Barry Brown1, Eric Laurier2
DRAFT COPY – PRESENTED AT 4S CONFERENCE, OCTOBER 2003
1
Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, United KingdomDepartment of Geography, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ,
barry@dcs.gla.ac.uk http:/www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~barry
2
e.laurier@geog.gla.ac.uk, http://www.geog.gla.ac.uk/~elaurier/
Abstract. To take seriously the geographical nature of technology we need to think notonly how technologies are used in particular places, but how those places are connectedtogether. However, in understanding these connections it is easy to becomemesmerised by the “flows” between places – yet these flows or networks do not eliminatethe specificities of particular places and practices. It is these practices what are involvedin experiencing and using space. This paper uses three examples to explore how workin specific places creates spatial connections. Our first example, of canals in 1800sAmerica explores how individual practices of standardisation were needed to enable thecommoditisation of food. Our second example focuses on how the movement of people(in this case mobile workers) depends upon their work which make places ‘workable’.Lastly, looking at the movement of things, spare parts supplied from a warehouse, wesee how the flows of things depends upon actors in a specific place. Together thesethree examples provide a start to thinking about how technology flows are dependent onunderstanding specific practices in specific places.
Introduction
Italo Calvino’s book “Invisible Cities” is a book of stories about places far away(Calvino, 1997). The explorer Marco Polo visits the court of the Mongolian
emperor Kahn. As they sit, resting or smoking opium, Polo tells fantastic storiesabout the different cities he has visited. Each chapter is about a different –imaginary – city: cities where every travellers memory lives on beyond the life ofthe city, or the inhabitants worship different gods depending on if they live belowor above ground. Calvino’s dream like images pass by as Marco Polo tells us ofhis cities both spectacular and dull. Yet, each chapter is not strictly about a city.Instead they reveal an observation, a comment or description. Calvino describesto us how our memories live on, yet the original observation dies, or that wealways wish and dream for what is distant when the monotony of the presentseems unbearable.
Indeed, the format of the book – the tales told by Marco Polo – is itself anobservation on how we experience and think about places. We have all toldstories of places far away, making connections using stories of the distant and thenear. The here and now is easily connected, by a comment or an explanation,with somewhere else. “In China, they do this.”, the American’s story might start,at once connecting himself with supposed events far away. Guidebooks take thisto the extreme: stories of different places are arranged together and standardised.You can stay here, you can eat here. A wall of standardised guidebooks tells thestory of the world, or the tourist world, and stories of the consumption of places(Urry, 1995, Brown and Perry, 2002).
This paper is about these connections between places – about the stories andflows between where we are now, and where we might go. In particular, it is apaper about how the connections which technology supports can lead towards aslight dazzlement towards networked practice. This dazzlement can causeresearchers to ignore the more mundane details of technological usage. Althoughthe modern computer networks are something of a cause celebre, technologyconnects and changes in many different less dazzling ways. The number 67 bus,or the frills-free budget airline can also cause innovations in the connections wesustain between places, if without much glamour or ‘spectacular’ impacts. Yet totruly avoid technological determinism we need to focus on the mundane uses of
technology, and how individuals use technology in specific settings, rather thanoffer generic answers to how technology ‘impacts’ a specific country, or even theworld.
In line with this criticism, this paper develop a critique of approaches to the‘spaces’ of technology which abstract way from the details of what is done inspecific places to produce ‘generic’ accounts of network and technology. Whilenotions such as ‘the space of flows’ have great impact and drama, they leavemuch of the work of actual connecting unexplicated. To understand that we haveto look at more mundane activities such as how mobile workers struggle to makea workable environment in a café, or how a computer database is used to ordertruck spare parts. Castells talks about “flows”, and Latour about “rhizomes”, eachof them finessing the network as their metaphor of choice for understanding theworld (Latour, 1999a, Castells, 1996b). Yet we still have Microsoft Powerpoint,text messages and HTML to deal with. Taking a broad approach to connectionsgive great power, yet it end up in a strangely deterministic position, linkingtogether places and events far away, with little understanding of how theseconnections are actually supported in those places.
