Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, Vol. 10 (1) 61–82 (2000) © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 1090-8471/00/010061-22 Tinkering with Technology: Human Factors, Work Redesign, and Professionals in Workplace Innovation Richard Badham Department of Management and BHP Institute for Steel Processing and Products, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia Pelle Ehn School of Art and Communication, Malmö University, S-20506 Malmö, Sweden I have been an organisation tinker for about twenty years. I tinker for, and with, many types of organisations. . . The Concise Oxford Dictionary (21951) defines a tinker (among other things) as: “a mender (especially itinerant), a rough and ready worker, a botcher, one who patches in an amateurish and clumsy fashion by way of repair or alteration. . . .” Organisation tinkers patch, alter, and repair organisations in a rough and ready fashion. The practice has a long and honourable history . . . but whatever tools he may be carrying in his knapsack, whatever his sales pitch, the tinker is fundamentally a botcher, a patcher, and, in the pejorative sense of the word, an amateur. His approach is that of trial-and-error, suck-it-and-see. His tools are simple, his techniques crude and clumsy, his familiarity and understanding of his raw material relatively slight. To tinker with something is not to know what it is you are doing . . . Few organisation development consultants are craftsmen. Most of us are tinkers exhibiting some degree of skill but little artistry. Our practice runs well ahead of our understanding. . . (Mangham, 1978, pp. xiii–xiv) ABSTRACT Professionals in workplace innovation operate in practice as collective designers and political entrepreneurs as well as applied scientists. They apply and adapt human factors and organizational knowledge and techniques to enable projects to succeed in complex, culturally diverse, and politically charged change processes. This creates a major challenge for their professional training. They require a self-understanding, ability, and will that enables them to act as reflective practitioners continuously improving the practical skills of their “craft.” This article draws on the reflections of professionals in workplace innovation to argue this case, and seeks to inform further reflection by presenting a view of their role as professional bricoleurs. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1. INTRODUCTION: INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND “HUMAN FACTORS” At the heart of the traditional industrial ethos is the belief that science and industry are capable of solving the problems that they cause (Badham, 1986). One of the prime examples of this ethos has been the enduring quest to deal with the “human factor” in production—whether this is seen as a problem of “motivation,” “resistance,” or simply 1 For elaboration on this point I am especially indebted to an unnamed referee of an earlier version of this article. 61 62 BADHAM AND EHN lack of appropriate skills or “match” between aptitudes, equipment, and jobs. While the advance of material technology has continued apace, this has not been matched, it is argued, by equivalent progress in the “human” domain. There is a problem of “culture lag” as knowledge and action in the adaptation of “man” to “industry” has fallen behind material technological knowledge and application. The answer lies, so it is further argued, in more scientific knowledge, but this time in the human rather than the natural sciences. Once this most complicated science has been completed, the whole of industry, and society, will be amenable to prediction and control for the benefit of all. Since World War I, a number of professions have arisen to help address this task. In the post–World War I period, the study of fatigue and personnel selection and training was replete with such hopes and rhetoric (Hollway, 1996). The scientific management movement subsequently became highly influential in its quest to rise above managerial and worker ideology to provide a scientific analysis of work. In partial reaction against scientific management, the human relations movement in the 1920s and 1930s discovered “social” man and developed counseling and leadership techniques in order to integrate this “man” into the common industrial purpose (Gillespie, 1993). Similarly critical of the earlier focus on methods for adapting people to their work, the development of ergonomics and human factors engineering from the 1950s on focused on using information from work physiology, biomechanics, and engineering psychology to design workstations and industrial processes that fit the people working with them. In the United States, this development was closely linked to military research on the use of sophisticated equipment, whereas in Europe it was more closely related to worker safety, health, and comfort (Helander, 1997). Since the classic work of the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s, sociotechnical systems professionals have developed a broader concern with the overall technical and social structure of work systems, and their links to organization as well as technology design (Badham, forthcoming). The latter has expanded in a number of different directions. It includes different national sociotechnical traditions (Einjatten, 1993; Taylor & Felten, 1993). It has also extended what were often work redesign methods into the design of “human centred” or “work oriented” man–machine systems. It has also been accompanied by the growth of a widely encompassing “macroergonomic” tradition linking sociotechnical systems approaches to organizational and work systems design and the design of related human–machine, human–environment, and user–system interfaces (Hendrick, 1997). The result has been a growth in the number of what could be broadly called professionals in workplace innovation. This broad category includes what many commonly define as the human factors profession, that is, the more traditionally defined disciplines of ergonomics and human factors engineering, understood as primarily concerned with applying scientific knowledge of humans to the design of man–machine interface systems, focusing mainly on human physical and perceptual characteristics, but more recently extending into “cognitive” or “software” ergonomics (Helander, 1997). This is the area that U.S. companies still consider to be the central “human” consideration in technology design and implementation (Lund, Bishop, Newman, & Salzman, 1993). In a broader sense, however, professionals in workplace innovation extend far beyond this central core. They can be seen to include a wide gamut of interdisciplinary workers applying knowledge and methods from a variety of disciplines to design technology, jobs, and organizations to more effectively mobilize and control the “human factor” in production—with more or less strong links to technology. These range from cognitive science and psychology to sociotechnical systems theory, organizational development, and ethnographic and socio- TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 63 logical explorations of technology and organizational design. Their effects can be found in job and work redesign; work-oriented, user-oriented, or human-centered system design; as well as computer-supported cooperative work and broader human resource development and strategic organizational redesign. In recent years, this broader grouping of workplace innovation professionals has received greater recognition by ergonomists and human factors engineers, as well as critics of the restricted scope of the human factors professions. Human factors professionals, in a strict sense, are strongly focused on the technological, biomechanical, and information processing characteristics of man–machine systems. However, in the papers of conferences organized by the International Ergonomics Association, as well as interlinked conferences such as the HCI Conference, there has been a broadening of scope to include contributions from other disciplines. This is clearly evidenced in the development of what some take to be a subdiscipline of ergonomics—“macroergonomics” (Hendrick, 1997). It is also notable, for example, that the second edition of the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics (1997) adopts a very broad view of human factors. It includes wideranging articles on participatory ergonomics, job and team design, organizational design and macroergonomics, and socially centered design. The latter, in particular, points to the contributions made by ethnography to an understanding of work