Designing the User/Using the Design: The Shifting Relations of a Curriculum Technology Change

Competency-Based Training (CBT) is a newly introduced national system of vocational skills development, designed to improve the performance of Australian enterprises through upgrading workers' skills. This paper presents a modified network analysis of the development and use of CBT by the various actors—including government, industry, unions, organizations, training practitioners, trainees, training protocols and training materials–making up this ‘social technology’. ‘Competency training’ is taken to conform to a conventional approach to systems design, where things are divided up according to the separate spheres of planned development and practical implementation. I deal, first, with the constitution of CBT's design, including its manifest and hidden heterogeneities; second, I show how this design is translated into use. I argue that relations of design and use are created and sustained together. Where this relationship is understood, design can serve as a ground for critique. More generally, I consider the limitations of actor-network conceptions of ‘heterogeneity’. I argue that translation implies exploring both similarity and difference, with difference having a positivity and non-assimilability that tend to remain hidden in actor-network theory. Using concepts from post-structuralist and feminist interactionist analysis, I argue that recovering the hidden heterogeneities of networks of technology design and use (for example, users' contribution to design) serves to complexify network accounts, and to help deal with forms of technology analysis with political relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]