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TALKING ABOUT MACHINES -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Vignettes of Work in the Field -- 3. Territories: The Geography of the Service Triangle -- 4. The Technicians -- 5. The Customers -- 6. Talking about Machines, and Bits Thereof . . . -- 7. The Work of Service -- 8. War Stories of the Service Triangle -- 9. Warranted and Other Conclusions -- References -- Index

Ethnography of technical work is susceptible of many readings. The author responds, suggesting that learning, narratives, and community all derive from the work and cannot be considered without it. Similarly, the relationship of the work to its parent organization is examined in terms of enactment, control, managerial discourse, technique, the socialization of technology, and the question of caring for society.

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

This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in their relations to the sites of their production and use, the authors reconstruct technologies as social practice. A central problem for the design of artifacts then becomes their relation to the environments of their intended use. Through ethnographies of the social world, the analyses focus on just how social/material specificities are assembled together to comprise our everyday experience.