Realist Activity Theory for Digital Library Evaluation: Conceptual Framework and Case Study

An activity system is a triply-mediated, outcome-oriented unit of analysis. Instruments (i.e., resources) mediate the relationship between subject and object; social rules and regulations mediate interpersonal relationships; and roles (i.e., division of labor) condition the relationship between a community of practice⁹ and its negotiated object. This work builds on Engeström's seminal work, and a variant on this basic model of an activity system figures prominently in subsequent analysis. Summarizing the major tenets of activity theory, all human activity is at once artifactually mediated, pragmatic (or, objectively motivated), situated, provisional (historically developing/evolving), and more or less contested (Blackler, 1995).

Data Collection Methods

Activity theory is employed as a middle-range realist theory to initiate, provisionally order, and govern the ongoing conduct of data collection and analysis. Data have been collected from several sources, employing a variety of techniques, such as documentary analysis and extended participant-observation. The idea is to take as many “cuts” at the data from as many angles as is feasible, so as to maximize the strength, density, and validity of theoretical ideas that emerge from data collection and analysis.

Such an approach automatically contributes to multiple triangulations, which strengthens the multiperspectival validity of the conceptual framework developed in, and of the findings of, this work (Yeung, 1997). Specifically, in terms of the present research, triangulation across sources and techniques is especially beneficial to theory generation, as the analytic strategy provides multiple perspectives on an issue, supplies more (and higher quality) information on emerging concepts, allows for cross-checking of assumptions and conjectures, and yields stronger substantiation of constructs (Layder, 1993, 1998; Orlikowski, 1993; Yeung, 1997; Yin, 1994).

A source of data especially important to the present research is the intensive participation of the researcher in the ongoing activities of the FNA project. As the Bioinformatics Coordinator and CPS Analyst, I have had access to the inner workings of Project management as well as to the informal and more or less spontaneous activities in the Organizational Center (OC) at the Missouri Botanical Garden, since May 1997. This immersion in the FNA project as both a participant and an observer provides a rich source of data, as well as a deeply grounded context for the analysis of other sources of data. Similar to that described in Näslund (1997), “… my role can be characterized as a participant observer of issues closely related to usability, and as an observer participant regarding other issues in the project” [emphasis in original] (p. 173). Both role variants facilitated the sort of unstructured interactive interviewing that makes possible the study of individual in their contingently configured casual contexts. In this way, data collection for research and for formative system evaluation happily coincided.

Moreover, a large and, more importantly, living corpus of such written materials as organizational documentation and communications (e.g., minutes from committee meetings) about the development and current use of written coordinative mechanisms and the design of CPS were analyzed to help further contextualize and situate the participant-observation. In addition, notes from selected interviews, use sessions, and meetings were content analyzed. Another important source of data was feedback from users as they learned to use CPS over time. Communication with the analyst, the FNA bryological community’s primary point of contact with the system development effort, was facilitated by mailto links on each CPS web page. Input from CPS users was important because their questions and comments were used both to contextualize system use and, as a filtering mechanism, to elicit extended feedback from selected users. Feedback from users about their difficulties or problems using CPS provides protocol-analytic data to the extent that users were encouraged to reconstruct what they did and saw and even to anticipate what they planned to do.

Case studies allow researchers to trace phenomena over time, which is essential if the interplay of (inter)action and its causally efficacious conditions are to be effectively separated and analyzed.

The realist case study approach employed in the present research is depicted in Figure 5.



Figure 5. Realist case study research methodology. Italicized elements refer to its application in the present research (adapted from Layder, 1998).
Inspired by key realist and activity theoretic principles, the case study approach employed in this research is deliberately sensitive to, and equally privileges, the contextual conditions of behavior. Moreover, by exhaustively specifying and contextualizing the findings (or, outcomes), previously and/or emergently developed theory can be used as a revisable template with which to constantly compare the results of other social realist case studies. In this way will social science cumulate coherently.

STUDY FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The approach to understanding the evolution of the FNA project that is summarized here is based on realist activity theory (developed earlier in the paper) and has been developed during an eighteen month, ongoing study of the Project. Because detailed presentation of the empirical work is beyond the scope of this paper, aspects of it are drawn upon to illustrate the application and development of the framework used to analyze the FNA project. Thus, while this presentation can only suggest ways in which the theoretical approach developed herein can be used to evaluate trajectories of DL development, in future work this theoretical framework will be explored as a more general conceptual framework for framing DL evaluation.

