Socio-technical Environment Research Articles

A framework for production rescheduling in sociotechnical manufacturing environments

No plan survives contact with reality. Despite the rich research base regarding handling uncertainty in production planning and control systems, there is an intellectual gap between theory and practice with regard to handling unforeseen events generated by internal and external factors, such as unforeseen machine downtimes and changes in demand. Motivated by longitudinal observations in two industrial settings and an analysis of the relevant literature, a framework for rescheduling decision-making in the face of unforeseen production events is proposed. In practical settings, the effectiveness of decisions depends on a set of situational factors. The findings of this research can be utilised further to provide guidelines for developing effective decision support principles and systems, addressing the needs of organisational decision-makers.

Human Factors and Health-Care Professionals Collaboration to Reduce Alarm Fatigue in ICU Settings at a Large Academic Medical Center

Key stakeholders across healthcare’s complex socio-technical environment have been called by the Joint Commission to take part in the shared responsibility to improve alarm safety. This project demonstrated the value added from applying Human Factors principles to a process supporting the safety of patients and the work of health-care providers by reducing the non-actionable alarms in 4 in-patient care units. An Alarm Safety Quality Improvement project is described with specific objectives, methods and results. Results from this project demonstrated an iterative process which provided data and empowerment to the team. The data provided the unit leaders new actionable information and targeted intervention planning with associated meaningful measurements. The process has empowered units to tackle alarm fatigue with the necessary knowledge, tools, and support. The four in-patient care units that have completed this process saw a combined average weekly decrease of 14,000 alarms.

Axel Hägerström and Modern Social Thought (review)

132 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. According to Scaff, Weber’s heritage consists of four modes of analysis: structural, cultural, and institutional analysis, and the employment of rational actor models. The structural dimension refers to the social structure, or socioeconomic and sociotechnical environment, that determines the life chances of status groups and classes. The cultural dimension points to the meaning of phenomena and their relevance for people’s conduct of life. The institutional dimension underlines the rules and regulations that determine the constraints for action. It is a pity that Scaff cites Douglas North but not M. Rainer Lepsius, who not only presented Weber as an institutional thinker but also contributed masterpieces of institutional analyses in a Weberian spirit. Finally, the models of rational action permit alternative courses of behavior to be gauged in terms of their ‘irrationality,’ i.e., as a deviation from an ideal-typically constructed mode of optimal action. Max Weber was and is certainly more than a mainstream sociologist . For Karl Jaspers, he was the philosopher and the ‘macroanthropos of our world’. Weber is not only embedded in the canon of Western thinkers. He also makes us question what the turbulent social change around us means for the life conduct of modern human beings—an aspect of Weber’s legacy that has been emphasized by Wilhelm Hennis as well as Scaff. This ‘social-philosophical’ side of Weber explains his attractiveness for critical theory, psychoanalysis, as well as late Foucauldianism, and remains today one of the most interesting avenues for future research in the social sciences. Lawrence Scaff makes a strong case for ‘Weber and the Weberians ’ as a centerpiece of sociology today. He has not only become a ‘magister ludi’ of Weberianism but is also well versed in the trends and tendencies, discourses and discussions in the social sciences of the twentieth century. This elegantly crafted and brilliant book is a must-read and the guide for Weber in the twenty-first century. Hans-Peter Müller Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Sven Eliaeson, Patricia Mindus, and Stephen P. Turner, eds., Axel Hägerström and Modern Social Thought (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2014), ix + 461pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-905622-43-6. £150.00. Axel Hägerström (1868–1939) is probably the greatest Swedish philosopher , keeping up with leading international standards, although Book Reviews 133© Max Weber Studies 2016. much more known in Sweden than abroad. He was influenced by Kant and Neo-Kantianism as well as Nietzsche, and paid attention to Marx, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, and the Austro-Marxist Victor Adler, but has become much more known as the founder of analytical philosophy in Sweden. He was one of many in the movement of cultural radicalism during the decades around 1900. His credo was the rejection of the belief in the objective existence of values. In his contribution to meta-ethics and philosophy of law he claimed that moral judgements cannot be true. A frustrated academic opponent labelled him in the early 1930s a value nihilist, and this label became the accepted reference among both adherents and antagonists. In his legal-philosophical project he denied the existence of natural or objective law. The laws were expressions of power and material interests and changed with them. He contrasted the actually existing positive laws with the imagery of natural laws, which he argued were nothing but a construct reflecting social power relationships. Class interests determined the sense of justice. With his interest in values and the question of objectivity he quite obviously touched upon problems raised not only by Karl Marx but also by Max Weber. Hägerström’s rejection of objective morals and morality invited social protests against laws and norms. Moral indignation over experienced injustice was not based on thoughts about objective values, and it could generate political power which, in turn, would carry through into legislation and reforms. Although there were obvious points in common with Marx, there was a decisive difference on this point. Hägerström rejected Marx’s conception of a kind of intrinsically objective developmental logic and criticized Marxism for its teleology. The philosophy of Hägerström fits hand in glove with...

