The role of information in daily activities is a key question for information science. Various theories and approaches have been developed to conceptualize the objects and events that inform people as they go about the conduct of daily life. This paper introduces the notion of 'regimes of information' to account for the different shapes and meanings that information takes in various situations. Building on Buckland (1991)'s account, and adopting the situated perspective of Garfinkel (2008), the paper applies Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)'s polity model to define and develop the notion of regimes of information. I argue that rather than 'using' information as a given, people enact it variously depending on the kind of situation in which they find themselves.
People manifest quite diverse behaviors in dealing with various kinds and sources of information. Two individuals with seemingly similar information may arrive at different decisions - e.g., in purchasing a car, making a career decision, or selecting a mate. On the other hand, two individual with dissimilar information may manifest similar behaviors. Particularly significant among these are i) various sources of information with their perceived quality, reliability, and accessibility; ii) social networks with their pertinent history, appeal, and authority. This degree of diversity and uncertainty generates behaviors that cannot be entirely explained in terms of rational choice or any variation thereof. Nor could it be understood on the basis of access to perfect information. Real people never have perfect information, nor do they act in a perfectly rational manner. This observation then leads to a two-pronged dilemma: How do people make meaningful and intelligible decisions on the basis of imperfect information, and on what grounds do they justify those decisions if and when principles of economic rationality seem to be violated? On the other hand, given that information often becomes available from various sources, on what basis do people select and compromise among these sources? And how do they justify those decisions for themselves and for others?
This paper seeks to answer these questions by developing a theoretical framework that accounts for the multifarious information seeking behaviors that we observe in people. It would seem that the source of diversity is mainly to be sought in individual interests, resources, and prior experiences. The paper, however, pursues a different line of thought, arguing instead that diversity mainly derives from situations and their constitutive orders of practice, not from individuals. This line of thought was thoroughly pursued by Harold Garfinkel in his multiple articulations of ethnomethodology, and it is developed further in his recently published manuscript on the sociology of information (Garfinkel, 2008). Garfinkel believes that "'information is constituted ' not just interpreted " or symbolically represented and exchanged " but actually constituted as information by the social (cooperatively ordered) aspects of the situated social orders in which it occurs" (p. 13). These social orders, he argues, are created in the routine practices of people as they go about their daily lives. For Garfinkel, the practices and their consequent social orders have a radically contingent character, so he is not interested in classifying these. For us, as information scientists, however, it is useful to discern and identify patterns (or orders, as it were) within these social orders. We need to explain how people manage to create and maintain social orders against which information can be discriminated. This is the objective of this paper.
Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)'s account of economic sociology, I argue that various sources of information receive disparate treatments because they belong to disparate 'worlds' with different regimes of worth - that is, with different ways of evaluating people and objects. What is considered as the key measure of value in one world (e.g., 'efficiency' in the industrial world) may be of secondary or minimal importance in another (e.g., in the domestic world of family relationships). These worlds, by the same token, incorporate various regimes of information that involve the situated activity of those who use the information. I want to show that information is not only put to use, but becomes information in the first place through situated social practice. In short, I adopt and develop a situated understanding of information as something that is created in practice --that is enacted, in other words.
In what follows, the paper provides a brief historical perspective of the situated view, starting with the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey. It then introduces Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)'s polity model, and develops the notion of regimes of information on its basis. Lastly, six different regimes of information that seem to be at work in contemporary Western societies are introduced.
The situated view of information has precursors in information science (e.g., Buckland, 1991; Fisher, 2007). Buckland, for instance, seeks to address the complex role of information in daily activities. Motivated by the observation that people are "informed by a very wide variety of things, such as messages, data, documents, objects, events, the view through the window, by any kind of evidence," Buckland (1991) offers a broad notion of information that would include as many of the above as possible. Grounded in the semiotic and European documentalist traditions, he arrives at 'evidence' as the appropriate term to characterize information. His broad account, however, hits a deadlock because in this fashion "we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information" - an unhelpful conclusion, as he hastens to add. The way out of the deadlock, Buckland argues, is to think of information as 'situational.' I find this line of thought useful, and would like to pursue it here in earnest. A good starting point for this is to revisit pragmatist thinking about 'situations'.
The notion of a problematic or indeterminate 'situation' plays a central role in pragmatic philosophy, especially in John Dewey's thought. Thinking, according to Dewey, is a process of inquiry in which a confused, obscure, or conflicting situation is transformed into a determinate one. The core idea behind this thinking is that indeterminacy is first and foremost in the situation, not in us. "It is the situation that has these traits [confusion, ambiguity, conflict, etc.]. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful" (Dewey 1931). In other words, situations are doubtful not only in a 'subjective' sense, but also in an 'objective' or non-subjective way. Dewey used this notion of 'situation' to also talk about relevance: "The existence of the problematic situation to be resolved exercises control over the selective discrimination of relevant and effective evidential qualities as means" (Dewey 1991). Relevance, Dewey concluded, is not inherent but accrues to natural qualities in virtue of the special function they perform in inquiry. What determines relevance is the impress of the individual on the context:
There is selectivity (and rejection) found in every operation of thought. There is care, concern, implicated in every act of thought. There is someone who has affection for some things over others; when he [sic] becomes a thinker he does not leave his characteristic affection behind. As a thinker, he is still differentially sensitive to some qualities, problems, themes. (Dewey 1931).