The present work will focus on describing how attempts to resolve inter-organizational problems (i.e., contradictions¹⁰) among the participants in the FNA project have collectively led to its expansive development (Engeström, 1991) and reconceptualization, which in turn, at least potentially, provides a more hospitable environment for the development and deployment of CPS as a publishing coordination environment and viably sustainable boundary infrastructure (Bowker & Star, 1999). A couple of the steps that Engeström includes in cycles of expansive development will perforce be the focus of future work. An additional way in which this presentation simplifies actual cycles of expansive development is by suggesting that the steps progress in a linear fashion, with no overlap between them. In fact, reality as lived and experienced is never so tidy.¹¹ The cycle of expansive development proceeded as described below.

Ethnography of trouble: describing and explaining the initial situation.

In Figure 6, FNA depicts an activity network, whose primary communities of activity are the Center for Botanical Informatics (CBI); Flora of North America Organization (FNA O), which represents those responsible for the execution, planning, and oversight of the entire project; and the Flora of North America Organizational Center (FNA OC), the workaday, administrative center of project coordination physically located at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Importantly, since its initial funding in 1989, FNA OC personnel have been the only full-time paid staff in the FNA project (more about this below).

Figure 6 depicts the FNA activity network as not only multiply mediated, but multiply stratified. Material mediation is embedded in sociocultural mediation. Communities of activity are embedded in activity networks (i.e., networks of related activity systems) And the material, technological, and socio-organizational infrastructures of work-related social interaction (i.e., object-oriented resources, rules, and roles derived from the relatively constrained objective(s) of work) generalize to processes of perspective shaping, taking, and making when activity systems are properly located in the networks of related communities of activity in which they customarily operate. The numbered lightning bolts indicate 'contradiction sets' that organize the following discussion.

This approach has been applied to identify and understand key differences between the three communities of activity that are vital to the project’s future viability. Factors that help account for differences include: approaches to work adopted by communities of activity, management and leadership styles, and the ways communities of activity define themselves in relation to others in the context of the project as a whole. These factors in turn are of course mediated by conceptual and material artifacts/tools/instruments (contextual resources), formal and informal social rules and regulations (boundary formation and transgression, i.e., innovation), and divisions of labor, expertise, and knowledge/know-how (i.e., domain-specific innovations).

As Blackler, Crump, & McDonald (forthcoming) explain, with regard to their two-year study of an international supplier of high-tech electro-optical devices to the military:

The infrastructure and priorities that make it possible for particular expert communities to focus on shared goals, to develop an identity, and to act competently can also act as barriers to close collaboration across different communities. Interactions across activity networks are easier to manage in times of relative stability when systems can be developed to minimise conflict or misunderstandings, and more difficult to achieve in times of uncertainty when priorities, methods and group identities may need to be re-examined (p. 18).

For example, both CBI and the FNA OC are physical places with co-located members, and each community of activity has formed a strong sense of shared identity and goals which have interfered with their ability to cooperate to develop an electronic tool to facilitate the work of the project. Moreover, while CBI functions as a source of specialized consultants, charged by the FNA O to help informate (Zuboff, 1989) the project, members of the FNA OC are the only full-time paid staff of the FNA project. In contradistinction to both CBI and FNA OC personnel, members of FNA O are in effect volunteers who are geographically dispersed, and many of whom serve multiple roles for the project.

Given their differing and inevitably conflicting roles and their equally divergent conception of the objects of their work, the project has been riddled with destabilizing, structurally embedded contradictions from its initial funding. The FNA OC considered their primary objective to be the timely production of the print Flora of North America. CBI was primarily concerned with the design, development, and deployment of CPS as the web-based coordination environment for the construction of the FNA digital library — the electronic Flora of North America. Finally, the FNA O's main concern was the overall identity of the project and its continued funding, which, until very recently, required them to fund FNA OC operations with monies ostensibly earmarked for FNA informatics development.

