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LANGUAGE ACTION PERSPECTIVE, ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS AND THE THEORY OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITY – A COMPARISON José Cordeiro and Joaquim Filipe Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal, Rua do Vale de Chaves, Estefanilha, 2910-761 Setúbal, Portugal [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract This paper presents some key concepts and underlying assumptions of three current fields of research: the Theory of Organized Activity, Organizational Semiotics and Language Action Perspective. All these fields are related by a human/social/organizational common view of Information Systems. In our analysis and, within Organizational Semiotics field Ronald Stamper’s theory was chosen, while within Language Action Perspective the DEMO approach was selected. A brief comparison among these three theories is presented. Finally, a simple proposal for an integration theory using the key concepts of the above theories is proposed.

1. INTRODUCTION Computer systems failure is stated by many researchers as one of the relevant problems in information systems (IS). Some of them estimate software failure rate around 40-50% (Stamper, 2000). System requirements rather than technical aspects seem to be the main problem. This has led many researchers to consider human and social factors regarding IS and to base technical solutions on theories that account for these factors. This paper is part of a work to establish a new analysis and design method for the development of computer applications to be used in IS that takes into account the real world of people acting in their organized and social life. The emphasis is put on how to increase people communication, coordination, cognition, and decision capabilities by using computers. In this paper an outline of the key ideas of three ‘socio-technical’ theories on IS, namely, the Language Action Perspective, Organizational Semiotics and the Theory of Organized Activity is presented. A brief comparison on some of their main concepts it is also presented, together with their possible integration in a general theory. The choice of these theories is based on a research program, which intends to create development methodologies for computer support to organizational activities from a socio-technical approach of IS. The chosen theories share in common several conceptual ideas where the human/individual and their relations are the centre of the living of all organizations (business or others). 1

In the next three sections each of these theories is analyzed and some of their main concepts are presented. Section 5 looks for a comparison of the theories, section 6 shows their possible integration and, finally some concluding remarks and future work are presented in section 7.

2. THE THEORY OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITY 2.1. Introduction The Theory of Organized Activity (TOA) was created by Anatol Holt (Holt, 1997). In his book he proposed a new theory of IS and organizations that is based on human (organized) activities. “Like language, organized activity exists wherever and whenever people exist” (Holt 1997, p.1). According to his view computers and information technology is just a supporting tool for human activities. Together with this theory a ‘vision’ of its application was presented using two computer applications descriptions, PULSAR and IGO, outlining two possible approaches for, respectively, group and individual coordination within activities. To model and to plan activities a special language – DIPLAN – based on Petri Nets was also proposed. 2.2. Key concepts TOA is based on ‘human’ activities which occur within every organization or business system. Human action or act is the key element for the structuring and planning of all activity processes. TOA builds on top of a metatheory: the Theory of Units (TU). This theory defines the concept of a unit that is associated with every action or thing. A unit is something that the members of a group (or community) bound together by an organized activity identify in common. As an example most programmers will agree on what means ‘inheritance’. For this group within their activity ‘inheritance’ is a unit. This common understanding is possible because there is a criterion (explicit or not) behind each unit that is maintained by this group or community and it can be used to identify realizations of that unit. So, interpretation of any unit should produce a collective meaning. Any and all activities in TOA are carried out in terms of their units, which could be special terms, or actions or things. TOA is itself expressed through its own units and it is formalized through basis statements as those showed in Table 1. TU main ideas are introduced by basis statements 1 and 2. In TOA the human act or action plays a central role as part of any and all organized activities. Statement 3 introduces the (human) action as the unit of human effort. All actions have a performer, who is always a person. However any action has another performer: the Organizational Entity (OE). This is because by performing an action a person acts as an individual and as an actor in the role of an OE. For example, an action performed by a President of a company (an OE) is also performed by the person who plays that role (statements 4 and 5). Actions are driven by the interests of their performers, whom carry also the responsibility of those actions. In this logic 2

machines do not perform actions because neither responsibility nor interest can be attributed to a machine. TOA BASIS STATEMENTS

