Articulation Work Research Articles

Articulation Work and Tinkering for Fairness in Machine Learning

The field of fair AI aims to counter biased algorithms through computational modelling. However, it faces increasing criticism for perpetuating the use of overly technical and reductionist methods. As a result, novel approaches appear in the field to address more socially-oriented and interdisciplinary (SOI) perspectives on fair AI. In this paper, we take this dynamic as the starting point to study the tension between computer science (CS) and SOI research. By drawing on STS and CSCW theory, we position fair AI research as a matter of 'organizational alignment': what makes research 'doable' is the successful alignment of three levels of work organization (the social world, the laboratory, and the experiment). Based on qualitative interviews with CS researchers, we analyze the tasks, resources, and actors required for doable research in the case of fair AI. We find that CS researchers engage with SOI research to some extent, but organizational conditions, articulation work, and ambiguities of the social world constrain the doability of SOI research for them. Based on our findings, we identify and discuss problems for aligning CS and SOI as fair AI continues to evolve.

Virtual Reality in Education and the Co-construction of Immediacy

AbstractVirtual reality (VR) in educational settings is often promoted by commercial actors as a way to experience environments outside the classroom and a soon-to-be part of everyday teaching and learning. This study follows the development of an educational software package in a Swedish municipality that combines VR technology with 360° live footage from museums and science centers to enable students to visit these spaces from the classroom via their headsets. By focusing on the workarounds and configurations intuitively performed by teachers, students, museum staff, and technicians in this pilot project, different kinds of articulation work performed to make the technology fit with local conditions are identified, from hands-on repair and maintenance to the facilitation of interaction and presence. The collective effort put into making the technology disappear and create a feeling of unmediated experience or immediacy shows how global imaginaries about VR as an immersive technology are enacted by the participants, at the same time as the work put into the project made them challenge the idea of VR as a new everyday technology. This tension between the desire for immediacy and the hands-on work in the physical environment that goes into fulfilling these imaginaries points to the need for local production of educational technologies that recognizes their co-constructive, embodied, and situated nature.

Ubiquitous but invisible – public librarians’ self-imposed professional information practices as articulation work

Introduction. To do a good job, public librarians must stay informed and updated on matters related to their work. Seeking and making use of information is ubiquitous in librarians’ everyday work life but this part of their work is elusive and hard to identify. This paper presents a study of how Swedish public librarians keep updated with professional information. It aims to elucidate the parts of this work that occur silently and often outside of formal working hours. Method. The empirical data consists of recorded and transcribed interviews with librarians at Swedish public libraries. Analysis. The activity focused on in the study is conceptualised using the theoretical concept of articulation work, which is used to describe and analyse how various tasks are linked together into an overarching whole recognised as the abstract phenomenon of work. Results. The analysis shows how information seeking and use constitute a fundamental part of the work but also plays a significant role in the library's efforts towards direction and development. Conclusion. Failing to make visible this information practice may contribute to reducing the legitimacy of the activity, ultimately leading to this fundamental element not receiving the time and space it seems to require.

Articulation work for supporting the values of students attending class via telepresence robots

Robotic Telepresence (TR) is a promising medium for providing classroom access for students who are unable to attend classes in-person. While existing research has focused on TR’s usability, adoption, and embodiment, there is a need for research focusing on how TR supports key user values — like identity, privacy, and courtesy — in educational contexts. To bridge this gap, we engaged 22 university students in a field study using Beam telepresence robots, which enabled us to discern the key manifestations of these three values in classroom human–robot interactions. We also identified articulation work improvised by remote students to maintain these values. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations for use that can support these values and offer design recommendations for future telepresence robots. Our insights offer valuable guidance to educational institutions intending to integrate telepresence robots, as well as to their designers.

GenAI and me: the hidden work of building and maintaining an augmentative partnership

AbstractIt has been argued that emergent AI systems should be viewed as working partners rather than tools. Building on this perspective, this study investigates the process through which academics develop a working partnership with generative AI chatbots using a relationship lens and collaborative autoethnographic methods. Based on a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of our experiences of working with AI, we identify five stages of relationship development in building a successful working partnership with generative AI: Playing Around, Infatuation, Committing, Frustration, and Enlightenment and Readjustment. In reporting each stage, we provide vignettes to illustrate the emotional and cognitive challenges and rewards involved, the developing skills, and the experienced anthropomorphic dimension of this emerging relationship. Drawing on prior theory, we identify and examine three types of work that are required in developing this working partnership: articulation work, relationship work, and identity work. We analyse how each type of work unfolds with the stages of relationship development and consider implications for research and practice.

