And we identified the constraints that companies themselves exert on the exercise of literate abilities. The project yielded a wealth of ethnographic data. We logged over 300 visits to two factories and collected some 500 hours of audio-taped interviews and observations and some 100 hours of video. At both factories we collected a wide range of documents, including workers' notes and drawings, quality and productivity data, meeting minutes and agendas, manufacturing process instructions, engineering changes, and assembly drawings, performance reviews and disciplinary notices, quality alerts and corrective action requests, supervisors' passdowns, inter-office memos and much more. Such data have allowed us to study literacy practices and organizational change in great detail.
Literacy provides the scaffolding within which work gets done at the circuit board assembly plants.
This number suggests something of the remarkable diversity of the literacy activities in these workplaces. This research, however, looks deeply at the implementation of teams at a highly regarded company, and in so doing probes beyond the company's public persona to document problems and challenges as well as successes. While claiming to empower its front-line workers, this firm generally continued to maintain traditional roles and relationships between workers and management, and this established hierarchy shaped and constrained literacy practices.