Socio-technical Structures Research Articles

The Role of Global Actors in Sustainability Transitions – Tracing the Emergence of a Novel Infrastructure Paradigm in the Sanitation Sector

The literature on sustainability transitions increasingly recognizes that sectoral structures transcending national boundaries can both hinder and promote sustainability transitions. Yet there is only limited evidence on the roles of global actors in transforming entrenched socio-technical structures directly at the global scale. To explore the mechanisms of agency at the global scale, we develop a conceptual framework and illustrate it with a case study of the World Bank's engagement in the sanitation sector. Based on a Socio-Technical Configuration Analysis of World Bank project documents combined with expert interviews, we demonstrate how a paradigm shift in the global sanitation sector was initiated by a coalition of global advocates and subsequently promoted by the World Bank in its role as an amplifier. The paper thus further conceptualizes and illustrates a multi-scalar transition trajectory that depends strongly on advocacy by global actors.

A Systems Approach to Identifying Hazards in the Management of Stream Buffers for the Protection of Drinking Water Quality

In drinking water catchments, exploiting ecosystem services provided by stream buffers has the potential to complement conventional engineering solutions such as water treatment and reduce the overall public health risks to consumers. These stream buffers interrupt the movement of contaminants and sediments from non-point source sources, such as agricultural land, to surface waters. Effectively managing stream buffers can be challenging due to the complexity and diversity of factors that can directly and indirectly impact efficacy. This study uses System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and Early Warning Signal Analysis based on STPA (EWaSAP) methodology to systematically examine the sociotechnical structures for managing stream buffers in surface water catchments using a theoretical scenario representative of typical surface water supplies. The combination of STPA and EWaSAP provides a practical approach for developing requirements for stream buffers in drinking water catchments, focusing on hazard assessment and management measures. The evaluation considers the complex management arrangements for land uses within catchment areas. The performance and effectiveness of these actions can be tracked through the selected sensors and early warning measures. As a practical matter, this approach would help specify requirements for catchment management and drinking water source protection that can be systematically integrated into relevant management strategies.

SDGs and fictional energy utopias: Gauging sustainable energy transitions against Ecotopia (1975) and The Ministry for the Future (2020)

Strategic narratives about the transition to sustainable energy systems, including those influenced by the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), frequently incorporate utopian elements. These ambitious targets encapsulate future-oriented visions and postulate implications of technological advancements; they also often underrepresent or even bypass the multifaceted nature of socioeconomic diversities, planetary constraints, and persistent energy disputes. The genre of utopian science fiction can offer a valuable heuristic to elucidate the heterogeneous and occasionally unsatisfactory projections that emerge from the SDGs. Two seminal novels—Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020)—which we classify as “fictional energy utopias” (FEUs), present incisive critiques of contemporary energy mechanisms and practices and envisage equitable, resilient, and robust renewable energy systems and socio-technical structures. Through an approach that combines narrative and discourse analyses, these literary works are juxtaposed with selected indicators of three SDGs. The ensuing study underscores the primacy of the topic of energy in policy and its concomitant narratives in fostering collective endeavors toward sustainable development. It also amplifies the pivotal interconnections between SDG 7 “Affordable and Clean Energy,” SDG 13 “Climate Action,” and SDG 16 “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.” Employing FEUs to evaluate sustainability policies can substantially benefit researchers, policy architects, and public engagement coordinators by highlighting lacunae and limitations within prevailing strategic narratives and proposing potential enhancements to fortify their capacity to motivate collective action.

