Mitch Davies

MA Student in Sociology

Supervisors: Mike Lloyd and Grant Otsuki

Tracing Sociotechnical Networks in Organisations: An Actor-Network Approach

People who work in organisations are actors in sociotechnical networks. This research is based on interviews with people whose organisations considered their work to involve significant interaction with computing technology. The focus of this research is on the networking between people, other people, and computing applications in a work environment. The research relies on what people have said in interviews about how their work is achieved by interacting in hybrid social and technical networks.

System interconnections may be modelled as layers, from the physical to the data-link, and on up to the application layer. Above those are human layers of interconnectivity which are messy, idiosyncratically indeterminate in comparison to the precise pathways of the lower digital networking layers. Human activity blurs into the digital with the use of applications, and conversely computing has agency in human networks. This research traces some paths through these hybrid sociotechnical networks.

The task is to consider how networks are described, qualified and elaborated upon in interview transcriptions. A coding-on-meaning approach to the transcriptions is being applied, with actor-network theory providing the schematic base for the artefacts being sifted out from the data. Actor-network theory is used as it strongly focuses on the associations between humans and technical objects, and produces descriptions of actor-networks that are in themselves explanations of the unfolding of those networks.

The research goal is a descriptive unfolding and partial understanding of how people achieve work in organisations, and the roles that computing has in work processes. Methodologically the research examines the suitability of actor-network theory for tracing work described in interview transcriptions.