How is it that Steve Jobs can die and people mourn the man as if he were a family member, and Dennis Ritchie dies and there is hardly a blip on mainstream media?

I realize that many people spend more time with their iPhone than any family member or friend, but try living in our digital age without C programming, windows, or linux.

Thoughts?

The father of C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.

Call me a naive STS newcomer, greenhorn, curly girlie or whatever, but as I was reading all this STS stuff I got more and more confused. And after a lively debate with a colleague from Hamburg University who told me „nobody is doing sociology of knowledge in STS anymore“ I got even more confused. What does that mean „not anymore“? The more I read the more I got the impression that STS proceeds somehow ‘evolutionary’. It seems like everybody is doing ANT (except of those who do post-ANT understood – somebody has to be against it). Other theories and concepts seem to be completely out of fashion.

Coming more from an organisation studies perspective I’m completely not used to something like that. Postmodernism, Neo-Institutionalism, Systems Theory, Structuration Theory – they are used (of course by different researchers) at the same time. What I mean is, not everybody in organisation studies does, let’s say, Neo-Institutionalism and John W. Meyer. In STS there seems to be a consensus – at least somehow – that ANT is the concept to be used.

There was this debate on „thirdwaveness“ a few months ago: http://www.installingorder.org/how-many-sts-waves-does-it-take-to-create-a-d

Well, I was wondering: Is ANT the platform shoes of STS? Will Latour be out of fashion in 2015? And what will be the dernier cri in 2015?

A fellow named “Peter” recently commented on Endre’s first post; turns out, he’s the long-time maintainer of content at ANTHEM, which is a blog originally formed to be:

… the public face of ANTHEM, the “Actor-Network Theory — Heidegger Meeting,” a gathering of human and nonhuman actors that are interested in both actor-network theory and the work of Martin Heidegger, as well as the relationship and controversies between the two. Our primary focus is the question of technology. We are interested not only in the philosophy of technology but also in the empirical issues pertaining to the social study of technology.

However, those meetings appear to be over, but the blog lives on … still nutured by Peter and readers.

Check it out — I am and now I’m getting turned-onto Princes, Wolves, and quadruple objects … oh yeah, Peter, what about quadruple “things”!?

I’m just starting to get turned-onto this line of research on “hollow states,” which is about the decreasing duties associated with state enterprise and how to manage the relations between states and non-state entities as they adopt a greater number of previously-state, now-outsourced duties related to governance.

This paper on infrastructure caught my attention. It is written by Georgia’s O’Toole.

Citation:

Laurence J. O’Toole, Jr.

Hollowing the Infrastructure: Revolving Loan Programs and Network Dynamics in the American States

J Public Adm Res Theory (1996) 6(2): 225–242

Abstract:

Trends toward more complex intergovernmental programs and greater use of public-private arrangements carry implications for public management, since these developments signify challenges for administrators called upon to manage within hollowed institutional settings: interorganizational networks for effectuating policy. The implications of such shifts are explored by examining one important program change of the last decade: the move away from federal grant support for municipal wastewater treatment infrastructure and toward the creation of separate state revolving-loan funds (SRFs). National regulatory standards remain, but the central place of the EPA in the infrastructure effort has shifted largely into other hands, with consequences for the implementation of policy. Altered policy instruments stimulate the formation of more complex network patterns involving new actors who offer needed technologies. These changes carry implications for program operations and results. Evidence from the operations of SRFs suggests that these developments are significant and also that public management has become, if anything, even more consequential in such networked contexts.

Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias?

The term infrastucture, per my understandings of the term, but also reflected in the wiki site, takes on two basic meanings.

First, infrastructure gets one of its meanings, which also double as conceptualizations, by being what precedes whatever system it supports, hence, infrastructure comes before the system it facilitates. This might be called “infrastructure as antecedent” (or pre-structure).

Second, infrastructure, perhaps this time in a more etymological sense, is also meant to denote the undergird that holds a system in place, for example, the layers of earth, sand, and rocks which create the bed under which roadways can be built and, hence, the interlinking arteries of transit can be laid. This might be called “infrastructure as support” (like a craddle, or sub-structure).

Of course, the notion of “sub-structure” is not foreign territory for sociologists. In fact, in numerous lines of scholarship far outside of sociology, there is a belief that something “real” or “raw” maybe even primordial can be discovered in the depths or beneath. Likewise, there is precedent in nearly any historical analysis, some being executed better than others on this measure, that that which occurs before a given event in need of explanation is often seen as powerfully influencing its later form. In this sense, infrastructrure almost becomes akin to “pre-structure.”

