Transcript Systemic Semiotic Design Practice:

BUSS 951
Critical Issues in Information Systems
Lecture 13
Researching Organisations
and Systems
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Recall
last week we described
describe several theories of one useful
strata- genre and apply it to SFL to an
actual IS in its workplace- ALABS
use our substantive knowledge of IS to
alter the theory
apply this theory to some features of
the ALABS system
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Agenda
 overtime we can see shifts in the genre
structure of texts associated with these
workpractices and a system features...
 NOTE: case studies conducted over time are
referred to as longitudinal studies, or diachronic
studies
 we can do this because we can study
systems features using texts, remembering
that there is a relationship between text and
context!
 we can ask question why did this change to
take place?
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Agenda (1)
Language/Discourse
its not just Vocabulary that is different between
Groups in Organisations- its Language (or
Discourse)
it helps us explain why users and developers
have difficulties in understanding each other!
this could be used as a theoretical basis for
participation- a way of making an interactive
method out of systems analysis
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Agenda (2)
We will recap important aspects of
the course (to assist you in doing the
examination)
we will also restate the critical issues
covered in this subject with a review
of the content of this course
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Language/Discourse as a
technology
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Language/Discourse (1)
Language and Discourses in general are
tools- they do things (achieve work in
organisations)
that is why they have evolved and
therefore it is their functionality that
determines their character
but discourses are semiotic tools (and
therefore tacit or unconscious)
they are therefore taken for granted in
discussions of 20C technology
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Language/Discourse (2)
at this time in our history we have
focused on designed tools- the
material products of conscious
invention
but it is the unconscious and
evolving discourses of our cultures
which engender all purpose-designed
systems
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Language/Discourse (3)
without an understanding of our material
technology- our information systems- in our
cultures, then the ways in which it can be
mastered (and masters us) is necessarily
incomplete
by understanding the discourses, we can
facilitate intervention in the process of
changing and improving workpractices
language is just not theorised in information
systems
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Language/Discourse (4)
written language is extremely important in
information systems
it is primarily the resources of written
language through which the discipline of
IS has, like others, evolved
as with most language learning, we learn
the discourses of IS- literally to be IS
practitioners- by copying written directly
from IS texts and related reference
materials
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Language/Discourse (5)
We are tacitly familiar with a number of
these written language patterns that we
often see in textbooks and journal articles
associated with science and technology:
Report Genre- description-oriented texts
Explanation Genre- reason-oriented science
with a taxonomising function
Exposition Genre- reason-oriented argument
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Language/Discourse (6)
Language of Deliverables
the deliverables used in IS are
technical in nature because they are
concerned with building up an
uncommon sense interpretation of
the world
to do this we take common sense as
a starting point and ‘translate’ it into
specialised knowledge
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Language/Discourse (7)
Language of Deliverables
the basic semiotic resource available for
this translation is called elaboration
at the clause rank this meaning is
constructed through the relational
identifying clause (Halliday 1985 112-128)
favoured clause type in science and
technology
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Language/Discourse (8)
Language of Deliverables
 Where:
 The data store...
 ‘is called’
 ‘Awards’
Value
Process
Token
Identifying Clause Example (NB these are reversible)
The data store used in changing pays scales is called
Awards
Awards is the data store used in changing pays
scales
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Language/Discourse (9)
Language of Deliverables
Elaboration is also found at the
group and word rank once again to
translate common sense into
specialized knowledge
traditionally this is called paratactic
expansion or more traditionally as
apposition
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Language/Discourse (10)
Language of Deliverables
used in science to ‘remind’ readers of
the way we talk technically
the technical term is glossed rather
than explicitly defined:
reduces or [as we say in IS] compresses the
file size
the term compresses can now be ‘taken
for granted’
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IS and User Language
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Grammatical Differences
IS language (scientific texts)
foregrounds identifying relational
processes which are used to define
technical terms
User language (historical texts)
relies on attributive relational processes
to assign participants to familiar classes
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Semantic Differences
IS language (scientific texts)
more likely to realise, and therefore
foreground, logical connections
between clauses and sentences
User language (historical texts)
more likely to bury the reasoning inside
the clause
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Grammatical Metaphor
differences between relational
processes and conjunction patterns
(IS practitioners and Users)
therefore, grammatical metaphor
plays a different role in mediating
between grammar and semantics in
respective discourses
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IS Discourse
Nominalisation & Grammatical Metaphor
nominalisation is strongly
associated with definitions
nominalisation is used to
accumulate meanings so that a
technical term can be defined
grammatical metaphor distills
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User Discourse
Nominalisation & Grammatical Metaphor
nominalisation is strongly associated
with realising events as participants so
