Socio-technical Approach Research Articles

Bridging technostress and continuous learning in knowledge-intensive organizations: A socio-technical systems approach for the future of healthy working life

We present an interdisciplinary exploration of technostress in knowledge-intensive organizations, including both business and healthcare settings, and its impact on a healthy working life. Technostress, a contemporary form of stress induced by information and communication technology, is associated with reduced job satisfaction, diminished organizational commitment, and adverse patient care outcomes. This article aims to construct an innovative framework, called The Integrated Technostress Resilience Framework, designed to mitigate technostress and promote continuous learning within dynamic organizational contexts. In this perspective article we incorporate a socio-technical systems approach to emphasize the complex interplay between technological and social factors in organizational settings. The proposed framework is expected to provide valuable insights into the role of transparency in digital technology utilization, with the aim of mitigating technostress. Furthermore, it seeks to extend information systems theory, particularly the Technology Acceptance Model, by offering a more nuanced understanding of technology adoption and use. Our conclusion includes considerations for the design and implementation of information systems aimed at fostering resilience and adaptability in organizations undergoing rapid technological change.

Infrastructuring informal urbanism: Negotiation of water, electricity, and natural gas in urban villages in Chengdu, China

Infrastructure such as water, electricity, and natural gas fundamentally underpins informal housing and industrial development in urban villages. Yet how the infrastructure is built, maintained, and governed, and what are the underlying mechanisms, remain peripheral to existing literature and policy agenda. This study addresses this gap by incorporating a socio-technical approach to infrastructure into informal urbanism to understand the negotiation of water, electricity, and natural gas in two neighboring urban villages in Chengdu, China. Four rounds of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with various stakeholders found highly precarious provision of infrastructure in urban villages. Its spatial layout, facilities, charges, quality control, and maintenance rest uneasily on, and then in turn shape, the development of informal renting markets and industries in different urban villages, especially when considering the cross-sectional interactions between different types of infrastructure. These processes are dominated by stakeholders’ commercial logics embedded in informal urbanism, including the urban village and infrastructure providers’ profit-seeking strategies, enterprises and migrants’ cost-saving behaviors, and the governments’ purposive absence in governing infrastructure, which leads to difficulties in meeting urban village residents’ needs for qualified infrastructure. This study unravels the “black box” of infrastructure in urban villages and puts forward inclusive planning strategies to promote infrastructure in urban villages.

Sustainable urban digital innovation: A socio-technical competency-based approach to evaluation

This study explores the leadership competencies required in practice by city planners and managers in smart city projects focusing on environmental urban sustainability. Although the literature notes that urban technologies and their capabilities can help address sustainability challenges in cities, there is a lack of studies exploring the competency requirements necessary to foster leadership capacity. This paper identifies leadership competencies within four real-world case studies in the urban built environment, guided by a socio-technical competency framework (DC2-CF). The selected case studies represent a diverse set of city planning purposes, geographic regions, various levels of spatial scale, and socio-technical elements of digital innovation. In these case studies, city managers exhibit specific competencies to develop digital innovation projects that uphold and advance urban sustainability. The study demonstrates the relevance and practical application of DC2-CF as a valuable tool to identify competency needs for local public, private, and community stakeholders throughout diverse stages of the urban digital innovation process. The findings suggest the complex relationship between competencies and project delivery, stressing variations in how they are utilised across various projects. Drawing from these key results, this paper provides practical recommendations for city professionals, guiding them in leading climate-friendly and sustainable urban digital innovation.