roles, organizational structure and informal work practices, and cultures in the design of man–machine systems. The broad category of professionals in workplace innovation also incorporates the particularly dynamic area of human–computer interface design. This area clearly continues and overlaps with traditional ergonomic and human factors concerns and has been the focus of a widening variety of disciplines. These disciplines have adopted a more or less broad and “deep” view of interface design and implementation. The broad interest in research, knowledge, and practice in the more general area of workplace innovation has also been confirmed in the establishment of this journal and the range of articles that it publishes. The characterization of this broader interdisciplinary grouping is difficult and controversial. Many researchers and consultants well versed in traditional human factors theory and practice have preferred to deliberately distinguish more general approaches to man– machine systems from “human factors.” Rasmussen (1993), for example, argued that “in a period of rapid technological change and large integrated socio-technical systems, it is a question of whether a separate human factors profession can be maintained or whether human factors problems call for cross-disciplinary cooperation in a study of the mechanisms governing the behaviour of large socio-technical systems in a turbulent environment. This research involves several engineering and human sciences. To distinguish the topic from classical human factors, we are talking about cognitive engineering, which is to be seen as a conceptual marketplace for interdisciplinary exchange, not as a separate profession.” (pp. 91–92). This use of the term cognitive engineering develops upon the pioneering work of Norman (1986), who coined the term to refer to “an entirely new discipline, one moreover that combines two already complex fields: psychology and computer science. Moreover, it requires breaking new ground, for our knowledge of what fosters good interactions among people and between people and devices is young, without a welldeveloped foundation . . . (it is neither Cognitive Psychology, nor Cognitive Science, nor Human Factors. It is a type of applied Cognitive Science, trying to apply what is known from science to the design and construction of machines.” (Norman, 1986, pp. 32, 59). From a different perspective, and more critically, Bannon (1991) argued for an approach that extends from “human factors” to “human actors”: 64 BADHAM AND EHN Within the HF approach, the human is often reduced to being another system component with certain characteristics, such as limited attention span, faulty memory, etc., that need to be factored into the design equation for the overall human-machine system. This form of piecemeal analysis of the person as a set of components de-emphasises important issues in work design. Individual motivation, membership in a community of workers, and the importance of the setting in determining human faction are just a few of the issues that are neglected. . . By using the term human actors, emphasis is placed on the person as an autonomous agent that has the capacity to regulate and coordinate his or her behaviour, rather than being simply a passive element in a human-machine system. (pp. 27–28) While such critics argue for a broader interdisciplinary study of man–machine systems that goes beyond the narrowness of traditional human factors, proponents of the human factors profession aptly point to the dangers of any careless adoption of a looser and broader definition of human factors. Similarly to critics of the failure of sociotechnical systems projects to adequately address technology (Badham & Naschold, 1994), they point to the neglect of technology in many work and organizational redesign projects, and the long-established initiatives by the human factors profession to overcome the technology– human sciences divide by integrating education in technology, biomechanics, information processing, work psychology, and organization design.1 In this article, the term professionals in workplace innovation will be used to refer to those involved in developing and applying knowledge about the “human factor” in production to the design of new man–machine systems and the broader organizational conditions that bear on man–machine systems. It incorporates the work of human factors, work redesign, cognitive engineering, sociotechnical, human–computer interface, human resource development, and organizational design and development professionals. The term is used here to provide a relatively neutral characterization of this range of professions, and to focus our attention on those professions, and their members, that are concerned with bringing about innovation in both work and technology. Despite this proliferation of academic research and professional practice in the general area of workplace innovation, it continues to be underrepresented at crucial stages in technological advance. Knowledge and expertise in this area is not given comparable weight to natural science and engineering, and it remains politically weak (Clegg, 1993; Perrow, 1983). This has occurred despite the fact that there continues to be welldocumented high levels of underperformance or failure in the introduction of new technologies (Buchanan and Badham, 1999a), and one of the key factors most commonly recognized as contributing to high failure rates continues to be the lack of effective action in dealing with human and organizational factors in technology design and implementation (Badham, Couchman, & McLoughlin, 1997; Buchanan & Badham, 1999; Majchrzak & Gasser, 1991). One strategy for addressing this problem has been to press for greater power and legitimacy for the professionals in workplace innovation, focusing in particular on increasing their scientific and educational standing. Explicitly or implicitly, this often assumes that the pressure of scientific authority, the language of science—and the human factors sciences in particular—might increasingly become the currency and influence the practice of technical designers and users. This assumption has often been linked to the search for improved methods, databases of successful examples, and other techniques to assist professionals in workplace innovation to apply their knowledge. During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a concerted effort by many groups of professionals in workplace innovation to pursue this path, particularly within Europe, by further developing new and TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 65 improved methods and software tools knowledge (Badham, Couchman, & Linstead, 1995). In Europe, this has been extended to attempts to influence international standards in such areas as human centered design (ISO, 1997), while in the United States it has been embedded in the statutory requirement for human factors courses in the training of industrial engineers. Another factor is that the human factors professions draw much of their support from more traditionally scientific disciplines such as work psychology and ergonomics, and are closely linked to subfields of technical disciplines such as industrial engineering and information technology and computer science. It is not surprising, therefore, that the search for improved methods has been accompanied by attempts to strengthen the “scientific” legitimacy of the workplace innovation disciplines within the research community. Another strategy for improving the effectiveness and impact of professionals involved in workplace innovation, and the strategy argued for in this article, is to create a different kind of self-understanding and language amongst such professionals in workplace innovation. This approach argues for a greater understanding of the social and political processes of collective design, and stresses the importance of improving the process knowledge, experience, and practices of professionals in workplace innovation. It locates the expertise of these professionals more centrally in such knowledge and practices. It also encourages proactive involvement in collective design processes to realize and champion human factors considerations in projects. This incorporates an understanding of what Hendrick (1997) described as the “ergonomist as an organisational change agent” but extends this to include a broader reconsideration of the nature of applied professional knowledge and practice. In arguing this case, this article draws on three sources: first, established research on the nature of professional knowledge and design practice; second, published reflections by professionals in workplace innovation on the nature of their “craft”; and third, reflections by sociotechnical researchers and practitioners in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark on the political practices they pursue in order to achieve successful outcomes in change projects. The latter reflections were the product of three workshops facilitated by the first author of this article in 1997 in the relevant countries (Buchanan & Badham, 1999a). In conclusion, it is argued that professionals in workplace innovation are best understood as operating in a somewhat paradoxical manner as “professional bricoleurs,” making do with what is at hand, creating a bricolage that is feasible and meaningful in context, yet doing so in a way that is both informed by theory and improved through ongoing systematic reflection. The term professional bricoleur is used deliberately to point to the tension between this activity and traditional understandings of the work of the professional and processes of applying scientific and technical knowledge. 