Abstract
In this review, I will first look at the key idea of Lanzara’s book and then talk in more detail about the research approach taken by the author. I will conclude this review by my assessment of who I believe will benefit from reading this book.
Key to Lanzara’s thinking is the idea of shifts in a practice. Shifts open up the possibility to reveal aspects of a practice that otherwise escape observation and description. Lanzara argues that technology can be a trigger leading to such shifts: When a new object, technology, or medium for doing work is introduced into an established domain of practice, we notice phenomena such as discontinuities, gaps, and disruptions, independently of the content of the practice: the ecology is perturbed, longstanding habits and engrained ways of doing and knowing are challenged, the system of activities and routines needs to be rebalanced or redesigned, and the smooth flow of action and sense making must be restored. (p. 196)
At a first glance, this could seem like a deterministic account of technology as it is technology leading to such shifts and changes. However, this is not the message Lanzara is advocating, instead he is interested in using technological triggers as a means for better understanding a practice into which a technology becomes enrolled. As people make use of a new technology, the practice into which a technology becomes enrolled is probed and challenged: Not only does the technology reveal features of the setting that are not readily observable in the smooth flow of everyday practice, but in turn, the ways in which the individual agents and broader institutions perceive and receive the technology tell us about the meaning of the technology for them. (p. 197)
Lanzara investigates this concept of shifting practice thoroughly in two different settings: music education and the use of video recording in Italian courtrooms. The following provides one example of a disruption brought about by a shifting practice Lanzara observed in the courtroom setting: the voice of the actors when they speak into the microphones is what triggers the fixed TV camera; if they are silent, they will not activate the camera, and therefore the image of the actors will not appear on the monitor. As a consequence, a reticent witness or defendant who refuses to answer questions or refrains from speaking (for whatever reasons) will not be video recorded, and therefore will not be available in the videotape. Yet such nonverbal behaviours and attitudes, and their very silence, might be more telling than speech in establishing a proof or making a decision. (pp. 154–155)
However, far from a shift merely revealing an aspect of a practice that would otherwise be hidden a shift goes much deeper as it changes a practice itself. For instance, through the video recording, the traditional activity of using paper transcripts for recording evidence in the courtroom changes. As one judge stated about the introduction of the video recording, It took me a while to accept the idea that with the video I could do without dictation. I felt I was missing something and didn’t feel secure … In the early phases I kept dictating to the court officer exactly as I did before, but now I have come to see it’s really pointless, a waste of time. (p. 160)
As the above excerpt indicates, in ‘Shifting Practices’ Lanzara takes a storytelling approach to reveal how a new technology is changing a practice. Lanzara offers reflective observations as he argues that this storytelling approach is essential for conveying what is going on when practitioners engage in the activities of their practice: Telling stories, I felt, was the most appropriate means I could rely on for representing an unfolding process, structuring a sequence of events, and presenting a case to my partners in the closest possible way to the action in which they were involved. (p. 50)
To Lanzara this storytelling approach is not merely a rhetoric device and end product for presenting his research, it is an active participant in the way how a practice becomes observable and meaningful to an observer.
By reporting these stories, one keeps the memory of the process, a memory that is often fragmented into many different, sometimes incompatible, ever-evolving stories. One’s task is to put these fragments together to compose a picture, a story of shifting stories that no single actor probably shares. (p. 138)
Key to Lanzara’s research approach is reflectivity. He continuously challenges his own conception of what is going on in a desire to develop a better account of a practice. Storytelling is an active device in this research, as stories offer a means to reflect back to practitioners what Lanzara is observing and how he is making sense of it all. ‘In different ways, the participants took issue with my previous description and their roles in it, and they generated multiple and shifting stories that presented discrepancies with my view and potentially disconfirmed it’ (p. 40). Thus, generating stories is not simply a means for reporting observations of a practice but by sharing these stories with his participants Lanzara uses them as generative devices for further unpacking and drawing out aspects of a practice that otherwise may be hidden.
