
ISIS Summit Vienna 2015—The Information Society at the Crossroads
Part of the International Society for Information Studies series
3–7 Jun 2015, Vienna, Austria
- Go to the Sessions
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- I. Invited Speech
- S1. Conference Stream DTMD 2015
- S2. Conference Stream ICPI 2015
- S3. Conference Stream ICTS 2015
- T1. Conference Track: (Big) history of information
- T1.0. Conference Track: Advanced hair-splitting (combinatorics)
- T1.0.1. Conference Track: Andrew Feenberg's technical politics and ICTs
- T1.1. Conference Track: As we may teach
- T1.2. Conference Track: China and the global information society
- T1.3. Conference Track: Communication, information and reporting
- T1.4. Conference Track: Cyberpeace
- T2. Conference Track: Emancipation or disempowerment of man?
- T2.1. Conference Track: Emergence of and in (self-)organizing work systems
- T2.2. Conference Track: Emergent systems, information and society
- T3. Conference Track: Empowering patients
- T3.0. Conference Track: Homo informaticus
- T3.1. Conference Track: Human resilience and human vulnerability
- T3.2. Conference Track: ICT and literature
- T3.3. Conference Track: ICTs and power relations
- T4. Conference Track: Information in the exact sciences and symmetry
- T5. Conference Track: Informational warfare
- T6. Conference Track: Multi-level semiosis
- T7. Conference Track: Music, information and symmetry
- T7.1. Conference Track: Natural disasters
- T7.2. Conference Track: Progress in Information Studies in China
- T8. Conference Track: Searching to create a humanized civilization
- T8.1. Conference Track: The ethics of foundations
- T9. Conference Track: The Global Brain
- T9.1. Conference Track: Transdisciplinary response and responsibility
- T9.2. Conference Track: Triangular relationship
- T9.3. Conference Track: Weaving the understanding of information
- Event Details
Conference Chairs
Sessions
I. Invited SpeechS1. Conference Stream DTMD 2015
S2. Conference Stream ICPI 2015
S3. Conference Stream ICTS 2015
T1. Conference Track: (Big) history of information
T1.0. Conference Track: Advanced hair-splitting (combinatorics)
T1.0.1. Conference Track: Andrew Feenberg's technical politics and ICTs
T1.1. Conference Track: As we may teach
T1.2. Conference Track: China and the global information society
T1.3. Conference Track: Communication, information and reporting
T1.4. Conference Track: Cyberpeace
T2. Conference Track: Emancipation or disempowerment of man?
T2.1. Conference Track: Emergence of and in (self-)organizing work systems
T2.2. Conference Track: Emergent systems, information and society
T3. Conference Track: Empowering patients
T3.0. Conference Track: Homo informaticus
T3.1. Conference Track: Human resilience and human vulnerability
T3.2. Conference Track: ICT and literature
T3.3. Conference Track: ICTs and power relations
T4. Conference Track: Information in the exact sciences and symmetry
T5. Conference Track: Informational warfare
T6. Conference Track: Multi-level semiosis
T7. Conference Track: Music, information and symmetry
T7.1. Conference Track: Natural disasters
T7.2. Conference Track: Progress in Information Studies in China
T8. Conference Track: Searching to create a humanized civilization
T8.1. Conference Track: The ethics of foundations
T9. Conference Track: The Global Brain
T9.1. Conference Track: Transdisciplinary response and responsibility
T9.2. Conference Track: Triangular relationship
T9.3. Conference Track: Weaving the understanding of information
Instructions for Authors
Procedure for Submission, Peer-Review, Revision and Acceptance of Extended Abstracts
The conference will accept extended abstracts only. The accepted abstracts will be available online on Sciforum.net during and after the conference. Papers based on the extended abstracts can be published by authors in the journal of their choice later on. The conference will not publish a proceedings volume.
