Stephen R Barley and Julian E Orr.

Stephen R Barley and Julian E Orr, ed Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres 1997 264 pp $4500 cloth; $1995 paper.

more [i]or[/i] less years ago I spotted in the novel York Times Business Section a picture Roland Barthes would have lov Behind a vast console, covered with all sorts of dials and buttons, sat a lonely technician. Before him was a large window affording a panoramic view of the entire GE dishwasher assembly floor below. single in kind technician and hundreds of machine servants. The article was about the "new manufacturing." This main division is about the person behind that comfort and his near and distant kin. The title says it well, it's about those whose labors are neither craft - skilled yet learned from practice - nor professional - prepared for their work by the agency of a lengthy process of technical education. The work of these technicians has four attributes: (1) the centrality of a tangled technology to the work, (2) the importance of contextual knowledge or skill, (3) the importance of theories or abstract representations of phenomena, and (4) the existence of a community of practice that assists as a distributed repository for knowledge of relevance to practitioners (p 12) The volume comprises an introductory chapter and three parts, given above respectively to (1) the position of the technician in the social and organizational order, the cultural ambiguities in disparities between a natural "horizontal" organization of technical specialties and the prevailing vertical organization preferr by the agency of employing firms, (2) in-depth descriptions of a dispose of technical occupations from an ethnographic perspective, and (3) an policy implications flowing from these considerations.

Several themes or "problematics" appear quite through these chapters. One is the ambiguous social position of the technical worker. While the relative importance of technical workers (and their numbers) has increased dramatically athwart recent decades, there has been no so increase in wages or organizational status. Technicians present the appearance more to resemble non-technical workers than professionals in areas like as job satisfaction and organizational allegiance. This assumes surprising, given the educational and experience requirements of technical work. Another, related theme is the ambiguity of the organizational position of technicians. To use the book's language, technicians can be typified as either "buffers" or "brokers" essentially as either assistants to professionals or largely independent practitioners mediating between a professional community of knowledge and non-technical conclusion users of the knowledge. While the two groups have to negotiate an identity in an organization in which their efforts are peripheral, this is especially conformable to fact for the brokers. Who are they? To what community do they belong: the community of knowledge, that of the organization, or neither?

A final theme I will note explicitly (there are others) is the tension between the presum utility of professional (credentialed) knowledge as oppos to experiential knowledge. Technicians find themselves relying forward a knowledge of practice unraveled by themselves and their peers while for a variety of reasons, the management emphasizes credentials and academic training. Here again is a source of conflict resident in a more natural horizontal arrangement of expertise and the preferr vertical form of authority.

This is an interesting main division and develops issues of which we have little specific, organized knowledge. Technical work is now the single largest constituting of the workforce and is growing rapidly. To hear economists reckon it, this kind of work is revolutionizing our political economy. further organizational scientists really don't know a great deal more about this kind of work and its organization than we did decades ago. For united thing, technical workers are an extremely heterogeneous cluster The interesting ethnographic studies not absented here make this quite clear. I would ask, does it really make faculty of perception to group "computer programmers" (an extremely heterogeneous collection in itself) with quality rule "technicians" on an assembly line who do little more than record numbers. Another issue which has been around for decades is the experiential versus academic skill requirements of technical work. Because technical work serves to become highly specialized organizationally, technicians (and engineers) issue to depend much more forward a body of practice than upon any academic knowledge. Still, this doesn't stop the management from insisting upon technical credentials. Is this a problem? If in like manner what should be changed, the work or the training?

I find that this volume offers to anyone seriously interested in organizational studies an opportunity to secure involved in an area of work that is certain to become steady more important in the what may occur hereafter Questions are posed here that can combustibles dozens of interesting research agendas. The editors and authors are to be complimented for organizing their chapters into a reasonably coherent whole, with issues being raised and lay opened in the quite various studies currented Only one minor quibble from me Is it really too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to ask to have a concluding chapter that summarizes the issues neared in an edited volume? Just asking.