STS: Doctoral Dissertation Research: Designing Software Orders: Patterns of Governmentality and Authority in Software Practice and Discourse

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Software increasingly mediates relationships between organizations and citzens. Governments, corporations, schools, businesses, and all kinds of urban and financial utilities adopt software systems to automate processes and interactions with citizens, employees, students, customers, and people who inhabit and make use of public spaces and goods. Large-scale software systems are also increasingly complicated to design and implement plus they evolve over time. Software is rarely shipped out as a closed product. Rather, software relies upon a set of ongoing relationships between software professionals and stakeholders. This project aims to understand these relationships and the work of software professionals as they design, implement, and maintain large-scale computational systems. The research utilizes ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the design and planning for a large-scale software system by the information technology program team for a master-planned urban development near Seoul, South Korea. The study addresses the questions: how does the IT program team define and imagine their role and the role of software in organizational processes, designed systems, stakeholder participation, and the structuring of urban and public spaces? How does their design process shape and constrain the social and technical role that software plays in their relationships with international partners and stakeholders, and with what consequences for the overall urban development project? The project contributes to scholarship on sociotechnical systems design, expert-public relationships, and the politics of computing. It adopts a critical and comparative approach, building on earlier cases studies of software systems including an online game and financial services software. Comparisons across sites allow the researcher to consider the ways that software code shapes and is shaped by different design processes and how it augments and extends relationships of authority and govern mentality. Broader impacts of this work include methodological implications for organizational processes for and stakeholder involvement in the design of large-scale software systems.