THE DISCURSIVE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL-TECHNICAL DIVIDE - THE EXAMPLEOF INFORMATION-SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

The social and technical are commonly defined in opposition to each ot her. Yet technology practitioners are often quite comfortable with the idea that the technical is constitutively social. Drawing on an ethno graphic study of a computerised information systems development projec t, this paper examines various usages of notions of 'technical'. Attem pts to situate the study at the 'technical core' of the project were m et with a series of rebuffs. 'Technical' talk is to be understood as a categorising device which does boundary work. Technical talk invokes and performs a disjunction between networks of social relationships an d stipulates a moral order with associated norms for acceptance and tr ansition. The difficulty of penetrating the intelligibility of technic al talk is understandable as a struggle in familiarising oneself with the routine social actions of a separate community. In addition, the p rivate sphere of the technical is often distanced in time. The costs i nvolved in journeying into the future are analogous to those of penetr ating alien cultures. Ideas of progress and advance are often associat ed with the invocation of 'the technical'. These connote a notion of t iming which reinforces the distance and difference of - and hence depi cts the costs involved in penetrating - removed sets of social relatio nships.