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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In what sort of assemblages, the strategies and digital policies in organization are made? Beyond digital mantras and management slogans/fictions, what is the concrete factory of information management system? What are the parts of the human and no human actors? Is it possible to create a new approach to understand how work change (or not), to explore the potential for a social and cognitive innovation way, considering simultaneously the increase of Data Management and the organizational analytics?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
1 Manufacturing the Organization, Manufacturing Scripts
1.1. Pragmatic sociology and the pragmatism of scripts
1.2. Setting the stage
1.3. Moeva “Beta”: building a theatre of operations
1.4. Extension and celebration
1.5. Years of continuous developments and testing
1.6. The designation and description of the scripts
1.7. Models
2 Performation: Out of Bounds (and Beyond Language)
2.1. The question of performativity, at the heart of the production of digital organizations
2.2. Digital organizational assemblages: towards a general narratique
2.3. The case of Open Data public policies: the processes of performation at work
3 Monitoring Assemblages and their Semiopolitics in Action
3.1. Interfaces and semiopolitical regimes
3.2. Corporate sociodigital economy
3.3. Prospects for the analysis of sociodigital assemblages
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
1 Manufacturing the Organization, Manufacturing Scripts
Table 1.1 Scripts and criticisms of the Moeva apparatus (simplified model)
3 Monitoring Assemblages and their Semiopolitics in Action
Table 3.1. A rhizome layout [GUA 11]
9
Table 3.2. Semiotic regimes and positions regarding the Internet at work
Table 3.3. Data associated with “PROFILE”: “profile page” root
Table 3.4. Data associated with “PROFILE”: “social base” root
Table 3.5. Data associated with “PROFILE”: “personal site”/“microblogging” root
Table 3.6. Data associated with “communities”
Table 3.7. Series 1 descriptors of a sociodigital space
Table 3.8. Structural and semantic descriptors (series 2)
71
Table 3.9. The (series 3) descriptors of narrative and sociosemantic types
Table 3.10. Position of communities of employees on the Internet
List of Illustrations
1 Manufacturing the Organization, Manufacturing Scripts
Figure 1.1 The frameworks and standard positions of the Moeva case
Figure 1.2 The reporting interface of recruitment actions
Figure 1.3 Sine wave model of the dynamics of in-scription/de-scription of Moeva
Figure 1.4 Example of relationships within an assembly of scripts
3 Monitoring Assemblages and their Semiopolitics in Action
Figure 3.1 Example of structural analysis models of a network of interactions between the members of a forum.
Figure 3.2 Calliope analysis matrix: the strategic diagram
Figure 3.3 Strategic diagram of Calliope: datamining applied to discussion forums
Figure 3.4 Example of central topics in the discussions about the organization of work at La Poste. The distribution is a transverse axis linked to multiple sub-topics. However, automated analysis shows its relation with two major dimensions: “round” and “clients/users”
Figure 3.5 Examples of semantic clusters
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Intellectual Technologies Set
coordinated byJean-Max Noyer and Maryse Carmès
Volume 5
Digital Organizations Manufacturing
Scripts, Performativity and Semiopolitics
Maryse Carmès
First published 2018 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2018
The rights of Maryse Carmès to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937246
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84821-907-6
Introduction
“In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent – Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision.”1 [DEL 91]
The purpose of this book is to describe how organizational digital policies are achieving the development of strategic models and socio-technical dispositifs, and both the changes and the supervision of the practices of employees, as part of the production of organizations.
The phenomena discussed here are a testament, not only to the transformations taking place (or claimed as such) since the decade of 2000–2010, and affecting the Modes of existence within the workplace and the frame of reference for managerial actions, but they also resonate more broadly with a general trend toward the digitization of our companies.
The organizational factories studied here are coupled with digital machines, collective enunciation assemblages that serve as a milieu for strategic model-selection dispositifs, as libidinal economies attached to the complication of the techno-politics of organizations, as local adjustments from local pragmatic approaches, and pragmatic approaches carried out by the proliferation of interfaces.
On the basis of several ethnographic analyses, we propose both a description of the processes for the formulation of these policies, a “manufacture”, as it is made, experienced and stated, as well as a general reflection on the methods and research that allows us to examine these processes.
Thus, this same movement is linked with the concept of “assemblage” by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari [DEL 80] and to the approaches of the actor-network theory by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon [AKR 06]. In this way, an analytical framework is created to adapt this ethnographic work to organizations. Our exploration stretches from the offices of project leaders to symposiums and other events dedicated to the self-glorification of the best practices of organizations in the era of all things “digital”, through workshops where employees meet, and extends to the observation of social-digital practices.
Starting from the examination of the battles that are waged in the context of the design of an information system, of the strength relationships and of the tests that are made there, but also by contextualizing it in front of an entire set of performation processes and with the installation of how it is laid out in its techno-political dimensions. One of the purposes of this book is also to show the extent to which digitization requires us to put the question of politics at the heart of our analysis of interfaces and the “molecular revolution” that characterizes it [GUA 77, NOY 13, NOY 16]. Therefore, we attempt to explore, with great attention, the status and functions of interfaces, by relying on several cases regarding the interlacing of the political economies of the semio-policies that these interfaces demonstrate.
Based on approaches to pragmatic sociology and socio-technical approaches, the issue of politics lies at the heart of the comprehension of organizational production processes and the production of digital milieu, which we focus on in this work.
