My dissertation research has been looking at many of these same issues in the context of video game development companies in the US and India. I've found several different veins of work useful for thinking about it (see below). I think the biggest aspect is that epistemic violence is done on all sides. I'm actually giving a talk at GDC (Game Developers Conference) looking at "corporate geomorphology" which is just a fun (you have to be funny/have fun in GDC talks) way of talking about and thinking about fault lines in an organization. The point seems to be that we (all of us) are disciplined as a part of our disciplinary training to judge what counts and doesn't count as knowledge. That's the way it works, in many respects this is a necessary component. What we forget is how to come back together and make new knowledge in between disciplines (the inter part of interdisciplinary). Engineers, managers, artists, designers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ... are all guilty of this. Cheers. Casey Boundary Objects Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Epistemic Cultures / Faultlines / Practice Centered Study Knorr-Cetina, K. D. (1983). The Ethnographic Study of Scientific Work: Towards a Constructivist Interpretation of Science. In K. D. Knorr-Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (pp. 115-140). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Traweek, S. (2000). Faultlines. In R. Reid & S. Traweek (Eds.), Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine (pp. 21-48). New York, NY: Routledge Press. Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Forsythe, D. E. (2001). Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Organizational Studies - While I have a less full understanding of this material it certainly is useful. Still working out how precisely it fits together in my work. Another poster mentioned this, and I tend to agree, mostly. Orr, J. E. (1996). Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Barley, S. R. (1996). Technicians in the Workplace: Ethnographic Evidence for Bringing Work into Organizational Studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(3), 404-441. Chris Kelty & Gabriella Coleman - Gabriella Coleman's dissertation is very good, and captures very well the recursive public of Debian F/OSS developers. It's just one perspective, but if you take those ideas and contrast them with the publics of other epistemic communities, you get some interesting stuff falling out. It uses CK's notion of recursive publics pretty extensively. CK's article is also available through Anthrosource for you AAA members out there. Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2), 185-214. Coleman, G. E. (2005). The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition. Unpublished Dissertation, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Social Worlds Becker, H. (1984). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. On 10/16/06, Elizabeth Van Couvering <e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk> wrote:
Ahem - I should have said that this seems to be the perspective of the engineers, not necessarily my perspective! On 16 Oct 2006, at 09:34, Elizabeth Van Couvering wrote:
Hi everyone,
I wonder if anyone can lend some literature to the impression I have from interviewing a series of software engineers that their work in technology organisations is more valuable that the work of other parts of the organisation - e.g., "management", marketing, facilities, etc.
Thanks a bunch,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth Van Couvering PhD Student Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vancouve/ e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk