The situated activity people have written on the informality of learning in the workplace, right now I am thinking of Julian Orr's (1996) Talking about machines, ILR, imprint of Cornell University Press. While it might be a bit dated, Orr draws on the work of Ken Kusterer (1978) to define worker's knowledge of the job into three categories: a) knowledge of routine processes b) knowledge of potential variations c) social knowledge Orr's book highlights the fact that the job cannot be learned without the informal input of others, particularly in b)variations and c) social knowledge. The troubleshooting aspect (in the this case Xerox repair staff) mostly happens in the area of c). Teams of programmers work much in the same way, it's the variations and the social knowledge (who to ask, and when to ask them) that are the most helpful in troubleshooting problems, sorry that's a personal observation, when I worked with a team of programmers in a company producing medical instrumentation. Orr's got a nice bibliography on work, might be something for you there. Bonnie Nardi, A small matter of programming, 1991, MIT Press (by memory) might also be helpful and more to the point. Cheers, Denise ===== "I want to focus on my salad" (M. Stewart. 2001) Denise Rall, Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & PhD student, School of Education, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW, 2480 Australia Phone +61-2-6624-8627 Fax +61-2-6624-8637 Office (Tuesdays) (02) 6620 3577 Mob 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/edu/research/deniserall/index.html __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com