Asaf Darr

Technological Incubators and the Social Construction of Innovation Networks: An Israeli Case Study

The construction of informal networks between universities and their affiliated technological incubators is explored using data gathered from forty-nine in-depth interviews with R&D project managers, project workers, and thirteen incubator support personnel from an incubator affiliated with the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, a leading research university. Findings point to a variety of strong and meaningful ties between the incubators personnel and university staff and faculty members. The informal exchange of knowledge is part of a wider barter economy between the incubator and the Technion. In fact, the data support a cyclical model of innovation management, in which a two-way flow of knowledge and goods between the Technion and the incubator exists. Although the construction and maintenance of reciprocal ties has some drawbacks, including the uncertain loyalties of workers affiliated with both organizations, the incubator remains a solid example of how an active work relationship between a research university and an affiliated incubator is an extremely efficient way of promoting innovation management. (SAA)

Physicians' and nurses' reactions to electronic medical records. Managerial and occupational implications.

Aims to understand the managerial implications of the perceptions hospital physicians and nurses hold toward the introduction of electronic medical records (EMRS). In-depth interviews were used with 18 hospital physicians and eight nurses from several different hospital wards at a large government-run, university-affiliated hospital in Israel, where EMRs were gradually introduced over the last 20 years. Physicians identified six different domains of impact. Senior physicians, most of whom held managerial roles, tended to emphasise managerial outcomes and to view these as positively affecting their organisations. Junior doctors emphasised mostly negative occupational effects of the EMR on their work--including limits to professional autonomy, heavier administrative burdens, and reinforcement of existing professional hierarchies. Nurses identified different domains and saw benefits for quality and administration of patient care.

Assumptions, assertions and the need for evidence:debugging debates about knowledge workers

Despite growing interest in the knowledge economy, the work practice of its key workers has remained neglected. This article reviews the key sociological and managerial debates about ascendant knowledge workers. The authors argue that both debates assume, rather than empirically examine, changing work practices and through a leap of faith move on to discuss the enhanced class position of knowledge workers and the managerial challenges that they pose. The authors postulate that omission of work practice undermines such claims. They critique both debates, presenting an alternative, empirically sensitive research agenda to help overcome the existing analytical myopia.

Gifting Practices and Interorganizational Relations: Constructing Obligation Networks in the Electronics Sector

Sociologists and economic anthropologists often implicitly associate capitalist societies with the commodity form and preindustrial societies with the gift form. In contrast, this ethnographic study of the sales of electronics components shows that gifting and commodity exchange actually are inextricably intertwined in contemporary markets. Commodity exchange depends on obligation networks created and sustained, in part, by gifting and countergifting. Each juncture of the sales process has an associated type of gifting. Gifts provide the social basis for a moral economy that governs the construction of sales networks.

Performing Sales: Material Scripts and the Social Organization of Obligation

Can a dramaturgical analysis of sales encounters further our understanding of the social organization of selling and buying in contemporary markets? The main argument of this paper is that limiting economic action in markets to the formal and often stylized and abstract properties of the exchange, as economists suggest, misses the material and social organization of this endeavor. Employing ethnographic methods, we apply our dramaturgical approach to three research sites in three different countries. We show how an often overlooked fundamental ingredient of economic transactions, the situated constitution of social obligation, is achieved locally on the sales floor. Social obligation allows the sellers and the buyers to move from one stage of the sales encounter to the next, and enables the closing of deals. As part of the constitution of obligation, market actors appeal to scripts which are observable, recurrent activities and patterns of interaction characteristic of a particular setting. Scripts are presented here as a basic unit of analysis in social studies of markets. We place most emphasis upon what we call “material scripts”, and show how they are organized to produce an escalating scale of obligation which helps buyers and sellers to produce and reproduce the underlying social and material logic of markets.

Control and autonomy among knowledge workers in sales: an employee perspective

This study focuses on control and autonomy among an emerging class of knowledge workers in sales, from the employees’ perspective. The sales engineers studied were not only technical experts, they also worked on their own in clients plants over extended periods of time, where they customised the emergent technology offered by their company. How did management control the work of the sales engineers? This paper will attempt to answer this question using ethnographic and interview material collected at a small engineering boutique. Market control emerges in this study as a central control mechanism. The sales engineers became a part of a quasi‐firm arrangement, composed of them and the clients engineers and managers, who supervised their work. Management effort to ensure detailed documentation emerges as a second control mechanism. The necessity to document created a dilemma for the sales engineers. They perceived documentation as a managerial tool designed to enhance control and limit their autonomy, but also as a professional norm.

Commodity, gift and mass-gift: on gift–commodity hybrids in advanced mass consumption cultures

Abstract While ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’ as theoretically distinct forms of circulation are central to economic sociology and anthropology, we argue that in practice they are often hybridized. Inspired by Bruno Latours work, we first describe the use in supermarkets and chain stores of one hybrid category, the mass-gift, which is neither a commodity nor a gift. Through our empirical investigation of sales interactions we critically describe the emergence of a vibrant mass-gift economy in which the meaning of ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’ as well as their hybrid forms is infused with ambiguity which is strategically played out by agentive social actors throughout the sales process. We suggest going beyond depictions of mass-gifting as merely a calculative strategy for promoting sales. Instead, we illustrate how mass-gifting establishes a relational space in which actors can negotiate the ambivalence of the cultural script of the ‘gift’: they can re-qualify the seller–buyer relationship as a socially binding one; and they can use the ambiguity infused into the notion of the mass-gift to express economic might and generate symbolic as well as material gains.

The Structure of Knowledge and Seller-Buyer Networks in Markets for Emergent Technologies

This empirical study compares the impact of knowledge structures on relational patterns in markets for emergent technology and in a mass market within the electronics industry. We hypothesized that in markets for emergent technologies, sellers and buyers do not have a common image of product use, and to reach it they must communicate contextual knowledge rooted in engineering practice. Furthermore, insofar as knowledge is contextual (as opposed to articulated in a mass market), sellers’ and buyers’ experts must engage in an intense technological dialogue. These hypotheses were tested by a key-parametric qualitative field study and quantitative network analysis. Communication activity was found more intense in the seller-buyer network in the emergent technology market than in the mass market. The seller-buyer network of emergent technology was also more hierarchical, with technical experts located at the center of the technological dialogue regarding product application. Shared practice and co-development proved to be dominant forms of work organization in the market for emergent technologies. By contrast, sequential development epitomized the activities in the seller-buyer network of the standard product. Implications for network theory, economic sociology, and organization studies are discussed.

Trade shows and the creation of market and industry

This study addresses the question of the constitution of markets in advanced societies. Specifically, the article studies the role of the traveling trade show in creating the real time computing market, which is part of the US electronics sector, during the mid-1990s. Real time computing products assist the transfer, storage and processing of digital signals in real time and support many of the internet applications we use today. By applying ethnographic methods, we explore the general question of how economic actors cope with uncertainty in the phase of market-making and at the cutting edge of technology. The paper makes two contributions to the existing literature. First, it shows that the attempt to organize a trade show in real time computing was triggered by the uncertainty experienced by sellers regarding the identity of prospective buyers and about the exact use to which they would put the emergent technology which is offered for sale. Secondly, we trace the history of an emergent market. We claim that trade shows for innovative products are important venues at which markets coalesce. The identification and ordering of market actors, the institutionalization of a distinct business culture and the social networks developed among market actors and across the subsidiary markets provided the basic social infrastructure for what later became known as the real time computing industry.

Technical Labour in an Engineering Boutique: Interpretive Frameworks of Sales and R&D Engineers

This ethnographic study of engineers in action introduces an interpretive approach to the recent debate about the factors shaping the organisation of engineering labour within the firm. The study compares the consciousness of kind and of difference developed by R&D and sales engineers (also known as customer engineers) working for an engineering boutique. Two case stories and other field data exemplify that the R&D and the customer engineers not only developed distinct interpretive frameworks, they also enacted them in the course of daily interaction either to protect or to alter an existing jurisdictional map between the two engineering specialities. Discussion suggests that the organisation of engineering labour is partly shaped by the interrelation of interpretive frameworks developed by engineering sub-groups. The possible technisation of sales work in micro-electronics is also discussed.