Andrea H Tapia
Portrait of Andrea Tapia

Dr. Andrea H. Tapia
Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology
Affiliate Assistant Professor, Department of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations
Affiliate Assistant Professor, Science, Technology and Society Program

329G IST Building
Center for the Information Society
College of Information Sciences and Technology
Penn State University
University Park, State College, PA 16802

atapia at ist.psu.edu
1.814.865.1524 (voice)
1.814.865.6426 (fax)

Statement of Professional Interests

I decided to become a traveler. 

Just as a traveler leaves her home and moves between countries and cultures, I have left my sociological home behind and have made my way to other academic spaces.  After taking my first tentative steps outside sociology I learned that I had been gifted with powerful tools that were portable, knowledge and skills in social research methodology and social theory that were applicable to a myriad of focal, topical areas of study.  Successful travelers also possess dynamic cultural flexibility in which they learn new languages and cultural behaviors applicable to their current location and assimilate elements of each into their own core value system.  I expected to travel to far off academic lands and assimilate as best I could into a new discipline, however, what I found was “inter-disciplinarity” and many more travelers like myself.

 There are quite a lot of us living between the disciplines. 

 I see myself as an academic with expertise in social research methods and social theory, who applies that to the study of information and communication technologies (ICT) and their context of development, implementation and use.  People like me are to be found in business schools, information schools, library schools, communication schools, and multitudes of smaller programs such as science and technology studies.  Some of us have accepted labels as social informaticians or socio-technical theorists, but this does not completely capture the range. 

I have found a home in Information Sciences and Technology “IST” because of its central belief in inter-disciplinarity.  I am unique to IST because of the sociological tools I bring to the table and my central focus on groups and institutions relative to their take up, uses and issues with ICT. 

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Over the past two years, I have effectively taught IST 301, a course that blended my strengths and interests in social institutions and technology.  In working with Dr. Larry Spence, I have participated in 2 substantial course redesigns of 301.  In working with Dr. Magy Seif al-Nasr, we have entered the initial stages of development for a online organizational simulation game to be used in future 301 classes.  In the spring of 2006, I will teach my first graduate course, IST 531, in which I will present the students with a variety of perspectives on the relationship between technology and the social context in which it is developed and used.  In the Fall of 2006, I will add two more IST courses to my repertoire, IST 110 and IST 590, expanding my access to and impact on the full range of IST students from freshmen to graduate students.  In spring 2005, I participated in the Multicultural Teaching Academy sponsored by the Africana Research Center and the Schreyer Teaching Institute which has helped me to prepare to teach in the IST GIT track.  I am also working with a team of IST faculty to develop two graduate courses; Community/Public Informatics and Social Research Methodologies. 

My goal is to create a mechanism in which my research informs my teaching and my teaching informs my research, where students play a central role.  Central to my plan for the next few years is the development of a reflective practicum for undergraduate and graduate students of IST (Schon, 1983, 1987).  My future intention is the creation of a cadre of critical student thinkers around the issues of Technical-Institutional Stratification.

A reflective practicum is one in which three relationships are reconstructed; the relationship between the student and the body of knowledge, the relationship between the student and faculty and the relationship between expertise and ethics.  Students begin to question their own forms of practice and those of the institution in which they work or will work in the future.  This is facilitated by IST’s Problem-Based Learning ”PBL” model which promotes thinking and content expertise through the use of realistic scenarios or problems.  Instructors act as designers, providing exercises that challenge learners.  Students simultaneously develop content knowledge and problem-solving skills.  I actively use both reflective practice and PBL pedagogies in my undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Behind this overt goal is the intention to create more interdisciplinary thinkers.  As we send our graduates out into the world they will not be confronted with problems that fall along disciplinary lines.  They will be challenged with global problems which will require technical, social, information and contextual solutions.  We need to equip our students with complex tools to solve these complex problems.

 Scholarship of Research and Creative Accomplishments

The central premise on which my research interests rests is that information and communication technologies are not value-neutral tools in any stage of their development, implementation or use.  Instead, they are continuously imbued with values from the human context in which they are developed, implemented and used.

 Because of my sociological training, the context is groups, particularly institutions.  Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.  Institutions are not natural.  They must be seen as socially constructed, artifacts of a particular time, culture and society, produced by collective human choice, though not directly by individual intention.

 What drives my research in these institutional contexts is how power relationships within social groups are reflected in the choices made concerning technology development, implementation and use.  All human institutions are defined, at least in some part, by their hierarchical arrangement and an uneven distribution of resources.  Human institutions such as the workplace, the school, the government, all contain complex social hierarchies, within which information and communication technologies are both part of the social system establishing and maintaining the hierarchy as well as a resource disputed among competing organizational factions.  I call this a focus on understanding Technical-Institutional Stratification.

