Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 264 pp. $45.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.
Davis also stated, "The use of the HydroMaid technology for an appliance other than a garbage disposal represents a significant expansion of the potential for HydroMaid's success."HydroMaid International Inc. (OTCBB: HYII) Monday announced that it has entered into an agreement with one of the largest appliance companies in the world providing for confidential disclosure of HydroMaid's patented technology to allow the appliance company to test the use of the technology in dishwashers.FMI: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jininut/noframes.htmlThis is an interesting book and develops issues of which we have little specific, organized knowledge. Technical work is now the single largest component of the workforce and is growing rapidly. To hear economists tell it, this kind of work is revolutionizing our political economy. Yet organizational scientists really don't know much more about this kind of work and its organization than we did decades ago. For one thing, technical workers are an extremely heterogeneous group. The interesting ethnographic studies presented here make this quite clear. I would ask, does it really make sense to group "computer programmers" (an extremely heterogeneous group in itself) with quality control "technicians" on an assembly line who do little more than record numbers. Another issue which has been around for decades is the experiential versus academic skill requirements of technical work. Because technical work tends to become highly specialized organizationally, technicians (and engineers) come to depend much more on a body of practice than on any academic knowledge. Still, this doesn't stop the management from insisting on technical credentials. Is this a problem? If so, what should be changed, the work or the training?Some years ago I spotted in the New York Times Business Section a picture Roland Barthes would have loved. Behind a huge console, covered with all sorts of dials and buttons, sat a lone technician. Before him was a large window affording a panoramic view of the entire G.E. dishwasher assembly floor below. One technician and hundreds of machine servants. The article was about the "new manufacturing." This book is about the person behind that console and his near and distant kin. The title says it well, it's about those whose labors are neither craft - skilled but learned from practice - nor professional - prepared for their work by a lengthy process of technical education. The work of these technicians has four attributes: (1) the centrality of a complex technology to the work, (2) the importance of contextual knowledge or skill, (3) the importance of theories or abstract representations of phenomena, and (4) the existence of a community of practice that serves as a distributed repository for knowledge of relevance to practitioners (p. 12). The book comprises an introductory chapter and three parts, given over respectively to (1) the position of the technician in the social and organizational order, the cultural ambiguities in disparities between a natural "horizontal" organization of technical specialties and the prevailing vertical organization preferred by employing firms, (2) in-depth descriptions of a group of technical occupations from an ethnographic perspective, and (3) some policy implications flowing from these considerations.
R. Richard Ritti Professor Emeritus of Administration of Justice and Sociology The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802
Author: R. Richard Ritti
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