This paper explores the relationship between materiality and knowing through the notion of dual m... more This paper explores the relationship between materiality and knowing through the notion of dual materiality. Dual materiality highlights how digital technology becomes important, as its materiality plays an integral part in creating, not simply representing, the materiality of the physical world. We elaborate upon this insight through a theory on sociomaterial knowing grounded in ethnographic fieldwork within a petroleum company. The main theoretical proposition of this theory is that knowing arises from the emerging patterns of interaction between material phenomena, the material arrangements for knowing about these phenomena, and knowledge practices. We elaborate upon this through three predominant modes of knowing in petroleum production: instrumentation, interpretation, and learning. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on sociomateriality by refining ideas of materiality through the notion of dual materiality. We conclude by encouraging further exploration of different materialities in contemporary work and organizing.
The last ten years I have had one footh in a business organisation and another footh in academic ... more The last ten years I have had one footh in a business organisation and another footh in academic research. This “betwixt and between” position has made me question the idea that modern science should be characterised as a uniform activity with a search for ways to characterise the specificity of different disciplines and specialities. This position has grown in the interaction with different disciplines or professions (earth scientists, engineers, economists, other social scientists, offshore mechanics and crane operators) in Statoil, the state oil company of Norway. Most of the projects in which I have been participating have been inter- or multidisciplinary since they have involved the development of computer supported cooperative work in one way or another (Hepsø 1997, Hepsø et.al 1997, Gjersvik & Hepsø 1998, Monteiro & Hepsø 1998, Monteiro & Hepsø 2000). I have worked as an anthropologist in Statoil Research and Technology since 1991. Growing numbers of anthropologists and other...
Flesteparten av dagens nyutdannede antropologer uteksamineres med god faglig antropologisk ballas... more Flesteparten av dagens nyutdannede antropologer uteksamineres med god faglig antropologisk ballast, men mange er rimelig uforberedte på de utfordringer og praktiske oppgaver som venter i arbeidslivet. Hovedfagsutdannelsen( som mest ligner en stipendiat-utdanning) gjør at nye arbeidsgivere i privat og offentlig sektor får individorienterte akademikere som ikke er spesielt egnet til å samarbeide med andre profesjoner. Nyutdannede vet lite om problemløsning, konflikthåndtering og kommunikasjon, og mangler tilstrekkelig forståelse av etikk og arbeidslivets spilleregler for å kunne utøve sin profesjon utenfor universitetet. Jeg har etterhvert veiledet en del vordende antropologer på hovedfagsnivå og til tider også fungert som “krisetelefon” for hovedfagsstudenter eller uteksaminerte antropologer som ikke vet hva de skal bruke utdannelsen til. Trenger vi en profesjonsutdanning i antropologi på lik linje med det psykologi og jus har? Faget i sin nåværende form skal selvsagt få leve videre ...
Hawthorne undersøkelsene representerer inntredenen til det menneskelige og sosiale perspektivet i... more Hawthorne undersøkelsene representerer inntredenen til det menneskelige og sosiale perspektivet i organisasjonsteorien som en korreks til det mekaniske og instrumentelle perspektivet til klassikere som f.eks Frederick W. Taylor. I 90-årene har tilsynelatende nye perspektiver på organisering av arbeid dukket opp gjennom Business Process Reengineering. Her har instrumentalismen dukket opp igjen og man utelater eller forholder seg ikke til over 60-års forskning og historie etter Hawthorne. Artikkelen prøver å dra noen historiske linjer og hevder at BPR har noe å lære av historien. Det fokuseres spesielt på fire problemstillinger i diskusjonen om BPR: kritikk av byråkratiet som organisasjonsform, oppfatningen av arbeidets natur, kombinasjonen av mekaniske/organiske metaforer og prosessperspektivet. Artikkelen argumenterer tilslutt at BPR forsøker å utvikle framtidens prosessorganiserte horisontale organisasjon til å bli en speilvendt utgave av dagens vertikale og byråkratiske organisasj...