The FNA OC has never been involved in decisions concerning CBI’s role as the Project’s informatics consultant; these decisions have been made by those in the FNA O responsible for managing the project. Accordingly, the FNA OC became extremely competitive with, and suspicious of, CBI’s efforts to develop an electronic infrastructure to enable the FNA O to adaptively construct its floristic DL, and again until recently, successfully lobbied for substantial internal funds to enable it to continue its work. Thus, it is easy to see (even in this brief sketch) how the profound differences between the communities of activity constituting the FNA activity network, in terms of both identity and objectives, generate profound difficulties and threaten the viability and continuity of the project in its entirety. In other words, community of activity boundary spanning activities that would lead to project-wide cooperation and overall identity construction and reinforcement have been severely undermined by “pathogens” resident in the very structure or configuration of the FNA network.¹³

Analysis of contradictions: historically and empirically

As can be seen in Figure 6, three sets of contradictions are identified (by numbered two-headed lightning bolts), each focusing on, and emanating from, differing conceptions of the objects of work within and between communities of activity, and which collectively have been fueled by cyclical, yet ongoing, funding pressures. Not only do each of the communities of activity have different conceptions of the same object, but, in some cases, the objects of their work themselves actually differ. For example, for CBI the object of work is CPS; for the FNA OC the print FNA, and for the FNA O a fully and renewably funded project (which, because of funding pressures and conflicting work exigencies, is being transformed from the paper-based production of FNA as a traditional multi-volume reference set to the construction of a floristic DL, of which the reference set is one product).

Referring to Figure 6, the focus of contradiction set 1 is on the tension between the object of work and mediating instruments, which jointly shape the context of work. For example, the model of FNA as a floristic DL (a conceptual mediating instrument) used by CBI to guide their work on CPS (its object of activity) is vastly different from, and in conflict with, the model of FNA as a print reference set used by FNA OC to guide their work on the print FNA, both of which differ from the management and funding strategies used by FNA O to shape the FNA Project into a fundable entity.

In terms of facilitating project-wide coordination strategies and developing some sense of overall identity, contradictions emanating from differing objectives are profoundly problematic. For example, the contextual resources employed by CBI reinforced its domain-specific (i.e., informatics consulting) orientation and approach -- its sense of technical expertise. However, by restrictively employing the traditional tools of paper-based publishing, based on their conceptual model of small-scale print publishing, the FNA OC developed and reinforced yet another domain-specific orientation and approach. The result of these radically different contexts was to create rather than cross boundaries, rendering the development of either participative (interaction-related) or reificative (artifact-related) connections problematic if not impossible (Wenger, 1998). In terms of the latter, differing investments in domain-specific perspective making activities prevented the development of coordinating boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989).

Because each community of activity — CBI, the FNA OC, and the FNA O — construes its purpose and place in the overall Project differently, additional tensions ramify throughout the FNA activity network (see lightning bolts/contradiction sets 2 and 3 in Figure 6). For example, FNA OC construed its object as the publisher-directed publication of the print FNA, and thus required all manuscripts to be processed locally and physically (according to a set of elaborate rules and procedures) by its staff to ensure print publication standards were being met. This clearly conflicted with the conception of FNA as first and foremost a digital library, of which one revenue-generating product is the print FNA multi-volume reference set. Moreover, the role of the FNA OC as the centralized, project-wide center of administrative coordination conflicted with the development and especially the implementation of CPS as a means to facilitate the fundamentally distributed nature of the Project’s work and, even more fundamentally, with the conception of FNA as a digital library and as a fundable testbed for studying and supporting large-scale and highly distributed knowledge work.

Until recently, the FNA activity network could be diagrammatically characterized as follows:

The network was deeply fragmented because of differing and incompatible objects, identities, and differing contexts of work. Instead of providing a common or shared object of interest and work, CPS became an arena of conflict. As Boland & Tenkasi (1995) astutely note, "boundary objects can, of course, be a center of intense conflict as easily as one of cooperative effort. Creating and reshaping boundary objects is an exercise of power that can be collaborative or unilateral” (p. 362). In terms of the analysis above, such a situation is likely to develop in the absence of a collectively held vision of future direction. Not surprisingly, the outcome has been a complex project whose work is behind schedule and whose very existence is threatened by votes of no confidence on the part of benefactors and funding agencies.