Submissions of abstracts should be done by the authors online. If you do not already have an user account with this website, please create one by registering with sciforum.net. After registration, please log in to your user account, and use the Submit New Abstract. Please chose the ISIS Summit Vienna 2015 conference in the first step. In the second step, choose the appropriate conference stream or conference session. In the third step you will be asked to type in the title, abstract and optionally keywords. In the fourth and last step, you will be asked to enter all co-authors, their e-mail addresses and affiliations.
- Scholars interested in participating in paper sessions of the Summit can submit their extended abstract (about 750 to 2'000 words) online on this website until 27 February 2015.
- The International Program Committee will review and decide about the suitability of abstracts for the ISIS Summit Vienna 2015. All authors will be notified by 20 March 2015 about the acceptance of their extended abstract.
- If the abstract is accepted for this conference, the authors will be asked to send the a formatted version of the extended abstract as a PDF file by end of May 2015.
- Please register with the conference before or once your abstract is accepted. Please note that the acceptance of an abstract will not automatically register you with the conference. The abstract submission and conference registration are two separate processes.
Please use the abstract template. The formatted version of the extended abstracts must have the following organization:
- Title
- Full author names
- Affiliations (including full postal address) and authors' e-mail addresses
- Extended Abstract (750 to 2'000 words)
- References
- Paper Format: A4 paper format, the printing area is 17.5 cm x 26.2 cm. The margins should be 1.75 cm on each side of the paper (top, bottom, left, and right sides).
- Paper Length: The manuscript should be about 3 pages long (incl. references).
- Formatting / Style: Please use the template to prepare your abstract (see on top of this page).
- References & Citations: The full titles of cited papers and books must be given. Reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ], and placed before the punctuation; for example [4] or [1-3], and all the references should be listed separately and as the last section at the end of the manuscript.
- Authors List and Affiliation Format: Authors' full first and last names must be given. Abbreviated middle name can be added. For papers written by various contributors a corresponding author must be designated. The PubMed/MEDLINE format is used for affiliations: complete street address information including city, zip code, state/province, country, and email address should be added. All authors who contributed significantly to the manuscript (including writing a section) should be listed on the first page of the manuscript, below the title of the article. Other parties, who provided only minor contributions, should be listed under Acknowledgments only. A minor contribution might be a discussion with the author, reading through the draft of the manuscript, or performing English corrections.
- Figures, Schemes and Tables: Authors are encouraged to prepare figures and schemes in color. Figure and schemes must be numbered (Figure 1, Scheme I, Figure 2, Scheme II, etc.) and a explanatory title must be added. Tables should be inserted into the main text, and numbers and titles for all tables supplied. All table columns should have an explanatory heading. Please supply legends for all figures, schemes and tables. The legends should be prepared as a separate paragraph of the main text and placed in the main text before a table, a figure or a scheme.
Copyright to the extended abstracts will stay with the authors of the paper. Authors will be asked to grant MDPI AG (Publisher of the Sciforum platform) and ISIS (organizer of the conference) a non-exclusive, non-revokable license to publish the abstracts online and possibly in print under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. As authors retain the rights to their abstracts and papers, papers can be published elsewhere later.