2. PROFESSIONALS IN WORKPLACE INNOVATION AS REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONERS What does it mean to say that researchers and practitioners in the area of workplace innovation are professionals? While there is a long-standing debate about the nature of professions and professionalism, and particularly what this means for those involved in personnel areas in organizations (e.g., Legge, 1978), it is generally agreed that professions can be said to exist where five conditions hold: (a) some level of skill based on theoretical knowledge (e.g., degrees in ergonomics or macroergonomics); (b) provision of training and education (e.g., delivery of university courses or consultancy workshops in job redesign); (c) testing of the competence of members or evaluating their peers (e.g., 66 BADHAM AND EHN from formal academic qualifications in psychology to evaluation of research publications, grants, etc. in international journals such as Ergonomics); (d) formal professional associations (e.g., international ergonomic or work psychology associations); and, (e) adherence to some professional code of conduct (e.g., ethical training and formal or informal code of ethics such as that adopted by particular institutes of work psychology). Analysts of professions have also stressed the control dimension of professionalism. Professions are identified as groupings having some level of control over expertise, knowledge, methods, and services that “clients” feel they need in order to address their own problems. In the more developed professions, they are accorded legal status and monopolies over particular areas of knowledge, with authority to diagnose “clients”’ problems and prescribe and apply remedies or solutions. Clearly, professionals in workplace innovation are quite fragmented and loosely organized and have far less monopolistic control over the “tools of their trade” than such more established professions as law and medicine. It is significant that the National Science Foundation’s Manufacturing Processes and Equipment Program confirmed that health and safety and narrowly defined ergonomics continue to be the main human factors concerns amongst U.S. firms, closely related to the demands of health and safety legislation (Lund et al., 1993). In broader human factors areas, extending into sociotechnical redesign and organizational development and change, managerial groups may not really see themselves as “clients” in the sense understood by such developed professions. Management groups quite appropriately often question their implicit “lay” status compared to such “expert” professionals, and see their relationship as more collegial than professional, with their own “practical” knowledge often exceeding that of mere “academics” and “consultants” (Legge, 1978). For the purposes of this article, therefore, professionals in workplace innovation are understood as a loosely knit, fragmented, and relatively weakly institutionalized set of three intersecting groupings. The first grouping is composed of scientists and researchers working within universities and other research institutions as members of the human factors disciplines. This refers, in particular, to ergonomics, and more recently macroergonomics as part of industrial engineering, human–computer interface studies as part of information technology and computer science, work and group psychology as part of psychology, and sociotechnical theory and organizational development as part of organizational behavior. The second grouping comprises consultants applying methods and research results from these disciplines, and the third is made up of members of user organizations acting as “internal” consultants in applying disciplinary methods and results. As noted earlier, the self-understanding of these professional groupings has tended to be dominated by a highly scientistic and rational view of professionals as applied scientists. While there has been some recognition that branches of workplace innovation research such as sociotechnical theory take the form of a “practical paradigm,” rather than “pure” research (Einjatten, 1993), this has not led to general systematic reflection on the professional role of workplace innovation researchers and consultants as “reflective practitioners.” This limitation has continued despite the emergence of an increasingly substantial body of research on professionals that supports such understanding and reflection. The influential work of Donald Schon (1983) and his colleagues has led to an abandonment of the traditional knowledge hierarchy of basic science, applied science, and technical skills as a guide for understanding the actual practices of professionals. While the “espoused theory” of the professions may present their work as the systematic application of formal knowledge, “theories in use” are different. Professional practice, as is TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 67 tacitly known and recognized by professionals, is characterized by an integration of all these areas of knowledge in indeterminate zones of practice where decisions have to be made in unique and uncertain situations. Information and values often conflict. Professional competencies come not from formal training alone but are an acquired “craft” developed through practice and reflections on this practice. Mediating applied science and technique and effectiveness in practice is professional artistry in problem solving, implementation, and improvisation. As summarized in work on software design by professionals in workplace innovation such as Winograd (1996) and Ehn (1988; 1996) and in the sociologists of science and technology (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987), this model of the reflective practitioner accords strongly with current research on the work of designers and of scientists and technologists in general. 2.1. The Design Profession In recent years, there has been an increasing convergence in the training of engineering and information technology professionals, creative arts, and architectural design. This synergy has helped throw more light on the breadth of the role of professionals in workplace innovation as designers per se, and the central importance of deepening the systematic yet nonscientific component of design knowledge and practice. Traditional historical analyses of the rise of design work have tended to focus on the gradual formal separation of “thinking” from “doing,” and the dominance of a technical problem-solving or “engineering” view of the design object (hardware, software, etc.) and the design process (formalization, manipulation and logic, rational control, creation of correct and predictable “firm” results, etc.). Within software design, as well as other areas of design, the limitations of this model have been recognized and supplemented by a more “social” model of design. This focuses not just on the objective character of the design object but its practical and symbolic use, the perceived utility and value of designs, the importance of communication, participation and learning in the design process, and the achievement of improved social interaction and democratic values as final results. Finally, drawing more on artistic design, the argument has also been made that design also involves the creation of aesthetic experiences and forms, the achievement of balance and style in the process of design, the provision of creative and expressive environments for design, and the release of creativity and innovation as a product (Ehn, 1988; 1996). A better understanding of design is provided if we take the focus away from engineering models of rational individuals working in technical processes and, instead, see design as a social, political, and aesthetic process in which “collective designers” are involved not only in technical analysis but also in ongoing communication, collaboration, and negotiation. In seeking to broaden and integrate the understanding of design, such critics have sought to enrich our understanding by reexamining the epistemological and aesthetic philosophies of Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers, drawing on the work of modern philosophers seeking a less formalized and more experience-based model of design (Bernstein, 1992; Macintyre, 1981). Aristotle’s concept of “phronesis” as one of the intellectual “virtues,” has been used by Ehn (1996) and others as a counterpoint to modern rationalized and intellectualized views of knowledge. Phronesis, identified by Aristotle as a form of knowledge, is focused on pragmatic and context dependent knowledge, the exercise of wisdom in action. It is this action-oriented, ethical and political as well as technical, form 68 BADHAM AND EHN of knowledge that has been reduced in status, if not actually rejected, by modern Western rationalized views of knowledge, design, and the professions. It is the importance of this aspect of knowledge and design that, it is argued, needs to be reasserted and built into the education and training of all designers, including workplace innovation design. Design as phronesis would, for such professionals, mean a critical and reflective recognition of the political dimensions of design understood somewhat flamboyantly as “an anxious act of political love” (Bernstein, 1992, p. 274). 2.2. Scientific and Technological Professions The focus on the situational, pragmatic, and inherently political nature of knowledge is a theme that also predominates in current research by historians and sociologists on the work of scientists, technicians, and engineers. The traditional developmental “progress” view of science and technology portrayed knowledge as a gradual process of evolution, punctuated by radical discoveries, on a path toward increasing understanding and control. Investigations of the actual practices of scientists and technologists have provided a different picture. Knowledge and artifacts are produced within specific contexts and are given a specific character and direction by the concepts, culture, paradigms, and politics of specific knowledge communities and social groups. Alternative paths of knowledge and technological development are neglected as particular trajectories are selected on the basis of social, economic, and political as well as scientific and technical criteria. The “successful” scientist or technician is one who is able to marshal the necessary technical, rhetorical, and social support for their “facts,” “discoveries,” or “inventions” (Bijker et al., 1987). For some researchers on science and technology, the knowledge and innovation process is best described as the result of a complex interaction of people and artifacts located in different “social worlds” (Garrety, 1997; Kling & Gerson, 1978). The form taken by science and technology is the result of the complex interactions and negotiations between scientific groups, technical experts, funding agencies, corporations, regulatory bodies, and so forth. This has led other researchers to emphasize the need for scientists and innovators to be “heterogeneous engineers,” able to cut across boundaries, manipulating scientific and technical knowledge as well as political and social resources in a “seamless web” of innovative activity (Latour, 1987, 1988). These bodies of research all have direct implications for the way in which the activities of professionals in workplace innovation should be understood and, most importantly, how strategies should be developed for improving their “professionalism.” It is the argument of this article, drawing on these perspectives, that such professionals should not be understood as professionals in the traditional sense of experts applying technical knowledge according to generic methods and rules. Quite the reverse. Their analysis and selfunderstanding should be based on recognition of the tacit and situated nature of their professional knowledge and activities. It should also recognize the inherently social and political nature of their work, and how technical, social, and political skills need to be combined to successfully achieve their desired outcomes. The next two sections of this article will use the reflections of professionals in workplace innovation to explore how this occurs in the collective process of man–machine and work redesign and the political processes involved in getting human factors considerations, broadly defined, to be taken seriously in technology projects. TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 69 3. PROFESSIONALS IN WORKPLACE INNOVATION AS COLLECTIVE DESIGNERS Merely having the inputs from these three perspectives (business, technical expertise, and organizational expertise) does not ensure a successful project. The project team itself must work together to understand and leverage each other’s expertise. Each may have unique and specific goals, objectives, priorities, schedules, politics, language, values, norms and reward structure. Specifically, the technical systems experts are often particularly focused on technology and its design, the human resources professionals usually direct their attention to the people of the company; while the line managers are typically concerned with the business objectives and goals and the “bottom line.” (Krobertson & Dray, 1991, p. 185) In discussing the work of professionals in workplace innovation, practitioners have made a number of observations about the social and collective design process in which they are involved. They have, particularly, remarked on the problems created for such professionals by the multidisciplinary and, frequently, multi-institutional contexts within which they have to work. The problem of cutting across and integrating different social worlds is a part of all design, but it is a particular concern for designers who are explicitly involved in the creation of “hybrid” designs that integrate human and technological factors in system designs. A key component of the work and competencies of professionals in workplace innovation is thus his or her ability to understand, operate effectively within, and facilitate such complex collective design processes. Despite this fact, there has been no systematic review by such professionals of the multifaceted nature of the collective design processes in which they are involved, or the range of boundaries that have to be crossed in integrating participants from different social worlds into the design of workplace innovations. What does exist are a variety of different comments and insights by practitioners on specific boundary problems and solutions. These reflections have tended to identify professionals in workplace innovation as working with participants from four main social worlds with boundaries that have to be transcended in order for cooperation and communication to occur during the design process. These social worlds are schematically represented in Figure 1. One of the particular problems of professionals in workplace innovation is that they are not as “centered” as this diagram suggests. They range from human factors professionals with technical and engineering backgrounds, working out of engineering schools and departments, to work psychologists and human resource management specialists with little or no knowledge or concern with technology. The role of spanning the different social worlds involved in the design of man–machine systems cannot, and should not, be seen as the role of a specific social science discipline—the particular role of “psychologists,” “sociologists,” “organizational designers,” and so forth. If professionals in workplace innovation are to effectively integrate human factors concerns into collective design processes, their role—whatever their disciplinary or institutional origin—must be to transcend the boundaries between participants from the different social worlds involved in the design process. There is a similarity here with Rasmussen’s (1993) argument for crossdisciplinary research in the area of “cognitive engineering.” Professionals in workplace innovation need to have an ability to understand and sympathize with participants from the different scientific, technical and social design, and user worlds, and create local languages, cultures, and artifacts that enable these participants to communicate and cooperate sufficiently to achieve a successful system design. There is clearly no “free floating” 70 BADHAM AND EHN Workplace Innovation Design Figure 1 The social worlds of workplace innovation design. workplace innovation intelligentsia free of stronger or weaker linkages with actors from the different social worlds. However, this creates specific issues for their practices rather than undermining their role as professionals. 