Reconfigured Medication: Writing Medicine in a Sociotechnical Practice

摘要

We feel that it is both legitimate and productive to maintain the overall claim stated in the introduction that it is complicated to simplify a sociotechnical practice. Formalisms and processes involved in a hospital ward will be reconfigured in multiple ways before a new stability will arise around the simplified procedure—for example, the EMM—so that it appears as an improvement on the daily work routines. Stability is a result of dynamic processes, and the active loyalty of the actors involved is decisive in determining how long the new simplification remains stable. In the situated writings, readings, and handlings of the medicine list, as we have suggested above, simplification is therefore an effect of a long series of transformations and shifts in previous procedures and activities, together with necessary translations of the new procedure.