Achieving deep transport energy demand reductions in the United Kingdom

The transport sector is a crucial yet challenging area to decarbonize, given its heavy reliance on fossil fuel usage, carbon-intensive infrastructure and car-centric lifestyles. It remains the largest contributor to local air pollution in cities yet has the potential to improve people's physical and mental health. This research investigated the potential contribution of transport energy demand reduction to climate change mitigation and improving public health. Using a comprehensive bottom-up modelling framework, the Transport Energy and Air pollution Model (TEAM), this study provides an integrated assessment of the impacts of deep mobility-related energy demand reductions, including lifecycle carbon emissions, local air pollution and health impacts. Using a sociotechnical scenario approach and the UK as a case study, this research reveals that energy demand reductions of up to 61 % by 2050 compared to baseline levels are achievable and can enhance citizens' quality of life. Business as usual approaches which rely on a technical transition miss the legislated carbon budgets and result in higher energy demand in 2050. More comprehensive scenarios deliver a reduction of up to 72 % in total lifecycle carbon emissions by 2050, with approximately half of the reduction achieved through mode shifting and avoiding travel, while the other half comes from vehicle energy efficiency, electrification, and downsizing of the vehicle fleets. The research shows that it can lead to significant co-benefits such as improved local air pollution and public health. The feasibility and practicality of policy measures and integrated strategies identified for achieving deep transport-energy demand reductions are discussed.

Emphasizing the Social in Sociotechnical Approaches to the Digital Curation of Visual Information

ABSTRACTThis panel explores the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the expanded sociotechnical practices associated with the preservation, curation, and use of visual information and ongoing perceptions of the affordances and constraints associated with new and emerging visual information objects. The panelists and the respondent work with the curation and preservation of visual information across a variety of research areas and utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the parallel and divergent sociotechnical challenges of curating visual information across analog, digitized, and born‐digital contexts. Sites of analysis range from format‐specific identity‐representation issues to the cultural practices of media archivists, translational challenges when moving complex scientific data across various digital and analog formats, and the role of accessibility in the design and deployment of discovery systems within cultural heritage institutions. Responding to the unique and intersecting challenges produced by working with visual information across various archival and digital curation contexts, the panelist will reflect on the practical and theoretical outcomes from ongoing research projects and identify persistent and emergent issues within the digital curation of visual information.

국제개발협력에서 디지털 공공재의 역할과 과제에 관한 연구

Purpose: This study examines the role and challenges of Digital Public Goods (DPGs) in international development cooperation. Emphasizing openness, it analyzes the socio-technical dimensions of DPGs, identifying key considerations and constraints for their development and application. Originality: DPGs are emerging as a strategic tool to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and address digital inequality. However, questions persist about whether technical openness alone can ensure successful development outcomes, suggesting the need for a broader analysis. Methodology: Using a socio-technical systems approach, this study reviews scholarly work on open-source software and open data in the Digital for Development (D4D) field over the past 15 years. Result: The findings show that DPGs enhance public service efficiency, support service expansion, and foster innovation through open access to data and knowledge. Despite these benefits, challenges such as technological complexity, infrastructure limitations, gaps in stakeholder awareness, capabilities, and trust, and hierarchical governance structures reveal tensions between technical and social dimensions. Conclusion and Implication: For effective implementation, DPGs require not only technical openness but also open governance structures, sustainable financial and technical capacities, and context-specific strategies. Governments and international organizations play a critical role as coordinators, while the formation of intermediaries and tailored strategies is crucial. This study contributes to the growing body of DPG research by offering a comprehensive analysis through a socio-technical lens.

Exploring the Factors Leading to Diffusion of Alternative Fuels Using a Socio-Technical Transition Approach—A Case Study of LNG as a Marine Fuel in Norway

The maritime shipping sector needs to transition towards a low- or zero-emission future to align with the 1.5 °C temperature goal and the recently adopted and revised greenhouse gas (GHG) strategy at the International Maritime Organization (IMO). A significant research gap exists in understanding how socio-economic and socio-political processes can lead to the adoption of alternative marine fuels that will be essential in meeting the aforementioned goals. The aim of this paper is to use a case study of an existing transition to understand how diffusion takes place, specifically how the adoption of liquified natural gas (LNG) in Norway has unfolded and what lessons can be learnt from this process. To answer this question, a combination of semi-structured interviews with key maritime stakeholders and documentary evidence was collected covering the period from 1985 to 2015. The collected data were analysed through a content analysis approach applying the multilevel perspective (MLP) as a heuristic. The qualitative results paint an interesting picture of the changing attitudes towards LNG as a marine fuel in Norway. In the early years, the adoption of LNG was primarily driven by air pollution and political considerations of using Norwegian natural gas, which over time, evolved into a more focused maritime paradigm painted through the lens of the Norwegian maritime industry under wider regulatory developments such as emission control areas (ECAs). By the 2010s, these drivers were superseded by GHG considerations such as methane slip concerns and a less favourable natural gas market leading to a slowdown of LNG adoption. These findings provide valuable insights for understanding future adoption dynamics of alternative zero-emission fuels, particularly in relation to the role of strong technology champions, institutional modification requirements, and starting conditions for a transition.

