10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17548
Ongoing work and theorizing in the field of STS has made important progress in conceptualizing agency, and stressing contingency and dynamic processes in science, technology and society. However, this focus on case studies and micro dynamics has left the field ill equipped to account for obduracy and stability. We suggest a framework for understanding obduracy in STS can be found by reassessing various insights from the social sciences and STS on the processes of maintenance and repair (M&amp;R). To illustrate our framework, we offer a concrete example in one of Europe’s crises: alterity processing or the collection of practices and infrastructures to manage Europe’s “migration crisis” (Pelizza 2019). We make explicit how maintenance and repair can be used to consider the obduracy of large scale orders without losing the empirical edge that the STS offers.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17548
2
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Annalisa Pelizza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
obduracy
Thinking with Maintenance and Repair to Account for Obduracy of Macro Orders. The Case of Informational Migration Management in Europe
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Scenarios
2022-03-26
2023-06-30
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
189-208
TS
Annalisa Pelizza
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17548
189
University of Bologna
2038-3460
2
obduracy
en
208
Thinking with Maintenance and Repair to Account for Obduracy of Macro Orders. The Case of Informational Migration Management in Europe
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17548/16396
12
                                                                                  Scenarios

Thinking with Maintenance and Repair
to Account for Obduracy of Macro
Orders
The Case of Informational Migration Management in
Europe

            Yoren Lausberg                               Annalisa Pelizza
                University of Bologna                     University of Bologna



     Abstract: Ongoing work and theorizing in the field of STS has made im-
     portant progress in conceptualizing agency, and stressing contingency and
     dynamic processes in science, technology and society. However, this focus
     on case studies and micro dynamics has left the field ill equipped to account
     for obduracy and stability. We suggest a framework for understanding ob-
     duracy in STS can be found by reassessing various insights from the social
     sciences and STS on the processes of maintenance and repair (M&R). To il-
     lustrate our framework, we offer a concrete example in one of Europe’s
     crises: alterity processing or the collection of practices and infrastructures
     to manage Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ (Pelizza 2019). We make explicit how
     maintenance and repair can be used to consider the obduracy of large scale
     orders without losing the empirical edge that the STS offers.

     Keywords: maintenance; repair; migration management; alterity pro-
     cessing; Europe; obduracy.

     Submitted: July 22, 2020 – Accepted: April 20, 2021

     Corresponding author: Yoren Lausberg, Department of Philosophy and
     Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Via Azzo Gardino 23,
     40126 Bologna, Italy. E-mail: ylausberg@processingcitizenship.eu




1. Introduction

    In 2015 the increased collective mobility of third country nationals
travelling to Europe, often without the required visa, was dubbed “Eu-
rope’s migration crisis” (Evans 2015; Park 2015). This labelling has since
persisted (Islam 2020). The conceptualization of crisis was not only