Organizational production processes are described through the lens of several phenomena and dynamics of formatting: the implementation of socio-technical scripts taken in conflicts and the relationships of various forces, the creation of a generalized “narratique” framework [FAY 72] nourishing desire for permanent innovation, moving towards “a data-centric imperium”.
Chapter 1 presents an ethnographic survey carried out over several years, referred to as the Moeva case: it concerns the creation and changes to digital policy and an associated dispositif in a large organization.
This survey examined an assemblage in the process of transforming and describing the manufacture of organizational techno-politics. The scripts were shown to be very dynamic “actants”, including in their agonistic and confrontational dimensions. They are at the heart of performative processes and the source of disputes: they are framework entities, activity patterns, design routines and professional models anchored in practice, constraints, and perceptions given to project managers and to users, but also to the programs of practice enrolled in the interfaces themselves. On this basis, digital innovation in the organizational environment and its manufacture thus presents itself as a combination of scripts: with each script, we encounter a mixture of narratives, drawings, experiences, desires, and semiotics: an assemblage of all these things.
The scripts are immanent to the organization, its project, its practices, its frames of reference for dominant actions, and the technologies that are put to use. We show that producing the organization is the equivalent of creating a script.
It then becomes a question of seeing how they are designed and how the cooperation that occurs in them is put into place: their form of mobilization (how one script mobilizes another script), their reinforcement, or their conflict (the imposition of another activity model or another techno-political approach). By being attentive to “what they do and what they require to be done,” we show a part of the chain of events, of formatting, given that they are processes of performativity.
And when a trial-event is found, there are at least two scripts that clash, and with them all the forces they carry. And we show that examining the production of a digital organization factory is akin to these conditions, to produce an “ethology of the forces” similar to the Deleuzian school of thought as expressed by its heir, B. Latour [SAS 03]. The question of defining the empirical or the observable elements provides access to a kind of “concrete ethology of the forces”. This issue is far from being resolved.
In this work, we essentially insist on scripts, as an organized set of utterances (not exclusively linguistic), having the ability to affect and to bring about the world they designate. Innovation can be seen as a struggle between scripts, for the conquest of the superior position or the control of its environment, such as the resolution of strength relationships between the performative processes in which the scripts are included and of which they are carriers.
Chapter 2 expands on the phenomena of performation already described in the case of Moeva to describe, in support of other areas, what we designate as a general “narratique” [FAY 72] of digital organizational policies: we envisage it through the story that the actors give themselves, from the self-referential processes, of dynamics that are also hetero-poetic, but also by examining the “innovative reasoning” thus brought into play. Here again, it is power relationships within the assemblages and between utterances that are discussed in particular. The assemblage, in an indissoluble way, is “the machine assemblage of desire and the collective assemblage of enunciation”2. The assemblage is a way of thinking about the relationship, the connection, and the composition of relationships “that hold these heterogeneous elements together”. The assemblage is defined in particular by the “alliances”, “alloys”, “attraction and repulsion”, “sympathy and antipathy”, “alteration”, etc., which it facilitates or censors and thus, also by means of the potential for transformation, it allows. It is no longer a question of posing the problem in terms of the spread of technologies, practices, orthodox discourses, cognitive equipment, etc., based on the assumption of a clearly defined center, but to consider the dynamics, the connections that are aggregated, the relationships between a plurality of actors and localities. These features of the layout prove to be close to phenomena described by the actor-network theory, which can be considered to have been inherited in some respects from the Deleuzian philosophy. For testimony of this proximity, M. Callon redefined performation on this basis. We envisage processes of performation, based on theoretical orthodoxy and experimentation (for example, when the managerial world develops a theory from its own practices), of performation opened up on the outside (via the formatting of organizational environments from the realm of the internet or other information systems designed for other organizations), of technical performation, etc., all these phenomena being considered in a process in which performation is desired. The organization is immanent in the pragmatisim of the scripts, the processes of alteration/creation that they bring, as well as to the energies, impulses, and libidinal economies that are affiliated with them and/or that are their byproducts. Again, under the same framework of interpretation, we are led to examine pragmatic communications from the consequences that we have already evoked from the rise of the performativity through “speech acts”, celebratory practices, the clutch-like functions of these watchwords. For these watchwords, just stating them is sufficient in order to be able to see the entire organizational and managerial script that goes with it, because again, it is the collective assemblage of enunciation that comes first, and the watchwords are merely both the expression and the expressed idea of the assemblage that gives them strength and efficiency. In doing so, we present a summary of the evolution of narratives from a “network-centric” perspective to a “data-centric” perspective. This shift and the diversity of the performation processes are illustrated by the case of the creation of an open data policy within a project group in the public sector.
Thus, we explore different performative configurations, and do so in order to especially elaborate on the description and understanding of how the populations of technical beings and human beings are woven together with their grammar and combinatory elements with the complexes that pass through them or that produce them. In doing so, we follow the considerably long networks of the powers that act at the heart of this manufacturing, whilst examining their transformation and their morphogenesis.
Finally, in Chapter 3, we insist that what has been presented so far is a political economy of the interfaces, or semio-politics. By this, we mean the entire set of rules, constraints, and arbitrations taking shape in digital interfaces or that are delegated to them. This delegation is partly carried out in the dark, because it sometimes instantiates itself out of any mastery and rational choice, of decision-makers and of users, thus under programs conceived elsewhere.
