Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision-Support Techniques and Medical Practices
Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision-Support Techniques and Medical Practices
Information, Systems and Information Systems: Making Sense of the Field
Information, Systems and Information Systems: Making Sense of the Field
The Social Life of Information
The Social Life of Information
From Control to Drift: The Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures
From Control to Drift: The Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems - Special issue on Ethnography and intervention
Located accountabilities in technology production
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems - Special issue on Ethnography and intervention
Reflections on a work-oriented design project
Human-Computer Interaction
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Whereas ethnography has been identified as an important method for developing situated IT for specific workplaces, its political pertinence and fuzzy practice have been underexposed. In this paper, I challenge the idea that ethnography leads to 'better' technology. In this context 'better' is often seen as 'more appropriate for a workplace'. However, I will show on the basis of fieldwork in a hemophilia care center (HCC) of a Dutch university hospital, that what this workplace is, and therefore what technology is desired, is equivocal. I will also show that 'doing fieldwork' cannot be separated from 'informing design' or 'intervening'. 'Intervention' is a subtle, layered concept and a continuous activity. Based on these insights an emerging interventionist approach is outlined that is geared towards interweaving fieldwork and informing IT design in an intentionally ad-hoc and nonsequential way. My aim with this approach is to sensitize the fieldworker to the located and strategic multiplicity of a site, to the data that can be found in roles that are being ascribed by various actors resulting from their 'view from somewhere', and to the action space that is constantly emerging and changing in an interventionist research project. The approach should lead to sensitized interventions based upon politicized ethnography.