Tinker, Tailor, Configure, Customize: The Articulation Work of Contextualizing an AI Fairness Checklist

Many responsible AI resources, such as toolkits, playbooks, and checklists, have been developed to support AI practitioners in identifying, measuring, and mitigating potential fairness-related harms. These resources are often designed to be general purpose in order to be applicable to a variety of use cases, domains, and deployment contexts. However, this can lead to decontextualization, where such resources lack the level of relevance or specificity needed to use them. To understand how AI practitioners might contextualize one such resource, an AI fairness checklist, for their particular use cases, domains, and deployment contexts, we conducted a retrospective contextual inquiry with 13 AI practitioners from seven organizations. We identify how contextualizing this checklist introduces new forms of work for AI practitioners and other stakeholders, as well as opening up new sites for negotiation and contestation of values in AI. We also identify how the contextualization process may help AI practitioners develop a shared language around AI fairness, and we identify tensions related to ownership over this process that suggest larger issues of accountability in responsible AI work.

Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is Impossible

Designing new technologies to support synchronous interaction across distance has for many years focused on creating symmetry for participation between geographically distributed actors. Symmetry in synchronous interaction has, to some extent, been achieved technologically (while multiple social, historical, political, and hierarchical concerns continue to exist) and proven empirically in the increased use of remote-work technologies that were used during the pandemic. However, synchronous interaction in hybrid work is achieved differently, since the asymmetry produced by some participants being collocated while others geographically distributed introduces increased complexities for such interactions. Focusing on this challenge, we ask: To what extent can symmetry in cooperative work engagements be achieved in hybrid work contexts? We explore this question by interrogating multiple different empirical examples of synchronous hybrid interaction collected across different organizations, activities, and events. We found that the effort required to accomplish hybrid work includes additional articulation work necessary for bounding multiple intertwined artefacts across sites, devices, and applications. Further, the multiple artefacts setup across sites, combined with asymmetric collocation across participants, produce incongruence in technological frames of reference for each participant. All participants in hybrid work have only partial access to the hybrid setup, and no single person has access to the complete setup. The incongruence in technological frames produces insurmountable gaps in collaboration, causing all hybrid work situations to be characterized fundamentally by asymmetric relationships. We argue that symmetry in hybrid synchronous interaction is impossible to attain in attempts to solve this problem through design. Instead, we propose that designers of cooperative technologies for hybrid work shift towards developing artefact-ecologies supporting hybrid work, focusing on asymmetry as a necessary feature. Fundamentally, the design strategy should explore novel ways of taking advantage of the multiple different artefact-ecologies which serve as the foundation for the hybrid collaboration. Instead of striving for symmetry, we propose to feature asymmetric conditions in future technology designs for hybrid interaction.

Maintaining “Good” Care: An Articulation Work Perspective on Organizational Ethics in the Healthcare Sector

Maintaining “Good” Care: An Articulation Work Perspective on Organizational Ethics in the Healthcare Sector

The public as infrastructure in policy processes: The case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system.

The Swedish political system is based on a strong tradition of commissions of inquiry, which work over the long-term to develop knowledge-based policy. This study explores knowledge processes associated with the work of such commissions, focusing on the case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system. The point of departure is the 1944 Temperance Committee and its internal committee work, the committee's reports, and also the resulting governmental bill that led to the abolition of the rationing system in 1955. The focus is directed at how the public was used in arguments for and against the abolition of the system. The article adds to studies of knowledge production in policy by presenting a case study of the various ways in which the arguments used in political processes rely on the public as a carrying infrastructure over the course of a political process. We use the concept of the infrastructure (Star, 1999) as a metaphor to engage with the way the public is taken for granted in policy processes, and with the discursive resources needed to move arguments forward within a political process. Political processes involve many activities related to the movement of knowledge, of which we have explored the use of the public as an activity required for the movement of arguments. The public is understood as providing both conversational and legalistic resources for moving arguments from one context to another. While the internal committee documents and the final bill allowed for an everyday use of the public in relation to arguments on hassle, annoyance and freedom, the committee reports combined the use of the public with formal arguments on legal processes and the public's sense of justice. Explanations of the movement of knowledge often miss the articulation work (Star, 1991) that takes place within policy processes. The public is indirectly present, as well-behaving witnesses used to emphasize arguments, and as such, they do plenty of work. At the same time, it is the committee documents that facilitate the presence of this public, which often lie far from the publics' actual potential to make their voices heard. Although a perception of the rationing system's lack of support in popular opinion constituted a backdrop to the work of the committee, there was little knowledge of the publics' actual views on the rationing system. We show that the public constitute a spoken rather than a material resource that proves quite effective: the public is rarely questioned as long as it is a restricted singular public that behaves well. To date, little attention has been focused on understanding the role of the everyday actors in relation to alcohol policy and other forms of drug policy. We argue that research needs to engage more with the way publics are allowed to indirectly or directly participate in policy processes and what knowledge and policy consequences this participation produces.