Creation of investor confidence: The top-level drivers for reaching maturity in marine energy

Electricity generation by tidal current and wave power arrays represents a radical innovation and is confronted by significant technological and financial challenges. Currently, the marine energy sector finds itself in a decisive transition phase having developed full-scale technology demonstrators but still lacking proof of the concept in a commercial project environment. After the decades-long development process with larger than expected setbacks and delays, investors are discouraged because of high capital requirements and the uncertainty of future revenues. In order to de-risk the technology and to accelerate the commercialisation process, we identified stakeholder-wide balanced and realisable strategic targets. The objective is to name the top-level drivers for facilitating technology maturation and thus achieving market acceptance. Our analysis revealed that the two major risks for multi-megawatt projects (funding and device performance) are directly interlinked and that co-ordinated action is required to overcome this circular relationship. As funding is required for improving device performance (and vice-versa), showcasing an “array-scale success” was identified as the interim milestone on the way towards commercial generation. By this game-changing event, both mentioned risk complexes will be simultaneously mitigated. We observed that system dynamics modelling is appropriate for an unbiased analysis of complex multi-level expert interview data. The applied research model was found to be efficient and allows a regular re-assessment of the strategic alignment thus supporting the adaptation to a complex and continuously changing socio-technical environment.

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC): Explorations in Human-Centered Informatics

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is a long-term research platform exploring immersive socio-technical environments in which stakeholders can collaboratively frame and solve problems

Future-oriented impact assessment: Supporting strategic decision-making in complex socio-technical environments

The article proposes a systemic and future-oriented evaluation approach designed to support decision-making in complex socio-technical environments. The approach integrates established methods of evaluation, foresight, impact assessment, system dynamic modelling and societal embedding within a single framework to provide versatile information to increase strategic intelligence in decision-making. This generic and flexible framework aims to support decision-making in various policy and decision-making situations. It is designed to meet the challenges of the changing innovation environment.

Control over personal data: True remedy or fairytale?

By Christophe Lazaro and Daniel Le Métayer. More than ever the notion of control plays a pivotal and pervasive role in the discourses of privacy and data protection. Privacy scholarship and regulators propose to increase individual control over personal information as the ultimate prescriptive solution to tackle the issues raised by emergent data processing technologies. Conceived as “the claim of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others”, the notion of control is not new. It is often considered as the unique means of empowerment of the data subject. The mechanisms of this empowerment remain however surprisingly vague and understudied. What does it really mean to be in control of one’s data in the context of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices? What are the characteristics, purposes and potential limits of such control and how can we guarantee data subjects effective control over their own data? This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of “control” to explore such questions in the fields of law and computer science.

Demonstration buildings as protected spaces for clean energy solutions – the case of solar building integration in Finland

Demonstrations serve an important role in the promotion of sustainable technologies. This paper analyzes sustainable building demonstration from the strategic niche management perspective. It studies how demonstration sequences conducted over a long time span gradually contribute to niche development for clean energy technologies at the national level. Our empirical analysis focuses on solar building demonstrations in Finland, an unfavorable context for the technology. Our findings show that the demonstrations leveraged sporadic windows of opportunity for the technology resulting from international developments. The projects supported three niche development processes: the building of networks, different types of learning and the creation of visions and expectations, thereby softening the ground for solar technology uptake in new buildings. However, they have also struggled to make an immediate impact on mainstream practices due to weak continuity and the challenging socio-technical environment. The paper concludes with implications for carrying out demonstrations projects that provide continuity in unfriendly environments.