1. Every social group (or community) bound together by organized activities has its UNITS. 2. Associated with every UNIT of a community is a CRITERION which this community maintains – a CRITERION by which its members decide whether a given something is, or is not, a REALIZATION of the UNIT. 3. An ACTION is the UNIT of (human) effort. 4. Every ACTION is doubly performed – ORGANIZATIONALLY and PERSONALLY. Correspondingly, there are two types of ACTION PERFORMERS: ORGANIZATIONAL ENTITIES, and PERSONS. 5. A PERSON assumes a RESPONSIBILITY by becoming an ACTOR, (…) who plays a role in an ORGANIZATIONAL ENTITY.

6. ACTIONS are driven by the INTERESTS of their PERFORMERS. PERSONS have PERSONAL INTERESTS; ORGANIZATIONAL ENTITIES have ORGANIZATIONAL INTERESTS. 7. To make an organized activity efficient and effective requires bringing all INTERESTS involved – PERSONAL as well as ORGANIZATIONAL – into proper alignment with one another, in every imaginable combination. 8. BODIES are material UNITS 9. Every ACTION INVOLVES at least one BODY; every BODY is ENVOLVED in at least one ACTION. 10. BODIES extend in space; ACTIONS extend in time. 11. The BODIES which an ACTION INVOLVES are, together, called the THEATER of the ACTION; the ACTIONS which INVOLVE a particular BODY are, together, called the LIFE of the BODY. Table 1 Some important TOA basis statements transcribed from (Holt, 1997)

Besides actions also physical elements or ‘bodies’ are building blocks of an OA. It should be noted that a person is also a body in an OA. Statements 9, 10 and, 11 establish the relations between action and bodies, defining also the related spatial and temporal dimensions of any activity. take

are effort lumps

Time

ACTIONS perform

perform

are involved in

involve

PERSONS

possess

ORGANIZATIONAL ENTITIES

possess

BODIES

material lumps

Space take

are

Figure 1 – Organized Activity Kernel

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Figure 1 shows the OA kernel that summarizes the above concepts. This kernel relies in two dichotomies: persons/OE and actions/bodies. As previously mentioned TOA also defines a graphical language – DIPLAN – to express action plans. Plans are used to describe OAs in an organized artefactual setting.

3. ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS 3.1. Introduction According to (Liu et al, 2001) Organizational Semiotics (OS) was first introduced by a research community with the intention to inquire into the use of information in organizational contexts. Semiotic concepts and methods were to be used as a common ground1. In this paper we restrict our analysis to one of the most well known OS theory and perhaps the most used, which was proposed by Ronald Stamper2. Stamper presented a Semiotic Framework where information and other IS key concepts were analyzed from different perspectives. This analysis is based on the ‘Sign’ notion originated within Semiotics3. This analysis should be able to produce a better understanding of IS and its ideas. Having semiotics and the sign concept implicitly omnipresent in his theory two analysis methods - norm analysis and semantic analysis – were introduced in order to, respectively, capture norms and elicit and specify business requirements. 3.2. Key concepts “Business is getting things done by using information. All information is ‘carried’ by signs…” (Stamper, 1996 p.350). The sign which carries information is the semiotic sign and make up the basic support for the OS view of IS. This view is presented through six levels that make the Semiotic

Human Information Functions

SOCIAL WORLD – beliefs, expectations, commitments, contracts, law, culture, ... PRAGMATICS - intentions, communication, conversations, negotiations, … SEMANTICS - meanings, propositions, validity, truth, signification, denotations,…

SYNTACTICS - formal structure, language, logic, data, records, deduction, software, files, … EMPIRICS - pattern, variety, noise, entropy, channel capacity, redundancy, efficiency, codes, …

The IT Platform

PHYSICAL WORLD - signals, traces, physical distinctions, hardware, component density, speed, economics, …