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
12 (2) pp. 189-208 – ISSN 2038-3460               2021
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190                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
adopted in media accounts on migration. Formal governing bodies of the
European Union (EU)1 embraced it, as well. The European Commission
(EC), for example, adopted a new Agenda for Migration (European
Commission 2015b), which maintained the crisis frame and introduced
the so called “Hotspot approach” to streamline methods of migration
management through “informational and bureaucratic standardization”
(Pelizza 2020, 269). The Hotspot approach is illustrative of existing ten-
sions between member states (MSs) and the EC triggered by the informa-
tional management of the outer edges of Europe. Infringement decisions,
for example, have revealed tensions which were originated by the pres-
sures set on frontline European countries who received the most people
(Geddes 2019; European Council 2015a; 2015b). All in all, the onset of
the “migration crisis” has laid bare the fragility of the EU project in a key
area of integration such us internal affairs and security.
    Scholars have questioned the nature of what is allegedly in crisis (Taz-
zioli and De Genova 2016). What does it mean that Europe is facing a
crisis? This expression assumes the EU as a solid, obdurate construction
that is being put under threat by people on the move. Scholars have con-
ceived of the mobility of non-Europeans to Europe as a challenge to Eu-
ropean stability (Mayblin and Turner 2021). They follow public and poli-
cy debates on migration and highlight the ways migration is problema-
tized, and how certain citizenship laws and integration policies are set up
to face this issue. The stability of the EU, or of MSs, is here conceived as
something that needs to be reproduced through social processes (De
Koning et al. 2018; Bracke and Hernandez Aguillar 2020). Differently,
with this paper we aim to outline a framework which posits fragility to be
a key characteristic of the European socio-material construct, highlighting
the material and epistemic dynamics by which the EU is kept stable, to
account for the obduracy of Europe. Obduracy is here taken as its hard-
ened quality to persist and remain stable. We aim to investigate the con-
stant work of maintenance that allows a complex set of organizations and
scales like the EU to hold together amidst migration-related tensions. In
particular, in this paper we wish to explore the extent to which the social
sciences and in particular the Science and Technology Studies (STS) liter-
ature on maintenance and repair (M&R) can contribute insights to the ef-
fort of framing the current European condition. We hypothesize that if
the ongoing migration “crisis” has up to now avoided the breaking point,
this might be due to a work of M&R.
    We suggest that a novel, potentially ground-breaking field of research
opens when looking at European institutional relationships (e.g., between
EC and MSs, as well as among MSs and International Organizations)
from the perspective of M&R. Assuming fragility and precariousness in-
stead of stability allows focusing on the mediating agencies, tentative at-
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                     191
tempts and unexpected developments that not only keep the EU going,
but every time enact it as a diverse outcome amidst crises. This is clearly
revealed when it comes to migration management, where migration is ac-
counted for as an issue that can be efficiently managed through soci-
otechnical solutions and informational controls. Data infrastructures for
migration management are indeed conceived of as efficient solutions
promising to smoothen the process of asylum application and relocation
across Europe (European Commission 2015a). While various systems of
registration and data collection are deployed, integrated and standardized
to the end of upkeeping the EU, what is maintained and repaired every
time is a different outcome.
     We thus wonder how data infrastructures and practices of migration
management operate to maintain and repair institutional relationships. In
Europe, the data-based management of migration goes back to the early
Union’s Treaties (Balch and Geddes 2011) and further intensified with
the Hotspot approach (European Commission 2015a). As the rationale
goes, digital data infrastructures are expected to make the process of asy-
lum application, deportation or relocation across Europe more efficient
and effective (Amoore and Raley 2017; Dijstelbloem and Meyer 2011). By
so doing, we suggest that they also contribute to address the tensions be-
tween MSs and European agencies, data infrastructures being a crucial
element in the work of maintenance and repair of the European order.
    In what follows we first provide an “archeology” of the objects of in-
quiry of M&R in literature. Then, we discuss insights on M&R from soci-
ology and STS, and the works on (data) infrastructures specifically. The
potential of these conceptualizations to understand the M&R of Europe
is then discussed against the field of migration management. Finally, we
conclude by outlining the potential consequences of a M&R framework
for the maintenance of macro orders.


