Introduction

Since the late 1980s, one can discern a ‘turn to the social’ in the field of computing. The increased attention being paid to ethnographic studies of work by various subgroups of the computing profession – requirements engineers, system designers – is but the most visible manifestation of this interest. While there has always been a small number of people involved in studying the social dimensions of computing, from the birth of the computing field (e.g. Kling, 1980), this more recent phenomenon has been led by a rather different set of concerns, which, although quite heterogeneous in their origins, have all contributed to a shaping of the discourse on the social embeddedness of technology. Human–machine relationships more generally have become problematised in new ways, moving beyond human factors and cognitivist human–computer interaction frames to include participatory approaches to system design, and ethnomethodological and actornetwork accounts of heterogeneous human–machine complexes. The outcome of this reconceptualisation of the field is still unclear, yet at the very least it has enlarged the arena for discourse on the nature of software development, and has allowed the participation of a number of actors from disciplinary fields previously not included in the discussion. One result has been a questioning of the assumptions behind standard development processes, such as the prototypical waterfall model of software development, and an increased emphasis on such areas traditionally known as requirements analysis and user needs analysis.