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This thesis examines the area of user-involvement in the development of computerised office information systems, with particular reference to gender relations and to initiatives in 'Human-Centred' systems design. it is based on a review of literature in computer science and in social science, and on case-study research. The thesis forms a contribution to the interdisciplinary work of the Human-Centred Office Systems Project, at Sheffield Polytechnic. Interdisciplinary research into information systems development is expanding, partly in response to evidence that many systems fail to meet their stated objectives. There is increasing emphasis on issues of "user relations', including user-involvement. In offices, as in other contexts, women tend to be defined as users or operators of technology; however, there has been little research into the constraints and opportunities women office workers face specifically in connection with information systems development. Previous projects within Human-Centred Systems research have been located in areas in which men predominate, such as printing and engineering. The thesis makes a contribution to new interdisciplinary research on information systems in two main respects. Firstly, the scope for clerical involvement is examined. It is argued that clerical skills and experience can form a strong basis for involvement in office systems design; in addition, managerial reliance on clerical skill and cooperation appear to increase, with the advent of on-line, integrated office systems. However, the case study research also illustrates the ways in which gendered associations can play a part in the definition of 'social' and 'technical' aspects of systems development, tending to marginalise clerical contributions. Secondly, therefore, the thesis examines the potential of Human-Centred systems development approaches to address gender inequalities in opportunities for user-involvement. Methods for establishing a Human-Centred approach in a local authority department are proposed; an assessment of their use, in a case-study context, exposes a weakness in the Human-Centred tradition in relation to management practices. In conclusion, specific proposals are formulated to support the creation of new links between organisational strategies on information technology and those on gender inequality.

This dissertation examines the politics of labor, gender, and heritage in Turkey's carpet industry, drawing on thirteen months of comparative, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among carpet weavers, manufacturers, designers, exporters, and tourists. The project contributes to the debates on globalization of work and labor, in particular stressing the importance of gendered and place-specific analyses of discourses, practices and material flows. It also argues for a historically situated, genealogical understanding of agency and subject formation through the nature of relationships that develop between the actors participating in the Turkish carpet industry and the ways in which both transparency and secrecy are employed as strategies of survival within diverse sites of production and sale by culturally-defined agents.As Turkey implements social reforms vying for membership to the European Union, the culmination point of the modernization and secularization processes that started even before the formation of the nation-state, the structural economic shifts result in increasingly complex gendered power relations and negotiations in Turkey's carpet industry. This dissertation argues that a detailed analysis of Turkish carpet industry in global economic competition discloses that globalization needs to be understood as a productive discursive practice that is heavily implicated in disciplinary programs and in the ubiquity of power politics that define and justify productivity and liberalism as emancipatory universals to be emulated and ultimately reached. Yet, as this study shows, both men and women taking part in the Turkish carpet industry actively participate in several balancing acts that traversed presupposed boundaries such as public and private, informal and formal and were experienced in thresholds that constantly questioned these naturalized boundaries. Investment in fictive kinship ties as well as friendships proposed relations that depended on networks of allegiances assembled with bonds of obligation and proper ethical conduct, which resisted easy incorporation into globalist, liberal narratives of "free" individuals and workers dis-embedded from the local and assembled into the global.

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