This performative, practice based perspective, is also adopted by Pickering (1993; 1995), and Pickering and Guzik (2008), during their investigations into the understanding of the development of scientific knowledge.
Although Pickering (1995) acknowledges a debt to ANT, the development of the ‘mangle of practice’ is seen to overcome some of the criticisms of the former theory, namely a lack of appreciation of time and concerns over the concept of generalised symmetry.
In the development of new machines, material agency is considered to be
‘temporally emergent in practice’. As the outcomes of material agency cannot be decisively predicted in advance, humans must continually explore them in their work. At a minimum this involves ‘delicate material positioning’ or ‘tuning’, where “tuning” is used in the sense of tuning a radio or car engine.
The second concern with ANT, highlighted by Pickering (1995, p.15) revolves around the semiotic ‘interchangeability’ between the human and material realms. Although Pickering (1995, p.15) disputes the ANT concept that there is no difference between human and nonhuman agency, the development of the
‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 1995) draws two important conclusions from a consideration of extended symmetry.
The first is that there exist important parallels between human and material agency, with regard to their repetitive quality and emergent nature. Just as machines such as computers are considered to display the same properties day after day, so too are the humans that engage with them. By employing
‘standardised gestures and manipulations’ when humans engage with machines they act like machines. Although not considered interchangeable the human/machine relationship is considered to involve a high degree of symmetry and interconnection. Secondly the concept of ‘tuning’ is considered to work both ways on humans as well as non-humans, both human and material agency are considered to be temporally emergent. While the human and material agents cannot be substituted for one another, they are intimately connected or ‘constitutively intertwined’ (Pickering, 1995, p.17).
As well as identifying parallels between material and human agency Pickering (1995, p.17) also identifies areas where the symmetry between the human and the material appear to break down. Human agency would then appear to involve a degree of ‘intentionality’ in the sense that scientific practice is organised around specific plans and goals, which have no counterpart in the material world. Within this context the origins of these plans and goals are considered to arise via the modelling of ‘existing cultural predispositions’ or
‘imaginatively transformed versions of its present’ (Pickering, 1995, p.19).
Modelling is however considered to be an open-ended process with ‘no determinate destination’ in which an ‘indefinite number of future variants can be constructed’ (Pickering, 1995, p.19).
In the construction of the ‘mangle of practice’, Pickering (1995, p.21) argues that through performances ‘the doings of human and material agency come to
the fore’. Human agents are then considered to be ‘agents in a field of material agency in which they struggle to capture machines’ as illustrated below:
‘human and material agency are reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle. Their contours emerge in the temporality of practice, and are definitional of and sustain one another. Existing culture constitutes the surface of emergence for the intentional structure of scientific practice and such practices consists in the reciprocal tuning of human and material agency, tuning that can itself reconfigure human interactions’ (Pickering, 1995, p.21).
The result of this reciprocal interaction can on occasion result in the
‘reconfiguration and extension of scientific culture – the construction and interactive stabilisation of new machines and disciplined human performances and relations that accompany them’ (Pickering, 1995, p.21).
The concept of “tuning” as developed by Pickering (1995, p.21) involves what he terms the ‘dance of agency’ whereby the development of a new machine involves the tentative creation of a piece of technology.
The creator then adopts a passive role whilst monitoring of the equipment occurs to see what ‘material agency it might effect’ (Pickering, 1995, p.21).
Symmetrically this period of human passivity is the period when material agency actively manifests itself. If the machine does not perform as intended a second stage of human agency is evoked to ‘revise the modelling vectors’
(Pickering, 1995, p.22) and the cycle begins again. The ‘dance of agency’ is thus considered to be a ‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ where resistance denotes ‘a failure to achieve and intended capture of agency in practice’, and accommodation ‘an active human strategy of response to resistance’ (Pickering, 1995, p.22). This accommodation can take the form of ‘a revision of goals and intentions’, changes to the ‘material form of the machine, or to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it’
(Pickering, 1995, p.22). This performative ‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ is what Pickering (1995, p.23) terms the ‘mangle of practice’.
When faced with a technology that affords or constrains action, humans are then faced with two potential alternatives to either change some aspect of their environment or modify the technology itself. Research suggests that in order to achieve their goals humans preferentially change some aspect of their organisational ‘routines’ or patterns of social action (Pentland and Rueter, 1994; Zack and McKenney, 1995).
3.7 ‘Imbrication’ (Leonardi, 2011)
Leonardi (2011, p.149) suggests that ‘studying contexts in which people can choose whether they will change routines or technologies, puts into relief that human and material agencies are the shared building blocks of routines and technologies’. Rather than consider the social and material to be ontologically
‘inseparable’ (Barad, 2003, p. 81), this perspective suggests that both human and material agencies are ‘distinct phenomena neither of which individually are empirically important’ (Leonardi, 2011, p.149). It is only when the social and the material become ‘imbricated’ or ‘interlocked’ in a ‘particular sequence that they together produce, sustain, or change either routines or technologies’ (Leonardi, 2011, p.149). The adoption of the ‘imbrication’ metaphor originally suggested by authors such as Taylor (2001) and Ciborra (2006) is derived from the names used for roof tiles used in ancient Roman and Greek architecture. In this context, it is used to illustrate the ‘multiple overlapping and convergence between two streams of representations’ (Ciborra, 2006, p.1339) so that they function independently.
In order to convey the concept of imbrication, as a means of illustrating how sociomaterial interactions arise and are maintained over time, Leonardi (2011) like Pickering (1995) utilises the theory of affordances (Gibson, 1986;
Stoffregen, 2002; Turvey, 1992; Chemero, 2003). In Gibson’s (1986) formulation of affordances Leonardi (2011, p.153) argues that ‘people do not interact with an object prior to or without perceiving what the object is good for’.
By contrast, Norman (1999, p.39) argues that and ‘perceived affordances’ are purposefully build into technology by designers to suggest how a technology should be used. Alternatively, Hutchby (2001) seeks a middle ground between the two perspectives suggesting that affordances are not exclusively the properties of either the human or the material. According to Leonardi (2011, p.153) utilising this formulation, ‘materiality exists independent of people, but affordances and constraints do not’. The affordances of an artefact are then considered to ‘change across different contexts, even though its materiality does not’, as highlighted below:
‘The affordances of an artefact are not things which impose themselves upon humans’ actions with, around, or via the artefact. But they do set limits on what is possible to do with, around, or via the artefact. By the same token, there is not one but a variety of ways of responding to the range of affordances for action and interaction that a technology presents’ (Hutchby, 2001, p.453)
Leonardi (2011) subsequently utilises the imbrication metaphor to investigate the material affordance and constraints of a technology designed to automate computer simulations for crashworthiness engineering works. Leonardi (2011, p.164) states the imbrication metaphor may be helpful in ‘specifying why people who can choose to change either their work routines or their technology to better execute their work make the choices they do’. Within this framework it is however acknowledge that although material agencies help people make
choices in the way they manage their routines, they are also constrained by its material features. As noted by Pentland and Feldman (2008, p.243) ‘no amount of translation will turn a toaster into a cell phone’.
In contrast to existing approaches which considers material agency as a potential threat to human agency, Leonardi (2011, p.164) considers that the
‘imbrication lens views material agency more neutrally: its influence as either an affordance or constraint depends on the perceptions people construct about it’.