Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 264 pp. $45.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.
A final theme I will note explicitly (there are others) is the tension between the presumed utility of professional (credentialed) knowledge as opposed to experiential knowledge. Technicians find themselves relying on a knowledge of practice developed by themselves and their fellows, while for a variety of reasons, the management emphasizes credentials and academic training. Here again is a source of conflict resident in a more natural horizontal structure of expertise and the preferred vertical structure of authority.Several themes or "problematics" appear throughout these chapters. One is the ambiguous social position of the technical worker. While the relative importance of technical workers (and their numbers) has increased dramatically over recent decades, there has been no such increase in wages or organizational status. Technicians seem more to resemble non-technical workers than professionals in areas such as job satisfaction and organizational allegiance. This seems surprising, given the educational and experience requirements of technical work. Another, related theme is the ambiguity of the organizational position of technicians. To use the book's language, technicians can be typified as either "buffers" or "brokers," essentially as either assistants to professionals or largely independent practitioners mediating between a professional community of knowledge and non-technical end users of the knowledge. While both groups have to negotiate an identity in an organization in which their efforts are peripheral, this is especially true for the brokers. Who are they? To what community do they belong: the community of knowledge, that of the organization, or neither?I find that this book offers to anyone seriously interested in organizational studies an opportunity to get involved in an area of work that is certain to become even more important in the future. Questions are posed here that can fuel dozens of interesting research agendas. The editors and authors are to be complimented for organizing their chapters into a reasonably coherent whole, with issues being raised and developed in the quite various studies presented. Only one minor quibble from me. Is it really too much to ask to have a concluding chapter that summarizes the issues presented in an edited volume? Just asking.R. Richard Ritti Professor Emeritus of Administration of Justice and Sociology The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802Some 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
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