I bedriftsorganisasjoner finnes det ofte en opp-fatning av at bedriften organiserer bruken av rom... more I bedriftsorganisasjoner finnes det ofte en opp-fatning av at bedriften organiserer bruken av rom etter klart rasjonelle og bedriftsøkonomiske prinsipper. I et slikt teknisk økonomisk system har alle ansatte klart avgrensede arbeidsoppgaver sydd sammen i et mekanisk, funksjonelt system og gitt rom til disposisjon som står i stilling til deres funksjon og plassering i et hierarki. Rommet og artifakter i det fysiske miljøet brukes og utnyttes bevisst for å bedre ressurs utnyttelsen og koordineringen i selskapet. Dette har ført til at arkitekter og interiør-dersignere har vært mest opptatt av det fysiske miljøet i seg selv, med produksjonsteknologi, utsyrs design og arbeidspro-sedyrer. Arbeidet og romutformingen har ofte skjedd utenfor en sosial kontekst. De har ikke i stor nok grad vært opptatt av at brukere investerer mening i både rom, utstyr og prosesser innenfor organisasjonen.
One day in late November 1992, wrong side of another day, I sat alone by a table at the ground fl... more One day in late November 1992, wrong side of another day, I sat alone by a table at the ground floor bar at Hotel Hilton and Towers in down-town San Francisco, watching football, looking at the programme and reading abstracts of the presentations of the 1992 American Anthropological Association Conference. In my professional job at Statoil Research I had taken up an interest in the relationship between man and information technology. At that time I felt that very little had been published on man “being with technology” and the implications of practicing anthropology in real life situations outside the university arenas. Scanning through the proceedings I noticed a session related to cyborg anthropology. It turned out to be one of a small number of sessions that dealt with anthropology science and technology. I sat down as a backbencher and followed the presentations and discussions on propositions about a new field in anthropology. The phrases of Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sa...
In an applied organizational fieldwork setting the anthropologist's image transforms as a res... more In an applied organizational fieldwork setting the anthropologist's image transforms as a result of changing formal and informal attitudes and expectations. The formal and informal attitudes and expectations in the setting make it necessary to help informants and is a necessary part of research to obtain "backstage" information. The mixture of ethnography and normative participation is regarded as the best suited method in an applied anthropological setting. The role metaphors of a "clown", "jester", "guru", "fallen angel" and "incorporated anthropologist" are discussed as ideal phases that an anthropologist might go through in his/her participatory fieldwork in an organizational setting. These roles can represent the local attitudes and expectations to anthropological knowledge. The last phase incorporation blurs the emic-etic distinction but can bring forth new dimensions and insights in academic anthropology and fiel...
Through my work with technicians and engineers I have become interested in their technological re... more Through my work with technicians and engineers I have become interested in their technological relationships, i.e. how they sense their world both through, with and among technologies. In my quest for developing an anthropological interpretation of these relationships I went in two directions. First, to the study of the ecological mind. Second, to Don Ihde a philosopher of technology and the philosopher John Dewey. Dewey and his followers Don Ihde (1979, 1990, 1991) and Larry Hickman (1991) have developed a distinctive pragmatic approach to technology, which can be labelled instrumental realism (Ihde 1979, Ihde1990, Ihde 1991, Hickman 1991). The latter approach will be the key issue of this paper but I will start with the development of the ecological mind. In what follows I employ the work of Don Ihde (1979, 1990, 1991) in an phenomenological analysis of technological relationships among personnel in Norne, a Norwegian offshore oil installation. I end with describing some key featu...
Most major oil companies and globally operating vendor/service companies have since the turn of t... more Most major oil companies and globally operating vendor/service companies have since the turn of the millennium increasingly addressed their future way of doing business as oil exploration and operation enabled by information and communication technology. They see this development as the improvement of three interwoven elements; people, tools/technology and work processes. Norway has a long tradition with work research that has been in the front to develop concepts related to socio-technical organization of work, self managed teams as alternatives to hierarchical organization and concepts for union-management co-operation. Some of us researchers with engineering or social science backgrounds that have a history in this tradition (or have been in the vicinity of this work research environment) now work with integrated operations. We want to have our say regarding how the so called “people” and “process” issues should be incorporated with “technological” issues in the increasing instru...