2. Maintenance and Repair between Engineering and Social
Sciences
    Through a systematic analysis for M&R in scientific databases like
Scopus, it clearly emerges that until the 1990s most works were published
in engineering disciplines, where the analyses were focused on the materi-
al infrastructures of mobility. They mainly dealt with the practical cases of
repair or maintenance of roads, highways or bus systems (Dutta and Maze
1989). Their driving interest mainly concerned the financial or economic
aspects of M&R. From the 1990s on, maintenance of mobility and
transport systems was discussed in combination with computer models.
The introduction of computers in the literature on M&R did not only
192                                                       Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
take computers as objects to be maintained (Ganderton 1990); they were
also conceived of as maintenance warning systems (Hudson et al. 1993;).
Computers therefore emerged since the 1990s as tools supporting M&R.
Still in the 1990s, journals in aviation business and commerce published
the first articles on aircrafts M&R (Parke 1995). It is in this field that
M&R are for the first time discussed in relation to some other values than
economics. Tripp (1995), for example, discussed the cosmetic side of re-
pairing an aircraft as a matter of aesthetics, whereas previous civ-
il/transport engineering journals mostly discussed M&R as a necessary
aspect to be modelled into optimization or financial models (Luxhoj and
Jones 1986). Furthermore, aviation studies for the first time discussed the
enacting potentialities of M&R. Bradley (1995), for example, discussed
M&R as key sites where business relations can be established or strength-
ened.
     M&R have remained important concepts in civil and transport engi-
neering well into the present. However, from 2000 onward we see M&R
being taken up by more heterogeneous disciplines. In environmental sci-
ence and policy, for example, maintenance is conceptualized as important
in reducing CO emissions produced by personal automobile vehicles
(Wenzel 2001, 2003). Interest in maintenance as an environmental matter
was often mentioned in engineering journals – or interdisciplinary jour-
nals in engineering and environment (Kazopoulo, Kaysi and El Fadel
2007). This entangling of engineering and environmental concerns was al-
so evidenced in the notions of “forest maintenance”, wherein “mainte-
nance” is taken up as an important factor in relation to climate change
(Rummer 2008; Platt, Veblen and Sherriff 2008). Around the same time,
the notion of “boundary maintenance” arose even in journalism and
communication journals (Bicket and Wall 2007, Wall and Bicket 2008),
used to discuss the process by which journalists maintain or protect an
authoritative position in the face of challenges to this authority, either
through online challengers or globalization processes.
     As such, around the early 2000s the notion of maintenance started to
trickle to the social sciences and be referred to sociotechnical topics. We
saw the emergence of studies which did not consider M&R to be purely
material or physical activities, but guided and laden with moral and social
norms and ideologies (Graham and Thrift 2007; Gregson, Metcalfe and
Crewe 2009). M&R started to appear in relation to safety science, risk
analysis and accident prevention (Lombardi et al. 2009; Hon, Chan &
Wong 2010) – mirroring Beck’s (1992) insights on risk management and
the risk society – as well as in urban studies and geography (Jacobs &
Cairns 2012; Chelcea and Pulay 2015). The use of M&R in these latter
was often done in response or relation to Nigel Thrift’s (2005; 2007) work
which convincingly called for an analysis of the politics of M&R. It was
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                       193
also often explicitly related to the work of Latour and STS more broadly:
it emphasized the role of non-human actors and stressed emergence, con-
tingency and unpredictability (Edensor 2011).
    However, it is against the micro-sociology of everyday life that M&R
dynamics have been predominantly framed. Studies in M&R in the social
sciences, and STS in particular, adopted Garfinkel’s (1967) conceptual-
ization of social order as produced through and in everyday interactions.
Ethnomethodology – seen as a microsociology focused on people’s re-
sponse to the breach of interactional order – was a resource to investigate
the breakdowns of social order to which M&R are expected to react. As
such, social studies in M&R became interested in conversation analysis
(Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977), and – especially relevant for this
overview – focused on “repair” as a category of analysis (Henke 1999). As
in conversations, when breakdowns halt smooth interaction, thus requir-
ing clarification or repair, so in sociotechnical M&R breakdowns are re-
vealing of taken for granted assumptions.
    This understanding of repair as indebted to ethnomethodology was
especially adopted by Henke (1999), among others. He described the
work of repairmen at his university and discussed how they engage in a
situated activity of repair through tacit knowledge and networked prac-
tices. He points to the ways in which repair is not always material, or not
only material, but can concern users’ expectations towards an artifact.
What Henke (1999, 65) describes as “repairing the costumer” or “people
repair” points to the gap between actual workings and expectations, for
example in the case of establishing whether it is the air conditioner that
needs to be repaired, or the user that needs to be convinced that the air
conditioner is not broken. Henke (1999:64) points to the ways technolog-
ical equipment is used as an extension of a worker’s body, describing the
body and the used equipment as a network, which is set to work to repair
technological infrastructures, but also expectations and demands from of-
fice workers – wherein the body is the link between the social and the ma-
terial. Henke’s work points to the myriad of ways in which “order” is (re-
)enacted in workplace settings through the constant work of repairmen.
    While Henke draws on these early STS insights and on analytically
neglected forms of work (Hochschild 1983; Orr 1996), ethnomethodolo-
gy is foundational to his attention to and conceptualization of M&R. This
is particularly evident in his analytical effort to frontstage those activities
which are usually kept in the backstage in everyday life. Henke trans-
posed the theorizing on M&R in conversation and the situated organizing
of order through conversations to account for the material, situated, net-
worked and embodied practices of maintenance and repair. Given Hen-
ke’s influence on more recent STS theorizing about M&R, it is not by
chance that many contemporary studies are underpinned by an ethno-
194                                                             Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
methodological approach based on micro situations, everyday interac-
tions and contingency (Sormani, Strebel and Bovet 2015; Denis, Mongili
and Pontille 2015).


3. Strands of M&R in Social Sciences and STS

    We suggest that thinking with sociotechnical M&R opens up possibili-
ties for theorizing about fragility and precariousness of institutional en-
actment from an STS perspective. As Denis, Mongili and Pontille (2015)
point out, analyzing M&R can expand our understandings of sociotech-
nical work and object agency, and can help us rethinking the dynamics of
innovation (Russell and Vinsel 2016), institutions (Sims and Henke 2012),
power (Graham and Thrift 2007; Barnes 2017; Ureta 2014), the narratives
and imaginaries of technology (Jackson 2014), as well as the careful, but
potentially exploitative relations people have with their (built) environ-
ment (Mattern 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) and the ontology (Denis
and Pontille 2015) and epistemology of order(ing) (Denis and Pontille
2020).
    Given the burgeoning field of M&R in social sciences at large and STS
specifically, we can identify four strands of research that are pertinent to
our goal of exploring the extent to which the literature on M&R can con-
tribute insights to the understanding of the work of maintenance and re-
pair of the European order in the field of migration management. These
strands should not be interpreted as straitjackets, but as identifications of
common themes and tropes. Aspects of some strands can be found in ar-
ticles that are here named under other strands, and authors named as
emblematic of one strand can be found citing or relying on authors in
other strands.
    The first strand we identify is not so much interested in M&R activi-
ties framed as such, but it is rather concerned with the implications of the
fact that relations, objects, organizations or structures require constant
work in order to persist. Highlighting this is one way to challenge societal
imaginaries of innovation, or a productivist bias in STS (Jackson 2014).
Jackson (2014) formulates this as the general theory of ‘Broken World
Thinking’ (BWT). BWT takes erosion, decay and breakdown as everyday
phenomena. Its two main components are the appreciation of the fragility
of the world we inhabit, and the recognition that many of the stories and
orders of modernity are in process of coming apart, perhaps to be re-
placed by better stories and orders (Jackson 2014, 221). As such, Jackson
(2014, 222) states:
       Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                             195
        hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-
        apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing
        and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combi-
        nations and new possibilities—a topic of both hope and concern.
        It is a world of pain and possibility, creativity and destruction, in-
        novation, and the worst excesses of leftover habit and power. The
        fulcrum of these two worlds is repair: the subtle acts of care by
        which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are
        maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and ex-
        tended.
    For Jackson, repair serves to hold pieces together, in this dual process
of centrifuging-reconfiguring, so that other pieces can be added and dis-
carded. Work in this strand focusses mostly on technological imaginaries
and stories, and complicates these imaginaries by describing the use of
technology in practice or in disrepair (Wakefield 2018; Donovan 2015).
    A second strand is concerned with M&R as specific knowledge prac-
tices, and their production. This strand explicitly names the study of
M&R as one that “helps reconsider an old legacy of ANT: The opposition
between breakdown (crisis, controversy) and routine (taken-for-
grantedness)” (Denis 2019, 284). While drawing from, or dialoguing
with, the other strands here identified, this strand has an explicit focus on
ontology and epistemology. It conceives of M&R as knowledge practices
that help shape an order, but also “cultivate a particular epistemology of
public order” (Denis and Pontille 2020, 21). In this analysis the authors
attempt to grasp the ecology of maintenance interventions in order to dis-
cuss the dynamics of order and disorder, stability and fragility. As Denis
and Pontille (2015, 353) state:
        Social scientists have known for a long time that order and disor-
        der go hand in hand. Order does not get rid of disorder, just as
        bringing disorder to light does not remove order. […] In the case
        of maintenance activities, producing order is less costly, but neces-
        sitates operations that have a short reach, […] the emergence of
        order from disorder in maintenance work is always ephemeral. It
        draws on situated reordering micro-processes that have to be con-
        tinually repeated. The very stability of the wayfinding system relies
        on each of the maintenance workers’ interventions.
   The production of order is thus a process that draws not only on
norms and standards, which define stabilized states for objects and their
environments, but also on the practices accomplished in the name of tak-
ing care of things. Order is thus not the negation of vulnerabilities, but it
emerges by taking vulnerabilities into account. With this, Denis and Pon-
196                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
tille (2015) mean that the nature of “order” is constructed, something
that requires constant re-enactment. Even if there is a materially stand-
ardized system in place, this standardized system requires maintenance.
     The third strand highlights M&R as political practices in which rela-
tions are formed or abandoned. Work done in this strand emphasizes
M&R’s specific type of politics. Graham and Thrift (2007) discuss these
politics as twofold: in the case of defining what is broken and how it
should be repaired; and in the practice of M&R which displace some rela-
tions in favor of others. In the former, the politics is about definitions and
discourses and how this influences other politics. In the latter, Graham
and Thrift (2007, 17) call for an analysis of M&R as a mode of doing poli-
tics:
       Maintenance and repair is an ongoing process, but it can be de-
       signed in many different ways in order to produce many different
       outcomes and these outcomes can be more or less efficacious:
       there is, in other words, a politics of repair and maintenance.
    Always in this strand, Barnes (2017) discusses how the everyday
maintenance of irrigation canals in Egypt, done by local farmers, helps to
build community relations and therefore empowerment. In contrast, the
Egyptian state operates large scale repair on this irrigation system once
per year, in which they undo many of the community-made adjustments.
Barnes (2017) here highlights how the acts of M&R enact power rela-
tions, and can be used to (re)enact the state, or to enact counter power.
Here, the specific practices of M&R matter, as well as who does them.
    Concerning the issue of M&R having a discursive dynamic as well as a
material one, Ureta (2014) describes how the Transantiago bus system in
Santiago de Chile was repaired through a dual process of repair by num-
bers and by buffering. Herein the ‘by numbers’ mode refers to a discur-
sive process of normalization that strategically refers to numbers and nar-
ratives. Repair by numbers points to quantitative metrics to shape a narra-
tive of control. The first stage in implementing such a repair was to define
what is “normal”. Statistics were then used to identify those areas where
