"I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions"

Conversation with Lucy Suchman
Xerox Parc
Palo Alto
August 13, 1999
Claus Otto Scharmer

Lucy Suchman is a professor in the Centre for Science Studies and the Sociology Department at Lancaster University in England. Her pathbreaking work at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) inspired a whole generation of researchers on technology and work practices.

COS: Lucy Suchman, what underlying questions does your work address, and what in your own life formed the context from which your research interests evolved?

I started to feel that the last thing that Native Americans needed was another anthropologist studying them. I thought instead I should study the institutions that were closer to my own position in life and that had tremendous consequences for Native Americans, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In fact, we have a responsibility to turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves, and really understand ourselves as participants and co-creators of the world, rather than just as observers.

Once I got to PARC I came into the office research group, where all these computer scientists were creating office information systems.

Studying Work Practices of Accountants. If you look at any form of human work closely enough, you discover that it’s a mix: some activities that we all consider tedious which can be usefully automated, and other activities that require judgment and practical reasoning of various kinds…

Studying Work Practices in a Law Firm. The thing that people are most anxious about is whether you’re going to do a respectful treatment of their work, and if they see that you are, then it’s fine. Everybody I know who studies work reports that people just love to talk about their work, because people love to talk about the things that they really know about...

Convening Collaborators. It turns out that all the airlines have what they call "operations rooms" at the airports where they’re operating, which are central locations that coordinate all of the work of ground operations. They’re really interesting from the point of view of technology-intensive, distributed, collaborative work…

In ’89, at the latter stage of that project, I was able to form a research area here called "Work Practice and Technology." We did a series of projects where we tried to carry along what we’d learned about doing that kind of ethnography of technologies in use and the organization of work, but get more of a change agenda and participatory design…

The Research and Development World as Closed System. The research world, as much as the development world, is set up to be self-referential.… I think the loss of productivity in American corporations due to change is enormous.

First Concern: My feeling is that the space for expansive, exploratory learning is closing down in American industry, and there’s a kind of intensification going on in competition, in the shortening of time frames, that’s really detrimental to research…. Even though in some ways there’s much more openness and interest, and ideas of learning and change, interdisciplinary work, I think the practical and economic realities are that there isn’t time for those things, and the forces working against them are much more powerful at the moment than the forces working for them. So the main limits I see are about space and time and the opportunities to pursue the kind of research interests that I’ve been pursuing.

The Second Concern: it worries me that we’re losing the diversity of roles, of temperaments.

The Third Concern: Suddenly an abstract community turns against you.

Systemic Conditions: People are increasingly preoccupied with just staying engaged within the self-referential world that they’re part of, never mind being able to make connections to other worlds.

I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions. I feel like I understand much more deeply why it’s so hard to effect change, but I have no less of a sense of the power of established ways of operating…

Continuity has been given a really bad rap in the current view.

Our social world has two modes of operating. The first mode consists of highly fragmented autopoetic islands. Every system is totally decoupled and blind to its environment. And every individual lives in one and only one system. The other mode operates based on the primacy of relationships. The social worlds are interconnected and each individual participates in multiple worlds or systems. People are the nexus of exchange, where one world is relating to another one, or becoming another one… allowing one world to slide into another and return.

Lucy Suchman’s initial aspiration was to "turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves." Her research question focused on understanding the constitution of social structure. On the one hand she found that social structure is enacted through practices, and that all work practices involve situated improvisation. On the other hand she also experienced the power of institutional immovability. Suchman’s turn of the anthropological gaze led her to differentiate between two types of social interaction: as a fragmentized, self-referential and outwardly blind system, or as a dynamically evolving relationship. In the latter mode, people are the nexus of exchange, where one world is relating to another one, or becoming another one, allowing one world to slide into another and return. Which leaves me with the question: On what does it depend whether we operate in the former mode or the latter? This question relates to an emerging second turn of the scientific gaze. In the first turn, Suchman turned the scientific perspective back onto the Western societies. In the second turn, the scientific gaze turns back upon the seer, the scientist. Lucy Suchman’s work is a living embodiment of the interplay of these two turnings and reversals.