To seethat working, learning, and innovating are interrelated and compatible and thuspotentially complementary, not conflicting forces requires a distinct conceptual shift.
The argument is an effort to change previous or perhaps embedded beliefs about work systems
we have been arguing throughout, to understand the way information isconstructed and travels within an organization, it is first necessary to understand thedifferent communities that are formed within it and the distribution of power amongthem
Baller conclusion, no real notes except that this is a great theory and how it works in practice is subject to absolutely vast pressures, which the team already acknowledges.
This architecture should preserve andenhance the healthy autonomy of communities, while simultaneously building aninterconnectedness through which to disseminate the results of separate communi-ties' experimen
This involves a staggering amount of trust
semiautonomous, self-constituting communities and not a brittle monolith
Jack Welch, GE, Six Sigma and lean/just-in-time manufacturing
will those smaller communities be adequately resourced to do this work if they cannot communicate upstairs what the work is
This is also related to bigger moves in US venture capital at this moment, specifically in and around california
dominant world view
this may require a closer look at what the dominant world view actually is in order to be useful
communities-of-practice must be allowed some latitude to shake them-selves free of received wisdo
"must be allowed some latitude" is again interesting given the context of this paper
Alternative world views, then, do not lie in the laboratory or strategic planningoffice alone, condemning everyone else in the organization to submit to a unitaryculture
It's weird that they don't cite Laboratory Life here
he two changes wentalong togethe
The rupture of a new paradigm: Kuhn's "the structure of scientific revolutions" covers this in a great deal of depth
Conversely, -hey can be granted peripherality but denied legitimacy. Martin(1982) gives examples of organizations in which legitimacy is explicitly denied ininstances of "open door" management, where members come to realize that, thoughthe door is open, it is wiser not to cross the threshold.
really interesting given the period this is written in
, not by explicating abstractions of individual practice.
everyone works their own way on their own
the question arises, how is it possible to foster learning-in-working
What they are actually interested in: how to foster improvement.
If this distinction is correct then it has two particularly important corollaries. First,work practice and learning need to be understood not in terms of the groups that areordained (e.g. "task forces" or "trainees"), but in terms of the communities thatemerg
Community work is therefore very important to permitting innovation or any type of Learning, really. It's unavoidable even in apparently-homogenous groups.
Learning, from the viewpoint of LPP, essentially involves becoming an "insider."Learners do not receive or even construct abstract, "objective," individual knowledge;rather, they learn to function in a community-be it a community of nuclearphysicists, cabinet makers, high school classmates, street-corner society, or, as in thecase under study, service technicians. They acquire that particular community'ssubjective viewpoint and learn to speak its language. In short, they are enculturated(Brown, Collins, and Duguid 1989). Learners are acquiring not explicit, formal"expert knowledge," but the embodied ability to behave as community members. Forexample, learners learn to tell and appreciate community-appropriate stories, discov-ering in doing so, all the narrative-based resources we outlined above. As Jordan(1989) argues in her analysis of midwifery, "To acquire a store of appropriate storiesand, even more importantly, to know what are appropriate occasions for telling them,is then part of what it means to become a midwife" (p. 935)
This is an interesting assertion here! It is valuing MEMBERSHIP pretty deeply - but what happens when someone is physically unable to fully become an insider, no matter their ideological commitment?
This is where "one of the good ones" and "tokenizing" pretty much lives all the time.
This is extremely tied to any critical theories that help understand hard differences in groups, particularly historically wicked social problems.
f social construc
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517607/the-social-construction-of-technological-systems/
The Social Construction Of Technological Systems is a major theoretical work originally produced in 1984 and released as a book from MIT Press in 1987, after which point it shows up in a lot of places. If we want to pull that thread, we'd look in the citations for specifics.
to Levi-Strauss's (1966) concept of bricolage
Claude Lévi-Strauss is the chief proponent of structuralism: "a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behavior, culture, and experience that focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system that reflect patterns underlying a superficial diversity."
a lot of contemporary critical theory is post-structuralist in that it is working with or against or around structuralism
bricolage is a theoretical construct assembled from many available resources - in thinking, it is interdisciplinarity, where in media it would be something like combining painting, photography, and sculpture as independent disciplines performed to a high level.
programming a machine using a different paradigm for each represented system - functional in one part, object-oriented elsewhere - is plausibly a form of bricolage
they meet for coffee or for meals andtrade stories back and forth
A seed is laid for the argument about what collaboration is later in the paper.
who gets to go to coffee? who gets to trade stories?