Castells and canals
Castells is perhaps the easiest to critique here, although he is not alone in chartinga course for a new sociology of networks (with different authors giving verydifferent accounts – e.g. (Law and Urry, 2002, Law, 1994 , Urry, 2000)). In hisencyclopaedic treatment of the ‘new economy (and much else besides) his threevolumes aim high. Yet even though comprehensive much is lost is the overviewgiven by Castells. In particular, we find little in his account which helps usunderstand how the networks he narrates come into existence. Castells uses theterm ‘space’ to bring out some important abstract processes that are involved inthe geographic organisation of the world, and how technology changes thatorganisation. When Castells describes the “space of flows” (Castells, 1996a) asthe “new industrial space [..] organised around flows of information that bring
together and separate at the same time”, he is not talking about literal geometricspace. He is exploring the abstract processes that contribute to the geographicalorganisation of the physical world. In this case Castells argues that the world isincreasingly organised in the form of flows. These are geographical organisationsof work and leisure such that there are flows of material, people, money andinformation around distributed geographic networks. Or as Castells puts it, flowsare “purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interactionbetween physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic,political and symbolic structures of society”. The arrangement of these circuitscomes to dominate the organisation of activity in individual places. That is, thesite of a place on a network and its relationship with other nodes comes todominate over the importance of the characteristics of that place itself. Thenetwork comes to be more important than the individual place - space dominatesover place.
One example that Castells uses to explain this is the network of narcoticsproduction, distribution and consumption by drug cartels. The raw plants ofnarcotics are grown in countries like Peru, sent to refineries and managementcentres in Columbia, precursor chemicals come from production centres inSwitzerland and Germany, using money which has passed through financialcentres in Miami, Panama, Cayman Islands, distributed through centres such asTijuana, and finally bought and sold thought-out the western world. For a “spaceof flows” like the illegal drugs industry it is the ways in which individual placesfit into this space – how they fit together for the job of distributing drugs - that ismore important than the characteristics of the places themselves. The networkdominates over the individual nodes.
Castells’ use of the word “space” here highlights the abstract features of work,and the ways in which the flows of money and produce across the world effectindividual places. There is much power in his account, in particular for howspecific activities come to be important not just for what they are in a particularplace, but how they interface with actions across the globe – how they fit into the
space of flows. Yet what is missing is how these networks and interdependenciesbetween people, technologies and places interact with the situated aspects ofaction within those places.
The space of flows is not an identifiable place, but rather a concept of how workand action increasingly contribute to abstract and standardised flows across theworld, from country to country. Yet this move away from a specific place is atthe danger of loosing grip of what is being studied. The notion of space canbecomes something of a playground for structures ‘behind’ the world (in his casethe rather devastating sounding “flows”, which wash away individual places indominating networks). This looses sight of the activities which make spaces,which connect together the places.
Without knowing about the story itself, knowing that stories of China are told inAmerica is little help. What stories are told? And by who? With talk of ‘space’it is easy to become dazzled by the scope of the story. It is indeed impressive –even Latour’s scientists in the Boa Vista need to ship soil samples around theworld to gain their views (Latour, 1999b). For Castells tables of aggregatedstatistics take the role of ‘actual events’.
