Inverted hierarchies on the shop floor: The organisational layer of workarounds for collaboration in the metal industry [original]

Vol.:(0123456789)

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-021-09415-2

Inverted Hierarchies ontheShop Floor:

The Organisational Layer ofWorkarounds

forCollaboration intheMetal Industry

FraukeMörike*1

*1 Technische Universität Berlin, Institute ofPsychology andErgonomics,

Division ofErgonomics, Straße des 17. Juni 135, MAR 3‑2, 10557Berlin, Germany

(E‑mail: f.moerike@tu‑berlin.de)

Accepted: 14 September 2021

Abstract. Workarounds, or practices that deviate from the official pathway to a target, are fre-

quent phenomena in the organisational context. With respect to collaboration, they highlight an

area of mismatch between normative versus lived work practices, and therefore depict a relevant

research area deeply rooted in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Building on the

theory of hierarchical opposition by Louis Dumont and empirical data collected through ethno-

graphic research at a company classified as a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the

German metal industry, this paper addresses the emergence of workarounds in collaborative work

processes by setting them into the wider organisational context. The organisational layer of analysis

reveals that workarounds emerge to cater for inversed information power relations and information

asymmetries in the shop floor setting, which require communication to flow against the hierarchical

slope between planning and execution functions. By applying an organisational lens to the concept

of workarounds, this paper contributes a novel empirical analysis that confirms the value of worka-

rounds as a source of insight into collaborative practices.

Keywords: Collaboration, Ethnography, Hierarchical Opposition, Louis Dumont, SME,

Workarounds

1 Introduction

Workarounds, or deviations from expected work practices, ‘remain for the most

part surprisingly underinvestigated and [under]theorized’ (Pollock 2005). While

researchers in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human–com-

puter interaction (HCI) have increasingly devoted attention to the complex and

multifaceted manifestations of workarounds, Ejnefjäll and Ågerfalk (2019), in

their review of the literature, called for further research on the subject. Work-

arounds play a decisive role in CSCW research by furthering the ‘endeavor to

understand the nature and requirements of cooperative work with the objective

ECSCW Contribution

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F.Mörike

of designing computer-based technologies for cooperative work arrangements’

(Schmidt and Bannon 1992, p. 11). They emerge as alternative paths to nor-

mative work procedures and underline the ‘situated’ nature of work (Suchman

1987). Workarounds are therefore directly entangled with long-established con-

cepts within CSCW research, including articulation work (Strauss 1985), work-

flows (Grinter 2000), and routine/non-routine work (Pentland and Rueter 1994).

The present paper analyses the role of organisational hierarchy in affecting

(and even fostering) the emergence of workarounds within collaborative work

processes, with particular regard to the metal industry. Applying Louis Dumont’s

(1980[1966]) theory of inversed power relations, the analysis contributes a

novel perspective on workarounds and the situatedness of work at the organi-

sational level, while highlighting the complexity at play in highly collaborative

socio-technical work systems. Additionally, the paper provides a set of design

recommendations for the management of information flows in the context of

workarounds. The application of Dumont’s theoretical framework on hierarchi-

cal opposition to empirical data from an organisational setting represents a novel

contribution to the CSCW literature on workarounds. In particular, the work

focuses on three main research questions: (1) Why do workarounds occur, from

an organisational perspective? (2) What role does technology (e.g. an Enterprise

Resource Planning (ERP) system) play in these situations? and (3) What implica-

tions can be derived for CSCW design?

Drawing on empirical data collected through ethnographic research at a com-

pany classified as a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME)1 in the German

metal industry, the paper garners a multi-level account of everyday work prac-

tices in which workarounds are employed to foster cooperation and to react to

shifting information asymmetries across functions. Ethnographic methods of

data collection have been well established in CSCW research since the early

1990s (Blomberg and Karasti 2013), and a significant proportion of the research

on workarounds has employed observational modes of data collection (Ejnefjäll

and Ågerfalk 2019).

