Julian E. Orr

Narratives at work: story telling as cooperative diagnostic activity

The diagnostic process for copiers involves narration of the process, including a description of the state of the machine. This follows from the fact that copiers are elaborate assemblages of relatively simple mechanisms, and the problem in diagnosis is not so much the testing of components as keeping track of the tests and making sense of their results. The anecdotal re-telling of this narrative to ones associates constitutes the mechanism for incorporating the diagnostic experience into the community expertise. These anecdotes are remembered and used or referred to during the diagnosis of other difficult problems or when seeking help. Individual expertise is in part the ability to interpret the anecdotes, to abstract the information about the machine from the context of the story. The participation of the community in remembering and using these anecdotes gives the community the flexibility to adapt to the unforeseen problems which are necessarily part of the service function.

Images of Work

The ways in which work gets done are observably different from the ways in which those in positions of responsibility talk about that work or from the ways in which the organizational and business literature portrays work. The ethnographic study of work focuses on work practice, on what is actually done, and on how those doing the work make sense of their practice, but this is rarely part of either corporate or organizational discourse about work This article tries to show what is missing from this discourse and suggests that the corporate model is based on a common misapprehension of the nature of technique and confounds the ways humans work with the ways machines work

Ethnography and Organizational Learning: In Pursuit of Learning at Work

This paper considers the question of ”organizational learning” and finds the organization to be much more problematic than the learning. It reports on the successful experimental use of radios to support field service work, in particular to facilitate learning from experience on the job. This worked well, but the corporate response to the eperiment suggests that the organization enacted by management differs significantly from that enacted by those doing the work of the corporation.