From: Paul Dourish <jpd@ics.uci.edu>
Date: Wed Jan 22, 2003  9:04:49  AM US/Pacific
To: 36250-W03@classes.uci.edu
Cc: jpd@ics.uci.edu, rabrams@ics.uci.edu
Subject: Agre article and homework assignment


I'll try to be more clear in future about which articles I'd like you
to read. In exchange, I hope that you'll read them. (I'll be
distributing another for next week.)

The Agre article isn't a breeze to read, but that's okay; it's a
social science research article, and I'm not expecting that it'll be
immediately clear to everyone. The discussion in class today should
help considerably.

After the lecture, some people asked me some questions about the
particular terms the article uses, and most especially "institutional
circuitry." The social sciences are, in some sense, characterised by
the levels of analysis they involve -- from individual behaviour up to
societies and cultures. Institutions are a level above organisations
but below societies. Institutions are persistent and recurrent social
structures which give form and meaning to activities that arise within
them. They encapsulate local interests, forms of practice, and
cultural norms. So, examples of institutions with which you're
probably familiar include banking, higher education, the media,
entrepreneurial capitalism, public museums, and the home. Each of
these institutions encompasses a set of people, a set of norms or
values, a way of seeing the world, and a set of expectations that we
all might have when encountering them. All homes are different, but
the institution of the home is broadly familiar.

When Agre talks about institutional circuitry, then, he's talking of
the way in which information, attitudes, practices, conventions, and
technologies circulate within and between these institutions. The
contents of the Beef Handbook arise out of a pattern of relationships
between agribusiness, government regulation, the press, and the
ecological movement, and the interactions between these institutions
and their relationships create a context for the production and
circulation of information. Similarly, in order to decode or
understand the kind of information that's there, we need to see it as
a product of those institutions, and understand how it is shaped by
and emerges from those institutional arrangements.

With that in mind, tackle the article again. In particular, as I
discussed today, keep in mind the relationship between IT and
organizational practice that we've been developing in class. As I
suggested, many of the same issues apply.


To help point up the issues here, and in lieu of a discussion today,
this week's assignment focusses on two questions.

Q1. On the second page of the article, talking of libraries and
institutional politics, Agre says: "If librarians attempted to
organize research works in the ways that their patrons orient to them,
of course, certain difficulties would follow. It would be necessary to
make explicit some frequently contested matters, such as who founded
the literature, which research groups are dominant, which survey
articles are definitive, which systems of ideas prefigured which
others, and so forth." In what way do these same tensions (not about
literatures, but about information) feature in the work of information
system designers and professionals? And how do we resolve them?

Q2. Later, in talking about the Beef Handbook, he comments, "My goal
is not to assess the truth value of specific assertions but rather to
specify how the Handbook is adapted to its role [...]." I suggested,
again, that information systems can be seen the same way -- as
mediating representations that are also adapted to their roles in the
same way as document genres. Thing about some of the architectural
styles you're familiar with, such as client/server, peer-to-peer, or
object-oriented. You've heard about these before in terms of their
technical characteristics -- but what kind of organizational
adaptations or characteristics might they reflect?

Give me about a page (that's 250-300 words, double-spaced) on each of
these, due at the lecture next Tuesday.

--p.