Based on this understanding of situations, Dewey proposed a notion of context with two components: (i) background, which is spatial and temporal, and is ubiquitous in all thinking; and (ii) selective interest, which conditions the subject matter of thinking. The background is that part of context that "does not come into explicit purview, does not come into question; it is taken for granted" (ibid). This is because background context, or rather some part of it, cannot be an object of examination: "If everything were literally unsettled at once, there would be nothing to tie those factors, that being unsettled, are in process of discovery and determination." The spatial aspect of background, according to Dewey, "covers all contemporary setting within which a course of thinking emerges." The temporal aspect, in turn, is both intellectual and existential. The existential background is an important notion for Dewey - it is part of the material means that contribute to the possibility of a thought process. 'Material considerations,' as Dewey calls them, represent the total effect of existential background and selective bias on thought processes, and reveal the close relationship between context and relevance, between situations and the kinds of information that come into play in people's thinking and decision making (Ekbia and Maguitman 2001).
Dewey's pragmatic thinking has found a more systematic formulation in recent writing on economic sociology -- e.g., in Boltanski and Théhvenot (2006[1991])'s work, On Justification. These authors seek to provide an integrated framework for understanding the relations between agreement and discord. Unlike the dominant intellectual traditions of the past (e.g., the Durkheimian sociology or the rational choice model from economics), however, they do not construct their framework based on the "opposition between what belongs to the collective and what belongs to the individual" (p. 26). Rather, they seek to embrace these various constructs within a more general model. Furthermore, since their interest is in the type of situation that "holds together in a coherent way and which includes no questionable objects," they focus on what they call 'natural situations.' Starting with premises similar to Dewey's and to other pragmatists' - e.g., in their commitment to 'practice' rather than 'prudence' in moral philosophy -- Boltanski and Thévenot invoke a number of axioms and principles to develop a theory and a polity model that "accounts for the confrontation with circumstances, with a specific reality, that accounts for the involvement of human beings and objects in a given action" (p. 128). A key advantage of this line of thought, which makes it interesting and relevant to the current study, is its deep commitment to the socio-material aspects that are brought to bear in all decision-making situations, whether individual or collective. The key question for us here, as mentioned earlier, is how people manage to create and maintain social orders against which information can be discriminated, and the polity model provides a useful lens for thinking about the question.
In their attempt to integrate economic and social values in one analytic framework, Boltanski and Thévenot have arrived at a set of principles that people resort to in order to justify their actions. These principles, which operate within different regimes of worth, are appealed to by individuals depending on the particular 'world' (or polity) in which they inhabit in a given situation. "Rather than hypothesizing that value systems or cultures are tied to members of a single group or a single institution, rather than presuming that values internalized in the form of ethical precepts or postures can be respected by a particular person in all circumstances of life," these authors say, "we hypothesize that a given person can refer to any and all measures of worth" (p.151). In other words, a 'situation' in this framework is associated with various worlds in which individuals may find themselves, and where various measures of worth are at work. The contrast between this and institutional thinking in sociology is obvious at once.
Boltanski and Thévenot have identified six such worlds - namely, the inspired, domestic, fame, civic, market, and industrial worlds - with their concomitant principles, objects, relations of worth, tests, evidence, and so on. Briefly, the inspired world is the world of vision, passions, and imagination, where people's worth is determined by their degree of spontaneity, originality, and creativeness. The domestic world is the world of traditions, customs, and conventions, where people's worth depends on their upbringing, manners, and character (honesty, trustworthiness, wisdom, etc.) as confirmed by those who have a higher position within a hierarchy of relationships: the elderly, the leader, the wise. In the world of fame - the world of attention, persuasion, and presentation - worth is based on the opinion of others. It is a world of identification, where "[t]he most worthy include the others because the latter identify with the former," in the fashion that a fan identifies with a 'star' (p.181). The civic world is distinct in that it attaches primordial importance to collectives instead of individuals. As such, it values solidarity, group membership, and collective interest, which often take a legal form in delegation and representation. The market world, not to be confused with a sphere of economic relations, is the world of desire and competition over the possession of valuable, salable, or rare goods. Finally, the industrial world is the world of science and technology, where efficiency, performance, and productivity constitute key measures of worth. In this world, people are evaluated on the basis of their reliability, predictability, and professionalism.