I siste halvdel av 1990-årene investerte Statoil betydelig i informasjons- og kommunikasjonstekno... more I siste halvdel av 1990-årene investerte Statoil betydelig i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi (IKT), og mange prosjekter og aktører var med og utviklet innovative ideer, konsepter og løsninger. Innovasjonselementet i dette kapitlet er utviklingen av forbedret helse, miljø og sikkerhet for personell involvert i kran- og løftemiljøet i Statoil. Vi tar opp den helhetlige dynamikken som preger innovasjonsprosesser i bedrifter og presenterer to ulike innfallsvinkler til hvordan innovasjoner utvikler seg: et spredningsperspektiv og et oversettelsesperspektiv. Vi viser hvordan oversettelsesperspektivet basert på aktørnettverksteori kan anvendes til å forstå innovasjonsprosesser i store organisasjoner. Her er innovasjoner i organisasjoner sett på som en kontinuerlig oversettelsesprosess hvor en idé eller et konsept går gjennom ulike faser for å bli en organisatorisk innovasjon.
The proper involvement and management of stakeholders in the planning and execution of developmen... more The proper involvement and management of stakeholders in the planning and execution of development processes has over the years been given through investigation in the action research literature. This methodology has become a well established practice in a range of efforts to involve the human and organisational forces under study. Stakeholder management has become increasingly dynamic and undertaken throughout development processes to address the dynamics of the context when stakeholders and their relations change over time. Many development and change processes today involve the design of information systems and become a design of both work and organisations. This makes stakeholder management more important because it has consequences for how we inform the design of information systems and involve diverse stakeholders in this effort. We approach stakeholder management as a practice where we as action researchers try to get a grip on how human stakeholders develop dynamic alliances...
Hva slags skrivekompetanse trenger arbeidslivet? Artikkelen forsøker å ta tak i dette gjennom å v... more Hva slags skrivekompetanse trenger arbeidslivet? Artikkelen forsøker å ta tak i dette gjennom å vise hvordan skriving ble brukt i en kollektiv refleksjonsprosess innenfor kran og løfteoperasjoner i Statoil. Dette er et miljø som tradisjonelt ikke preges av skriftlighet og skriving men hvor man gjennom en involveringsprosess brukte denne samarbeidsformen for å få fram viktige sider ved farefullt arbeid og en eksisterende praksis. Prosjektet var en del av et større utviklingsprosjekt hvor målet var å øke helse, miljø og sikkerhetsnivået innen kran og løfteoperasjoner og fremme langsiktig kompetanseutvikling for denne typen personell. Vi presenterer prosjektet som en avart av refleksjonskriving og hvordan det ble en del av et større prosjekt hvor man forsøkte å endre praksis. Samtidig forsøker vi å koble yrkeslivets behov for refleksjonskriving i en større sammenheng i lys av dette eksemplet.
How can industrial insiders and social researchers make a difference in leading research and deve... more How can industrial insiders and social researchers make a difference in leading research and development processes in sophisticated technological and scientific settings, where the integration of tools and technologies in human and organizational practice is of utmost importance? The role of a company internal social researcher is fleshed out in three rich empirical cases from the oil and gas industry where the development of new collaborative practices enabled by emerging information and communication technologies is the key issue addressed. A general framework for insider social research in Technoscience that integrates human, organizational and technological capabilities is fleshed out to help practitioners in similar situations. This book is written for social researchers and others who are leading development work within science and technology dominated settings. It should also be of interest to engineers, IT professionals, economists or any other group that wants to understand...
In this paper we look at standardization as a dynamic co-creation process involving multiple acto... more In this paper we look at standardization as a dynamic co-creation process involving multiple actors, using the concept of circulation to study organizational ideas as IT-standards. Standards embedded in IT-systems are pre-coded by IT-companies often based on company proprietary, de-facto or international standards. Thus, these standards might have considerable influence on both operational work and strategic choices pursued. Several actors have the interest in the design of these standards. We have studied the process of standardization from the emergence of management ideas through the internal negotiations and adaptations to the implementation of “best practice” inscribed in an IT-system supported by work processes. In this paper we will use concepts from Science and Technology Studies to supplement Scandinavian institutionalism on the dynamic of standards and standardisation processes. This perspective is fleshed out to address the human and artefact dynamics of standardization, ...
