Culture-Centered Computing: Social Policy and Development of New Information Technology in England and the United States

In addition to using computers, anthropologists now study computerization as a cultural process in its own right. A properly developed applied anthropology of computerization could help create more humane organizations as well as more effective information technology.This article contributes to the applied anthropology of computing by focusing on culture-centered computing, an approach to computing that results from a policy of deliberately using social and cultural means to influence the outcomes of the computerization process. The article is based primarily on anthropological fieldwork in Sheffield, England, where substantial computerization policy emerged in the 1980s, and secondarily in the Upper Mohawk Valley in New York, U.S.A.After placing studies of policy in the context of the anthropology of computing, the article summarizes the results of more general social science studies of computerization as a process of social change. Following an extended discussion of the development and adaptation of selected Sheffield and Utica computer policy projects, the article summarizes what the existing basic and applied research suggests about how to encourage the development of information systems that accomplish social as well as technical goals. Accumulating research and experience, combined with the technical features of the micro-computer and recent developments within Computer Science that indicate a greater openness to cultural approaches, justify the optimistic view of the prospects for culture-centered computing with which the article concludes.