By making use, in particular, of the “signifying / a-signifying” theorems of F. Guattari, we highlight the way in which semio-politics affect the potentialities of digital practices, their extent and their richness. They play out and distinguish themselves according to several archetypal regimes: a regime of signs that becomes a regime of “capturing” and intensive encoding of relational processes; backed by the first, a connectivity regime that defines the rules of association/dissociation and therefore access, as well as a reflexivity regime from which the fields of visibility and the mastery of scales are defined. The analysis of a corporate social-network platform serves to illustrate the design and the concrete action of these regimes.
Semio-politics insist on the action of non-linguistic semiotics, on the exponential growth of digital data traces and the automated processing of these, on the movement of semiotics as the major players in the performation of practices and of an organizational political economy. Thus, we consider that the negotiation and evolution of these new means of semiotic management, under the current socio-technical conditions [GUA 83] are essential today, and we sustain that making history, building the memory of the interfaces, determining their power to open new futures within the organization and understanding the manner in which this affects the metastability of these collectives, is a major political task.
Finally, we turn our attention to the variations that affect organizational semio-politics and we show the complex relationships (with their related problems) that are interconnected with digital methods and analytics. We thus indicate the ways to analyze new empirical elements and to emphasize the rise of algorithms within this general process of transformation and the manufacturing of digital organizations. By placing ourselves at the heart of the creation of new socio-cognitive and techno-political ecologies (from the example of platforms for “online socialization” used by employees), we suggest the development and the enrichment of methods and ethno-digital approaches, requiring these elements to be located as close as possible to the assemblages, amid their complexity.
1
The text by D.H. Lawrence that Deleuze and Guattari are referring to is the introduction he wrote for Harry Crosby’s
Chariot of the Sun
, first published in 1928. It is available online and is really worth reading. Gaston Bachelard wrote something strikingly similar in his book on
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
:
https://aphelis.net/poetry-philosophy-communication/
.
2
As such, these phenomena are regulated through various modes (not exclusively linguistically), the production and distribution of the statements, “what is said and exchanged”: “the utterance is the product of an assemblage, always done collectively, which puts into play, both within us and outside of us, populations, multiplicities, territories, fates, affections, and events” [DEL 96].
1Manufacturing the Organization, Manufacturing Scripts
1.1. Pragmatic sociology and the pragmatism of scripts
1.1.1. A few requirements
The transformation of organizational environments arising from the deployment and complexity of digital apparatus has already been widely studied for several years and across all continents. As we may recall, after the first waves of computerization, the “webification” of work processes (especially those involving the use of intranets) was marked by the same desires for the disruption and reconfiguration of practices – a rather banal process. The companies’ ICT level of equipment was also present as an indicator of economic development. This profound shift is analyzed, or perhaps thought about, starting from the basis of efficiency problems (the optimal economics of the equipment/productivity ratio, for example), working conditions (the psycho/sociological analysis of stress and surveillance situations, compounded by their digital component) or also with regard to the evolution of collective work (after the work done by the CSCW in the 1980s1, cognitive sciences and engineering sciences continue to be common objectives for the design of ever more intelligent interfaces and applications). What we are facing are multi-faceted, complex objects and processes that bring several disciplines into play. For a long time, research work has been (and often continues to be) categorized not only according to the disciplines they are connected with, but also according to the “time” and “level of scale” with which they were involved. Are you an economist? Well then, look at the macro sets and productivity statistics in the deployment phase of technological solutions in these business sectors, or look at the “mid-level”, that is, the scale of the company, by linking the investments made by trendy applications with the efficiency of an industrialization of administrative processes (and while they’re at it, making projections on the possible reduction of staff). Are you a semio-cognitive scientist? Then go see how other players, such as paid beta-testers equipped with eye-tracking devices, react to a new search engine company to formulate the best possible recommendations to the publisher or developers, in the hope of improving functionality and making them more affordable. If all the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences are entered by digital means into organization, we also know which obstacles they face when the levels of scale and temporal events are found to be fragmented in this way, the actors and the processes are broken down to their bare essentials. Here, as in other areas (since digital practices outside of working hours are also involved), the quantitative studies of the spread of a technology, or the studies of “user-centric” uses, have told us little if anything about what is being placed within the framework of a technical continuum. How can we explain the failure or the success of the implementation (its description in these terms) of this kind of application, or digital system? What is it that is being configured and recomposed in the context of the design and the implementation of the use of digital apparatuses? What does an ICT project of an organization in the process of redefining itself tell us?
When put to use here, pragmatic sociology may help us to provide some elements in response. Several principles describe this approach (perhaps presented as a vast nebula)2. In the case of France, the currents that emerged here in the 1980s and that may be attributed to that have the notable common characteristic that they have all broken away from the critical posture of Bourdieu. For F. Chateauraynaud [CHA 15], there are three of these currents: actor-network theory, or “sociology of translation”, brought about by the Center of Innovation Sociology of the Ecole des Mines (Callon, Latour, Akrich), the sociology of action regimes (cities and justifications) (Boltanski, Thevenot) and situated action (Quere, Theureau) [CHA 15]. Others like J. Noyer [NOY 16] or C. Liccope [LIC 08] by extending, at right, the perimeter to English and European research, bring together within what is presented as “the approaches to activity”, the current of distributed cognition [HUT 95], The psychological theory of the activity [THE 04]3, the ethnographic approaches of the situated action [SUC 87]4 and the theory of the actor-network. Antoine Hennion also highlights all the influences the American work has had in the development of the approaches of the Center of Sociology of Innovation [HEN 13]. For J.-M Noyer, the objective of precisely located and distributed approaches is to “understand the conditions in which cognition unfolds in networks, the modes of circulation of information, the norms in usage and the intellectual technologies involved. These approaches branch into many varied strands […] we only need to mention that one should think of the co-determination of thinking entities and tools, of cognitive processes and intellectual technologies as situated in the milieu of collective assemblages of enunciation, in the milieu of collective equipment of subjectivation, of complex and hybrid actor–networks” [NOY 16].