Care robot literacy: integrating AI ethics and technological literacy in contemporary healthcare

AbstractHealthcare work is guided by care ethics, and any technological changes, including the use of robots and artificial intelligence (AI), must comply with existing norms, values and work practices. By bridging technological literacy and AI ethics, this study provides a nuanced definition and an integrative conceptualization of care robot literacy (CRL) for contemporary care work. Robotized care tasks require new orientation and qualifications on the part of employees. CRL is considered as one of these new demands, which requires practitioners to have the resources, skills and understanding necessary to work with robots. This study builds on sociotechnical approach of literacy by highlighting a dynamic relationship of care robotization in which successful human–technology interaction relies on exchanges between the technological and the social. Our findings from directed content analysis and theoretical synthesis of in-demand technological literacy and AI ethics in care work emphasize competencies and situational awareness regarding both using the robot and communicating about the care robot. The initial conceptualization of CRL provides a conceptual framework for future studies, implementation and product development of care robots, drastically differing from studying, implementing and developing robots in general. In searching for technologically sound and ethically compliant solutions, the study advocates for the future significance of context-specific CRL as valuable addition to the terminology of ethical AI in healthcare.

Health Care Actions for Reducing Plastic Use and Pollution

This Viewpoint proposes a comprehensive sociotechnical approach spanning the entire plastics life cycle to reduce plastic use and pollution in health care.

The factors influencing the continuance intention of MOOCs: The perspective of socio-technical approach

The factors influencing the continuance intention of MOOCs: The perspective of socio-technical approach

Transition in action: toward a social theory of the governance of transitions.

This article explores how a re-interpretation of the socio-technical, socio-ecological and transition design approaches to transition from the point of view of Niklas Luhmann's general systems theory of society. The need to understand and promote changes that include a technological and ecological dimension has led to different approaches, such as socio-technical or socio-environmental approaches, to incorporate links with society. While these approaches often include sociological insights, they rarely offer a general understanding of how these are embedded into society. We need a new environmental sociology that helps catalyze change processes with a collectively reorganized society, empowering more radically transformative actions to change the current structures and processes that have led us to where we are today. The article offers a cross-sectional look at the socio-ecological and socio-technical systems literature, specifically for what concerns their understanding of the 'systems' in transition and how they can be governed, and re-interpret it from the theoretical lens of the deep sociological knowledge, which refers to the profound understanding of social systems and their dynamics, embedded in Luhmann's theory of social systems. From here, we suggest the second-order coupling for a sociologically grounded understanding of the interactions that comprise socio-ecological and socio-technical systems, heterogeneous and almost self-organizing assemblies of social, technical, and natural elements and processes. At the same time, third-order couplings are analyzed, focused on governance, relationships between operations, and structures mediated by a deliberate attempt to ensure coherence and coordination against the autonomy and heterogeneity of socio-techno-ecological systems. Therefore, this manuscript offers a deeper conceptual and methodological understanding of socio-techno-ecological couplings and systems in the context of sustainability transformation and gives insights into its governance.

