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My paper aims at presenting the cross-cultural encounters between my educational and intellectual background as an international Ph.D. researcher and the epistemological stances underpinning my Western-based methodology. In my reflexive ethnographic study of a global non-governmental organisation, I developed a dual act of reflexivity, one on constructing the data and the other on developing my methodological perspectives and skills. I draw this approach from Alvesson's (2010) proposal for a methodological awareness through ‘an epistemological-theoretical-methodological context’ in order to make stronger knowledge claims.

The influence of digital technology on our modern workforce is significant and has been instrumental in the creation of new jobs in new marketplaces to satisfy new needs. Although we may not know the direction of future technological change, what is known is that change will invariably benefit some groups and not others. One group who have not benefited are Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. With very few Māori employed in the information technology (IT) sector, the benefits to Māori from the increased opportunities are yet to be realized. Historically, Māori have been the subjects of research as end users of technology rather than as technology workers. The dominant narrative being that Māori are underachieving and that Māori will want to participate if they either acquire the technical skills or see the benefits of working in IT for themselves. The aim of this study was to push past this narrative and explore, via the experiences of Māori IT workers, why so few Māori work in IT. At the heart of this research was the question that drove this study: How can Māori IT workers be enabled to thrive in IT? Seeking answers, I traveled throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to kōrero (discuss, converse) with Māori IT workers. A newly developed approach called kaupapa tika was used, where unstructured insider-based interviews were conducted as a co-creation exercise to explore participants’ complex lived experiences. What was uncovered was that while working with IT is fun and exciting, in many cases, working in IT is not.

The IREC system aims to control the evolution of Eiffel classes to enable not only versionning, but also the most possible automatic reactualization of dependent entities: client or heir classes, instances migration, library merging…These reactualizations need a very sharp knowledge of classes' structure and semantics in order to compute deltas, to determine the consequences of changes from different points of view, to dynamically evaluate class invariants…in a both compiled and interpreted framework. This paper presents the reflexive representation chosen in IREC to give the needed knowledge for previous handling. It is presented in the form of an Eiffel language components library, which describes in a distributed way every structural and semantic aspect, from classes up to Eiffel language tokens. Each of these components is equipped with handling methods for the different life cycle phases of the application or library classes. The modularity of the representation and factorisations by inheritance enable to consider of other handlings and the adaptation of current components to other languages.