CHAT and power: temporal chains, submerging and elevating

Building on CHAT’s activity systems and network concepts, in order to articulate power relations and the 6P sensitivities, the study must demonstrate how power/data/knowledge silences, configurations or omissions are generated during evaluation practices. How do rationalised knowledges subjugate local or other knowledges in practice (Avgerou, 2002)? How do governing processes or TIEK prescriptions marginalise other ways of knowing impact? This section describes temporal activity chains and processes of editing along the chains, by which aspects of data/knowledge relations become submerged or elevated over time. In ICT4D, Hayes and Westrup (2014) show, for example, how the qualities of efficiency and effectiveness are elevated in technical evaluation methods designed by consultancy organisations, who strategically paint local NGOs or competitors as incompetent, and thus submerge their voices. In a similar vein, Mukute & Lotz-Sisitka (2012: 361-364) examine governing controls and local responses using CHAT and critical realism. They show how South African farmers learn sustainable agriculture, but simultaneously resist governing influences including: government farming policies; commercial promotion of unsustainable agricultural technologies; divisive gender impositions (male land ownership, female labour supply); and university/education sector promotion of “modern” or “scientific” agricultural knowledge over farmers’ own knowledge (ibid: 358). They use CHAT to account for what “research participants … say and do” (ibid: 364), and critical realism to critique subjugating structures. Such subjugating influences can be silent. Blackler (2011) depicts organisational power relations in four quadrants, across two dimensions. The first dimension is from personal to collective, and the second from overt to unobtrusive power. Power relations in the current study lie in Blackler’s unobtrusive dimension, in terms of how TIEK shapes NGO evaluation activities and how evaluation processes become normalised in everyday work as part of what people “think of as ordinary” (Blackler, 2011: 732).

If subjugation is normalised and silent, then how can it be critically approached in the study? Normalised power relations embedded in TIEK and DIKW assumptions and omissions mean the process of knowing impact becomes less contestable and less subject to dialogue or political negotiation. Critical attention is therefore required as problems may not surface in open dialogue between participants. Kontinen’s six contradictions may not be explicit in daily

practice. For this reason, Blackler (2011: 733) and Mukute & Lotz-Sisitka (2012) recommend an awareness of power and politics beyond local client or local partner activities. In this way, the critical approach uses CHAT to question silent, unobtrusive, normalised TIEK and implicit DIKW influences, and elevate the 6P sensitivities.

It is worth revisiting Engeström’s (2008: 22-47) work with a TV production crew to elaborate on this aspect of critical engagement. In his study, there were few conflicts or disturbances. This could have been a sign of skilled performance (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) by the TV crew. Well-managed problems or disturbances can lead to innovation and collaboration, or badly- managed disturbances can prolong stagnation, and conceal deeper systemic contradictions (Perrow, 1984). On analysis though, Engeström suggests disturbances, misunderstandings, dilemmas, conflicts and problems in the case were not allowed to surface; they became “masked”. Management withheld information about program production revenue in order to cut costs and potentially terminate the show. Marketing failed to pitch the program accurately, and the TV crew were defending an old way of making the show, rather than experimenting with new ideas and technologies. The masking of disturbances ignored systemic contradictions, constrained learning, collaboration and innovation, and silenced power relations. The case is insightful because diverse activity systems and agencies (management, marketing and production) were all involved in masking the conflicts and disturbances.

Such networked mediations are common in CHAT, where outcomes produced in one place and time become are changed, mediated, used and adapted in another place (Miettinen et al, 2011). This means, for the current study, that specific impact data/knowledge is developed and transformed in a flow or motion (Leontyev, 2009) through time-sequential activities. In much Knowledge Management literature, what becomes focal or peripheral depends on the need for innovation and effectiveness (e.g. Nonaka & Takuechi, 1995; Tuomi, 1999). In TIEK, what becomes focal depends on applying an appropriate method to deliver results that will elevate project efficiency and effectiveness and produce robust scientific narratives of cause and effect. However, in CHAT, these goals, methods and results are viewed as elements of activities (Holzman, 2006b: 112). In a distributed way, beyond the NGO’s themselves in the study, TIEK goals, methods and prescriptions mask or submerge alternative ways of knowing impact. Having isolated TIEK methods and techniques as specific elements of activity, one can identify how impact data is mediated; as Tuomi (1999: 111) suggests, how it is decontextualised in one activity and decontextualized in subsequent activities. What is left in as impact data/knowledge

is repeatedly transformed in temporal sequences of activities. But what is left out of this temporal chain? CHAT can register such mediations as locally incremental changes that transform the data, the knowledge, the activities themselves, and the power relations between agents. Therefore, by paying attention to what is edited in or out, that is, what is “submerged” or “elevated” along the temporal chain of impact data/knowledge construction (Figure 4.6), one can describe the genesis of impact end-products and power relations occurring over time.

Figure 4.6: Data is mediated between capturing and reporting activities