Rural Tale

A Rural Tale:

A Cautionary Allegory for IS Researchers

Professor Mike Newman

Abstract

A textual fragment from a case study describing the attempted introduction of a simple water deliver system into a rural village is presented. Using text as allegory, we try to reveal how textual analysis, management change theories, social theory and IS literature can be used to add to our understanding of the events portrayed in the text. We show what each interpretive device contributes to our understanding as well as uncovering their limitations. The paper ends by drawing some lessons for IS researchers.

Keywords: Allegory, Information Systems, Research, Management Change Theories, Textual Analysis

1. Introduction and the Rural Tale

Consider the following description of a series of events at a rural village:

“A story was recently told concerning a certain village in a developing countryS1. The villagers were approached by foreign aid workers with a view to making their lives easierS2. One of the features of village life that the experts noticed was the considerable time the women spent going quite long distances together to bring back water in jars to their hutsS3.

The experts considered this problem and came up with a fairly low-tech solution to ease the women’s burden: they provided a pump and water pipe from the water supply and taps for each hutS4. Then, instead of walking several times a day to pick up the water, the women could fill up their jars as often as they wished at their hutsS5. The experts, waiting perhaps for the accolades of the villagers were astounded instead by their hostile reaction: collectively, the women decided not to use the tapsS6”.

Ostensibly it seems straightforward as a tale. A group of aid workers (experts) enter a village and attempt to make the women’s lives easier by removing what they saw as the drudgery of collecting water in jars from some distant water hole and replacing this with a water delivery system (WDS) consisting of a pump, pipe and individual taps. A worthy goal you might think, demonstrating altruistic behaviour. However, without consulting the women (or anybody so it seems) the experts go ahead and design, build and hand over the system to the women. Contrary to the experts’ expectations the women reject the taps (and therefore the WDS) and make their feelings known to them (“their hostile reaction”). We are not told how this rejection was handled by the experts or what they did subsequently.

There is a popular formula in the management change literature that “user” involvement is a sine qua non of successful implementation (Newman and Robey, 1992; Robey and Farrow,1982; Gallivan and Keil, 2003). Success without user involvement is impossible to achieve. User Involvement of course may range from consulting the users to allowing the users to participate fully in the systems’ design (Demodaran, 1996). You have to have the users’ “buy-in” to increase their commitment to the system and thereby increase your chance of delivering a workable, acceptable system. The tale supports this: the lack of user involvement in this case brings user rejection of the WDS by refusing to use it. But was it as simple as this? Were there deeper reasons why the WDS was rejected? For example, did the system violate the collectivism as apparently practiced by the women? Could it be that the women liked to spend time together? The individual taps undermined this and removed a perfectly reasonable excuse to meet and “network” at the waterhole while performing the socially useful task of water gathering. Moreover, this could also be an issue of status in the village. In this scenario water gathering is a recognised, high status role in the village. Take this away and the women’s role and status would be threatened by the WDS, a more than enough reason to reject the system . Alternatively, it could be that the women were concerned about the quality of the water supply: could water be polluted in its transit through the pipes or could its transit violate religious ideals? And who would repair the pump if it broke down? There also appears to be no effort spent training the women in using the WDS and educating them as to its advantages. The WDS was just handed over as if education and training were someone else’s job. In summary, the experts seem to have violated all the generally-accepted rules in making this system.

But you might say that we are getting ahead of ourselves. All we know from the description above is the reporting of the events and behaviors of the participants. The rest is largely speculative. Moreover, many of the above comments betray the same tendency of the experts in the story. Are we making (too?) many assumptions about other peoples’ world views: their attitudes, beliefs, traditions and assumptions. Who are we to act as the arbiters of truth as we look at the text?

Nonetheless, the description raises many questions. For example, where is the village? Where do the aid workers come from? Why did the aid workers choose the village for their work? Were they invited into the village? What was the gender mix of the aid workers? What was the motivation of the aid workers? What was the significance of the women’s work prior to the WDS? Why did the village women reject the new water gathering arrangement? What happened to the taps and delivery system afterwards? And, because we are interested in information systems (IS) and developing IS (ISD), how might it inform us as IS researchers about the building and using Information Systems?

Clearly, some questions are easier to answer than others. The need to walk to collect water and the use of the word “hut” twice provides clues and we learn from the respondent that the village is located in rural Africa. We also learn that the aid workers are from Scandinavia and that the aid granting body has some history of similar aid work . Many of the other questions we have to make assumptions about and analyse in a deeper fashion. But the tale is about water supply not about Information Technology. In order to make sense of it for that purpose we use the tale as an allegorical device. Table 1 summarises what we know, what we might want to speculate about and what it implies.

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