Understanding the Role of Socio-Technical Infrastructures on the Organization of Access for the Mixed-Ability Collaborators

TPositioning disabled people as deficient, dysfunctional, and locating the 'problem' of disability within the individual, the over-medicalized, individualistic, and not equity-oriented perspectives of disability have led to oppression, discrimination, and exclusion of disabled people from important parts of public life. The global politics of disability rights and disability movements have brought thorny questions regarding the nature of dominant explanations. Equity-oriented perspectives and collaborative approaches regarding organization and distribution of access started to gain visibility. HCI research has a vital potential to contribute to this by providing related tools and technologies for integrating equal access in the collaborative organization of access. Considering the existing literature, the question of how access is collaboratively organized, negotiated, distributed and scaled through socio-technical mechanisms especially at an institutional level, as well as how mixed-ability groups reorganize access by interacting with institutional socio-technical structures remains open. In this research, I aim to extend the body of literature in collaborative access by presenting the importance of socio-technical perspectives for designing collaborative technologies to support equal distribution of access. My research is about the signifcance of equity perspectives in access and interaction. Specifcally, this research focuses on understanding the role of socio-technical infrastructures for the organization and distribution of access by mixed-ability collaborators and developing design insights for socio-technical mechanisms to support equal distribution of access for people with disabilities.

Moving across a genre continuum: Pedagogical strategies for integrating online genres in the language classroom

Drawing on a case study investigating the design and implementation of an ESP course for English majors in a Hong Kong university, this article discusses how the integration of online genres in a language classroom can contribute to a greater understanding of specialized genres and enable learners’ capacity to write across (Prior & Smith, 2020) semiotic modes and genre conventions. Data was collected from instructional materials, coursework and interviews of seven participants enrolled in the course that involves a process-oriented, genre-based (Hafner & Ho, 2020; Hafner & Miller, 2019) approach. Findings demonstrate that recursive contrastive analysis of online and offline genres can enable a more comprehensive and critical genre awareness that involves authenticity, multimodality, and interdiscursivity. Applying a material lens to this comparative analysis also enabled learners to discover how the design of platforms and their sociotechnical structures provide affordances and constraints that shape genre conventions and features. By drawing on learner knowledge of online genres familiar to them, these pedagogical strategies were able to bridge the out-of-school literacies and identities of learners with the disciplinary literacies and authorial identities that ESP seeks to develop. Recognizing the value of integrating diverse genres in an ESP course in ways that erode boundaries and highlight their connectedness, this paper proposes the notion of a genre continuum where rhetorical strategies and social purposes are shared across diverse genres using different modes and media. By facilitating a genre awareness that recognizes the fluid and deictic nature of genres, genre-based pedagogy can not only demonstrate synergies between online and offline genres, but also enable the acquisition of specialized genres through an awareness of the structures and features of non-specialized genres.

Subversion, cyber operations, and reverse structural power in world politics

The Russian-sponsored influence campaign targeting the 2016 US Presidential Elections surprised policy-makers and scholars, highlighting a gap in theories of (cyber) power. Russia had used information technologies to project power, yet more subtly than prevailing militarized conceptions of cyber power predicted. Rather than causing damage and disruption, it turned sources of American power into vulnerabilities. Recent scholarship emphasizes this mechanism’s technological novelty. Instead, I argue this campaign demonstrated the importance of an undertheorized instrument of power: subversion. Integrating Intelligence scholarship and International Relations theory, this article develops an innovative theory of subversion as reverse structural power. Structural power shapes structures of interaction and the capacities of structural positions to the benefit of the holder of such power. Subversion reverses these benefits into harms. It exploits vulnerabilities in structures to secretly manipulate them, leveraging the capacities of structural positions to produce outcomes neither expected nor intended by the holders of structural power. Traditional subversion targets social structures, while cyber operations target sociotechnical structures: namely, Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) embedded in modern societies. The targeted structures differ, yet both rely on subversive techniques of exploitation that reverse structural power. Cyber operations are means of subversion. This theory helps explain two unresolved issues in cybersecurity: the capability–vulnerability paradox and the outsize role of non-state actors. Finally, I demonstrate the theory’s utility in a plausibility probe, examining the 2016 Election Interference Campaign. It shows this campaign did not use new “weapons,” but rather integrated traditional and sociotechnical means of subversion.

