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Talking About Machines
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Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 16:55:16 PST From: orr@parc.xerox.com Subject: Talking About Machines
Orr, Julian E., Talking about Machines: An ethnography of a modern job. ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1996. Cornell University Press 512 East State St. Ithaca, NY 14850 [607] 277-2338 $13.95 in paper $32.50 in hardbound Also available from http://www.amazon.com Or demand it from your nearest (preferably independent) bookseller.
In the foreword, Stephen Barley, Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at Stanford University, writes: "Julian Orr's study of photocopier repair technicians at Xerox has for some years now been an underground classic among ethnographers of work. First completed as a dissertation in 1990, that version was distributed as a 'Blue and White', a Xerox PARC technical report. Even with this limited distribution, the book you are about to read has been influential; it is the source of a number of ideas that have recently gained considerable currency. For instance, it is here that Julian documents and develops the important and counter-intuitive notion that technical knowledge is best viewed as a socially distributed resource that is diffused and stored primarily through an oral culture. Viewed from this perspective, the technicians' war stories become texts, not only for the ethnographer, as the post-modernists would have it, but for the technicians themselves."
From the introduction itself: "Work is a constant part of our lives in the United States and other modern industrialized countries; we spend a significant portion of our lives doing something, usually for someone else, in order to earn our living. Life at work is a staple in our conversation, but we rarely talk about what we really do in the doing of the job. This omission extends to the professional literature on work: Most such literature is not concerned with work as practice, by which I mean that these writings do not focus on what is actually done in accomplishing a given job. Instead, most are centered on work as the relation of employment or on work as a source of the worker's identity. Although such writings are inevitably based on assumptions about practice, practice itself is usually taken for granted, and the basis of the assumptions remains implicit. In contrast, I will argue that a study of practice itself shows work to be generally different from and frequently more complex than is usually assumed; this suggests that a careful examination of work practice will deepen our understanding of both the relations of employment and the role of the work in the constitution of the worker's identity. . . . . "The nature of the work of technical service as defined by the corporation is the result of contracts between corporations, negotiations between workers and management, and unilateral decisions by management in the form of service policy and the design and content of machine documentation. At the same time, the actual expert practice of technical service is necessarily an improvisation by the participants in the concrete situation. Each episode of machine repair is built on shared knowledge of earlier successes and failures, and the stories which the technicians tell circulate that knowledge. The stories also celebrate the technicians' mastery of the complex and sometimes obscure interaction between technicians, customers, and machines, while acknowledging the contingent and temporary nature of their success. The principal issues for the technicians in this triangular interaction are control and understanding, and one reward for achieving the two is their own identity as competent technicians. The first and foremost goal of practice, however, is getting the job done, and it is only by accomplishing that primary goal that practice contributes to the technicians' social identity and preserves their relations of employment. . . . . "Our enterprise, then, is to make sense of the technicians' situated practice, but that practice is also a sense-making endeavour, as is culture itself. The stories for which the technicians are famous are examples both of the sense they make of their world and the process of making that sense. Our goal is to gain an understanding of the technicians' work as they do it and as they understand it, and use that understanding to look at the question of the relationship between work as it is done and work as it is described or prescribed. In this way we will come to understand both what work is like in the triangular relationship between technicians, customers, and machines and what value there may be to a study of work practice." ```
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