In this context, specific branches are formed, such as “the cognitive anthropology of modern situations” [THE 96, THE 04]5 all the while passing through a painful separation of the problems on the basis of their disciplinary fields through the subjection of classic anthropology (its heritage) to a dialogue with philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and sociology. The central project of these surveys on contemporary and concrete situations would be [LAV 88]:
– “The empirical and theoretical characterization of situationally specific cognitive activities”;
– “To arrive at a theory of active social players, localized in time and space, acting reflexively and recursively on the world in which they live, and at the same time, that they transform”;
– “Take the localized nature of the activity (including cognition) as a given, and begin to explore its dimensions”.
These empirical approaches to the activity (which, as a result, involve anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and researchers in information, communication and cognitive sciences, etc.) bringing together an entire collection of surveys led on the fields of organization, research, art, on controversies, law, public action, digital practices, etc.; a vast array of landscapes and subjects, understood through the prism of analyses of ethnomethodological inspiration to describe concrete situations (at the present or in a “genealogical” fashion), the actions conducted within them, and the mechanisms that come to govern and contort them. Though some branches differ in their scientific applications, at a minimum, they share this “astonishment with the terrain”, as well as a large part of their methodology. From within this continuity, we present four essential prerequisites for our own work.
First, we consider the question of the inter-definition of organizations and the digital realm, as an object that demands a “pluridisciplinary pragmatism”. Not only because this object may be seized on by the various obediences of the Humanities and Social Sciences, but because it is there that extremely varied acts and processes can be found. At certain times, we must play the role of a legal scholar to understand the co-construction of the law and the policies of cyber-surveillance; at other times, we will put on the glasses of an organizational theorist, to attempt to live through the transformations of work; in still other situations, we will need to live in the world of mathematics, statistics, and digital technology, to incorporate the actions of algorithms used for digital information processing. “Playing the role of…” does not mean that the researcher is improvising from time to time as a data scientist and management specialist, but that he is located in a complex interwoven environment of problems and actors of very different natures, and that he has to live in this environment: this means giving himself the capacity to make use of multiple propensities that are presented to him, including “human/non-human things”6 and phenomena. Objects, like other entities, as well as individuals, assume the stature of actors7. They act: a notion imported from semiotics [GRE 86], the “actor” is “any element that presents a difference within a course of action and that modifies the outcome of a test” [BAR 07].
In this continuity, by placing the researcher in the situation and without interpretative presuppositions, J. Denis insists on the need for a change of perspective and angle of observation during the same survey. This is one of the points where sociology breaks from the dominant parallel uses in France in the 1970s through the 1990s [PRO 15, DEN 09]. It no longer involves considering “isolated uses in a possibly artificial face-to-face exchange between a user (or group of users) and a certain type of technology, but the emergence and the consolidation in essentially stable socio-technical chains in space and time” [DEN 09]8. This transformation requires the researcher to shift from the role of the spectator observing the uses of techniques, to a decoder of meanings and classifier of appropriations (a term still used often, and quite poorly when referring to statistical tables of users) to a person in motion and curious about all situations.
Secondly, our perspective is related to sociotechnical approaches, and more broadly, to the anthropology of techniques, which has largely shown (but nevertheless must constantly recall) the drama of the great separation between “technical” and “human” elements. In the organizational analysis, the same difficulty was expressed logically: the example of the “contingent” or “systemic” readings of technology shows how it can still be studied as a simple “ingredient” or as an independent variable (one that is independent from politics in particular). Conversely, other works insisted on the analysis of the co-determination relationships which remain current, of which B. Latour cites some major works of the 1990s [LAT 94, 88, 06a]:
“The works by Leigh Star on computerized work sites [STA 10], of Ed Hutchins on cognition anthropology, of Lucy Suchman and Charles Goodwin on coordination into work sites, of Laurent Thévenot [THÉ 06] on familiar courses of action, in addition to the studies by social historians of science, and sociologists of science turned to organization like John Law point to a complete redefinition of the divide between the two worlds. In the following sentence ‘information science and artificial intelligence in human organizations’ only the two copules ‘and’ and ‘in’ have remained unscathed! Each of the six other words have been reformated beyond recognition”9.