Advancing a sociotechnical systems approach to workplace safety – developing the conceptual framework

Traditional efforts to deal with the enormous problem of workplace safety have proved insufficient, as they have tended to neglect the broader sociotechnical environment that surrounds workers. Here, we advocate a sociotechnical systems approach that describes the complex multi-level system factors that contribute to workplace safety. From the literature on sociotechnical systems, complex systems and safety, we develop a sociotechnical model of workplace safety with concentric layers of the work system, socio-organisational context and the external environment. The future challenges that are identified through the model are highlighted.

Multimodel Ecologies: Cultivating Model Ecosystems in Industrial Ecology

SummaryMany industrial ecology models may be classified as single‐use products‐constructed to address a specific problem and of little use beyond their original context. But a knowledge ecosystem based around single‐use representations of reality wastes effort and resources and limits the impact of industrial ecology as a field. In recent years, tangible progress has been made in areas such as integrated modeling and multisimulation. However, this work tends to discount the evolutionary nature of models and their embeddedness within a changing sociotechnical environment—aspects which, we argue, are central to enabling the sustained usefulness of models in industrial ecology.We define a multimodel ecology as an interacting group of models coevolving with one another in a dynamic sociotechnical environment. A multimodel ecology perspective can facilitate model integration and reuse and highlight different ways in which models—mental, conceptual, and computational–may interact and evolve. To demonstrate the use of this perspective, we introduce and analyze an existing multimodel ecology—the Energy Modeling Laboratory. We conclude with a set of guidelines for facilitating model reuse and integration. Among others, these include use open standards, build simple components, leverage the Web, borrow proudly, and enforce sharing.

Internet banking deployment in a sub-Saharan African country: a socio-technical perspective

The purpose of this study is to understand how the socio-technical environment in a sub-Saharan African SSA country shapes internet banking functionality deployment. Research on internet banking in SSA has focused more on adoption, use and diffusion and less on how the socio-technical environment shapes functionality deployment. To address this knowledge gap, this study investigates the case of an internet banking functionality deployment in the SSA context of Ghana. The study employs socio-technical theory with external environment as analytical lens and qualitative interpretive case study as methodology. On the social side, low internet banking competition, unclear regulations, physical signature requirements and perceived online fraud were found to have shaped the functionality deployment. On the technical side, improved internet access and lack of online payment infrastructure were found to have shaped the functionality deployment. The conclusion offers implications for research, practice and policy as well as recommendations for further research.

Conceptualising uncertainty in safety-critical projects: A practitioner perspective

In safety-critical organisations such as civil-nuclear and aerospace, managing uncertainty is of particular importance as the consequences of failure can be potentially catastrophic. The challenge facing project managers in these complex, socio-technical environments is how to better understand the sources of project uncertainty and how to navigate a path through them in pursuit of successful project outcomes.This exploratory study analyses the literature on the management of uncertainty in projects using Söderlund's (2011) seven schools of thought on project management. Additionally it draws on interviews with project management practitioners from several large-scale projects in civil-nuclear and aerospace companies in the United Kingdom to posit the “uncertainty kaleidoscope” as a means of understanding the sources of uncertainty in safety-critical projects and identifies four conceptual approaches that may be adopted by project managers to attenuate the impact of uncertainty on the delivery of successful project outcomes.

The Central Role of Engagement in Online Communities

Online communities are new social structures dependent on modern information technology, and they face equally modern challenges. Although satisfied members regularly consume content, it is considerably harder to coax them to contribute new content and help recruit others because they face unprecedented social comparison and criticism. We propose that engagement—a concept only abstractly alluded to in information systems research—is the key to active participation in these unique sociotechnical environments. We constructed and tested a framework that demonstrates what engagement is, where it comes from, and how it powerfully explains both knowledge contribution and word of mouth. Our results show that members primarily contribute to and revisit an online community from a sense of engagement. Nonetheless, word of mouth is partly influenced by prior satisfaction. Therefore, engagement and satisfaction appear to be parallel mediating forces at work in online communities. Both mediators arise from a sense of communal identity and knowledge self-efficacy, but engagement also emerges from validation of self-identity. Nevertheless, we also found signs that the contributions of the most knowledgeable users are not purely from engagement, but also from a competing sense of self-efficacy. Our findings significantly contribute to the area of information systems by highlighting that engagement is a concrete phenomenon on its own, and it can be directly modeled and must be carefully managed.