Figure 2 - Stamper's Semiotic Ladder

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A good reference is (Liu, 2000). See for reference (Stamper, 1973), (Stamper, 1996) and, (Stamper, 2000) 3 A good introduction on Semiotics and Signs can be found in (Chandler, 2002)

2

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Framework depicted in figure 2. In this framework we can identify other important key concepts of OS. We see the separation of the human information functions and the IT platform, revealing the notion that in OS the real IS is a human system where the IT platform is under as a support to human organizations. Concerning the human information functions this ladder proposes 3 levels: semantic, pragmatic and social world. Within OS, IS are social systems and these human levels reflect the individual and social character of any IS. This introduces a new paradigm oriented towards the needs of organizations, which “concentrates on the meaning of signs, the purposes for which they are used and the social consequences they produce” (Stamper, 1996 p.364). Another key concept of Stamper’s OS is the concept of ‘Norm’. In OS, Norms are what generally guides our behavior, thinking and acting. Social Psychology provides the following classification of norms, and each norm type is related to an attitude type, as indicated below: • • • •

Behavioral – to govern the action of people (deontic attitude) Evaluative – to judge about something (axiologic attitude) Cognitive – to form beliefs about the world (epistemic attitude) Perceptual – to mold our perception (ontological attitude)

This classification can be used to define a general norm structure (Stamper, 1973): IF condition THEN norm-subject ADOPTS attitude TOWARD something Norms don’t need to be explicit, as written laws, rules, or regulations, can be broken and usually act as a ‘field of forces’ in our everyday living. Norms are shared and common to people belonging to a particular culture, religion, tradition, family or even organization, activity or business. These particular ‘clusters’ of ‘communities’ create the ‘information-fields’ in which people live and belong to and where a ‘system of norms’ is present. Within each field we find different meanings and intentions for words and other semiotic signs. Individuals belong simultaneously to different information fields, obeying to different norms and interpreting different signs according to the appropriate field. This OS ‘information-field’ concept defines a new paradigm more suitable for analysis and design of IS. A Norm Analysis Method is provided by OS to capture these norms.

4. LANGUAGE-ACTION PERSPECTIVE 4.1. Introduction Most attention and consequent work on what would be called Language-Action Perspective (LAP) was originated by the book of Winograd and Flores (Winograd and Flores, 1986). This book presented and proposed a design of computer systems based on a linguistic model of conversation 5

for action. In this model linguistic action is seem as the essential human activity. Computers would play the role of mediators and facilitators of these activities. Within LAP mainly three theoretical approaches and methods were proposed4: • • •

Action Workflow Dynamic Essential Model of Organization (DEMO) Business as Action game Theory (BAT)

Without intending to reduce the importance of the other two methods and because all of them are mainly based on identical theoretical foundations we opted to use the DEMO approach in our comparison. 4.2. Main concepts LAP as presented by Winograd & Flores (W&F) is essentially a proposal for a computer-based system design based in language-acts as proposed on James Austin’s speech-act theory (Austin, 1962), which was formalized in part by John Searle (Searle, 1969). A language-act may be explained as the utterance of a sentence seen as an action. In this case it is called a performative utterance having this general form given here in this rough definition: When we say something (a locutionary act), with the intention or the effect to change the world (or acting on the world) in some way, we are performing an illocutionary act, being those changes perlocutionary acts. Searle’s formalization of illocutionary acts leads to a distinction within a

Figure 3 - The basic conversation for action

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See for example for information and references about these methods and their models (Goldkuhl and Röstlinger, 1999).

