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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, April 2009.

Hierarkier har funnits under en lång tid och är för många en självklarhet inom organisationer. Vi vill i denna uppsats undersöka tre organisationer i Sverige, som menar att de utmanar den hierarkiska strukturen genom att de inte har några chefer. Syftet med uppsatsen är att öka kunskapen om dessa organisationer genom att undersöka hur beslut tas och färdas. Vi undersöker även vad det är som påverkar beslut och beslutsfattande i dessa organisationer. Tidigare forskning behandlar dels organisationsutveckling ur ett historiskt perspektiv och hur beslut kommer till, olika beslutsmodeller, hur beslut färdas och implementeras och kopplingen mellan beslut och ansvar. Det teoretiska perspektivet är Actor- Network Theory, ANT. Empirin har samlats in genom nio stycken kvalitativa intervjuer. Den har kodats och analyserats utifrån teorins begrepp aktör-nätverk, performativitet, handlingsnät och översättning. Beslut har analyserats som en symbol, vilken kan skapas och färdas inom organisationen med hjälp av olika aktörer. Studien visar på att begreppet beslut är starkt kopplat till ett agerande. Beslut som något performativt blir en översättningskedja som består av många detaljer som lättare beskrivs med ett sammanfattande beskrivande begrepp, beslut, för att kunna begripliggöra vad det är. Vi har även hittat faktorer i materialet som visar på hur beslut är kopplat till den decentraliserade strukturen samt att medarbetaren som individ blir viktig. Slutligen förs en diskussion av resultatet i förhållande till frågeställningar, tidigare forskning, teori och metod samt ger implikationer för vidare forskning inom ämnet.

Within the public sector great change efforts are currently made to meet future challenges. In the area of health care, change initiatives are implemented to enhance quality and efficiency. To this end, a lean change programme is being widely introduced in Sweden as well as internationally. The overriding aim of this study is to increase knowledge of what happens when change programmes, CP, such as lean are implemented in a healthcare organisation, HCO. Previous research has shown that the main obstacle to implementing CP in HCO:s is their complexity. However, the complexity has often been reduced, as different factors such as management, professions, organisation and control have been studied separately. To fully capture the complexity of the HCO the Actor Network Theory, ANT, was used in this study. In line with ANT, introducing lean can be described in terms of a translation process in which human and non-human actors are woven into a network. This approach allows for the incorporation of various factors in the study of a change process in a complex organisation. Drawing on ANT, this thesis explores how network constructions enable or impede change programmes. The approach is based on ethnographic monitoring of the implementation of lean in the Värmland county council public healthcare organisation. As a result of the holistic perspective, the study provides detailed descriptions of how complexity impacts on the implementation. It displays the relations enabling or impeding the implementation of CP and the methods actors use to establish and defend the relations. The contribution of the study is threefold. Empirically, the study monitors a HCO aiming to implement full-scale lean as philosophy, principle and tool. Methodologically, the study evaluates ANT as a methodological theory to study CP in a HCO. Finally, the domain-specific contribution of the study is its identification of the relations and methods that impact on lean deployment. / Kan förändringsprogram från den japanska bilindustrin lösa framtidens utmaningar inom hälso- och sjukvården? Ja, tycks svaret på frågan vara. Allt fler hälso- och sjukvårdsorganisationer väljer nämligen att införa och tillämpa lean i hopp om att öka kvalitet och effektivitet. I denna bok följer Stefan Hellman införandet av lean i ett av Sveriges landsting.   Tidigare forskning visar att förändringsprogram som lean kan resultera i positiva effekter när det införs i hälso- och sjukvården. Införandet är emellertid förknippat med problem. Hellman visar att det både finns anhängare och motståndare till lean. Han intervjuar och observerar anhängarna och motståndarna och identifierar därigenom hur de går tillväga för att underlätta respektive försvåra införandet av lean. Därigenom ger Hellman en inblick i hälso- och sjukvårdens komplexitet och visar vilka konsekvenser den ger när förändringsprogram införs i praktiken.

This thesis, based on a methodology borrowed from Science and Technologies Studies (STS), studies the implications of using energy modeling software for code compliance in the architectural design process. Specifically, the careful study of the development and use the of the software itself, including the assumptions and frameworks of its developers and users, is required to accurately examine the implications and practical effectiveness of using energy modeling to aid in reducing the environmental consequences of the built environment. I argue that the value in studying energy modeling software is not primarily to improve the scientific accuracy of the software. Rather, the value is to demonstrate how the assumptions used in the software’s calculation methodology can adversely influence the technological decisions made by building designers when using the software to demonstrate compliance with energy codes. To develop this hypothesis I have employed both historical and empirical methods. In my historical analysis, I find that the origins of modern building energy modeling software date back to the beginning of the air conditioning industry at the start of the 20th century. One consequence of this history is that assumptions built into the software measure the relative efficiency of building components under static and assumed average conditions, but not the dynamic rates of consumption caused by inhabitation. This, in-turn, prescribes the problem-at-hand of energy code compliance as primarily technical. However, as others have argued, dynamic social and circumstantial issues also influence energy consumption (Guy & Shove, 2000). Therefore as means to examine potential conflicts between the static and technical method of analysis employed by code compliance energy modeling software and the dynamic and circumstantial context in which buildings are designed, my empirical analysis is of a design process for a net-zero energy subdivision in Austin, Texas in which energy modeling was required and used extensively. The case study is designed to demonstrate how the problems-at-hand for each distinct group of stakeholders involved in the design process was varied and did not necessarily conform to the technical solution advocated by the energy modeling process. A primary conclusion of my analysis is that all mature technologies come to us with embedded assumptions that may subvert our intentions. A secondary conclusion is that the competing assumptions and problem definitions of building scientists and building designers tend to frustrate the goal of sustainable development. My hope in studying energy modeling, in relation to practice and code compliance, is to discover ways to better use the analytical power of energy modeling that is more directly responsive to the dynamic and contextual conditions of architectural production and real world resource consumption. / text

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In this thesis, I explore the phenomena of cheese production in Ontario, Canada. I initiated this project after learning that some cheese producers in Ontario that were struggling to stay in business, in part because of whey management issues, especially as they relate to the Ontario Nutrient Management Act O. Reg 267/03 (OMAFRA 2002). In this thesis, I utilize the Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005) approach to examine how certain elements of cheese production in Ontario are organized, with an emphasis on whey management and utilization. Of interest are tensions that threaten to destabilize these relations, such as controversies over how whey should be handled, how identities such as “artisan” or “industrial” cheese producers are constructed and maintained, and how smaller producers sustain themselves in a market in which they compete with large- scale industrial cheese production were examined. Interviews took place with seven participants involved in government, agriculture, and cheese production. Participant/observation data were collected in six field sites (cheese factories, farms). I found that humans and nonhumans perform significant work in holding cheese production and whey management together, even in situations commonly understood as under human mastery or control. In particular, I found that the manner by which relations between entities both human and nonhuman are governed, through law or through informal expectations (e.g., "protocol"; Galloway and Thacker 2007), is responsive to, and emergent from, these relations. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-20 09:12:33.559

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This thesis presents an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) inspired analysis of sheep scab in Scotland. Sheep scab is caused by scab mites, and it has a long history in terms of its legislation and available treatments in the UK. In 2010 it became a notifiable livestock disease again in Scotland. Even though sheep scab is studied by natural scientists and economists, it remains unclear how scab is understood by sheep practitioners. This means that the stories, practices and knowledges of sheep practitioners who work at the forefront of sheep scab (in terms of its recognition, diagnosis, treatment and notification) remain absent from the political arena. However, their activities shape how rules and regulations are used. An ANT approach proved helpful for this research, because it allows the researcher to follow connections. The connections followed are sheep scab stories and practices. This research therefore has the following main question: How are multiple sheep scab situations enacted in Scotland? Multi-sited ethnography is the methodology used for this research, and semi structured interviews and field observations were done to get in-depth information about sheep scab situations in Scotland. In total 47 interviews, and 14 observations were done from 2013-2014 with diverse respondents ranging from farmers, veterinarians, slaughterhouse employees and natural scientists. This thesis contributes empirically and theoretically to human-animal studies (HAS). The empirical findings are that the notification legislation for sheep scab is rarely used; sheep scab diagnoses are rarely done; and finally, sheep practitioners trust their own situated knowledges of sheep scab. The theoretical contribution is a reworking of ANT to make it more suitable for studying sheep scab. In particular I rework ANT's confusing terminology; its tendency to reduce entities to their effects; and I include concepts from livestock disease literature that proved particularly helpful.

This dissertation addresses the question of the creation of scientific knowledge, in the con- text of an online question-and-answer forum: Stack Overflow. The project starts from the claim advanced in the philosophy and sociology of science that Nature is not sufficient to settle disputes; for a fact to be created by being accepted as true, it must be justified in discourse. Actor-Network Theory claims that this justification occurs through the mo- bilisation of resources, which are marshalled to make a truth-claim unassailable without also defeating all the supporting resources. I adapt ANT’s claim to the methods of Social Network Analysis. In network terms, the facticity of a claim is measured by its indegree — the number of other claims which are justified by it — and its outdegree measures the count of the resources which justify it. I first consider answers to Stack Overflow questions, because they are the most straight- forward to describe, and the closest object to what previous analyses of citation networks of academic papers have considered. The central question is how an answer is made to be true, where I find that the more other answers an answer links to, the higher its indegree. In fact, when the measure of outdegree is expanded to include the resources which resources themselves link to, this association is higher still. While referring to users doesn’t matter in itself, referring to users’ posts does, as does having more code. The best predictor of indegree is the number of users linked to. I also find that although more modalised answers matter more, black-boxed answers which are not modalised at all matter the most. Finally, while more resources make an answer more likely to be edited, they do not make it more likely to be defeated and deleted entirely. But Stack Overflow is also (and primarily) made of questions to which these answers respond, and questions are less addressed by existing theory. The basic conflict is between whether questions are just transparent references to answers, or whether they make their own independent contributions to knowledge. Having established that the network of questions is structurally distinct from the network of answers, I find that questions’ indegree and outdegree are also correlated, but less so than for answers. I find that linking to answers matters, especially when the appropriateness of the answers to the question is taken into account. However, the contributions that questions make independently of their answers, topicality and uniqueness, do not generally matter. Like answers, questions can also be closed rather than answered, and I find that questions that are closed for different reasons have different patterns of answering. In the final chapter, I consider how the techno-social infrastructure of the site encourages the creation of knowledge. The chapter is spent studying the existence and nature of a Matthew Effect on Stack Overflow, going beyond the results for the distribution of reputation to examine the mechanisms involved in assigning reputation. Both the distributions of posts’ upvotes and the attachment kernel indicate a rich-get-richer effect, but they suggest that the effect is not proportional as in common models of the phenomenon. However, it also seems like the reason for attributing more upvotes to users with higher reputation is not solely due to their higher reputation: a regression discontinuity design on displayed user reputation produces a null result, suggesting that the reputation-rich are good, and the good get richer.