BOG4
Organizational and Social Analysis: Social Informatics

BOG4 Themes and Issues

NSF Workshop on Human-Centered Systems

Organizational and  Social Informatics 
BOG4 --   Issues and Focus

Leaders: Rob Kling & Leigh Star

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This BoG is devoted to examining organizational and social
scale issues that arise in the design, implementation & use
of information systems. It is well known that there is a
disjunction, and sometimes even conflict, between
individual level rationality and good social outcomes. The
importance of game theoretic studies of prisoners dilemma
hinge on this contrast, as do social/economic analyses of
free-rider problems (as in the "tragedy of the commons").
These conflicts suggest that improved "human centered"
systems designs (say through improved interfaces) do not
necessarily scale up to the information systems that
improve the functioning of organizations the competence of
its participants, or services for clients. 

Nor do "better interfaces" necessarily improve social life in
the large. A simple example of "better interfaces" and a
reduced quality of life would be systems that capture
information about a person so as to facilitate some
activities (automatically opening doors, doing funds
transfers for shopping, etc). Such systems would usually
also capture and store detailed traces of a person's
locations, social interactions, etc. Labelling such systems as
parts of "intelligent buildings" or "smart commerce" ignores
the way that they also profoundly risk the privacy of people
whose lifeworld interactions are streamlined with computer
support.


This BoG will advance our understanding of Human
Centered Systems by addressing (at least) these three
issues:

1. One key theme of this BoG is to characterize the label
"Human Centered Systems" in ways that make clear what
good human centeredness means at an organizational or
social level. For example, systems that are organized to
facilitate an "economy of action" or "an economy of
information sharing" at an individual level may scale up to
have problematic social properties.



2. We know little of new computer systems, except through
narratives (ie. scenarios)  about their likely use and uses.
Human-centered narratives of systems use should engage
the richness of people's work practices, social lives, etc. For
example, the standard narratives of Computer Supported
Cooperative Work systems focus on the ways that new
technologies enhance cooperation and intellectual
teamwork. But people's work relationships are not simply
cooperative, and may also sometimes be conflictual,
competitive, coercive, or convivial. Human-Centered
Systems have to help people and groups under the wide
gamut of  plausible work relationships. We need to develop
ways of modelling systems use under a wide variety of
social relationships.

This issue goes further, since Human-Centered Systems
design should examine messy work worlds head on -- with
their multiple media (as in printing large electronic
documents for careful reading, or in the paper strips that
air traffic controllers use to communicate flight
trajectories), workplace politics, etc.


3. Human-Centered Systems at the individual level
contrasts with approaches that emphasize technology-
centeredness or procedural rationality (as in traditional
expert systems). At the organizational level, there have
been significant problems with computer-integrated
manufacturing and with mega-packages such as SAP, that
emphasize formal economies of information sharing and
procedural rationality. One alternative direction is for
Human-Centered Systems to  enhance building social
capacity to live and act -- by supporting human
competencies, social trust, and organizational learning.

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Rob Kling                              http://php.ucs.indiana.edu/~kling
The Information Society (journal)      http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS
Center for Social Informatics          http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI
Indiana University
10th & Jordan, Room 005C
Bloomington, IN 47405-1801             812-855-9763 // Fax: 855-6166

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