Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation

by Giovan Francesco Lanzara

Overview

How disruptions and discontinuities caused by the introduction of new technologies often reveal aspects of practice not previously observed.

What happens in an established practice or work setting when a novel artifact or tool for doing work changes the familiar work routines? Any unexpected event, or change, or technological innovation creates a discontinuity; organizations and individuals must reframe taken-for-granted assumptions and practices and reposition themselves. To study innovation as a phenomenon, then, we must search for situations of discontinuity and rupture and explore them in depth. In Shifting Practices, Giovan Francesco Lanzara does just that, and discovers that disruptions and discontinuities caused by the introduction of new technologies often reveal aspects of practice not previously observed.

After discussing methodological and research issues, Lanzara presents two in-depth studies focusing on processes of design and innovation in two different practice settings: music education and criminal justice. In the first, he works with the music department of a major American university to develop Music LOGO, a computer system that allows students to explore musical structures with simple, composition-like exercises and experiments. In the second, he works with the Italian court system in the design and use of video technology for criminal trials. In both cases, drawing on anecdotes and examples as well as theory and analysis, he traces the new systems from design through implementation and adoption. Finally, Lanzara considers the researcher's role, and the relationship—encompassing empathy, vulnerability, and temporality—between the reflective researcher and actors in the practice setting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262332316
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/18/2016
Series:	Acting with Technology
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Giovan Francesco Lanzara is Professor of Organization Studies in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Prologue: On Negative Capability 1

I Studying Innovation as a Phenomenon 13

1 Innovation in Practice: A Contrasted Dynamics 13

2 Processes of Design: Discontinuities, Bricolage, and Drifting 19

3 Practice and Method: A View from the Swamp 21

4 The Path in the Woods 24

5 Studying a Process of innovation as It Happens in Practice 28

6 Designing a Reflective Inquiry 34

7 First-Order and Second-Order Inquiries 38

8 Backtalk and Conversations 41

9 On Unremarkability 45

10 Theoretical Narratives 50

II Making Music in the Digital Medium: A Reflective Inquiry into the Design of a Computer Music System for Music Education 55

Introduction 57

1 Tracking the Design Process 59

1 Entering the Stage: The Computer Music Project and Its Antecedents 59

2 The Early Design Problem: Upgrading the System 61

3 Designing the Computer Music Interface 64

4 Aspects of Designing: "Entry Points" and "For Instances" 73

5 Bridging Different Worlds: Two Experiments in Self-Observation 77

6 Knowing in Terms of What One Already Knows 85

7 Learning to Make Music in the Digital Medium 87

8 The Emerging Educational Environment: New Objects, Descriptions, and Activities 91

2 The Music Faculty's Test of the System 95

1 The System's Demo 95

2 The Music Faculty's Responses 97

3 Engaging the System as a Teaching Tool and as a Medium for Composition 98

4 Making Music: Composition or Programming? 104

5 Integrating the System into the Music Curriculum 108

6 Music LOCO as a Reflective Tool 112

3 Revisitations: Shifting Stories 117

1 The Backtalk and the Generation of Further Stories 117

2 A Further Round of Backtalk: The Demo as Cooptation 125

3 Accounting for the Shift: Toward a Second-Order Inquiry 128

4 Nature and Consequences of the Reflective Move 131

5 Evolving Understandings of the Design Process 133

6 Concluding Remarks: Telling a Story of Shifting Stories 137

III Encountering Video Technology in Judicial Practice: Experiments and Inquiries in the Courtroom 141

Introduction 143

4 Entering the Temple of Justice 145

1 The Courtroom and the Criminal Trial 145

2 The VCR System and the Courtroom: Research Setting and Method 147

3 Intervention: The Observer as Enabler 148

5 Experimenting with Video Technology in the Courtroom 151

1 Hosting a Stranger: Displacement and Redesign 151

2 Early Encounters with the New Tool: Virtual Replicas, Courtroom Contingencies, and Microinterventions 152

3 Design Probes: Seeing… Making… Seeing… 158

4 Learning to Use Videos in Judicial Decision Making 160

5 Nonverbal Behavior and the Legal Relevance of Visual Cues 169

6 The VCR and the Back Office: Building "Equipmentality" 175

1 Turning the Videotape into an Administrative Object 175

2 Redesigning Microprocedures 179

3 The Magistrates' Working Habits and the Private/Public Use of the VCR 183

7 Reshaping Judicial Practice 185

1 Engaging with the Medium 186

2 Questioning the Grounds of Practical Knowledge 188

3 Reweaving the Fabric of the Practice 192

IV Further Inquiries into Shifting Practices 195

1 Two Worlds of Practice: So Distant, and Yet not Quite so Distant 195

2 Practices and Media 198

3 Making Sense of the Practice in the New Media 207

4 The Medium-Object-Representation Triad: A Digression on Mark Rothko's Color Field Painting 213

5 Transient Knowledge 217

6 Aspects of the Practice of Innovation 234

Epilogue: Reflections on Work Past 253

1 "A Very Difficult Game Indeed" 253

2 Between Empathy and Reflexivity 257

3 How Is Self-Observation Empirically Possible? 259

4 Reflective Experiments 262

References 267

Index 279

What People are Saying About This

Jannis Kallinikos

Shifting Practices recounts the lifelong experience of Giovan Francesco Lanzara with the challenges posed by the intrusion of radically new technologies into established domains of social practice. With wisdom, precision, and sharp analytic gaze, Lanzara reconstructs the complex fabric of action and interpretation through which professional actors relate to and assimilate into their routines and mindsets the hidden logic of technological artifacts, and the predilections these last embody. A unique, extraordinary book that carries the analytic potency of the field of organization studies into its apex.

Haridimos Tsoukas

This is a book Donald Schön would have been proud of: it is enviably well written, philosophically informed, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically rich. Giovan Francesco Lanzara's reflective theorizing and subtle writing add what has been missing from the pioneering work of Schön (a theory of surprise), break through unhelpful dualisms, and elevate design thinking to a new level of sophistication. The book appeals, equally, to the scholar and the reflective practitioner. A great accomplishment!

Stewart Clegg

Innovation—an elusive elixir and obscure object of desire. Lanzara uncovers innovation as a swampy, ambiguous, eventful, discontinuous, drifting, entangled, discursive, metaphorical, dynamic process of bricolage in which practice is paramount. He has composed a beautifully written and wonderfully insightful book in the finest traditions of ethnographic research.

Endorsement

Shifting Practices recounts the lifelong experience of Giovan Francesco Lanzara with the challenges posed by the intrusion of radically new technologies into established domains of social practice. With wisdom, precision, and sharp analytic gaze, Lanzara reconstructs the complex fabric of action and interpretation through which professional actors relate to and assimilate into their routines and mindsets the hidden logic of technological artifacts, and the predilections these last embody. A unique, extraordinary book that carries the analytic potency of the field of organization studies into its apex.

—Jannis Kallinikos, Professor of Management, London School of Economics

From the Publisher

This is a book Donald Schön would have been proud of: it is enviably well written, philosophically informed, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically rich. Giovan Francesco Lanzara's reflective theorizing and subtle writing add what has been missing from the pioneering work of Schön (a theory of surprise), break through unhelpful dualisms, and elevate design thinking to a new level of sophistication. The book appeals, equally, to the scholar and the reflective practitioner. A great accomplishment!

—Haridimos Tsoukas, The Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management, University of Cyprus; Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies, University of Warwick; and author of Complex Knowledge

Innovation—an elusive elixir and obscure object of desire. Lanzara uncovers innovation as a swampy, ambiguous, eventful, discontinuous, drifting, entangled, discursive, metaphorical, dynamic process of bricolage in which practice is paramount. He has composed a beautifully written and wonderfully insightful book in the finest traditions of ethnographic research.

—Stewart Clegg, Professor, Management Discipline Group, University of Technology Sydney

Shifting Practices recounts the lifelong experience of Giovan Francesco Lanzara with the challenges posed by the intrusion of radically new technologies into established domains of social practice. With wisdom, precision, and sharp analytic gaze, Lanzara reconstructs the complex fabric of action and interpretation through which professional actors relate to and assimilate into their routines and mindsets the hidden logic of technological artifacts, and the predilections these last embody. A unique, extraordinary book that carries the analytic potency of the field of organization studies into its apex.

—Jannis Kallinikos, Professor of Management, London School of Economics