Having introduced the central topics, theoretical underpinnings, keywords, and empirical settings of this thesis, it would be helpful at this point to develop three research questions in order to operationalize these considerations and shape the analysis. These research questions should be understood as interpretative devices rather than definitive demands for answers. Indeed, they provide guidance in approaching empirical instances and suggest directions along which to look at in navigating the fieldwork.
The first issue concerns my sense of uneasiness with the ideological association between technology and masculinity (Grint & Gill, 1995). Although I recognize the value of taking into account such cultural connection, I am interested in probing the relationship between computer technologies and actual human subjects, specifically women, which remains an underexplored issue. Such a tension fosters the following research question:
1. what is the relationship between female professionals and practitioners in IT and computer technologies? How do women problematize gender issues in their technical field?
The second question specifically regards my ethnographic journey into the IT company and entails the role of materiality and technical artifacts with respect to the process of organizing. The analysis of the literature on workplace studies and my first approach to the field have spurred the following questions:
2. what is the role of material artifacts in the process of organizing?
What kind of and in what ways do feminist concerns emerge from the investigation of technology in organizations?
The third question represents a sort of return to the initial theoretical and conceptual inquiries and involves specifically the contribution of FTS to the study of technoscientific discourses and practices. More specifically, this concern addresses both the theoretical debate and empirical research as to the role of feminist inquiry in detecting differences (Law & Lin, 2011) in the study of information technology:
3. How can we respecify such contribution in the light of empirical research? What is the contribution of feminism and feminist approaches to the study of information technology and materiality in work places?
These analytic inquiries will help me to address the theoretical and methodological discussion as well as to disentangle the following empirical instances.
These research questions outline some contributions that this study seeks to provide. In the first place, this dissertation advances a discussion of the relationship between feminist critique and information technology. While it is reasonable to claim that feminist critique of science and technology constitutes a well-established body of knowledge (albeit mostly in the USA and northern European countries), sociological and historical analyses of computing, especially in non-American countries, are still in their early days, and all the more this is true for feminist inquiry. This is also due to the fact that computer science and computer engineering are still relatively young subjects in comparison to other traditional disciplines such as mathematics, biology or physics.
Secondly, this study unfolds two empirical settings in which the relationship between feminism and IT is explored. While I do not disclaim the difficulties to deal
with two field sites with different features — a closed organization on the one hand, and open and visible networks on the other —, such difference constitutes a value by all means insofar as it shows how the analytic inquiries so far described can be investigated in different settings through a variety of methods. The result is somewhat similar to what David Silverman has defined as “triangulation”
(Silverman, 2006), that is the use of multiple methods and analytic sensibilities to render the heterogeneous character of the issues under scrutiny. However, my aim is not that of reporting an “objective representation of the object of study” as Silverman claims (p. 291) since the theoretical underpinnings of this research have in their core precisely critical and articulated viewpoints on the concept of
‘objectivity’ (see Daston &, Galison 1992; Harding, 2005).
Finally, considering the empirical research findings, this study offers a contribution to the sociological debate as to the study of information technology through feminist lens. This brings about two overall suggestions: it invites to focus on the role of materiality and digital artifacts so as to detect affordances, relations and conflicts they enact as well as “questions of voice and silence” (Star, 1995, p.
10); on the other hand, encounters with women engaged with gender troubles in IT have allowed me to go beyond the assessment of those mechanisms of discrimination and segregation — glass ceiling, leaky pipeline, sticky floor, stereotypes — well-articulated in the literature, in order to explore how they relate with their own discipline and technologies.
2. FEMINIST STUDIES CONFRONT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
As feminist physicist Karen Barad has argued (2011), feminist science studies, for all its diversity and because of all its diversity, was never a subfield of science studies exclusively engaged with the analysis of gender relations and women’s condition, but rather it has been developing as a rich and polyphonic body of knowledge and research with ethical and political commitments to a variety of issues — from environmental sustainability to biomedicine and new reproductive technologies, from the transactional and domestic sexual division of labor in technoscience to the gendered shaping of technoscientific cultures and practices. in this regard, Judy Wajcman (2010) suggest that rather than thinking of feminism, we should think of as multiple and dynamic feminisms — plural — engaged in processes of ongoing transformation.
In this chapter I shall draw the lines of the theoretical debate over the study of science and technology through the lens of feminist critique. I shall start out by presenting the more evident issue of female discrimination scientific fields to the more nuanced critique of practices and political aims behind the production of scientific epistemologies. This second line of inquiry presents different, though connected, approaches that go from the standpoint feminism (Harding, 2001) to