Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work together. The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as systems of fragmented knowledge: that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter's alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: Framing and postscripting, as practices that generate a space of signification for the subsequent action; footing, as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and delegation to the nonhuman, as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation.
Knowing in a System of Fragmented Knowledge
Parolin, Laura Lucia
2007-01-01
Abstract
Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work together. The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as systems of fragmented knowledge: that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter's alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: Framing and postscripting, as practices that generate a space of signification for the subsequent action; footing, as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and delegation to the nonhuman, as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation.I documenti in ARCA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.