System Development Process 8.0 Introduction
8.5 Betrayals and controversies
How did it become possible to break the contract and close down the pilot project? To trace the series of changes of identities, every sign of loss of representation was noticed. It was
investigated where actors or spokesmen for the actors became “questioned, negotiated, rejected, and discussed” (M. Callon, 1986, p. 217).
The case developed within the span of two different logics: (1) the organizational rationale constructed by hierarchy and financial control; and (2) the case logic, which differs from (1) by having a time constraint, an N-F valuing method, where actors are not inscribed in the hierarchy, and actions are not visible in financial representations as KPIs and financial accounts. The two logics were manifest through their representations in the networks of human and non-human actors. Some of the actors were active in both networks: Actor TopM as president and carrying the highest formal position in logic 1, and actor ProjM as SVP and Actor TopM’s substitute, number two in the department, who was a senior specialist in their department. Actor Res was visible in the hierarchy represented in organizational charts for a limited period of time, but everyone knew that the presence of Actor Res was temporary; she was not really a part of the company, and as a researcher she had no impact in operations. During the first month in the GCC, Actor Res learned that the part of the organization closest to the CFO was not accessible, because the managers related to financial management on Actor TopM’s lists122 of potential allies in the project to be contacted did not answer e-mails nor did they want to attend meetings.
During the 24 months of the case, the agency of Actor Res was changed by incremental, almost invisible events that nevertheless aggregated to a reduced representability (M. Callon, 1986, p.
222) and caused controversies, which are important to outline, because the agency of the processes of induction were silently undermined by these events.
One of the accessible shared, but to the pilot case project unidentified actors documenting these small events identified itself as the non-human actor, the organizational chart. Its actions went from an organizational representation of actor Res to a non-representation creating less
organizational agency for the project. Another effect was produced through the physical location of Actor Res’ work station in the room. When the case contract was signed, Actor Res appeared
122 List of employees to be contacted Nov 2009.
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in the edited organizational chart with her name as referring directly to Actor TopM. During the problematization phase, and as repeated attempts to enroll actors in the emerging N-F network failed, access to the president (Actor TopM) slowly vanished. From an initial position at a table with individual storage space next to his office, with her name printed at a glass plate, and able to walk into his office for informal chats, Actor Res’ table was slowly moved some tables away, and his secretaries only allowed scheduled meetings. From November 2010, after extensive layoffs, the department moved to another town in order to cut costs. Many employees in the department had already left, but the square meters were reduced even more. Actor Res, who was present in the company on a part-time basis, was no longer provided with a workstation. Thus, the physical presence and visibility of Actor Res in the office was reduced, and she was offered changing work stations, when necessary and when available.
Actor TopM argued that the mentioned changes in the organizational chart were of no importance123. In spite of the formal contract regulating the relationship as one of Actor Res reporting directly to Actor TopM, his PA was inserted in a revised published organization chart between Actor TopM and Actor Res without any dialogue with Actor Res. When Actor Res discovered the new chart on the Intranet by accident and asked Actor TopM about the change, he understated the importance as a mere formality due to organizational development and logic.
Nevertheless, step by step, the PA came to demand that every communication to Actor TopM was addressed through him, as he had to rank its importance and relevance. He soon replaced the role of Actor TopM and reduced accessibility and frequency of meetings with Actor TopM to a minimum. He limited the economy of the project and warned Actor Res that the project was to be closed down if the pilot did not succeed. The employees, forever sensitive to issues of hierarchy as an expression of power and agency, read this as a clear signal, although it was expressed through “the silent language” of the chart.
Another accessible, shared non-human actor was the share value and its effects, which was represented by the changing agencies in the competing financial network.
During 2010, financial representations took over the focus and the agenda of Actor TopM and his corporate HR department that had to handle an outdated, but in the listed company still communicated and defended dramatic growth strategy as well as the burden of stressful, massive layoffs. The increased focus on short-sighted financial management triggered by the GCC’s market performance and share price impacted the legitimacy of any actions. The declared long term and hidden short term business logics were battling in the employees, who had to balance both disruptive perspectives at the same time in their work. The psychological context was stressed, and some decisions were defended only with great difficulty in the light of lost colleagues, closed projects, and future insecurity. Future layoffs were announced and an overall uncertainty dominated the attitudes in a company, clearly not used to uncertainty. One effect of the experienced growth in share values for the last 8 years seemed to prevail: “We did not have a sales force, only processes of order intake; everybody wanted to buy our products without really fighting for it” until the summer of 2008. The average seniority was three years,
123 Chapter 8.2.1: The First Moment of Translation.
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one of every two colleagues had in meetings never met before, and corporate memory and discourse did not include a decrease in share value. In 2009, the company was acting like a successful child star: it was not suspecting a bad destiny, but it was heading straight for one.
