Critical Issues in Information Systems

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Critical Issues in Information Systems

• BUSS 951

Lecture 13 Researching Organisations and Systems
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Recall

• last week we described
• describe several theories of one useful strata-
  genre and apply it to SFL to an actual IS in its
  workplace- ALABS
• use our substantive knowledge of IS to alter the
  theory
• apply this theory to some features of the ALABS
  system

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Agenda

• overtime we can see shifts in the genre structure
  of texts associated with these workpractices and
  a system features...
• NOTE case studies conducted over time are
  referred to as longitudinal studies, or
  diachronic studies
• we can do this because we can study systems
  features using texts, remembering that there is a
  relationship between text and context!
• we can ask question why did this change to take
  place?

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Agenda (1)

• Language/Discourse
• its not just Vocabulary that is different between
  Groups in Organisations- its Language (or
  Discourse)
• it helps us explain why users and developers have
  difficulties in understanding each other!
• this could be used as a theoretical basis for
  participation- a way of making an interactive
  method out of systems analysis

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Agenda (2)

• We will recap important aspects of the course (to
  assist you in doing the examination)
• we will also restate the critical issues covered
  in this subject with a review of the content of
  this course

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Language/Discourse as a technology
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Language/Discourse (1)

• Language and Discourses in general are tools-
  they do things (achieve work in organisations)
• that is why they have evolved and therefore it is
  their functionality that determines their
  character
• but discourses are semiotic tools (and therefore
  tacit or unconscious)
• they are therefore taken for granted in
  discussions of 20C technology

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Language/Discourse (2)

• at this time in our history we have focused on
  designed tools- the material products of
  conscious invention
• but it is the unconscious and evolving discourses
  of our cultures which engender all
  purpose-designed systems

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Language/Discourse (3)

• without an understanding of our material
  technology- our information systems- in our
  cultures, then the ways in which it can be
  mastered (and masters us) is necessarily
  incomplete
• by understanding the discourses, we can
  facilitate intervention in the process of
  changing and improving workpractices
• language is just not theorised in information
  systems

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Language/Discourse (4)

• written language is extremely important in
  information systems
• it is primarily the resources of written language
  through which the discipline of IS has, like
  others, evolved
• as with most language learning, we learn the
  discourses of IS- literally to be IS
  practitioners- by copying written directly from
  IS texts and related reference materials

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Language/Discourse (5)

• We are tacitly familiar with a number of these
  written language patterns that we often see in
  textbooks and journal articles associated with
  science and technology
• Report Genre- description-oriented texts
• Explanation Genre- reason-oriented science with a
  taxonomising function
• Exposition Genre- reason-oriented argument

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Language/Discourse (6)Language of Deliverables

• the deliverables used in IS are technical in
  nature because they are concerned with building
  up an uncommon sense interpretation of the world
• to do this we take common sense as a starting
  point and translate it into specialised
  knowledge

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Language/Discourse (7)Language of Deliverables

• the basic semiotic resource available for this
  translation is called elaboration
• at the clause rank this meaning is constructed
  through the relational identifying clause
  (Halliday 1985 112-128)
• favoured clause type in science and technology

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Language/Discourse (8)Language of Deliverables

• Where
• The data store... Value
• is called Process
• Awards Token
• Identifying Clause Example (NB these are
  reversible)
• The data store used in changing pays scales is
  called Awards
• Awards is the data store used in changing pays
  scales

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Language/Discourse (9)Language of Deliverables

• Elaboration is also found at the group and word
  rank once again to translate common sense into
  specialized knowledge
• traditionally this is called paratactic expansion
  or more traditionally as apposition

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Language/Discourse (10)Language of Deliverables

• used in science to remind readers of the way we
  talk technically
• the technical term is glossed rather than
  explicitly defined
• reduces or as we say in IS compresses the
  file size
• the term compresses can now be taken for granted

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IS and User Language
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Grammatical Differences

• IS language (scientific texts)
• foregrounds identifying relational processes
  which are used to define technical terms
• User language (historical texts)
• relies on attributive relational processes to
  assign participants to familiar classes

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Semantic Differences

• IS language (scientific texts)
• more likely to realise, and therefore foreground,
  logical connections between clauses and sentences
• User language (historical texts)
• more likely to bury the reasoning inside the
  clause

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Grammatical Metaphor

• differences between relational processes and
  conjunction patterns (IS practitioners and Users)
• therefore, grammatical metaphor plays a different
  role in mediating between grammar and semantics
  in respective discourses

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IS Discourse Nominalisation Grammatical
Metaphor

• nominalisation is strongly associated with
  definitions
• nominalisation is used to accumulate meanings so
  that a technical term can be defined
• grammatical metaphor distills

