skip to main content
research-article

The Coerciveness of the Primary Key: Infrastructure Problems in Human Services Work

Authors Info & Claims
Published:07 November 2019Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

The premise of a primary key is simple enough: every record or row in a table should have some number or string that can uniquely identify it. Primary keys are essential for linking data spread across database tables, and for looking up and retrieving data from specific records. Yet for an identifier that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial, we find myriad ways that this unassuming bit of infrastructure has an outsized influence in human services work. Through case studies of the organizational networks of two nonprofit human services organizations, we find that different stakeholders use variants of identifiers to support work practices that are far more complex and social than the linking of tables or the lookup of data. Yet we also find that the low-level technical properties of the primary key are often coercive, forcing end-users to work on the infrastructure's terms-influencing the nature and order of the work, creating new forms of work, and influencing the tenor of the relationships among stakeholders. The technical abstractions of the underlying infrastructure, then, start to become the de facto public policy. We conclude by offering design provocations for better supporting identification across a variety of contexts.

References

  1. Jo Bates, Yu-Wei Lin, and Paula Goodale. 2016. Data journeys: Capturing the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows. Big Data & Society 3, 2 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716654502Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Lehn M. Benjamin. 2008. Account space: How accountability requirements shape nonprofit practice. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 37, 2 (2008), 201--223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764007301288Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  3. Lehn M. Benjamin. 2008. Bearing More Risk for Results: Performance Accountability and Nonprofit Relational Work. Administration & Society 39, 8 (2008), 959--983. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399707309357Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Lehn M. Benjamin. 2012. Nonprofit Organizations and Outcome Measurement: From Tracking Program Activities to Focusing on Frontline Work. American Journal of Evaluation 33, 3 (2012), 431--447. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1098214012440496Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. Lehn M. Benjamin, Amy Voida, and Chris Bopp. 2018. Policy Fields, Data Systems, and the Performance of Nonprofit Human Service Organizations. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance (2018), 1--20. https://doi.org/10.1080/23303131.2017.1422072Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Marc Berg. 1997. Of Forms, Containers, and the Electronic Medical Record: Some Tools for a Sociology of the Formal. Science, Technology, & Human Values 22, 4 (1997), 403--433. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399702200401Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  7. Matthew J. Bietz and Charlotte P. Lee. 2009. Collaboration in metagenomics: Sequence databases and the organization of scientific work. In Proceedings of the 2009 European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, 243--262.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Pernille Bjørn and Ellen Balka. 2007. Health care categories have politics too: Unpacking the managerial agendas of electronic triage systems. In Proceedings of the 2007 European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Liam J. Bannon, Ina Wagner, Carl Gutwin, Richard H. R. Harper, and Kjeld Schmidt (Eds.). Springer, London, 371--390.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. Chris Bopp, Ellie Harmon, and Amy Voida. 2017. Disempowered by Data: Nonprofits, Social Enterprises, and the Consequences of Data-Driven Work. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3608--3619. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025694Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Nikolaj Gandrup Borchorst and Susanne Bødker. 2011. "You probably shouldn't give them too much information"-- Supporting Citizen-Government Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2011 European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, 173--192.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  11. Geoffrey C. Bowker. 2000. Biodiversity Datadiversity. Social Studies of Science 30, 5 (2000), 643--683.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Eleanor Burt and John Taylor. 2000. Information and Communication Technologies: Reshaping Voluntary Organizations? Nonprofit Management and Leadership 11, 2 (2000), 131--143. https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.11201Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  14. Eleanor Burt and John Taylor. 2003. New Technologies, Embedded Values, and Strategic Change: Evidence From the U.K. Voluntary Sector. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 32, 1 (2003), 115--127. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764002250009Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. Joanne G. Carman. 2007. Evaluation practice among community-based organizations: Research into the reality. American Journal of Evaluation 28, 1 (2007), 60--75.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. Sarah Carnochan, Mark Samples, Michael Myers, and Michael J. Austin. 2014. Performance measurement challenges in nonprofit human service organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 43, 6 (2014), 1014--1032.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  17. Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2014. Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage Publications.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. James Cutt and Vic Murray. 2000. Accountability and Effectiveness Evaluation in Nonprofit Organizations. Routledge.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  19. Jasper De Witte, Anja Declercq, and Koen Hermans. 2015. Street-level strategies of child welfare social workers in Flanders: The use of electronic client records in practice. British Journal of Social Work 46, 5 (2015), 1249--1265.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Drew DeSilver. 2017. What does the federal government spend your tax dollars on? Social insurance programs, mostly. http://pewrsr.ch/2oUsg8hGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Paul Dourish. 2017. The stuff of bits: An essay on the materialities of information. MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Paul Dourish and Melissa Mazmanian. 