Who Needs Accountability?

During the twenty-some years since ethnographic field studies in the workplace first began to be taken seriously as having possible relevance for the design of information technology, accountability has been one of the recurring concepts in the literature exploring these areas. Like usability and actability, accountability sounds like an important issue, but proves a difficult feature to define. Of what exactly is it an attribute? Who defines it? For whom? Under what conditions? In this paper, I explore and compare a few of the various uses of the concept of accountability that I have come across in ethnomethodological and CSCW literature. In the third section, I tentatively indicate what focusing on accountability, in one or several different interpretations of the concept, might imply for design of IT in some specific cases. These brief and sketchy examples, aiming to be thought-provoking rather than analytically thought-through and articulated, are selected from recent development projects and on-going research work with which I have been involved or come in contact.