To see something of what Castell’s descriptions miss out, let us look at somethingof a Castellsian example, if perhaps a somewhat premature one. In 1800sAmerica there were two – famous – transport revolutions right after each other.The advent of canal and railroads changed fundamentally the connectionsbetween places in the US, firstly in how long it took to get between places, but inmuch more besides. Yet understanding the changes in flows needs more thanjust the network itself: this change was dependent on a change in practice.Figure one shows some of the changes in terms of how long it took to get betweendifferent places in the US. In their textbook of economic history, Attack andPassel argue that the advent of the canals had huge effect on the development ofthe US (Atack and Passell, 1994). In the 1800s most of the population of the USlived on the eastern seaboard – in cities such as New York and Boston. Before the
canal much of the food for these hungry masses came overseas from Europe, orwas locally grown in New England. While the canals change the time it takes toget between places, they also change the cost in moving goods. With the canals,the massively fertile lands in the mid-west could now be farmed, and cornshipped along the canals to the eastern seaboard.
Figure 1: Time to travel from New York, 1800 and 1830 (from J. Atack and P. Passell (1994) A new economic
view of American history, Norton & Company)
At first appearance this is a very Castellsian story. The ‘flows’ of grain enabledby canals means that it is the relationship of places to each other (the fertility ofthe mid-west, the hungry masses in the east) which is more important than theproperties of these places per se. However, this story neglects a second importantelement: the mobility of crops depended upon an important change in theparticular places themselves, a change in how the crops themselves were seen.It is not only where the food came from which changes here however, therelationships between buyer and seller change from personal relationship tocommoditised relationships through markets, such as the grain markets in Boston
and Chicago. Theodore Porter (Porter, 1993, Porter, 1992) points this out whenhe describes the advent of standardisation in the Chicago and Boston trademarkets. The first step in standardisation came from the efforts of the Bostonboard of trade to enforce the use of a 60-pound bushel of wheat, over the oldbushel stack, which was unsuitable for the new grain elevators being introduced.While this standardised weight of wheat was moderately successful, it producedanother problem for the Boston board of trade. Since it was the elevator operatorswho selected what was suitable wheat to be transported, farmers began to mixtheir wheat with dirt and chaff, since they could receive the same price for it.Soon, the price of wheat from Boston fell to 5 to 8 cents below that ofMilwaukee. To prevent this, the Boston board of trade began subdividing itswheat into grades based on quality, eventually training inspectors to certify thegrade of each shipment of grain traded on the wheat exchange. To this was addedlaws against mixing wheat of different grades. Bureaucrats managed to createwhat had never existed in nature: uniform categories of natural produce.
Now we have a radical change – practice plus technology plus markets. It is withthe combination of these three which changes the flows of food around the US –of the commoditisation of food and its movement in massive transport networks.Yet before we are dazzled too much with the changes let us not forget that thenetworks themselves only exist because of what people do. It is not just thenetwork which is important here, but the changes in practice, in this case howthey see food as a standardised object.
Specifics of networks
“The highway bridge is tied into the network of long-distance traffic, paced ascalculated for maximum yield. Ever differently the bridge escorts the lingeringand hastening ways of men to and fro . . . The bridge gathers , as a passage thatcrosses, before the divinities–whether we explicitly think of, and visibly givethanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of bridge, or whether thatdivine presence is hidden or even pushed aside.” (Heidegger, 1971)
The argument I am developing here is that by focusing on the networks it is easyto loose sight of the specificities of how connections are made in particularplaces. While Heidegger was hardly an avid enthusiast for ethnography, asDrefuss points out (Dreyfus and Spinosa, 1997), his comments on technology hintat the tension concerning the details of specific technologies in specific places.The quote above describes a highway bridge ‘paced for maximum yield’. YetHeidegger hints at how this very technological of bridges might do other thansimply enframe, or exclude, humanity. In the last line of the quote the highwaybridge gathers together aspects of our being. This reveal something of how intechnology Heidegger saw the possibility of savour as well as danger – notalways, not everywhere, but a possibility. In this example it is in how that bridgeconnects with the history of other bridges which Heidegger uses to hint at its‘saving power’. These sorts of subtleties are lost when one only sees the flows oftraffic across the bridge, the bridge as a “network of long-distance traffic” ratherthan as a “passage that crosses, before the divinities”.