Ethnography of transformation: describing and explaining the new situation

Recently, the FNA project has undergone a dramatic change in its structure, which is largely, if not exclusively, due to the need to resolve the contradictions described above (as well as many others) under renewed and intense funding pressures. The current funding for the project ran out at the end of calendar year 1998, which forced project management to confront several particularly internecine contradictions: FNA as primarily a print reference set or a digital library; adequacy of small-scale print publication practices or the necessity for implementing web-based database publishing and DL construction techniques; and the FNA project as a centrally administered activity system or fundamentally distributed activity network (in the parlance of realist activity theory). The way to resolve these contradictions has come in the form of a newly co-constructed organizational form and context:

However, apparent success may be short-lived. As Engeström (1990) reminds us, a “… new descriptive ‘what’ artifact [e.g., FNA as a floristic digital library] may provide for temporary involvement and discussion – but it alone is not likely to achieve much change in the practical actions of the community members. Correspondingly, a new algorithm or a new explanatory model [e.g., CPS] alone will probably remain a curiosity, no matter how obvious its need may be to the researcher [e.g., CBI]” [emphasis in original] (p. 193). Neither involves a needed change in perspective and thus both only downwardly contextualize. Then again, when the FNA project was explicitly re-conceptualized as the highly distributed project it always had been (i.e. acknowledging its true nature, what it is about the project that makes it what it is), together with FNA being formally recognized as a floristic DL, a prospective, perspective-changing, upwardly contextualizing artifact was co-constructed. It was only then that project participants could finally agree that CPS will function as the accepted environment for FNA DL construction.

Finally, however, for the social realist such transformative activity always occurs in some extant context and thus begins from some definite (if unspecified) somewhere. In the case of the FNA project, the new vision of it as a distributed network of semi-autonomous centers was enacted on a small scale from the beginning of this research by bryologists whose lead editor is based at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). Given that they study lower, non-vascular plants (as opposed to the rest of the FNA project which covers the vascular flora, the higher plants, of North America), the bryology community of activity was structured differently from the start. They were included in the FNA Project several years after the project was initially funded, only after strenuous lobbying that a flora of North America could not be considered complete if the bryoflora were omitted.

While they were begrudgingly admitted to the project and are represented on project-wide committees, the bryologists have formed an especially tightly integrated community of activity, often holding their own editorial meetings and communicating intensively among themselves. And crucially for the present work, they have, for the most part, chosen not to work with the FNA OC and instead to use earlier versions of CPS to coordinate the publication of their FNA contributions. While there have been problems with these earlier versions of CPS, the bryology community of activity has worked (not always harmoniously) with the CBI informatics team to iteratively develop CPS and, in the process, have modeled not only the new perspective of the FNA project as a truly distributed network, but also a more adaptive and constructive approach to information infrastructure design, development, and possible deployment. In fact, the transformative potential for the project as a whole was prefigured and at least partially modeled by the autonomous emergence shortly after this research began of the bryoflora center at the New York Botanical Garden.

As the example of the bryology community of activity illustrates, the FNA Project is both highly stratified and relationally differentiated (Stones, 1996). Social systems (i.e., activity systems or communities of activity) do not exist in a vacuum, but are always in contact with the differentiated powers and liabilities of the objects, processes, people, and practices in other systems. Indeed,

for the standard view of science, the world is a determined concatenation of contingent events; for the realist it is a contingent concatenation of real structures. And this difference is monumental. [emphasis added] (Layder, 1990, p. 14).

The difference was certainly monumental for the bryology group at NYBG, which in turn made a monumental difference to the development of the FNA Project as a whole. In the open, stratified, and differentiated world that is the FNA Project, its development could never have been predicted because the consequences of the interaction between the unique configuration of structural processes (e.g., the necessary independence of the bryology community of activity) and such contingently intervening factors as funding deadlines and national research priorities can never be captured by simple empiricist logic (for the realist, human beings are spontaneous loci of causality — generators of social behavior rather than simple transmitters of external constraints). The ontology of any non-trivially complex activity network is simply too richly variegated. However, what has happened can be causally explained (or evaluated), which is the vital and generative province of realist social science.