The third principle that we retain is that of the association of the levels of scale: “Globalize the local” and “Locate the global”, these being a condition of renewal of the sociology for B. Latour [LAT 06a]. Connecting, associating, following the trajectories, which have been artificially described as micro, meso, or macro-levels and then, just as artificially, relying on them. The engaging presentation made by a group of researchers [BAR 13] of the theoretical and methodological positions commonly found in pragmatists leads us to repeat this obvious fact: the localized approaches of the organization and work collectives do not erase the situation, the action of law, social norms, or of any other institution which, instead of being rejected in the past, “far away” or “high above”, cross through the “here and now” of collective interactions. Among the many ways these entities can become apparent are as strategic resources (interests, justifications, denunciations) but also as cognitive resources (decision support, representation, information filtering, etc.). When Edwin Hutchins observes the decision-making process on a military boat, he sees the role played by maritime charts and the compass that have this specific nature of being a means of transport, in this place, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, the Defense, cartographic services, their practices and legacies in the long run… Thus, in a large amount of these works, the “micro” level is not conceived in opposition to the “macro” level but, conversely, as the plane where, from situation to situation, the “macro” level itself is accomplished, realized, and objectified through practices, devices and institutions, without which it could certainly be deemed to exist but, however, would no longer be able to be made visible and describable… This posture is valid for sociological reasoning itself, which, in this respect, cannot claim any kind of privilege: the social sciences deserve to be understood and analyzed as contributing to the processes societies use to reflect on themselves and take control [BAR 13]. Moreover, Latour considers that removing ourselves from levels of scale becomes a requirement for getting rid of the a priori nature of the hierarchy of essential characteristics, when one wants to study translation and transformation as major communication processes: as ANT holds, there is no equivalence, there are only translations.10 Thus, for example, we would be more interested in the processes of performation, as opposed to concepts such as “Culture” or “Structure” (these concepts – if we still want to rely on their existence – must be shown precisely in their processes of designation, transformation, and formatting by digital practices, and not taken as an explanatory variable, etc.) [BAR 13] 11.
Finally, the last point on which we want to insist concerns the analysis of the phenomenon of politics. Contrary to what some authors claim, the question of politics – far from being removed from pragmatic approaches and socio-technical approaches (something that was presented as the expression of a break with the critical theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, etc.) – is at the heart of the apprehension of organizational manufacturing and the manufacturing of the digital environments that interest us here. The fact that the Marxist reading of technologies has been abandoned does not mean that the phenomena of power have been erased from the analysis; but it must be understood that this concept is used without an a priori critical (or worse, ideological) view beforehand, that it refers to a political economy of relations and to an analysis of the assembly of forces in presence (something that should be understood as “power relationships”, and thus irreducible to a mere conflict of forces). The focus is not on the processes of domination and class struggles, but class struggles are reconfigured considering the hardships, power relationships and associations between forces, particularly with ANT, which has enriched the description tremendously. B. Latour formulates one of the limits of the Marxist critique of technology in this sense, mainly seen in an antagonistic relationship (capitalism/workers) for which he induces and reduces the passage to the number of the phenomena and dimensions in play12:
“Whenever the introduction of a machine does not attack the workers, many Marxists are left speechless and start talking about technical factors and other determinisms. When a machine does deskill textile workers they know what to say; when companies create new highly skilled workers they see this as a puzzling exception, or even, in MacKenzie’s terms as an “obverse trend” [LAT 88, 06] 13.
1.1.2. A few trials
In our view, the problem or tension that proves this is the controlling condition materiality has on the situation (which serves as a trace) and by which proof is provided for the understanding of power relationships. It is a requirement of empirical analysis and has been one since it began: the second proposal of irreductions is “there are only trials of strength, of weakness. Or more simply, there are only trials. This is my point of departure: a verb, “to try”” [LAT 93].
The descendant of pragmatic philosophy, also known as empirical philosophy, French pragmatic sociology presents itself as a “sociology of ordeal” [LEM 07, BAR 13, MAR 15], but according to these authors it deviates from the proposal – which we believe is central – of irreduction. In the situations considered here, we are not interested in a social order or a socio-historical complex that would be processed as an inseparable whole, but a combination of elements taken from the same position as the place of the organization. [LAM 00] take the discussion of the term épreuve, which translates to “ordeal” or as Latour describes it a “trial of strength”, in English further by stating: “In the Francophone world, however, the term has a more complex meaning, referring also to ‘trial’, ‘ordeal’, and ‘proof’. This approach has been developed in terms of an international comparison. Assuming that individual members of different national groups are, in principle, equipped with the same competences and have equal access to the cites permits us not only to pay attention to similarities that are commonly overlooked, but also to shed light on actual differences without having to reify them as ‘natural’, ‘self-evident’, or ‘culturally determined’” [LAM 00, LEM 04, NAC 98].
Moreover, it does not apply exclusively to the long term and the macro-level, for which we have already pointed out the limits for the analysis of socio-technical couplings. Rather, a radical empiricism of technical and organizational policies would require us to consider a discontinuous chain of adjustments that will need to follow the uncertain paths. When examined between intervals of time, the organization is merely the result of bifurcations, and from among these oscillations, sometimes the smallest. To this end, we will show in this work how the digital forces require us to put the question of the politics of interfaces, and the “molecular revolution” that characterizes it, at the heart of our analysis [GUA 12, NOY 13, 16, MAR 15].
With regard to trials, the pragmatic approach adopts both an epistemological position and a methodological position, since this phenomenon is that each of us must think and make the situation able to be grasped and described. As Dewey points out, quoted by Martuccelli, for “any judgment resulting from a problematic situation, the important thing is to determine what problem or problems are posed by a problematic situation in the investigation” [DEW 93]. Among the various currents in the sociology of conventions [BOL 91], currently in an uncertain situation, a trial of strength represents a problem of the construction of judgments, a construct conceived on the basis of the placement of opinions into confrontation (or into equivalence): junctures, couplings, and assemblies between different “orders of magnitude” (commercial, religious, etc.) are thus the basis of disputes and then arrangements (agreements), either local or more extensive arguments analyzed as common higher principles, more generally, conventions (institutions) and therefore, a set of social relations, described here based on how individuals set out to justify (make right) their behavior and decisions (without presuming interest or rational calculations) [BOL 91] 14:
“Thus, beyond the success or failure of an action, it is important to understand how actors base their beliefs about sanctioning proof considered as fair. Ordeals are at work in case of litigation (within the same city) or in disputes (between various cities), they are also the source of arrangements or compromise, in fact, they come into play every time there is a question of resolving a controversy in court through a trial” [MAR 15]15.