Slowly, the shares continued to fall, but this did not have an impact on the communicated ambitious growth strategy; uncertainty became manifest only from October 2010, when the board, for the first time, acted on the current present. Up until then, the company had a steady focus on the future and had invested in a future global presence and production capacity124. Uncertainty had come to stay and gave increased agency to financial management: budgets were cut and projects were closed down.
To retain a pilot project with a long-term perspective had turned risky in the financial logic. The identity of Actor TopM was impacted by the double membership of competing networks. The OPP lost his support and relations between Actor TopM and Actor Res lost its power, not only internally in the network, but also through the silent language of the signals known to the actors in both networks. When employees heard/saw this kind of language they dared not give agency to connections, and the representability (M. Callon, 1986) of Actor Res got lost.
As a consequence, Actor ProjM grew worried and required guarantees from Actor TopM. Walk-out questions were formulated by allies: if top management didn’t guarantee a roll-Walk-out to a larger part of the GCC after the pilot, there would be no pilot project.
Actor ICMCS, which depended of financial resources allocated by Actor TopM, was scrutinized by the actions of the PA, representing Actor TopM. Financial control of expenses necessary to adapt ICMCS, required by Actor ProjM, designed by Actor Res, adapted by Actor ICMCS, and realized by an external supplier, changed from an economic frame with significant project autonomy to a detail-oriented straitjacket. In a very short time, the budget was reduced to zero.
Actor IC and Actor TIC were both in an interdependent relation to Actor ICMCS, the
distribution device, because individual knowledge was only able to travel independently of time and space when Actor ICMCS actively connected to users asking them to enter individual knowledge and competence applying TIC.
Competing corporate HR initiatives were launched into partly the same population at the same time as the case pilot, which caused confusion and refusals to cooperate in the pilot project. In the “trial of technologies,” this proved to be an effective weapon, because managers in the financial network could not differentiate between the two and considered the pilot to represent double work with the same goal. In spite of the GCC’s attitude expressed late in 2009 that “we are not interested in knowledge, only competencies,” Actor Q—head of the HR-section—
initiated activities to register individual knowledge a few months later using an education-based classification. From never having registered any educations in the personnel files, a selected group of employees was asked to do so. With direct access to managers and to structural and
124 HR administrative corporate capacity “Foreign Country” HR capacity was established late 2010 and closed down in 2012
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financial capital, this took place before it was possible for the N-F pilot case to build up a network and enter the phase of mobilization.
Actor Q assigned one of her employees to the task of recording educations in HR suites within the existing IT architecture. He created an extended template in the existing personnel SAP folders with information about leave, wages, addresses, etc. The template asked the users to type in—after their own choice—the name of the education(s) held by the employees.
The interesting part is what can be done with such recorded data. Information on knowledge can be found by a search—by the HR employees allowed to access the HR system—such as a search in the Yellow Pages, but only when the names of educations are known beforehand by the searcher. The practice of recording does not make knowledge travel nor does it make it
manageable. Dynamic, real-time BI on individual knowledge and competence is not technically possible. However, the activity from the competing network created biases against Actor ICMCS from connecting to the employees, because they had already entered “the information”
into this existing IT structure.
Actor Res’ nearest collaborators and allies became insecure in their positions. In-house support became difficult to obtain and was not accessible anymore for some services, meetings, or e-mails. Some employees told Actor Res that Actor Q had closed down support to the project.
The supremacy of the financial network, irreversible in its black-boxed state, was never questioned, and only entities in the N-F network were affected. The representation and the changes in agencies between actors in the N-F network induced a new spirit of mistrust, which was particularly destructive in an iterative development process. Relations became biased by changed expectations and beliefs, and the identities changed. The sum of all these silent signals became the mechanisms of closure, because “closure occurs when the spokesmen are deemed to be beyond question” (M. Callon, 1986, p. 220). Actor TopM enacted his betrayal by asking the PA to dismiss Actor Res from the company. This act stopped the entry of data of individual knowledge and competence in the ICMCS. Thus, the OPP question could not be answered in this case.
