Understanding sociotechnical action: an introduction to the special issue.

i The decision to propose this special issue reflects a relatively long-standing and continually developing body of work that assists understanding of interactions surrounding the utilisation of ICTs in work and social environments. The papers were developed following a workshop held at Napier University , Edinburgh (UK) during June 2004. The workshop brought together academics interested in understanding sociotechnical action, either in terms of the ways in which we may — or indeed, whether we may — theorise about such action, or in relation to methods that may be appropriate for developing our empirically based knowledge. Our thinking behind the request for submissions to the special issue had been stimulated by a number of traditions, including: social shaping of technology , soft systems thinking, social informatics, and socio-technical systems, amongst others. The original workshop was stimulated by a concern that where problems arise with computerization projects it is often because those involved have failed to grasp the complexities of sociotechnical action involving ICTs. Existing approaches to design and implementation are constrained in a number of different ways. These constraints often arise as a result of the ways in which such approaches try to address (or not, as the case may be) sociotechncal aspects — or more likely, technical, and possibly some social dimensions. In some cases, action is modelled as a series of disembodied socially neutral tasks, articulated as a set of activities and goals (or as organisational processes) that are defined by a designer working with the metaphor of the 'systems life cycle'. Such approaches often assume a development that involves a 'system' being built from scratch, and yet increasingly, it is pre-developed 'packages' of technology that have to be configured in, with, and by, institutional settings. Sawyer and Crowston (2004, p. 43) argue that there has been 'too little systematic attention paid to the arrangements, interactions, and elements of ...socio-technical relation-ships'. One way of improving this situation would be to adopt a truly sociotechnical approach to understanding action — i.e., not merely looking at the 'social' and the 'tech-nical', but endeavouring perhaps to address the idea of mutual constitution in appreciat