The Evolution of Organisational Semiotics

Organisational Semiotics is a young discipline which emerged from the late 1980’s, for which Ronald Stamper’s contribution is significant and essential. This paper is to mark his role and contribution to this field of study. The paper is based on an interview with Ronald Stamper and research of relevant papers. It reviews briefly the history of the evolution of Organisational Semiotics; summaries key contributions from Ronald Stamper; and reports his personal thoughts and guidance on the research directions and important issues in the further development of the field. 1 The Emergence of Organisational Semiotics Ronald Stamper’s service in the army gave him the first real experience in an organisation. His conclusion was that an authoritarian organisation such as the army would not allow the proper use of individual’s talent, though the organisation could be efficient. After the military service, he went to read mathematics and graduated from the University College of Oxford University, followed by a postgraduate study in statistics in the same college. Ronald Stamper joined the Oxford Regional Hospital Board 1958 as an Assistant Statistician, where he was a pioneer in the use of computing and operational research. He worked for the steel industry in Ashorne Hill from 1960 as a project team member, the project leader, and a member and then a senior member of the Directing Staff. To remedy the industry’s desperate shortage of specialists, he created the first UK course in systems analysis (for information technology based information 1 This paper is based on an interview with Ronald Stamper on the 22 December 2003, and research of relevant papers. systems) geared to improving organisational performance rather than for computer sales. This course became the foundation of the national programme of Systems Analysis training. He developed a business game called the Fluted and Square, teaching people about the nature and characteristics of information. The players of the game were required to interact with each other using information for communication and coordination to conduct business. This helped the participants to understand how information is used in a business context and to generate value for organisations. This training package of business game was then adopted by the National Computer Centre for public and professional courses for a long time and is still in use at several universities. During the extensive contact with industry and his involvement in the training courses, Ronald Stamper observed the important questions raised by industrial users, and started to see the need for an effective theory for information systems, which has motivated him to write about information as a resource. His notes covered a wide range of topics from many aspects of information, its role and function. In the course of the development of his ideas, he has been inspired by several schools of thoughts. Semiotics, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, has offered him inspiration to his work. A student of Peirce, Charles Morris (e.g. [6, 7]) had further influences on the development of Ronald Stamper’s ideas. In his view, signs enable one to perform actions. Operations one performs in relation to the sign define the meaning of the sign, as that links the sign and the reality which is socially constructed and constantly altered through the use of signs. This is perhaps an early form of his theory of affordance. As his work evolved over the years, the foundation of a semiotic approach to information in an organisational context gradually built. Ronald Stamper joined London School of Economics and Political Science in 1969. He was instrumental in creating a research and teaching programme in information management. He was motivated to leave his intended career as an industrial manager because he was concerned about the emphasis on information technology without a corresponding concern for the information resources it manipulates. He has aimed to establish a better balance in both teaching and research concerning information resources, methodology of analysis and design, the semantics of data, and computers and law. In support of the teaching he decided to write a book on the semiotics of organisations. The title of the book he first conceived was “Organisational Semiotics”, but after some discussions with colleagues he decided to choose a title that would be more recognisable by the intended readers. His book of 1973 is the first in examining the nature of information from a semiotic perspective. Built from the contribution of several schools of thoughts, his book has been recognised for the remarkable contribution in that he has developed the semiotics much further by introducing three additional aspects (physical, empirical and social aspects) to the original Peircian semiotics (syntactics, semantics and pragmatics). In his book, he explains the contribution of Shannon in relation to other semiotic aspects by explicating the use of the information theory in the study of syntactic functions and properties of the signs. However, his ground-breaking contribution in the book is his in-depth discussion in pragmatics and completely new addition of social dimension. His behaviourism position is apparent in the book, which determines his later adoption of Gibson’s affordance theory, with expansion from ecology to social and business contexts. The great value of this book, in view of many readers, is that he has given a new life to Semiotics, a long established discipline, and has revealed its relevance to our current work and life in the information society that we live in. 2 The Development into a Scientific Discipline In London School of Economics and Political Science, Stamper established a major research programme in the analysis of organisations as information systems, which has delivered a series of research outcomes with great impact. Supported by the two national research councils, his work pioneered the fields of computers and law (as deontic systems) and of data semantics. The methodology which has been developed under this research placed the control of information technology firmly in hand of management. As a by-product of this research, he created one of the first expert systems shells. This expert system was used in testing the releases of the first relational database system at Palo Alto. Stamper and his colleagues published a Legal Oriented Language (LEGOL) at the ALTORG Conference in Gothenburg in 1974, which is probably before the publication of PROLOG. LEGOL, as a language and formalism, enables to express complex rules and regulations. It was first developed for application of statute law and preparation of legislation and the development of associated administrative systems, with the primary aim of providing techniques of information analysis. In the meantime, Stamper has been explicit in adopting the philosophical position of radical subjectivism. He has totally opposed the stance of a given objective reality; and argued that reality is constantly being constructed and altered by people’s interaction and negotiation through social processes. Consequently, objectivist methodologies that see information systems as based on a simple mapping of the objectively given world to a representation in the information system are bound to fail. Popper’s scientific method of refutationism [9], by which techniques, methods and theories are tested against a series of cases, is an important element in the process of social construction of knowledge. Theories that fail to stand up to the test will be refuted and eliminated, and further hypotheses will be established, subject to further tests. A hypothesis successfully withstood a range of rigorous test will be accepted as scientific knowledge. Another element in the process of social construction of knowledge is the creative act of a person to propose new views, techniques, methods and theories. Once fundamentally new views (and the associated techniques, methods