Robodebt: A Socio-Technical Case Study of Public Sector Information Systems Failure

Large-scale public sector information systems (PSIS) that administer social welfare payments face considerable challenges. Between 2014 and 2023, an Australian government agency conceived and implemented the Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) scheme, widely referred to as Robodebt. The scheme's primary purpose was to apply digital transformation in order to reduce labour costs and increase recovery of overpayments. Among its key features were a simplified, but inherently erroneous, estimation method called income averaging, and a new requirement that welfare recipients produce documentation for income earned years earlier. Failure by welfare recipients to comply with mandates resulted in the agency recovering what it asserted to be overpayments. This article presents a case study of Robodebt and its effects on over 1 million of its clients. The detailed case study relies on primary data through Senate and other government hearings and commissions, and secondary data, such as media reports, supplemented by academic sources. Relevant technical features include (1) the reliance on the digital persona that the agency maintains for each client, (2) computer-performed inferencing from client data, and (3) automated decision-making and subsequent action. This article employs a socio-technical systems approach to understanding the factors underlying a major PSIS project failure, by focusing on the system's political and public service sponsors; its participants (users); the people affected by it (usees); and the broader economic, social, and political context. Practical and theoretical insights are presented, with the intention of highlighting major practical lessons for PSIS, and the relevance of an articulated socio-technical frame for PSIS.

Pathway to work with AI: Testing the clAIr role development method in an industrial work environment

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in work processes requires the anticipatory change of work roles because areas of activity are shifting within job profiles, resulting in new interaction patterns between humans and AI and between employees. In order to avoid role conflicts, rejection of the AI system and other undesirable side effects of AI integration, organizations must support human-AI role development with suitable measures. This article presents a methodologically sound approach to role development (clarifying AI Augmented individual roles—clAIr) using the example of service technicians in a mechanical engineering company before and during the introduction of AI-based services. It illustrates how role clarity can be achieved in the interaction with AI when job profiles shift and how role development also includes collaboration with other departments and goal-oriented external communication with customers. The method results in six basic roles that are rooted in role theory in terms of role identity, role innovation, and role clarity. clAIr allows the anticipatory examination of human-AI work roles as a process-based approach.Practical Relevance: Due to the rapidly advancing development of AI in work processes, there is a need in organizations for scientifically validated findings and examples of good practice for successful work with AI. A socio-technical approach with a focus on the changes in role identities of professionals is promising, as the anticipated development of tasks and professions resulting from AI use can only be countered with a comprehensive approach. Previous work refers to human-centered job designs but neglects the preceding process of role identification as a key challenge of implementation. This process support is made possible by the clAIr method for determining roles for working with AI. Its use requires an understanding of role theory and expertise in organizational development.

Drivers of consumer trust in mHealth apps among young consumers: a socio-technical approach

Drivers of consumer trust in mHealth apps among young consumers: a socio-technical approach

Gender Justice in Saudi Arabia: Sociotechnical Institutions' Approach to Addressing Domestic Violence Against Women and Men

The aim of this research is to determine the effectiveness of a sociotechnical institutional approach in overcoming domestic violence against women and men in Saudi Arabia with a focus on achieving gender justice. This research uses an extensive literature review method by examining scientific literature, official documents, and reports from various sources to gain an in-depth understanding of this problem. This analysis involves a synthesis of literature findings to understand the dynamics of domestic violence and the effectiveness of sociotechnical strategies in promoting gender justice in Saudi Arabia. The research results show that domestic violence is a global phenomenon that is understood and handled with different approaches from Islamic, Feminist and Western perspectives. The Islamic perspective emphasizes the values of justice, respect and reconciliation in marital relations, as well as fighting for women's rights and opposing violence within the framework of religious teachings. Feminist approaches, particularly in Western contexts, highlight gender-based power dynamics and urge to address inequality as a root cause of domestic violence. In addition, the family violence perspective and ecological violence theory offer a broader view of this issue. In Saudi Arabia, the role of sociotechnical institutions is very important in overcoming the problem of domestic violence. A multidisciplinary approach that includes technology, legal reform, education, and community support contributes to creating a safer and more supportive environment for women. This research concludes that a sociotechnical institutional approach can be an effective strategy in achieving gender justice and reducing domestic violence in Saudi Arabia.

