Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Stefanie Raible
(Johannes Kepler University Linz)
Martin Schwab (University of Arts Linz)
Uli Meyer (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
René Werner (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-11A22
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how social scientists and interdisciplinary research teams studying digitalization in organizations shape the field's understanding through empirical and epistemic work, interaction with organizational members and the usage of specific notions, methods or technologies.
Long Abstract:
How do we as social scientists or interdisciplinary research teams (e.g. STS scholars, artists, designers or technologists) studying digitalization in organizations shape the understanding of digitalization in the field through our own empirical and epistemic work and interaction with organizational members? What are the consequences or effects if we deliver certain notions of digitalization while debunking others? How do our participatory, co-creating or collaborative research methods (e.g. workshops, experimental or research-led development and implementation of digital methods and tools) create (un)wanted or (un)intentional effects? We conceive ‘digitalization’ or ‘digital transformation’ as an umbrella term for numerous forms of socio-technical transformations taking place in organizations.
With this panel we refer to a long and established discourse in STS, because it is a common practice to reflect on our roles as researchers within a field. Now, we want to focus on those effects on digital transformation within organizations. We consider organizations to be specific social contexts that must be taken seriously if we want to understand (or shape) durable transformations affected by our very own research practices.
We want to elaborate the numerous dimensions and facets of effecting digital transformation in organizations while doing research on it. So, we want to engage participants to reflect on dimensions like e.g. :
The setting of research
The role of scientists
The spectrum of (un)intended consequences
The spectrum of (un)wanted consequences
The kind of effect
We especially encourage interdisciplinary research teams from arts, design and technology, who use participatory methods and/or digital technologies within their work to contribute.
Possible formats are:
traditional paper presentations
insights to academic reflections (e.g. essays)
experimental graphical or multimedia engagements(e.g. reflective and discussion-stimulating visual or audiovisual contributions)
workshops on methods, criteria and approaches for ordering and evaluating (possible) effects and consequences
participatory experiments with guided and moderated dialogues or discussions
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The project „Working the way I want“ brings together an interdisciplinary team to develop a tool for people with disabilities to support their participation in labour. For this, participatory and transdisciplinary methods (real-world laboratory, embedded research, participatory design), are used.
Paper long abstract:
In the project “Working the way I want” (German: “Arbeiten – wie ich es will!”, AWIEW), people with and without disabilities co-create a needs assessment tool, including a technological solution, to support their participation in labour. Thereby, AWIEW brings together an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, social scientists, rehabilitation scientists, social designers and a welfare organisation.
The project design features participatory approaches that are applied to co-create and test the tool and new practices in the welfare organisation under real-world conditions: The real-world laboratory approach is employed to identify needs and hopes of clients, embedded research (meso-level) is used to find hindering and fostering factors for successful transitions into the labour market. At micro-level, we are working with people with disabilities (co-designers) employing participatory design for the co-creation of the tool. In this context, it emerged that transdisciplinary is a presumed, but challenging, prerequisite for success.
This contribution focuses on transdisciplinary working methods and suitable formats for collaboration, transparency and mutual understanding. By answering the following questions, it will provide impetus for discussion about the effects of participatory and transdisciplinary methods:
• Which contexts (social, structural, normative) are relevant to develop a technological solution to support greater participation in work?
• Which participatory methods contribute how and by whom to the development of new solutions and practices in organisations?
• How do we evaluate these methods in comparison to their purposes? Where are gains and shortcomings?
• What could academic research learn from the use of a participatory transdisciplinary methodology?
Paper short abstract:
Reflecting on our transdisciplinary co-creation project with SMEs we raise questions about (un)intended effects of how technology is embedded in organisational knowledge cultures. What happens to organisations, workers and researchers, when informal knowledge work is made explicit by STS research?
Paper long abstract:
How do digital systems of knowledge management transform the practical expertise of craft work in small manufacturing companies? Together with transdisciplinary partners (software, design, manufacturing) we addressed this problem through a co-laborative ethnographic study.
While we expected our epistemic challenge to be researching ways to make tacit knowledge explicable, in our efforts to co-create digital knowledge management we inadvertently raised new problems for our partner organisations. Observing means of storing and making available knowledge of manual and organisational processes, we encountered well-established practices of individual knowledge work. However, such knowledge work was not understood as part of the actual work, carried out informally and by analogue means, partly during leisure or sick leave. Knowledge production and transfer were not institutionalised, rather considered responsibilities of the individual employee.
Our own empirical work uncovered how digitalisation re-distributes responsibilites by infrastructuring and interfacing knowledge. This raised questions (inside the organisations) about (un)intended effects: What does it mean to open “intimate” knowledge practices in the context of (industrial) workplaces? Does it promote appreciation for learning or lead to new forms of control? Who is allowed to contribute to such a new “public” knowledge culture? Who certifies, legitimises and governs knowledge work, how is this re-negotiated through digital technology? In this talk, we reflect on the effects of making knowledge work explicit - for organisations, workers and our own role as researchers.
Paper short abstract:
Retrospective discussion and reflection on creative and technological approaches in the context of digitisation/digitalisation projects and their confrontation with individuals and organisations
Paper long abstract:
The article reflects and discusses what happens when technology-based perspectives are confronted with the relevance of looking at individuals and organisations. It addresses the following questions:
What happens when design and technology are confronted with a variety of challenges in digitalisation projects stemming from the interrelation of technology, humans and organisations within the framework of clearly defined tasks - keyword digital transformation(s)?
How is the development and research design of interdisciplinary projects (pre)defined in theory, what deviations can be observed in practice, and how do we respond to this in the context of third-party-funded projects and interdisciplinary teams?
There will be a retrospective reflection on application-oriented examples from research projects on technology-focused topic . Those examples stem from experiences within two Austrian academic research transfer initiatives (digital.werk funded by BMBWF, dih.work funded by FFG), that set the goal to connect between physical and virtual "worlds" in the environment of design, craft and production, where the development of experimental approaches for application of digital methods and technologies and different scientific perspectives should go hand in hand.
In this presentation, it is intended to provide an insight into the spectrum of interdisciplinary work at the connection of digital and “real” environments, leading to first encounters with sociotechnical perspectives from STS or sociology.