Modelling in practice

In previous chapters, we have argued that responsibility plays a key role in sociotechnical systems; however, the task of pinning responsibilities down to specific individuals or organisations is not trivial. In this book, we have presented three viewpoints for analysing responsibility. Firstly, the ethnographic approach (Chapters 3 and 4), while highlighting the difficulties associated with locating responsibilities, allows us to describe certain levels of responsibility and identify areas where responsibility needs to be clarified. Secondly, the management perspective (Chapters 5 and 6) enables us to model processes and tasks involved in job allocations in such a way that potential areas of responsibility conflicts can be revealed. Finally, the software engineering models in Chapters 8 and 9 complement these two viewpoints by providing a way of explicitly mapping responsibility to agents, thus making responsibility conflicts and neglects more evident, while also providing a method for analysis.