CONCLUSIONS

The FNA Project, along with CPS, is emerging and evolving as this is being written. Drawing conclusions about the ultimate form of the former or the usefulness and productive integration of the latter are thus impossible. However, while the new funding cycle that triggered the crystallization of the FNA project as a network of semi-autonomous centers has not yet begun, the vision described in the ethnography of transformation above is guiding all current project developments, and it is highly likely that the trajectories outlined above are at minimum directionally accurate.

However, while conclusions are hard to come by, the analysis in the present work has demonstrated the utility of a realist activity theory conceptual framework for ecologically evaluating the socio-organizational and institutional embeddedness of computer-based information systems, such as digital libraries, and explaining the contextual conditioning of our experience of them. Such a framework includes a concern with intrinsic (or generative) causation (e.g., latent systemic contradictions); a stratified and relationally differentiated view of social life (e.g., material and socio-organizational mediation, activity systems related by shared objects and identities into activity networks); and cycles of expansive development/learning/object co-construction in terms of the temporal patterning and interplay among structural conditioning, social interaction, and structural reproduction, elaboration, or transformation.

For the social realist, all valid social scientific research, and even more so for the evaluation of social systems (of which DLs are paradigms), must inhabit the middle-range somewhere between the Scylla of fables of continuous, unconditioned, and unfettered local construction and the Charybdis of grand narratives of the inexorable, de-peopled, and totalizing march of master mechanisms. To paraphrase Marx’s celebrated dictum, people make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. Instead, the social realist adopts a research strategy of appropriate form and scope for leading and, perhaps even more importantly, federating (i.e., cumulating) empirical inquiry. This type of empirical inquiry leads to the development of a generic fuselage of concepts, which in turn provides a scaffolding for middle-range hypothesis generation and an ontological chassis for evidence collection (Pawson, undated). The social realist “… moves from one case to another, not because they are descriptively similar, but because [she has] ideas that can encompass them both [emphasis in original] (Pawson & Tilley, 1997, p. 119). It is axiomatic for the social realist evaluating social systems, such as DLs, that the insightfulness and subsequent utility of the evaluation will necessarily and massively depend on the perspicacity of its explanatory vision and means.

So, let us end where we began, with the assertion that this research would be real, realist, and realistic. How so? First, and obviously, this research deals with the real activity network that is the FNA Project. Additionally, the organizational incoherencies and the inter-organizational conflicts and contradictions have been all too real. Second, its methodology is realist in that thoroughly contextualized generative mechanisms have been identified. Lastly, this research has been realistic; its applied focus is on better understanding those contradictions so as to improve the fit between CPS, the web-based coordination environment, and the organizational form of the FNA Project, as a truly distributed web-enabled activity network.

Finally, while the conceptual foundations of the framework outlined in this work have been widely accepted throughout the natural and social sciences, social realism has yet to find acceptance in the social informatics, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer/computer-human interaction communities (all of which include at least aspects of research on DLs). Thus, to the extent that the analysis is valid and compelling, it is hoped that the ideas contained herein may find greater acceptance in better understanding DL evaluation in its tensed, dialectical interplay with design, development, deployment, and use.
POSTSCRIPT

As of this writing, the fate of the FNA Project has taken yet another unanticipated turn. The NSF grant that outlines the new organizational form of the Project has been rejected. It was decided that too much of the project is incomplete and that not enough was done for the previous grant. FNA leaders were told not to apply for funding until at least 60% of the project was complete (estimates are that about a quarter of the project is now finished). The FNA OC is being subsidized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, CBI has been eliminated, and CPS continues to be used by the bryology group. Thus, whether FNA truly becomes the distributed network of editorial and service centers outlined in the grant application, whether CPS can be successfully adopted now that CBI is out of the picture, and whether the fit between FNA's organizational structure and state-of-the-art information technologies can be improved so that the former can effectively capitalized on the availability of the latter, are all unclear and to be determined.. Stay tuned!

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7 As Sayer (1992) notes, “… the juxtaposition of necessity and contingency is complex … the relationship between objects and causal powers is necessary; the relationship between these and their conditions is contingent …. For any particular set of conditions, the results occur necessarily by virtue of the nature of the objects involved, but it is contingent which conditions are actually present” (p. 108). See figure 9 below.



Figure 9. Necessity and contingency in realist explanation (adapted from Sayer, 1992, p. 109).