List of accepted submissions (217)
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sciforum-004115 | Quantification of audiences as a decision-making factor in Slovene web journalism | , | N/A |
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Business models of news media organisations are currently undergoing profound transformations as the ability of traditional news media to effectively monetise their audiences is eroding (Napoli 2011). Since the beginning of the global economic crisis the news industry is facing not only problems of trust in journalism, but also of increasing financial difficulties resulting from declining numbers of readers, listeners and viewers, lower advertising revenues and failed technological innovations in the sphere of journalistic production (e. g. Jones and Salter 2012; Grieskin et al 2012). While online news production has often been studied from the perspective of audience participation in the creation and distribution of news or the impact of digital technology on newsgathering routines, it has less frequently been examined how business models of news organisations are being transformed in the digital age. Different authors (e.g. Napoli 2011; Fuchs 2011; Turow 2012; Allmer 2012) emphasize that digital technologies enable increased surveillance of internet users; it remains to be answered to what degree media industries (beyond biggest Internet corporations) in fact utilize these possibilities in their daily business and in what ways “economic surveillance” influences their decisions. It is therefore of key importance to study the changes in these industries that occurred in the recent years because of technological developments and the economic squeeze. In short, these transformations must be analysed from a critical political-economic perspective as well. While Slovenia has been especially hit by the global capitalist crisis (e.g. Vobič et al 2014) and Slovenian media industries have undergone transformations similar to other capitalist countries, Slovene media have also been under pressure from holders of social power during the last 20 years in the form of unstable ownerships, unstable management and frequent changes of editors, making it hard to balance journalistic and business goals. (Vobič 2012) The transition to online has in part because of this troubled history been quite problematic. In Slovenia detailed analysis of business models of digital media are available only for online editions of newspapers (e. g. Vobič 2013) and they find they are adapting to deteriorating financial circumstances mainly by reducing production costs, especially the costs of labour. Using the methods of content analysis, document analysis and in-depth interviews with journalists, editors, and advertisers, the authors analyse the three most visited Slovene news sites (24ur.com, Planet Siol and MMC RTV SLO) to examine: a) how these organisations are adapting to changing circumstances (particularly decreasing advertising revenues); b) how relationships between media organisations and advertisers are being transformed; and c) how is the availability of online audience metrics impacting the work process in newsrooms, relationships between different parts of news organisations (particularly the editorial and marketing of advertising space) and relationships between news organisations and advertisers. |
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sciforum-004358 | Ubiquitous Computing and Privacy | N/A |
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Introduction Ubiquitous computing is a topic in sciences for almost 3 decades and there are the very first application of ubiquitous computing in real life. People wish with ubiquitous computing to ease in work and allday routines, they hope for a rise of security and to extended their senses and memory. Every day objects would have sensors and/or RFID-tags. These sensors and RFID-tags can be read ubiquitously and personal data are inquired, computed and/or stored. Ubiquitous computing needs an infrastructure of ubiquitous surveillance. In the future many participants, in constantly changing settings, with manifold goals in very different contexts will take part in ubiquitous computing. Systems will organize them selves, unnoticed by the ones affected, and mysterious for them. Privacy laws of today hold for situations with few participants in their straight defined roles. They claim to establish transparency, attachments, needs, control abilities, and participation of the affected ones. But these laws are not made for situations with many participants, in a variaty of constantly changing rules, under different goals in each role. Privacy laws must accommodate to the needs of ubiquitous computing to realize a right to informational selfdetermination (9). New Privacy Laws should address the following principles:
To realize all this in ubiquitous computing, it is necessary to integrate privacy principles into the technology. In networks of sensors and RFID-Systems privacy is ment to the appropriate handling and transfer of the ubiquitous surveillance infrastructures they realize (9). Surveillance has allways to faces. It is necessary and supportive for securety, crime prevention and crime detection. On the other hand surveillance changes behaviour, people fell unfree and inhibited (6,7). Because of the latter people will stay anonymous in public spaces (6, 11). Concepts like the principle of agreeing with the gethering, computing and storing of data, like we know it today, didn’t function in the context of ubiquitous surveillance. “If I couldn’t buy some thing to eat without surveillance, how can the acceptance be free?”