the current system lagged behind the envisioned normal state. Second,
the goal was redefined as bringing those specific areas that did not meet
the standards up to the “normal” level. The failures of the Transantiago
were framed by the project’s management as a failure to reach the so de-
fined standards of normality. As a result of these adjustments, the
Transantiago was “normalized”, repaired by bringing its quantitative
metrics in line with its predefined standards. All in all, Ureta recalls, the
aim of repair by numbers is affirming the government’s power and capac-
ity to plan and manage, by normalizing the situation. It works for “the
maintenance of power, not the improvement of societies and/or individu-
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                     197
als” (Ureta 2014, 372). While this mode of M&R raises also technical as-
pects, “repair by numbers” is mostly done through public discourse.
    “Repair by buffering” instead refers to the practice of introducing
mediators to relegate an issue in the background. One issue that haunted
the Transantiago was the boarding speed of passengers. During the after-
noon rush-hour, users who prioritized the possibility to sit in the bus and
were thus willing to wait for the next bus used to slow down the boarding
process. However, the Transantiago was designed around a different type
of users: users who would board a bus in a minute’s time. The design of
the Transantiago’s platform foresaw travelers as fare-and-time-optimizers;
rational individuals who used the Transantiago in the most time-efficient
manner and would thus board a bus rapidly. It quickly turned out that
those intended users were quite different from actual travelers, who often
preferred the convenience of achieving a sitting place, rather that board-
ing the first available bus. This unforeseen behavior was the cause of fre-
quent disruptions.
    While ostensibly a minor problem, these small disruptions had cas-
cading effects on the full system, as every delayed bus delayed the next
one. The project managers first attempted to educate those users that
slowed down the system by hiring staff to stand at the platform and in-
struct users on proper usage. However, these attempts had no positive ef-
fects and only heightened tensions at the platform. After having found
that it was impossible “to reduce traveling time because people don’t
want to change their behavior” (Ureta 2014, 381), the project managers
begrudgingly accepted to redesign the bus stations to allow for two types
of users: those who prioritized seating, and those who wanted to board
the first possible bus. “Buffering” took place by redesigning the
Transantiago system so that it allowed for two types of users in addition
to the initially inscribed one. Buffering did not materially fix the problem
but mediated it: “the new design is a buffering device mediating between,
on the one hand, people with multiple motivations to use public transport
and, on the other, a system that mostly enacts them as fare-and-time-
optimizers” (Ureta 2014, 385). Buffering, in other words, can be under-
stood as a process of placing (material) mediators as devices to separate
conflicting entities.
    The three strands so far identified were underpinned by univocal the-
oretical references: respectively BWT, ANT and a political-sociological
call to relocate the site of politics. These strands are grouped based on the
focus of analysis, and their theoretical underpinnings. A fourth strand
that focuses more on methods than on theoretical underpinnings of M&R
research was proposed by Colmellere (2015). The author discusses the
production of workplace order through the organized repair of an IT sys-
tem (named the ‘K’ system in the article), and outlines a method for stud-
198                                                       Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
ying the co-production of order and maintenance. Such method is located
at the meso level of analysis. Colmellere indeed points to the need to in-
vestigate “an intermediate level, halfway between studies in ethnometh-
odology and analyses of macro scale structures” (2015, 106-107), which
she locates in the workplace, as she calls to study the “links between re-
pairs practices and maintenance issues in the workplace” (ibid.).
Colmellere’s approach develops at the intersection of sociotechnical
M&R and organization studies to make sense of how structures and social
orders change and stay the same. Her analysis combines an attention to
machine properties with organizational structures, power, and micro so-
cial practices. This still novel, and relatively unexplored, perspective is
how we’d like to label this last strand: one focused at the sociotechnical
M&R dynamics between organizations and social actors.
    Leavitt Cohn (2019), Glouftsios (2020) and Bellanova & Glouftsios
(2020) can be conceived of as further recent works in this strand. Leavitt
Cohn (2019) discusses the maintenance of an old code in a space mission.
She describes how legacy codes are not appreciated, but more begrudg-
ingly accepted as something to live with despite their endurance, not be-
cause of it. The author discusses how the old code is tied up with the mis-
sion, or organization more broadly, and how a specific group of main-
tainers have to keep it updated, keeping this “patchwork” (2019, 438)
relevant and stressing its relation to the organization’s past. Through
keeping a legacy code, and reminding coworkers of its relevancy to the
history and future of the organization, these maintainers also maintained
the integrity of the organization, the author concludes. In this, mainte-
nance work is tied to the functioning of an organization: “it is not so
much the code, but the relational assemblage of software and organiza-
tional work that these engineers must tweak and adapt in order to pre-
pare for the future” (2019, 436). All in all, Leavitt Cohn (2019) points to
the dynamics of M&R as sociotechnical processes, stressing herein the ef-
fects of M&R on organizational processes. According to her, to maintain
is to organize. The space mission was (partly) organized through the
maintenance work of these maintainers; keeping the past in the present,
enacting obduracy.
    A further case is presented by Glouftsios (2020) who studied the
M&R practices in maintaining two large information systems, the SIS II
and VIS, which are deployed by the EU for migration management, law
enforcement and border security. He describes these systems as unruly
objects, which are made docile and workable through constant mainte-
nance. Focusing mainly on the dynamics of (in)security, Glouftsios (2020)
discusses M&R practices as part of the constant enactment of security. In
this, he discusses maintenance and IT workers as security workers, and
simultaneously discusses how border guards, police and data analysts are
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                  199
made relevant in M&R practice through trainings and evaluations (Bella-
nova and Glouftsios 2020, 15). M&R are here discussed as a key part of
how the EC gains and controls the means to govern international mobili-
ty, by discussing M&R in relation to a powerful organization like the EC,
and the mundane practices of border guards and data analysts. All in all,
Bellanova and Glouftsios (2020) practice the “intermediate level of analy-
sis” that Colmellere (2015) calls for: they discuss the interplay between
M&R practices of organizations and those more everyday M&R practices.