Optimizing Response Strategies of Healthcare System in a Large-scale Disaster

Urban infrastructures are invariably constituted by social and technical components whose capacity to withstand crisis is determined by the resilience of their sociotechnical structures. This study aims to apply the principles of sociotechnical resilience in modeling and simulating disaster response in urban areas. Drawing on a case study of Jakarta, Indonesia, our study focuses on the role of hospitals as part of healthcare infrastructure in response to a large-scale disaster. Each hospital is modeled as a coordinated location with a certain amount of resources, primarily in terms of medical staff. We perform sensitivity analysis through Monte Carlo simulations to observe the impacts of various response strategies, disaster severity, and communication duration on system resilience. The results show that centralized systems are generally more suitable for dealing with low disaster severity, while the decentralized strategy performs better during a disaster with worse impacts. Additionally, the time taken for communication and coordination can significantly affect the performance of centralized systems. By simulating various scenarios, parameters, and recovery protocols, the model we developed can help policymakers, city planners, and other stakeholders design proper response strategies suitable to their structural conditions and available resources during a large-scale disaster in urban cities.

The digital is different: Emergence and relationality in critical realist research

When analyzing empirical phenomena, the implicit or explicit assumptions we have of relationality guide what we take as the primary units of analysis and how we study them. This paper investigates and expands on the notion of relationality and relational explanations in the Critical Realist (CR) paradigm of Information Systems (IS) research. As digital technologies are becoming increasingly adaptive to the social and socio-technical structures they are embedded in, it is necessary to expand the field's conceptual tools in its study of digital phenomena. Therefore, to explain why the digital seems more tightly coupled to social phenomena than other types of technologies, the concept of transformational emergence is introduced. The key argument is that the malleability of digital entities entails that they are disposed to transform by emergence, which is key to understanding the constitutive relationality between the social and the technical in contemporary digital phenomena. This has fundamental implications for CR-based theories in the IS field, most notably Affordance theory and Representation theory.

Smart Cities, Playable Cities, and Cybersecurity: A Systematic Review

ABSTRACT Smart cities connect humans to networks of information to create urban operating systems that optimize traffic management, sustainable energy use, and enact smart governance. The concept of playable cities has been advanced to create smart cities that are more human-centered. As smart cities are socio-technical structures involving technologies, people, and policies that each impact privacy and security, such an approach also has potential to develop stronger cybersecurity protocols for smart cities going beyond technological approaches. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review of articles from 2015 to 2020 that discuss smart/playable cities and data gathering in relation to privacy and security. Based on this systematic review, we found a disconnect exists between smart and playable cities literature in terms of exclusive focus on technological solutions for security and little focus on people and policies as part of cybersecurity in the literature analyzed. Seeing as playable cities embrace user-generated co-creation, we argue that this personal side is important to get people to participate meaningfully in smart cities that lets them embrace cybersecurity policies as part of personal behavior. For this purpose, we propose utilizing a cybersecurity lens (e.g., McCumber cube model) so that smart city designers can more fully develop and consider cybersecurity that includes both personal privacy and playable approaches.

Trends of integrated project delivery implementations viewed from an emerging innovation framework

