Trust in Technology: A Socio-Technical Perspective

Socio-technical approaches to standardization (p.72-73)

Standardization can be defined as the activity of establishing provisions for 'common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context' (11), or as conformity with 'any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects', spanning more than one community of practice and persisting over time (12:13). The concept needs to be considered in context, since there are different levels and types of standardization, including those of product and service, the processes and technologies for their delivery (operational), and administrative or financial procedures (informational), and organizations may practice all or only some of these. Some standards are generated externally to organizations. Some may be in widespread use; some are adhered to (or not) by practitioners operating within particular domains of knowledge and practice. Other standards may be internal to a specific organization. Indeed, it could be suggested that standardization is one of the distinguishing features of current organizational life.

Standardization tends to be premised at least partly on the prior existence or creation of classification systems: apparently simple but significant technologies for ordering the world. Classification appears to be a fundamental human activity enabling us to tame 'the wild profusion of existing things' (1:xv) and make sense of the world's complexity. It is an intensely social undertaking, rooted in communities of practice and contexts (13), and is often domain-specific. It involves ordering entities into groups on the basis of their relationships to establish a classificatory system, the assignation of subsequent instances of such entities to groups in an established classificatory system (14), and using the results of that classification as a basis for future action. Again, classifications can be generated externally to a particular organization, as in the case of the International Classification of Diseases (12), or they may be organizationspecific (15).

The design of computer-based systems tends to assume that certain aspects of a user organization's practice and knowledge have been (or will be) standardized, in order for the system to operate effectively. At the very least, there needs to be a decision within the organization about what data should be recorded, and how data should be structured within the system to allow for subsequent retrieval and analysis. There may also be decisions about who may enter or extract data, and how and when this may be done. For example, the classification systems inherent in database fields imply that a shared, standardized way of thinking about and recording (and sometimes doing) activity and information has already been developed, even where this has not actually occurred or been fully adopted. This becomes a particular issue in organizations where several communities of practice interact, each with their own bodies of knowledge and ways of ordering that knowledge.

The Motorco case study highlights the translation effort required between different professional domains when an organization attempts to integrate previously separate information systems, and the consequent potential for undependability. Can standardization be seen as both a prerequisite for and a result of the implementation of computer-based systems; a means of enhancing and enforcing dependability?