Aramis or the Love of Technology

Citation

Whitley, E.A. (1999), "Aramis or the Love of Technology", Information Technology & People, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 403-408. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.1999.12.4.403.1

Bruno Latour’s description of the Aramis project is a gripping murder mystery, where the victim is Aramis which was to have been a radically new transportation system for Paris. Aramis was intended to transport individuals efficiently while doing away with the inconvenience of passengers having to transfer between vehicles to reach any particular destination. Instead, passengers would enter Aramis and be delivered to their final destination. However, despite over ten years of research and development work, Aramis finally failed and the book describes the search to find out who or what killed Aramis.

As in all good detective stories, in the course of the story we are given all the clues and the reasoning used to find out who killed off the project. The difference is that in this book it is not only the detective who tells us how this was done. Rather, a variety of different linguistic devices: interview transcripts, document extracts and academic texts are seamlessly interwoven to tell the story.

The important socio‐philosophical ideas that Latour presents in the book have been applied to disciplines as diverse as accounting and geography. There is little published research in information systems, however, that makes use of these ideas. I believe this limited application of Latour’s work is information systems loss as his ideas have direct relevance to much mainstream information systems research, as I outline below.

The first feature of Latour’s approach is its heavy reliance on observation, interviews and other documentary sources. Indeed, the Aramis story is told largely by such documents. Laboratory experiments with hypotheses and t‐tests are not the methods of Latour’s investigations (although they are the subject of his books Laboratory Life (1986) and The Pasteurization of France (1988)). Nor should we rely on explanations in terms of big themes like politics, economics, organization and technology as these are designed not to explain since “if that were the case, they would have to wear out in contact with the hard, contorted circumstances” (p. 133). Similarly surveys and questionnaires are not going to provide the insights required. Instead, Latour recommends that we “follow the actors”, investigating what they said, did and did not do at particular times.

A second key principle is the way he embraces both human and non‐human actors in his analysis; indeed Latour is promiscuous in the number of human and non‐human actors he includes in his analysis. To him, the coupling mechanisms used to link carriages in Aramis are as important to the story as the managers who sought to develop the system. More particularly, there is no human problem that does not involve non‐humans and no non‐human problem that is free from human factors.

Stated this way, the parallels with information systems become apparent. The success of, for example, a client‐server project does not lie solely in the capabilities of the technical solution offered; nor, however, will the introduction of the system be totally independent of the form of the computer system.

The final lesson for information systems from Latour’s work is his view of how innovations develop. In contrast to the technological determinism implicit in much information systems writing, whereby an innovation takes on a life of its own, Latour emphasizes the translations the project must go through in order for the innovation to proceed. An innovation (such as a new computer system) succeeds, not because it is inherently better than the alternatives, nor because it is the right answer to the problem being faced, but rather because it is adopted by other actors to serve their purposes. In doing so they change the nature of the innovation and the project can change dramatically at each stage.

The translation of projects away from what was originally intended is common to many information systems developments, indeed Peter Keen in “Information systems and organizational change” (1981) warns of precisely such a risk when considering possible counter‐implementation strategies: “A central lesson to be learned from examples of successful counter implementation is that there is no need to take the risky step of overtly opposing a project” (p. 28), all that is required is to accept the project and then translate it onto a different path. Keen’s proposed solutions: a “clear specification” and a top management “fixer” can also be seen as attempts to ensure that the actors who take forward the project do so in the way intended by the project’s originators.

Aramis, and Latour’s earlier study of Louis Pasteur, are based on analysing situations that have arisen rather than considering ongoing problematic situations. It would be interesting to see more clearly how the approaches advocated by Latour could be applied to understanding the perspectives of the various stakeholders during the development of, for example, a new information system rather than just reconstructing them at the end.

This book was originally published in French in 1993 so it is worth considering the implications of this. Latour reviews the translations of his books and, characteristically, makes many changes to reflect how his ideas have changed in the duration. In doing so, however, he is faced with the results of some of his own actions‐at‐a‐distance. The structure and narrative of the original book is relatively stable (folded, in his terminology) and this limits the amount of changes that he can introduce into the English version; the resulting English text is therefore a hybrid of published and developing ideas.

Latour’s style of writing is a delight and an inspiration to read making this fascinating book much more than just a detective story. It is an introduction to a particular way of thinking, a call to action and textbook for a style of research that information systems can greatly benefit from. Oh, and who killed Aramis? You’ll have to read the book to find out. And I’m confident that you’ll not be disappointed with the story.