Courses I teach
fall, 2011
1cS 161: Social Analysis of Computerization
161_syllabus_online_f_2011.docx
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
This course is a broad introduction of computerization as a social process. It examines the social opportunities and problems raised by new information technologies, and the consequences of different ways of organizing. You will learn to do a socio-technical historical analysis that analyzes the stakeholders, expected outcomes, and unexpected consequences that emerge as new technologies affect social structures and daily experience. Topics include: computerization as providing new ways of “seeing”; information archiving, search and locating; privacy; environmental implications of IT; the ‘self’ in a connected world; financial markets in the information age; community based research and informatics; and games and virtual worlds.
1cS 207: Research and Writing Seminar
The goal of the seminar is to provide students with milestones for getting some sort of 'product' out to the group and a rhythm for writing and thinking. It also engenders shared understanding of what your colleagues' are engaged in and hopefully becomes a site for productive cross-over in ideas, literature, and writing tips. This workshop is geared toward students that are actively working on their own work and research stream.
Spring, 2011
ICS 163: Projects in the Social and Organizational Implications of Technologies-in-Use
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
The objective of the course is to provide practical experience in researching social and organizational implications of technology. Emphasis will be placed on conducting ethnographic research, writing, and presenting. You will be part of a team project analyzing organizational process and technology-in-use at a local business, non-profit organization or service at UCI.
First, you will learn about how to design an empirical study. Even though, you have learned some of this in 161 and 162, this practicum will help you engage that material in the empirical world.
What question are you trying to answer? How should you go about attempting to answer these questions? What other factors do you need to consider when engaging in empirical research?
Second, you will learn how to gather data about people’s social and cultural environments.
Techniques will include observing social dynamics, interviewing people, and analyzing technologies-in-use. We will also discuss other techniques such as organizational documents, artifact analysis, and journals and logs. For each technique you will learn what types of question it can answer, how to go about using it, and how does it influence your study design.
Third, you will learn how to analyze the data that you collect.
Analysis is the process of taking the data that you gather and turning into a systematic set of findings that let you make claims. For example, analysis lets you say how and why an organizational process is effective or ineffective for the users or whether software needs to work a certain way in order to meet the needs of potential users. We will learn how to perform analysis on the types of data that you’ve just learned how to collect.
The goal of this class is to provide you with an introduction to how to use empirical methods and engage in data analysis to provide insight into organizational processes and technologies in-use.
At the end of this class you should be able to design a study that allows you to take a research question and answer it using appropriate data collection and analysis techniques.
1cS 161: Social Analysis of Computerization
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
This course is a broad introduction of computerization as a social process. It examines the social opportunities and problems raised by new information technologies, and the consequences of different ways of organizing. You will learn to do a socio-technical historical analysis that analyzes the stakeholders, expected outcomes, and unexpected consequences that emerge as new technologies affect social structures and daily experience. Topics include: computerization as providing new ways of “seeing”; information archiving, search and locating; privacy; environmental implications of IT; the ‘self’ in a connected world; financial markets in the information age; community based research and informatics; and games and virtual worlds.
Winter, 2011
ICS 263: Computerization, Work and Organizations
Mazmanian_263_syllabus_Win_11.docx
This course is intended to generate understanding of the philosophical, theoretical, and empirical foundations of the social study of technology in organizations. The course involves consideration and discussion of the research literature that includes a range of social phenomena surrounding the development, implementation, use, and implications of technology in organizations. A particular focus of the discussions will be an examination of the research assumptions guiding the theoretical ideas and empirical studies conducted in this field. The readings in this course follow a trajectory from readings that will help us understand research assumptions’ underlying studies in technology and organizations, to a variety of theoretical frameworks applied to studies of technology in organizations and empirical examples of research conducted from the perspective of different research methods/assumptions and theoretical perspectives. This course would be useful for graduate students doing sociological and anthropological work in organizations. Even if one’s research focus does not directly focus on technology more and more core organizational processes and routines happen via information technologies. Therefore, developing frameworks to understand the relationship between technological infrastructure and assumptions and organizational processes is important for scholars across disciplinary traditions.
SPRING, 2010
ICS 161: Social Analysis of Computerization
This course is a broad introduction of computerization as a social process. It examines the social opportunities and problems raised by new information technologies, and the consequences of different ways of organizing. You will learn to do a socio-technical historical analysis that analyzes the stakeholders, expected outcomes, and unexpected consequences that emerge as new technologies affect social structures and daily experience. Topics include: computerization as providing new ways of “seeing”; information archiving, search and locating; privacy; environmental implications of IT; the ‘self’ in a connected world; financial markets in the information age; community based research and informatics; and games and virtual worlds.
ICS 295: The connected, mediated and wired self: Exploring social identity in the information age
This seminar asks students to explore how they develop, maintain, and assert a sense of themselves through ongoing interactions. This course will rely on course readings, active discussion, and a collective interview project to evoke questions about who we are - and are able to be - in an increasingly technologically mediated social environment. This seminar is intended to generate understandings of the origins of symbolic interactionist, social identity, and social constructivist theories of the self, and inspire questions about how these perspectives translate into the current era of pervasive communication and information saturation (graduate).
Copyright 2012: Melissa Mazmanian