the other hand, have been much more concerned with exploring worksites (such as research laboratories) where “human/non-human hybrids” (Latour, 1993) and “cyborgs” (Haraway, 1991) are debated and designed. They have been centrally concerned with the work of scientists and engineers and the way in which these professions have come to mediate between the material world and the rest of society. STS has arguably ignored many important aspects of scientific discovery and technological invention and the ways in which these discoveries and inventions come to be deployed across society. ANT, on the other hand, has often ignored other areas of expertise such as accounting, finance, the law or professional management and have overstated the power of scientists and engineers (though perhaps not science and engineering as activities) to influence the course of events. Each tradition has much to learn from the other. This is a relatively easy way to move “beyond STS” and to glimpse what will come “after ANT” (Law and Hassard, 1999). We also believe that “pragmatist/culturalist” perspectives such as STS and ANT have much to learn from more rationalist/functionalist approaches. This connection, however, is likely to be more difficult precisely because these latter approaches tend to avoid dealing with the issue of incompletion and openness by assuming it away, relegating it to measurement error, or talking about social construction without investigating the work that goes on in

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