Capital markets integration: A sociotechnical study of the development of a cross-border securities settlement system

Digital information and communications technologies (ICTs) are transforming capital markets. The integration of capital markets is seen as one such area of transformation. The research presented in this article studies one integration initiative that took shape around the proposed combination of a number of key European securities marketplaces through the development of a cross-border settlement system. Taking a sociotechnical approach, the research presents the positions of the key actants identified in relation to key controversies regarding the development of the settlement system and shows how the relations between the controversies and the positions of the actants involved in them evolve. By examining the role of ICTs in the evolution of these relations, the study seeks to illuminate the complex causalities between the social and technical aspects of cross-border capital market integration. The article argues that in addition to enabling the interconnecting of an expanded set of transacting parties, ICTs bring important cognitive dimensions that enable the inspiration, planning, and foresight necessary for both developers and market participants to formulate their plans, strategies, and positions vis-à-vis the expanded and transformed marketplace arrangements

Towards a Semiotics of Machines: the Participation of Texts and Documents in the Design and Development of an Information Technology-Based Market Device

Towards a Semiotics of Machines: the Participation of Texts and Documents in the Design and Development of an Information Technology-Based Market Devic

Innovation in the making: performative dimensions of the innovation process

A processual ontology has penetrated the understanding of many organizational phenomena, such as innovation. Contemporary considerations on innovation have focused on its development over time, as a journey taken by organizational actors leading to an open range of outcomes. Nonetheless, such perspectives do not fully capture the processual nature of innovation: they still rely on a vision of actors involved as faits acomplis. Along these lines, the paper offers an alternative way to look at an evolving phenomenon – innovation - in process terms. Our research enriches contemporary investigations on innovation by introducing the concepts of enrolment and posthumanist performativity in the analysis of innovation, and by empirically exploring the entanglements of matter of different kinds and their influence on the making of innovation. Such intra-activities are illustrated through the use of data derived from an ethnographic study in a pharmaceutical not for profit research centre

Explication and the changing of market participants’ subjectivities in securities market integration

This paper addresses one of the central premises of the concept of market devices, namely, how the subjectivities of economic agents are (re)configured by market devices (Callon et al., 2007). While the market devices research has addressed how markets behave when devices are incorporated into clusters, we shift research attention to the question of how market devices relate to how markets come about. In particular, how technological and human actors interact and shape one another during the processes through which markets are (re)configured

Objects and their participation in the interdisciplinary design and development of computer games

This paper investigates the role of boundary objects in the interdisciplinary collaborative processes found in computer games development. It draws on data from an in-depth case study in a computer games studio that explores boundary objects in relation to the compelling, sensory and entertainment- centred game-playing practices that inform computer games design and development. Sensory user experience and aesthetic considerations – of primary importance in computer games development – are becoming increasingly significant in the design and development of many other kinds of software and information systems. For this reason developments in the design and production of computer games have wider implications for other software and information systems settings and provide valuable insights into processes of collaboration that bridge cultural and aesthetic as well as technical forms of expertise. The paper seeks to provide insights into how objects contribute to such collaboration, with attention focusing especially on how game developers devise objects that span boundaries and draw on these in their collaboration. Through its focus on the material production and practices of computer games development, the research presented also seeks to contribute to the theoretical treatment of interdisciplinary collaborative working in software design and development via a critical assessment of the concept of boundary objects in the setting being studied

The material production of virtuality: trials of explication in the design and development of computer games

This article seeks to contribute to the development of a relationship between digital game studies and science and technology studies by studying the design and development of computer games at three leading UK studios in the light of what MacKenzie refers to “the material production of virtual ity” (MacKenzie 2007). The article examines the common ground in trea tment of ‘the virtual’ and ‘virtuality’ in science and technology studies and studies of material culture and the importance placed in the relationship between ‘virtuality’ and ‘materiality’ as “a dialectical process of imagination followed by its realisation” (Miller 2005) for the “expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms” (Miller 2005). The article explores the concept of ‘explication’ as a crucial part of this dialectical process through which previously unmapped and unformatted aspect s of the world are articulated to the formalisms on which social life depends and through which certain of its features become gradually more explicit and ultimately knowable socially

Material Practices of Coordination and Innovation in the Design and Development of Computer Games

Taking as its starting point the growing interest in organizational studies regarding the role of objects and the material (Engestrom and Blackler 2005), this article investigates the role of objects and artefacts in the coordination involved in the development of computer games. The article draws on a comparative study of three leading UK computer games design and development studios the aim of which was to capture an in-depth understanding of the way in which the developers studied create, leverage, and alter shared objects in this work and describe the interactions of the developers both with these objects and with one another in their work. Rather than seeing formal and emergent coordination as antithetical, the article explores the link between formal and emergent types of coordination encountered in the development of computer games to show the important role objects and artefacts play in making this dynamic dialogical relationship work. Furthermore, the article explores, through this link between formal and emergent coordination, how many difficult to represent experiential and aesthetic features of the games are rendered explicit and captured in order to become addressable through the existing formal coordination practices of the studios and how contingencies and previously under-determined elements of the games under development are dealt with