This symposium is free and open to all who want to attend.
Information technologies such as a mobile phone and a computer, and the other artifacts are not merely a new communication tool but part of a new social system. For example, designing information technologies is beyond the design of tools or machines. Rather, the project is designing a new social system even though designers might not explicitly intend to do it. This panel sheds light on how a social system as ‘hybrid collectives’ along with information technologies and the other artifacts are constituted. We illustrate how those collectives are newly constituted and what the role of information technologies and the other artifacts as non-human actors is in the constituting and the functioning of those collectives. For example, some information technologies reorganize forms of coordination among various sites, divisions of labor, and other heterogeneous actors. In some workplaces, the center of calculation or the center of coordination is drastically reconstituted and, accordingly, these centers are distributed in various fields with the introduction of information technologies and of infrastructures for a mobile network system. The metaphor of center in social organization seems to be closely connected with the traditional technologies such as a mainframe computer although it can be also regarded not merely as a machine but as a specific kind of social system. In the case of families, young people and the other family members obtain new settings in space and time in which they reside and make new linkage with the outsides. Information technologies are part of these new collectives, while simultaneously, they constitute a new kind of social space in which these collectives are linked and shaped. In the new social space, social identity, position of human actors in collectives and power relation among them emerge and are transformed. The panel attempts to draw concretely how ‘hybrid collectives’ accompanied with information technologies and the other artifacts are constituted. It also attempts to clarify the role of information technologies in the dynamic reorganization of those collectives and its practices through the case studies of mobile phone and computer use in various sites such as a workplace, families, a municipal office and , a scientific lab.
Designing an artifact can be regarded not merely as developing a machine, a tool, an inscription or the others but as organizing a socio-technological network for constructing and utilizing it. That is also true in the case of a computer network system.
In this paper, I will analyze a series of trial of services in an e-municipality in Japan and discuss the factors of its success and failure in developing the electronic community. The city Yamato, located in eastern part of Kanagawa prefecture, is famous for the pioneering effort to make use of the ICTs in workplace and in communicating with citizens. They have also provided online community
Technological constitution of social space and practices service with BBS since 1999 that was one of the rare exceptions in Japan in those days. The BBS service is highly appreciated by the citizens and researchers inside and outside of the city. The success of the system lies in the prosperous socio-technological network which links various actors including the administrative officers from many sections, the city mayor, the citizens interested in local communities, internet technology, LAN cables, the national grant for ICTs system development and so on.
The succeeding trial to facilitate citizens' activities with ICTs done by Yamato city is the electronic community currency system started in 2002. In the service, the web-based application and the IC cards have been prepared to make the community currency into circulation. The IC cards have been distributed to 90 thousands citizens out of 170 thousands population, and the management of the system is delegated to a citizen group (NPO) which voluntarily formed in the BBS community. So far, the local currency looks popularly accepted as one form of electronic community systems. However, it doesn't. After two years running, the actual circulation of the currency is still far less than expected. This resulted mainly from the lack of the connection between the transactions of the community currency and the actual citizens' activities.
People in the project are now trying to modify the system to build closer relationship between the activities and currency circulation.
I will compare the socio-technological networks in these successful and unsuccessful services in Yamato city by tracing the connections of the actors, and point out the key factors to decide the consequence.
Inspired by recent work featuring situated perspectives on learning, I attempt to illuminate learning of international graduate students in a science lab in Japan as participation in a hybrid system in which machines play a crucial role. Experimental machines in a science lab are delicate and fragile, and are always exposed to the danger of various kinds of contamination. The use of these machines requires various specific types of know-how. Therefore, an experimental machine does not function as a machine alone. Rather, it works when and only when it is within a social organization that supports maintenance, management, and appropriate use. In this sense, an experimental machine can be regarded as part of a social system. Thus for members of a lab, accessing a machine means accessing a social system. My research focuses on how international graduate students were able or unable to access machines. Access to machines can be regarded as representing participation in the scientific practices of a lab. Through the examples, I will attempt to show how lab members’ access to machines is socially organized, and how members’ participation in various social activities and occasions facilitates or restricts access to machines.
In Japan, the discussions on mobile phones have mainly been conducted in connection with youth culture. Many such discussions focus on and emphasize the ability of mobile phones to create a novel style of communication and social encounters among young people. In this vein, mobile phones have often been regarded as something transformative to existing social norms and cultural orders. However, we must note that such transformative ability of mobile phones does not always become actual in all users. Because the influence of mobile phones can change to various degrees depending on social position or cultural context of each user. If so, we can speculate that there would be the cases in which the affection of mobile phones appears not in the transformation of existing norms or orders, but in the maintenance or reinforcement of them. With these points in mind, this presentation will identify such aspect of mobile phones through the findings of interview survey on the use of new ICT in domestic contexts conducted on up to 30 households in 2002-2003. According to our findings, the use of mobile phones in domestic contexts is highly gendered practice. Especially, in the case of housewives, the use of mobile phones is strongly related to their gender role or identity as a mother or a wife. For example, compared to their husbands or children who mainly use the mobile phone to manage their social networks in public realm, housewives who are expected to be a manager of practical and emotional family affairs tend to regard the mobile phone as a tool to communicate mainly within family members or kinship.
As a result, at least as for housewives, mobile phones in domestic contexts often function as the medium which reproduce existing gender norms in domestic culture. These findings show that the novelty of new technologies does not guarantee the renovation of social systems and the interaction between the technical and the social is complicated and sometimes contradictory.
The introduction of new artifacts or technologies in the workplace brings about re-designing divisions of labor or the relations among people, objects and technologies. For example, Toyota production system implemented in Ford- type factories changes work floors from a center-management system to a team-management system. This kind of system change is usually recognized as the shift of social control from the center to the field. With making the center’s control invisible, the worker’s autonomy apparently expands in the field, while in reality the system change produces the configuration without‘center’ in the field. ‘Control’, ‘power’ or ‘autonomy’ does not reside in entities such as a person, a technology, a bureaucratic system, and a center. Control or power is only made visible with the participants through their practice. Control or power is inseparable from the relations among people, objects and technologies in the workplace.
This paper describes how a mobile technology introduced in the copiers. service field reorganizes the divisions of labor in the workplace, where service technicians dispatch system has changed from a controllers’ dispatch to a technicians’ self-dispatch system. It explores how various norms and controls are made visible among actors in the field, and the artifacts as reified indication systems are achieved through everyday practice. We also argue that to design social systems inevitably includes the design of politics such as control, conflicts and tension.