In the last 20 years or so, ethnography has made major inroads in corporations, other large organ... more In the last 20 years or so, ethnography has made major inroads in corporations, other large organizations in government, and the not-for-profit sector, organizations that used to rely almost exclusively on quantitative data for strategic decision making. That situation has changed slowly but dramatically, and today practically all global companies hire anthropologists or other ethnographically trained and experienced experts to help them understand, from the inside out and from the bottom up, how their organizations work and how they function within the larger context of customer relationships and supply chains. Ethnography has thus gained a new, strategic legitimacy, which has also led to the reemergence of employees hired for other reasons now claiming their ethnographic skills. In surveying the landscape of ethnographic employment in industry, it is clear that at the present time, ethnographers work in two primary situations: either hired as full employees to provide a presence a...
Science and Technology Studies has opened the black boxes of socio-technical systems and argued t... more Science and Technology Studies has opened the black boxes of socio-technical systems and argued that technological artefacts are a product of human action and values, and shape social action. The black boxes of information technologies are opened in a quest to understand the way various stakeholders, IT included, shape action. A case that describes the development of a new offshore
SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, 2010
ABSTRACT A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving i... more ABSTRACT A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving installations from the surface to the seabed utilizing existing surface based facilities or by developing new onshore facilities. Enabling this trend is an increased instrumentation of the equipment, down-hole and on the seabed. Increased instrumentation results in more data that has to be processed by human operators. Research shows that human operator information overload leads to poor decision making. To avoid information overload, we need a new breed of system where more of the information processing and decision making can be handled by computers. Over the last couple of years we have worked extensively with autonomous systems. We see autonomy as a vital property in this new breed of systems, where we have identified three scenarios that can benefit. These are: Production and process optimization Environmental monitoring and control Equipment condition monitoring The key elements of our approach are a combination of the distributed data processing capabilities of software agents with a variable autonomy approach to the interaction with the human operator. Variable autonomy enables a human operator to defer control to a system when the system state is within a given envelope. The system will escalate decision making to the human operator when it reaches its decision making boundary. The goal of our work is to make the human operator more capable of handling critical situations and prevent unwanted incidents by transforming the stream of data into information and proposed actions. The work will be focused around the transformation of data into decisions and the interaction between the human operator and the computer system.
This paper explores the relationship between materiality and knowing through the notion of dual m... more This paper explores the relationship between materiality and knowing through the notion of dual materiality. Dual materiality highlights how digital technology becomes important, as its materiality plays an integral part in creating, not simply representing, the materiality of the physical world. We elaborate upon this insight through a theory on sociomaterial knowing grounded in ethnographic fieldwork within a petroleum company. The main theoretical proposition of this theory is that knowing arises from the emerging patterns of interaction between material phenomena, the material arrangements for knowing about these phenomena, and knowledge practices. We elaborate upon this through three predominant modes of knowing in petroleum production: instrumentation, interpretation, and learning. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on sociomateriality by refining ideas of materiality through the notion of dual materiality. We conclude by encouraging further exploration of different materialities in contemporary work and organizing.
The last ten years I have had one footh in a business organisation and another footh in academic ... more The last ten years I have had one footh in a business organisation and another footh in academic research. This “betwixt and between” position has made me question the idea that modern science should be characterised as a uniform activity with a search for ways to characterise the specificity of different disciplines and specialities. This position has grown in the interaction with different disciplines or professions (earth scientists, engineers, economists, other social scientists, offshore mechanics and crane operators) in Statoil, the state oil company of Norway. Most of the projects in which I have been participating have been inter- or multidisciplinary since they have involved the development of computer supported cooperative work in one way or another (Hepsø 1997, Hepsø et.al 1997, Gjersvik & Hepsø 1998, Monteiro & Hepsø 1998, Monteiro & Hepsø 2000). I have worked as an anthropologist in Statoil Research and Technology since 1991. Growing numbers of anthropologists and other...
