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Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

This paper concerns the intersection of knowledge, power and gender in information systems design. This is explored with the help of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, and ideas from feminist technoscience studies, and studied in the context of an information systems design project in a Swedish authority. The aim of the paper is to explore how power/knowledge plays out in the everyday practices of an information systems design project, and how this is also a gendered issue. The analysis showed three different configurations of power/knowledge during the course of the business analysis as a result of shifting design conditions. The analysis contains no key, but the project clearly worked towards the enactment of some specific, and differently gendered, futures, which shifted with the different configurations of power/knowledge. The analysis provides an example of how in IS design projects, various realities are enacted, how some gendered realities are being explored, dismissed, and replaced by others. This illustrates how hopes for a better future among some gendered bodies might emerge, but also how these hopes – in the course of the the same IS design project – might be turned down, when other bodies and values become prioritized.

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