(6). In future the Focus of privacy law should be more to the person than to the data. Privacy in ubiquitous computing and surveillance is more and more a problem of anonymity and untraceability. But anonymity of users and untraceability of each kind of “items of interest” would make a lot of applications of ubiquitos computing impossible. Though anonymity and untraceability are only senseless against attackers and not the legal users of surveillance. The legality of surveillance in ubiquitous computing and surveillance is to be ruled out in privacy law. Anonymity From the view of technology anonymity is the state of non identifiability within a set of subjects (e. g. people) the anonymity set. The anonymity set is a set of subjects which are able to trigger actions and/or which are addressed by actions. I. e. subjects are sender or receiver within a set of senders respectively a set of receivers. If a attacker is unable to identify the connection between a single user and a specific sender resepctively to receiver, then the user is anonymous. Anonymity is not the anonymity of senders and receivers, it’s the anonymity of users (8). Welbourne et. al. have engineered tools for RFID-Systems with which users can delete the data the system has stored about them. The user can easily implement rules about who should read which data when, and which concatenations the system is allowed to do. With this it is possible to implement anonymity (“nobody is allowed to read personal data”), but the system functions nevertheless. Also the requirements of systems and authorities can be implemented and recorded. This is an example for technologies with which anonymity can be implemented in ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous surveillance (12). Untraceability Also untraceability is described from a technological view here. Therefore we define Data, Entities, Identities, Users, Objekts, Subjects, Services, Ressources, and so on, or instances of them as Items of Interest (IOI). IOI are „things“ which an attacker is interested in. IOI are untraceable, if an attacker is unable to see a relation between two or more IOI’s or to trace an IOI in a network. For instance if in a Car to Car Safety Message System there is a message exchange, then messages has to be untraceable to one of the car’s such that there is no possiblity to trace the track of the car (10,2,5,1,3,8). The same holds when clothes have RFID-tag’s on it and when they pass different readers in a while (4). Untraceability in this way can be implemented as follows (4):
For an attacker the tag is untraceable, because it changes its ID with each message transfer. Traceability of the tag by the applicationsystem is still possible (4). The above examples presented for implementing anonymity and untraceability show the possibility to implement privacy in ubiquitous systems as it is required by Roßnagel (9). Needed are the legal frameworks to require such privacy features in ubiquitous systems. By defining this sort of legal framework there should be answers to the following questions:
When CCTV in public places appeared in the 1990’iesth Gras (6) showed that it is much more difficult to regulate and rule the use of technologie when already installed, than before installation and use. Therefore it is important that legislation keeps pace with technological progress. References and Notes
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sciforum-004456 | The Role of Information and Values in the Participatory Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems | , | N/A |
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Introduction Objectivism, supposing that information is ‘out there’ and can be accessed through appropriate research methods, is a valuable and unavoidable initial stance in field work. However, even within an objectivist paradigm, information gathered from field work can never be accepted uncritically, however rigorous the research methodology, since each step of the process from the choice of methodology onwards is driven and circumscribed by the values and beliefs of the participants. In response to the growing threat of climatic change researchers are increasingly utilising social surveys to access information on human-environment interactions or the operation of “social-ecological” systems, in order to preserve key functions into the future. This paper explores the sources of uncertainty which emerge as simple environmental data transfers from participant to researcher. In particular, it considers the role that values can play in determining the quality of participant-reported quantitative environmental data, presented within the framework of Shannon’s standard communication model. Gathering information from interviews and surveys Survey participants have a theory of the world. The knowledge they possess is dependent on this theory [1]. In the philosophy of information, the information exists in a specific level of abstract [2]. Participants’ theories encompass the values – ethical, political, social, and religious – they have developed in their life and work. The researcher has a different theory of the world. He/she too comes with a framework equally embedded within a set of values, different from those of the participants. In qualitative research, an interpretative stance recognises the context-dependence of knowledge: “Interpretive methods of research start from the position that our knowledge of reality, including the domain of human action, is a social construction by human actors and that this applies equally to researchers. Thus there is no objective reality which can be discovered by researchers and replicated by others, in contrast to the assumptions of positivist science” [3] What about accessing numbers through interviews and surveys? If an interviewed farmer tells a researcher “my yield was 8.5 tonnes”, what is the status of the “8.5 tonnes”? To explore the status of apparently simple numerical data we model the data acquisition using the standard communication model due to Shannon [4], consisting of: a message source; encoder; noisy channel; decoder and message destination. Although the validity of using the Shannon model outside its origin in the engineering of telecommunication systems has been contested (see for example [5] and [6]), it provides a convenient structure to explore issues with research data which would need to be addressed, whatever the model. The supposed ‘perfect’ data exists as the message generated at the source, and we explore what becomes of this message as it travels to the destination where the data is embedded in the work of the researcher.