In short, each of these worlds holds a particular regime of worth, according to which people are evaluated and, in turn, evaluate other people and objects. In effect, objects, as sources of information but also for their own sake, acquire different, and often, contrastive values in each of these worlds. Notwithstanding the industrial world, where objects are valued as instruments and means for the purpose of production, other worlds attribute a different set of values to objects. In the inspired world, objects are valuable insofar as they play a symbolic role as attached to persons. In the domestic world, "objects are not apprehended according to their own worth, as is the case in the industrial world, but essentially according to how much they contribute to establishing hierarchical relations among people (p. 164). In the world of fame, objects are identified with in the same fashion that people are " as a happy driver would identify with his car or a well-off family would with their house. Objects, as such, can become a source of attention, respect, and reputation. In the civic world, by contrast, objects are valuable to the extent that they serve a common collective good. Lastly, unlike the industrial world that evaluated objects according to their effectiveness, the market world puts worth on objects according to how much they satisfy desires. In summary, the perception of objects as instruments of production should be envisaged as a specific feature of the industrial world, "not as a property that would be of a higher order of generality characterizing the actions of human beings endowed with reason" (ibid: 206).
If objects have such varying values in different worlds, information might also acquire various meanings in each of them. This idea is implicitly suggested in Buckland (1991), when he argues that "the capability of 'being informative,' the essential characteristic of information-as-thing, must also be situational." However, given that any object or document can be deemed informative under some circumstance, this leads into an anarchy where subjective individual judgments come to determine the informational value of things. Being aware of the potential anarchy, Buckland points out that "what is or is not reasonably treated as information depends on agreement, or on at least some consensus." One way this consensus is relevant is if an actor receives the same information from multiple sources, which can reinforce the perceived reliability of information. Such reinforcement can happen coincidentally by information traveling through multiple pathways, and reinforcement can occur when an actor actively seeks validation of information received via one pathway by fact-checking through another pathway. Buckland does not in fact elaborate on how people reach agreement or consensus, but Boltanski and Thévenot's framework might afford such an elaboration. This integrated framework, as I said earlier, is originally developed to address the question of how people, despite their varying priorities and preferences, arrive at agreement in collective decision-making situations. However, the framework is equally useful in understanding individual behavior - that is, those situations where there is no controversy with others. In these cases requirements similar to those of justification may weigh upon an individual's behavior, "when constraints of coherence and control come into play" (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 347). The framework presented here follows the nomenclature of Boltanski and Thévenot in their use of the term 'worlds'. Here we consider different 'worlds' as a set of subjects (worthy and unworthy beings), objects (rules, diplomas, tools, lands, buildings, machines, etc.), an investment formula (how benefits are balanced by burdens), a relation of worth (how beings are evaluated in the given world), natural relations among beings (e.g., 'marvel,' 'honor,' 'promote,' 'elect,' 'buy,' 'operate'), and forms of evidence (ibid: 140-41). Although information is not an explicit component of their framework, Boltanski and Thévenot discuss form of evidence as "the modality of knowledge appropriate to the world under consideration" (ibid:144). This notion of evidence, we suggest, implies a particular regime of information in correspondence with the particular regime of worth in each world. Each regime of information incorporates a specific concept of information, which I briefly introduce here.
In the industrial world, things are valued to the extent that they 'work,' and the proof that they do is "grounded in a temporal regularity, the methodic repetition of measurement" (p. 211). Evidence, therefore, takes the form of measurement, and information is largely the outcome of measurement data "processed and assembled into a meaningful form" (Meadows et al. 1984).
In the market world, "money is the measure of all things, and thus constitutes the form of evidence" (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 202). Things are informative to the extent that they translate into monetary value. Information, as such, is a commodity whose value can be expressed in cash, commission, a fee, or an honorarium. The value of the information is determined in a market context.
In the civic world, texts and documents are the primary sources of information. Law, "embodied in texts that can be invoked and in legal rules that can be applied" (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006:193), provides the paradigmatic example of such documents. People, largely informed by legal rules and texts, are guided in their decisions by the same.
In the world of fame and public opinion, information is that which is accessible and understandable by the majority of the population. The purpose is to get a message across to audiences, whether it is through name dropping, publishing a book, or spreading a piece of information (p.181). Media operate on their own regime of worth, which usually draws on the status of people/experts as 'celebrities.'
In the domestic world, where relationships between people take a personal shape based on trust, "the forms of evidence that support judgment belong to the category of examples " cases, especially anecdotes in which exemplary behavior on the part of appreciated persons is identified and offered as a model' (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 176). Information, in other words, is embedded in the anecdotal experience of people such as family, friends, and neighbors.
