laboral: estructurador de procesos de integración-desintegración

Within various literatures, breakdowns have been studied extensively. Many of these em- phasise the philosophical rami�cations of breakdowns. Verbeek (2005), for example, has observed in his analysis of Heidegger’s view on technology that:

The trustworthy world that developed around the computer—the open books, the keyboard, the screen, the cup of co�ee; in short, the entire mutually refer- ring network that Heidegger calls a world—is abruptly destroyed. The com- puter changes over from being one of the handy or ready-to-hand objects that shape this world to what Heidegger calls somethingvorhanden: ‘object- ively present’ in the newer translation, or ‘present-at-hand’ in the older. Its transparency is transformed into opacity. The computer no longer can be conveniently utilized in the practice of writing, but abruptly demands inter- action with itself. The relation with the world around the computer that took place ‘through’ it is disturbed. Only when it starts up again and everything works without a hitch is the world that was destroyed again restored (ibid., pp. 79-80).

This space of the breakdown, according to Verbeek, marks a qualitative shift in the relationship between a human and a computational object, one that moves away from the former’s intended practice to the attendance of the latter’s ‘needs’. These ‘needs’ are not like human or animal needs, nonetheless, because without attending to them or�nd- ing some way to work around them, the practice that was formerly in process cannot be reconstituted.

Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) also leverage Heidegger in their re�ections of the prac- tice perspective of Donald Schön to reframe his ideas in a phenomenological perspective.

They explore the concept of breakdown explicity as a means to explain competency in practice throughre�ection-in-actionwhich they distinguish from:

[S]urprise and awareness [...] articulating more clearly the way improvisa- tional responses emerge in the misdst of action (2009, p. 1357).

Sandberg and Tsoukas also invoke Heidegger in their conception of breakdowns by employing Heidegger’s categorisation oftemporary andtotal breakdowns. According to Sandberg and Tsoukas, temporary breakdowns involve a movement from a previous intention and towards ‘paying deliberate attention to what we do in order to continue’ (2011, p. 344). In contrast, a total breakdown involves an acknowledgement on the part of the human that the intention cannot continue, resulting in a state that Dreyfus refers to as ‘theoretical re�ection’ (1991, p. 80). This is a term he uses to denote a mode of being in the world ‘detached from the everyday practical context’ (ibid., p. 83) when ‘work is permanently interrupted, [and] we can either stare helplessly at the remaining objects or take a new detached theoretical stance towards things and try to explain their underlying causal properties’ (ibid., p. 79).

Within their work, Sandberg and Tsoukas also argue for an alternative framework to the representationalism of scienti�c rationality that brings the research closer to ‘the logic of practice’ (2011, p. 353). Their alternative,practical rationality, is an approach that enables the development of open-ended theories ‘in the sense that they are open to further speci�cation in particular cases’ (ibid.) that:

[A]re seen as indicators that guide the search for better understanding, en- couraging researchers to look for family resemblances—namely, for the simil- arities and di�erences among the empirical phenomena indicated by a concept (such as, for example, routine-in-action, strategy-as-practice, sensemaking) (ibid.).

In this view, Sandberg and Tsoukas argue for a methodologically comparative ap- proach, not unlike Ragin (1989). Unlike Ragin, however, theirs is ontologically grounded in the work of Heidegger (1927 /1996) and his core ideas of tool-being and breakdown. Indeed, their alternative to the hypothetico-deductive tradition of scienti�c rationality is argued explicitly through the very notion of breakdowns.

Graham and Thrift also explore repair and maintenance as an ongoing response to continual breakdowns. For example, within the modern-day city, they call our attention to:

[S]irens denoting accidents, to the noises of pneumatic drills denoting the constant upkeep of the roads, through the echoing clanks and hisses of the

tyre and clutch replacement workshop, denoting the constant work needed just to keep cars going (2007, p. 3).

Mobilising a materialist perspective and invoking Heidegger’szuhandenheit(1927

/1996, pp. 64-67), they argue:

[T]hat a major research challenge in the social sciences currently is to re- imagine economies and places in ways which, to adopt Susan Leigh-Star’s term, manage to ‘surface the invisible work’ (1999, p. 385) of maintenance and repair that continuously surrounds infrastructural connection, movement and

�ow (2007, p. 17).

Thus for Graham and Thrift, a processual cycle of ongoing breakdowns triggers ongoing repair and maintenance and is a profoundly political issue; one where options abound and choices have consequences. Their concern is how the space of ongoing break- down gives rise to choices and that the choices and their outcomes have wide-reaching ef- fects, including worker wages, living conditions, deskilling, and concealment of expendit- ure related to repair (ibid., p. 18).

Suchman also explores breakdowns in her landmark study of user interaction with copying machines, drawing on both the work of Heidegger and Dreyfus (2007, pp. 73-74). Here, Suchman makes a distinction between the kinds of temporary breakdowns already described and those that arise out of a user’s lack of familiarity with the equipment. Indeed it is explicitly as a result of such breakdowns that Suchman argues forsituated action, which:

[I]s not made explicit by rules and procedures. Rather, when situated action becomes in some way problematic rules and procedures are explicated for purposes of deliberation and the action, which is otherwise neither rule based nor procedural, is then made accountable to them (ibid., p. 74).