4. European Order and the Maintenance and Repair of its
Migration Crisis

    To what extent can the perspectives raised by the literature on M&R
discussed up to now help us to understand the European institutional or-
der in the informational management of migration as a matter of mainte-
nance and repair? We suggest that a novel and potentially innovative re-
search direction can be carved when studying the European order as a set
of continued socio-technical M&R practices. From the previous overview
of M&R in social science and STS literature, we have thus identified six
insights that can be extended to the field of European migration man-
agement, and support the development of a framework to understand the
maintenance and repair of the European order.
    First, M&R teaches us that any order needs to be taken as inherently
fragile (Jackson 2014). Similarly, as evidenced in the introduction, ab-
stract macro organizations, or orders, such as the EU, are characterized
by fragility and precariousness. Especially in the field of migration man-
agement, the EU is intrinsically conceptualized as a fragile order. Every
continued “flow” of (unauthorized) mobility to Europe is considered a
threat or a crisis (Tazzioli and De Genova 2016). In order to fully illus-
trate the fragility of Europe as a configuration of organizations one can
turn to the decisions published in 2015 by the European Council (2015a
2015b). Here, the EC called the Hotspot Approach into existence in or-
der to shape “informational and bureaucratic standardization” (Pelizza
2020, 269). This approach was accompanied by a series of infringement
decisions lodged by the EC (European Commission 2015a), forcing EU
member states to collaborate in informational cooperation. The image of
the EU that emerges is then one that recalls Jackson’s (2014) insights of
any abstraction being simultaneously stable and powerful, but also fragile
and precarious.
    Secondly, as recalled by Denis and Pontille (2015) practices of M&R
need to be understood as situated practices that shape an order. This or-
200                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
der is not to be taken as a negation of vulnerabilities, but it emerges by
taking vulnerabilities into account. In the EU’s efforts at migration man-
agement, this can be best highlighted by turning to the various data infra-
structures in use that require maintenance and back-ups. For example,
Bellanova and Glouftsios (2020, 10) describe the SIS II2 system as the
flickering foundation of the Schengen area; pointing to the inherent fra-
gility or vulnerability of the system. The vulnerability of the SIS II system
can emerge through various means; through the use of outdated local sys-
tems to something so banal as the breaking of cables somewhere in the
countryside. This fragility is accounted for in the architecture of SIS II,
containing a centralized back-up and copies of the central database
stored at various national facilities. The European data infrastructures are
the mediators through which the EU is made stable and obdurate. At the
same time, as data infrastructures are materially and socially constituted,
they themselves require updating, upkeep, and other types of mainte-
nance (Glouftsios 2020).
     Thirdly, order requires constant re-enactment, or said differently, ob-
duracy is achieved by performing it iteratively. This is revealed also in the
field of migration management. For the execution of much of the process
of receiving and relocating people on the move, for example, the EU or-
ganization for border control and management Frontex receives a steady
annual increase in funding (European Commission 2015b) and the Inter-
national Organization for Migration (IOM) was mobilized to organize the
relocation of migrants deemed eligible to stay in the EU (IOM 2018).
These moves make clear that a powerful order such as Europe needs to
continuously respond and adapt to various processes and pressures. Fur-
thermore, mobility forces the EU to expand some operations and take up
a collaboration with non-governmental actors, such as IOs. Through
these collaborations, the EU is enacted anew, yet along different bounda-
ries that comprise new actors.
     Fourth, there is a politics in M&R (Graham and Thrift 2007). M&R
dynamics enact power relations or asymmetries, as previously illustrated
by Barnes (2017) and Ureta (2014),. Similarly, a case in point in the field
of the informational migration management are the communities of prac-
tice that regularly assemble at events organized by European agencies.
EU-Lisa, the EU agency for the operational management of large-scale IT
systems, for example, organizes yearly roundtables for various industry-
partners to discuss digital solutions for emergent issues in border control
and migration management (EU-lisa 2017; 2018). Here, heads of large
commercial businesses such as Accenture and Thales present their wares
of security software or hardware to senior bureaucrats, policy managers,
and directors of the EC and various ministry representatives of MSs. In
the last years, the proliferation of professional networks and working
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                    201
groups dedicated to the informational management of migration has re-
vealed de facto new assemblages that are constituted through the con-
stant work of maintenance and repair of European relationships. At
meetings and conferences, the formal boundaries of European institu-
tions are made blurry, while trans-organizational arrangements keep this
