Following the work of theorists including Mead (1962), Goffman (1981), Foucault (1972) and Bourdieu (1991), it has come to be accepted that language plays a number of crucial roles in the establishment and maintenance of social relations. The types of mechanisms involved include the capacity to define a particular language as standard, to vocalise in a certain way, to control the vocabulary in use, and to control turn-taking and the direction of discourse (Bourdieu, 1991). The use of language for control purposes is simultaneously a reflection of existing power relationships, and an exercise in extending and entrenching them (Fairclough, 1989).
There are some qualitative differences between the ISBL and natural languages, and these tend to intensify power effects. The ISBL is essentially an artificial language designed to eliminate the possibility of misconstructions: ‘for a total guarantee of adequacy between the transmitted and received message there has to be an artificial (simplified) language … the universalism inherent to natural language is in principle alien to it’ (Lotman, 1990, p. 13). The precision of the ISBL enables conversational mechanisms such as turn-taking to be applied as controls rather than to check understandings. This is consistent with the ways in which prescribed turn-taking is used to control the sequence of events and responses that occur during rituals (Wolf, 1999, p. 128).
Issues of efficiency and convenience can be so compelling that questions concerning autonomous IS can naturally reduce to issues of technology adoption, rates of diffusion, and trust (Gefen et al., 2003). The linguistic perspective provides an antidote to this in the form of an analytical platform from which to show that there can be losers as well as winners, and that there is a fine line between encouragement and coercion where technology adoption is concerned.
The term ‘electronic frontier’ is used here to refer to the virtual space in which people and automated systems interact as autonomous agents, with the use of ‘frontier’ justified on the grounds that the two cultural groups (people and autonomous systems) are still in the early stages of meeting, interacting with, and understanding each other (Holm, 2000). The driving force behind development of the ISBL is the problem of finding a vehicle that will enable people, who speak a natural language with all the inbuilt vagaries and inconsistencies of such languages, and systems that speak a conceptually limited but highly precise language of their own, to converse with each other. The emerging language is in this regard English-like, but is not English.
Three types of interaction involving autonomous IS can occur as follows:
-
between an autonomous individual and an organisation represented by an automated system;
-
between an organisation represented by a person and an organisation represented by an automated system;
-
between two organisations each represented by an automated system (in some types of B2B procurement exchanges for instance).
For the purposes of this paper, the focus will continue to be on interactions between a person acting individually and an autonomous system representing an organisation, although it is assumed that the logic is equally applicable to the other two cases. Figure 15.1, “Business transaction mediated by the ISBL.” shows the basic logic of interactions mediated by the ISBL in schematic form.
Figure 15.1, “Business transaction mediated by the ISBL.” shows a standard type of transaction proceeding in parallel at two generic levels. At the action level, it involves an exchange of values, for example the provision of cash in return for the right to debit a bank account. At the second level, the exchange of information supports and enables the completion of first level action. It is axiomatic that genuine communication can only occur on the basis of shared understandings (Gibbs, 1999); in this situation the shared understandings are represented in terminology sourced from the language the participants have in common, conceptualised here as the ISBL.
Permitted interactions are of course tightly scripted by the designers of autonomous systems. An ATM will, for example, work according to a fully defined job description (Dos Santos and Peffers, 1995), but must have the authorisation, the basic intelligence, and the conversational competence to complete transactions on behalf of the organisation(s) represented. That the level of transactional complexity is low is essentially irrelevant to the argument being developed; the practical implication of an effective interaction is that two entities acting autonomously have been able to communicate successfully. The linguistic foundations will in practice usually be sufficiently unproblematic to stay below the threshold of attention, but they can become salient under conditions of breakdown. Thus, for example, the lack of conversational repair mechanisms when dealing with an ATM quickly become apparent when it returns an incorrect amount of money or refuses to recognise a credit card.
The following lists twelve theoretical propositions that are discussed as a group in subsequent sections. The propositions are framed in descriptive terms as topics susceptible to empirical research. It is important to note that they were developed on the assumption that a positive perspective on the ISBL is embedded in current thinking about systems and standardisation. The view that autonomous IS provide great benefits of convenience to consumers is not contested, and it is in fact impossible to see how the ever increasing volumes of business transactions could be effectively handled without them (Weizenbaum, 1984, p. 28). The argument is, however, that the increasing spread of ISBL-mediated activity creates possibilities for the exercise of power and the exploitation of consumers that warrant empirical research.
The propositions are as follows:
-
Autonomous IS have been installed as organisational agents.
-
The business behaviour of autonomous IS can be analysed in linguistic terms.
-
To the extent that autonomous IS share basic IS concepts with standardised definitions, they can be conceptualised as speaking a specific language. The language is referred to in this paper as the information systems business language or ISBL.
-
Organisational customers interacting with autonomous IS must use the ISBL for communication purposes.
-
The continuing standardisation of IS definitions in data, process structures and objects, is contributing to the further development of the ISBL.
-
Implementation of the ISBL has social effects on relationships between organisations and their customers; the ISBL can therefore function as an instrument of social power.
-
The emergence of the ISBL as an instrument of social power will tend to encourage its wider adoption.
-
The wider adoption of the ISBL will tend to inhibit possibilities of structural change, by lengthening change management cycles and making change management processes more complex.
The following propositions relate specifically to social power effects:
-
The efficiency gains facilitated by adoption of the ISBL will encourage attempts to impose it as the standard language for conducting some types of business transactions.
-
General adoption of the ISBL will tend to marginalise some people, and create new types of ‘outsiders’.
-
Adoption of the ISBL will exacerbate organisations’ difficulties in dealing with exceptional cases.
-
Adoption of the ISBL will tend to impede people with unusual or exceptional requirements in the pursuit of their transactional interests.