Global Software and its Provenance: Generification Work in the Design of Global Software Packages
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Date
01/04/2007Author
Pollock, N.
Williams, R.
D'Adderio, Luciana
Metadata
Abstract
This paper addresses the seemingly implausible project of establishing a ‘generic’
organizational information system. The is an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, we are told of
the diversity of specific organizational contexts and on the other, we often find the same standardised
software solutions being applied across those settings. How do generic software packages work in so
many different contexts? Science & Technology Studies provides contrasting accounts of how this
contradiction is resolved: either stressing the unwanted organizational change that standardised
systems may bring; or, alternatively insisting these technologies can only be made to work through
processes of ‘localization’. We argue that the focus on specificity versus localization of application
contexts draws attention away from enquiring into the origins and characteristics of generic solutions.
Through comparing the design and evolution of two software packages we shift the debate from
understanding how technologies are made to work within particular settings to how they are built to
work across a diverse range of organizational contexts. Our question is ‘How do software packages
achieve the mobility that allows them to bridge the heterogeneity within organizations and between
organizations in different sectors and cultures?’ We describe a set of revealed strategies through which
suppliers produce software that embodies characteristics common across many users; what we term
generification work. One aspect of this process of generification is the configuring of users within
‘managed communities’, but it also includes ‘smoothing’ the contents of the package and, at times,
reverting to ‘social authority’. Our argument is that generic systems do exist but that they are brought
into being through an intricately managed process, involving the broader extension of a particularised
software application and, at the same time, the management of the user community attached to that
solution.