Our case study is a field study conducted in the Vietnamese portion of the Mekong Delta, which aimed at quantifying the benefits local farmers receive from an environmental service, the deposition of nutrient-rich fluvial sediments during the annual monsoon. A case study: rice farmers in Vietnam Accessing quantitative, environmental, data through social surveys has, as a methodology, seen rapid growth in recent years, particularly as a result of approaches such as the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework [7] which are used to evaluate the success of human adaptations to environmental change (seem [8], [9] and [10]) by measuring the capital - natural, human, social, and economic - at the disposal of the participant. The work considered here was an expedition to Vietnam aiming to access information on the impact of climate change and changing farming practices on the farmers of the Mekong Delta. In April and May 2014 a native English speaking researcher teamed up with five native Vietnamese speaking researchers to conduct 434 interviews spread across 19 villages and two provinces of the Delta. The interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, with the enumerator asking closed quantitative questions, recording the response in Vietnamese, and later translating and converting it into digital format, before forwarding it to the English-speaking researcher for processing. Among the information sought from the interviews were: farm size, amount of fertilizer used; depth of sediment following the annual flooding; and crop yields. We can explore where and how the numbers degrade at each stage of the communication model. 1 Issues with the source (the farmer). The farmer might be thinking of the wrong number for various reasons.
2 Issues with coding. The farmer might know the correct number but report it incorrectly for various reasons.
3 Noise in the communication channel. The farmer might report the right number but the researcher might receive it incorrectly for various reasons such as mishearing an answer, errors in transcription (a common issue was that survey enumerators would write the answer in the wrong answer box, or not in a box at all), or errors in translation 4 Issues with the decoding or mismatch between the coding/decoding including misunderstanding units. For example, two different units of land area are used, both called Cong. One is the ‘new’ 1000m2 and the other is the ‘old’ 1300m2 but both are still in use. Also, misunderstanding of what the number signifies. For example, some farmers reported rice in dry weight, as opposed to wet, which substantially reduces the number. 5 Issues with the destination (the researcher). For example, asking the wrong person and/or at the wrong location – perhaps made a mistake when sampling, or just poor understanding of the issue being investigated. Influence of the location of the interviews In this section we go in-depth into one error formed during the farmer’s coding process. A challenge of overseas fieldwork is that it is not always possible to maintain full control over the execution of the project, and this is particularly the case in Vietnam where the political context can have a strong influence. The initial aim of this fieldwork project was to run all farmer interviews individually at the farmer’s homestead however, due to preferences of the local authority, more than half the interviews were ultimately conducted in large groups. The group setting meant farmers were subject to greater peer scrutiny while reporting their data, but perhaps less governmental scrutiny. This introduced a new potential avenue for the farmer’s values to create errors in their reported data. In order to probe further into the impact of these particular values, some statistical analysis was conducted on the reported data. After controlling for some key factors affecting the yield achieved by rice farmers we found that the binary variable of either an individual or group setting had a significant (p<0.01) correlation with yield, with the group setting increasing the mean yield reported by 0.26 (± 0.13) tonnes (around 3%). The role of values While at first sight, at least, some of the sources of error are accidental (such as mishearing a number), many are also a consequence of value. The extent to which such sources of error affect the farmer’s reported data depends on the difference between what he/she values compared to the researcher values: do they prioritise: honesty/scientific advancement (an ethical concern), fear of authority (political), personal feelings towards the researcher (including racial biases), general pride, or social standing (social). The difference in values reported in home interviews compared to group discussions demonstrates a second-order impact of values: the data reported by the farmer depends on the farmer’s perception of the values of the witnesses. Almost all of the researcher’s errors can be reduced through increasing the time/diligence with which the interviews are conducted. Hence, the magnitude of the error on the researcher’s side is dependent on what they value more: accuracy of the data (less interviews but more accurate data) which ensures work will stand up to scrutiny of peers, or statistical operability (more interviews but less accurate data) which may affect whether the work is publishable. Discussion Numbers are never value-free. Numbers only have meaning by virtue of their context, and the decision to select one parameter over another already entails implicit or explicit value judgments. The decision to investigate rice farming in the Mekong