Regarding screens for surveillance of the system1

Abstract

The paper examines recent theoretical developments in the treatment of the relationship between technology and society and applies them to understand changes in the information systems support provided to the refining sector of the oil industry. According to participants' stories, the notion of a refinery based Oil Management System (OMS) emerged from the particularities of practice at a European refinery. These particularities were re-presented and solidified in a large-scale, site-wide information system. Once constructed, this system was rendered as a transportable source of “commercial advantage” and the site's parent company embarked upon a series of OMS implementations at each of its “strategic” refineries world-wide. The aim was to have a series of site specific systems built around a common core. Thus, at each site, an unhappy marriage was brokered between the demands of genericity and specificity as an ongoing translation took place. The upshot seems to have been that 50% of each system was site specific, with the remaining 50% being made up of software available elsewhere within the group. However, this “outside” 50% did not constitute a common core. Rather, different materialised precedents were imported at different sites, seriously undermining earlier aims of “cost effective” centralised group maintenance and support, and the ideal of a technologically mediated commercial coherence.

Using this story as a base, an attempt is made to assess the methodological implications of different approaches to the society/technology imbroglio for those who seek to study information systems in their organisational contexts. Starting from simpler sociotechnical ideas that demand cognisance of the social shaping of technology, the paper goes on to consider the advantages offered by the translation approach, advocated by writers such as Law, Callon and Latour, to the understanding of sociotechnical networks. The key role of representation in these processes and its relation to the “impermanence” of the body is also examined in some detail before a discussion which addresses some of the political and existential implications of these insights for researchers in the field. Finally, the conclusion attempts to re-illustrate the point of this rather strange series of moves. That, as will hopefully become clear, is to show simultaneously both the contingency surrounding those seemingly “natural” forms that surround us, and the ways in which this contingency is occluded. For it is this occlusion that buttresses the world, as it stands, against critical reflection. The paper contends that it is only by understanding the myriad ways in which “naturalness” is achieved that we can seriously hope to comment upon its propriety. Or to put is another way, we can only begin to see how “things” could be different once we understand the forces that seek to ensure that they are not. These then are the rather grandiose aims of the paper as a whole.