and theories) get accepted in a scientific community, one can speak of what Kuhn [3] called the paradigm shift in the process of scientific evolution. Together, these two elements form a valid approach in the information systems discipline. The LEGOL project evolved into another research project of NORMA, which stands for Norms and Affordances. Norms are rules derived from social, cultural and business practices, which can be formal, informal, explicit and implicit. Affordances, as first discussed in Gibson’s ecological approach [2], are abilities of an individual or an organisation which enable them to perform actions. Affordances are socially determined and dependent on the social, cultural and business context (more discussion on this notion to be found below in section 3.5.). Stamper in this project places a great deal of emphasis on norms, which he sees as a field of force that governs the behaviour of individuals and organisations. (This is similar to the notion of how gravity controls the behaviour of all objects within the field of gravity). These constructs of norms and affordances opened up an entirely new approach to organisational analysis and information systems development. The information systems analysis becomes identification of agents (or actors), affordances and the governing norms. These constructs have been further expanded to incorporate other essentially important elements that other approaches have ignored or are unable to deal with, such as responsibility, authority and temporality. In 1987, as the result of consolidation of the research activities in his group and his associates elsewhere, Stamper established the MEASUR research programme. The philosophical departure of the programme was that “information systems are social systems. Telematic systems have essentially the same role to play in social systems as those based on paper and telephone technologies: that is they can assist people in collaborative activities.... Only by correctly embedding the computer-based system in the social system, can the data it contains have any meaning, express knowledge or support intelligent behaviour” [13]. Unlike many technologically motivated projects which focused on CASE (computer assisted software engineering); it regarded the CABE (computer assistance for the business enterprise) as the key concern, by focusing on how IT systems can best support business objectives. The University of Twente became the centre of organisational semiotics research when Ronald Stamper took up the chair of information management in 1988. He has been a key member of FRISCO, a task group of IFIP WG 8.1 to produce a framework of information systems concepts. The majority of the task group took an objective positivist stance and considered the design and specification of information systems could be based on a set of clearly defined concepts and teams on a scientific ground, as what have happened in other sciences such physics and chemistry. Stamper had to work extremely hard to demonstrate the value of his work; and finally, thought not totally convinced, FRISCO has accepted Organisational Semiotics as one of the pillars on which the field of information systems is built [4, 11]. As the key initiator, Stamper and his colleagues launched the first international workshop on organisational semiotics in 1995 on the campus of the University of Twente. This workshop allowed the participants to form a research community with a commitment to inquiring into the use of information in organisational contexts. Compared with the first meeting, the second workshop in Almelo (The Netherlands) in 1999 and the third workshop in Stafford (UK) were attended by more researchers and work presented there confirmed the importance of the issues that the community has been concerned with. Stamper’s work has been highly regarded in the community. Two more workshops took place, thereafter one in Delft (the Netherlands, 2002) and the other one in Reading (UK, 2003). One of the important milestones for the organisational semiotics community is the IFIP WG8.1 working conference, “Organisational Semiotics: evolving a science of information systems”, Montreal, 2001; Stamper was the general chair. This conference is the first IFIP working conference in the field of Organisational Semiotics, which is one step closer to a fully-fledged discipline which has been continuously evolving [1]. 3 Some Key Concepts in Stamper’s Work Ronald Stamper has enriched the world by introducing a system of concepts that play an important role in organisational semiotics. These concepts are, in order of historical appearance: the semiotic ladder, social norms, the information field, actualism, the social affordance, and ontological dependency. The development of Ronald Stamper’s concepts must be seen against the background of the development of his philosophical position. Starting around 1967 with a kind of pragmatic operationalism inspired by Peirce and Morris, Ronald Stamper’s philosophical position has since 1985 developed further into the direction of a radical subjectivism called by him ‘actualism’. The concepts of ‘semiotic ladder’, ‘social norm’, and ‘information field’ have been developed in his operationalistic period, while the concepts of ‘actualism’, ‘social affordance’, and ‘ontological dependency’ have been developed in his subjectivistic period. 3.1 The Semiotic Ladder The semiotic ladder has emerged from the difficulties that Ronald Stamper has detected while trying to define ‘information’. His opinion is that, in defining something, it is important to specify precisely by what procedure or operations to be measured or performed. This leads to an operational definition. In addition, you have to use ostensive definitions for making clear what you mean. An ostensive definition is a definition by pointing to an example of the thing or quality being defined. In his later work within the FRISCO group, Ronald Stamper asked for an ostensive definition of basic concepts like perception and conception: take me by the hand and show where these perceptions and conceptions are. In the interview with Ronald Stamper, he said he was especially inspired by Ogden & Richards, Morris and Carnap at the time he followed the path to operational and ostensive definitions of information, while the operationalism of Bridgman was unknown to him at that time. The solution to the difficulties encountered in trying to define ‘information’, according to Ronald Stamper, is to see information as signs and to define the different aspects or levels of these signs based on the different operations you can do upon these signs. In his book about ‘Information’ [10], Ronald Stamper explains that his research into the operational definition of signs has led to three new views on signs from physics, empirics, and the social world, respectively, in addition to the three aspects of signs distinguished by Morris, namely syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. This leads to six views on signs that together can be depicted as a semiotic ladder. This semiotic ladder consists of the views on signs from the perspective of physics, empirics, syntactics, semantic, pragmatics, and the social world. The addition of a view on information from the social world stresses that information use is always a part of human behaviour in a social setting, where norms or social conventions govern people’s behaviour [5]. The semiotic ladder shows that there are six views on information that together form a complex conceptual structure. This means that seeing ‘information’ as a primitive or atomic concept is wrong [12]. In the interview with Ronald Stamper, we discussed whether the levels of the semiotic ladder can be seen as levels of description, where each level has its own time scale and presupposes the underlying levels. According to Ronald Stamper, the levels of the semiotic ladder are independent of each other, you look at properties of signs using different operations; furthermore, each level has its own theoretical apparatus.