Delta was embedded in a set of values of the geography department of the University of Southampton, itself embedded in the values of several wider communities. The researcher then identifies the need for numbers, but these numbers have meaning within the abstraction of the research. They do not have the same meaning in the minds of the farmers. This paper attempts to explore the consequences of the fact that the numbers are embedded in values. Given that the research requires specific data (amount of fertilizer used; depth of sediment; crop yields), it is suggested that the data acquired is unavoidably influenced by the values of the farmers and the society in which they live and work, by the values of the research team, and by the interaction of values of all the actors involved. In the present context of intensifying environmental change, the use of numbers reporting on human-environment interactions accessed through quantitative surveys is only likely to increase as a fast and cost-efficient method of garnering information covering large geographical regions and populations. Furthermore those numbers are likely to be utilized by policy makers designing large-scale, expensive and often irreversible, hard and soft interventions in social-ecological systems (‘adaptations’). An appreciation of the effect of values on the reliability of the numbers (information) being examined is essential, to avoid catastrophic ‘maladaptations’. The communication model implemented above provides a valuable framework, or lens, through which to view the potential sources of bias brought about by values and indeed other factors during the number collection process. Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank the staff and students at Can Tho University, Vietnam for their support in the field. References and Notes
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sciforum-004119 | Critical Alternatives in Computing Scholarship: Coordinates of a Struggle to Go Beyond Capital | , , | N/A |
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Introduction The history of computing scholarship has been marked by two narrative tropes about the work of scholars and computing professionals. Historically, these tropes go back to the 1950s, to the work of Norbert Wiener on one hand (1954), and of Shannon and Weaver (1949) on the other. Wiener was concerned with the social implications of digital technologies, centrally automation. Shannon and Weaver were more concerned with the technical characteristics of computing technologies and the smooth flow of communication. Since that time, the Shannon/Weaver program has been the dominant narrative, especially in the academic discipline of Computer Science. However, in computing practices, both narratives are recognized, as the search for technical proficiency is often framed in terms of social demands to be intercepted and translated into technological solutions, in the quest for an always “new new thing” (Lewis, 1999). Thus, from the beginning, there has been a gap between the way computing has actually developed—as a socio-technical process—and the way it is usually conceptualized—as a primarily technical activity, but one that largely takes as given the centrality of capital. One current manifestation of this confusion is the various positions taken on what “openness” means in computing, even in corporate talk: As a force for liberation but also a platform for the reproduction of capital (Tkatz, 2009). The strange duality of computing narratives—socially and technically aware in practice, but engineering/corporately oriented in theory—has fostered an alternative domain of critical scholarship, manifest in, among other places, the decennial conferences held in Aarhus, Denmark. These conferences, as well as the closely related “Participatory Design Conferences” and “Computer Supported Cooperative Work” domain of inquiry, pay attention to the emergence of “Critical Alternatives” to the dominating computing practices, as illustrated by the title of the 2015 Aarhus Conference. Similarly, the aim of this paper is to sketch out, on the basis of our reading of the academic literature in the field of critical alternatives in computing, basic concepts for technological design that can be integrated into a leftist perspective, one that goes “beyond capital.” 1. A constructivist, critical perspective, on technology design In general, constructivist perspectives on technology need to focus on more than the interpretation of technology. Some of these perspectives have been rightly critiqued for merely replacing one form of determinism, a technological one, with another social one. That both determinisms dismiss the dynamic relations between the social and technical dynamics is a theme in Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Latour, 1993). Still, technicist views of technology remain dominant. The important task of building critical alternatives needs to begin by identifying and promoting what Shaowen Bardzell (Bardzell, 2010) has called the “constellation of qualities” that can replace incomplete with more nuanced perspectives, ones that acknowledge social construction while still attending to the co-construction of the social and the technical. Here, we outline the implications of one such a perspective for how design and production of digital technologies are conceived. We recognize DTs as one of the main sites where future societies are being built, seeing technology as “society made durable” (Latour, 1990). Two concepts best capture the relation between an STS-inspired view of technology and the design of