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.

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:

1. data should be fair and be computed law-abiding,
2. data should only computed on their purpose,
3. data should be appropriate, relevant and not excessive,
4. data should be precise and up-to-date,
5. data should remain as local as possible,
6. data shouldn’t be stored longer than necessary,
7. appropriate punishments must be possible (11).

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):

1. the reader sends a messag to the tag with a nouce-identifier N_R.
2. the tag generates a new nouce-identifier N_T and sends this, the encrypted tag-ID h(ID) und the encrypted nouce-identifier pair h_(ID)(N_R,N_T) back to the reader. The reader passes that triple to the application system. The application system decodes with the key h and computes with the known nouce-identifier N_R the nouce-Identifier N_T. With this the application can verify the ID of the tag.
3. If the application system accepts the tag, it computes a new tag-ID. The tag also computes a new tag-ID with the same algorithm. The application system with new tag-ID generates the encrypted message h_(ID+1)(N_T,N_R) and send this to the tag.
4. The tag evaluates the message and the new ID. If the received ID is the same as the ID computed by the tag, the old ID and the nouce-Identifier N_T are erased from the tag-store.

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:

1. Who is the owner of the data an RFID-Reader explores and an application system computes and stores?
2. Are there marking obligations for items with RFID-tags on it (e.g. clothing, food)?
3. Is it necessary to require offical approval for the installation of RFID-readers and sensors?

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

1. Arapinis, M.;Chothia, T.;Ritter, E.;Ryan, M.: Analysing Unlinkability and Anonymity Using the Applied Pi Calculus http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/Papers/csf10.pdf, visited 16.12.14
2. Blues Team: Unverkettbarkeit und Pseudonymität in der digitalen Welt, http://blues.inf.tu-dresden.de/prime/EUT_Tutorial_V0/german/german/Content/Unit2/dig.%20unlink.htm, visited 16.12.14
3. Brusó, M.; Chatzikokolakis, K.;Etalle, S.; Den Hartog, J.: Linking Unlinkability https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00760150/PDF/Unlinkability.pdf, besucht am 16.12.14
4. Dimitriou, T: A Lightweight RFID Protocol to protect against Traceability an cloning attacks, http://www.ait.gr/export/TDIM/various/RFID-securecomm05.pdf, visited 18.2.15
5. Fischer, L.: Measuring Unlinkability for Privacy Enhancing Technologies, http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/2367/1/lars_fischer_dissertation.pdf, visited 16.12.14
6. Gras, M. L.: The Legal Regulaiton of CCTV in Europe, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/3375/3338, visited 17.02.15
7. Gerichtshof der Europäischen Union: „Der Gerichtshof erklärt die Richtlinie über die Vorratsspeicherung von Daten für ungültig“, http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-04/cp140054de.pdf, visited 17.02.15
8. Pfitzmann, A.; Hansen, M.: Anonymity, Unlinkability, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management – A Consolidated Proposal for Terminology, http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/terminology.pdf, visited 16.12.14
9. Roßnagel, A.: Datenschutz in einem informatisierten Alltag, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/stabsabteilung/04548.pdf, visited 19.11.14
10. Rost, M.; Pfitzmann, A.: Datenschutzziele, http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/814/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11623-009-0072-9.pdf?auth66=1416396902_c7935e6bcf15afa95108ffb192c1fd9f&ext=.pdf, visited 19.11.14
11. Taylor, N. : State Surveillance and the Right to Privacy, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/3394/3357, visited 17.02.15
12. Welbourne, E.; Battle, L.; Cole, G.; Gould, K.; Rector, K.; Raymer, S.; Balazinska, M.; Borriello, G.: Building the Internet of Things Using RFID, http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kyle_Rector/publication/220491250_Building_the_Internet_of_Things_Using_RFID_The_RFID_Ecosystem_Experience/links/0c960519d82721508d000000.pdf, visited 18.2.15

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.

