Marlot Kuiper

73 Research Perspective: Professional routines actions and actants – and they can thus include human-human and non-human- human interactions. Such functional events in the context of a Surgical Safety Checklist would include: The surgeon takes on the written checklists and reads out the items. The scrub nurse checks and verifies the availability of equipment. The anaesthesiologist confirms the availability of blood and verifies the patient’s condition by checking the parameters on the screen. Functional events thus provide units of action, and from these we can ultimately recognize patterns of action that make up the routine. In this conceptualization, each part of the routine thus is a functional event (Pentland and Feldman, 2008). Artefacts and their affordances Building on the idea of functional events – actant interactions - that make up patterns of actions, I consider the notion of ‘affordances’ useful. The concept of ‘affordance’ originally stems from psychology (Gibson, 1977, 1979), the psychology of perception more precisely. Gibson claimed that humans, along with animals, insects and birds, orient to the world in terms of the opportunities they offer for action. “For a reptile for example, a rock might offer the possibility of shade from the sun, or for an insect, concealment from a hunter. A tree may offer a cat a scratching pole and a bird, a place to build a nest. Affordances differ from species to species and from context to context. However, they cannot vary completely. While a tree offers a range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a tree can afford that a river cannot”(Allen, 2013, p. 463). Gibson therefore put the role of perception central; he believed that the possibilities of what can be done with something, or someone, are unique to each individual and their situation. This idea of affordances was introduced into science and technology studies by Hutchby (2001). He claimed that we can think about artefacts in the same way as humans and animals in Gibson’s understanding. Artefacts possess different affordances that constrain how they can be written, read and used. When people work with artefacts, it is necessary for them to deal with the possibilities and constraints that result from the artefact’s affordances. According to Hutchby, acknowledging the affordances that shape both the possible meanings and uses of an artefact, allows us to study the effects of artefacts more precisely. In this way, artefacts can be understood as both shaped by and shaping of the practices other actants use in interaction with, around and trough them. 3