PurposeResearch into integrated project delivery (IPD) has attracted increased attention over the past 2 decades, and a significant number of IPD studies have been published more recently. The purpose of the study is to explore the state of IPD to reveal innovative areas of focus.Design/methodology/approachThe research presented puts forward a science mapping and bibliometrics methods to study systematic analysis of IPD scientific output published between 2006 and 2020. It uses a framework from emerging literature relating to innovation to incorporate a perspective of the process of innovation for the analysis of IPD. The adapted framework from the literature on innovation, called the Technology Innovation System (TIS), has functions that reveal novelty in the existing structures of IPD. The framework uses the analysis of scientific output from science mapping and bibliometric study techniques, using the ScienceDirect (SD) and Web of Science (WoS) databases as sources. The framework analyzes factors involved in the development and diffusion of the IPD approach and charts new knowledge development on IPD.FindingsFrom the analysis, future implementation of IPD will converge on cases of collaboration, as a systemic feature, among participating stakeholder teams. A significant and robust effect resulted from collaboration and integration as major mechanisms influence opportunities, problems and solutions within construction firms using IPD, marking a future trend. Reports further substantiate the importance and focus on collaboration and integration between IPD practitioners. With the same dynamic and gradual prominence, building information modeling (BIM) and new technology applications demonstrated the importance of the development and diffusion of IPD in the form of, for example, digital government initiatives. It is expected that the trend for IDS and resource mobilization functions will continue to grow – clear evidence of the benefits of the IPD approach in the construction sector. New evidence for gaining cognitive and normative legitimacy emerged. The expansion of new avenues for further legitimation is expected to enable growth.Research limitations/implicationsBeyond the innovative approach of viewing IPD from the emerging innovation framework, the research presented fully contributes to IPD literature, providing a comprehensive state-of-the-art status and a quantitative analysis of IPD scientific output, thereby illuminating promising work areas for future research into IPD. The main limitation is related to the dynamic process of indexing of IPD literature in the WoS and SD – although many new research publications are added in the discipline, only a part of them have been indexed in the WoS and SD core database.Practical implicationsThe study revealed key evolving trends within the field, including instructive findings and implications concerning possible deficiencies. Based on factors from network visualizations and quantitative evaluation from major influential articles, journals and authors, future critical IPD implementation focus will be on BIM and sustainability concepts – centerpiece concepts for the evolving line of IPD growth and development in the architecture, engineering and construction industry.Social implicationsThis study fills the gap created in a shortage of studies mapping out the most critical contributions in journals, authors and research perspectives related to IPD. It presents a framework that can be used as an objective procedure to evaluate the topic. It is expected that the study will serve as a cornerstone for researchers in this field, as it provides a bibliometric analysis and presents trends using an analytical framework of innovation.Originality/valueThe research presented is a keystone in the foundation of the literature review on this topic. The research draws on an existing framework for innovation – the TIS, developed from innovation studies using a robust theoretical framework to enable further analysis of IPD. This approach is one of a kind, using the results of scientometric analysis to study the scientific landscape and knowledge output of IPD in the AEC community. Science-mapping bibliometric analysis was conducted to shed light on IPD trends and explain factors that back or support the development and diffusion of IPD, including shaping and enabling evolution and growth. The framework helps to shed light on the interaction of socio-technical structures (i.e. stakeholders, technologies and rules) embedded in the industry, which helped create, direct and advance IPD in the project delivery system.

Make-in-India and Industry 4.0: technology readiness of select firms, barriers and socio-technical implications

