- Science, where I work with Steve Jackson,
who is my co-author on this paper.
The paper is called Logistics as Care and Control,
An Investigation into the UNICEF Supply Division.
In this paper, we cast light on the nature, experience,
and ambivalence of global flows that enable HCI work
in ICTD and post-colonial computing settings.
To do so, we introduce the concept of logistics to HCI.
We define logistics as artful coordination
of human and material flows.
As one of my interviewees at UNICEF Supply Division said,
logistics means that you get goods
where they need to be, when they need to be there.
Logistics is important to HCI for many practical reasons.
As HCI continues to contribute to global technology
and infrastructure design,
attuning for the powers and limitations of logistics
will be key to successful technology dissemination.
Logistics is the work that happens in the background
to make the global reach of contemporary HCI possible.
Further, HCI practitioners are often the ones
who make logistical IT tools,
and therefore they have an ethical stake
in the logistical revolution.
Though as I will describe later,
there has been a scholarly emphasis on the smooth
globalizing effects of logistics,
we ask in this paper what happens when logistics moves
into particularly difficult places to travel?
In the places that the UNICEF Supply Division works,
logistics isn't easy and it doesn't always work.
We argue that logistics in this case,
but perhaps also more broadly,
functions simultaneously as a form of care and control.
To do so, we rely on Foucault's notion of pastoral power.
Foucault defines the concept
using the figure of the shepard.
A shepard both looks out for his sheep, caring for them,
but also holds them to a certain discipline
and has some control over them.
This tension between care and control
is a tension that we see in logistical work at UNICEF.
To build out our definition of logistics as work,
we rely on past HCI scholarship that theorizes
globally dispersed work,
namely the concepts of coordination and articulation.
Schmidt and Simone define coordination
as the varied ways that dispersed workers align
individual components of cooperative activities.
Star and Strauss describe articulation work
as the often invisible work that gets things back on track
in the face of the unexpected.
Infrastructure ties these dispersed work processes
to the materiality of the built world.
This paper builds on prior insights,
such as Star and Ruhleder's notion
that infrastructures exist as both technical and social
as well as global and local artifacts.
It also builds on some of Steve's earlier work,
which has challenged the notion that infrastructures
are always planned, orderly, and mechanical.
These classic theoretical concepts
apply directly to the contemporary logistics industry,
which ties disparate parts of the globe together
through intricate coordination work,
relying on physical infrastructure
and electronic data interchange.
Logistics has undergone a revolution in the past 25 years
due to gains in technologies of all types,
from electronic tools
to the standardization of the container.
This has rendered transport costs so low
that it is often easier to ship something
tens of thousands of miles
rather than making it regionally.
These gains in logistics, however,
have raised some troubling questions
of organizational power and control.
Critical logistics scholars,
some of whom I pull out here,
have particularly emphasized the implications
of the logistical revolution on laborers
such as dock workers and truck drivers.
We agree with this literature and draw on it,
yet we see two main limitations to date.
The first is that these scholars assume
that the world is somehow seamlessly connected.
We argue, however, that the term globalization,
as anthropologist Anna Tsing so beautifully describes,
encourages dreams of a world in which
everything has become part of one single imperial system,
when in fact the systems are still broken up
and global connections are fraught with friction.
The second main limitation
is that the critical logistics scholars
have neglected to recognize the care
which also makes up a part of logistics.
This care component of logistics
is particularly salient in the case of logistics
at the UNICEF Supply Division.
We rely on the definition of care
by feminist science studies scholars
such as Annemarie Mol and Maria Bellacasa
to explain that care involves a notion
of doing and intervening,
and has strong affective and ethical connotations.
Care is a practice that can be done well or badly.
We found that the logicians at the Supply Division
cared deeply for the beneficiaries
that are supposed to be receiving the goods,
and this care makes up an essential part
of the work that they do.
So now for the fun part, this is the case.
This study is based on field work
at the UNICEF Supply Division.
UNICEF is part of the UN,
and it provides long-term humanitarian
and developmental assistance to children and mothers,
and has an extensive network
of around 50 global field offices.
The Supply Division, which is a specific branch of UNICEF,
serves as a distributing agency for items
ranging from vaccines and anti-retro-viral medications
to nutritional supplements and education supplies.
And it works both in international development context
as well as in emergency situations.
This is a huge organization.
The supplies made up 10,000 shipments in 2014,
and they were valued at $3.4 billion.
And this has grown enormously as well.
The goods were only worth $500 million in 2000.
The Supply Division prides itself on getting goods
to the most unreachable
in the most trying of circumstances.
I began this project in the spring of 2015
with an engagement with the UNICEF Supply Division
in New York City,
and then followed up with some interviews remotely
with Copenhagen staff in the headquarters.
I then traveled to Copenhagen in the summer of 2015,
where I conducted an observational study
as well as many more in-person interviews.
I was also able there to review both public
and internal documentation.
So I found through the study that
while supply staff admire and hope to emulate
the rigor, integration, and control
brought to logistics in the private sector,
they also note their difference with such organizations
marked by the organization's core humanitarian mandate
and the particularly challenging context
the organization is required to engage.
UNICEF differentiates itself
from private sector logistics companies
because they go to places that these companies
simply will not go.
Highlight the challenging nature of their work,
a UNICEF employee told me that there are
seemingly limitless ways that they can fail.
These failures include stock out,
heat or cold damage, demurage, expiration,
breakage, wrong documentation,
or any kind of delay.
These failures have real stakes.
A stock out of a vaccine
means that kids aren't getting vaccinated
and they might not return
when the vaccines are back in stock.
So many people in the organization
have started to point to hopes in new IT tools
to help manage some of these issues.
They have dozens of different projects
going on at headquarters around IT,
but I will spend a couple of minutes
just briefly talking about two of the most important
IT projects happening.
First, the team has recently rolled out
a large new enterprise resource planning tool
in order to give headquarters more oversight
into regional operations,
and to make data sharing easier.
The team chose SAP and rolled it out in a big bang approach
in January 2012 to all of the field offices.
However, they have found it extremely difficult
to roll it out to all the varied context in which they work.
As one interviewee explained,
"from a usability perspective,
it is the worst ever nightmare you can imagine.
The learning curve is not steep, it is vertical.
You take weeks and weeks to master just basic things.
We here in our context in Europe,
people are familiar with computers,
they use them at home.
But imagine in the middle of a third world country,
in an emergency, you come in
as a newly hired warehouse manager by UNICEF
and they put you in front of that?
Either you go mad or you don't use it."
The two main challenges they faced, in summary,
were that there wasn't quite enough training
at the beginning,
and also there was some lack of enthusiasm
from country offices.
There's a flipside, though,
and some of my interviewees explained
that some country offices liked the additional help
and oversight that headquarters brought,
and they do say that it's improving with time.
So the second IT initiative
that I briefly want to describe
is the Supply Division's attempts
to track goods outside of UNICEF hands
to make sure that they get to the beneficiaries themselves
rather than being sold on the black market,
getting lost, or otherwise getting to the wrong people.
Distribution patterns for UNICEF
vary depending on the specific country context.
Frequently though, UNICEF control ends
at the in-country warehouse level,
at which point they give goods
to partners like Save the Children or MSF,
to distribute to the final beneficiary.
So the IT team recently developed
a mobile phone and tablet application
which allows final leg distributing partners
to report who exactly received goods
to the individual level.
This was being developed at the time of my research
and was being piloted in Nepal,
which had recently been struck by an earthquake
in April 2015.
Though UNICEF employees were very excited
about the possibilities of control
that this tool provides,
they also noted some important barriers to the project.
First, the partner might choose not to use the application,
or may not be able to use it because of illiteracy,
access to the device, or lack of training.
Second, the partner might input false information
for a whole variety of reasons.
It could be just a simple mistake
or it could be for malfeasance like theft or resale.
And finally, the partners have reported that
this additional oversight
sometimes feels like policing
rather than celebrating the successes,
as the team initially hoped.
So I'd now like to return to the notion of care
that I began with.
To complement these stories of logistics at UNICEF,
I was trying to get greater control over goods movement.