2012. Media as material: Information representations as material foundations for organizational practice. In Perspectives on process organization studies: How matter matters: Objects, artifacts, and materiality in organization studies., Paul Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridmos Tsoukas (Eds.). Oxford University Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Alnoor Ebrahim. 2003. NGOs and organizational change: Discourse, reporting, and learning. Cambridge University Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. W. Keith Edwards, MarkW. Newman, and Erika Shehan Poole. 2010. The Infrastructure Problem in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 423--432. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753390Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Sheena Erete and Jennifer O. Burrell. 2017. Empowered Participation: How Citizens Use Technology in Local Governance. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2307--2319. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025996Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Shelly D. Farnham and Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2011. Faceted Identity, Faceted Lives: Social and Technical Issues with Being Yourself Online. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 359--368. https://doi.org/10.1145/1958824.1958880Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Matthew Fuller. 2005. Media Ecologies: Materialist energies in Art and Technoculture. MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Christine A. Halverson. 2002. Activity theory and distributed cognition: Or what does CSCW need to DO with theories? Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 11, 1--2 (2002), 243--267.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Ellie Harmon, Chris Bopp, and Amy Voida. 2017. The Design Fictions of Philanthropic IT: Stuck Between an Imperfect Present and an Impossible Future. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7015--7028. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025650Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. Yeheskel Hasenfeld (Ed.). 2010. Human services as complex organizations (2 ed.). Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. Yeheskel Hasenfeld and Richard A. English. 1974. Human service organizations: A book of readings. Univ of Michigan Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Ron Haskins and Jon Baron. 2011. Building the connection between policy and evidence: The Obama evidence-based initiatives. Using Evidence to Improve Social Policy and Practice 25 (10 2011), 25--51.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. Christopher A. Le Dantec and W. Keith Edwards. 2008. The View from the Trenches: Organization, Power, and Technology at Two Nonprofit Homeless Outreach Centers. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 589--598. https://doi.org/10.1145/1460563.1460656Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. Christopher A. Le Dantec and W. Keith Edwards. 2010. Across Boundaries of Influence and Accountability: The Multiple Scales of Public Sector Information Systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113--122. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753345Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  35. Heather MacIndoe and Emily Barman. 2013. How Organizational Stakeholders Shape Performance Measurement in Nonprofits: Exploring a Multidimensional Measure. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 42, 4 (2013), 716--738. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764012444351Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  36. Lev Manovich. 2002. The Language of New Media. MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  37. Aryn Martin and Michael Lynch. 2009. Counting things and people: The practices and politics of counting. Social Problems 56, 2 (2009), 243--266.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  38. Nan L. Maxwell, Dana Rotz, and Christina Garcia. 2016. Data and decision making: Same organization, different perceptions; different organizations, different perceptions. American Journal of Evaluation 37, 4 (2016), 463--485.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  39. Brenda McPhail, Terry Costantino, David Bruckmann, Ross Barclay, and Andrew Clement. 1998. CAVEAT exemplar: Participatory design in a non-profit volunteer organisation. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 7, 3--4 (1998), 223--241.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. Cecelia Merkel, Umer Farooq, Lu Xiao, Craig Ganoe, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M. Carroll. 2007. Managing Technology Use and Learning in Nonprofit Community Organizations: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities. In Proceedings of the 2007 Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology (CHIMIT '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1145/1234772.1234783Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. Cecelia B. Merkel, Lu Xiao, Umer Farooq, Craig H. Ganoe, Roderick Lee, John M. Carroll, and Mary Beth Rosson. 2004. Participatory Design in Community Computing Contexts: Tales from the Field. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Participatory Design: Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices - Volume 1 (PDC 04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1011870.1011872Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  42. Annemarie Mol. 2002. Cutting surgeons, walking patients: Some complexities involved in comparing. Complexities: social studies of knowledge practices (2002), 218--257.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  43. Naja Holten Møller and Pernille Bjørn. 2011. Layers in sorting practices: Sorting out patients with potential cancer. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 20, 3 (2011), 123--153.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  44. Dawn Nafus. 2014. Stuck data, dead data, and disloyal data: The stops and starts in making numbers into social practices. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, 2 (2014), 208--222.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  45. Diane M. Nelson. 2015. Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide. Duke University Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  46. Wanda J. Orlikowski. 2010. The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 1 (1 2010), 125--141. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep058Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  47. Michael Quinn Patton. 2006. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Sage.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  48. Sarah L. Pettijohn and Elizabeth T. Boris. 