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User Discourse Nominalisation Grammatical
Metaphor

• nominalisation is strongly associated with
  realising events as participants so that logical
  connections can be realised inside the clauses
• nominalisation is deployed to construct layers of
  thematic and information structure in a text
• grammatical metaphor scaffolds

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IS and User Discourse Register Differences

• IS Discourse
• science is concerned with constructing taxonomies
  and implication sequences
• emphasis is focused on field
• knowledge constructed is more transcendent
  (beyond experience)
• scientific taxonomies and implication sequences
  tend to function as system

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IS and User Discourse Register Differences

• User Discourse
• concerned with constructing text
• emphasis is focused on mode
• knowledge constructed is more experientially
  based than transcendent
• historical generalizations and explanations tend
  to function as text not system
• users tend to refer to their work texts in order
  to find out what work means

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IS and User Discourse Generic Differences

• IS Discourse
• organised as large Report Genres with embedded
  Explanation Genres and Experiment Genres
• User Discourse
• organised as long, generalsied Recount Genres,
  with embedded Report Genres and more occasionally
  Exposition Genres

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IS and User DiscourseTable of Differences
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Summary (1)

• semiosis at all levels constructs discourses as
  truth or at best as hypothesis about what is and
  what happened that can be proved and disproved
• the discourses of IS and of Users in workplaces
  are
• constitutive of their subjectivity
• and negotiable
• is an idea which is hidden in the IS discipline-
  but it is an idea that can change this discipline

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Critical Issues in IS
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Critical Issues

• Critical Issues
• Are organisations really systems?
• What is information?
• What does the IS Discipline do?
• Further Issues
• How might organisations be theorised?
• How can we improve IS Development Practices?

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Information-theoretic basis of the Discipline

• data is easy to identify but information depends
  on who, what, where, how and when
• organisations are not axiomatic (rule determined)
  since members can change the internal and
  external processes of the organisation

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Data Information

• IS concept of information (Shannon Weaver,
  defines information in terms which preclude
  meaning
• in other words the second basis of our discipline
  (the concept of information) is theoretically
  inappropriate for use when developing systems

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Systems Design as Social Activity (1)

• social processes are always at work during the
  analysis, design, development and implementation
  of systems
• all these activities take place in organisational
  and institutional settings

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Systems Design as Social Activity (2)

• need to locate social processes and human
  interactions within historical and organisational
  contexts
• some justification is required for this
  approach...

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Systems Design as Social Activity (3)

• communication processes and social interactions
  within the developer community are of great
  importance
• changes in systems development practices, whether
  related to technology or organisational issues,
  are always driven and mediated by social factors

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Systems Design as Social Activity (4)

• systems development is a complex bridging process
  linking areas of specialized and diverse
  expertise the domain of the IT professional and
  the domain of the user
• systems development concerns itself with IT
  innovation, application and diffusion- all social

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Effects of Shannon WeaverIS Methods

• skews the types of IS methods that get produced
  and therefore used
• IS methods come with inbuilt with individualism
  as a theoretical assumption
• rather communication gets reduced to exchange

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Effects of Shannon WeaverPolitical Effects (2)

• if this model is about transmission then who
  has the role of the sender becomes a political
  act (in an organisation or a society)
• that is
• who can speak
• who is allowed to speak
• who has the authority to speak

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Effects of Shannon WeaverPolitical Effects (4)

• adopting Shannon Weaver, means we adopt a
  theory of communication which privaledges
• those who have the power to speak over those who
  may only be permitted to listen!
• systems development in organisations is therefore
  political

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Communication Power

• there is always a close relationship between
  communication and power
• therefore, we must look for other models of
  communication
• the limits in practice which constrain
  communication depend on the political and
  ideological outlook of the reader

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Summary (2)

• we communicate because sets of concepts reoccur
  in our culture and language
• but we dont need to share meanings, we only need
  to think that we can in order to communicate

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Use Semiotic Approaches

• the discipline which studies meaning-making (or
  semiosis) is called semiotics
• some semiotic analysis has been criticised as
  nothing more than arid formalism

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Use Semiotic Analysis

• purely structuralist semiotics does not address
  authorial intentions or audience interpretation
• it ignores particular practices, institutional
  frameworks and the cultural, social, economic and
  political contexts.