In other words, when breakdowns occur, rules and procedures, which are often the reference points for various practices, no longer function and people must account for their own actions in a di�erent fashion than through pre-existing rules and procedures. Such action must therefore besituatedand not predetermined.1

Note however, that Suchman’s view on breakdowns not only applies to interac- tions between humans and non-humans, but also between humans in terms of breakdowns in communicative acts where:

1_{See, however, Ciborra’s critique of this term and his argument that Heidegger’s term,be�ndlichkeit, has}

been mistranslated into the termsituated, and omits an essential a�ective component in its general under-

[T]he coherence of the interaction over some inde�nite number of past turns may be called into question, and the source of the trouble may be di�cult or impossible to reconstruct. In contrast to the routine problems and remedies that characterize local repair in conversation, such a situation may come close to communicative failure; that is, it may require abandoning the current line of talk or beginning anew (2007, p. 101).

It is interesting to note that Suchman does not refer to such issues as ‘breakdowns’ but instead uses words like ‘problems’ and ‘failure’. I suggest, however, that while Such- man never explicitly states this, breakdowns in communication between people o�er yet another site of the same pattern of breakdown where subject-object relations are trans- formed. A di�erence is that in human communication, the object-in-question is intelligib- ility, which is a not an externally materialised, physical object.2 _{Suchman acknowledges} the existence of such a non-physical object when she asserts that:

Human interaction succeeds to the extent that it does, however, due not simply to the abilities of any one participant to construct meaningfulness but also to the possibility of mutually constituting intelligibility, in and through the inter- action. This includes, crucially, the detection and repair of mis- (or di�erent) understandings (2007, p. 12).

This, as with the positions of Graham and Thrift (2007), Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011), and Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) asserts a processual perspective where breakdowns are considered an inherent part of the construction of, in this case, intelligibility. When, through breakdown, access to intelligibility is obstructed, human communicative practices employ the breakdown as a means to repair and maintain, just as Graham and Thrift’s pneumatic drills maintain the roads.

Elsewhere, however, Suchman speci�cally acknowledges the role of technology and its associated breakdowns as located amidst an even more basic phenonenon—the very constitution of subjects and objects. In this view, computational technology sits:

[P]rovocatively on the boundary of subjects and objects, threatening its break- down at the same time that it reiterates its founding identities and di�erences (2011, p. 133).

Thus, human interactions with computational technology, for Suchman, o�er a Janus-faced set of relations. On the one hand, these relations always hold the possibility

2_{For perspectives on such non-physical objects limited to the technical sphere, see Faulkner and Runde}

for breakdown, while on the other, idealisations about them are discursively employed ‘within both technical and popular imaginaries’ (2011, p. 133) as a means to normatively shape perceptions of such objects, and thus, our own identities in relation to them.

In summary, all of these positions explore breakdowns, not only from a practical perspective through their outcomes and consequences, but through a consistent emphasis on their philosophical rami�cations.

Meanwhile, a still broader stream of literature explores speci�c and famous break- downs as a means to understand them and, in many cases, to either promote learning or at least suggest opportunities for learning that arise out of breakdowns (Beck and Plowman

2009; Bostrom and Heinen1977; Christianson et al.2009; Weick2008). Such studies are often couched in terms of a tension between human and system error that leads to break- down (Beynon-Davies1999; Yeo2002). Such studies tend to frame breakdowns as events that contradict expected outcomes and, therefore, have the power to surprise and shock (Lyytinen1988; Weick and Roberts1993).

Speci�cally, with respect to relationships with technology, there exist studies on systems that inadvertently kill people by administering too much radiation (Leveson and Turner1993), space shuttle disasters (Starbuck and Milliken1988), buggy missile defence software (Halpern2005), failed transit systems (Latour1996a), military drones employed as thanatological devices (Sharkey and Suchman 2013), and a range of other high-risk technologies (Perrow1984). However, it is not necessary to explore such Frankensteinian scenarios (Winner1997); one can just as easily argue thatanystudy that explores how

people work with technology in any depth must also address the everyday mundane issue of breakdown (Nicolini and Roe2014, p. 70; Nicolini, Mengis et al.2011, p. 13; Orr1996, p. 3; Star1999, p. 382).

Thus, a wide range of studies have explored breakdowns as a means to make sense of practice. Such studies, as I have shown, highlight the philosophical rami�cations of breakdowns; for many of these, the work of Heidegger (1927 /1996,1977) is a perennial resource. I have also shown that studies that explore breakdowns can be very speci�c, looking at particular incidents and linking them to human learning and/or relationships to technology. This chapter follows this established tradition but, in particular, also re- sponds to Sandberg and Tsoukas’s call for the development of open-ended theory through practical rationality (2011, p. 353).