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sentence of an illocutionary point, an illocutionary force and its propositional contents. He categorizes illocutionary points in five categories5: • • • • •

Assertives – commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition Directives – attempt to get the hearer to do something Commissives – commit the speaker to some future course of action Expressives – express a psychological state about a state of affairs Declarations – bring about the correspondence between the propositional content of the speech act and the reality

To apply these ideas W&F suggests a model for a conversation for action (figure 3), where a network of conversation states connected by speech-acts (mainly requests and commissives) permits to walk through paths directed towards cooperative action. To achieve the desired goals the path should go mostly through ‘assertive and commissive‘ speech-acts lines. 4.3. Demo approach Demo follows the same theoretical guidelines proposed by W&F, seeing communication as doing things. A communicative action based perspective is used to model organizations, themselves formulated as a ‘network of commitments’ or ‘networks of communicating people’. DEMO defines the elements of a communicative act, with an illocutionary part and a propositional part that is represented formally by the OER6 notation: : : : : Communicative-acts examples are called ‘conversations’ in DEMO. Connecting these elements we form the basic building block of every

Figure 4 - The basic pattern of a business transaction

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In (Winograd and Flores, 1986) OER stands for Order, Execution, Result and is used later in the Business transaction

concept

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business system – the business transaction - as defined in DEMO. A business transaction is showed in figure 4 and is composed by an Order phase, an execution phase and a result phase. The first and last phases are seen as performative conversations and are used to reach an agreement respectively, on the request and on its satisfaction. The middle phase is the necessary (objective) action associated with the request.

5. LAP, OS, TOA COMPARISON 5.1. Introduction When looking through the main concepts and basic assumptions of these three theories we found a similar perspective of the world and how it is experienced. In these theories the human being plays the central role. According to these ideas individuals together with their relationships are to be seemed as the kernel of any business, organization or activity. An IS should be understood as a network of people where connections are essentially human relationships established by actions, being linguistic or not. Another important issue is that there is always present a social dimension where individuals are related to each other and to their environment. We can advocate a constructivist perspective of the world underlying these theories. When analyzing the instruments to carry out business processes we found linguistic and material actions conducted by humans. Although OS permits the use of non-human agents, it advocates the necessity of a human to assist and carry the responsibility for the action. This responsibility factor is present and required by the three theories, and it is always assigned to a person. Also an authority factor is added by DEMO and OS. Besides these common assumptions of centered human based information systems or social systems, there is another common concern about people, their actions and their acting environment: awareness and grounding of the context. Where TOA uses the activity and its members as a defining context for any performed action, OS defines an information field as the context to which everyone is subjected in a world of norms and social behaviors. LAP, on the other hand relates to context by specifying an individual and social ‘background’ which takes into account each one’s preunderstanding and past experience together with the elements of a present situation. These ideas within LAP are directly associated with meaning because the ‘background’ is a major intervenient on the meaning-creation activity. “Meaning is created by an active listening, in which the linguistic form triggers interpretation, rather than conveying information” (Winograd and Flores 1986, p.57). This view in LAP leads to another two important and arguing concepts within IS: meaning and information. Bounded by context in the three theories, ‘meaning’ in TOA is shared, dynamic and socially created, being established by the TOA unit concept, whereas in OS ‘meaning’ is imported from semiotics through the sign concept. Using 8

semiotics a TOA unit is a socially established sign, whose meaning can be defined and validated (socially) through a criterion. Regarding ‘Information’, it is obtained by interpretation in LAP and OS and carried by language (in a broad sense) in LAP and by signs in OS. TOA has a different and interesting view of information: “… it is always carried by bodies”, and it “… is a kind of human resource, as essential as energy”, which “ end-use is in the making of decisions” (Holt 1997, p.130-131). This would mean that it is useless, except for the making of decisions. One last common and important aspect of these theories is the role of technology as supportive to business systems or organizations, or else to people as they are understood. Concerning differences, they occur specially through the use/planning of human acting within any business or organization. LAP and DEMO are based on language (as) actions for conducting business operation leaving material actions to a secondary level. In this case TOA is strongly based on (human) actions of any kind involving always some material resource (a body). OS uses agents for doing the action according to a well formed formula where there would be present a normative factor. However we should note that in DEMO, the Business Transaction can have an embedded material action in its execution phase. Even though these apparent differences among these theories we can find several possible complementarities. This will be shown in next section. A simple comparison table between some of the mentioned concepts and others is presented in table 2.

