Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Social Informatics in Practice: A Guide for the Perplexed (15 Jun 2005) A vignette illustrating this practice can be found in a Kling and Iacono (1994) study of a municipal computing system in “Riverville,” which was not performing as specified, according to local administrators, but which was presented as a success by those higher up. Using a specific social informatics framework (the technology action frame), Kling and Iacono unravel the history of the project and offer the following explanation: the system’s “primary value was in enhancing the welfare agencies’ image when they dealt with Federal funders and auditors” and that local administrators “gained substantial advantage by keeping the story of its administrative value alive.” In a later version (1998), this explanation is presented as a computerization pattern: “When new understandings become part of local discourse they often remain local, rather than being widely circulated across other organizations and social settings…It is for this reason that public discourse about new technologies and the technological frames embedded in them can remain relatively stable and misrepresent actual practice for long periods of time.” Such generalization from repeated instances is common in the work of Kling and his colleagues, and it acts as a means of validation for social informatics research. Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/davenport.html Read 126 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Social Informatics: Beyond Emergence     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy