Narratives and “I statements"

Compared to other research work that we have read in the past year, a striking feature of this book was Orr’s willingness to use the first person in his writing. For myself, I can say that from the time I was first taught to write formally, I was explicitly told never to use “I” in formal writing – even writing this sentence feels strangely uncomfortable.

However, since Orr’s focus is on the narratives that the technicians use to describe themselves, their work, and their machines, he is forced to take “I statements” seriously –including his own. Rather than standing apart from the subjects of his research, as an objective third party observer, he attempts to integrate himself into his own narrative account of his interactions with these technicians (for example in Chapter 2’s vignettes).

So what is the relationship of the narrative to “social science”? There are a couple levels of this dynamic that are brought out in the book.

1.) On the most basic level, taking non-academics’ narratives seriously, allows for new voices and realities to be heard and portrayed. The “objective” researcher’s willingness to engage with the “subjects” of the study breaks down the idea of the scientist being able to observe the social world from afar, without participating in it. Orr explicitly differentiates himself from this more traditional (dare I say neo-positivist?) idea of social science by relating a technicians’ story of his interaction with a researcher who pretended he could maintain objectivity:

“Frank was delighted that I had been to school on this copier. He had been observed by an earlier visitor doing a time and motion study who refused to speak to him at all. Frank had wondered how the observer could write down what Frank was doing if he knew nothing about the job” (60).

Clearly, the fact that the researcher refused to talk to the technician not only (a) did not make him any less of a participant in the process we was trying to study “objectively”, and (b) greatly hindered his ability to draw any meaningful conclusions about what he was observing. On this level, I see a great deal of value in Orr’s work.

2.) But there is a second level of the narrative that also must be considered: the researcher’s own narrative. It is one thing to come to understand that your ethnographic study participants are communicating their own narratives, but it is quite another to turn their narratives into your own – to turn their day-to-day realities into your “research.”

It was at this level that I began to feel a bit dubious about the conclusions that Orr reached. Orr says his goal is to “examine practice” (10) and to analyze the Weberian “webs of significance” (12) in the cultural world of the technicians.

But on what basis does he then become qualified to infer what the “real” meanings of their narratives are, beyond what the participants themselves claim them to be? A couple examples of this are his description of a “social contract” between customers and technicians in Chapter 5, and his conclusion that most of their stories reflect the issues of “fragility of understanding and the fragility of control” (144). How does Orr become qualified to draw these distinctions? How do we judge the legitimacy of these conclusions? At what point can an ethnographer who pretends complete subjectivity suddenly remove themselves and write objectively?

Nevertheless, I (!) would like to note that I found some of his conclusions profoundly significant, especially as they might speak to policy questions surrounding modern work. Although it is not the technicians addressing these questions directly, perhaps we have to take Orr’s word on his conclusions as the next closest thing we can get to some ideal-type dialogue or understanding.

Most notably, Orr’s conclusion’s that technicians’ narratives actually constitute part of their work is revealing: “Stories are more than a celebration of practice; they are an essential part of the practice to be celebrated” (143). The importance of the ethnographic engagement is also made apparent as he describes how “attitude towards war stories varies directly with distance from the field” (140). The technicians find them critical, their immediate managers see their limited instructional value, those promoted out of the field see them as political jockeying for reputation, and top managers see them as a waste of working time.