Pergamon Accting., Mgmt. & lnfo. Teeh., Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 213-240, 1997 © 1997 ElsevierScienceLtd. All fights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0959-8022/97 $17.00 + 0.00 PII: S0959-8022(97)00007-6 GOVERNING THE CONDUCT OF COMPUTING: COMPUTER SCIENCE, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND FRAMEWORKS OF COMPUTING Richard Hull Manchester University A~tact--Social science concepts and techniques have been bound up with computing since its earliest days. This relationship is described in terms of three distinct "frameworks of computing", historically specific ways of understanding, working with and developing computer systems. Each framework has different understandings of the "real" and desirable relations between people and computers, and a concern that hardware and software should reflect these relations They render some forms of comput- ing thinkable and desirable, whilst ruling out others---to a considerable extent they govern the conduct of computing, in both basic R & D and in commercial and organizational development. The frameworks are not purely internal to the historical development of computing, but nor are they the direct effect of any single external factor. They also overlap with each other in different configurations within comput- ing, and two such sites are described in more detail: human-computer interaction and computer- supported cooperative work. In conclusion, firstly some suggestions are offered for further research, in particular the possibility that new frameworks are being assembled as computing converges with the media industries; and secondly the form of analysis is presented as being complementary to many exist- ing approaches, through occupying a middle ground between traditional scientific and historical methodologies, and the emergent focus on contextuality, difference and deconstruction. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved INTRODUCTION There are many dualisms either inherent or explicit within social science discussions of computing. ~It is perhaps a popular belief amongst social scientists that they are progressing beyond the earlier "naive" dualisms, especially that between the "technical" and the "social", and that social science is becoming more sophisticated in its analyses. It is developing more fine-grained forms of ethnographic case-study that allow more voices to emerge and consequently more subtleties to be expressed; and broader forms of social, economic and cultural analyses are being developed which can capture the multifarious ways in which computing is bound up with changing patterns of production, employment, consumption and culture. There is indeed no doubting that social scientists have considerably refined and improved their ability to describe and analyse the dramatic changes occuring alongside the diffusion of computing into many aspects of organizations and everyday life. But one dualism remains unacknowledged, and that is precisely the division between IBecause this paper is partly an historical analysis we will use the more all-encompassing term "computing" rather than the more recent term "IT". 213