Metatheoretical perspectives on sustainability journeys: Evolutionary, relational and durational

Journeys to a sustainable future have become important to industry, government and research. In this paper, we examine evolutionary, relational and durational perspectives on sustainability journeys. Each perspective emphasizes different facets of sustainability - shifts in selection environments, reconfigurations of emergent networks, and intertemporal comparisons and contrasts. Drawing on our analysis, we discuss implications for sustainability policy, strategy and research.     

Convergence and divergence: Policy making about the convergence of technology in Korea

In 2009, the South Korean government reformed its communications sector through legislation that addresses convergence services. This study traces the policy-making process of the convergence in terms of politics and regulation, and it also examines how the stakeholders' interests are aligned and coordinated in the policymaking process of convergence in Korea. Using actor-network theory, this study relates the socio-political construction of Korea's strategy for convergence reform. Key research questions include: (1) what social and political factors influence strategy formulation and (2) how do different interests stabilize ideologies in which actors formulate their strategies based on their interests. Despite the dynamic interactions, the actor-network around convergence has yet not been effectively stabilized, as the politics of convergence is complex and marked by paradoxical features. This study suggests new intellectual perspectives and methodological heuristics that may assist researchers and practitioners analytical efforts in examining socio-technical change and the implications for policy development and implementation.     

Socioscientific issues via controversy mapping: bringing actor-network theory into the science classroom with digital technology

ABSTRACT

What are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class. This teaching innovation, called controversy mapping, has been pioneered in different contexts of higher education before being adapted to school education. Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issues-based science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry.     

Researching ‘messy objects’: how can boundary objects strengthen the analytical pursuit of an actor-network theory study?

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a detailed consideration of how the theoretical scope of the boundary object concept fits within an actor-network theory (ANT) sensibility when researching ‘messy objects’. Messy objects are artefacts whose relational effects are inherently slippery and complex. As the aim of ANT is to show how non-human and human actors are co-constitutive in performing social activity, the uptake of boundary objects in ANT studies may appear to be an expedient analytical endeavour. However, scholars have raised concerns that the boundary object concept has lost some of its original analytical bearing, and that it is theoretically incompatible with ANT. This paper argues that a more careful reading of boundary objects’ conceptual origins can provide useful insights for an ANT study. To illustrate this argument, findings are presented from an ethnographic study of engineers’ knowledge practices in an emerging industry. Specifically, it shows that when a messy object – a signature on a contract – is foregrounded as a boundary object, particular knowledge practices are made visible. However, due to the complexity and messiness of the signature’s performance, this paper contends that a pluralist theoretical approach to analysing messy objects may be more helpful to address issues of professional practice and knowledge.     

E-Government institutionalizing practices of a land registration mapping system

Delivering on the promise of E-Government (E-Gov) to implement IT-enabled changes implies that processes and service delivery modifications are incorporated into the routine operations of the public sector. This is referred to as institutionalization. In contrast, institutionalizing E-Gov involves practices through which system functionalities and procedures come to assume an embedded status within the organizational environment. Prior research has focused on institutionalization but offered few clues on these institutionalizing practices of E-Gov within organizations. Our theoretical framework posits that institutionalizing of E-Gov can be analyzed as situated practices. We apply this conceptual approach to analyze the case of an 11-year implementation of a strategic E-Gov project that automated the land mapping registration services and their delivery to the public. We examine institutionalization outcomes as construction of actor-networks and institutionalizing practices as enactment of actor-network reconfiguration. Our findings provide evidence of black-box status for some E-Gov functions and situated institutionalization for others. We thereby extend the research on E-Gov post-adoption and post-implementation behaviors by providing early evidence of generic institutionalization measures and institutionalizing practices.     

Community-based environmental monitoring goes to school: translations,detours and escapes

Community-school partnerships are an established practice within environmental science education, where a focus on how local phenomena articulate with broader environmental issues and concerns brings potential benefits for schools, community organisations and local communities. This paper contributes to our understanding of such educational practices by tracing the diverse socio-material flows that constitute a community environmental monitoring project, where Australian school students became investigators of and advocates for particular sites in their neighbourhood. The theoretical resources of actor-network theory are drawn upon to describe how the project – as conceptualised by its initiators – was enacted as both human and non-human actors sought to progress their own agendas thus translating the concept-project into multiple project realities. We conclude by identifying implications for sustaining educational innovations of this kind.     

Designing information communities: Ethical issues in the information age

Abstract

The worldwide use of computers, telecommunications, and other information technologies is giving rise to the formation of new communities called “information communities.” In the United States, for example, more people are employed as information givers, takers, or orchestrators in these communities than in any other occupation class. With so many social resources going into the conduct of these communities, it is essential that they are designed to be ethical. This requires that we identify the parties involved in each community, that we be empathetic and sympathetic to their needs and that we follow Kant's dictum by always treating them as “ends in themselves.”     

Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian inquiry into assessment validity in higher education

Within professional higher education, the construct of assessment validity is used to make assumptions about the extent to which students are able to replicate in professional practice what they have learned during their studies through the provision of authentic simulated opportunities to practice. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article argues that the conceptualisation as well as use of the idea of assessment validity in theorising the assessment of simulation-based learning in professional courses, in order to predict the future performance of the student constitutes a category mistake that consequently makes claims for assessment validity which are unfounded. The article goes on to explore ways by which ethnographers of education might use other elements of Latour’s work in order to generate rich, problematising accounts of educational practice.     

Beyond the skin bag: on the moral responsibility of extended agencies

The growing prominence of computers in contemporary life, often seemingly with minds of their own, invites rethinking the question of moral responsibility. If the moral responsibility for an act lies with the subject that carried it out, it follows that different concepts of the subject generate different views of moral responsibility. Some recent theorists have argued that actions are produced by composite, fluid subjects understood as extended agencies (cyborgs, actor networks). This view of the subject contrasts with methodological individualism: the idea that actions are produced only by human individuals. This essay compares two views of responsibility: moral individualism (the ethical twin of methodological individualism), and joint responsibility (associated with extended agency theory). It develops a view of what joint responsibility might look like, and considers the advantages it might bring relative to moral individualism as well as the objections that are sure to be raised against it.     

行动者网络理论视角下嵌入式信息素养教育运行机制分析

[目的/意义] 将行动者网络理论引入嵌入式信息素养教育研究中,全面分析嵌入式信息素养教育运行机制。[方法/过程] 采用访谈方法,通过行动者网络转译的4个步骤进行嵌入式信息素养教学过程分析。[结果/结论] 研究发现嵌入式信息素养教育现存障碍在于各行动者的认知差异、高层管理机制和相关规章制度的缺乏、各行动者参与的激励不足、馆藏资源亟须整合等方面,提出通过强调高校的核心行动者地位,赋予各行动者利益,完善嵌入式信息素养教育理论。