Abstract:
Organisations are increasingly turning to software to manage, monitor, organise, and optimise almost every aspect of work today. This is especially true in the healthcare industry, where a global trend towards rising costs and surges in demand have led to the use of software to ease this burden by optimising healthcare with algorithmic management techniques, data analytics, and the promise of AI. This thesis draws on an ethnographic study of a global health software company to investigate the construction of a fantasy discourse lurking behind its software. It finds that software is ontologically problematic. This fact has been overlooked, and as a result, its consequences for organisations have gone unexamined. Rather than trying ever harder to define software once and for all, this thesis demonstrates that what software is not has important effects for organisations. Through a poststructuralist discourse analysis of ethnographic data, this thesis reveals the emptiness of software as a signifier, and the way in which this emptiness constructs a powerful fantasy of the ultimate perfection of healthcare through software. More significantly, this thesis further demonstrates that the inevitable failure of this fantasy to deliver on its promises has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing itself and silencing effective critical engagement. In practical terms this thesis seeks ultimately to challenge the tendency towards abstract, grandiose visions in software discourse. Instead it aims to invite managers, clinicians, and society itself to re-ground our conversations about software in specifics, so that we might find new means for critical conversations regarding software’s purportedly inevitable domination of organisational life.