STS: Doctoral Dissertation Research: Designing Software Orders: Patterns of Governmentality and Authority in Software Practice and Discourse

软件越来越多地调解组织和公民之间的关系。政府、公司、学校、企业以及各种城市和金融机构都采用软件系统来实现与公民、雇员、学生、客户以及居住和使用公共空间和商品的人之间流程和互动的自动化。随着时间的推移，大型软件系统的设计和实现也越来越复杂。软件很少作为封闭产品发布。相反，软件依赖于软件专业人员和涉众之间的一组持续的关系。这个项目旨在理解这些关系以及软件专业人员在设计、实现和维护大规模计算系统时的工作。该研究利用人种学和话语分析来检查信息技术项目团队为韩国首尔附近的总体规划城市发展设计的大型软件系统的设计和规划。该研究解决了以下问题：IT项目团队如何定义和想象他们的角色以及软件在组织过程、设计系统、利益相关者参与以及城市和公共空间结构中的角色？他们的设计过程如何塑造和约束软件在他们与国际合作伙伴和利益相关者的关系中所扮演的社会和技术角色，以及对整个城市发展项目的影响？该项目为社会技术系统设计、专家-公众关系和计算机政治方面的学术研究做出了贡献。它采用批判和比较的方法，建立在早期的软件系统案例研究的基础上，包括在线游戏和金融服务软件。跨站点的比较允许研究者考虑软件代码形成和被不同设计过程形成的方式，以及它如何增强和扩展权威和治理心态的关系。这项工作更广泛的影响包括大规模软件系统设计中组织过程和涉众参与的方法论含义。

Software increasingly mediates relationships between organizations and citzens. Governments, corporations, schools, businesses, and all kinds of urban and financial utilities adopt software systems to automate processes and interactions with citizens, employees, students, customers, and people who inhabit and make use of public spaces and goods. Large-scale software systems are also increasingly complicated to design and implement plus they evolve over time. Software is rarely shipped out as a closed product. Rather, software relies upon a set of ongoing relationships between software professionals and stakeholders. This project aims to understand these relationships and the work of software professionals as they design, implement, and maintain large-scale computational systems.The research utilizes ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the design and planning for a large-scale software system by the information technology program team for a master-planned urban development near Seoul, South Korea. The study addresses the questions: how does the IT program team define and imagine their role and the role of software in organizational processes, designed systems, stakeholder participation, and the structuring of urban and public spaces? How does their design process shape and constrain the social and technical role that software plays in their relationships with international partners and stakeholders, and with what consequences for the overall urban development project?The project contributes to scholarship on sociotechnical systems design, expert-public relationships, and the politics of computing. It adopts a critical and comparative approach, building on earlier cases studies of software systems including an online game and financial services software. Comparisons across sites allow the researcher to consider the ways that software code shapes and is shaped by different design processes and how it augments and extends relationships of authority and govern mentality. Broader impacts of this work include methodological implications for organizational processes for and stakeholder involvement in the design of large-scale software systems.