So how might we start on studying some of these aspects of technology in theparticular? There are two of technology which I have worked on which areperhaps relevant here. Each study looked at a different aspect of network flows insome detail – in the first the focus was the movement of people, in particularmobile workers and their use of paper, laptops and mobile phones. This studylooked at how different environments such as trains and cafes would be adoptedby mobile workers to be ‘workable’1 (Brown and O'hara, 2003). HardlyHeidegger’s terrain, but an interesting point of departure for those of us interestedin how networks of people are supported. With the second study, the focusmoved on to the movement of things and in particular how the a group of workersat a truck warehouse managed the supply of spare parts distributed in a globalnetwork. Here the topic was how things moving globally, yet still relied uponwhat goes on in a specific place. 1 This work was conducted with Mark Perry and Kenton O’Hara (Perry et al., 2001).
Flows of people
For the first study we interviewed a group of around twenty highly mobileworkers about their mobility, and also their experiences with working in newoffice environments. These workers were interviewed for between one and oneand a half hours about their experiences, with half the participants asked to keep adiary of their activities which was used in a second interview. Our focus here ason the effects that places had on their work. For these workers the physical placesthey could work in become a very important practical concern for them. When amobile worker goes to work, they must decide where that work is going to be,under pressures of task and management.
It is important to emphasise that these mobile workers were not simply mobile forthe sake of being mobile: they moved around because of the people they neededto work with in each different place. This is the main reason why mobileworkers were mobile; so they can meet people face to face. As Boden points out,the face to face meeting is still the paramount means of communication inorganisations (Boden, 1995).
This constant movement, connecting places together, has had an impact on manycafés, bars and restaurants. Many of these sites have been augmented withfeatures which turn them into sites of work. As any frequent visitor to a Starbuckscafé would have noticed, they now have areas available for the use of laptops, andcafés are as much sites for group work now as they are group leisure. To theworkers we studied, cafés were useful “semi-offices” where they could meet withcolleagues and clients. There mobility meant that they more often than notworked in settings outside their office – café’s, cars, airports and such.
However, these places were not merely spaces between places, they were placeswhich themselves had to be skilfully used in managing relations with others.When the world, potentially, becomes a workplace, there are practical and socialdilemmas involved in making this happen. Most importantly, the world is not
literally an office. In attempting to work outside the office much of the artificialconstruction of the office was made apparent. In the world all manner of noisescan interfere with work or conversation. There is also little privacy in publicplaces, and confidential matters can be overheard. Lighting is also a controlledfeature of offices, as it is not in the world. Cafés can be too dark to read, or thesun can be too bright while chatting in the park. There can simply be a lack ofroom in a particular setting, whereas offices are outfitted with ergonomic desksand chairs. Perhaps most serious of all, there is a lack of access to the tools of theoffice - the records, files, documents, photocopiers and so on, which are importantfor the process of getting things done.
To some of these problems there are limited solutions. In particular, mobiletechnologies increasingly support a range of these activities outside the office.The laptop computer, for example, provides a prop that can be used in a variety ofsettings to re-establish a link with the office. More broadly, technology canencapsulate some of the properties of the office into mobile devices. Mobileworkers increasingly make use of a range of new mobile technologies, mostubiquitously the mobile telephone (Brown et al., 2001), but also an increasingrange of more eclectic mobile devices such as PDAs, mobile scanners, textmessaging, instant messaging and so on. These devices allow characteristics ofplaces – such as co-presence, informal communication, and such to be supportedon the move. They transfer these characteristics of places – such as being able tohave a quick chat with a colleague - into a thing (such as a laptop with instantmessaging software) which can then be carried around. These mobile devices inturn are objects which can be bought and sold by electronics companies. In thisway, some of the characteristics of places become commoditised in the form ofconsumer electronics.