European collective going; updating and maintaining it. These networks
can be read as buffers, as per Ureta’s (2014) repair by buffering: they
serve to mediate the issue at hand and binding multiple motivations and
enactments together in a diffused network. The EU then, is stretched and
diffused in this governance network; a dynamic network of state and non-
state actors, an actor-network beyond the state (Passoth and Rowlands
2010; Pelizza 2016). Similarly, Pelizza (2021, 18) describes how, through
the informational management of migration, the state becomes only one
of the many actors in a network made up of “global corporate contrac-
tors, the FBI and the US security regime, the EU Commission, national
authorities in Athens, and thousands of fingerprinted individuals, to
name a few”. We see novel relations, and asymmetrical power relations
emerge through the goal of maintaining the EU in the migration crisis.
    Fifth, these M&R dynamics can best be studied by focusing on the so-
cio-technical infrastructures at a strategically selected organization
(Colmellere 2015). The tacit knowledge of maintenance workers in any
organization (Henke 1999), as well as their work of helping others re-
member the fundamentality of some material infrastructures (Leavitt
Cohn 2019), needs to be understood as to maintain the structural integri-
ty of an organization, while organizations are key in understanding the
maintenance of more macro orders. As described above, also in the field
of migration management an intricate network beyond only state actors
emerges through the organizing of M&R practices for the EU. In this
network, it is strategic to study specific organizations to highlight how
M&R takes place in an organization, as part of the maintenance of a larg-
er structure or abstraction. The hypothesis here is that valuable insights
can be gained by turning to (non-EU) organizations to highlight how the
EU’s attempts at M&R through informational migration management
plays out in practice, and which novel dynamics emerge in terms of prac-
tical, policy and epistemological positions (Passoth and Rowlands 2010).
    The sixth insight stresses that M&R practices also shape “a particular
epistemology of public order” (Denis and Pontille 2020, 21). The last in-
sight is thus that M&R can also be done or found in knowledge practices.
The notion of repair by numbering as introduced by Ureta (2014) is espe-
cially helpful to make these epistemological aspects of M&R visible. In
the field of migration management, we shall turn to one strategic organi-
zation to illustrate this insight: the International Organization for Migra-
tion (IOM). The IOM takes up a unique position in the M&R dynamics
202                                                            Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
of Europe, which can be used to illustrate the re-enactment of Europe as
well as the ways in which M&R intersects which various knowledge prac-
tices at specific organizations. The IOM runs their own data collection
and analysis department; the Global Migration Data Analysis Centre
(GMDAC), with which they help shape the EU’s “migration crisis”
through knowledge practices. Through these data practices, they aim to:
      foster better analysis, use and presentation of IOM data, establish-
      ing IOM as a key source of reliable data on migration through
      strategic partnerships, and to act as a data hub for decision makers
      and practitioners seeking the best available statistics. The Centre
      also contributes to the development of IOM’s global migration
      governance framework (IOM 2020).
     The GMDAC serves as the knowledge-branch of the IOM, their task
is to collect and analyze data on migration, in order to support member
states in managing migration. The GMDAC operates in multiple partner-
ships with organizations as diverse as the Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD), McKinsey, United Nations Inter-
national Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the UN and the Euro-
pean Commission’s Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography
(IOM 2019). Through this work with GMDAC, the IOM builds a central
database about Europe’s migrant population and ongoing migration. In
this, they deliver the numbers, by which the normal and crisis states are
identified; allowing for norms to be set which delineate when ‘migration’
is under control, and when it has been normalized. Like the Transantiago
(Ureta 2014), migration is enacted as a problem to be fixed by increasing-
ly approaching a numerical normality. In this dynamic, in which the IOM
takes up many of the tasks of practically governing migration, the
GMDAC works to both assure the IOM a role as key referent, and to en-
act migration as a technocratic management issue which temporarily ex-
ceeded a normal state to which the situation must return. The knowledge
practices of the GMDAC serve to grasp Europe’s migration crisis in nu-
merical terms and from a birds-eye view. Broeders (2011, 60) described
the work of categorizing the flow of migrants as a key part of the work of
securitizing the borders of Europe; similarly, we emphasized this work as
M&R practices wherein Europe is maintained. This example also illus-
trates how M&R practices are also knowledge practices (Denis and Pon-
tille 2020), and how these knowledge M&R practices constantly
(re-)enact a particular order.
Lausberg and Pelizza                                                      203
5. Conclusion: Maintaining Europe. Repairing Migration
Management