• Issues with the source (the participants) and the destination (the researcher), including a mismatch between their respective theoretical frameworks, so that the numbers in one can never have the same meaning in the other.
• Issues with the encoding (framing, writing and talking) and decoding (extracting, reading, listening), including the use of different languages, both metaphorically and literally.
• The channel is unreliable.

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.

• Estimation factually inaccurate due to misperceiving/mismeasuring quantity at first attempt (e.g. farmers do not have accurate weight measuring instruments, and the rice they measure will not be pure)
• Thinking of the wrong number due to misunderstanding the question. The interviewers were asking questions using technical language common to an academic environment.   In some cases farmers would not have been sufficiently familiar with this language and may have purely misunderstood what they were being asked.
• Estimation warped by exaggeration of the past (e.g. when farmers remember rates of change which have negatively affected them they tend to exaggerate when their answers are compared with the government’s own data (which of course could be wrong))

2     Issues with coding. The farmer might know the correct number but report it incorrectly for various reasons.

• deliberately increased to ‘save face’ in front of peers
• deliberately decreased to gain additional ‘handouts’ from the government
• deliberately altered to impress researcher
• deliberately altered because they think they know what answer the researchers ‘really wants’
• deliberately altered to serve a personal agenda they are pursuing
• deliberately made controversial to enhance self-importance
• deliberately altered because the participant doesn’t like researcher

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

1. Chalmers, A. F. (1980, 2nd ed. 1982), What is this thing called Science?, The Open University Press, Milton Keynes.
2. Floridi, L (2013) “The Ethics of Information”, OUP, Oxford
3. Walsham, G. (1993), Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations, Wiley, Chichester, UK.
4. Shannon, C. E. (1948), 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', The Bell System Technical Journal 27, 379–423, 623–656.
5. Reddy, M. J. (1979), The Conduit Metaphor - A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language, in Andrew Ortony, ed., 'Metaphor and Thought', CUP, Cambridge.
6. Chapman, D. A. (2014), 'Information is Provisional', Kybernetes 43, 895-910.
7. Scoones, I. (1998). Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis (p. 22). Institute of Development Studies, Brighton.
8. Holler, J. (2014). Is Sustainable Adaptation Possible? Determinants of Adaptation on Mount Kilimanjaro. The Professional Geographer 66, 526–537.
9. Suckall, N., Tompkins, E., & Stringer, L. (2014). Identifying trade-offs between adaptation, mitigation and development in community responses to climate and socio-economic stresses: Evidence from Zanzibar, Tanzania. Applied Geography 46, 111–121.
10. Thi, M. H. B., & Schreinemachers, P. (2011). Resettling Farm Households in Northwestern Vietnam: Livelihood Change and Adaptation. International Journal of Water Resources Development 27, 769–785.