that logical connections can be realised
inside the clauses
nominalisation is deployed to construct
layers of thematic and information
structure in a text
grammatical metaphor scaffolds
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IS and User Discourse
Register Differences
IS Discourse:
science is concerned with constructing
taxonomies and implication sequences
emphasis is focused on field
“knowledge’ constructed is more
transcendent (‘beyond experience’)
scientific taxonomies and implication
sequences tend to function as system
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IS and User Discourse
Register Differences
User Discourse:
concerned with constructing text
emphasis is focused on mode
‘knowledge’ constructed is more experientially
based than transcendent
historical generalizations and explanations
tend to function as text not system
users tend to refer to their work texts in order
to find out what work means
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IS and User Discourse
Generic Differences
IS Discourse
organised as large Report Genres with
embedded Explanation Genres and
Experiment Genres
User Discourse
organised as long, generalsied Recount
Genres, with embedded Report Genres
and more occasionally Exposition
Genres
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IS and User Discourse
Table of Differences
Table: Synoptic overview of key meanings in the pedagogic discourses of science and
history (after Martin 1991, 333 in Ventola ed/ 1991)
Differences
IS Discipline Discourse
User Discourse
Grammar
Discourse Semantics
identifying defining relational
external congruent
(congruent)
nominalization and definitions
(distill)
taxonomy and implication
sequence construction
(field orientation)
report: taxonomizing
[[explanation]]
[[experiment]]
attributive classifying relational
internal and congruent
external conjunction
nominalization and “hyper”Theme (scaffold)
text construction
borrowed technically
(mode orientation)
(generalised recount)
[[report: generalizing]]
[[exposition]]
analyse
interpret
Interaction Patterns
Register
Genre
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Summary (1)
semiosis at all levels constructs discourses
as truth or at best as hypothesis about what
is and what happened that can be proved and
disproved
the discourses of IS and of Users in
workplaces are
constitutive of their subjectivity
and negotiable
is an idea which is hidden in the IS disciplinebut it is an idea that can change this
discipline
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Critical Issues in IS
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Critical Issues
Critical Issues
Are organisations really systems?
What is information?
What does the IS Discipline do?
Further Issues
How might organisations be theorised?
How can we improve IS Development
Practices?
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Information-theoretic basis
of the Discipline
data is easy to identify but
information depends on who, what,
where, how and when
organisations are not axiomatic (rule
determined) since members can
change the internal and external
processes of the organisation
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Data & Information
IS concept of information (Shannon &
Weaver, defines information in terms
which preclude meaning
in other words the second basis of our
discipline (the concept of information) is
theoretically inappropriate for use when
developing systems
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Systems Design
as Social Activity (1)
social processes are always at work
during the analysis, design,
development and implementation of
systems
all these activities take place in
organisational and institutional
settings
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Systems Design
as Social Activity (2)
need to ‘locate’ social processes and
human interactions within historical
and organisational contexts
some justification is required for this
approach...
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Systems Design
as Social Activity (3)
communication processes and social
interactions within the developer
community are of great importance
changes in systems development
practices, whether related to technology
or organisational issues, are always
driven and mediated by social factors
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Systems Design
as Social Activity (4)
systems development is a complex
bridging process linking areas of
specialized and diverse expertise; the
domain of the IT professional and the
domain of the user
systems development concerns itself
with IT innovation, application and
diffusion- all social
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Effects of Shannon & Weaver
IS Methods
skews the types of IS methods that
get produced and therefore used
IS methods come with inbuilt with
individualism as a theoretical
assumption
rather communication gets reduced
to exchange
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Effects of Shannon & Weaver
Political Effects (2)
if this model is about ‘transmission’
then who has the role of the sender
becomes a political act (in an
organisation or a society)
that is:
who can ‘speak’
who is allowed to ‘speak’
who has the authority to ‘speak’
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Effects of Shannon & Weaver
Political Effects (4)
adopting Shannon & Weaver, means
we adopt a theory of communication
which privaledges:
those who have the power to speak over
those who may only be permitted to
listen!
systems development in organisations
is therefore political
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Communication & Power
there is always a close relationship
between communication and power
therefore, we must look for other
models of communication
the limits in practice which constrain
communication depend on the political
and ideological outlook of the reader
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Summary (2)
we communicate because sets of
concepts reoccur in our culture and
language
but we don’t need to share meanings,
we only need to think that we can in
order to communicate
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Use Semiotic Approaches
the discipline which studies
meaning-making (or semiosis) is
called semiotics
some semiotic analysis has been
criticised as nothing more than arid
formalism
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Use Semiotic Analysis
purely structuralist semiotics does
not address authorial intentions or
audience interpretation
it ignores particular practices,
institutional frameworks and the
cultural, social, economic and
political contexts.