While non-office places offer challenges to work, they can also be used to presentan image; cafés are often settings of informality. This informality can be used asa tool – it can contribute to a friendship with a customer, or emphasise thefashionability of a new media company. The main business of coffee shops –
coffee – also already has a strong niche in organisational culture. Yet it cannot beused in settings where flippancy must be avoided, such as a financial meeting. Sowhile the individuals we studied used these “third spaces” between home andwork as important workplaces, this was not an automatic or problem freetransition. Work had to be done to convert regions that were once demarcated asoff-limits from work (or at least explicit work) to be re-interpreted and adopted bytheir practices. While we have yet to see a pub designed for work, but we haveseen people working with laptops and documents in pubs.
So to these highly mobile workers the places they worked in were more, not less,important to them as they moved around. Statistical studies suggest that the flowsof mobile workers is increasing (Vilhelmson and Thulin, 2001) - yet these areflows which would not be possible without the activities which take place in eachspecific environment, activities which make possible work by ‘clearing a space’.The ‘space of flows’, then for mobile workers, relies on a more ordinary transferof office work to places outside the office. This is some of the work which isdone which enables the mobility of workers. Contrary to writers such as Auge wefind that non-places are places, which very much going on in them (Auge, 1995).
Flows of things
Travelling further on this highway, our second example shows something of howthe flows of objects interacts with the places people find themselves in and thework they do. This work comes from some recent fieldwork we2 conductedlooking at how a large Bus and Truck manufacturer managed their spare parts andrepairs. In this work the staff we studied were static – at least in the sense ofworking on one site. Rather than moving between places, it was the things whichmove around these workers as they controlled the distribution and arrangement ofspare parts around their organisation. 2 This work was conducted with Eric Laurier and Henrik Fragrell
We had expected repairs to be a neglected corner of the truck business. Yet wediscovered that repairs are at the centre of what this company did: indeed, thistruck company only broke even on selling trucks, and make nearly all their moneyby fixing them. In the repair depots where spare parts are sold, and the servicingof trucks done, we found a bunch of friendly yet underpaid store men. Their jobwas surprisingly difficult – although on paper they simply picked parts fromshelves and put them in the hands of company mechanics or customers, findingthe right part turned out to be a significant daily challenge.
Many of their parts they supplied came from a warehouse in mainland Europe,and were manufactured further a field. Yet the repairs they supplied the parts forneeded to be completed as quickly as possible, since a truck off the road couldcost a company thousands of pounds an hour. In their work then the logistics ofsupply interacted with the urgency of repairs. Moreover, each of the trucks orbuses they repaired had literally thousands and thousands of standardised parts. Intheir work, the parts staff needed to work these standardisations to find out whatparticular parts would be needed to fix a specific truck.
For example, the computer system could tell them where each part was stored inthe workshop and give extensive details on what that part was. Yet theexperienced parts staff knew the workshop very well –they knew themselveswhere most of the parts were stored. Accordingly, staff could go straight to thecorrect part of the warehouse, grab the part and hand it to the waiting customerwithout needing to do any searching on the computer to find the correct partnumber. With the part in hand that number could be obtained from labels on eachpart.
Finding parts numbers was cumbersome. So when asked for a part, parts staffwould often walk to the correct area of the warehouse and, even if a part was outof stock, look for where the part should be. They could then take a note of thepart number (written above the empty bay) and use this number to order the partusing the computer. So even though the computer told the parts staff where to
find parts in the workshop, much of the time they used the arrangement the otherway around, exploiting the physical place to find numbers which they could thenuse on the computer. This practice shows something of how it is that thecompany’s standardised parts numbers (held in the computer system) interactedwith the place of the workshop. In using the computer system the partsmenneeded to stitch together the information given by their technology with thearrangement of the physical place.
Along with this management of the parts in the warehouse, the parts staff werepart of a network of parts distribution worldwide. Through their computer systemthey could order parts and have them dispatched from warehouses in the UK, andfrom the main European warehouse. The system even allowed them to put out a‘vehicle off the road” call which would search the whole company worldwide fora part. In this way the parts staff’s use of the computer stretched out and couldcause goods to be shipped worldwide without any need to directly phone orcontact anyone.