technology themselves. First, promoting the understanding that design comes “from somewhere” as opposed to being “from nowhere” (Suchman, 2002), or abandoning the idea of the designer as holding a form of authoritative knowledge. Second, recognizing contemporary digital technologies as infrastructures, which means questioning the designer/user opposition. This requires taking seriously the contexts of production and use of technology, as well as the already existing technological base (Pipek & Wulf, 2009). Both these concepts are essential to “infrastructuring.” This concept is a direct borrowing by the design community of a concept from Science and Technology Studies (STS), in particular of the work of Susan Leigh Star and colleagues (e.g. Neumann & Star, 1996; Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Star, 1999; Star & Bowker, 2006). Their work identified the characteristics of infrastructures and the processes bringing them into existence. In infrastructuring, software designers transition away from a project-based design activity, often seen as (and encouraged by proprietary law to do so) as always starting from scratch. The new approach is to design “in the wild” (Dittrich, Eriksén, & Hansson, 2002), which meant dealing directly with the mass of already installed software applications and technological working practices (Hanseth & Lundberg, 2001). The concept of infrastructuring contributed to another direction in the design community leveraging the constructionist approach of Lucy Suchman (1993, 2002a, 2002b). Suchman drew upon feminist theory, in particular the work of Donna Haraway (Haraway, 1988), to question the way design was done. Suchman questioned the role of authoritative knowledge, which meant conceptualizing design as an activity detached from actual work practices. She referred to this view as “design from nowhere” as opposed to being “from somewhere” (Suchman, 2002a). Design activities came to include both the entry of the professional designer into the working relations of users as well as accounting for the forms of local improvisations shaping the technology in use (Suchman, 2002b). In short, Suchman was overcoming the dichotomy “designer/user” by incorporating the actual reconfigurations of working relations that take place when introducting DTs. The connection between these streams of thoughts in the design field becomes especially clear when an infrastructuring approach is applied to the design of large scale entities. Design becomes seen as the ensemble of activities making possible, maintaining, and redesigning digitally-mediated things (Pipek & Wulf, 2009). The concept stresses both the dynamic characteristics of infrastructures and their emerging trajectories, underlining the articulation work of all actors involved in creating the infrastructure itself. Recently, with the emergence of large scale infrastructures outside of the workplace (e.g. social media and web-based applications in general), the infrastructuring perspective has been articulated as public design (Ehn, 2008; Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013; Teli & al., 2015). The connection here is to other trends in STS, attending to “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004) while also focusing on “making things public” (Weibel & Latour, 2005). Focusing on matters of concern means acknowledging that “things” are forms of gathering, assemblies within which controversies are solved. “Making things public” opens up space to examine them as part of the issues people are concerned about. These scholars then relate such issues to Dewey’s concepts of public and publics. Specifically, Di Salvo and colleagues have clarified how design can be relocated as “public design” (DiSalvo, Lukens, Lodato, Jenkins, & Kim, 2014). When these two perspectives are attended to, a society becomes understood as being constituted by many publics and groups of people interested in specific issues, and thus design can both support existing publics and participate in their formation. 2. Constructivism beyond Capital In the context of a “Beyond Capital” (Hakken, et.al. forthcoming 2015) perspective, the discussion and promotion of public design and infrastructuring becomes particularly relevant. First, it recognizes the contestable role of technologies, dismissing any deterministic view in favor of the politicized view of technology. Second, it stresses how technology design can start with the concerns of people, as in Scandinavian Participatory Design, involving people not only in the interface with design but also in the definition of the goals of the design project [Ehn, 2008]. Third, these approaches obviate a vision of technology designers as having a god-like view, replacing this with a more situated perspective that leads to a variety of changes in how technological projects should be carried out. Most basically, the idea of the technology designer (as well as of any other intellectual in society) as somebody who is a person primarily with design (or sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc...) skills needs to be promoted. Projects would become seen as combining the skills and needs of the main beneficiaries of the project itself with the design, intellectual, and communicative skills of the professionals involved. Such a shift will require change in the way projects are funded, to favor open-ended, socially-based, projects over projects that presume that the answers to research and design questions are already known. Public design and infrastructuring are particularly open to another recent approach to DTs, what is