3.1. Technical and Social Design At the heart of the professional in workplace innovation’s design practice is the need to establish cooperation between technical and social scientific designers. Norman (1998), for example, listed the importance of at least six disciplines within the field of user experience alone. These include: field studies (anthropology and sociology); behavioral design (cognitive science and experimental psychology and human–computer interface programs); model building and rapid prototyping (computer programming, electrical and mechanical engineering, and architect and industrial design model building); user testing (experimental psychology, only speeded up); graphic and industrial design (art, design, and architecture); and user manuals (technical writers). Bringing together the many different areas of interest and expertise is a particularly difficult and problematic activity for professionals in workplace innovation, involving understanding and integrating participants from within the technical and social scientific worlds as well as between them. 3.1.1. The Technical Designers. Within the traditional instrumental technical worldview, the design process is formally viewed as proceeding in a linear fashion from initial idea through basic concept, detailed concept design and engineering analysis to planning, manufacturing, and delivering the product. Complex engineering products are created by TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 71 dividing labor between expert specializations and integrating these together in the final product. The technical design process is seen as one of facts and logic, rule following and procedures, application of knowledge and verification of results. The management of this process follows a simple command and control model, assigning tasks and responsibilities, and monitoring performance and delivery. Yet, the real world of technical design, as uncovered by anthropologists and known all along by practitioners, is somewhat different. Design is a place where worlds collide, where individuals and groups compete within “communities of practice” or where different communities confront each other in cooperation or conflict. It is a messier, more contingent, and culturally embedded process of conflict and compromise, half-understandings and dissensus. While formally working on the “same” project, technical specializations operate within what Bucciarelli has called their own “object worlds.” They literally “see” the design object differently through their own professional and cultural lenses. The electrician sees electrons and the mechanical engineer sees pressures and temperature. The design process and the final design is the result of the conflict, compromise, and collusion that inevitably occurs between different object worlds “of technical specialisation, with their own dialects, systems of symbols, metaphors and models, instruments and craft sensitivities” (Bucciarelli, 1996, p. 162). Often technical participants in the same design process, working within their own object worlds, are little more than “ships passing in the night,” little aware of or concerned with the detailed knowledge, perspective, or world view of their design colleagues. As Bucciarelli put it in Designing Engineers, Most engineering practitioners know that designing is not simply a matter of synthesising solutions to independent problem sets . . . the working world of engineers is filled with negotiations across specialties, with decision making under uncertainty within contexts in which scientific principle is mixed in with social, political, and financial “constraints.” (1996, p. 110) Key to the importance of successful technical design is, therefore, creating a common space for these diverse specialties to work together, facilitating the emergence of a “composite framework for common discourse” accepted by the members of the different object worlds by the end of the design process. This common discourse includes establishing a common language, and determining what are honorable claims to be made, what counts as significant conjectures, and what constitutes valid proof. It may involve the effective collective technical designer actively seeking for communication and understanding across the various object worlds by creating puzzles, stories, diagrams, schedules, and plans that enable this to occur. The first task of the collective designer of workplace innovation is, therefore, to understand how such activities are actually being carried out within the technical part of the project, and how social scientific designers may link into these processes. 3.1.2. The Social Science Designers. The social scientific designers are also frequently fragmented. As noted earlier, there are major differences in focus and orientation between traditional human factors professionals and other professionals in workplace innovation. This is one example of what Blackler and Shimmin (1984) have observed as many different “paradigms of practice” in applied social science disciplines, that is, “common practices emerge from a developing consensus within a community of practitioners as to appropriate theoretical, methodological and ideological frameworks” (Blackler & Shimmin, 1984, p. 127). As an example, they contrast, within the discipline of work psychology, an “NIIP approach” consisting of a pragmatic orientation toward selection and 72 BADHAM AND EHN training issues, with a “Tavistock approach” referred to as an action-oriented stance toward the psychodynamics of groups and reconciling technical and psychosocial requirements at work. Pettigrew (1976), in a discussion of internal social scientific redesign agents, observed that a “major source of internal consultant ineffectiveness stems from . . . (this) . . . apparent inability to present a unified political force within their organisation in dealings with clients. Often major differences in values, work style and career interests disrupt consultancy units and leave clients bewildered about the range and quality of service they can expect” (Pettigrew, 1976, p. 193). In addition, as observed by commentators on actual work redesign projects, this process of diversity and disagreement between social scientific designers is further confounded by the uncertainties of the overall design projects. As Ketchum (1982) observed, Work redesign is a political process, the art of the possible. It is done in the real world where there are limits to power, where what “is” rather than what “ought to be” is dominant and stakeholders are numerous. . . . Work redesign must take place in an ever-changing situation. Things won’t stand still while the organisation and its technology are redesigned. People retire, quit, get promoted, are reassigned, and are not re-elected. Replacements may come in from the outside. Product demand changes. Products and technologies change. Raw materials change. Economics change. Companies merge, are taken over: units are spun off. (p. 76) Pettigrew (1976) identified the failure of organizational designers to recognize and proactively respond to such crises as the second principle source of consultant ineffectiveness. The ability of professionals in workplace innovation to overcome the divisions between the social scientific groups and develop a common understanding of the complex nature of the design process is their second major task. 3.1.3. Technical and Social Scientific Designers. The ability to integrate participants within each of the technical and social scientific design worlds is a major challenge, yet needs to be accompanied by the achievement of effective cooperation between these worlds. While the human factors professions are committed to integrating the ideas and work of technical–engineering and social science–human resource disciplines and professions, there remains, as Klein (1994) has observed, a “deep institutionalised splitting” between engineering and social science communities. Klein observes the different models of science, relations to values, types of outputs and methods within as well as between these communities, and emphasizes the deep divide