Information Technology and Organizational Change as Transformation of Accountability
Casper Bruun Jensen, Stud. Mag, Institute of Information - & MediaScience, University of Aarhus, Denmark, cirdan@imv.au.dk

This paper intends to disentangle several threads of technoscientific practice, with the aim of better understanding key issues of technological and organizational debates. These key-issues can be seen as revolving around conceptions of agency, representation, and accountability.

Accountability is about the ways praise (for good performance) and blame (for failure to perform competently) is distributed among actors. This means that accountability is dependent upon whose representations, of what has taken place in this setting, gets to count. This furthermore means that representing is a deeply political activity, part of a larger moral economy, the implications for the use of ICT’s urgently need to be investigated.

Since these key-concepts are all ‘loaded’ with different meanings, depending on what specific fields of discourse one is situated within, the first part of the paper consists in explicating and defining these notions. This definitional exercise will necessarily be provisional, however, since defining what such concepts can mean is part of what is at stake in the analyses that are subsequently discussed.

After explicating the choices of analytical concepts and defining these, the paper proceeds with the following three steps.

First, Shapin’s (1995, chapter 8.) canonical analysis of ‘Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge’ on experimental practices in 17^th century England, specifically in Robert Boyle’s laboratory, is read through. Shapin speaks from a point of view, roughly characterizable as SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge). Speaking from a particular point of view is simultaneously an inevitable necessity (since we cannot speak from nowhere), and a selective activity (since we cannot say everything simultaneously).

One of the concerns when reading Shapin’s text, is to think about the specific interpretive choices that are made by Shapin in this analysis; why these are made; and what analytical leverage they provide him with. Such choices define who are the main-characters of his text, what questions he must necessarily ask, and also what problems are rendered invisible.

Secondly I look at Haraway’s (1997, chapter 1) re-analysis of this experimental setting, and her re-categorizations of what are taken to be relevant questions. Evidently Haraway, no more than Shapin, can escape being situated somewhere. My questions are about the ways in which her position makes her redefine Shapin’s choices, with regards to relevant characters of the experimental narrative. How does she represent the setting differently; what difference does that make?

In the final part of of these analytical results for relevant questions at hand; that is, questions of representation, agency and accountability as they emerge with the development and implementation of ICT in organizations. Specifically these issues are contextualized in relation to the implementation of the EHCR (Electronic Health Care Journal) in Danish Hospitals.

Following Latour, Haraway & Star, it is suggested that we should open our narratives for more active voices (human & non-human) and it is pointed out how this might improve our understanding of technological as well as organizational practice. This open-ended, situated, and accountable mode of inquiry is termed immanent reflexivity. the paper I open up the discussion, and try to take issue with the broader implications.

Voluntary Organisations: Values and Virtuality
Eleanor Burt and John Taylor (Glasgow Caledonian University)

‘Virtual’ networking holds the promise of radical innovation within voluntary organisations seeking to respond to deep shifts in the social, economic and political regimes in which they operate today. Evidence from a large-scale survey of UK voluntary organisations with incomes of £250,000 per annum to in excess of £11 million demonstrates that at a prima facie level key voluntary organisations are adopting electronic technologies in all their forms. However, the survey also shows significant disparity at the level of adoption of specific network technologies as well as in their application to key mission and business critical activities, for example, internal governance, strategic management, service provision, and forms of public policy intervention. Thus, our research indicates that key components of the sector are ‘electronically challenged’.

Values, Virtuality, and Electronic Challenges: an Institutionalist Perspective
Further case study research of a number of prominent organisations demonstrated that a range of ‘social conditions’ is active in enabling or inhibiting electronic innovations. Moreover, while ‘collision points’ between technological capability and social context exist in both ‘volunteer intensive’ and ‘professional-staff intensive’ organisations, they are acutely experienced within ‘volunteer intensive’ organisations. Here, within volunteer intensive settings we find that organisations are seeking to employ virtual responses to contemporary strategic challenges whilst, at the same time, remaining true to deeply cherished founding values. New forms of virtual organisation are perceived to undermine historically embedded ‘ways of thinking’ and ‘ways of doing’, with their seeming potential to strike to the heart of established autonomies and independences, and locally sensitive client relationships. Institutionalist theory, with its focus on the continuities and permanencies of organisational life, on the relatively settled nature of organisations, speaks to the deeply cathected commitment displayed by longstanding voluntaries to espoused missions, precepts, and principles.

In this paper we examine how these profoundly valued ways of thinking and ways of doing are being confronted by the strategic challenges of the information age, to which voluntary organisations must now respond. We witness the ‘uneasy compromise’ between virtuality and values which is developing within these organisations as they seek to adjust to the electronic challenges which they now face, and as more advanced technologies enable sophisticated electronic choices to be made.

Social and organisational implications of telemedicine
Tracy Ibbotson, Margaret Reid, Nessa Barry (University of Glasgow) and Jane Bower (Kinnell Technologies)