[Sigiii-l] Global Information Technologies and Local Health Care Practices

[Gianluca Miscione]

Hi all,
maybe you can find of some interest the schema of the seminar I'm going to run here at the Sociology Department of the Binghamton University.
any response is welcome.

cheers

gianluca


P.S. if anyone is around here, is welcome to come!




 
 
Global Information Technologies and Local Health Care Practices 
 
 

Gianluca Miscione - dadalo at tiscali.it

PhD candidate in Information Systems and Organizations

Sociology and Social Research Department

of the University of Trento

Italy

 

Visiting scholar at the Sociology Department

of the Binghamton University

New York State

U.S.A.





I am going to draw a trajectory that passes through some contemporary issues to arrive to my research.


 In any communication can be seen two aspects:

  1.. informational 
  2.. relational 

The first one highlights the literal meaning of a message.

            Ex: I write to somebody how to cook spaghetti


The second one pays attention to the broader social relevance of a communication act.

            Ex: I'd like a foreigner friend reminds of me, I'm trying to spread Italian cooking, and so on.



The first aspect implies a formalized knowledge, which -by the way- maybe my grandmother could not have, although she cooked very well.


The second one tends to imply tacit knowledge and mutual understanding. Usually it is not explicit, it needs to be explicated when something goes wrong (ethnomethodology).



Even if cooking is not a science (although in Italy is being opened the "University of Taste") usually formalized knowledge is backed (legitimated, Weber) by Reason, nowadays, mainly Science.


On the other hand, the relational aspect of any communication mainly depends on the (social) context in relation with which it is meaningful.



So there is a dualism between universality and situatedness:



      Informational aspects of communication 

      Formalized knowledge


      Science


      Universality
     Relational aspects of communication

      Tacit knowledge


      Uses, practices


      Situatedness
     

 

 Usually information technologies, when purposely implemented, are (implicitly?) seen as consistent with the left column. Any piece of knowledge formalized and legitimized by science (or by a science-looking reasoning) can be transmitted everywhere, and it is supposed to be effective everywhere.

 But scientific truth is a source of truth only where science has already arrived.

 So it could be interesting to focus on relations among IT and practices instead of Knowledge.


 What are practices?

Practice it is a buzz word to describe social relationships, it does not have a definite meaning; it is among action and habit, tacit and social, formalized and informal. 

 Practice is a skilled performance situated in a social context. It has material and symbolic elements.

Ex: the daily work of air traffic controllers is made up of practices, rather that procedures. Indeed a light kind of strike is following all procedures strictly, it always has the effect to delay all flights.

 Practice is here a central concept because it is in the practices that knowledge is embodied.

Practices are resource and boundary of organized actions.

 The concept of practice offers an useful perspective on how knowledge and power are embodied in social action.



Different social practices are very evident in the encounter of different cultures and through an information network.