If the trial is relevant here (but only partly) regarding a question of power relationships (between registers and delegated authorities) and their transformation [BOL 99], we cannot agree in our approach with either the logic of “these large sets” that would comprise shared higher principles that are dominant (at least in the use that was made by then), the issue of the method of construction and empirical selection, of which they are the product (which we find to be of interest in the first place), nor the domination of the verbal enunciation of the theory of conventions, which, incidentally and at the risk of a “psychologizing” reading that the project by Boltanski and Thevenot has nonetheless sought to avoid, may slip into the reduction a priori of the action of objects, or even the time and space, into a “context” – even if they have been included in his remarks. For us, the forces acting within the structures of enunciation come first, and the contents of the words come second16,17.
For science studies, a trial of strength comes to describe the formation process of scientific controversies, or when they are exhausted, their processes of closure [CAL 91, LAT 84]: we are dealing with multiple trial-sanctions in scientific research, for example, in proof-stabilization in the controversy for the ANT, but also in trials of strength that are relaunched, opening new opportunities and confrontations. Thus, we find that these collective disputes arise, as a way of putting to the test not only relationships (hybrids, since they are not only inter-personae) but more broadly, the assemblage itself, within which these relationships are built (the term “assemblage” is now preferred by Callon and Latour to the somewhat confusing “actor-network”). Our perspective on “trials” or “events” thus relates fundamentally to a political dynamic, formed within the frameworks of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, following the thinking of assemblages. To describe the organization-digital connections, we cannot limit trials to situations of dissent. Describing and understanding the transformation of assemblages implies that we now consider the trials as “events”: when the individual, the rules or the object resist, when the desires compete, including technology “that no longer wants to work”, at the time when new alliances are created between laws and computer standards, when an algorithm for recommendations on the Internet and the recommended clicks it performs, etc., each time we experience a trial-event. What are the trials that characterize the establishment of a socio-technical process? What are the events experienced in the digital manufacturing of organization? What are the driving forces in the experience that are related in these tests, to ensure the performation (the result of these tests)? And we will still need to see how the test is participating in a shift – even one that is infinitesimally small – of the assemblages, in the two-way movement of “deterritorialization” (from which it takes its capacity to transfer) and “reterritorialization” (that it selects and makes use of as a given medium until a new deterritorialization) [DEL 80, LAT 06b] 18.
1.1.3. Following the scripts in action
On the occasion of these trials, the actors demonstrate their ability to affect and be affected. Multiple mediations take place, taken from what we describe as socio-technical scripts. The movement of the organizational assemblage is tested in terms of the power of scripts and the propensity for deterritorialization / reterritorialization they authorize.
One of the first objectives of this ethnographic study is to observe the process of development and mediation borrowed from these scripts. Putting the phenomena of performation and trials at the heart of these processes involves seeing what they do or “cause” and following the tensions that aggregate around these particular actors. Again, we form part of the continuity of the works of sociology of innovation (1980s–1990s), but this survey will allow us to discuss certain contributions and pursue our reflection on the regimes of enunciation. To claim that this interplay of scripts has been instilled in our research on organizations is an understatement. As we will try to show, we see it spread throughout all parts of the work because it has to do with their microtranscendances and their macro/meso colleagues. Because it concerns the establishment of particular livelihoods organized together, as well as between organizations and beyond them, as regards our relationship with the state of digital affairs. In short, it refers to those elements comprising the framing beings who act: how they happen, what do they do and how to spot them? We try to offer some answers by including the digital manufacturing of the organization within our study, that is to say, the establishment of the way that organizations and their components exist, the codetermination of ICTs and organizational practices (from workshops for employees to management offices). Since these technological agents are routinely put to use in order to meet the demands of change and continuous innovation, this socio-technical perspective and co-evolution will be one of our connecting threads19.
The approach places processes of inter-definitions of social and technical elements, and the varied nature of their connections, at the heart of the analysis. It highlights the components of pragmatism, or as Guattari writes, “a generative pragmatism corresponding to the mechanisms of the linguistization of semiotics and a transformational pragmatism that is not transformational, not meaningful”. To take it even further: it bears on semiotic pluralism in its very heterogeneity and hybridizations.
Rather than ask the question of the “social significance of technology”, it is preferable to find one that aims to examine the technical construction of all things social, the performation of practices and subjectivities, the weaving together of populations of technical beings with populations of legal, moral, or managerial entities. This leads to conceiving innovation as a process that gives rise to an invention, the ability or lack thereof to meet the conditions of happiness that will allow it to incarnate, to update and produce, with a singular purpose, a world of meanings.20
The antithesis of a “shot sequence” in film, a plan to file without interruption or editing, innovation in the organizational field is overly coded practically everywhere: it is applied to times, places, situations, objects, diagrams and it is connected by slogans, legitimization, rationalities, and strategic models, often afterward. The socio-technical, techno-political couplings of the digital organization operate as redistributive slices, constraints, and desires. The scripts are one of the actors. To clarify our direction, let us elaborate a bit further on the film metaphor. Established on the basis of a plot, a film script is a document, providing various pieces of information: reproductions, behaviors of the actors, the technical data required in the shooting (lighting, sound, etc.), staging elements (sets, spatial configuration) and camera movements (tracking shot, close-ups, etc.). In production, the script makes reference to the person in charge of ensuring the continuity of the movie, that person will work on the connections between plans, scenes, and sequences, connections that will allow for continuity, compliance with the plot (for editing) and that, by making continuous adjustments to the script, will “document” it (registration). In reclaiming the project and its purpose (a work to be “projected”, as it were), by embodying and bringing it to the screen, this initial document serves three purposes: descriptive operator, connector and modeler. It is also the mission assigned to the “Project Leader” in businesses21,22.
