How to Recognize an Immutable Mobile When You Find One

Research involved with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) application in engineering domains often crosses through its fundamentals. In fact, exploring trends that envisage ANT as a paradigm that can prove valid in the engineering design field, researchers sometimes enrol in discussions that drive them to its roots. Obligatory Passage Points (OPP) and Immutable Mobiles (IM) are two of the fundamental concepts that need to be revisited. These concepts are critical to understanding innovation in Actor-Networks, especially for the part of IMs. In the pursuit of that understanding, the authors opt to entangle ANT and engineering design and explore a framework based on Programs of Action where actors are represented as taxonomies of competences. These actors are hybrids but, when human, they are mainly engineers engaged in the scope planning and resource management in engineering design projects or processes. This article exercises and develops a constructive process towards a methodology to approach innovation in engineering design. This research is useful for the first stages of the project design process and, in a broader way, to the full cycle of the engineering design process.

Adoption of ICT in Rural Medical General Practices in Australia

ICT has been used in medical General Practice throughout Australia now for some years, but although most General Practices make use of ICT for administrative purposes such as billing, prescribing and medical records, many individual General Practitioners themselves do not make full use of these ICT systems for clinical purposes. The decisions taken in the adoption of ICT in general practice are very complex, and involve many actors, both human and non-human. This means that actor-network theory offers a most suitable framework for its analysis. This article investigates how GPs in a rural Division of General Practice not far from Melbourne considered the adoption and use of ICT. The study reported in the article shows that, rather than characteristics of the technology itself, it is often seemingly unimportant human issues that determine if and how ICT is used in General Practice.

The Use of Structuration Theory and Actor Network Theory for Analysis

In the current climate of global competitiveness, many organisations are increasingly dependent on their IT strategy – either to increase their competitiveness, or often just to survive. Yet little is known about the non-technical influencing factors (such as people) and their impact on the development and implementation of IT strategy. There would therefore seem to be prima facie evidence that there is a need for a new approach to examining the relationships between social factors, technology and the organisation with respect to the development and implementation of IT strategy. This article seeks to make a contribution in this regard. Structuration Theory and Actor-Network Theory were employed to analyse how non-technical factors influence IT strategy. Structuration Theory holds that human actions are enabled and constrained by structures. Structures are rules and resources that do not exist independently of human action, nor are they material entities. Giddens describes them as ‘traces in the mind’ and argues that they exist only through the action of human beings. Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides a fresh perspective on the importance of relationships between actors that are both human and non-human. By their very presence, actors work to establish, maintain and revise the construction of organisational networks of aligned interests and gradually form stable actor-networks. ANT emphasises the heterogeneous nature of actor-networks which consist of and link together both technical and non-technical elements.

Aspects of e-Learning in a University

Most universities make use of e-learning facilities to manage and deliver on-line learning. Many universities have adopted an approach to teaching and the delivery of course content that combines traditional face-to-face delivery with online teaching resources: a blended learning approach. Many factors act to determine how online learning is adopted, accepted, and the balance between online and face-to-face delivery is formed. In this paper, the authors suggest that educational technology adoption decisions are made at three levels: strategic decisions are made by the university to implement a particular package, and then individual academics made adoption decisions regarding those aspects of the package they will use in their teaching and how they will use them. They also make a decision on the balance they will have between on-line and face-to-face teaching. This article questions how decisions are made to adopt one e-learning package rather than another. The authors then examine how individual academics relate to this technology once it is adopted and make use of it to deliver some or all of their teaching and determine the appropriate blend.

On Actors, Networks, Hybrids, Black Boxes and Contesting Programming Languages

In the mid 1990s the programming language Visual Basic (VB) fought hard to enter the undergraduate information systems curriculum at RMIT University, against resistance from two incumbent programming languages. It could not, of course, work alone in this and enlisted the assistance of a human ally known as Fred. The incumbent programming languages, Pick Basic and the Alice machine language simulator, also had their human allies to assist them in resisting the assault of the newcomer. In many ways, it is useful to think of all these programming languages as black boxes made up of hybrid entities containing both human and non-human parts, along with a conglomeration of networks, interactions, and associations. The non-human cannot act alone, but without them, the human parts have nothing to contest.

RAD and Other Innovative Approaches to Facilitate Superior Project Management

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is promising to bring many benefits and state-of-the-art uses to the discipline of software engineering. The plethora of low cost RAD tools, together with the claims made by advocates of this methodology, has lead to an explosion in the use of this technique across the field. Unfortunately, however, there has been comparatively little regard in context to the project management issues of adopting RAD methodologies on which this paper will focus.

A Socio-Technical Account of an Internet-Based Self-Service Technology Implementation

Despite the rampant growth in technology-based service delivery options, the implementation of these contemporary forms of service channels continues to be risky and problematic for organisations. Current conceptualisations of IS implementation is rather narrow and highlights only particular aspects of this phenomenon. This paper adopts a socio-technical lens to enhance our understanding of the implementation of an Internet-based self-service technology (ISST) at a major South African healthcare insurance firm. Actor-Network theory’s (ANT) key conceptual elements of inscription and translation are used to describe how the design and use of this self-service technology emerged from the co-entanglement between the technological and social. Drawing from a field study, this paper demonstrates the complex interdependencies and interactions among contrasting social, political, economic and technological issues and therefore advances implementation theory for these contemporary service channels in yet another important way.

Negotiating the Socio-Material in and about Information Systems

Recent moves to more explicitly account for the relationship between the social and the material in the Information Systems discipline, under the banner of socio-materiality, also imply the need for a closer examination of practice. Using John Law’s (2004) exposition of “method assemblage” as foregrounding and backgrounding a re-reading of Jonathan Grudin’s (1990) account of the various delineations of the computer interface is attempted. It is offered as a preliminary orientation to some of the native “ethno-methods”, (discursive and embodied practices) which might be deployed to negotiate sociality and materiality in IS and other technical arenas.

Negotiating Meaning

Using an ANT approach based on Programs of Action the authors explore the description of innovation cases to discover internal referents that conveys their meaning. This paper revisits some old and well known histories like the application of ecography to obstetrics and gynaecology and the making and evolution of the computer mouse. Finally, the authors change from these localized cases of innovation to other histories on a more global frame, that is, the cases of two firms, one in the semi conductor industry, and the other in the mould for plastics industry. These descriptions are used as a way to research on the building of an ANT view for engineering innovations and wonder at the ability in which Actor-Network Theory (ANT) adapts and conciliates micro and macro worlds.

From Intermediary to Mediator and Vice Versa

Assuming symmetry between human and nonhuman actors is a tenet of actor-network theory (ANT), i.e., an actor, anyone or anything that modifies a state of affairs. This symmetric perspective entails granting agency attributes to both human and nonhuman actors, an approach that has been often criticised. By means of a combination of research observation and participation, the use of electronic mail systems, especially the automatically generated “Out of Office” message, is examined in this article to emphasise the distinction between agency and intentionality. The fundamental assumption is that work practices are nothing less than technology mediated activities and the use of electronic mail and its multiple tools is an inherently sociotechnical practice. The notions of intermediaries and mediators are introduced not only to corroborate that the division between the social and the technical is artificial but also to reveal the difference between nonhuman agency and human intentionality.