Perceived effects of digitalization on social work in Finland: A network analysis approach

Drawing on a socio-technical approach, we examined Finnish social welfare professionals’ (n = 990) perceptions of the effects of digitalization on their work and how these are associated with factors related to work and client information system usage using mixed graphical modelling. Overall, perceptions were predominantly positive. Digitally replaced services were most common in the non-public sector. Higher client information system ratings were associated with perceptions of more active client roles, supportive decision support systems and faster service processes. The relationship between various factors and perceived effects of digitalization appears complex and should be considered during the digital transformation of social work.

Agility in virtual environments: the socio-technical approach of distributed agile teams

PurposeThis study aims to understand how distributed agile teams (DATs), encouraged by globalisation, and recently accelerated by the COVID-19 outbreak, adopt agile practices to achieve project goals by working virtually.Design/methodology/approachThis study developed a multiple-case study involving four companies undergoing several changes, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors collected data mainly through in-depth, face-to-face interviews with seven key informants. Moreover, this study operates data triangulation by referring to secondary data sources and developing a grounded theory data analysis.FindingsThe findings highlight three main categories associated with the DAT functioning, namely, “DATs’ implementation issues”, “elements supporting DATs’ implementation” and “outcomes of DATs’ implementation”, that show DATs’ primary triggers, critical aspects and supportive actions for team functioning.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper produced valuable theoretical knowledge of DATs’ dynamics within a socio-technical approach that distinguishes soft and hard variables supporting DAT implementation. Moreover, the evidence provides useful suggestions for managers about creating an objective-oriented virtual work environment based on DATs’ self-organisation, digitally shared leadership and occasional on-site socialisation.Originality/valueThis paper provides new and interesting insights that bring to evidence the main variables related to DATs’ adoption and dynamics, showing supporting activities that enhanced their operativity. It provides a valuable descriptive framework for academics and practitioners to understand DATs’ functioning better and take action to improve their implementation.

Situating the social issues of image generation models in the model life cycle: a sociotechnical approach

Situating the social issues of image generation models in the model life cycle: a sociotechnical approach

Driving sustainability in industry 5.0 through sociotechnical approach of quality management

Industry 4.0 is primarily driven by technology, while Industry 5.0 (I5.0) places more emphasis on the interaction between human (socio) and technology (technical) aspects in shaping sustainability. Although I5.0 represents a burgeoning area of research, however, there remains a paucity of research on the sociotechnical perspective of quality management (QM) and sustainability in I5.0. This study intends to investigate the direct and indirect effects of socio-technical components of QM on sustainable performance through agile manufacturing, as well as the moderating role of firm size on these relationships. Data is gathered from 298 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through a survey approach employing proportionate stratified sampling techniques. The findings support the socio-technical view of QM in Industry 5.0. Unexpectedly, employee education and training has no significant role in enhancing technical QM practices. Furthermore, QM and agile manufacturing are crucial to achieving sustainable performance in manufacturing SMEs. Finally, firm size has played a significant role as a moderating variable, particularly in I5.0. Based on the findings, the study offers novel theoretical contributions and practical implications by shedding light on the nuanced role of QM and agile manufacturing on sustainability within Malaysian manufacturing SMEs.

‘Citizen Scientists’ on Citizen Science

AbstractCitizen science, also known as participatory or community science, involves the participation of non-professionally trained individuals in scientific research. This article, part of a series of articles aiming to map and theorise the postdigital dimensions of citizen science, presents diverse narratives from individuals actively engaged in citizen science endeavors. The authors were invited to share their experiences, motivations, challenges, and opportunities in their own words. Their perspectives are organized into three categories: (1) citizen science as a mediator between professional and amateur science, (2) citizen science for diverse publics and community action, and (3) citizen science from the margins. These narratives illuminate citizen science as not just a theoretical construct, but a dynamic methodological prism, revealing the complex entanglement of the postdigital realm and citizen science through innovative sociotechnical methods and approaches. Each contribution highlights the rich possibilities and challenges arising from the intertwining of community researchers and technology in the pursuit of knowledge, meaning, and action. This tapestry of experiences invites further exploration of the evolving landscape of postdigital citizen science.