8.5.1 Trials of Technologies
The following section explores how the three principles established in the introduction were applied and discusses how the financial network won the trial of technologies.
The principle of generalized agnosticism (M. Callon, 1986) was applied in considering market artifacts, the context in which the GCC operates, and the social contexts in which elements of agency were elaborated and shaped. Consequently, doubts and uncertainties about plasma (B.
Latour, 2006) and actors were reported in the same way.
The principle of generalized symmetry (M. Callon, 1986) demanded similar ways to analyze controversies in both the organizational context and the case context. The same vocabulary was used in the four phases of translation and for both non-human and human actors. The six categories of actors were equally important and described. Company logic was not reduced to a
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power of balance; controversies were explained through small changes in translations and representations.
The third principle of free association (ibid.) has been followed, outlining the different attempts of interessement and unpredictable relationships by allowing identities to fluctuate. Who could have guessed that the legal department was able to become an actor in a radical project in the GCC? Who could have predicted the fast decrease of share value of the world’s leading company within its business, and its consequences?
By following the events (the translations and displacements in every phase), the advantages and disadvantages of the role of the “engaged scholar,” (Van de Ven, A. H., 2007), and her biased view have been managed and described in terms that are not open to interpretations. Every phase, event, and object has been faithfully described.
When exploring how the identities of the allies in Network 3 in the below Figure 45 changed over a period of 24 months - to understand why the network disconnected - the number, kind, frequency, and quality of representations and allies are elements of interest, because network and the power of network are effects of representations and allies (B. Latour, 1991; J. Law, 1992).
Network 1—Financial Network Representation Allies
Type
Every material and immaterial item in the world is translated into financial value representation and routines
From top to bottom in the hierarchy All the existing capitals, structural
Number Uncountable All employees
Frequency Incessantly Uncountable
Quality
Punctualized, representing a whole network in one point, every human/non-human actor
representing a black boxed strong agency
Black boxed
Visible clear representation in department with CFO in double team with CEO, one identity Distributed and integrated into every process
Distribution Internal and external distribution Unquestioned and known by all
Duration Always Always
Where Globally Globally
Network 2—HRM in Financial Network
The representations, actions, and processes generated in Network 2 are not subject to questions and changed agencies, because Network 2 has powerful allies in Network 1.
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Network 3—N-F Project Network
Kind
New processes translate the matter of concern, knowledge, into inscriptions and digital representation
No calculative practices yet No routines
3 human and 3 non-human actors
Number
50–100 generic websites in the ICMCS
In meetings during the pilot case
6 allies
Frequency 0 none
Quality Only representing 1 actor, 1
translation, 1 process
2 multidimensional human actors, allies who change identities
Distribution No distribution Organizationally separated
Duration 12 months 24 months
Where 2 local offices 2 local offices
Figure 45. Characteristics of the three networks by the author.
The Figure 45 shows that Network 1 acted as a verb (Hernes, 2008) by refiguring value representations in its own logic in every process, event, and actor, incisively, in a never-ending reconfiguration of the world (Lynn, 1999; Sarker et al., 2006), while Network 3 did not have the power to do so.
Two black-boxed networks (1 and 2), presented themselves against one emerging network (3) differing in the number and frequency of representations. The competing networks had defined themselves within the financial narrative, the existing financial network controlling the
structural capital through integration and numerous value representations, routines, calculative practices, non-human and human actors, and alliances at the very top of the hierarchy; and the N-F network initiating control of values in the knowledge-based organization with almost no value representations, had no routines and both non-human and human actors, and alliances anchored in a department with a top manager referring to CEO. The three networks and their characteristics are summed up in Figure 45 above. The representations, actions, and processes generated in Network 2 were not subject to questions and changed agencies, because it had powerful allies in Network 1 and followed the financial logic. No actors from Network 1 were identified openly as actors in the new N-F network (Network 3), although a proposition to involve potential actors from the dominating financial department was activated. Actor TopM did not support the idea, and as he was the nearest manager in the hierarchy the question was closed.
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