Low-carbon innovation from a hydroelectric base: The case of electric vehicles in Québec

This article explores the transformative potential of hydroelectricity by examining interactions with electric vehicle (EV) technologies in Québec, Canada. It finds that structural features of Québec's hydroelectric regime enabled Québec's EV technological innovation system. Organizational and institutional characteristics of the socio-technical environment shaped by Québec's history of hydroelectric development played a particularly important role in promoting political legitimacy and early-stage EV innovation processes, such as knowledge development and exchange. While the technical complements between hydro and EV could lead to significant GHG reductions, technical overlaps between the two technologies were less responsible for initiating the momentum needed to build an EV innovation system. Québec's social history of hydroelectricity development provides actors with important resources for the development of EV technologies.

Technology assimilation through conjunctures – a look at IS use in retail

We study the assimilation of information technology by an organization establishing itself in the emerging retail industry in India. We highlight the need for conducting a holistic analysis of the assimilation process that considers the role of various organizational actors, the socio-technical environment, the exogenous factors and the historical context under which the organization is operating. We adopt strong structuration theory, a refinement of Giddens' structuration theory, as the theoretical lens for studying the technology assimilation process. We combine this with actor network theory to incorporate the socio-technical perspectives. An organization in the Indian retail industry is selected as the empirical context. We analyzed the assimilation process as a series of conjunctures and illustrate how the socio-technical changes, the situated actions and the conjuncture's context influence the assimilation process. We also highlight the influence of historical context, and the role of organizational actors and actants in the technology assimilation process.

Dilemmas in the Analysis of Technological Change. A Cognitive Approach to Understand Innovation and Change in the Water Sector

In this paper we argue for the need to apply a cognitive approach to understand deep dynamics and determinants of technological evolutions. After examining main contributions from innovation studies to the conceptualization of innovation and change in complex socio-technical environments, we highlight the contribution coming from the application of the cognitive approach to evolutionary studies on technologies and we introduce the concept of technological memory as an interpretative tool to understand those changes. We discuss our hypothesis with reference to several observations carried out in different local contexts – Mexico, India and Italy – in relation to technological change in the water sector. In those cases deliberate attempts to substitute traditional technologies with modern ones led to interesting trajectories of change ranging from the collapse of old technologies to the development of multifaceted hybridization patterns.