2013. Nonprofit-Government Contracts and Grants: Findings from the 2013 National Survey. Technical Report. The Urban Institute.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  49. Kathleen H. Pine and Max Liboiron. 2015. The Politics of Measurement and Action. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3147--3156. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702298Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  50. Charles C. Ragin and Lisa M. Amoroso. 2011. Constructing Social Science. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  51. Rita Raley. 2013. Dataveillance and Countervailance. In "Raw data" is an Oxymoron, Lisa Gitelman (Ed.). Chapter 7, 121--146.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  52. Dave Randall, Rob Procter, Yuwei Lin, Meik Poschen, Wes Sharrock, and Robert Stevens. 2011. Distributed ontology building as practical work. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 69, 4 (2011), 220--233.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  53. David Ribes and Steven J. Jackson. 2013. Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining a Long-Term Study. In "Raw data" is an Oxymoron, Lisa Gitelman (Ed.). Chapter 8, 147--166.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  54. Monika Schneider, Daniel Brisson, and Donald Burnes. 2016. Do we really know how many are homeless?: An analysis of the point-in-time homelessness count. Families in Society 97, 4 (2016), 321--329.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  55. Dick Schoech. 2010. Interoperability and the future of human services. Journal of Technology in Human Services 28, 1--2 (2010), 7--22.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  56. James C. Scott. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  57. Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky. 1993. Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  58. Alana Conner Snibbe. 2006. Drowning in Data. Stanford Social Innovation Review (2006), 38--45.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  59. Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. 2011. The Organization of Discipline: From Performance Management to Perversity and Punishment. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: J-PART 21 (2011), i203--i232. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25836107Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  60. Tony Sparks. 2010. Broke not broken: Rights, privacy, and homelessness in Seattle. Urban Geography 31, 6 (2010), 842--862.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  61. Susan Leigh Star. 1999. The ethnography of infrastructure. American behavioral scientist 43, 3 (1999), 377--391.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  62. Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information spaces. Information Systems Research 7, 1 (1996), 111--134.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  63. Randy Stoecker. 2007. Research practices and needs of non-profit organizations in an Urban Center. Journal Social & Social Welfare 34 (2007), 97.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  64. Jennifer Stoll, W. Keith Edwards, and Elizabeth D. Mynatt. 2010. Interorganizational Coordination and Awareness in a Nonprofit Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 51--60. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718930Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  65. Alex Taylor. 2015. After Interaction. interactions 22, 5 (Aug. 2015), 48--53. https://doi.org/10.1145/2809888Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  66. Nitya Verma and Amy Voida. 2016. On Being Actionable: Mythologies of Business Intelligence and Disconnects in Drill Downs. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 325--334. https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957283Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  67. Helen Verran. 2001. Science and an African Logic. University of Chicago Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  68. Janet Vertesi. 2019. From Affordances to Accomplishments PowerPoint and Excel at NASA. In DigitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies, Janet Vertesi and David Ribes (Eds.). Princeton University Press, 369--392.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  69. Amy Voida. 2011. Shapeshifters in the Voluntary Sector: Exploring the Human-centered-computing Challenges of Nonprofit Organizations. interactions 18, 6 (Nov. 2011), 27--31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2029976.2029985Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  70. Amy Voida, Lynn Dombrowski, Gillian R. Hayes, and Melissa Mazmanian. 2014. Shared Values/Conflicting Logics: Working Around e-Government Systems. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3583--3592. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556971Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  71. Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, and Ban Al-Ani. 2011. Homebrew Databases: Complexities of Everyday Information Management in Nonprofit Organizations. In Proceedings of the 2011 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 915--924. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979078Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  72. Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, and Ban Al-Ani. 2012. Bridging Between Organizations and the Public: Volunteer Coordinators' Uneasy Relationship with Social Computing. In Proceedings of the 2012 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1967--1976. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208341Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  73. Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, Willa Weller, Aubrey Thornsbury, Ariana Casale, Samuel Vance, Forrest Adams, Zach Hoffman, Alex Schmidt, Kevin Grimley, Luke Cox, Aubrey Neeley, and Christopher Goodyear. 2017. Competing Currencies: Designing for Politics in Units of Measurement. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 847--860. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998209Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. The Coerciveness of the Primary Key: Infrastructure Problems in Human Services Work

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    • Published in

      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
      Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 3, Issue CSCW
      November 2019
      5026 pages
      EISSN:2573-0142
      DOI:10.1145/3371885
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2019 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 7 November 2019
      Published in pacmhci Volume 3, Issue CSCW

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader