Martin Brigham

E-mail, power and the constitution of organisational reality

To many observers, the introduction of electronic mail into a business organisation is an undramatic affair which is likely to have little impact beyond that on intra-organisational communication. Using insights from actor-network theory, this article demonstrates the more insidious and far-reaching impact of electronic mail on organisational power relations, knowledge and employee behaviour.

Hospitality, improvisation and Gestell: a phenomenology of mobile information

This paper reports on longitudinal research into the implementation and use of the first mobile vehicle mounted data system (VMDS) at a UK fire service. Using insights from Claudio Ciborras work, the paper develops a phenomenological ontology for conceptualising the co-constitutive relation between organisational practices and information technology mediated practices. The paper sets out how the brigades mobile data system can be understood in terms hospitality, improvisation and Gestell. It is argued that despite the seemingly innocent and potentially mundane replacement of paper-based practices by electronically mediated mobile information and communication, the VMDS is associated with significant and far-reaching outcomes, both empirical and ontological, within the brigade and for the modernisation of fire service provision across the UK. We suggest that the dynamic of hospitality between guest and host provides a way to think through and beyond the deployment information infrastructures as enframed by a technological mood. The paper concludes with some general implications for a phenomenology of information technology.

Reconsidering community and the stranger in the age of virtuality

Purpose – This question of community has always been a preoccupation for the human sciences and, indeed, is a practical concern for us everyday humans in our variety ways of being. As such a preoccupation with community traverses vast territories of intellectual discourse in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth. Recent developments in continental philosophy, innovations in information and communication technology and the emergence of “virtual” communities afford an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of community in what is believed to be a rather fundamental way. Virtual communities are often critiqued for being “thin” and “shallow” lacking the depth that local proximity in face‐to‐face communities brings. It is suggested that such a critique privileges a certain view of community premised upon shared values, or shared concerns, embedded in local situated face‐to‐face interaction and practices. The paper agues that such a view of community, based on categorical and physical pro...

The utility of social obligations in the UK energy industry

The imposition of social obligations on the UK energy supply industry provides an important opportunity to examine how social responsibilities are construed by companies and how these constructions relate to perceptions of the role of regulation, specifically the scope for compromise and influence with the regulator. Our data suggest four templates for understanding this relationship: embracing social obligations, business as usual, management deliberation, and conflicts with commerce. First, embracing social obligations is based on competitive advantage and struggles for market leadership, and highlights informal mechanisms in attempts to influence the regulatory agenda. Second, business as usual reflects pre-existing standard operating procedures and a generalized approach to serving the broad consumer base in line with regulation as formal policing procedures. Third, management deliberation is a way of either reflecting upon or stalling progress on social issues, and suggests compromise and passivity in regulatory relations. Fourth, conflicts with commerce focuses on the inherent difficulties of reconciling social obligations with economic regulation and a profit orientation, so that meeting minimum standards or the risk of regulatory censure may be sensible strategies. Together these templates emphasize the subjective and multiple nature of social responsibility and of regulatory relationships, and demonstrate struggles for the strategic and operational meaning over the nature of public interest and competitive advantage.

Invoking politics and ethics in the design of information technology: undesigning the design

It is a truism that the design and deployment of information and communication technologies is vital to everyday life, the conduct of work and to social order. But how are individual, organisational and societal choices made? What might it mean to invoke a politics and an ethics of information technology design and use? This editorial paper situates these questions within the trajectory of preoccupations and approaches to the design and deployment of information technology since computerisation began in the 1940s. Focusing upon the dominant concerns over the last three decades, the paper delineates an interest in design and use in relation to socio-technical theories, situated practices and actor-network theory. It is argued that each of these approaches is concerned with a particular form of politics that does not explicitly engage with ethics. In order to introduce ethics into contemporary debates about information technology, and to frame the papers in the special issue, it is argued that Levinas’ ethics is particularly valuable in problematising the relationship between politics and ethics. Levinas provides a critique of modernity’s emphasis on politics and the egocentric self. It is from a Levinasian concern with the Other and the primacy of the ethical that a general rethinking of the relationship between politics, ethics and justice in relation to information and communication technologies can be invoked.

Hybridity, consulting and e-development in the making: inscribing new practices of impact assessment and value management

This paper examines critically the changes taking place in the e-development sector, and, specifically, investigates the ways in which private sector information and communication technology (ICT)-led organizations may be implicated in shaping such changes. We report on a research into a multi-national ICT consultancy company which is developing their own offering in the domain of value management and performance management for the development sector. We situate this initiative within the development literature that has charted the changing role of donors and non-government organizations (NGOs). Drawing on actor–network theory, we argue that, with the deployment of value management techniques, upstream donors are becoming a more central feature of NGOs’ preoccupations and activities. We provide an in-depth analysis of the renegotiation of the e-development network, and argue that e-development can be understood as a hybrid practice. The paper concludes with implications and suggestions for further research.

Organizing Technology: Of Hospitality

‘In a world populated by mobile, nomadic ‘hordes’ … there will hardly be a hotter issue than the one of hospitality’, so said Claudio Ciborra a decade ago (1999: 193, emphasis added). But what does or might hospitality denote now? And more specifically for our purposes, what kind of insights does the concept of hospitality offer to those studying the deployment and use of information technology? Ciborra suggests that an interest in hospitality is part of a fresh vocabulary and emerging landscape of inquiry for thinking differently about our relation to information technology. The implications of this preoccupation with hospitality for the field of information system research, with its long-held concerns for alignment, control and planning and related aspirations that privilege integration, coherence and complementary practices, is the focus of this chapter.