Julian E Orr.

Julian E Orr. Ithaca, NY: ILR Pres 1996 172 pp $3250 cloth; $1395 paper.

by what means ironic, at an historic weight when technology has assumed a taken-for-granted status in the workplace, that scholarship in succession organizations, work, and technology has merely recently begun to find its feet With this splendid ethnography of work practices by the agency of technicians who service photocopy machines, Julian Orr has made a major incursion into this territory, producing a convolution that bridges disciplinary boundaries by dint of joining the literature of organizations, occupations, and work with that of science and technology studies. Orr, formerly an army technician, trained as an anthropologist, then useed by Xerox to repair copiers in use in the corporation, now is part of a social science research team at Xerox He regions Talking about Machines in field observations made while accompanying technical service workers who repair photocopies in succession site for the customers who have purchased them. His year's of preparation have paid distant from in a nuanced analysis of work practices and technology that builds toward an anthropology of organizations, adding to our understanding of the human/machine interface and the social organization of work and occupations.

Theoretically, Orr positions his analysis within the situated-action approach to work practices bring to maturityed by Suchman (1987) in her fine meditation of human/machine communication. In explaining what he finds, he ranges across disciplinary boundaries, drawing onward Garfinkle, Geertz, Latour, Levi-Strauss, Schon Lave, Van Maanen, Martin, and Barley. The race-ground he carves out for us is the triangular relationship between technicians, customers, and machines. This is an occupation that makes house calls. As we tread close upon these technicians on the work at jobs and in encounters with each other, the photocopiers, and customers, we diocese that this job is no piece of cake. The documentation furnished on the corporation, both to customers and technicians is inadequate as a guide to by what means to fix a recalcitrant machine; the customers are unhappy, and the do job-work of nurturing the customer/corporate relationship falls to the technician who corresponds to a call; individual machines have idiosyncrasies that dare understanding; replacement parts often don't work; work rotation sometimes has common technician invading another's service territory, to such a degree neither the regular technician nor the interloper knows the history of the machine (which deflects out to be important); the customer, misusing and abusing machines, is the ever-present enemy from whom their machines must be preserveed All of these social and technical complexities combine to make this apparently routine work highly non-routine. The work practices of these technicians require constant improvisation.

Talking about Machines gains its title because narrative is essential to this contingent and continuous extemporaneous practice. Technicians sustain themselves by the and of the development of an oral improvement in which the circulation of stories continues them informed of the subtleties of machine behavior in the field. Thus, narrative, to what extent it is employed and in subordination to what circumstances, is the analytic thread that hastens throughout the book. Considerable artistry was required of the author in shaping this main division Orr protects us from this same complex, near-impenetrable technical language by dint of demonstrating narrative-in-use by several different means: for example, common chapter isolates vignettes of technicians talking work-talk in three different circumstances, another focuses forward different kinds of war stories. Whatever the chapter theme, we are able to view clearly and from different vantage points the primacy of talk in negotiating work practices. Orr does not make distinctions between narrative, stories, discourse, and accounts, limits that he uses throughout, to such a degree it is not clear if he is using them interchangeably or is making more crooked points. These terms have been clarified by way of others (for a review, view Orbuch, 1997); if employed here, the distinctions would have lowered the analysis.

What come forths is a fascinating portrait of an occupational cultivation and complex work practices normally invisible to us. Orr put in mind ofs they are invisible to Xerox administrators, too, who make decisions about documentation, territories, and work rotation without sensitivity to the social and technical fragility of the work that is done. Orr determines with a theoretical chapter that lifts us without of daily work practices to broader issues. First, he throw backs on how technicians deal with "the fragility of understanding and the fragility of control" (p 144) that are inherent in the social and technical aspects of work practice. Having laid without the sources of uncertainty in preceding chapters, Orr argues that the technicians he observ achieve rule by community values that help these service workers calculator the constant threat of chaos. These shared values include keeping tools, parts, and appearance in order, drawing forward an oral culture that addition s the gap between documentation furnished on the corporation and the real challenges of the technical work, and technical expertise demonstrated by means of quick and neat fixes. next to the first Orr turns to the literature upon work, juxtaposing his findings against traditional assumptions about alienation and deskilling. Neither alienation nor deskilling, Orr ends typifies his technicians. He points gone out that little empirical evidence exists that can be brought to bear in succession these issues because of the bent for "black box treatment of recent jobs" (p. 152). (As Barley wryly notes in the preface, the harshest critics of scientific management must admit that at least they come aftered in studying work process.) Buttressing his position, Orr gathers together any otherwise widely scattered, superior research onward work processes, identifying common themes and differences.