Dumont’s theory of hierarchical opposition (Dumont 1980[1966]) assumes that

elements belonging to a whole (e.g. a social system or organisation) are arranged

in a hierarchical relationship. This arrangement arises (more or less) independently

and in reference to the whole of which each entity is a part. While at first glance

Dumont’s approach might appear to reinforce stereotypes and dichotomies, his the-

ory in fact challenges the traditional notion of hierarchy as a static construct. In par-

ticular, his idea of hierarchical inversion proposes that a hierarchical arrangement

can become inversed in certain situations and for a limited amount of time, without

fundamentally threatening the dominant hierarchical set-up. Through this analytical

lens, this paper presents the results of a study, drawing on ethnographic vignettes to

1 According to the definition provided by the European Union.

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Inverted Hierarchies ontheShop Floor

illustrate the organisational set-up of SteelWorks, Inc. (pseudonym) as characterised

by a deep-rooted hierarchical opposition between planning and production func-

tions. This hierarchical arrangement was reinforced by the building architecture, the

labels applied to administrative (oben) and production (unten) functions, and the

normative and official communication flow in the ERP system, which ran along the

hierarchical slope between administrative and production functions.

The results reveal the various workarounds that SteelWorks, Inc. employees

applied to channel information flows against this hierarchical slope. During the

manufacturing process, production workers held significantly more information on

the actual status of manufacturing jobs than the administrative workers, generating

temporarily inverted hierarchies. Consequently, workarounds were established to

control and effect the upward flow of information—including, in extreme cases, the

use of deception. Neither systems nor processes accounted for the inverted hierar-

chies and information asymmetries: the ERP system represented the dominant hier-

archical set-up, but it did not allow for collaborative actions such as communicat-

ing feedback from the production team to the engineering office. Thus, the paper

highlights that the study of workarounds through an organisational lens can reveal

system constraints and configuration needs at the intersection between analogue,

digital, and human agents within an organisational system. Workarounds can there-

fore signify: (1) processes of critical relevance for collaboration, (2) areas of mis-

match between information and its intended use, and (3) areas that explicitly require

a multi-directional informational flow.

The following section (Sect.2) grounds the study in the existing CSCW literature

on workarounds and related concepts. It then discusses the specific challenges of

SMEs as fields of enquiry and opportunity, and introduces Dumont’s theory of hier-

archical opposition. Section3 is devoted to the research design and methodological

considerations for data collection and analysis, including ethical reflections on eth-

nographic research in fields dominated by power and dependency relations, such as

the work environment. Section4 presents the results of the ethnographic study, illus-

trating the organisational setting and the emergence of workarounds in the everyday

lived working praxis at the investigated SME. Section5 discusses the organisational

layer of workarounds, in relation to both the challenges that arise from information

asymmetries and the potential for workarounds to signify constraints for CSCW

design. Finally, Sect.6 provides concluding remarks.

2 Related work andtheoretical foundations

2.1 Coming toterms: Workarounds andrelated concepts

The very concept of workarounds connotes essential areas of interest for CSCW

research: the possibility of working around something requires the existence of

a commonly accepted or normatively prescribed path that may be circumvented

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F.Mörike

or deviated from (e.g. a work process and/or technology). Consequently, work-

arounds relate closely to workflows, articulation work, and routine/non-routine

work—topics that have been prominent fixtures on the CSCW research agenda

for the past three decades (Schmidt and Bannon 2013). In the 1980s, research

on workarounds described these phenomena as the result of a mismatch between

systems and work practices; generally—while not exclusively—they were

applied to the context of technology (Gasser 1986). More specifically, definitions

of workarounds varied from the general ‘misfits with the idealized representa-

tions of work’ (Gerson and Star 1986) to the specific ‘nonstandard procedures to

compensate for system deficiencies’ (Courtright etal. 1988).

Research on workflow systems and the challenges associated with designing

systems that support work processes has highlighted the conflict between stand-

ardisation and ‘flexibilisation’, as well as the role of formalism in supporting col-

laboration (Grinter 2000). Using the example of a configuration management

system, Grinter (ibid.) illustrated the supporting qualities of formalised and par-

tially automated systems for software developers. Similarly, other scholars have

asserted that plans can be orientation devices (Suchman 1987), guiding maps, or

scripts (Schmidt 1997), and that coordination mechanisms may foster coopera-

tive work between actors (Schmidt and Simone1996).

