Reading: Info Seeking in Context-- Cool, Dervin, Talja et al.

Notes:
Cool (2001): Situation in Information Science
There are different Ideas of "Situation" in Information Science Research:

• Problematic Situation: Focuses on the cognitive level; people discover a lack of information where information is needed, or that their knowledge is potentially incorrect, and when this lack of information is keeping them from achieving a goal, they act on it.[Schutz & Luckman, Wersig, Belkin]


• Social Interation Theory: sociocognitive perspective; people behave based on their own perception as well as their concern about how others will percieve them; this effects who we feel comfortable asking for information; the intermediary and the user both have their own ideas of how they are supposed to act in their roles in an IS situation and behave accordingly; intermediaries have to deal with the problem of, "calibrating the degtree of intersubjective alliance between oneself and the creators of infomration items" (19) in order to encourage the negotiation between user and information producer.[Goffman]


• Situated Action: People don't just make a plan and stick with it, they change their behavior based on the feedback and cues given to them by the technology or people they are working with; is a rather vague concept-- almost to vague to be useful.[Suchman]


• Person in Situation: Combines ideas about how individuals function with those of how situation affects their functioning; people's personalities affect the way in which they deal with situations. [Reid, Snow, Pervin]


• Situation as information environment: Based on viewing the situation as the physical environment[Taylor, Algon]

Dervin: A Context by Any Other Name (1997)

• "A context is a label for a site of struggle" (15).


• Themes: "Knowledge is partial & temporary; reality is discontinous, gap filled, changeable across time-space; the knower and the known are inextricably bound; context is not usefully conceptualized as independent entity; context requires a focus on process; focus must be placed on the dialtectical relationships between products and process; focus must be placed on multiple interdependencies; context is a neccessary source of meaning"

Tajla, et al.-- Metatheoretical view of production of context (1999)

• Behaviorist: how groups seek information; researches "the individual and his action as part of a specific group;" etic fiew of constructed concepts; aims to identify "general processes of information seeking."


• Social Constructionist: how is meaning constituted?; studies social constructions, cultural narratives, etc; constructed concepts viewed from an emic perspective; trying to, "Identify historical and local structures of meaning or discursive practices"

Summary
Situation and context have varied meaning depending on the framework from which one approaches them. Cool points out several variations on the study of situation, and Dervin seeks to find some cohesive definition drawn from the range of definitions given of context. Tajla, et al. give a good summary of the difference between the behaviorist and social constructionist approach to context.