In the inspired world, evidence takes the form of an affective state, "a feeling that is spontaneous, involuntary, and fleeting; its validity demands neither approval from others (as it would be in the world of fame) nor the construction of a routine that stabilizes relationships among objects (as it would be in the industrial world)" (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: p. 163). Information, therefore, derives from individual intuitions, tastes, and preferences. All things being equal, there is always, as Dewey said, subjective interest and selectivity at work.
The central idea of this paper is that information takes on different meanings derived from the situated socio-material practices of its use. Indeed, as Garfinkel (2008) has argued, it might be more accurate to say that information is created by these practices in the first place. The framework developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) provides a useful way to examine the mechanisms of how this happens. The notion of regimes of worth allows us to understand individual behavior in the context of their particular situation, which also involves 'things' and objects that support the individual in their situated practice. I introduced the notion of regimes of information to account for the different ways such objects and practices figure in how people evaluate various information pathways, as they cancel out, accumulate, or reinforce each other. I find this notion useful in thinking about real information behaviors of individuals. I also believe that it is a useful addition to the original framework developed by Boltanski and Thévenot, as information is a constitutive component of social life in contemporary societies, regardless of what polity we focus on.
The framework developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) is not, of course, universal, nor is it intended to be. The regimes of worth provide just one perspective to distinguish the different mechanisms by which landowners may receive and utilize information. The real world is not so clear and distinguishable. These distinct regimes of worth cross and merge when considered from the perspective of an individual landowner. For example, a landowner's neighbor may casually mention their brief knowledge of a government program providing tax incentives for reforestation (information as anecdote), which may motivate that landowner to seek more formal information about that program (information as documentation). Also the boundaries of what may be considered anecdotal as opposed to definitive are often fuzzy and dynamic. These crosscutting interactions across various worlds do not, in our view, undermine the key premises of the perspective adopted here = namely, that people draw on various types of information that derive their validity from different regimes of worth, and that these regimes operate within various worlds that each and every individual (within a given context) might find themselves. However, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed in the current context.
A relevant aspect of information in different worlds is the measure of trust that people invest in a source. Given the diversity of sources upon which particular individuals may rely, we must consider how they consider the reliability or value of information from different sources. Here trust is a core issue that affects how an actor treats different types of information from different sources, the development of social networks themselves and interactions between actors (Ostrom, 2002). The same information coming from two different sources may be acted upon quite differently depending on the degree of trust an individual places on different sources. Trust is an elusive element to measure and may be the product of reputation, prior history and notions as ephemeral as 'gut feelings.' In other words, like any other concept within the present framework, trust acquires different meanings in these various worlds. It might, in fact, be more relevant in some worlds than others - e.g., in the domestic world (where typical sources may be family, friends and neighbors) as well as the market world (where typical sources may be professionals).
Our challenge in developing this situated account is to capture and formulate the notion of 'context' or 'situation,' which has proven to be quite elusive in character. Wary of the container metaphor of context, and committed to a network understanding of the term, we found the framework developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) quite powerful for our purposes. Their construct of 'regimes of worth' provides a convenient and effective method for thinking about situations, while at the same time avoiding entrenched dichotomies between the collective and the individual, the general and the particular, the theoretical and the practical, and so on. By introducing the notion of 'regimes of information,' we applied and expanded this notion in order to bring it closer to our own theoretical goals.
This paper aims to provide an account of information that is closer in spirit to how it applies to daily lives of people. I believe that such an account should take stock of the situated practices of people as they enact and create information; it should be based on what people do to and with information in practice, rather than how they 'use' it stock and barrel. A key premise of our study is that something is information for a specific individual in a specific context insofar as it is acted upon by that individual in that context. This premise, which also underlies Garfinkel's sociological theory of information, is in sharp contrast with some of the fundamental assumptions in dominant theories of both information science and economics. In the same fashion that economic theory has remained bound to an abstract notion of human beings as (pseudo) rational optimizers, information science has adopted a narrow view of information as the content of a communication channel (Day 2000). In the era of computing, this is considered the kind of information that is captured, encoded, structured, and manipulated as data in digital computing systems, allowing accurate performance and productivity measurements. However, as critics of this narrow notion of industrial information point out, not all useful information can be encoded in digital form and not all information that is digitally encoded is effectively put to use.
I believe that the notion of regimes of information has a broad utility, which I hope to demonstrate in future work. Also, although there are similarities between this notion and Foucault's notion of 'regimes of truth' (e.g., Foucault 1980), there is also an important difference between them that is significant for our purposes: Foucault uses regimes of truth to discuss the broad issues of the circulation of knowledge-power through the techno-scientific conduits of contemporary society. Regimes of information, on the other hand, deal with the situated practices of daily life involved in the creation and enactment of information. Furthermore, the two notions dissect the society at different junctures: the former at institutional boundaries (cf. Ekbia and Kling 2003), and the latter at what Boltanski and Thévenot call 'worlds' or 'polities.' In short, the two notions differ in both structure and scope.
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