Making assessment protocols workable: Navigating transparency and person-centredness in Norwegian reablement.

Western welfare states are facing great challenges as they strive to optimise their health and social systems in response to the realities of an ageing population. Many countries put a stake on reablement services-short-term rehabilitative interventions aiming to help older people regain functional capacity. To ensure a person-centred approach and outcome measures, service providers are recommended to follow a protocol designed for the dual purpose. In this article, we explore how reablement staff perceive and work around these person-centred assessment protocols. Departing from the perspective that standards never operate in isolation, but in social settings already infused with values and interests, we explore the various kinds of work involved in aligning the protocol with ongoing day-to-day assessment practices. The article demonstrates that professionals continuously engage in processes of tinkering to navigate between different values and concerns: they tinker with workflows (articulation work), with clients (identity transformation work) and with protocols (editing work). Exploring the different forms and intensity of tinkering enables us to discuss the practical and moral difficulties inherent in making assessment protocols workable.

The Legacy of Coordinative Practice: How the Mesh of Formal and Informal Articulation Work Through Time Affects a Shipyard in Transition

This article explores the balance, and the shift in balance, between technologies and practices that coordinate work. The empirical data stems from a primarily qualitative study of a Norwegian shipyard in a phase of transition, where new models of collaboration emerge due to changes in the company environment. The article highlights the interplay between formal and informal articulation work, as well as the role of coordinative IT artifacts in this regard. With this background, the findings show that the balance (between coordinative technologies and practices) shifts depending on circumstances. Thus, the more formal coordination gains importance as transitions increases the need for detailed instructions. The findings also show that the existing IT infrastructure (the legacy) lacks the granularity as a coordinative artifact to facilitate necessary change in the organizational work arrangement, and how the workers cope with such issues. Based on this, the paper provides insights into how articulation work and its sociomaterial aspects develops over time in the interplay of organizational and technological change (or lack thereof).

Visions of Control: The Head-Up Display, Perceptual Labor, and a Lesson for Augmented Reality.

Traditional workplace studies focus on the bodily integration of familiar technologies like the desktop computer and smartphone. To better understand augmented reality (AR) technologies that provide new ways to perform daily tasks, this article turns to an overlooked yet critical forerunner of AR: the head-up display (HUD). Extensive archival research and oral histories show that the HUD caused pilots to depend on a single interface, curtailing their autonomy for integrating disparate information that could inform critical, often lethal decision-making processes. This history provides evidence that once a single device subsumes many functions of a work environment, adaptive articulation work can drive information workers to undertake increasingly insulated information practices. The HUD's isolating and insulating perceptual legacy suggests that AR will similarly train users in many contexts how to trust interactive data overlays in ways that preclude cross-checking alternative data sources that could inform decision-making processes.

Navigating the empty shell: the role of articulation work in platform structures

Abstract This article explores platform workers’ strategies for producing sustainable, quality services within platform structures that simultaneously over- and under-determine their work. We present findings from interviews with U.S.-based mental health professionals (n = 48) working on teletherapy platforms. These therapists describe navigating both the presence of platformic controls and the absence of features supporting professional best practices and regulatory requirements. We describe this absence as the “empty shell” characteristic of platforms and argue that it is a central technique through which platforms create scale. Our findings detail the communicative strategies therapists employ to navigate the empty shell and provide quality care to their clients. These strategies can be seen as a form of “articulation work,” a concept drawn from the sociology of work. Attending to articulation work in an emerging platform labor context, such as teletherapy, contributes to our understanding of the politics of platforms.

