Two seminars November 18 by Joeri van Laere on socio-materiality and crisis training, respectively

14:15-15:00
The first seminar has the theme "Socio-technology, socio-materiality: are we still lost?" Joeri makes an account of his search for concrete design themes in works from Ciborra, Orlikowski, Weick, Argyris, Quinn et cetera. (The language of this presentation will depend on the people attending the seminar.)
15:15-16:00
The second seminar will probably be in Swedish: "What is good crisis training? - Recurrent challenges and clever advice based on more that 100 training occassions." This seminar connects to the Centre for HumanIT's and Centre for Climat & Security's joint effort to explore digital tools in crisis management training.
Room: Information Systems 1A349
 
Socio-technology and Sociomateriality – does 1+1 make 3 or are we still lost?
IS research aims at tackling questions related to how IT (technical systems) can support organizations (social systems). Researchers like Claudio Ciborra and Jonathan Grudin have (amongst many others) discussed the enormous challenges of developing theories that address both social and technological issues in this design problem in depth. Or should we say, that address socio-technical design issues? Is a socio-technical system something different than “interaction between technology and organization”? Does 1+1 make something different than 2, is it 3? Re-reading Orlikowski’s work from the early 1990s (a structuration perspective) and her recent contributions on socio-materiality it appeared to me: Did we come any further in this discussion during those 20 years, or is the message the same? What is a socio-technical system anyway? What consequences would an innovative answer on that question have for socio-technical systems designers in our society (and where do they work)? An attempt is done to create a new answer by mixing insights from Weick, Orlikowski, Ciborra, Argyris, Quinn and Heidegger and see what an interaction of their contributions leads to. This presentation is based on work in progress and does thus contain provocative questions and preliminary answers, but no final conclusions. Be prepared to enter the debate.
What is good crisis training – lessons from over 100 crisis management trainings in Swedish municipalities
Good crisis training is a series of education moments and a variety of different trainings that together evoke a longitudinal learning process. A good training aims at learning and not at grading/judging. A good training is challenging, but not so difficult that the trainees fail. A good training addresses the complexities of internal and external information sharing and information management, and does not delimit itself to only decision making. In a good training facilitators are not just observing, but even actively coaching participants: by giving feedback during the training failures are corrected and “good” information management and decision making is trained. These and other interesting is insight will be shared thorough vivid examples and summarized in an easy to grasp take-away checklist. Our insights are grounded in observations during a longitudinal study between 2006 and 2015.
[There are video recordings of both presentations but as everyone attending the seminars understood Swedish, these are in Swedish. See the Swedish page of this post to find the links to the videos.]
 
Joeri van Laere is an Assistant Professor at University of Skövde, Sweden. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Joeri performs research at the interface of organisation science, communication science and information systems. His research interests include decision support, crisis management, situation awareness, gaming-simulation, knowledge management, organizational change and distributed work. He has published at several international conferences such as ECIS, HICSS, and ISCRAM, and in journals including the European Journal of Information systems, the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, the Journal of Information Fusion and the Journal of Production, Planning and Control.