These are sometimes used in infrastructure studies to justify their reason for being done in the first place; some version of “it came before and powerfully shaped X” or “it is beneath and powerfully supports X”. Sometimes these claims are explicit, but often they are more implicit such that were the author, one would imagine, to get a review who writes “why study this at all?” the author would be almost dumbfounded as if to say “duh.”

Now, infrastructure that comes before the system/material it supports, I suspect, operates according to different dynamics as compared to (a) infrastructure that comes after the system/material it supports (i.e., a system that is imposed on pre-existing materials such as security infrastructure developed in response to and not before serial crimes) or (b) infrastructure that support from above rather than below (i.e., a system that is not under us, but on us, although an obvious infrastructureal equivalent of this illudes me now — imagine the infrastructural equivalent of glasses on a human face, which does not support from below, and instead supports on top of or above the person).

Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias? This might be a nice empirical question.

This morning’s New York Times on-line features an article titled “New State Laws Are Limiting Access for Voters” and it presents or conceptualizes the infrastructural entitiy of “the state” in a couple of interesting ways.

On the one hand, states are presented in the journalist protrayal as active agents, in this case, passing laws.

Five states passed laws this year scaling back programs allowing voters to cast their ballots before Election Day, the Brennan Center found.

On the other hand, this hard work was the networked outcome of competing representatives with diverse interests.

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters — especially poor voters, young voters and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

More in the middle, we see “the state” as both an actor, capable of passing laws, but also an effect of networked practices and representations, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths (the state being more like the effect, rather than the cause).

The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it — a flurry of activity that Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, called “pretty unusual.”

In reflecting on these issues, I am reminded of a dichotomy in the literature about states and statehood. Sometimes the state is presented as an empty signifier capable of action, as evidenced in their ability “pass laws this year.” In contrast, sometimes states are defined by their effect, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths. In our final example, we see one of two things: either an actor-network (where the state is conceptualized as an actor because it is a network) or a register-shift, meaning that the state registers as an actor during certain actions as a shortcut in presenting ideas, but also as an networked entity composed of competing actors incapable of concerted effort that might otherwise be called “state action.”

Check out this recent video from the FuturICT group in which Paul Lukowicz presents his take on the project from the perspective of a computer scientist.
A lot of the issues we have been discussing come up very explicitly in this bit. Particularly interesting, I think, is how emergent structures on the one hand and purposefully built infrastructure on the other are being renegotiated conceptually, and how both are finally associated with the use of a platform by an potentially infinite and yet unkown set of users: “there will be an infrastructure” which all kinds of people may contribute to, may use to run their own projects on, built their own apps, and so on. This particular aspect of infrastructure as platform may be worth exploring further, as it has all kinds of conceptual implications, and an interesting political undertone.

A couple of more videos are linked at the site, for example a ten-minute promo of the project.

Many thanks to my mentor, Alice Robbin of Indiana University’s School of Library Sciences, for turning me onto this interesting new paper by Nancy C. Roberts.

Beyond Smokestacks and Silos: Open-Source, Web-Enabled Coordination in Organizations and Networks

What accounts for coordination problems? Many mechanisms of coordination exist in both organizations and networks, yet despite their widespread use, coordination challenges persist. Some believe the challenges are growing even more serious. One answer lies in understanding that coordination is not a free good; it is expensive in terms of time, effort, and attention, or what economists call transaction and administrative costs. An alternative to improving coordination is to reduce its costs, yet there is little guidance in the literature
to help managers and researchers calculate coordination costs or make design decisions based on cost reductions. Th is article explores two cases—the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Offi ce’s Peer-to-Patent pilot program and the online relief eff ort in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there in 2010—to illustrate the advantages and constraints of using Web 2.0 technology as a mechanism of coordination and a tool for cost reduction. The lessons learned from these cases may offer practitioners and researchers a way out of our “silos” and “smokestacks.”

Now, I’m not totally convinced that the author is suggesting that infrastructure is the answer to reducing transaction costs associated with coordination efforts. However, the claim, which seems well substantiated to me, that the challenges facing those attempting to coordinate are growing “even more serious” amid ever complex webs of people, places and things seems like a valuable position to take for those of us writing on infrastructure.

The position can be used to justify infrastructure research. Why is this needed? All too often, I see papers on infrastructure that must justify their raison d’être and their justification is little better than “duh, its infrastructure”, “its the reason other stuff can work,” or “its the stuff that civilization is made of.” However, I am dissatisfied with all of these reasons, even though I share the personal sentiment, esp. “duh, its infrastructure.”

Of course, there are a variety of reasons that we might want to invetigate/examine infrastructure, especially for theoretical purposes. However, scholars tend to fail to justify their research on a more general or social level, and this position on transaction costs associated with coordination is probably a decent position to start from.