(In)visible everyday work of fostering a data‐driven healthcare and social service organisation

AbstractThis article combines the frameworks of (in)visible work and articulation work to examine the everyday articulation work ascribed to a knowledge production and technology expert team (KT) in the transition to a data‐driven healthcare and social service organisation. The article structures the results of an ethnographic study spanning 2.5 years around four roles of the KT's work: (1) mediating messy and incomplete technologies in‐the‐making, (2) facilitating bleeding‐edge technologies in‐the‐making, (3) coaching in new data practices and technologies in‐the‐making, and (4) advocating for care staff. Additionally, insights are provided into the invisible articulation work of the care staff performed in support of these KT roles. With these results, the study advances our understanding of the complexity, power dynamics, and instability of work invested in transitioning to a data‐driven public organisation. It also contributes to the critical discussion on the perpetual piloting nature of this transition.

Articulation Work and the Management of Intersubjectivity Disjunctures in Offshored Production

Since the move away from integrated value chains in production in the 1980s, the outsourcing and offshoring of various aspects of manufacturing has become commonplace. This has led to global production and marketing relationships between enterprises in numerous different countries, a prominent axis being between Europe and Asia. This paper reports on a study of one such offshoring relationship between a German SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) and their Chinese subsidiary, the trials and tribulations of the collaboration between them, and the implications of this for our understanding of how articulation work might be best supported in the context of global production. We also look at how a separate entity, which we term an 'articulation hub', was established to support articulation between the sites. While a number of studies have looked at articulation work in Global Software Development (GSD), there are very few ethnographic studies of offshored manufacturing, despite the unique challenges it presents. We find here that issues arise not only because of differences in technology environments, infrastructures, and cultural expectations, but also because of differing development strategies and business philosophies. The core problem confronting articulation work in offshored production is the difficulty of arriving at a mutually-grounded intersubjectivity, where shared assumptions about working practices and their relative importance and value can be trusted to apply, leading to what we term 'intersubjectivity disjunctures'. These disjunctures have a number of important implications for accomplishing articulation work. This paper offers a number of contributions to CSCW. First, it adds to a very thin corpus of CSCW-relevant ethnographic studies of global manufacturing. Second, it finds that articulation work in offshored production is less closely-coupled than it is in other distributed settings, making conventionally promoted solutions, such as knowledge sharing and relationship building, less relevant. Third, it reveals how differences in moral reasoning can result in different sites assigning very different priorities to articulation work. Finally, while articulation work is typically seen to be invisible work in CSCW, we argue that, in this context, there are a number of ways in which using a separate hub to actively render articulation work visible may be the best solution.

How librarians and firefighters built a special library in Champaign, Illinois, USA: a community informatics story

PurposeThis paper aims to understand how a special library helped firefighters in Illinois navigate the digital revolution by evidencing the elements and forms of work that made its innovative services possible.Design/methodology/approachThe authors examine the history of a special library through a community informatics lens, drawing from sociomaterial perspectives to highlight forms of work often invisible in digital innovation. Data was collected through documentary revision, oral histories and semi-structured interviews. Deductive-inductive coding and constant comparative analysis was used in the analysis.FindingsA historical narrative of the library between 1990 and 2021 highlights three sociotechnical innovations that assisted firefighters through the digital revolution: the facilitated collection, the co-created collection and the inside-out library. To develop these innovations the library drew from institutional relations, personal relations, grants, labor, knowledge of firefighters and technology. Various forms of articulation work brought these elements together to create innovative services.Originality/valueThe role of special libraries in addressing the digital divide has not been sufficiently detailed so far; this paper is a contribution in that direction. It also has practical value for professionals working in specialized libraries and information centers.

Warm Solutions: Centering Nurse Contributions in Medical Making

Making medical devices in healthcare settings engages practitioners in organizational innovation. Nurses improvise physical workarounds at the bedside in response to patient needs. Yet nurse-led problem-solving is rarely centralized in an emerging innovation ecosystem through medical making. We interviewed medical makers in six healthcare makerspaces to understand factors for nurse inclusion in the medical making ecosystem. Findings from 16 multi-stakeholder interviews with 6 facilitators and 10 nurses in the USA, reveal insights into nurse-led problem-solving with and without the use of physical prototyping (making) in formal innovation spaces with maker technologies. We report how a nurse's capacity for making is practice-driven to address in-patient discomfort, repair their own practice, and update standardized workflows. Most nurses iterate on low-tech solutions facing barriers to formal collaboration when they attempt to scale up. Their technical capabilities extend from innovation-centered resources (e.g., lab spaces, technologies), often with complete reliance on facilitators who have limited authority in the medical system. We contribute to themes around practice-based innovation, participation in technology design, and articulation work for collaborative innovation. From nurse makers' experiences, we discuss how nurse participation can be supported in healthcare technology design.