Yet, as with our descriptions above, this worldwide network relied upon localconnections between offices. Although frowned upon nearly everyday the staffused “half way meets” or “full way meets” to swap parts between local offices.This allowed staff to get hold of parts quicker than waiting for them to be shippedfrom overseas. Using a ‘half way meet’, where staff met halfway and exchangeddesired parts, they could get parts that day, as opposed to the next day deliveryoffered for parts from overseas.
So while the computer was at the centre of the distribution of parts – from theordering and supply of parts coming into the depot, and how parts were found bythe staff, this is not to say that the ‘space’ which the parts occupied and flowedthrough made the staff themselves irrelevant. There was considerablemanagement of these flows by the parts staff, organising and choosing themselveswhen and how parts would be supplied, along with local practices such as usinglocations to find parts numbers, or using “half way meets” to get hold of parts
quickly.
In their work the parts staff both managed the flow of parts around the companyto their local office, and from that office into the hands of mechanics orcustomers. These flows were global flows – many of the parts were sourced frombeyond Europe, and their ordering of parts had automatic effects on themanufacturing of parts around the world. Yet this flow depended in many wayson their own skills and management. They had to find the right part for a specificcustomer, without which this specific truck would not be repaired. So while thisvery ordinary of jobs was connected to a networks of goods being ordered,tracked, and distributed worldwide we find that very local concerns were essentialin the feasibility of such an arrangement.
Some conclusions
As with the advent of the global postal service at the advent of the 20th century,global networks have a certain mesmerising nature. Be they networks of people,goods, or technology their span and power can make claims of seeminglyspectacular power more reasonable than it should. In many ways these networksare amazing, and do have considerable power. Yet we should not forget that theyexist only in the actions of individuals in particular places, and that the details ofwhat is done in those specific places is as important as how these places areconnected together. For the wonder of the direct dial telephone network, thepostal service, mobile work or even just the repair of trucks lies in how peoplestitch together networks from their own practices.
We started this paper with the fantastic stories of Calvino’s explorer. As thispaper has emphasised, telling stories about places far away is an old tradition, onewhich connects and networks together without the need for sophisticatedtechnology or ‘new economies’. Rather than being dazzled by the scope of suchnetworks, or other networks grander in their telling, it is possible to ask abouthow particular networks work in detail. We encourage looking at and thinking
about specific networks. Calvino’s stories are about places far away, but they tellus about how we do things here and now. In this paper we have travelled throughthree stories of technology and its connections. While Canals andstandardisation, mobile workers and even the supply of spare parts may seemsomething of a motley combination each one tells us something about how thingsand people come to distribute and change the places in which they move throughand arrive at.
The three examples describe how particular sites network together in details. Ourdiscussion of the advent of canals shows something of how networking reliesupon changes in practice – in this case the standardisation of food to enablemarkets and commoditisation. In turn, our discussion of mobile workers lookedat how these workers managed to convert the places they found themselves in to‘workable spaces’ using new technology and changes to their cultures of work.Lastly, in looking at the work of the supply of spare parts for trucks we looked atthe ways in which a worldwide network of things relies upon the local actions ofworkshop staff and their manipulation of place.
Our creative opponent in this paper has been Castell’s and his network sociology.Yet we do not seek to simply critique Castells, but rather to move ‘networksociology’ onto studying specific networks in specific places and times. Our fearis that in moving sociology towards a notion of ‘networks’, we are starting withconcepts as ambiguous as ‘society’ or ‘culture’. The motivations for this paperthen has been to start in a different place, to look at specific connections, ratherthan seeing using these concepts to power generic enquiries.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Mark Perry, Kenton O’Hara and Henrik Fagrell for theirfieldwork, analysis and ideas.
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