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Use Semiotic Analysis

• semiotics emphasizes that signs are related to
  their signifieds by social conventions which we
  learn
• we become so used to such conventions in our use
  of various media that they seem natural or
  commonsense

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Use Semiotic Analysis

• semiotics can help to make us aware of what we
  take for granted in representing the world
• we are always
• dealing with signs, not with an unmediated
  objective reality
• that sign systems are involved in the
  construction of meaning

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Semio-informatic Dilemma (1)

• their are great difficulties faced by any
  semio-informatic approach which relies on models
  of the sign
• we have seen that signs are everywhere, that we
  utilise many systems of signs simultaneously to
  signify meaning

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Semio-informatic Dilemma (7)

• the use of higher level semiotic structures
  confuses many researchers who have only ever seen
  semiotics defined in terms of signs- semiotics is
  the study of signs according to many
• it is the semio-informatics researchers
  responsibility to theorise the higher level
  semiotic structures

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Language and social contextApplied to IS

• SFL gives two complementary perspectives
• can look at the perspective of language IS as
  text
• can look at the perspective of context IS as
  social organisation
• applying SFL to examining systems is very
  different to traditional IS approaches
• a given text provides only a partial perspective
  about a work practice

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Language and social contextApplied to IS

• in the short term a linguistic analysis provides
  only a small part of the overall picture
• traditional IS practices are applied top-down
  gives a very broad picture poor on details
• SFL methodology is applied bottom-up provides a
  very detailed view of work practices which then
  need to be integrated across various sites

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Language and social contextApplied to IS

• need to look at many actual texts in a social
  context in order to find out about work practices
• only by shunting between language and social
  context (the work practice and the organisation)
  can we perform a meaningful analysis
• in one of your assignments you were asked to
  collect a small set of texts
• you would need to collect many texts of the same
  type of transaction before you understood it (see
  all the variations)

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Language and social contextApplied to IS

• how many texts to collect? well its difficult to
  know
• you need to include those people involved in the
  work practices into the analysis
• so this SFL approach to understanding work
  practices MUST be participative

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SFL and IS

• not all the SFL model needs to be used on each
  text- what language resources you use will depend
  on the type of analysis needed
• for IS the most useful strata and context (genre
  and register) and discourse semantics
• IS are interesting because they are multigeneric,
  many genres are involved in describing the
  general properties of texts
• end-user modification of system and wholesale
  management driven change can be characterised
  using genre...

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SFL and IS

• System Development
• Genres as Quasispecies
• Generic Element Cut, Paste and Elaboration
• Genre Graphs
• Genre Associations
• Genre Assemblages

• Systems Analysis
• translate from certain structurally simple
  Factual and Narrative Genres to to more complex
  Factual Genres
• Methodologies
• can also be described using Genre
• Methodologies are multi-generic (Macrogenres)

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Course Justification
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Justification (1)

• almost all IS students leave without
  understanding anything other than methodologies
• so I have tried to get you to consider a social,
  rather than a technical, basis of the information
  systems discipline

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Justification (2)

• one of the things that should be important to
  you...
• an explicitly theorised social description can be
  used to implement- not just talk about- an
  information system

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Justification (3)

• in order to do this I needed you to understand
  that there is an enormous body of material that
  you can apply to understand IS development
• we have looked at sociology (qualitative
  analysis), ethnography and semiotics
• of all of these my interest is in semiotics- it
  is the least used and I think the most promising
  because it involves issues of meaning making,
  social groups and culture

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Justification (5)

• of the semiotic approaches to IS my preference
  (and my own research area) is SFL and Social
  Semiotics, why
• can deal with systems (manual/automated) and
  changes to them over time
• can deal with Analysing Systems, and can be used
  to theorise Methodologies
• most of the work is being developed in Australia
  (accessible)

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JustificationAssessment

• what I have tried to do in this course is to
  teach you how to act as researchers
• thats why the assessment was designed in order
  for you to practice thinking about topics from a
  theoretical, methodological and substantive
  aspects- to clarify the epistemology and ontology
  of a specific paper and on being able to
  identifying concepts, statements, models and
  theories

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JustificationAssessment

• understanding these concepts is a necessary part
  of the research process and is a significant part
  of our proficiency and literacy in a given field
• these concepts are building blocks that enable us
  to effectively summarise what we are reading
• not just recounting what was said by the author
  but actually identifying what was meant (even if
  the author didnt realise it)

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JustificationAssessment

• these divisions are a little difficult- because
  they are a little artificial- but it is necessary
  since it is the start of the research process!

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JustificationAssessment

• we used an explicit model of genre built into the
  assessment
• in other words, I have applied genre analysis to
  the assessment process in a course which is in
  part about genre analysis!

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Justification

• this course has been a direct result of my own
  research interests and that of the Department of
  Information Systems
• we are interested in supervising good students in
  this area (Projects and PhDs), or in the new
  Extension Programme

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Justification

• but if you decide to finish your studies and get
  back to industry, then...
• keep in touch if you are interested in applying
  these methods in your workplace
• study hard and prepare well
• GOOD LUCK and THANKS