Organizational Ethnography and the Art of Judgment in-the-Moment

This paper responds to the conveners’ call on exploring and advancing Organizational Ethnography (OE) as a paradigm for the organizational sciences. This sub-theme is linked through my empirical study of senior managers in international development organizations and how they make sense of using their judgment ‘in-the-moment’ in the context of their leadership roles and work environments. I adopt an “ethnographic orientation” (Watson, 2011, p.216) and emphasize the need for a highly reflexive approach in an ethnographer’s role as making judgments throughout the challenging processes of doing “fieldwork, headwork and textwork” (Van Maanen, 2011, p.218). Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing judgment and decision making literature from a social constructionist perspective by drawing linkages to judgment as a co-constructed phenomenon. How senior managers understand their judgment-making in situations ‘in-the-moment’ is an understudied area thus far and even scarcer in the context of international development organizations. Methodologically, the ethnographic and radically reflexive approach taken addresses a gap in the literature, builds awareness and raises in importance examining the ‘multiple selves’ (Reinharz, 1997) of the ethnographer. How I influenced my research and was influenced by it as both subject and object were key to my findings. In addition to the sub-theme call, this paper also links to the overarching Colloquium theme, ‘Bridging Continents, Cultures and Worldviews’, by connecting the cultures and co- constructed views of the researcher and practitioners. The collaborative, ethnographic approach taken was a unique way to get ‘up close and personal’ in understanding what judgment meant to senior leaders in the two participating UK-headquartered organizations. With international development missions in African nations, the senior leaders continuously constructed their own bridges across borders in their financing, operations and communications between their team members and external stakeholders located in multiple countries, reliant on virtual offices and mobile and Internet technology to stay connected. My judgment as an ethnographer was necessary to determine how to best embrace this way of ‘working’ during fieldwork and become another type of stakeholder to them. I will begin with a brief theoretical and methodological background of my exploratory study, identifying the gap in the literature and how my study fills it. Then I will outline the methodology, methods, data collection and analysis and findings. Finally, I will conclude with the challenges of ‘doing organizational ethnography’ inside small international development organizations and the contributions made to advance OE as a unique way to study the social phenomenon of judgment ‘in-the moment’

Young children learning with mobile devices: Research on design and implementation

The increasing growth and usage of mobile devices, such as tablets and iPads, by young children has not yet been accompanied by systematic research about the effects they have on children's learning and the conditions that facilitate or hinder learning and engagement. As a result, only few empirically-based guidelines exist to guide parents, educators, and application (app) designers when choosing or designing apps for young children, often leading to non-evidence-based decisions, or the design of apps with little educational value. This symposium aims to bring together researchers from Australia, the UK and USA to discuss what evidence exist about the learning potential of mobile devices and apps for young children and how it could be used to inform relevant stakeholders

Activity Theory Analysis of Heart Failure Self-Care

The management of chronic health conditions such as heart failure is a complex process emerging from the activity of a network of individuals and artifacts. This article presents an Activity Theory-based secondary analysis of data from a geriatric heart failure management study. Twenty-one patients' interviews and clinic visit observations were analyzed to uncover eight configurations of roles and activities involving patients, clinicians, and others in the sociotechnical network. For each configuration or activity pattern, we identify points of tension and propose guidelines for developing interventions for future computer-supported healthcare systems

Pass the Ball: Enforced Turn-Taking in Activity Tracking

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users' own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: social-relatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to "practices" of tracking; and look within and beyond "collaboration" and "competition" in the design of activity trackers

Motivations for OpenLearn: the Open University's Open Content Initiative

This short paper is a contribution to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expert workshop to help identify "motivations, benefits and barriers for institutions producing open educational resources". The motivations are examined by looking at the reasons behind the launch by the Open University in the UK of a web based collection of open educational resources, OpenLearn. OpenLearn launched on October 25th 2006 and reflects an initiative backed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Open University to develop a learning environment (LearningSpace) and an accompanying educator environment (LabSpace) giving free access to material derived from Open University courses. There are of course many reasons for the taking part in open educational resources and so this paper considers motivations in community, organisational, technical and economic terms.The paper was initially prepared for the OECD experts meeting on Open Educational Resources 26-27 October 2006 in Barcelona, Spain

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

USING ALGORITHMIC NUDGES TO SAVE ENERGY AND WATER: A PROPOSAL FOR A LONGITUDINAL FIELD EXPERIMENT

Energy and water consumption are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. While facilitating conservation behaviors in private households can help to mitigate these emissions, the effects of such mitigations are often indirect and delayed. Presenting meaningful feedback about consumption can help to make clear the positive effects of conservation behaviors to those who undertake them. We propose a large-scale field experiment to increase energy and water conservation through algorithmic econudges. We use smart metering data to provide transparency, social references, and information about the environmental effects of conservation behavior. The proposed research is planned in a longitudinal design for 8 weeks in the winter of 2022/23 in Germany. The findings are expected to contribute to scholarly research on nudging and practice as well as to housing providers and policymakers who are interested in green nudging

The Cognitive Atlas: Employing Interaction Design Processes to Facilitate Collaborative Ontology Creation

The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge-building project that aims to develop an ontology that characterizes the current conceptual framework among researchers in cognitive science and neuroscience. The project objectives from the beginning focused on usability, simplicity, and utility for end users. Support for Semantic Web technologies was also a priority in order to support interoperability with other neuroscience projects and knowledge bases. Current off-the-shelf semantic web or semantic wiki technologies, however, do not often lend themselves to simple user interaction designs for non-technical researchers and practitioners; the abstract nature and complexity of these systems acts as point of friction for user interaction, inhibiting usability and utility. Instead, we take an alternate interaction design approach driven by user centered design processes rather than a base set of semantic technologies. This paper reviews the initial two rounds of design and development of the Cognitive Atlas system, including interactive design decisions and their implementation as guided by current industry practices for the development of complex interactive systems

Mobile technology in complex emergencies: A study of digital data collection in the Norwegian relief sector.

Master's thesis in Societal Safety and Risk ManagementThis thesis presents a study of digital data collection amongst the five largest humanitarian relief organizations in Norway – with data from each actor. More specially, it examines the potentials and challenges in the implementation and diffusion of mobile technologies for the Norwegian NGO relief sector. The term mobile technology is used to describe the various mobile devices used for data collection including mobile phones, tablet computers, laptop computers, and so on. Within the confines of this study, social media was largely excluded. In this thesis, an integrated diffusion/implementation model is presented and applied in the analysis of how mobile technology spread (diffusion) and are applied (implementation). Integrated into this model, are components of sensemaking (ambiguity & uncertainty) and different images of decision making in relief work. The purpose of this model is to explore and highlight the uses and experiences of mobile technology for data collection amongst the different organizations in presenting the matters of diffusion and implementation. The findings suggest that mobile technology is a recognized humanitarian innovation that is diffusing within the Norwegian relief sector. Data collection is becoming faster, cheaper, more efficient, and is providing higher quality data with better oversight. At the same time, with the ease of data collection presents the challenges of data overload, competing solutions, administrative constraints and making sense of the data that is collected. In conjunction with these findings, the thesis concludes that mobile technology is improving the efficiency for collecting information but is not a solution that is effective in all situations and all places