Flesteparten av dagens nyutdannede antropologer uteksamineres med god faglig antropologisk ballas... more Flesteparten av dagens nyutdannede antropologer uteksamineres med god faglig antropologisk ballast, men mange er rimelig uforberedte på de utfordringer og praktiske oppgaver som venter i arbeidslivet. Hovedfagsutdannelsen( som mest ligner en stipendiat-utdanning) gjør at nye arbeidsgivere i privat og offentlig sektor får individorienterte akademikere som ikke er spesielt egnet til å samarbeide med andre profesjoner. Nyutdannede vet lite om problemløsning, konflikthåndtering og kommunikasjon, og mangler tilstrekkelig forståelse av etikk og arbeidslivets spilleregler for å kunne utøve sin profesjon utenfor universitetet. Jeg har etterhvert veiledet en del vordende antropologer på hovedfagsnivå og til tider også fungert som “krisetelefon” for hovedfagsstudenter eller uteksaminerte antropologer som ikke vet hva de skal bruke utdannelsen til. Trenger vi en profesjonsutdanning i antropologi på lik linje med det psykologi og jus har? Faget i sin nåværende form skal selvsagt få leve videre ...
Hawthorne undersøkelsene representerer inntredenen til det menneskelige og sosiale perspektivet i... more Hawthorne undersøkelsene representerer inntredenen til det menneskelige og sosiale perspektivet i organisasjonsteorien som en korreks til det mekaniske og instrumentelle perspektivet til klassikere som f.eks Frederick W. Taylor. I 90-årene har tilsynelatende nye perspektiver på organisering av arbeid dukket opp gjennom Business Process Reengineering. Her har instrumentalismen dukket opp igjen og man utelater eller forholder seg ikke til over 60-års forskning og historie etter Hawthorne. Artikkelen prøver å dra noen historiske linjer og hevder at BPR har noe å lære av historien. Det fokuseres spesielt på fire problemstillinger i diskusjonen om BPR: kritikk av byråkratiet som organisasjonsform, oppfatningen av arbeidets natur, kombinasjonen av mekaniske/organiske metaforer og prosessperspektivet. Artikkelen argumenterer tilslutt at BPR forsøker å utvikle framtidens prosessorganiserte horisontale organisasjon til å bli en speilvendt utgave av dagens vertikale og byråkratiske organisasj...
I bedriftsorganisasjoner finnes det ofte en opp-fatning av at bedriften organiserer bruken av rom... more I bedriftsorganisasjoner finnes det ofte en opp-fatning av at bedriften organiserer bruken av rom etter klart rasjonelle og bedriftsøkonomiske prinsipper. I et slikt teknisk økonomisk system har alle ansatte klart avgrensede arbeidsoppgaver sydd sammen i et mekanisk, funksjonelt system og gitt rom til disposisjon som står i stilling til deres funksjon og plassering i et hierarki. Rommet og artifakter i det fysiske miljøet brukes og utnyttes bevisst for å bedre ressurs utnyttelsen og koordineringen i selskapet. Dette har ført til at arkitekter og interiør-dersignere har vært mest opptatt av det fysiske miljøet i seg selv, med produksjonsteknologi, utsyrs design og arbeidspro-sedyrer. Arbeidet og romutformingen har ofte skjedd utenfor en sosial kontekst. De har ikke i stor nok grad vært opptatt av at brukere investerer mening i både rom, utstyr og prosesser innenfor organisasjonen.
One day in late November 1992, wrong side of another day, I sat alone by a table at the ground fl... more One day in late November 1992, wrong side of another day, I sat alone by a table at the ground floor bar at Hotel Hilton and Towers in down-town San Francisco, watching football, looking at the programme and reading abstracts of the presentations of the 1992 American Anthropological Association Conference. In my professional job at Statoil Research I had taken up an interest in the relationship between man and information technology. At that time I felt that very little had been published on man “being with technology” and the implications of practicing anthropology in real life situations outside the university arenas. Scanning through the proceedings I noticed a session related to cyborg anthropology. It turned out to be one of a small number of sessions that dealt with anthropology science and technology. I sat down as a backbencher and followed the presentations and discussions on propositions about a new field in anthropology. The phrases of Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sa...
In an applied organizational fieldwork setting the anthropologist's image transforms as a res... more In an applied organizational fieldwork setting the anthropologist's image transforms as a result of changing formal and informal attitudes and expectations. The formal and informal attitudes and expectations in the setting make it necessary to help informants and is a necessary part of research to obtain "backstage" information. The mixture of ethnography and normative participation is regarded as the best suited method in an applied anthropological setting. The role metaphors of a "clown", "jester", "guru", "fallen angel" and "incorporated anthropologist" are discussed as ideal phases that an anthropologist might go through in his/her participatory fieldwork in an organizational setting. These roles can represent the local attitudes and expectations to anthropological knowledge. The last phase incorporation blurs the emic-etic distinction but can bring forth new dimensions and insights in academic anthropology and fiel...
