10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17387
application/pdf
2038-3460
17387
2
en
Attila Bruni
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Giovan Francesco Lanzara, Shifting Practices. Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation, MIT Press, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
237-240
TS
Attila Bruni
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17387
237
University of Trento
2038-3460
2
en
240
Giovan Francesco Lanzara, Shifting Practices. Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation, MIT Press, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17387/16247
8
Book Review                                                                237
    Giovan Francesco Lanzara
Shifting Practices. Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation.
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2016, pp. 304

Attila Bruni University of Trento

    One of my favourite album of past months is Rock’n’roll Conscious-
ness by Thurstone Moore. Singer, guitarist and architect of one of the
most important bands on the contemporary alternative musical scene
(Sonic Youth), thirty years since the beginning of his career, Moore has
made a record that in my opinion strikes a perfect balance between ‘old’
and ‘new’, tradition and innovation, past and current. It is an album that
ranges among different music genres (from rock, through punk, noise
and dark, to free jazz and drone-metal) but which creates an amalgam of
sounds that make the final result entirely ‘natural’. It is a record whose
tracks never last for less than six minutes (and in fact, in a couple of cas-
es, exceed ten minutes), but they do not sound ‘long’, ‘boring’ or ‘repeti-
tive’. Dissonances and harmonies, suspended moments and sonic irrup-
tions, rhythms that slow down and accelerate, are all played with such
mastery that the novice and/or distracted listener may even not realize
how much expertise lies beneath them.
    But these trajectories, where careful composition and free jamming
merge together, never lapse into a self-indulgent display of virtuosity or
nonchalance because there is always a dynamism and impetus that do not
leave time to get bored. In a sense, it is an album that not only expresses
the author’s approach and musical aesthetic but also asks the listener to
position him/herself. The circularity of the melodies, in fact, transports
the listener into the piece, and then asks him/her: do you like this music?
Too predictable? Too experimental? Compared to what? What music do
you usually listen to? What do you like about it?
    But above all, what does this have to do with the book subject to this
review?
    Perhaps nothing. But because of my passion for music, whenever I
have to review a book, I ask myself: and if it was an album? What album
would it be? In most cases, I cannot find a sufficiently intuitive match to
decide to use it as an outline for the review. But this time the match
seems wholly befitting.
    Firstly, like Moore’s record, Giovan Francesco Lanzara’s text ‘sounds
good’ in the sense that the writing is enjoyable, rhythmic, rich with ana-
lytical concepts and reflections, as well as metaphors and references to art
and literature.
    Secondly, it is a book written by someone who, following a multi-year
research career, expresses his own ideas without citing those of others.
Lanzara, who has always carried out his research at the intersection
238                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