called “digital social innovation”. This expression, promoted by the European Union through its research funding, encompasses “a type of social and collaborative innovation in which innovators, users and communities collaborate using digital technologies to co-create knowledge and solutions for a wide range of social needs and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet” (DSI, 2015: 9). Without specific measures being taken to guard against it, the practices described appear to provide space for the subsuming of collaborative practices into the processes of capital valorization, extending the ability of capital to extract value from life (Morini & Fumagalli, 2010). However, when articulated in terms of public design, digital social innovation is re-articulated as innovation that addresses societal challenges properly. This puts at the center the concerns of people and their collective ability to address issues. However, the perspective depends on integrating nuanced understandings of the capital relations in normal design practices, something that can be fostered in interdisciplinary teams that, include sociologists, anthropologists, etc. Achieving interdisciplinarity makes another institutional move necessary, restructuring the career opportunities of scholars now trapped in strictly disciplinary career paths in academia, while expanding possibilities to do effective interdisciplinary work in organizations. Such restructuring is what will make possible for scholars to engage in open-ended projects, contributing to the interdisciplinary thinking that is needed to promote a constructivist, beyond capital, perspective on technology. Acknowledgment Maurizio Teli's research is funded by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca, through the project “Città Educante”. References and Notes
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sciforum-004133 | Reporting Sustainability in the Oil Sector: Transparency or Greenwashing? | , |
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Introduction Communication is fundamental in marketing. Pinske and Dommisse (2009) have highlighted that it is essential for consumers because they need to be informed about the benefits sprung by their responsible choices in terms of purchases; moreover it is important to improve a company’s reputation (Bronn and Vrioni, 2011; Mark-Herbert and Von Schantz, 2007). For this reason sustainability report, considering its communicational function, can be deemed also a tool for marketers. According to Lozano and Huisingh (2001) sustainability report “is a voluntary activity with two general purposes: (1) to assess the current state of an organisation’s economic, environmental and social dimensions, and (2) to communicate a company’s efforts and Sustainability progress to their stakeholders. However, these purposes do not consider the time dimension, nor the interactions among the different sustainability dimensions”. Obviously companies can choose between two ways: transparency, showing real data, or greenwashing, masking their real attitude and relying on appearance, with risks for reputation and boycott actions (Glazer, Kanniainen and Poutvaara, 2010). This research is focused on the oil sector, characterized by different sustainability problems, both in an environmental and a social perspective. Methods In order to highlight this issue in the oil sector, a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2009) has been applied. Two of the largest oil company have been chosen, BP and Eni. These companies draft a sustainability report, providing a lot of data and information about their attention to safeguard the environment and to have also a positive impact on society. In this study researchers have compared these two cases, spotlighting the controversies which sometimes are stressed in the public opinion. Researchers have analyzed these two companies reports and then they have compared the information gathered from this document to their image. Results and Discussion The analysis of these companies’ sustainability report has pointed out a deep commitment to protect environment and also to be responsible from a social point of view. In the following table, for example, there is the list of some of the indicators used in Eni’s report. Table 1. Some of the sustainability indicators used by Eni. Area // Main indicators People // Training hours on safety, Safety expenditures, OHSAS 18001 certifications, Health and Hygiene expenditures, Employees (total), Employees (women), Women senior managers, Satisfaction of participants.
In spite of this, this company has been accused to produce pollution in Nigeria, causing health problems for the local communities, but also to be irresponsible with workers. Also BP presents a report full of information about its sustainable initiatives but, at the same time, it has been found guilty because the damages created near the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Conclusions The analyzed cases have shown that sustainability report can be important in a marketing communication strategy but, at the same time, it is not a guarantee of truth. This shows that it is not a perfect tool for communication: it is necessary to research the possible ways to integrate information about environment and society in the balance sheet. Another reflection is relative to the importance of communicating with transparency: greenwashing could represent a problem also from a marketing point of view because it implies the worsening of the company’s reputation. References
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