Through my work with technicians and engineers I have become interested in their technological re... more Through my work with technicians and engineers I have become interested in their technological relationships, i.e. how they sense their world both through, with and among technologies. In my quest for developing an anthropological interpretation of these relationships I went in two directions. First, to the study of the ecological mind. Second, to Don Ihde a philosopher of technology and the philosopher John Dewey. Dewey and his followers Don Ihde (1979, 1990, 1991) and Larry Hickman (1991) have developed a distinctive pragmatic approach to technology, which can be labelled instrumental realism (Ihde 1979, Ihde1990, Ihde 1991, Hickman 1991). The latter approach will be the key issue of this paper but I will start with the development of the ecological mind. In what follows I employ the work of Don Ihde (1979, 1990, 1991) in an phenomenological analysis of technological relationships among personnel in Norne, a Norwegian offshore oil installation. I end with describing some key featu...
Most major oil companies and globally operating vendor/service companies have since the turn of t... more Most major oil companies and globally operating vendor/service companies have since the turn of the millennium increasingly addressed their future way of doing business as oil exploration and operation enabled by information and communication technology. They see this development as the improvement of three interwoven elements; people, tools/technology and work processes. Norway has a long tradition with work research that has been in the front to develop concepts related to socio-technical organization of work, self managed teams as alternatives to hierarchical organization and concepts for union-management co-operation. Some of us researchers with engineering or social science backgrounds that have a history in this tradition (or have been in the vicinity of this work research environment) now work with integrated operations. We want to have our say regarding how the so called “people” and “process” issues should be incorporated with “technological” issues in the increasing instru...
I siste halvdel av 1990-årene investerte Statoil betydelig i informasjons- og kommunikasjonstekno... more I siste halvdel av 1990-årene investerte Statoil betydelig i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi (IKT), og mange prosjekter og aktører var med og utviklet innovative ideer, konsepter og løsninger. Innovasjonselementet i dette kapitlet er utviklingen av forbedret helse, miljø og sikkerhet for personell involvert i kran- og løftemiljøet i Statoil. Vi tar opp den helhetlige dynamikken som preger innovasjonsprosesser i bedrifter og presenterer to ulike innfallsvinkler til hvordan innovasjoner utvikler seg: et spredningsperspektiv og et oversettelsesperspektiv. Vi viser hvordan oversettelsesperspektivet basert på aktørnettverksteori kan anvendes til å forstå innovasjonsprosesser i store organisasjoner. Her er innovasjoner i organisasjoner sett på som en kontinuerlig oversettelsesprosess hvor en idé eller et konsept går gjennom ulike faser for å bli en organisatorisk innovasjon.
The proper involvement and management of stakeholders in the planning and execution of developmen... more The proper involvement and management of stakeholders in the planning and execution of development processes has over the years been given through investigation in the action research literature. This methodology has become a well established practice in a range of efforts to involve the human and organisational forces under study. Stakeholder management has become increasingly dynamic and undertaken throughout development processes to address the dynamics of the context when stakeholders and their relations change over time. Many development and change processes today involve the design of information systems and become a design of both work and organisations. This makes stakeholder management more important because it has consequences for how we inform the design of information systems and involve diverse stakeholders in this effort. We approach stakeholder management as a practice where we as action researchers try to get a grip on how human stakeholders develop dynamic alliances...
Hva slags skrivekompetanse trenger arbeidslivet? Artikkelen forsøker å ta tak i dette gjennom å v... more Hva slags skrivekompetanse trenger arbeidslivet? Artikkelen forsøker å ta tak i dette gjennom å vise hvordan skriving ble brukt i en kollektiv refleksjonsprosess innenfor kran og løfteoperasjoner i Statoil. Dette er et miljø som tradisjonelt ikke preges av skriftlighet og skriving men hvor man gjennom en involveringsprosess brukte denne samarbeidsformen for å få fram viktige sider ved farefullt arbeid og en eksisterende praksis. Prosjektet var en del av et større utviklingsprosjekt hvor målet var å øke helse, miljø og sikkerhetsnivået innen kran og løfteoperasjoner og fremme langsiktig kompetanseutvikling for denne typen personell. Vi presenterer prosjektet som en avart av refleksjonskriving og hvordan det ble en del av et større prosjekt hvor man forsøkte å endre praksis. Samtidig forsøker vi å koble yrkeslivets behov for refleksjonskriving i en større sammenheng i lys av dette eksemplet.
How can industrial insiders and social researchers make a difference in leading research and deve... more How can industrial insiders and social researchers make a difference in leading research and development processes in sophisticated technological and scientific settings, where the integration of tools and technologies in human and organizational practice is of utmost importance? The role of a company internal social researcher is fleshed out in three rich empirical cases from the oil and gas industry where the development of new collaborative practices enabled by emerging information and communication technologies is the key issue addressed. A general framework for insider social research in Technoscience that integrates human, organizational and technological capabilities is fleshed out to help practitioners in similar situations. This book is written for social researchers and others who are leading development work within science and technology dominated settings. It should also be of interest to engineers, IT professionals, economists or any other group that wants to understand...
In this paper we look at standardization as a dynamic co-creation process involving multiple acto... more In this paper we look at standardization as a dynamic co-creation process involving multiple actors, using the concept of circulation to study organizational ideas as IT-standards. Standards embedded in IT-systems are pre-coded by IT-companies often based on company proprietary, de-facto or international standards. Thus, these standards might have considerable influence on both operational work and strategic choices pursued. Several actors have the interest in the design of these standards. We have studied the process of standardization from the emergence of management ideas through the internal negotiations and adaptations to the implementation of “best practice” inscribed in an IT-system supported by work processes. In this paper we will use concepts from Science and Technology Studies to supplement Scandinavian institutionalism on the dynamic of standards and standardisation processes. This perspective is fleshed out to address the human and artefact dynamics of standardization, ...
In the last 20 years or so, ethnography has made major inroads in corporations, other large organ... more In the last 20 years or so, ethnography has made major inroads in corporations, other large organizations in government, and the not-for-profit sector, organizations that used to rely almost exclusively on quantitative data for strategic decision making. That situation has changed slowly but dramatically, and today practically all global companies hire anthropologists or other ethnographically trained and experienced experts to help them understand, from the inside out and from the bottom up, how their organizations work and how they function within the larger context of customer relationships and supply chains. Ethnography has thus gained a new, strategic legitimacy, which has also led to the reemergence of employees hired for other reasons now claiming their ethnographic skills. In surveying the landscape of ethnographic employment in industry, it is clear that at the present time, ethnographers work in two primary situations: either hired as full employees to provide a presence a...
Science and Technology Studies has opened the black boxes of socio-technical systems and argued t... more Science and Technology Studies has opened the black boxes of socio-technical systems and argued that technological artefacts are a product of human action and values, and shape social action. The black boxes of information technologies are opened in a quest to understand the way various stakeholders, IT included, shape action. A case that describes the development of a new offshore
SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, 2010
ABSTRACT A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving i... more ABSTRACT A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving installations from the surface to the seabed utilizing existing surface based facilities or by developing new onshore facilities. Enabling this trend is an increased instrumentation of the equipment, down-hole and on the seabed. Increased instrumentation results in more data that has to be processed by human operators. Research shows that human operator information overload leads to poor decision making. To avoid information overload, we need a new breed of system where more of the information processing and decision making can be handled by computers. Over the last couple of years we have worked extensively with autonomous systems. We see autonomy as a vital property in this new breed of systems, where we have identified three scenarios that can benefit. These are: Production and process optimization Environmental monitoring and control Equipment condition monitoring The key elements of our approach are a combination of the distributed data processing capabilities of software agents with a variable autonomy approach to the interaction with the human operator. Variable autonomy enables a human operator to defer control to a system when the system state is within a given envelope. The system will escalate decision making to the human operator when it reaches its decision making boundary. The goal of our work is to make the human operator more capable of handling critical situations and prevent unwanted incidents by transforming the stream of data into information and proposed actions. The work will be focused around the transformation of data into decisions and the interaction between the human operator and the computer system.
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Papers by Vidar Hepsø