among organization studies, information systems and innovation studies,
uses his research findings to reflect both on innovation as a bricolage and
practice-based phenomenon, and on the methodological and epistemo-
logical principles useful for reading innovation in processual terms. In
particular, Lanzara revisits two of his research studies: the first (conduct-
ed between 1986 and 1989) concerning the introduction of software for
the teaching of music in a music school; the second (conducted between
1990 and 1993) concerning the introduction of video recorders in Italian
courtrooms. Rather like some of the sounds in Moore’s album, despite
the amount of time that has elapsed, both cases ‘sound’ extremely current
and exemplify the different phases, ambiguities, decision-making, imper-
fections, contrasting interpretations, “translations” (to use the ANT term)
that characterize any process and innovation design at organizational lev-
el. Moreover, both are narrated with an attention to detail that engages
the reader in a sort of “participatory analysis” of what is being recounted.
The reader is provided with the tools and materials to follow the author
in his narrative. At the same time, in this way, the reader has the oppor-
tunity to construct his/her personal interpretation of the events narrated,
without this necessarily coinciding with the author’s point of view. The
search for “interpretative reciprocity” is, moreover, an essential move for
the purpose of studying (and understanding) innovation as a processual
phenomenon. The author focuses in this regard on the centrality of
“backtalk”, not so much in the Goffmanian sense as in that defined by
Donald Schön (1983), as “reflective conversation with the materials of the
situation”. But unlike Schön (to whose memory the text is dedicated), for
Lanzara “the materials of the situation” comprise not only the interaction
among the designer/researcher, his or her partners, and the materials, but
also “the researcher’s conversations with his own research materials; the
researcher’s conversations with himself and his own theories; the second-
order conversations between the researcher’s and practitioners’ stories
and between their current and previous stories” (p. 42). The study of in-
novation phenomena therefore necessarily requires an approach which if
not longitudinal nevertheless extends over time. Reading innovation in
processual terms means giving innovation time to unfold in relation to the
different “situations of practice” (p. 21) and to the various actors with
whom it will come into contact. During this time, the meaning of innova-
tion can change, and so too can the identities and interests of the actors
involved. The flow of this time is characterized by the alternation of
“transient” knowledge (and constructs): that is, “knowledge that is creat-
ed in a process of design and innovation: a kind of transformative activity
is carried out, and the knowledge is subsequently obliterated, trans-
formed or transcended by the same activity as the process unfolds” (p.
217). Typically, this knowledge is “embodied in (...) artifacts, minimal
structures, recombinant routines, ephemeral practices, incomplete repre-
sentations and shifting stories (...)” (p. 217). These are “transient con-
Book Review                                                             239
structs” or “embodied hypothesis”, that is: “hypothetical statement about
how an object or tool could look, how it could or should be used, how
the situation could be understood, and how the world could be orga-
nized” (p. 222).
    Transient knowledge and constructs are ephemeral. Consequently,
people often lose track and memory of them. But for Lanzara they are the
moments on which it is most interesting to dwell in order to understand
the trajectory of an innovation. While knowledge and constructs are
ephemeral, they are also transient in the sense of “transitional”, thus
providing a “provisional ‘anchoring’ to some features of the situation that
can be handled” (p. 224). It is therefore in these partial articulations and
definitions that innovation takes shape, embodying materials, objects,
ideas and interpretations that are sometimes lost, while others persist over
time, but which in any case act as “temporary scaffolds for building new
forms of knowledge and agency” (p. 246).
    More than asserting a series of statements, therefore, Lanzara’s text
asks a series of questions: “What happens in an established practice or
work setting when a novel artifact or tool for doing work changes the fa-
miliar work routines?” (p. 5); “What is revealed of a practice in the
switch to a different medium? How are objects, activities, representa-
tions, and skills affected by the nature of the medium? How are our per-
ceptions and idea of materiality and reality mediated by the medium?
How is knowledge itself medium-dependent? And (…) in what sense is a
practice a mediated world?” (p. 203). Moreover, “To what extent can an
observer legitimately penetrate into the representations of the actors ob-
served? What kinds of access are technically rigorous, socially feasible,
and morally acceptable? To what extent is digging deeply into the actors’
representations also a form of intervention, or perhaps intrusion, into
them?” (p. 253); “How can an experiment be designed that would enable
both the researcher and the practitioners involved in the project to devel-
op relevant knowledge about the innovation process and reflect on their
own theories, strategies and experiences while they are actually engaged
in action?” (p. 37); “How does the subtle line between what is remarked
and questioned and what instead goes unremarked and unquestioned af-
fect the researcher’s reconstruction of reality?” (p. 46); “When does the
researcher notice the tools being worked with and the equipment on
which she or he relies for carrying out ordinary research work? When are
the things that surround her or him and support routine operations
seen?” (p. 47).
    As in the case of some of the sounds in Moore’s record, there will cer-
tainly be those who say that they have already heard these questions (and,
perhaps, have already found the answers). However, for Lanzara ques-
tions serve to problematize reality, and if they are well formulated, they
lead to further questions, more than to definitive answers. From this
point of view, it can indeed be argued (as Lanzara does) that: “what is
240                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

fixed as the reality – the accepted facts, the known events, the shared
truths – also constitutes the experiential and cognitive limit of the inquir-
er, marks the boundaries of the hitherto known world, and the nature
and quality of social interaction. And what is called reality coincides with
the place and time in which the practice of reflexivity gets suspended” (p.
265).
    Just as the keyword of Thurston Moore’s album is not so much
“Rock’n’roll” as “consciousness”, so the keyword of Giovan Francesco
Lanzara’s text is not “practice”, “technology” or “innovation” but rather
“reflection”. And reflection (like music) is never-ending.



                                    ***

    Bruno Latour
Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione (con una nota di Jacques Fontanille)
[Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation (with a note by Jacques Fontanille)], Ro-
ma, Aracne, 2017, pp. 68

Alvise Mattozzi Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

     Providing an autonomous format to Bruno Latour’s 1999 article “Pic-
cola filosofia dell’enunciazione” [Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation] with
both the original French version and the already published one in Italian,
was the right move. Now that some years have passed since the publica-
tion of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) (Latour 2013), it can
result extremely useful to have at hand one of the sources, and one of the
steps towards, AIME, in order to better understand and appreciate
Latour’s trajectory in its entirety.
     This new version of Latour’s article is accompanied by a useful after-
word – in Italian and in French – by French semiotician Jacques Fon-
tanille – “Dagli atti di enunciazione ai modi di esistenza” [From acts of
enunciation to modes of existence] (pp. 43-52 and pp. 53-63). In such
afterword, Fontanille clarifies the closeness and the distance between
Latour’s proposal and the original theory of enunciation, from which
Latour draws, in order to track and describe the relations giving way to
different modes of existence.
     “Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione” (PFE; Latour 1999) has been ini-
tially published in a festschrift dedicated to Paolo Fabbri, semiotician
who introduced Latour to semiotics and with whom Latour signed his
first science studies article. Fabbri, who is now the director of the Centro
Internazionale di Studi Semiotici [International Center for Semiotic Stud-
