The family resemblance of technologically mediated work practices

Community-based evaluation in online communities

Purpose

The idea of “best practice” is very much built into information systems and the ways in which they organise and structure work. The purpose of this paper is to examine how “best practice” may be identified (produced) through a community-based evaluation process as opposed to traditional expert-based evaluation frameworks. The paper poses the following research questions: how does “best practice” (e)valuation in online communities differ depending on whether they are produced by community members or experts? And what role play these two practices of valuation for online community performance?

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is based on a three-year ethnographic study of a large-scale online community initiative run by the European Commission. Participant observation of online and offline activities (23 events) was complemented with 73 semi-structured interviews with 58 interviewees. The paper draws on Science and Technology Studies, and in particular actor-network theory.

Findings

Promoting the idea of “best practice” is not just an exercise about determining what “best” is but rather supposes that best is something that can travel across sites and be replicated. The paper argues that it is crucial to understand the work performed to coordinate multiple practices of producing “best practice” as apparatuses of valuation. Hence if practices are shared or circulate within an online community, this is possible because of material-discursive practices of dissociation and association, through agential cuts. These cuts demarcate what is important – and foregrounded – and what is backgrounded. In so doing new “practice objects” are produced.

Research limitations/implications

The research was conducted in the European public sector where participants are not associated through shared organisational membership (e.g. as employees of the same organisation). An environment for determining “best practice” that is limited to an organisation’s employees and more homogeneous may reveal further dynamics for “best practice” production.

Practical implications

This paper sheds light on why it is so difficult to reach commensuration in crowd-sourced environments.

Originality/value

The paper provides an analysis of how online community members collaborate in order to identify relevant and meaningful user-generated content. It argues that “best practice” is produced through a process of commensuration.

Johnny was here: From airmanship to airlineship

In this article we explore the phenomenon of airmanship in commercial passenger flights, in a context of increasing standardisation of procedures and technologies. Through observation studies in cockpits and interviews we have studied pilots' practices and how they relate to the larger system of procedures and the technical environment. We find that practices are to a large extent guided by standard operating procedures, and that interchangeability of pilots and aircrafts is both a prerequisite for and enabled by this standardised regime. However, since sociotechnical systems in general - and operation of aircrafts is no exception - are inherently underspecified, the pilots' exercise of discretion in their context-sensitive adaptation of the procedures and technical environments is another prerequisite for well-functioning systems. Mastering these adaptations - and recognising the absolute delimitations of adaptations - is a central aspect of airmanship. Outside this space of manoeuvre for the pilots, the aircrafts are managed by what we call airlineship: The inter-organisational efforts to create predictability and safe practices through de-identification and interchangeability of personnel and aircrafts. Pilots are actors in sociotechnical systems that are not demarcated by the cockpits. To understand pilots' work, studies must account also for the wider sociotechnical context of organisational, regulative and techno-material structures. The article is a contribution to the a generic attempt in the field of ergonomics to contribute with models and theories that portray individuals, groups, organisations and systems in ways that keep sight of the individuals in the systems and the systems in the individuals at the same time.

Developing a Relational View of the Organizing Role of Objects: A study of the innovation process in computer games

Innovation processes create distinctive challenges for coordination. Objects are seen as supporting coordination in such settings by enabling the emergent action needed to deal with a dynamic and uncertain process. Thus, previous work has highlighted the role of different types of objects in coordinating the collaborative tasks undertaken by expert groups, either by motivating the creation of new knowledge or through the translation of understanding. Through an empirical study of innovation processes in the computer games sector, our paper adds to this previous work by finding that the relations between objects, and not the objects alone, help to orchestrate multiple collaborative tasks towards a final outcome within temporal and resource constraints. The relational view which emerges from this study shows how such a ‘system of objects’ is able to stabilize coordination of the process while preserving the emergence and autonomy of games developer practices needed to achieve innovation.