    In this scenario, we have set out to understand the persistence or ob-
duracy of macro orders, despite their fragility. We aimed to address a
central tension that is present in much theorizing in STS, while building
on the vocabulary developed within STS. Within the discipline of STS
many dichotomies have been opened up to scrutiny, such as sub-
ject/object, micro/macro, and agency/structure. In this, much attention
has been given to the micro and the agentic, allowing to highlight enact-
ment, performativity and emergence. This attention has opened up many
avenues for research; however, it makes difficult accounting for obduracy
without resorting to overly deterministic accounts or structuralist modes
of analysis. In order to stay with the sensitivity for the role of everyday
work and agency we extended insights from STS literature on mainte-
nance and repair to account for order. As M&R practices are always in re-
lation to an infrastructure, or existing set of practices, they are key in ac-
counting for obduracy of order while keeping the analysis with everyday
interactions and practices. As such, thinking with M&R helps us to ex-
plain and analyze obduracy without using said obduracy as an explana-
tion in itself.
    Foregrounding M&R allows one to highlight everyday practices, the
role of sociotechnical infrastructures, while also accounting for the fact
that these orders don’t radically shift every day. We turned to the EU as a
set of practices and organizations, as an order that is constantly being
maintained in response to its ongoing “migration crisis” to illustrate the
various ways thinking with M&R opens up a novel analytic for accounting
for obduracy. This “crisis” presented an acute case in which M&R be-
came visible as seen in the quick response of EUrope to update and
streamline informational exchange systems. Thus, we take this informa-
tional migration management as the key site where EUrope is maintained
and repaired. We have distilled six key insights which we inherit from
STS M&R research and combine to shape a framework for thinking with
M&R in accounting for obduracy. The six insights are the inherent fragili-
ty of any order (Jackson 2014), the complementarity of order and vulner-
ability (Denis and Pontille 2020), the constant work of re-enactment re-
quired by any order (Denis and Pontille 2015), the power relations or
asymmetries that are enacted or distributed in M&R, as well as in the
maintenance of Europe (Ureta 2014; Barnes 2017), organizations that can
function as a tactical site as the interplay between everyday M&R practic-
es and the stability of a structuring organization (Colmellere 2015), and
finally, knowledge practices and infrastructures that play a significant role
204                                                               Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
in the maintenance of any order. Focusing on M&R practices at strategic
organizations makes it possible to discuss the interplay between everyday
social actions and macro orders, while taking these orders to be fragile yet
powerful, to be obdurate but not unchanging.


Acknowledgements
    The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was written in
the context of the “Processing Citizenship” project (2017–2022), which has
received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant
agreement No 714463.


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1
  In this paper we refer to the European Union (EU) as the historically circumscribed
attempt at a supra-national form of governance. We sometimes use “European order” as
a synonym that however stresses how even institutions can be performed and are not
fully obdurate. They are both distinguished from what we refer to as “Europe”, a
community of belonging (Anderson 2006) that includes not only institutional actors, and
it is often declined in the plural, as it might entail multiple, diverse “Europes” (Pelizza
2020).
2
  “SIS II” stands for Second Generation Schengen Information System and functions to
make information exchange between national border controls, customs and police
possible. It collects and transfers data on individual people, as well as goods, documents
and money.
