Resumen de Studying reflexivity in socio-technical systems
Since the middle of the twentieth century, sociologists and anthropologists have recognized that there is a mutual and continuous altering relationship between individuals and the social systems they belong to. Individuals can change the course of the system with their ideas, expectations and actions, and a new state during the evolution of the system can lead to a shift in their behavior. Several social and historical events can be better understood in those terms, e.g. stock market crashes, self-fulfilling prophecies and the relationship between the ideas of Enlightenment and the French revolution.
This process is commonly called reflexivity in the social sciences and the aim of this thesis is to study it in different socio-technical systems. To this end, we start by examining the concept of reflexivity in depth, in order to distinguish it from related ideas in complex systems theory. Furthermore, we provide a strong argument for Agent-Based Models (ABMs) as the best methodology to study reflexivity, and advance a couple of scenarios that could benefit it from a reflexive approach. Then we propose an ABM to analyze the effects of reflexivity in diffusion of innovations, a well-known and highly researched social system, which nevertheless shows unexplained outcomes in certain situations. Finally, we make use of reflexivity, along with well-established anthropological and sociological theories, to define a model of organizational change; we use it to explain why the amount of software developers from Latin America in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement is very small; and we apply it to design a series of strategies that could improve that situation.
The main contributions of this thesis are (i) a simple yet effective definition of reflexivity for research; (ii) an explanation of why, despite its proclaimed importance, it has been very difficult to include reflexivity in theoretical models; (iii) the first simple agent-based model --to the best of our knowledge-- that shows that the inclusion of reflexivity can help to explain a disconcerting social phenomenon; and (iv) a novel conceptual model on how to engender organizational change using reflexivity, national culture and social status conferrals.