The employees at UNICEF that I spoke with
consistently referred to their humanitarian mandate
and tied their motivations to this mandate.
Many of them found strategies
to directly tie their work in Copenhagen
to the beneficiaries they cared so much about.
So one strategy that they used to do this
was to compare their large-scale logistics
to logistics at a personal scale.
For example, one employee told me,
"we are trying to do things at crazy times,
experiment with crazy things.
You can recognize it with the carriers,
you can recognize it with the freight forwarders.
It is not something that they do because they can publish
or because they get compensation,
but it is an expectation of the work.
In transport, when it is goods that save lives,
it is like trying to get someone who is really in need
to get to the hospital.
You know, it is that urge
that someone feels like doing something.
This is one thing the computer does not understand."
Comparing large-scale logistics
to rushing somebody to the hospital
is a very good example of ways
that Supply Division employees describe their work
as a form of care.
Another strategy, which I can't get into too much today,
but is in the paper, is that employees also often drew
on past experiences working country offices
to more concretely have individuals in mind
while completing their work in headquarters.
So at this point, I just want to briefly conclude now
with a few final thoughts about these concepts
and this case.
I argued that UNICEF Supply's work
represents both a form of care and of control,
and this tension between these two qualities
defines the logistics done at UNICEF Supply.
I now want to point out that there are, of course,
some complications to performing care at a distance.
When you're far away, it is often more difficult
to engage with beneficiaries,
and therefore they are given less choice
in what kind of care they're receiving.
Though there are many examples of caregivers
who have more decision-making capacity
than receivers of care,
such as doctors or nurses or educators,
this care at a distance does have a particular risk
of being misguided or even harmful.
I also want to point again
to the difficulty and complexity of logistics
in the context that UNICEF works in.
In traditional private sector logistics,
the term inter-modal has gain traction
as a way to understand the seamlessness of logistics.
With the rise of the container, goods can now move
from airplanes to trucks to boats
without changing the container's shape.
Yet we think that the sites where the transport modes meet,
such as in this image, which is a picture
of Sihanoukville in Cambodia,
which is where I do the bulk of my field work.
We can also see the meeting of language,
regulatory, and cultural modes.
I argue, then, that these sites
are therefore important places
to observe the global frictions
inherent to all kinds of logistics.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Man] Questions?
- [Woman] Hi, thank you for your talk.
I'm Melanie Fineberg,
I'm at the School of Information and Library Science
at UNC Chapel Hill.
I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more
about the relationships between control and care.
And I think partly, when you alluded to sometimes
our good intentions can lead to the most harm,
what you might have seen
in the relations between control and care in that context.
- I think that...
I think that it brings out the trade-offs
for any kind of decision.
So I think that
we can, as I think like the very...
This pastoral power from Foucault,
I think we can see this kind of tension,
the care and control and many kinds of governance,
so even like any kind of welfare state
often has this tension between care and control
where people are doing their best to help,
but sometimes the end result isn't what you expect.
So I think it just makes us
think a little bit more carefully
about when we're building out systems like this.
So for example, in the IT systems,
I think that they are...
I think that everybody wants them
to do the best that they can do,
but sometimes they don't think about
the privacy, autonomy trade-offs.
So I think that it's a way to kind of
keep both of those things at the forefront.
I hope that answers the question.
- [Woman] You mentioned very briefly
the paternalism that happens,
where you got the people in Copenhagen
emotionally responsible for what's happening locally.
Could you say a little more about that?
And the reason I mention it is
it seems to have such relevance for the global teams
that some of us find ourselves managing today.
- Could you...
So your question is how are...
- [Woman] The paternalism that you've just touched on it,
could you say a little bit more about it,
and if that's a good thing or a bad thing?
- Yeah, I think that it's...
I think that we can look at it as paternalism,
I think we can also look at it as a form of...
I mean, it's inherent to any of these global collaborations,
but I think that there are the power dynamics
that we really need to be aware of,
especially when we're looking at these, you know,
large international organizations.
- [Man] Okay.
Let's thank Maggie once again.
- Thank you.