The literature also underlines the need for greater flexibility to cater for the

contingent nature of daily work (Abbott and Sarin 1994); ‘improvisation in prac-

tice’ (Orlikowski 2008, p. 287) when plans don’t work out may be an example

of such flexibility (Rönkkö etal. 2005). In this context, workarounds may play a

decisive role in their capacity to mediate between flexibilisation and standardisa-

tion: Gerson and Star (1986) argue that workarounds are the result of articulation

work—‘work that gets things back “on track” in the face of the unexpected and

modifies action to accommodate unanticipated contingencies’ (Star and Strauss

1999, p. 10). Articulation work as ‘supra work’—or ‘work to make work work’

(Schmidt 2002, p. 19) involves workarounds to ‘meet local resource constraints,

deadlines, configuration limitations, or a mix of technical capacities’ (Gerson

and Star 1986, p. 366). Both articulation work and workarounds are often invis-

ible in system or process documentation and the end product (ibid.; Dupret 2017;

Pallesen and Jacobsen 2018), underlying their nature as work practice phenom-

ena. Both routine and non-routine work are closely related to workarounds, as

‘routine aspects of working yield to mechanization, leaving the nonroutine to

personal management’ (Holt 1988, p. 123). This idea similarly supports the inter-

relationship between the flexibilisation and the standardisation of work, empha-

sising adaptability as an essential feature (Hutchins 1991) and the tendency for

rapid shifts to occur between what is considered routine versus non-routine work

(Holt 1988; Pentland and Rueter 1994).

In relation to normative perspectives on workarounds, Pollock (2005) and

others (Beijsterveld and Groenendaal 2016; Gasser 1986) have described

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Inverted Hierarchies ontheShop Floor

workarounds as non-standard uses of computing (or uses of alternative, non-

computing paths) to accomplish a task. In other domains, such as healthcare,

studies have framed workarounds as temporary work practices (Kobayashi

etal. 2005; Zhou etal. 2011), ‘clever methods for getting done what the sys-

tem does not let you do easily’(Ash etal. 2003, p. 195; Vassilakopoulou etal.

2010), means of overcoming the weaknesses of a new system prior to imple-

mentation (Bjørn and Boulus-Rødje 2015), means of expressing emotions in

formal emergency room documentation (Mentis etal. 2010, 2013), and poten-

tial threats to patient safety (Halbesleben etal. 2008).

Conceptual framings of workarounds are quite nuanced. For instance,

Strong and Volkoff (2010), focusing on the fit between an organisation and

an enterprise, presented workarounds as mismatches between system func-

tionality and work practices. More specifically, these researchers distinguished

between two types of mismatches related to workarounds: (1) gaps between

the features required by users and the features a system is able to provide (i.e.

‘deficiencies’) and (2) challenges rooted in the deeper characteristics of a

system (i.e. ‘impositions’). Other CSCW studies have illustrated how worka-

rounds support the local ‘flow of work’ in an effort to maintain the prescribed

workflow of an international organisation (Avram etal. 2009), and how the

interplay between formal organisational structures and informal workarounds

can achieve departmental goals of timeliness and safety in the context of air-

craft technical support (Lutters and Ackerman 2007).

In contrast to these system-level perspectives, Alter (2014) proposed an

actor-centred framework, theorising workarounds as the outcomes of actors’

decision-making processes to identify and overcome obstacles in a strictly

process-driven approach. Ejnefjäll and Ågerfalk (2019) presented a conceptual

understanding of workarounds as alternative paths to goals when the designed

paths are blocked. They explicitly incorporated the question of intent, in order

to exclude unintentional acts (i.e. mistakes), and further included the pre-

condition of a goal, to distinguish between workarounds and other concepts,

such as fraud or sabotage. Some works, connecting workarounds to forms

of resistance, control, and disempowerment, have also raised the question of

intent (Alvarez 2008; Bain and Taylor 2000; Button etal. 2003; Choudrie and

Zamani 2016; Ferneley and Sobreperez 2006; Sia etal. 2002), including those

discussing the potential benefits of workarounds (Li etal. 2017; Röder etal.

2014; Safadi and Faraj 2010). The latter are of particular interest for this paper,

as their perspectives connect workarounds to wider organisational functioning.

Several works have theorised the deeper causes and consequences of worka-

rounds on the basis of social and cultural science perspectives (Button etal.

2003; Dupret 2017; Pollock 2005; Star and Strauss 1999); this paper seeks

to contribute to this body of research. In relation to organisational function-

ing and the inclusion of the ‘social’ (Andelfinger 2002), the paper focuses

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