between the technical and social sciences. So powerful is it (institutional splitting) that large parts of both professions see no relevance in collaborating with the other at all. A feature of the situation is that some social scientists are afraid of technology and some engineers are afraid of getting into the human area. These fears are difficult to acknowledge and from such fear, the human aspect may get turned into pseudo-mechanical form, like “the Man-Machine Interface” or “the Human Factor.” There is also a substantial history of mutual criticism. (Klein, 1994, p. 82) 3.2. Basic Research and Applied Research or Design A major boundary that also has to be crossed is that between “basic” scientific research and “applied” practically oriented research and consulting. Not only do scientists and applied researchers often work for different organizations, but also the culture, reward TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 73 TABLE 1. Comparison of the value and problem-solving assumptions of managers and researchers (Source: F. Blackler and S. Shimmin, 1984, p. 69.) Researchers Value assumptions: • Goal • Criterion of excellence • Application Problem-solving assumptions: • Time perspective • Methodology • Viewpoint A negative result is: Managers Understanding Validity Abstract/general Accomplishment Effectiveness Concrete/specific Long-term Control inputs for valid explanation Objective Information (for further analysis) Short-term Control inputs for effective influence Involved Failure systems, and general “orientation complexes” of these two groups are often in conflict. These can range from a general bias toward “analysis” and “specialized expertise” versus “action” and “mobilizing diverse groups to achieve desired ends,” or more specific orientations toward publications and peer approval, on the one hand, and project success and client approval, on the other. A somewhat stereotyped contrast between these viewpoints is provided in Table 1. Institutional Splitting in Action. On an enlightened human-centered design project to create a computer numerically controlled lathe that built on and developed operator skills, a social scientist on the engineering–social science steering committee asked for an introduction to the technology so that she could play a more effective role. The result: “for a week (I) was treated like an undergraduate learning about metal-cutting. Among other things, I was shown a video, which is used in teaching first-year students. It was an excellent teaching aid, but within the first five minutes two things had happened: (a) the operator had been referred to as a constraint, a cost. He was never mentioned again. And (b) the content itself, the engineering, was very fascinating and absorbing. These two things together would, of course, help to set a student’s attitudes for life and be very difficult to counteract later” (Klein, 1994, p. 82). As collective designers are necessarily oriented toward achieving results in context, they need to use the experiences of others, build upon their experiences, and improve their effectiveness. In so doing, they also need to draw on theoretical knowledge; “mine, organize, and evaluate” generic methods; pursue, at a minimum, a systematic eclecticism; and develop new and effective systematic methods and approaches. The Translator Role between Scientists and Practitioners. There has always been tension between practitioners, on the one hand, and both theoreticians and researchers (scientists), on the other. Practitioners face the immediate, and often desperate, needs of their clients on a daily basis; they want to use whatever will work and use it now. Researchers very often focus on such small parts of the helping process that applications to interactions with clients are not immediately evident. Furthermore, there is a tendency 74 BADHAM AND EHN among some researchers to argue that their findings are not yet ready to be translated into practice. Finally, some scientists criticise practitioners for using methods that have no scientific basis . . . Clinical psychologists were supposed to avoid these pitfalls by being trained in the so-called scientist-practitioner model. This model has not worked very well, but we still cling to it. Therefore, there is desperate need in psychology, and especially in the helping professions, for a third role, which I have called translator. Translators stay in touch with the best in theory and research and with the needs of practitioners in their service to clients. Their role is to translate the best of theory and research into models, methods, and skills that will benefit practitioners and clients alike . . . There needs to be something of the translator in the scientist and in the practitioner. (Egan, 1994, p. xvii) 3.3. Designers and Users or Professional and Nonprofessional Worlds As design and engineering have been institutionalized in a set of specialized professions, a great divide has emerged between the formal, written, and codified knowledge and discourse of these professions and the informal, frequently spoken, and often tacit knowledge of practitioners who become the object or client of these professions and the unwitting or reluctant user of their products. This problem has been frequently commented on in the literature of workplace innovation and redesign. This issue of developer–user communication and cooperation was one of the key “language” problems recognized in the celebrated UTOPIA project to create a newspaper typesetting software program that would support and enhance the skills of craft typesetters. Multi-languages in the Utopia Project. As project leader, and the only full time employee, one of my main tasks was to facilitate a common understanding between people who spoke so many different “languages.” The difference between national languages was only a minor problem: we all pretty quickly learned to speak “Scandinavian.” The real challenge was to establish the project as a language-game where all participants could make use of their professional language. This meant developing a research and design approach where researchers with as different backgrounds as computer science and systems design, ergonomics, organization theory, sociology and history could not only speak with each other, but also—just as importantly—with the users in the design team, ie. skilled typesetters, page make-up persons, graphic artists, and experienced trade unionists. When we later on established cooperation with a vendor who was willing to try to implement our UTOPIAN specifications, the project as language-game also had to take into account the specific technical and financial language of a commercial producer. Finally, when we came to “test site” implementation, the language at that workplace, as used not only by the local graphic workers, but also by journalists and management, also affected our UTOPIAN language. (Ehn, 1988, p. 18) 4. PROFESSIONALS IN WORKPLACE INNOVATION AS POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURS Much of the reflections on collective design are about “communication,” “translation,” and “languages”—there is little attention or much less attention paid to the politics of collective design, that is, the “theories in use” employed by professionals in workplace innovation to “get things done their way” in the face of different and conflicting interests. This occurs as a necessary counterpart of all of the activities listed above, and is a phe- TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 75 nomenon that is commonly recognized by practitioners but rarely formally acknowledged or publicly analyzed and discussed (Buchanan & Badham, 1999a, 1999b). Professionals in workplace innovation often point to a general failure to adequately consider human factors in technology projects. This is commonly attributed to a lack of awareness or interest in human factors issues by design engineers, a lack of sophisticated quantitative evidence for human factors judgments, and an absence of easily useable human factors tools and methods. While some explanatory power must be given to such conditions, analysts of organizational power and politics do not regard them as the main reason for the frequent marginalization of human factors considerations. The neglect of human factors is, rather, attributed to organizational factors. This refers, in particular, to the ideas and interests of different affected groups and the distribution of power and resources between them. Perrow (1983) pointed to the lack of incentives and legitimation for human factors considerations, resulting from a number of factors. These include: lack of interest from senior management; the culture, training, and resources of design engineers; the lack of organizational authority of human factors professionals; and the relative weakness of operators or users of technology who are most immediately disadvantaged by inadequately designed technologies. Clegg (1993) observed that broader organizational, institutional, and educational systems have evolved and operate to marginalize human and organizational issues without the deliberate intervention of any particular individual or group. He points in particular to the characteristics of technology development organizations, user firms, education and training cultures, regulatory institutions, and public funding bodies. These institutions systematically foster: • disempowering attitudes toward end users and a lack of end user skills, knowledge, and organization; • technology development processes that have goals, design criteria, and control mechanisms that foster a narrow technical orientation; • technology investment and commissioning practices that systematically undervalue human factors; • an education and training system that is biased toward technical skills and creates two antagonistic scientific and humanistic cultures; and • a research and development profile that underresources and narrows the scope of human factors research. The analysis of such influences and how to address them leads professionals in workplace innovation into the broader area of organizational power and politics. For the purposes of discussion in this article, we shall look at one area of politics with which one branch of professionals in workplace innovation is involved—that of achieving sociotechnical change in a specific client organization. In this case, it is argued, the professional in workplace innovation (as collective designer) plays an ongoing iterative “integrative” role in bringing together and helping to maintain support for projects at the level of senior management, middle management, and the shopfloor. The data is drawn from three international workshops with sociotechnical professionals from the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, in which the participants were encouraged to reflect on how effective sociotechnical practitioners “get things done” within organizations. These workshops were held at the Danish Technological Institute, Nijmegen University Business School, and the University of Sheffield Institute for Work Psychology in August, October, and November 1995. Each workshop had between 15 and 25 partici- 76 BADHAM AND EHN pants and was organized by Richard Badham in collaboration with sociotechnical change practitioners in each of these institutions. While sociotechnical redesign is clearly one of the broader and more organizationally focused applications of human factors expertise, we would argue that the principles of organizational intervention and practice are generic across the human factors professions. The majority view of workshop participants was that there were a number of problems with traditional linear models of their change role. The traditional model identified the first stage as that of obtaining senior management “commitment”—“initiating,” “visioning,” and “sponsoring” change. The second stage involves middle management “driving” and “implementing” change. The final stage is taken up with persuading lower middle management and the shopfloor to become “adopters” rather than “resistors” of change. In contrast, they argued, the realities of sociotechnical change projects was more like an Figure 2 Circuit of change agency. TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 77 ongoing iterative “circuit of change” as, at different times, senior managers, middle managers, and shopfloor take on roles of visionaries, sponsors, drivers, implementers, and resisters. Senior management, for example, is not just responsible for initiating and sponsoring projects at a general level in the “start-up phase.” At various times throughout the project they will be needed to respond to problems resulting from initiatives from change agents lower down the organizational hierarchy. As Beatty and Gordon (1991) observed of advanced manufacturing technology projects, middle level “evangelist” change agents “will need approval, empowerment and active support and often protection from top management to effectively promote AMT across organizational boundaries. Otherwise they may get bogged down in ‘turf wars”’ (p. 93). In the “initiation” phases, key visioning and sponsoring activities may also be initiated from middle management or the shopfloor, as they enthusiastically champion human factors ideas and dedicate resources under their control to “push start” the change. Senior management may then be the targets of change, the enthusiastic adopters, or the subversive resistors. The professional in workplace innovation can either ignore the building of such change coalitions as the “external context” of their work, or act to support them (Pettigrew, 1976). In playing a supportive role, the formal and informal work of integrating participants from these three different worlds within the organization is an essential part of workplace innovation projects. It is quite common for the literature on workplace innovation project management to recommend placing user representatives on project teams, and project team representatives on steering committees that are intended to transcend the differences between numerous project “stakeholders.” Sociotechnical projects, for example, have often sought integration across these tiers. Suggested methods have been “deep slice” strategic and diagnostic workshops, higher level steering committees as core project teams, and issue or problem solving groups cutting across design team–user tiers (Benders, de Haan, & Bennett, 1995; Cobbenhagen & den Hertog, 1994). The key role of formal and informal integrators in forming an effective multitiered change coalition was observed in all three international workshops and has been the subject of both theoretical reflection and project team training. At the theoretical level, Beatty and Gordon (1991) stressed the key relationship between “patriarchs” and “evangelists” in change processes, and the role of cross-functional “organizational mavericks” in cutting across boundaries. This confirmed Law and Callon’s (1992) analysis of the key to project success being the effective linkage of resource providing “global networks” and detailed configuration of change in “local networks,” with project leaders as an “obligatory point of passage” for innovation politics. Ashridge Teamworking Services provides training for such project leaders. This involves integrating the “visible” project team with the required “invisible” team, and continually “managing up” as well as “managing down” in securing the successful continuation of the project (Geddes, Hastings, & Briner, 1990). One crucial area, for example, is the socialization and resocialization of senior level project champions as the “legitimacy” of any change project has a short half-life—as senior management attention turns to other matters or, as is commonly observed, they leave their posts for other jobs. Latour (1988), in his analysis of “The Prince for Machines as well as Machinations,” stresses the central role of political negotiations in this process. He argues, in particular, for the ongoing need to enroll and re-enroll workers, colleagues, staff, peers, and consumers by continually “translating” their interests in order to gain their commitment to change projects. As one of Beatty and Gordon’s (1991) “evangelists” remarked, there is 78 BADHAM AND EHN a continual need to translate project activities into the local “language” of different interests at the three different levels. As one stated, “It’s hard to preach Christianity to the Eskimos if you only speak English.” He continues to stress the difficulty of such a task, and its essential nature, “I am able to make about one good conversion a year. . . . Who you convert matters” (Beatty & Gordon, 1991, p. 87). Latour also emphasizes, however, that the content as well as the definition of the project will change in the course of development in the process of enrolling such elements. “Communication” is, crucially, linked to political negotiation in this formal and informal coalition building. Successful workplace innovation comes up against a number of technical and organizational barriers. If these are to be overcome, a change coalition has to be established to ensure that necessary circuits of change are not broken. The participants in the sociotechnical workshops saw the professional in workplace innovation as playing a key role in keeping such circuits running if they wish to see their objectives realized. A part of this activity is identifying what Hughes (1983) called “reverse salients” and Rosenberg (1982) called “bottlenecks” in the change process, that is, breakdowns in the circuit or “lags” in particular sections of the circuit that are holding back overall progress. Once these reverse salients or bottlenecks are understood, however, the task of the professional in workplace innovation is to ensure that they are addressed. While this may involve a more limited “facilitator” role, advising on problems and solutions, it often also requires playing a range of more proactive and inevitably political roles. This does not exclude but necessarily includes political and other activities necessary to facilitate the circuit of change. In this manner, the integrative actions of the professional in workplace innovation as a collective designer become interweaved with integrative political entrepreneurial activities. 