Focus

Primary building block Context boundary Instruments for executing business processes Business processes executors

TOA Human (organized) activities

OS Organizations and semiotics

Units

Signs

Activity

Information field

Human action

Agent actions within a normative scope

Person/OE

Agent

LAP Organizations as networks of commitments (or communicating people – DEMO) Speech-act (LAP) Business transactions (DEMO) Human(s) pre-understanding and actual situational context Human linguistic action (LAP) Human objective action (DEMO)

Actor

Table 2 - Some comparisons between general concepts of TOA, OS and LAP

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6. A POSSIBLE INTEGRATION OF THE THREE THEORIES 6.1. Introduction In this section we would like to propose an integration of LAP, OS and TOA. Our main goal it is not one of the draft definition of a general theory which would integrate the three previous ones but to show this integration possibility with a simple proposition. Further work will be necessary to derive a general theory, which would capture some relevant concepts of these theories and that shows itself useful and practical. Even though that theory wouldn’t be a substitute theory for LAP, OS and TOA but rather another approach to IS development. 6.2. Integrating TOA, LAP and OS TOA seems to be an interesting departing point for integrating OS and LAP. It provides the necessary structure for business and organization systems by using its particular ‘Activity’ concept as the structural element. According to TOA an activity relates humans, resources and actions where its dependence is based strictly on the human element. From this perspective a business transaction can be defined and performed within an activity which in the other hand provides the necessary elements: actors and actions. In this case we could consider linguistic actions as a special case of actions. Also the necessary resources (bodies) for material and possibly communicative actions could be taken into account to support the business transaction concept of DEMO approach within an activity. From OS the agent which performs an action based on a normative behavior according to some condition it would be again ‘mapped’ into an actor in TOA that would perform a conditional action within an activity. The actor in TOA carries the responsibility required in the three theories. An additional actor feature would be the authorization and commitment to perform the action imported from LAP. In this integration model we adopt the human within his social domain as the leading concept. In this case human action would be relocated to its functional objective within an activity. Adopting this perspective allow us to consider other contextual domains besides the activity domain which tends to be more pragmatic. However, it should be noted that the activity notion embraces the information field paradigm by considering for example a family, a religion, a country as an activity performed by people. These other activities probably won’t be useful for most business and organization modeling, not saying that they shouldn’t be considered.

7. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK The Theory of Organized Activity together with Language Action Perspective theories and Organizational Semiotics were presented, compared and a possible integration of these theories was proposed. 10

Particular perspectives of their main ideas including some new point of views were used to show their relevance to IS development. As current research work, we are designing and creating application prototypes in order to test and analyze TOA application to IS. TOA integration with OS and LAP will be the next step following an incremental process. Future work perspectives includes also the analysis of close to theories such as Activity theory, Coordination theory and Actor-Network theory and a possible integration of some particular concepts from these last theories.

8. REFERENCES Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. 2nd Ed. Harvard University Press, Cambridge , Massachussets, USA. Chandler, D. (2002) Semiotics: the Basics, Routledge, London, UK. Goldkuhl, G., Röstlinger, A. (1999). Expanding the scope: From language action to generic practice, in procs of the 4th Int Workshop on the Language Action Perspective, Copenhagen. Holt, A. (1997). Organized Activity and Its Support by Computer, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Liu, K. (2000). Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Liu, K., Clarke, R., Andersen, P. Stamper, R. (Eds) (2001), Information, Organisation and technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Searle, John R. (1969). Speech acts, Cambridge University Press, London, UK. Stamper, R. (1973). Information in business and Administrative Systems. John Wiley and Sons, New York. Stamper, R. (1996). Signs, Norms, and Information Systems, in Holmqvist B. et al (Eds.) Signs at Work, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, Germany. Stamper, R. (2000). New Directions for Systems analysis and Design, in Joaquim Filipe (Ed.) Enterprise Information Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, ISBN 0-7923-6239-X. Winograd, T. and F. Flores (1986). Understand Computer and Cognition, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ, USA.

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