Thus, as with designing a cinematic apparatus, here the project organization, approach and associates are all placed together, varied elements in businesses, which are objectives and management requirements, distributions in space-time, situations and singular contingencies, objects and material constraints, programs and interfaces, individuals and their roles (principal, MOA/MOE designers, developers, experts, spokespersons, users, etc.), text (annotations, data, images, diagrams, explanations, language elements, etc.), routines and professional standards. This forms the first type of script: the script draft. However, unlike the cinematographic elements, the technical-organizational scripts are, firstly, immanent, practices and the organization itself (can you imagine a film without the start of a script and only designed from improvisation?). From the initial idea to the handoff to the users, the scenario of a digital apparatus in an organization can always be replayed differently, and change the assignment of duties and roles of the various “human and nonhuman” entities that it composes, becoming secondary or at least asynchronous from this perspective. The characteristic itself of the projects is the uncertainty and instability of the actors, who are impossible to list in their entirety at the beginning of the design and thus to define their attributes and behaviors a priori. This is the paradox of “project-risk management” in the design of information systems where inductive approaches have to face the innovation process itself, namely the existence of blind and uncertain areas.
The script presents itself as both the process by which links are created (between different entities), and as the program that reassembles courses of action [THÉ 06]. As such, the sequences, the narrated segments, can be edited independently (as in the context of an organizational “narrative” in film); we then proceed to make “connections”, associations between different themes/planes, doing so in order to ensure a level of overall consistency and to serve the rational nature or the goals of the project (participants may have only partial knowledge). Thus, in a project intended to design a new digital apparatus we adjust our actions in response to the events that occur over the course of the project and the order of the presentation of the arguments. They are enriched and modified by other narrative sequences.
In the same sense as “actor-network”, “problematization”, “controversy”, “stakeholding”, etc., the script is one of the key concepts of the sociology of translation. More recently, Latour has devised one more of the major means of analysis, the “modes of existence” and the two ways in which they tend to work (difficult to hold in place), metaphysically and pragmatically. What does it mean to him to read our social groups through their scripts? In particular, we need to contact the “beings of passionate interest” (economic interests, for example) and “attachment beings” (which will be connected): in this context, “that which we refer to as “Society” is not, from the viewpoint of this mode, the effect of scripts stacked on top of each other, the exact nature and type of the stacking has been lost from sight, and to those, a giant dispatcher was surreptitiously added, by way of confusion with politics; this meta-distributor, this providence that would allocate seats, roles, functions, without our being able to know in which offices it would exercise its wisdom, nor by which mechanisms it would transmit its orders, its formats, its standards” [LAT 12]. To unfold and deconstruct scripts requires us to discard any temptation to reach transcendence, without giving in to the excesses of constructivism and relativism. The concept of mediation will help us in this23.
The anthropology of Modernity proposed by Latour is vast, and to the extent that it focuses on organizations, we must consider this mode to be in different areas of application: business, government, religion, the market, etc. Thus, regardless of the field, “the organization” does not emerge as an outcome, but as a process, an institution whose dynamics we must analyze, in addition to as a mode of existence in itself. Yet, several issues remain common (how are entities within a script connected? What is their performative force and where is it drawn from? What is it that ensures the effects that frame this? What mediations does it employ24? How can it be transformed in time and what is it that transforms it?), phenomena to which the connected scripts may vary, depending on the point of view from which we examine it and what we look at: a set of organizations (in our case, for example, a company and the army of partners and stakeholders that are related to it), a specific company, and the various internal processes that characterize a particular situation of working in a team, or the work done by an employee on his computer. Perhaps, we may already sense that these different levels of scale can be considered discontinuously. In this first part of the work, the scripts indiscriminately take us from the office of an employee to the CEO of the company, at times passing through professional rules and others, through the settings put in place by a digital developer. We show that manufacturing an organization is the equivalent of producing scripts (and not exclusively linguistic scripts) and that they are no longer a matter of “floors in the building that is the company’s headquarters”, but the creating of relationships, as well as power relationships. In our view, following the scripts and their heterogeneous grammar (their production and action) amounts to performing a crossing of arrangements. They are constructed and from them, distributed themselve in others.
We therefore agree with the ambitious vision of Latour and the fundamental position he gives to scripts in his analysis of organizational phenomena. However, we will try to clarify the elements that attach and tie together within these scripts, to extend the length of the networks that feed into them and stem from them (especially in the study of the process of performation, discussed later). Finally, our work here involves describing what is presented as a study of the conflict between scripts (the conflicts or the reinforcements between them) while placing the issue of digital semiotics at the heart of organizational performation process. Where did each of these scripts get their names from? And what is the role of their creators (which is difficult), their materials, their spokespersons/representatives, their intensity, and the place from which they express themselves? Besides the common phenomena that we have already indicated, what is it that will distinguish them from each other? This will be revealed over the course of the investigation and the trials that we highlight here.
