“I Have, More Than Ever, a Sense of the Immovability of These Institutions”

“I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions” Conversation with Lucy Suchman Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, August 13, 1999 Claus Otto Scharmer1 Lucy Suchman is a Professor in the Centre for Science Studies and Sociology Department at Lancaster University in England. Her pathbreaking work at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) inspired a whole generation of researchers on technology and work practices. COS: Lucy Suchman, what underlying questions does your work address, and what in your own life formed the context from which your research interests evolved? I. Origins: Berkeley 1968 Lucy Suchman: I grew up in Ithaca, New York, and my parents and stepfather were at Cornell. I studied anthropology as an undergraduate, but without the idea that I would actually continue and become an anthropologist. I became more and more interested in developments around symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. I became very interested in challenges to traditional sociology that were based on the idea that social structure is not a given, it’s ongoingly and actively constituted and reproduced. I found this very compelling because I was interested in change, and it seemed if things were ongoingly produced, then they could be produced differently. So it felt to me as though it opened up a space of a kind of contingency to the way things work that I found very heartening. I was a student at Berkeley from 1968 on, 1 The conversation with Lucy Suchman took place as part of a global interview project with 25 eminent thinkers on knowledge and leadership. The project was sponsored by McKinsey & Company and the Society for Organizational Learning (formerly the MIT Center for Organizational Learning). The interviews and the summary paper are accessible as free downloads from www.dialogonleadership.org. Lucy Suchman and like all students at Berkeley at the time, I was quite preoccupied with the major institutions in the United States, and what I felt was problematic about them. So that line of social theorizing was very compelling. I was also very much interested in Native Americans, as many students of anthropology are. I was just overwhelmed by the sense of their wonderful ways of organizing and relating to the world. But it was a very terrible history, and I started to feel that the last thing that Native Americans needed was another anthropologist studying them. I thought instead I should study the institutions that were closer to my own position in life and that had tremendous consequences for Native Americans, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was also at the time when the idea of studying up, as it was called in anthropology, was developing at Berkeley. COS: “Studying up” means? II. Turning the Anthropological Gaze Back On Ourselves Lucy Suchman: Anthropology had traditionally been concerned with non-industrial cultures, or those that major Western societies were interested in administering and dominating, and that’s carried over into the field. Even within American anthropology, the focus has always been on Native Americans, and then more recently on various minority groups within the United States, rather than on mainstream, middle-class Americans, on elite institutions, powerful organizations. In the 70s there was an initiative within anthropology that said: We have as much culture here as anywhere else. In fact, we have a responsibility to turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves, and really understand ourselves as participants and co-creators of the world, rather than just as observers. COS: Isn’t that interesting? Because this is really mirrored in today’s corporate practices. In knowledge management, aren’t we trying to understand front line people, as we did foreign cultures, from an executive perspective? Lucy Suchman: Yes, and in fact I worry about that, because I think there are some very strong parallels, and also lessons to learn from the history of anthropology. Anthropology has become extremely reflective and critical about its own historical role as a kind of service provider to colonial administrations. Administrators would start to recognize that in order to administer the colonies they needed to know more about what was going on there, and then they would send the anthropologists out to study that and report back. I think that there is a model of corporate anthropology that could be very similar if we aren’t aware and careful about that. © 2001 www.dialogonleadership.org 2 Lucy Suchman Over the last 25 - 30 years there’s been a tremendous growth in the awareness of the position of an anthropologist—of how political it is, and how critically important it is that you are aware and understand all of your various relationships and all of the various interests that are involved, and act responsibly within that. So it’s not necessarily that you should no longer work in developing countries, but anthropologists now position themselves very differently. They tend to go and find indigenous organizations that are working for change and attempt to align themselves, to contribute to those organizations, rather than coming in from the outside and delivering up some kind of solutions. There is much more of an orientation to the fact that things are already going on there, and that your responsibility is to learn about those things, and then see if you can contribute to them in some way. I think there are very strong parallels in organizations. Having spent time at a number of different organizations, I’ve come to believe that change is always in process at the front lines. Not everyone, not uniformly, but there are invariably participants who have an interest in thinking about what they’re doing, and whether it makes sense, and how it could be done differently. Often these people are first line supervisors. They probably become first line supervisors because they have an orientation to the workings of the operation. But they remain first line supervisors because they want to be close to the action. In some ways those people are ideally positioned to be informed agents of change. They are people who really know the work and are in a position to take something of an overview, to reflect on how things are being done. And I don’t mean to glorify, there are good and bad people everywhere, but I do think that that’s a very critical position. So the ways in which anthropologists have redefined their relationship to the subjects of their studies has a lot to say to organizational studies and technology development, or to any situation where people located in one place are interested in the operations or the activities of people located somewhere else. COS: Very interesting. Now before we took that rabbit trail, I interrupted you. We were in the late 60s. By the way, I’ve noticed that quite a number of my interviewees spent their formative years then right here in the Bay area. For example, Nonaka was starting at Berkeley. Peter Senge was here at Stanford. Brian Arthur also came here around ‘68. So all sorts of people were here in ‘68. Lucy Suchman: There was a lot going on here, that’s for sure. Yes, I was talking about two strands. One, the alternative way of theorizing about the social world, and two, this initiative to study up within anthropology. They both came together for me in my fieldwork when I decided to go back to graduate school in anthropology. I wanted to do my dissertation on a study of a large corporation, because for me, and for many people with my background at Berkeley at the time, corporations were black boxes. They were just monolithic, undifferentiated, problematic institutions. © 2001 www.dialogonleadership.org 3 Lucy Suchman I was interested in understanding what the everyday life within a corporation was really like for people in different positions, and how it was that this effect that we were all so concerned about actually got produced. How did corporations actually get constituted in an ongoing way as big, powerful institutions? It was really that idea of trying to understand issues of size and power as something that was actively and continually produced and reproduced through the everyday activities of the people who made up these institutions. III. Joining Xerox PARC Given that as my interest, one of my professors pointed me to another anthropologist, Eleanor Wynn, who was then at PARC. When I got in touch with her she was doing an interview project and was simultaneously trying to finish her dissertation, and had a lot of other things to do. She hired me as a research assistant and I transcribed the interviews and then wrote a paper with her about that. Through that I got to know people at PARC and became a summer intern here, thinking at the time that I would continue this idea of doing my dissertation on every day life in Xerox. Once I got to PARC I got heavily distracted by a whole set of issues that I hadn’t thought of before that were very interesting to me. I came into the office research group, where all these computer scientists were creating office information systems. In order to do that, they were modeling office procedures. It was clear that they believed that procedural office work was ready-made for automation, because computers operate through procedural programmatic kinds of instructions. I was very intrigued by this, and of course, I had a sense from my studies of human interaction and ethnomethodology that procedural office work probably wasn’t at all like computer programs. Studying Work Practices of Accountants So then I thought, what I’ll do for my dissertation is go out and try to find the most apparently routine procedural form of office work I can, and explore the question of what ways it is and is not like a program, and in what ways the assumptions that were being made at the time about it, and that were informing the design of these systems, really were sound or not.

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