Unveiling Practices of Customer Service Content Curators of Conversational Agents

Conversational interfaces require two types of curation: data curation by data science workers and content curation by domain experts. Recent years have seen the possibilities for content curators to instruct conversational machines in the customer service domain (i.e., Machine Teaching). The activities of curating specialized data are time-consuming. These activities have a learning curve for the domain expert, and they rely on collaborators beyond the domain experts, including product owners, technology expert curators, management, marketing, and communication employees. However, recent research has looked at making this task easier for domain experts with a lack of knowledge in the Machine Learning system, and few papers have investigated the work practices and collaborations involved in this role. This paper aims to fill this gap, presenting and unveiling practices extracted from eleven semi-structured interviews and four design workshops with experts in Banking, Technical support, Humans Resources, Telecommunications, and Automotive sectors. First, we investigate the articulation work of the content curators and tech curators in training conversational machines. Second, we inspect the curatorial and collaboration strategies they use, which are not afforded by current conversational platforms. Third, we draw the design implications and possibilities to support individual and collaboration curating practices. We reflect on how those practices rely on self and collaboration with others for curation, trust, and data tracking and ownership.

Office Work Interrupted: Evolving Understandings of Work and Organizing in the Shadow of COVID-19

For many workers, COVID-19 catalyzed a rapid disappearance of the physical organization and a dramatic rise in technologically mediated forms of organizing. Prior research on remote and virtual work has largely focused on what changes enable virtual workers to succeed, under the assumption that these virtual workers would represent a minority of the workforce and would primarily occupy specialized roles. Key questions to be asked are: do we need to revisit our thinking about virtual work in light of our changed, and changing, circumstances? And what might the recent, widespread virtualization of work teach us not just about virtual work, but, also, about workers and organizations, more broadly? Our goal with this symposium is to feature future-of-work scholars who can share their insights into the ways that we might understand virtual work anew, as well as the ways that virtualization can impact how workers understand themselves, their work, and their organizations. The presentations contained in this symposium cover newcomer socialization, the doing of virtual work, the emotional costs of that work, and workers’ reflections upon the transition to virtual work. In so doing, they invite us to question both scholarly and practitioner assumptions about virtual work and highlight the ways in which workers shape their experience of work. Benefits To Onboarding Remotely? Building Trust With Supervisors Without Face-To-Face Contact Presenter: Mailys George; IESE Business School Presenter: Kevin W. Rockmann; George Mason U. The Work Of Getting to Work: Independent Workers and The Articulation Work People Engage In... Presenter: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine Presenter: Ingrid Erickson; Syracuse U. School of Information Presenter: Margaret Jack; Syracuse U. School of Information The Emotional Costs Of Remote Work Arrangements Presenter: Christine Beckman; U. of Southern California Presenter: Cynthia Wilkes; U. of Southern California You Can Take It With You: Worker Adaptation To The Virtualized Organization Presenter: Julia Coff; New York U. Presenter: Frances J. Milliken; New York U. Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; U. of British Columbia

Video connecting families and social robots: from ideas to practices putting technology to work

Technology use is a socially embedded process, especially when it comes to older adults and care. However, the restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have limited social contact to protect vulnerable groups in care homes, and even if technology use has increased in other areas, there is little known about the potential uptake of communication technology and changes in social interaction in the care context during a lasting crisis. This paper explores changes in communication technology use triggered by the pandemic at two care homes, using a qualitative diary study, online interviews and observations, and in-situ interviews within the care home with residents and workers. Our findings point to increasing use of tablets and video conference software triggered by COVID-related experiences, with implications for living and working in care homes. We also characterise the isolation experience of the residents, the workers’ concerns about the residents and changes in social interaction. We observed new areas of technology usage, associated changing work practices, technical affinity issues and context-specific attitudes towards future technologies. While the pandemic has triggered the use of communication technology in care homes on a small scale, this has also caused increasing workload and in particular articulation work, which requires support structures and the re-definition of work roles.