So What? Use/Value of Knowledge
At the beginning of his book, Orr defines the goal of his investigation of “work practice” as illuminating and deepening our understanding of the more commonly studied aspects of the industrialized society – that of the relations of employment and the role of work in the constitution of the worker’s identity (1). His account of the copier technicians maneuvering through the daily grind of their jobs and negotiating the “service triangle” between themselves and the machines, themselves and the customers/users, and the users and the machines is rich in detail and surprisingly interesting. (Who would have imagined that someone could write 160 pages about a day-in-the-life-of-the-Xerox-man?) The technicians think of themselves as skilled, yet underappreciated. Interaction with customers is a much bigger part of their jobs than is believed by the corporate management. They are forced to constantly improvise, both because of the complexities of the technology and the vagaries of its users, but also because of the inadequacies of the product design and documentation. And so on, and so forth….Okay, so what’s the use of this knowledge?
While this was not Orr’s stated intention, the numerous implications of his work that immediately leapt to my mind were related to management of this portion of the company. FOr example, if procedures limit future options (like cutting a wire that may be useful in the future (27)) or design leads to poor performance (reversing-roll problem (57)) – how is this knowledge being communicated to the non-technicians in the company? Like the engineers or manufacturing units? Why do some fixes get incorporated (soldering of faulty wiring connections (52)) and some procedures are made customizable (the LOLOS forms for field inventory (55)) but others are not? When technicians circumvent the system by obtaining extra schematics (33) or manually forcing settings outside the specified ranges (Chicago Fix 53), what does that mean for the company’s efficiency and performance? Are the corporate criterion for success (partially machine and partially customer (80)) out of sync with what the technicians value in their performances? For example, if the technicians think of the “great” technicians as those that hold a “repertoire of known problems and fixes”, doesn’t this imply that that knowledge is held within a person (who may leave, get fired, forget….)? Maybe the proximate technicians would then have access to that information, but what about the universe of technicians? Wouldn’t it be better for the company if everyone knew these findings? How could the company employ incentives for reporting and documentation of these currently oral traditions? [It seems like these were the types of questions that Xerox also had in response to Orr’s work since they apparently created a tips database, and the enduring influence that it has had on the business community – see Wall Street Journal article of 1/23/06 – “Companies struggle to pass on workers’ knowledge”]. What would Orr think of this use of his work? Is there a privileged use of ethnographically gathered information? If so, what is it?
While this was not Orr’s stated intention, the numerous implications of his work that immediately leapt to my mind were related to management of this portion of the company. FOr example, if procedures limit future options (like cutting a wire that may be useful in the future (27)) or design leads to poor performance (reversing-roll problem (57)) – how is this knowledge being communicated to the non-technicians in the company? Like the engineers or manufacturing units? Why do some fixes get incorporated (soldering of faulty wiring connections (52)) and some procedures are made customizable (the LOLOS forms for field inventory (55)) but others are not? When technicians circumvent the system by obtaining extra schematics (33) or manually forcing settings outside the specified ranges (Chicago Fix 53), what does that mean for the company’s efficiency and performance? Are the corporate criterion for success (partially machine and partially customer (80)) out of sync with what the technicians value in their performances? For example, if the technicians think of the “great” technicians as those that hold a “repertoire of known problems and fixes”, doesn’t this imply that that knowledge is held within a person (who may leave, get fired, forget….)? Maybe the proximate technicians would then have access to that information, but what about the universe of technicians? Wouldn’t it be better for the company if everyone knew these findings? How could the company employ incentives for reporting and documentation of these currently oral traditions? [It seems like these were the types of questions that Xerox also had in response to Orr’s work since they apparently created a tips database, and the enduring influence that it has had on the business community – see Wall Street Journal article of 1/23/06 – “Companies struggle to pass on workers’ knowledge”]. What would Orr think of this use of his work? Is there a privileged use of ethnographically gathered information? If so, what is it?
posted by Anonymous at 1:50 AM
2 Comments:
In the forward Stephen Barley writes that Orr's work "documents and develops the important and counterintuitive notion that technical knowledge is best viewed as a socially distributed resource that is diffused and stored primarily through an oral culture" (xiii). I wonder how, or if, the internet and other networking telecommunications advances of the last decade have significantly affected this oral tradition. I think of all the "knowledge databases" and "knowledge sharing" applications developed by consulting firms and other large companies (as KSG alluded to) that try to capture and codify this knowledge. But then I think about how conversation and interaction produce knowledge and provoke new ideas and I wonder if it wouldn't be better to invest in more collaborative, personal and unstructured approaches as opposed to assuming you can transmit what you know via words on a screen stored in a database. Not to mention finding this knowledge.
Also, I wonder to what extent Orr's presence in an otherwise solitary work existence affected the production and transmission of knowledge. It seems to me that the technicians primarily work solo, but when Orr tagged along there was then another person with whom to interact (interface?!?) and perhaps even bounce ideas off of, given Orr's previous technical experience. DId this influence the production of knowledge or even facilitate these flows.
As Bea mentioned, it would have been nice to know more about the methodology and research design in order to assess some of these issues.
So What Indeed…
Did we just now discover the concept of human resources? I can’t be sure, but I would assume there are similarities between a Swedish work place and one here in the U.S. The ‘real’ jobs I have had in my life come down to four: three dark months at McDonald’s (Kaiser Söze sound familiar? Whisper our local manager’s name, you’d get the same reaction); many years working in a grocery store while in college; another six months as a store manager between semesters abroad; and finally three years as a bureaucrat for the Swedish Migration Board. These jobs range from the seemingly completely unqualified to the somewhat more demanding. All of them, however, displayed the same characteristics described by Orr in his painfully detailed description of the work of a technician (sorry KSG, I do not share your enthusiasm…). That is, there is an oral distribution of knowledge, often shared to newcomers by those who have been present at the work place longer. I believe these people are often seen as possessing something referred to as ‘experience’.
In all fairness, Orr wrote this book ten years ago, and perhaps he is partly the reason why my last employer chose to document the responsibilities of employees through a dialogue, in which we all had a say in what we felt our job meant, rather than imposing a definition on us. So, thanks, I guess.
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