She studied the clash between midwifery as it is prescribed by officials fromMexico City and as it is practiced in rural Yucatan.
See also WTREX controlled-burn forest management in the west coast (2022)
thick description
technical term for a detailed and in-depth recording of what people were doing during an ethnography
A Qualitative Method has appeared
As a result, a wedge is drivenbetween the corporation and its reps: the corporation assumes the reps are untrain-able, uncooperative, and unskilled; whereas the reps view the overly simplistictraining programs as a reflection of the corporation's low estimation of their worthand skill
the last forty years tbh
performing their jobs according to formal job descriptions,
in practice this is a strike tactic called "work to rule"
Often it has its moreimmediate cause in the strategy to downskill positions
Employers ain't like paying people, so they try to downskill by abstracting roles and encoding them.
We begin by looking at the variance between a major organization's formaldescriptions of work both in its training programs and manuals and the actual workpractices performed by its members. Orr's (1990a, 1990b, 1987a, 1987b) detailedethnographic studies of service technicians illustrate how an organization's view ofwork can overlook and even oppose what and who it takes to get a job done. Basedon Orr's specific insights, we make the more general claim that reliance on espousedpractice (which we refer to as canonical practice) can blind an organization's core tothe actual, and usually valuable practices of its members (including noncanonicalpractices, such as "work arounds"). It is the actual practices, however, that determinethe success or failure of organizations.
Initial argument: Via reading many ethnographies, these authors have transitively proven the details of practice in how work gets done determines organizational success.
By reassessing work, learning, and innovation inthe context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connectionsbetween these three become appare
From that familiar basis, we can then go back to the introduction and come to understand the precision and theoretical basis of the author's arguments - if we have even one small toehold we can start climbing the paper.
In this case, with this paper being from 1991, we can see that this predates the internet qua internet, and we can consider what the technological provisions of org comms were at the time - telephones, fax, office spaces, and so on - and also social constructions, like the passage of the new Civil Rights Act in September of the year, following the veto of the bill in 1990. The expansion of the bill allowed employees to more successfully sue employers in cases of harassment or exclusionary behaviour, which could be argued to mean this type of research about how to understand working, learning, and "innovation" was in the water as organizations changed to be less uniform in their apparent membership.
Organizational redesign to include more people in informal networks: legally suddenly very important in the early nineties in the USA.
This paper does not have to be specifically about that problem for that problem to be nationally interesting and form the backdrop of the paper's Moment at somewhere like Xerox Palo Alto.
What the evaluations saw was that an expensive machine was not needed to make arecord copy of original documents. For the most part, carbon paper already did thatadmirably and cheaply. What they failed to see was that a copier allowed theproliferation of copies and of copies of copies. The quantitative leap in copies andtheir importance independent of the original then produced a qualitative leap in theway they were used. They no longer served merely as records of an original. Instead,they participated in the productive interactions of organizations' members in aunprecedented way. (See Latour's (1986) description of the organizational role o
... find the citation within the paper and read the surrounding argument, in this case a really correct representation of Bruno Latour's "immutable mobiles" as individual units of scientific production that are difficult to change (https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/13things/7163.html)
LATOUR, B. (198
To read a theory paper, first go check out who the citations are, look for one you recognize from related readings or basic intro courses, then...
Figure 3 shows a second way of searching for the information. Moreexperienced users may wish to go directly to the information, and they canuse the grapher view of the same diagnostic questions.
Attempt to answer questions such as "how to store, find, and reproduce private knowledge into a public sphere with the help of an information interface"
The students are presented with about 500 of these cases in the course of their studies, themain goal being to school their decision-making behavior. The large number of cases is notseen as an inductive basis for statistically generalizable knowledge, but rather as preparationfor a maximum number of diverse situations.
this seems like a truly extraordinary number of cases, more like the students are being indoctrinated into a stress-based cohort model than are learning anything generalizable.
archaeological reading is a means of constantly locating a text’s arguments, statements, and metaphors within a set of other discourses (see Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, “What is an author?”
referential reading
A positive reading to me is one which aims to create new concepts or arguments, or to elaborate on existing ones in order to articulate them with current issues. As I discussed today, I think a negative reading is one which is addressed to one’s own limitations as a cautionary tale.
Hello world