Andrea H. Tapia is an Assistant Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Tapia holds a degree in Sociology from the University of New Mexico and conducted her post-doctoral work at the University of Arizona. Dr. Tapia’s work encompasses the study of both public and private complex organizations in which information and communication technologies have been used to reframe power relations within the organizational structure and culture. Dr. Tapia is a scholar with expertise in social research methods and social theory applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICT) and their context of development, implementation, and use.

Dr. Tapia’s career research question is, What is the role that technology plays in institutional patterns of power, hierarchy, governance, domination and resistance?

The central premise on which Dr. Tapia’s interests rest is that information and communication technologies are not value-neutral tools in any stage of their development, implementation or use. Instead, they are continuously imbued with values from the human context in which they are developed, implemented and used. Because of her sociological training, this context is groups, particularly institutions.

What drives her research in these institutional contexts is how power relationships within social groups are reflected in the choices made concerning technology development, implementation and use. All human institutions are defined, at least in some part, by their hierarchical arrangement and an uneven distribution of resources. Human institutions such as the workplace, the school, the government, all contain complex social hierarchies, within which information and communication technologies are both part of the social system establishing and maintaining the hierarchy as well as a resource disputed among competing organizational factions. She call this a focus on understanding Technical-Institutional Stratification.

Dr. Tapia research goals are: (1) theorizing on Technical-Institutional Stratification specifically focusing on the impacts of technical and social interventions upon it, (2) extending current methodologies to measures of Technical-Institutional Stratification and measures of the effectiveness of technological and social interventions, (3) testing these theories and methodologies through the development, implementation and evaluation of intervention programs, and (4) drawing on this scientific understanding to provide recommendations for public policy and community-based initiatives that take into account the issues confronting institutions in the information age.

Methodologically, Dr. Tapia draws from both qualitative and quantitative tools, with the goal of describing and defining patterns in human-technological behavior. Specifically, her methodological training sees social networks as having three aspects: user identities, formalized connections and statuses between users, and mechanisms for discussion between users. Much of the recent research focusing on these networks is descriptive of these new social phenomena, often illustrating and visualizing the network itself or analyzing the content of the posted textual discussions. In contrast, Dr. Tapia’s focus is on the formalized connections and statuses between users, specifically how these connections are used to create online power relations and hierarchies, making qualitative differences between connections rather than purely quantitative, structural and spatial.

Dr. Tapia’s work has appeared in The Information Society, Government Information Quarterly, Database for Information Systems Research, The Communications of the ACM, Science Technology and Human Values, and Information Technology and People.