PurposeIn this research, the emphasis is multifold. First objective is to study differences amongst India's Make-in-India, Germany's Industry 4.0 and China's Made-in-China 2025 on a macro level. Second objective is to identify where does individual industry segment out of the five broad segments (prioritized by Make-in-India initiative) represented by ten firms in India stand in terms of adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies. Third objective is to identify key barriers for each of these five industry segments. Finally, socio-technical interventions are also proposed aimed at faster adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.Design/methodology/approachA mixed methodological approach is followed to achieve the research objectives. First, for the macro-level comparison of three pertinent countries, extant research and industry literature have been relied upon. Thereafter, at a micro level, inputs from experts belonging to focal sectors are included in this study to ascertain the current level of readiness of adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies and the barriers to adoption. Finally, the authors argue for and propose some socio-technical interventions that are aimed at mitigation of barriers for adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.FindingsIt has been ascertained that amongst the ten firms (two each from given focal sectors) considered in the study, the automotive and the software firm are perhaps best placed to adopt the Industry 4.0 technology, while the infrastructure project management firm is least ready for Industry 4.0 technologies. The common barriers to adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, as elaborated by experts belonging to each of the ten firms, are also identified. These three commons barriers are resistance to change, unclear economic benefits and problems related to coordination and collaboration.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is one of first attempts to understand the nuances related to technology readiness across focal industries pertaining to the Make-in-India initiative and Industry 4.0. The study furthers the extant understanding of common and distinct barriers across industries. Employing the soft-systems methodology, the study advocates for a number of socio-technical interventions pertaining to establishment of e-skill ecosystem, community learning clusters and sector-focussed skill acquisition and augmentation. Since the study considers only two firms corresponding to each of the five focal sectors, including more firms across industries could have resulted in further validation of study as well.Practical implicationsContrasting the initiatives of the three countries results in identification of different thematic focus of the respective initiatives. While India's Make-in-India initiative has a strong social dimension, Germany's Industry 4.0 and Made-in-China 2025 have key objective related to integration of cyber-physical systems and to graduate to innovation-driven country, respectively. Further, analysis on the technology readiness for adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies based on the respective experts' assessment results in understanding of the underlying barriers.Social implicationsAdopting the soft-systems perspective linking nuances of stakeholders, socio-technical systems and socio-economic characteristics results in several propositions to further the social objectives of India's Make-in-India initiative. These propositions advocate for pathways in which extant strengths in terms of technology, people and existing socio-technical structures can be brought together to cater to the requirements related to employability and skill augmentation of new as well as existing workforce.Originality/valueExtant research literature is primarily focussed on certain specific topics within Industry 4.0 implementation and is mainly based on conceptual or theoretical basis. From a practitioners' perspective, only a few empirical papers could be found that too are typically focussed on single case studies resulting from pilot applications of Industry 4.0. However, such papers have not examined the broad implications of Industry 4.0 in terms of differences between key countries' manufacturing initiatives, readiness of key sectors, sectoral barriers and accompanying policy-level implications associated with implementation of Industry 4.0. Thus, the objective of this research is to abridge these research gaps.

Investigating Technostress Among Teachers in Low-Income Indian Schools

Smartphones play an increasingly large role in the professional lives of teachers in low-income contexts, creating an urgent need to better understand the role of technology-related stress (technostress) in teachers' smartphone use for work. We contribute a mixed methods study analyzing the impact of smartphone use on teachers' work lives in low-income Indian schools. Findings from 70 interviews and 1,361 survey responses suggest that although smartphones aid teaching and administrative functions, smartphone use also significantly predicts burnout among teachers, with technostress providing a major explanation for this relationship. We reveal how teachers' work is constantly surveilled and monitored via technology and how teachers' personal smartphones were controlled and repurposed through socio-technical structures by the higher management to serve management's goals, substantially increasing the work teachers were required to perform outside of work hours. Our work extends technostress research to HCI4D contexts and highlights the need to develop better support structures for teachers and rethink how smartphones are used in their work.

Dropdown rights: Categorizing transgender discrimination in healthcare technologies

This study analyzes how U.S. healthcare organizations implemented legal requirements to treat patients in a manner consistent with their gender identity under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. The ways that healthcare organizations determine gender and track complaints constitute socio-technical systems for compliance, and they shape what discrimination protections look like on the ground. We interviewed grievance handlers about how they use information technologies to process possible civil rights claims from patients and argue that their work demobilizes and erases civil rights, especially claims such as transgender harassment. Mobilized physician-led implementation groups, by contrast, enacted a version of gender identity recognition by tracking identities and bodies in electronic medical records and material objects such as specimen labels. Default structures—the dropdown menus of healthcare software—both shape and are shaped by professional norms, financial incentives, and conceptions of justice and deservingness. These socio-technical structures allow conflicting stories of transgender rights to continue on in different parts of the healthcare organization, making it difficult for law to transform healthcare delivery.

Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century

A predominant understanding in information systems research (ISR) is that technology has institutionalizing, routinizing, and socializing effects in its interaction with users in the human enterprise. Subscribing to these effects from an organizational point of view no longer provides a full understanding of the more complex dynamics in the 21st century workplace inhabited by a vast amount of different technologies with different purposes. Through a critical realist analysis, focusing on patterns in socio-technical structures and more specific actions and outcomes afforded by the recent and forceful adoption of unified communication and collaboration platforms (UCC), the authors see a new, powerful socio-technical mechanism of individualization that is profoundly changing these socio-technical dynamics. Through 18 interviews with knowledge professionals, the study finds that the mechanisms of individualization reduce the influence of the organization as an institutionalizing and socializing socio-technical system. As an example, the power of individualization creates new parallel structures of small networks of close colleagues. Thus, this research sees new structural patterns and dynamics emerging, forming a much more complex, yet self-organizing socio-technical system. The authors suggest expanding the socio-technical understanding of the present techno-organizational reality by taking into account the socio-technical mechanisms that produce certain outcomes. By understanding the fundamental mechanisms at work, they provide those with a fuller understanding of how these mechanisms can enable, while simultaneously crippling, each other. This fuller understanding also aids the pursuit of providing workplaces that achieve both humanistic and economic objectives.

Sociotechnical Transformative Effects of an ICT Project in Rural Bangladesh

The purpose of this article is to provide lessons from the field about an Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) project (Participatory Research and Ownership With Technology, Information and Change [PROTIC]) concerned with the use of mobile phones by women in remote villages in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government considers that the role of ICT in social and economic transformation is significant for the country’s development. International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also regard ICT as important but are challenged as how to use them effectively for their programs and how to deal with long-term sustainability, digital divides, gender, and cultural issues. This article considers the PROTIC project as a modeling force for innovation and pressure on established sociotechnical structures. In this analysis, we follow what Donner defines as the “interrelationship” perspective, as applied to ICT4D. In particular, the notions of niche, regime, and landscape will be used to frame the changes that a village-level project may activate or respond to at the micro, meso, and macro levels of sociotechnical interaction. A mixed methods approach has been implemented during the 4 years of the project to monitor its outcomes, including interviews with project participants, reports of monthly consultations and training with villagers, extensive surveys, analysis of the Facebook profile of the project, and field notes and interviews with local NGOs and international NGO staff. Results show that the women villagers have undergone a transformation in attitudes, skills, and practices associated with mobile phone use. Transformations at individual and community niche levels have in turn influenced the conceptual framework of local and international NGOs and have also contributed to the reorientation of other regime actors, such as universities, major NGOs, and the government. Methodological constraints as well as the complexity of conducting international fieldwork with multiple actors will also be discussed.

Understanding social processes of shopping destination choice - An approach to model stability and variability

Transport systems are affected by fundamental technical and social dynamics. For planners and researchers, travel demand models are an important tool to gain insights into possible effects of these dynamics and to find appropriate ways of dealing with them. However, most state-of-the-art travel demand models underestimate social aspects of travel choices, which we consider essential for understanding stability and variability of travel behavior. Based on a qualitative interview study, the paper presents an interdisciplinary approach to consider social aspects for modeling shopping destination choice. Starting point for our considerations is that people are social beings, moving around to build and maintain relationships, and that these relationships only unfold in relation to overall sociotechnical structures. The interview study provides evidence for relationships between stores and customers. Relationships can be distinguished in two dimensions. First, in terms of the nature of a relationship: having a relationship either with the owner of a specific store or towards specific brands. Second, in terms of the meaning: if the relationships is perceived meaningfull or obligatory. Findings are represented in a first modeling approach. The results show that the more seldom relationships to owners of a store can be modeled easily, while the more typical relationships to brands require further research.

Psychological containment of organisational toxicity and its spillovers

Organisational toxicity can thwart creation and sharing of knowledge necessary for collaborations. Psychological phenomena lurking in covert processes affect dynamics of containment and spillovers of organisational toxicity. This study discusses insights from four longitudinal action research studies in organisations across a spectra of technologies and technology intensities to examine containment and spillovers of organisational toxicity. This article concludes that strategic juxtaposition of ends, ways, and means requires sociotechnical structures to provide reliability; techno-economic systems for coping with anxieties around uncertainties of value-adding functions; and, socioeconomic processes for credibility and aesthetics to promote harmony. Together, under certain conditions, this trine of structures, systems, and processes may facilitate mitigation of toxicity with more understanding of the toxicity bred in systems from introjections, projections, transferences, and countertransferences. Sustaining a shared core to cultivate inner awareness and wisdom for the common good requires hermeneutic endeavours to work with unconsciously held phenomenal primary tasks. This article raises new research questions for understanding the scope and limits of these conditions in old and new combinations of scale, growth, and dominance.