3DTV방송기술 표준화과정의 참여자간 상호작용 : 행위자 네트워크 이론기반 사례연구

본 연구는 기존의 표준관련 연구가 실제로 표준이 만들어지고 보급되는 제반 사회적 환경과 다중 이해관계자가 존재하는 복합적인 사회시스템에서의 행위자 역할 및 변화과정을 조망하는 작업이 충분히 이루어지지 못했다는 데에서 문제의식을 갖고 출발한다. 이를 배경으로 본 연구는 사회-기술적 제도 환경의 맥락에서 각기 다른 이해관계를 가진 참여자들이 혁신적인 기술을 개발해 표준화해가는 동태적 과정을 사회-기술적 접근으로 재구성하는 것을 목적으로 수행되었다. 이를 위한 세부 목표는 첫째, 표준화 과정을 둘러싼 사회-기술적 네트워크에서 인간 행위자 간, 인간과 비인간 행위자와의 상호작용 관계의 특징을 살펴보는 것이다. 둘째로는 표준화 과정을 선도한 핵심 행위자의 활동과 역할의 변화를 관찰하고자 하였다. 이를 위하여, 행위자-네트워크 이론(Actor Network Theory)에 기초하여 한국에서 진행된 고화질 3DTV방송기술의 표준화 과정의 동태적 속성을 분석하였다. 분석방법은 연구자가 행위자-네트워크에 직접 참여하여 동태적 특성을 분석하고, 설문 인터뷰와 심층 인터뷰를 통한 질적 연구의 방법을 적용, 표준 형성과정에 나타난 제반 환경-행위-기술 동학을 고찰하였다. This study is devised out of the recognition that the existing standardization-related research has not sufficiently examined the overall social environment where a standard is actually made and diffused and the roles of the actors and the changes in them in the complex social system where multiple stakeholders exist. Against this backdrop, this study purports to reconstruct the dynamic process of developing and standardizing an innovative technology through a socio-technical approach involved by multiple stakeholders with different interests in the context of a socio-technical institutional environment. The specific goals to achieve the purpose include first, inspecting the characteristics of the interactions between the human actors and between the human and non-human actors in the socio-technical network surrounding a standardization process. Second, the study aimed to observe the activities of the focal actor who led the standardization process and its changing role. To that end, it analyzed the dynamic features of the process of standardizing a HD 3DTV broadcasting technology that took place in South Korea based on the actor network theory. As for the analysis method, the researchers personally took part in the actor network involving the new technology to analyze the dynamic characteristics of the network, applying the qualitative research method of survey and in-depth interviews and exploring the overall dynamics of environment, behavior and technology observed over the course of the entire standardization process.

Introduction: Constructing Sociotechnical Environments—Aurality, Air Quality, and Automobiles

This article introduces a fortuitous convergence of five articles on different automobile topics that probe the historical processes of creating, maintaining, and challenging sociotechnical environments. Gijs Mom, David Morris, and Stefan Krebs each explore aural environments in and around cars; David Lucsko and Christopher Neumaier study topics related to the broader environmental movement of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Bringing them together in this issue highlights the continued analytical richness afforded scholars through automotive topics, and points to a continuing vibrant and critical engagement with one of the most consequential consumer technologies ever developed.

Service-oriented Architecture Projects in Practice: A Study of a Shared Document Service Implementation

Abstract This paper reports on a case study focusing on service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects in practice. The aim of these projects has been to develop a shared document service supporting different business divisions in a large Norwegian governmental institution. The research question guiding this research is: How are SOA projects carried out in practice? What are the challenges of developing shared services in service-oriented architecture? SOA projects are accompanied by a complex socio-technical system development environment. In the present study we followed parallel system development processes and identified several issues associated with competence requirements, distributed coordination principles and control, lack of communication, tuning of parallel projects, and selection of appropriate project management approaches and system development methods. Clearly, there was a difference between undertaking a system development project within one organizational unit (silo) compared to the development of shared services to provide support across a large organization. Findings demonstrate that the complexity of SOA projects was underestimated by the project managers, and ad hoc governance was practiced in terms of control, coordination, and communication. To capture the entire system development context of an SOA project, a holistic approach and mind-set comprising time management and fine tuning of all parallel SD activities is necessary. Organizational maturity to carry out SOA projects is also of significance. The study has implications for SOA adopters in general and for system developers and project managers working in an SOA context in particular.

Toward a Cooperative Approach for Continuous Innovation of Mobility Information Services

Mobility information services (MIS), associated with intelligent transport systems (ITS), are expected to provide valuable contributions toward sustainable and smart mobility. MIS inherit from ITS the characteristic of being a collaborative system of systems (SoS) where no centralized management can actually be enforced and where heterogeneous types of independent actors are involved. Therefore, innovation in MIS cannot be conceived, represented, and consequently promoted merely as a matter of advancements in specific technological fields. In this paper, we propose a sociotechnical framework for promoting continuous innovation in MIS. Focus is made on a cooperative approach, which leverages SoS principles, to foster service and product innovation in the mobility information domain on a regional scale. We describe how this approach has been put into practice by architecting an open working environment. This is a sociotechnical environment made by: 1) a cooperative network of stakeholders (e.g., regional and national public administrations, enterprises, and research bodies) and 2) an architectural framework, which is the reference technological baseline enabling the rapid configuration, deployment, and integration of different technological capabilities. The latter is also made to support demonstration and validation activities of applied research results. Finally, we discuss obtained results, as well as future research directions and exploitation activities.