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Use Semiotic Analysis
semiotics emphasizes that signs are
related to their signifieds by social
conventions which we learn
we become so used to such
conventions in our use of various
media that they seem natural or
commonsense
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Use Semiotic Analysis
semiotics can help to make us aware
of what we take for granted in
representing the world
we are always:
dealing with signs, not with an
unmediated objective reality
that sign systems are involved in the
construction of meaning
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Semio-informatic Dilemma (1)
their are great difficulties faced by
any semio-informatic approach which
relies on models of the sign
we have seen that signs are
everywhere, that we utilise many
systems of signs simultaneously to
signify meaning
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Semio-informatic Dilemma (7)
the use of higher level semiotic structures
confuses many researchers who have only
ever seen semiotics defined in terms of
signs- semiotics is the study of signs
according to many
it is the semio-informatics researchers’
responsibility to theorise the higher level
semiotic structures
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Language and social context
Applied to IS
SFL gives two complementary
perspectives
can look at the perspective of language: IS as
text
can look at the perspective of context: IS as
social organisation
applying SFL to examining systems is very
different to traditional IS approaches
a given text provides only a partial
perspective about a work practice
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Language and social context
Applied to IS
in the short term a linguistic analysis
provides only a small part of the overall
picture
traditional IS practices are applied topdown: gives a very broad picture poor on
details
SFL methodology is applied bottom-up:
provides a very detailed view of work
practices which then need to be integrated
across various sites
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Language and social context
Applied to IS
need to look at many actual texts in a social
context in order to find out about work
practices
only by shunting between language and social
context (the work practice and the organisation)
can we perform a meaningful analysis
in one of your assignments you were asked to
collect a small set of texts
you would need to collect many texts of the
same type of transaction before you
understood it (see all the variations)
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Language and social context
Applied to IS
how many texts to collect?: well its
difficult to know
you need to include those people
involved in the work practices into
the analysis
so this SFL approach to
understanding work practices MUST
be participative
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SFL and IS
not all the SFL model needs to be used on
each text- what language resources you use
will depend on the type of analysis needed
for IS the most useful strata and context
(genre and register) and discourse semantics
IS are interesting because they are
multigeneric, many genres are involved in
describing the general properties of texts
end-user modification of system and
wholesale management driven change can be
characterised using genre...
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SFL and IS
System Development
 Systems Analysis
 translate from certain
Genres as Quasispecies
structurally simple
Generic Element: Cut,
Factual and Narrative
Paste and Elaboration
Genres to to more
complex Factual Genres
Genre Graphs
Genre Associations
 Methodologies
 can also be described
Genre Assemblages
using Genre
 Methodologies are multigeneric (Macrogenres)
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Course Justification
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Justification (1)
almost all IS students leave without
understanding anything other than
methodologies
so I have tried to get you to consider
a social, rather than a technical, basis
of the information systems discipline
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Justification (2)
one of the things that should be
important to you...
an explicitly theorised social
description can be used to
implement- not just talk about- an
information system
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Justification (3)
in order to do this I needed you to
understand that there is an enormous
body of material that you can apply to
understand IS development
we have looked at sociology (qualitative
analysis), ethnography and semiotics
of all of these my interest is in semiotics- it
is the least used and I think the most
promising because it involves issues of
meaning making, social groups and
culture
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Justification (5)
of the semiotic approaches to IS my
preference (and my own research area) is
SFL and Social Semiotics, why:
can deal with systems (manual/automated)
and changes to them over time
can deal with Analysing Systems, and can be
used to theorise Methodologies
most of the work is being developed in
Australia (accessible)
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Justification
Assessment
what I have tried to do in this course is to
teach you how to act as researchers
that’s why the assessment was designed
in order for you to practice thinking about
topics from a theoretical, methodological
and substantive aspects- to clarify the
epistemology and ontology of a specific
paper and on being able to identifying
concepts, statements, models and
theories
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Justification
Assessment
understanding these concepts is a necessary
part of the research process and is a
significant part of our proficiency and literacy
in a given field
these concepts are building blocks that enable
us to effectively summarise what we are
reading:
not just recounting what was said by the author but
actually identifying what was meant (even if the
author didn’t realise it)
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Justification
Assessment
these divisions are a little difficultbecause they are a little artificial- but
it is necessary since it is the start of
the research process!
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Justification
Assessment
we used an explicit model of genre
built into the assessment
in other words, I have applied genre
analysis to the assessment process
in a course which is in part about
genre analysis!
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Justification
this course has been a direct result
of my own research interests and
that of the Department of Information
Systems
we are interested in supervising good
students in this area (Projects and
PhDs), or in the new Extension
Programme
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Justification
but if you decide to finish your
studies and get back to industry,
then...
keep in touch if you are interested in
applying these methods in your
workplace
study hard and prepare well
GOOD LUCK and THANKS
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