5. CONCLUSION: THE PROFESSIONAL BRICOLEUR In order to enhance their ability to influence technology design and implementation, professionals in workplace innovation need to learn about and work to improve their understanding of how to operate effectively in both the design and implementation dimensions of change processes (Parker & Wall, 1998, p. 137). It is the argument of this article that a systematic improvement of professional capabilities in this area is required to help address the many barriers to effective human factors interventions (Badham, Couchman, & McLoughlin, 1997). This improvement, it has been further argued, should be based on three main “planks” in a particular self-understanding of these professions. First, professionals in workplace innovation should become more acquainted with their role as “reflective practitioners.” There is now considerable evidence and theoretical support for the simple observation that scientific knowledge and methods cannot be simply “applied” or “diffused” in practical settings. They require configuration, tailoring, or translation by individuals or groups whose capabilities and legitimacy span the general and the specific, the theoretical and the particular, the development and the user contexts. There is inevitably a degree of tinkering or bricoleur activity in tailoring universal principles or generic methods to local circumstances. Professionals in workplace innovation need to understand this fact and continuously reflect on and improve their practices in this area. In part, initial training may support this, but it can be significantly developed and refined only through reflective practice. Second, professionals in workplace innovation require a better understanding of and ability to act within the complex collective design activities of which they are a part. This TINKERING WITH TECHNOLOGY 79 does not mean that they have to act as a heroic leader of the collective design process. It does mean, however, that they need to understand the complex nature of collective design, and both understand and promote a more realistic and sociologically informed model of the design process. Without such an informed view, it is much more likely that workplace innovation projects will be overwhelmed by miscommunication and conflict among designers and a lack of communication and cooperation between designers and users. One example of this was recently outlined by Okamura, Orlikowski, Fujimoto, and Yates (1998). In the case of computer supported cooperative work systems, there is substantial evidence that a central tailoring and translating role is played in implementation by what they term mediators, that is, “individuals who intervene deliberately and with organisational authorisation in the ongoing use of technology within its context of use” (Okamura et al., p. 2). They continue to argue that workplace designers—if they wish to produce useable and effective systems—need to understand, advise, and assist such mediation activities rather than restricting design to “workshop” activities. Third, professionals in workplace innovation need to improve their political understanding and skills if they are to be effective actors in technology design and implementation. Pettigrew (1975) observed that “Specialists do not merely advise, they persuade, negotiate and exercise the power they can mobilise” (p. 15). In so doing, they utilize five power sources: (a) expertise, (b) control over information, (c) political access and sensitivity, (d) assessed stature, and (e) the amount and kind of group support given to the specialist by his or her colleagues in his or her own and related specialist groups. The professional in workplace innovation, like other specialists, needs to establish credibility if he or she is to be effective. This inevitably involves anticipating the varying needs, expectations, and reference groups of different groups of executives and specialists involved in or affected by a workplace innovation project. Those specialists who work on their own tasks, become preoccupied with the intricacies of their own expertise, and only see clients when task issues are involved are unlikely to be able to anticipate such needs very well. Successful specialists develop multiplex relationships with other significant partners or clients in a project, and succeed in demonstrating competence in areas salient to the other actors. Buchanan and Badham (1999) argued that such “power skills” should be part of the skills of all professional innovators. As Pfeffer documented, most organizations have great difficulty in just “getting things done,” and this inevitably affects the success of more uncertain and complex projects such as those attempting to systematically and explicitly address human and technology factors in workplace innovation. In general terms, Pfeffer argued that it is the political ability to mobilize “enabling power” to achieve the goals of projects that is often a crucial problem. “Until,” argued Pfeffer, “we are willing to come to terms with organisational power and influence, and admit that the skills of getting things done are as important as the skills of figuring out what to do, our organisations will fall further and further behind” (1992, p. 13). Given the substantial barriers that exist to addressing human factors considerations in technology design and implementation, the professional in workplace innovation neglects this political dimension at his or her peril. The stress on the reflective, collective, and political nature of professional tinkering or bricoleuring should not be seen as antithetical to professionalism and science. It should, rather, be associated with a different understanding of both professionals and scientists. Professional training, accreditation, communication, and cooperation can support improved collective design skills and practices. The outcome is professionals who are able to act more effectively as reflective practitioners in collective design processes that are 80 BADHAM AND EHN social and political in character as well as technical. This inevitably involves a degree of ad hoc “tinkering” or “bricoleuring.” A professional bricoleur is one who admits to and understands the necessarily ad hoc and context-specific nature of much of their activity but also systematically improves their abilities in this area and mentors others in these activities. In this task, professionals in workplace innovation are not acting as rational designers instrumentally applying expert rules and procedures. Scientific languages and new methods and techniques may enhance the effectiveness and ease of activity and education in bricoleuring and tinkering processes. In playing this role, however, they should be understood as bridging mechanisms and boundary objects. In this instance, they are means for facilitating communication and cooperation in the design process, not the source of scientific truth or the application of purely instrumental knowledge. Whether or not this view of the professional in workplace innovation as collective designer and political entrepreneur can be effectively communicated and work as a new design language is a matter of conjecture. One thing is certain, however, the alternative has not been highly successful. The history of developing and defending the legitimacy of the workplace innovation professions by their “scientific” status and expertise, and subordinating the innovation design process to scientific rules and technical procedures, has not been a triumphant one. 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