Speech acts and voices: Response to Winogradet al.

The critique presented in Suchman (1994a) was motivated by two central premises of CSCW research. First, that designers of CSCW systems are designers of organizational life, through the systems that they build.1 Second, that CSCW technologies require the construction of a relation between computational formalisms and the structuring of the organizational activities that are to be transformed (Bowers, 1992; Agre, 1994). I take the language/action perspective and the Coordinator, as represented in Winograd and Flores (1986) and Flores et al. (1988), as particularly influential exemplars of both of these premises. My critique begins with the question of the appropriateness and adequacy of speech act theory as a basis for system design. Others have raised this question before, so my aim is not to restate the arguments but rather to bring them to the fore in relation to the role of speech act theory in the language/action perspective. The basic argument is that the categorical framework offered by speech act theory provides a particularly attractive foundation for designers interested in inscribing a formal structure of communications into their technology. Moreover, given a premise that organizational communications at present are in a general state of disarray a premise that Winograd, Flores and their colleagues clearly hold systems so inscribed are offered as providing remedies and improvements to organizational life. In light of the categorical foundations of speech act theory, the language/action perspective and the Coordinator, I next take up the question of categories and their politics. The heart of my argument is that the politics of categories turns on the question of who gets to define relevant categories, and who or what gets categorized. The important point is that wherever we find systems of categorization we should look to see where they come from, and what work .they are doing for whom. If we look at systems of categorization in this way, there is evidence that they have been used historically as devices of control by some and resistance by