Rural TaleEssay Preview: Rural TaleReport this essayA Rural Tale:A Cautionary Allegory for IS ResearchersProfessor Mike NewmanAbstractA 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 Analysis1. Introduction and the Rural TaleConsider 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.
In summary, the survey found that people in the ‘Middle East’ are still paying more attention to electricity than they used to. The majority, 60 per cent, now say they want to change their lifestyle.
The findings about the water supply are important when they are used by policymakers and other stakeholders. In South Africa, for example, the government has already made significant progress in improving the water supply since its launch in March. In 2013 the government managed to achieve a 13 per cent improvement, largely due to increasing water infrastructure. In December 2013, it achieved its target of a 60 per cent improvement so far, and the government has since expanded water distribution to 13 nationalities since then.
If government policy will now deliver that promised land, it will be worth the effort. By the way, in a similar way around the world the same issues with water, energy and climate remain more or less unresolved. In South Africa, a new kind of water solution cannot replace a traditional one and it is not surprising that, like in the Middle East, its challenges are more of a challenge and more so with respect to energy.
Water’s political dimension could not be more different, especially when the United States, China, India and Pakistan are working on all of these fronts together. In South Africa, while the energy and climate challenges are relatively minor, the water issue is also somewhat more a political issue with a much greater degree of gravity. The US and China have their hand under the water issue whereas these nations (as in Iraq and Syria) are struggling by their own rules.
On the one hand, the Obama administration has made significant efforts to address and improve the water resource in South Africa from the start, and they have focused on water conservation from the start. One of the most notable efforts is from US Department of State (USGS) Secretary of Energy Fred Hiatt’s National Clean Water Plan which recently signed at the annual meeting of the US government Open Room in Washington DC. The Plan also targets reducing the use of tap water and improves water quality on a scale not seen since the 1990s. One major issue discussed by Hiatt is whether developing countries will be able to adapt to the water situation in place at all, and that means we need to increase water use from the current level. The United States is the leading party on this because it has its own national water resources portfolio, and most countries have good water resources management policies. The USGS is in charge of protecting the public’s right to trust in the federal government and its own policy, while providing technical services. Although the USGS is based in Washington DC, it does not necessarily have jurisdiction over the