Questions that I ask as part of this kind of research are; when institutions plan to solve institutional problems by implementing some new technology who defines the problem as a technical one, who chooses the technical solution, who creates the implementation and training plans, and what effect does the solution have on the organizational hierarchy once implemented? More simply put, who benefits within an organization from the technical definitions, choices and knowledge made by that organizational leaders? Another question might be how do the lowest levels of organizational hierarchies use organizational hierarchy to manipulate the hierarchical system to their advantage? And finally, by adopting technologies and merging its use with the organizational identity, how does the organization manipulate its external environment to its advantage?

Because of these core interests I have sought out research sites that are found in these three institutions. 

Workplace: Dot Coms, Recruitment and Retention of IT employees.

Education: IT Training vs. Education, Recruitment and Retention of non-traditional IT students.

Government: JNET, Municipal Wireless Policy, Inter-governmental arrangements. 

My Research Goals 

  • Theorizing on Technical-Institutional Stratification specifically focusing on the impacts of technical and social interventions upon it.
  • Extending current methodologies to measures of Technical-Institutional Stratification and measures of the effectiveness of technological and social interventions.
  • Testing these theories and methodologies through the development, implementation and evaluation of intervention programs.
  • Drawing on this scientific understanding to provide recommendations for public policy and community-based initiatives that take into account the issues confronting institutions in the information age. 

 My Research Community

There is no single community that contains like-minded academics.  I find others like myself and outlets for my work in three principal communities. 

  • Sociologists of Information and Communication Technologies.  This community is well represented in the American Sociological Association’s special interest group, Communications and Information Technologies (CITASA), of which I am a member, regular presenter at annual meetings and hopefully soon to be an officer.  The publication outlets for this group would be journals such as Information Communication and Society, and The Information Society.
  • Science and Technology Studies.  This community is well represented in two organizations; the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), of which I am a member and a regular presenter at annual meetings, and the American Sociological Association’s special interest group, Science Knowledge and Technology (SKAT), of which I am a member, regular presenter at annual meetings, and the editor of their newsletter.  The publication outlets for this group would be the journal Science Technology and Human Values, in which I have published my work.
  • Social Research in Information Systems.  This community is well represented in two organizations; the ACM’s special interest group for Computer Professional Research and Management of Information Systems Research (CPR/MIS), of which I am a member, a regular presenter at annual meetings, and organizing this year’s Doctoral consortium, and the International Federation of Information Professionals special interest group on Information Systems and Organizations (IFIP 8.2), of which I am a member, a regular presenter at annual meetings, and on this year’s program committee.  The publication outlets for this group would include the journals The Communications of the ACM, Information Technology and People and Database for Information Systems Research, in all of which I have published.

Service and the Scholarship of Service to the University, Society and the Profession

I have given much of my service energy to IST.  I have been the faculty advisor to WIST for the past two years.  I have served on two faculty recruiting committees, one per year.  I now sit on the Graduate Advisory Committee.  I have been a part of the Comprehensive Exam Committee for the Information-People side of the IST triangle for the past two years, writing and grading our graduate student exams.  I have been the advisor to two IST Schreyer Honors Student Theses.  I am also a full member of the Center for the Information Society, and co-designed the Center’s webpage in the past year.  Informally, I have supported my colleagues as an invited speaker in their courses IST 590, IST 531, and IST 541.  Also, as one of the few female faculty in IST, I informally mentor our female students to a great degree. 

To the University, I am an affiliate assistant professor with the department of Labor and Industrial Relations in the college of Liberal Arts as well as in the Science and Technology Studies program in the College of Engineering.  I look forward to additional opportunities for service to the university.

 To my profession, I have taken on three principal roles, editor, reviewer and organizer.  As an editor I have been Guest Editor for the Social Science Computer Review (SSCORE), special issue on Critical Information Systems Research, the Co- Editor and the Book Review Editor of the newsletter for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Science Knowledge and Technology.  In my role as reviewer, I have reviewed for Information and Organizations, ALOIS, Information Technology and People, ICIS, International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, Human Resource Management Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, and Group 2005.   I have been on the planning/program committee for the following conferences, ACM SIG MIS/CPR Conference - Doctoral Consortium, International Federation For Information Processing Working Group 8.2 (IFIP 8.2), and IRMA, Track--Social Responsibility in the Information Age.  I have been a session chair or session organizer for the American Sociological Association, the ACM SIGCPR/MIS and the Pacific Sociological Association.