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Anthropology and building software systems
Software systems are built by people, who are usually a member of one or more teams. While a lot of research effort has gone into studying the software/hardware used to build these systems, almost no effort has been invested in studying the activities of the people involved.
The study of human behaviors and cultures, in the broadest sense, sits within the field of Anthropology. The traditional image of an Anthropologist is someone who spends an extended period living with some remote tribe, publishing a monograph about their experiences on return to ‘civilisation’. In practice, anthropologists also study local tribes, such as professional workers.
Studies of the computer industry, by anthropologists, include: Global “Body Shopping” An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry by Xiang Biao, and Cultures@SiliconValley by J. A. English-Lueck.
Reporters and professional authors sometimes write popular books for a general audience, which might be labelled pop anthropology. For instance, Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine.
These academic/reporter publications are usually written by outsiders for an audience of outsiders. They are not intended to provide insights for insiders (Kidder’s book strikes me as reporting on the chaos that ensues when dysfunctional teams have to work together, which is not how it is described on its back cover).
If insiders want to learn about their community, some degree of insider knowledge is needed; exploring culture from the point of view of the subject of the study is known as Ethnography. Acquiring this knowledge can take years, an investment that will deter most researchers. Insightful insider commentary is most likely to come from insiders.
These days, insiders who write usually have blogs. Gerald Weinberg was an insider of times gone by, who wrote popular books for insiders about consulting in the software business; perhaps the most well known being “The Psychology of Computer Programming” (which really ought to be titled “The Sociology of Computer Programming”).
Who might be the consumers of research by anthropologists of software system development (assuming that a non-trivial amount eventually gets done)?
There are important outsiders, such as lawmakers looking to regulate.
Insiders only ever get to experience a sliver of the culture of software communities. The considered experiences of others can provide interesting insights, in particular learning about how teams working within other application domains operate.
Those seeking to change company culture ought to be looking to anthropology as a source of ideas for things that might work, or not.
History deals with the outcomes of past human behavior and culture, and there are a handful of historians of computing.
Anthropological studies of software engineering
Anthropology is the study of humans, and as such it is the top level research domain for many of the human activities involved in software engineering. What has been discovered by the handful of anthropologists who have spent time researching the tiny percentage of humans involved in writing software?
A common ‘discovery’ is that developers don’t appear to be doing what academics in computing departments claim they do; hardly news to those working in industry.
The main subfields relevant to software are probably: cultural anthropology and social anthropology (in the US these are combined under the name sociocultural anthropology), plus linguistic anthropology (how language influences social life and shapes communication). There is also historical anthropology, which is technically what historians of computing do.
For convenience, I’m labelling anybody working in an area covered by anthropology as an anthropologist.
I don’t recommend reading any anthropology papers unless you plan to invest a lot of time in some subfield. While I have read lots of software engineering papers, anthropologist’s papers on this topic are often incomprehensible to me. These papers might best be described as anthropology speak interspersed with software related terms.
Anthropologists write books, and some of them are very readable to a more general audience.
The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology by Wesch is a beginner’s introduction to its subject.
Ethnography, which explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study, is probably the most approachable anthropological research. Ethnographers spend many months living with a remote tribe, community, or nowadays a software development company, and then write-up their findings in a thesis/report/book. Examples of approachable books include: “Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation” by Kunda, who studied a large high-tech company in the mid-1980s; “No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs” by Ross, who studied an internet startup that had just IPO’ed, and “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking” by Coleman, who studied hacker culture.
Linguistic anthropology is the field whose researchers are mostly likely to match developers’ preconceived ideas about what humanities academics talk about. If I had been educated in an environment where Greek and nineteenth century philosophers were the reference points for any discussion, then I too would use this existing skill set in my discussions of source code (philosophers of source code did not appear until the twentieth century). Who wouldn’t want to apply hermeneutics to the interpretation of source code (the field is known as Critical code studies)?
It does not help that the software knowledge of many of the academics appears to have been acquired by reading computer books from the 1940s and 1950s.
The most approachable linguistic anthropology book I have found, for developers, is: The Philosophy of Software Code and Mediation in the Digital Age by Berry (not that I have skimmed many).
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