If we are interested in the construction of theories on managerial actions (ranging from academic theories to orthodoxies on digital strategies), the scripts, “stories” produced in this way, travel and move from company to company, and repeat themselves until they become idea archetypes (an established framework, or frame) [MIN 75]. Thus, some of these encounter fortuitous conditions that allow them to dominate. In this sense, they may be able to have a relatively automatic nature, and approach the script of cognitive science or IT, which emphasizes the automation of sequencing and behavior. For us, the figure in this case relates to “stabilized” decision-making models (within a short-term period for the company), to frequently repeated inferences: the responses given by managerial, conceptual and normative scripts (we will see further the role that celebratory practice have here). But when, on the basis of the landscape and its contingent weak points (scripts of localized activity), we come to understand that the script is susceptible to the arrival of a new actor (who plays the role of a “Hitchcock”, taking pleasure in punching holes in the logical construction of the filmmaker, who offers to collaborate on a film that has already been scripted), who requires that changes be made, new programs of action be devised, new holes be made in the scripts. Creation and innovation are at play in the introduction of this difference itself [MIN 75]25,26.
Drawing from Latour and his anthropology of modes of existence, the act of organization (or “organizing”) in the sense that we understand it, and its maintenance and stability, are conditioned by “a connection, an accumulation, a formidable layering of successive disorganization: people come and go, they carry all kinds of documents, they complain, assemble, separate, grumble, protest, assemble again, they organize once again, they disperse, catch up, all in constant disorder, without ever being able to define the boundaries of these entities that continuously expand or shrink like an accordion” [LAT 12].
According to this philosopher, the script is basically immanent in the organization, an organization that manufactures them, disputes them, and tests them, but a script that, almost simultaneously, it acts out and sets in motion:
“Scripts are not presented as a tautology (we produce the same society that has produced us; at the same time, we are bound externally by the standards to which we nonetheless aspire) that if we forget the slight delay in time, by which it is never exactly the same moment and never with exactly the same capabilities that we find ourselves “above” or “below” the same scenario. This sinuous nature, so unique to scripts, is unfortunately not to be found in the concept of tautology And even if it could follow this expansion mode, this does not always make it capable of serving as a template for politics, religion, law and the psyche – not to mention one’s first or second nature” [LAT 12].
Another figure who in this case leads us specifically to technical materiality, described in detail by M. Akrich, deals specifically with interfaces, with the proposal made by the designer of a technical object to the potential users of this object. Again, this is a scenario of a predetermination of situations of practice. This proposal (which, to varying degrees, can be binding or relevant from the point of view of the user) is accompanied by several movements [AKR 87, AKR 91]:
– indications (as found, for example, in operating instructions);
– descriptions (the formation of a customary meaning, decoding of the scenarios, the singular adaptation of this).
In this chapter, we will have the opportunity to analyze these two movements, and we propose to view them in their continuous state of flux, a major feature of digital apparatuses in organization. The investigation of scripts thus also involves following the trajectories, in addition to numerous iterations and updates made to the socio-technical configuration.
From our perspective, we therefore give the concept of “script” an extensive meaning: scripts are immanent to the organization (in fact, they themselves are organization, through and through) and giving their mobile nature, are based on a semiotic pluralism.
The investigation will not only include this particular level of scale that includes the linkage “localized” between an object and a user (a practice of confrontation between an individual, a situation, and perceptions, and a script framed by a digital program), but also extend to other places and processes that constitute the assemblage within which organizational action programs are produced. In this specific case, the design of digital apparatuses in business, what are the locations and entities that become involved as a result?
The designers and suppliers of ICT solutions, a project group whose members come from a single company or from other companies (project managers, managers of different services, consultants, IT companies, etc.), the employees of this company have do their jobs from multiple applications, and may also include Internet users, trade unions, journalists echoing the achievements of companies, professional associations, and some clubs, which organize meetings and other events, etc. A large collection of objects and inscriptions are utilized in the design processes: specifications, schedules, PowerPoint presentations, reports, email exchanges, financial indicators, computers, software programs, URLs, access codes, cookies, viruses, network and bandwidth infrastructure (which, in some cases, was subject to being devoured by rats27), “quality” standards, the company’s internal regulations, legislation work and ICT law, some of the best known websites and online tools (Google, Facebook, etc.). In a way, each of these actors crosses through “worlds”, in which they is linked, and each one “speaks” at their own level but leaves a mark on the group as a whole; everyone participates with varying levels of intensity in the production of scripts, working together with or against the other actors.
To summarize up to this point, we have found at least three precautions to take to prepare for the investigation.
We will be looking at an aggregate script, at hybrids, and then our task will be to “seek to bring to the foreground the materiality of the apparatuses they use to stack up and merge together” [LAT 12]. The attention given to trials and the equipment of these trials will assist us in this task.
On the basis of the regimes of enunciation, whose scripts are both the expression and material that is expressed (as they are immanent to the organization) and the mediations that they borrow, the materials (registration) that are preferred vary in quality and intensity: linguistic materials (speeches, reports), non-linguistic semiotics (interfaces, programs, digital codes), corporeal elements (behavioral postures, physical movement, or activity routines), architectural materials, etc.
Finally, several scripts can take action simultaneously: digital innovation in the organizational environment appears as a combination of scripts and power between performative processes in which they are included, and which they carry.