‘Sticky’ Policies—Three Country Cases on Long-Term Commitment and Rooting of RE Policy Goals

Denmark, Germany, and Finland are countries that have emerged as technology leaders in key renewable energy fields—wind energy, solar power, and bioenergy. In this article, we dig into the policy trajectories of these countries and concentrate particularly on a phenomenon that is common for them all—the long-term commitment to promoting particular renewable energy (RE) technologies. Analyzing commitment, its causes and its consequences, can be considered important, as earlier findings show that long-term, consistent policy signals are a key for policy success. In this article, we point out that this ‘sticking’ to a RE technology has emerged and manifested in multiple ways in the case countries. Examples include relying on existing cultural capacities when navigating energy policy direction, strategically promoting scaling of technology markets to root new energy practices in society and developing energy policies as an extension of existing socio-technical structures. In order to understand these dynamics in more depth, we utilize literature on policy robustness and resilience. While all the case countries, Denmark, Germany, and Finland, have generated robust RE policy goals, Finland has failed to foster resilience simultaneously. We conclude that analysing stickiness of policy elements can be fruitful when seeking to understand and design transformative policies. Further, it can be taken as a complementary analytical perspective in the policy mix studies.

The Rise and Fall of the Note

In this note, I quantitatively examine various trends in the lengths of published papers in ACM CSCW from 2000-2018, focusing on several major transitions in editorial and reviewing policy. The focus is on the rise and fall of the 4-page note, which was introduced in 2004 as a separate submission type to the 10-page double-column "full paper" format. From 2004-2012, 4-page notes of 2,500 to 4,500 words consistently represented about 20-35% of all publications. In 2013, minimum and maximum page lengths were officially removed, with no formal distinction made between full papers and notes. The note soon completely disappeared as a distinct genre, which co-occurred with a trend in steadily rising paper lengths. I discuss such findings both as they directly relate to local concerns in CSCW and in the context of longstanding theoretical discussions around genre theory and how socio-technical structures and affordances impact participation in distributed, computer-mediated organizations and user-generated content platforms. There are many possible explanations for the decline of the note and the emergence of longer and longer papers, which I identify for future work. I conclude by addressing the implications of such findings for the CSCW community, particularly given how genre norms impact what kinds of scholarship and scholars thrive in CSCW, as well as whether new top-down rules or bottom-up guidelines ought to be developed around paper lengths and different kinds of contributions.

Integrating Practical and Epistemic Actors: Co-Constructing a Knowledge Organization System to Address Housing Insecurity in West Philadelphia

In response to colonial legacies of divisiveness and paternalism underpinning the development of knowledge organization systems (KOS) and thus impeding their appeal, accessibility, and usefulness to diverse stakeholders (Castleden, Morgan, and Lamb, 2012), this case study explores the challenges and opportunities inherent to the design of a malleable, sustainable KOS as part of an mHealth tool called Map the Gap. Map the Gap intends to reduce the burden of housing insecurity in West Philadelphia. By examining the active cultivation of communal ties between the “epistemic” and “practical” actors (Callon, 4, 2004) who substantiate Map the Gap, as well as the sociotechnical infrastructure which shapes and is shaped by such ties, the processes of collaboration underpinning functionality decisions are delineated. This paper reflects on the way KOS sociotechnical structures defy and challenge traditional academic and community models of research and development, thus requiring a unique, temporally-conscious embracement of select and dynamic collaborations. By elucidating and evaluating the considerations and practices central to Map the Gap, we seek to yield a template for cultivating healthy KOS sociotechnical structures.