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

1. Bardzell, Shaowen. "Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2010.
2. DSI. Growing a Digital Social Innovation Ecosystem for Europe, Report 2015.
3. Le Dantec, C.A. and DiSalvo, C. Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design. Social Studies of Science 2013 43, 2, 241–264.
4. DiSalvo, Carl, Jonathan Lukens, Thomas Lodato, Tom Jenkins, e Tanyoung Kim. «Making public things: how HCI design can express matters of concern». In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2397–2406. ACM, 2014.
5. Dittrich, Yvonne, Sara Eriksén, e Christina Hansson. «PD in the Wild; Evolving Practices of Design in Use». In Participatory Design Conference, 2002.
6. Ehn, Pelle. «Participation in Design Things». In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008, 92–101. PDC ’08. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indiana University, 2008.
7. Hakken, D., Andrews, B., and Teli, M. Beyond Capital: Values, Commons, Computing, and the Search for a Viable Future. New York: Routledge (forthcoming 2015)
8. Hanseth, Ole, e Nina Lundberg. «Designing Work Oriented Infrastructures». Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2001, 10, n. 3–4: 347–72.
9. Latour, Bruno. «Technology is society made durable». The Sociological Review 38, n. S1 (1990): 103–31.
10. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
11. Latour, Bruno. «Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern». Critical Inquiry 30, n. 2 (1 gennaio 2004): 225–48. doi:10.1086/ci.2004.30.issue-2.
12. Morini, Cristina, e Andrea Fumagalli. «Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value». Ephemera: theory & politics in organization 10, n. 3/4 (2010): 234–52.
13. Neumann, Laura J., e Susan Leigh Star. «Making Infrastructure: The Dream of a Common Language». PDC, 1 gennaio 1996, 231–40.
14. Pipek, Volkmar, e Volker Wulf. «Infrastructuring: Toward an integrated perspective on the design and use of information technology». Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10, n. 5 (2009).
15. Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. "The mathematical theory of information." (1949).
16. Star, S. L. «The ethnography of infrastructure». American behavioral scientist 43, n. 3 (1999): 377.
17. Star, Susan Leigh, e Geoffrey C. Bowker. «How to infrastructure». Handbook of new media: Social shaping and social consequences of ICTs, 2006, 230–45.
18. Star, Susan Leigh, e Karen Ruhleder. «Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces». Information systems research 7, n. 1 (1996): 111–34.
19. Suchman, Lucy. «Located accountabilities in technology production». Scandinavian journal of information systems 14, n. 2 (2002): 7.
20. Suchman, Lucy, «Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World». The Information Society 18, n. 2 (2002): 139–44. doi:10.1080/01972240290075066.
21. Suchman, Lucy. «Working Relations of Technology Production and Use». Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2, n. 1–2 (1 marzo 1993): 21–39. doi:10.1007/BF00749282.
22. Teli, Maurizio, Silvia Bordin, Maria Menendez Blanco, Giusi Orabona, e Antonella De Angeli. «Public design of digital commons in urban places: a case study». International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2015.
23. Tkacz, Nathaniel. "From open source to open government: A critique of open politics." Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 12.4 (2012): 386-405.
24. Weibel, Peter, e Bruno Latour. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy : [exhibition], ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 20.03.-03-10.2005. Mass., 2005.
25. Wiener, N. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. (1954)

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.
Environment // ISO 14001 certifications, ISO 50001 certifications, EMAS registrations, Total systems audit, External certifications bodies, Environmental expenditures, CO2 emissions, Indirect CO2 emissions from sales of products, Net consumption of primary resources, Nitrogen Oxide emissions, Sulphur Oxide emissions, Total water used, Total recycled or reused water, Waste from reclamation activities, Waste management expenditures.
Local development // Total spending for the territory, Interventions on the territories from agreements, conventions and PSA by category.
Stakeholders // Eni customer satisfaction score, Suppliers used, Overall distributed net added value.
Ethics // Presence of women on the Board of Directors of Eni Group companies, Hours of training on human rights, Suppliers subjected to qualification procedures including screening on human rights, SA8000 audits carried out.
Innovation // R & D expenditures net of general and administrative costs, Personnel employed in R & D activities.

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

1. Bronn, P.S.; Vrioni, A.B. Corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing: an overview. International Journal of Advertising 2011, 20, 207-222.
2. Glazer, A., Kanniainen, V., Poutvaara, P. Firms' ethics, consumer boycotts, and signalling.      European Journal of Political Economy 2010, 26, 340-350.
3. Lozano, R., Huisingh, D. Inter-linking issues and dimensions in sustainability reporting. Journal    of Cleaner Production 2011, 19, 99-107.
4. Mark-Herbert, C.; Von Schantz, C. Comunicating corporate social responsibility- Brand management. Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies 2007, 12, 4-11.
5. Pinske, J.; Dommisse, M. Overcoming barriers to sustainability: an explanation of residential builder's reluctance to adopt clean technologies. Business Strategy and the Environment 2009, 18, 515-527.
6. Yin, R.K. Case study research: design and methods. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, USA, 2009.