In the beginning of his book, Lanzara takes a closer look at this reflective research approach. Here, Lanzara offers a very useful introduction into the challenges of qualitative research more widely. I want to pick out two ideas discussed by Lanzara there which inform much of the writing in his book. The first is negative capability, and the second is backtalk.
Lanzara describes negative capability as the ability to be in a state of uncertainty without the desire to immediately long for facts to regain certainty. Instead, negative capability is a state where non-understanding and confusion are embraced by a researcher as a necessary state to come to a better understanding further down the track. Negative capability is thus a researcher’s ability to hold and appreciate a state of ‘confusion’, which enables them to lose themselves and experience the setting of a practice. This, Lanzara argues, enables a different means for observing what is going on: ‘We come to grasp these phenomena by sensing rather than knowing; in a way, we resonate with the phenomena before we actually know them’ (p. 6). This approach resonates with Dewey’s pragmatism or Heidegger’s phenomenology as any description of a ‘factual’ statement expressing ‘how things are’ is only possible on the background of an ongoing experience that provides the foundation for expressing. That is by exercising negative capability a researcher suspends the expression of how things are in favor of experiencing it first, and thus, possibly coming closer to an understanding that is intrinsically shared with other participants of a practice.
A second important concept for Lanzara is backtalk, the process where he as a researcher subjects his participants to his sense making of the practice they are engaged in. This process of backtalk is different from feedback as it offers a generative mechanism for qualitative research. Lanzara uses backtalk to both tests and probe his accounts of a practice and also to enable a reflective turn by participants on what it is they are doing. Backtalk thus has the potential to reveal additional aspects of a practice that otherwise would go unnoticed.
One excellent aspect of Lanzara’s book is that he not only introduces reflective ideas but throughout the section on musical education he also provides ‘reflective commentaries’ where he demonstrates how his own thinking was challenged throughout the research process. This meta-reflective level brings concepts such as backtalk to live (e.g. p. 108) as one can see how the idea informed Lanzara’s own research.
I definitely can see research students embarking on a qualitative research journey benefiting from reading the first and second section of the book. I also believe that the third and fourth section of the book will be a good read for those who have not yet delved into the issue of how technology is experienced and used in the everyday live-world of practitioners. For those who are already thinking about alternative conceptions of technology, Lanzara’s related journal articles may offer a more direct path into some of the interesting ideas discussed in the last part of his book (Lanzara, 1999, 2009, 2010; Lanzara and Patriotta, 2001).
Overall, Lanzara’s stories make salient how technology is experienced as something that pushes back at practitioners when it enters into the practice of what they are doing. Lanzara’s stories bring to live how technology is actively shaping and changing what it is that practitioners are engaged in. Through the introduction of new technology, both the practice of musical education and criminal justice are reshaped and changed. Importantly, these changes are not superficial as new tools replace old ones, but instead these changes require practitioners to ask themselves essential questions about what it is they are engaging in. For musical educators this includes questions such as ‘What is a tune made of?; What is a musical structure?; What is a nice tune?’ (p. 207), or for judges to ask themselves: ‘How should we represent the facts of the trial?; How can we use visual data to make a judicial decision?’ (p. 207).
Lanzara not only questions the technological deterministic view but also introduces ideas and concepts that can be used in the space of organizational research for conceptualizing technology. Concepts introduced include transient knowledge, bricolage, assemblage, ontology of versioning, and dross. While the depth of the discussion of these concepts varies, Lanzara’s discussion offers a good starting point for thinking about alternative conceptions of technology beyond technological determinism or social constructivism. While these conceptions of technology come from different authors and have slightly different connotations, the important commonality across all these conceptions is the idea that as practices shift through and with technology, technology leaves an ‘imprint’ in a practice. For instance, Lanzara uses the analogy of dross to describe the role of technology in shifting practices. Dross is the build up of residue that is not only undesired but also unavoidable during manufacturing. While shifts enable innovation, they also create dross, for instance, in the form of no longer necessary routines or clunky fragments in a computer interface. The concept of dross is thus useful to think about the ‘dark side of innovation’ and how innovation leaves behind an imprint in a practice that is not only unavoidable but also undesired.