Talking about machines
Subtitle: an ethnography of a modern job
By: Julian E. Orr.
Series: Collection on technology and work
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Ithaca, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 172
Subjects: Xerox Corporation -- Customer services.; Photocopying machines -- United States -- Maintenance and repair.; Mechanics -- United States.; Ethnology -- United States.
First sentence: 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.
Description: THIS IS A STORY OF HOW WORK GETS DONE. It is also a study of how field service technicians talk about their work and how that talk is instrumental in their success. In this innovative ethnography, Julian E. Orr studies the people who repair photocopiers and shares vignettes from their daily lives. He characterizes their work as a continuous highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine.

The work technicians do encompasses elements not contained in the official definition of the job yet vital to its success. Orr's analysis of the way repair people talk about their work reveals that talk is, in fact, a crucial dimension of their practice. Diagnosis happens through a narrative process, the creation of a coherent description of the troubled machine. The descriptions become the basis for technicians' discourse about their experience, and the circulation of stories among the technicians is the principal means by which they stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behaviour. Orr demonstrates that technical knowledge is a socially distributed resource stored and diffused primarily through an oral culture.

Based on participant observation with copier repair technicians in the field and strengthened by Orr's own years as a technician, this book explodes numerous myths about technicians and suggests how technical work differs from other kinds of employment.

JULIAN E. ORR is a Member of the Research Staff in the Work Practice and Technology Area of the Systems and Practices Laboratory, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-166) and index.