You are here

Exercise: Socio Technical System

15 January, 2016 - 09:08
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/05c97be4-3ad0-47f2-b5a7-a75d0ad90ab7@3.72

Your group work this semester will take place within a group of nested or overlapping environments. Taken separately and together, these will structure and channel your activity, facilitating action in certain circumstances while constraining, hindering, or blocking it in others. Prepare a socio-technical system table for your group to help structure your group self-evaluation. Include hardware/software, physical surroundings, stakeholders (other groups, teacher, other classes, etc.), procedures (realizing values, avoiding pitfalls), university regulations (attendance), and information structures (collecting, sharing, disseminating)

Some things about Socio-Technical Systems

  1. Socio-Technical System Analysis provides a tool to uncover the different environments in which business activity takes place and to articulate how these constrain and enable different business practices.
  2. A socio-technical system can be divided into different components such as hardware, software, physical surroundings, people/groups/roles, procedures, laws/statutes/regulations, and information systems.
  3. But while these different components can be distinguished, they are in the final analysis inseparable. STSs are, first and foremost, systems composed of interrelated and interacting parts.
  4. STSs also embody values such as moral values (justice, responsibility, respect, trust, integrity) and non-moral values (efficiency, satisfaction, productivity, effectiveness, and profitability). These values can be located in one or more of the system components. They come into conflict with one another causing the system to change.
  5. STSs change and this change traces out a path or trajectory. The normative challenge of STS analysis is to find the trajectory of STS change and work to make it as value-realizing as possible.

Socio-Technical System Table for Groups

Hardware/Software

Physical Surroundings

Stakeholders

Procedures

University Regulations

Information Structures

Think about the new role for your smart phones in group work in class. Will you be using Google Docs to exchange documents?

How does the classroom and the arrangement of objects within it constrain and enable group activities?

Think about other teachers, classes, supervisors, jobs, and other individuals that can have an impact on your ability to carry out group assignments.

Name but don't describe in detail, the value-realizing procedures your group is adopting.

What are university regulations that will have an impact on your group work. For example, switches between MWF and TTH schedules.

There is a wealth of information and skill locked in each of your group's members. How will you unleash these and telescope them into group work and activities? How, in other words, will you work to maximize group synergies and minimize group disadvantages?

***Exercises 1-3*** compose the Preliminary Self-Evaluation which is due shortly after semester-long groups are formed. ***Exercise 4*** is the close-out group self evaluation which is due at the end of the semester.