Situated Knowledge and Practical Reasoning as generalized Usage Models

posted by Eleanor Wynn on January 22, 2007

As an anthropologist and researcher of work practice and behavior for 30 years I get a little concerned when usage models are boiled down to roles and personas. I do have a topic about drugs, narratives and social networks but I have to postpone it. There is always something to talk about later, being that life is one long stream of conversation. So, just for those of you who are tempted to lump all “people” stuff into one category, there are differences in how disciplines approach the topic.

Psychological approaches.

Most commonly assumed is the psychological approach, which looks at people as individuals either through emotion or cognition. Subdivision: social psychology—still about individuals. Lately, because of the wonderful work of Cziktsentmihalyi (yes I do spell it from memory) on “flow” states, psychologists have stopped looking for sick, repressed, infantile, concealed motives and such, and look for good stuff like creativity, joy and achievement. They call this “positive psychology.” Not that I am opinionated or anything, but generalized positive psychology is a wheel reinvention of maddening proportions to us other social scientists, as psychology seems to have the better PR machine.

Anthropology and sociology have always asked the question: “How do societies, tribes, clans make their lives work?” not “what delusions do they have?’ Psychologists, feel free to comment. So, work on flow states is great. Suddenly discovering that people are capable by the rest of the psychology field—not too literate. Read some anthropology.

Social social science

Anthropology and sociology have been going on basically since the enlightenment, gaining ground in the 19th century with the work of field anthropologists and historical sociologists. There was a period of organizational anthropology in the 50s that gave us the Hawthorne effect. Anthropological studies of computing and work have being going on for thirty years, actually 33 years. I know, I was there. A lot of this work is based on concepts like “situated cognition”, “practical reasoning”, “social construction of knowledge”, “negotiated order” and more….The unit of analysis here is the group or the organization, not the individual. Or it is the network. Or the actor and the network together as a scale-free form of action.

Personas and marketing constructs: for individual consumers not interacting groups

Where does “persona” fit into the above? Nowhere. Persona implies that an actor, a person, has fixed properties, set roles and can be characterized like a consumer in the marketplace, a demographic. The older sociological concept of “norms” is kind of close to this concept but is no longer particularly respected. The idea of personas probably does work in the marketplace. I personally responded viscerally to the wonderful ad produced for a retirement planning service using Dennis Hopper. You may have seen it. Throwing away the “flower power” notion and endorsing “powerful dreams”. I am definitely the persona that ad is directed at; and the marketing people for that company did a really good job of grabbing me.

People at work

But that is not the same as the me at work. At work I am interacting with literally hundreds of other people of all demographics, with other agendas, with stated and unstated corporate goals, with results I need to produce and yes impressions I need to create, with tools I use etc. All of this together is an actor-network. The people, goals and tools are all “actors” because they influence the behavior of the network and are influenced by it. Within that actor-network I lose a lot of my individual demographic, role and “persona” traits in order to go with the flow of what the network is doing, needs my response to, etc.

Ethnography is more than a “method”

This is the way researchers in the truly social as opposed to “behavioral” sciences, look at people. What has happened is that the design disciplines discovered positive psychology, and they discovered ethnography as a “method” without adopting the premise behind ethnography: social contex is everything. I think the current Usage Model efforts and specifically the work on personas is OK for the marketplace of individual choosers. Consumers do make choices according to a demographic they fill and also according to what their friends are doing; a kind of diffuse social influence, but not necessarily an interlocking one.

Friends, do try to be aware of this. You already know it. An engineering manager I have worked with over the years said it so succinctly: “engineers are constantly negotiating over their work.” The output is socially constructed among the group, that is: engineering artifacts are social artifacts. Whole is greater than the sum, etc. If this were not the case we could automate the whole company and forget about people altogether! When we think about people in the workplace we need to think about them in the larger context, not just as paper dolls that you put new clothes on, or attach new tools that fit their size of paper hands. Ciao for now

tagged: actor-network, ethnography, flow, people, persona, psychology, social construction, sociology, usage