Papers by Nina Boulus-Rødje
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, May 8, 2018
This paper investigates the collaborative practices and computational artifacts that welfare work... more This paper investigates the collaborative practices and computational artifacts that welfare workers use in a public welfare agency. Specifically, the paper focuses on caseworkers' knowledge practices related to assessing unemployed citizens and identifying 'perfect' pathways. I draw upon an ongoing ethnographic study, carried out in one of the largest municipal jobcentres in Denmark. Findings from this research point out that existing computational artifacts support compliance with welfare policy, while limited support is provided to caseworkers in helping citizens obtain an employment. The contribution of the paper is three-folded: 1) identifying fundamental characteristics of the caseworkers' knowledge work entailed in assessing unemployed citizens and identifying appropriate pathways, 2) examining the conditions surrounding these knowledge practices, and 3) discussing implications for the design of computational artifacts that better support local knowledge practices. While maintaining support to policy compliance, I argue that computational artifacts can also support 'data-driven knowledge', meaning the creation of knowledge that is based on data collected from the wide range of cases of unemployed.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Oct 11, 2018
In this paper, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech en... more In this paper, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech entrepreneurship possible. We report from a longitudinal ethnographic study of tech entrepreneurs situated in occupied Palestine. By investigating this polar case of tech entrepreneurship, we identify critical infrastructures which are otherwise invisible and go unnoticed. We propose infrastructural accessibility as a method to identify available and absent infrastructures in concrete trans-local situations. Infrastructural accessibility leads us to identify multiple dimensions of critical infrastructures necessary for the success of tech start-ups. This includes infrastructures related to location, community, funding, digital platforms, politics, and history. Our study shows how these multiple dimensions of infrastructural accessibility shape the everyday practices of tech entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our study reveals how Palestinian tech entrepreneurship is characterized by infrastructural inaccessibility due to missing infrastructures related to mobility, legal frameworks, payment gateways, and mobile Internet. Infrastructural inaccessibility seriously limits tech entrepreneurs' potential to succeed in creating a long-term sustainable tech industry.
Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS, Oct 28, 2013
The paper offers the notion 'imagined potentialities' to explore the power generated to sustain t... more The paper offers the notion 'imagined potentialities' to explore the power generated to sustain technological innovations. Imagined potentialities bear strong power that can drive technological innovations and enable them to re-instantiate themselves regardless of their actual outcomes. This notion looks into how futures are enacted through discursive and material processes. Résumé: Cette communication porte sur la notion de « potentialité imaginée » pour explorer le pouvoir généré et susciter l'innovation technologique. Les potentialités imaginées recèlent d'un fort pouvoir qui peut favoriser l'innovation technologique et leur permettre de se ré-instancier sans égard à leurs effets. Cette notion permet un regard tourné vers des avenirs matérialisés grâce à des processus discursifs et matériels.
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 2014
A much revisited question within the field of Information Systems is how researchers can interven... more A much revisited question within the field of Information Systems is how researchers can intervene in the context of large-scale, complex and heterogeneous information infrastructures, while ensuring impact on field settings. To explore this question, I draw upon my interventions and fieldwork experiences from an action research project in a healthcare infrastructural setting. I use these experiences as a basis for appraising the normative criteria for rigor and relevance that are enacted in IS action research literature. I argue that while these criteria originally had important contributions, there are also weaknesses with normative approaches. Specifically, these norms of action research leave relatively little space for understanding and managing emerging empirical uncertainties. These norms are important because they have implications not only on how we conduct action research in practice, but also on how we share research experiences, document and report research processes, and on how we use this literature for teaching and training purposes. Therefore, we need methodological perspectives more adequate to the varied experiences of empirical IS research. I propose replacing the normative frameworks found in some IS action research literature with a reflexive framework that encourages researchers to investigate critically how their methods are enacted and practiced in the field. The contribution of this paper lies in providing a reflexive analysis of the situated and emergent challenges encountered when handling action researcher's dual agenda of combining academic and practical contribution.
Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, Jun 19, 2019
This paper draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study conducted at one of the largest municipal j... more This paper draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study conducted at one of the largest municipal jobcenters in Denmark. It investigates what happens when welfare-to-work policies meet the complex lived realities of unemployed citizens. I examine the nature of welfare policies, and show how these inscribe neoliberal economic discourse, which are not easily applicable to the lived reality of unemployed citizens. Findings from this study illustrate that there are incongruences between the nature of policies and the policies-in-use. I argue that these incongruences are a result of myriad of assumptions that are inscribed in the welfare apparatus, constituting tools, people, policies, and practices. I, therefore, unpack assumptions about caseworkers as well as benefit recipients, appointments they must attend, and activation programs assigned to them. This way, the paper aims at initiating a discussion about finding ways to develop policies that are better applicable to the citizen's lived realities.
European Conference on Information Systems, 2012
This paper explores roles and interventions in IS action research. I draw upon a four-year resear... more This paper explores roles and interventions in IS action research. I draw upon a four-year research project about electronic medical records, conducted in close collaboration with a community partner. Following a self-reflexive stance, I trace the trajectory of the research engagement and the different roles I occupied. To better understand the complex nature of collaboration found within action research projects, I propose conceptualizing action research as a network. The network framework directs our attention to the collective production and the conditions through which roles and interventions come to exist. Thus, interventions and roles can be seen as network effects-they are enacted and supported by the network. Accordingly, roles and interventions are neither simply static and fixed nor fluid and flexible; rather, these are products of past and present attachments. I demonstrate how the different attachments existing in the network at different points in time enable the configuration of particular actors with capacities to enact different roles and interventions in a diversity of contexts and settings. Finally, I illustrate what happens when these attachments are missing and how this influences the researcher's agency.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Jan 25, 2023
Eco-conferences like COP26 in Glasgow (UK) in 2021 have brought the debate on energy consumption ... more Eco-conferences like COP26 in Glasgow (UK) in 2021 have brought the debate on energy consumption and climate change to the fore. Given that a third of the energy produced worldwide is consumed in the home, it is pertinent to investigate how households use emerging technologies that allow households to monitor their energy consumption. This paper investigates how Danish households use green IT to monitor and manage their energy use and studies the related meaning householders attach to the green IT. We present qualitative data collected through interviews with 14 households, electric car owners mostly, who have adopted an application to monitor green energy availability-and its derived consumption. The paper highlights these householders' green energy monitoring practices with an emphasis on the meaning they make of the green IT application they used. Our study found that households can use more green energy without interacting continuously with the green IT application. This contrasts with a common assumption in the field of green IT design that consumers must continuously engage with the green IT to consume more green energy. We also posit that including householders in future green IT design is paramount for designing successful green IT applications. Finally, this paper calls for household energy consumption studies to view energy consumption as a service where specific practices are matched to energy sourcesrather than viewing energy availability as a solitary incident.
Springer eBooks, 2015
This paper focuses on the collaboration in an Israeli-Palestinian tech start-up company. We inves... more This paper focuses on the collaboration in an Israeli-Palestinian tech start-up company. We investigate the strategies enacted by the IT developers for managing the political dynamics and making collaboration possible under the highly challenging political conditions. We found that one of the key strategies was explicitly separating the work domain of software development from the domain of politics. We argue that the IT developers manage to collaborate by displacing the political conflict through strategies of non-confrontation instead of engaging in translating conflicting agendas against each other. By insisting on keeping politics outside of the workspace, the IT developers adopt a strategy of keeping the collaboration together by keeping politics and work apart. However, we found that despite the attempts to manage the subgroup dynamics, politics constantly invade the workspace and challenge the collaboration. Significant resources are invested into managing the regimes of differentiated identity cards, permits, and checkpoints, all of which have consequences on the employees' freedom or restriction of mobility. Thus, we argue that the IT development domain is inseparable from and deeply dependent upon the political domain.
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Papers by Nina Boulus-Rødje