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"The findings of forensic science--from DNA profiles and chemical identifications of illegal drugs to comparisons of bullets, fingerprints, and shoeprints--are widely used in police investigations and courtroom proceedings. While we recognize the significance of this evidence for criminal justice, the actual work of forensic scientists is rarely examined and largely misunderstood. Blood, Powder, and Residue goes inside a metropolitan crime laboratory to shed light on the complex social forces that underlie the analysis of forensic evidence. Drawing on eighteen months of rigorous fieldwork in a crime lab of a major metro area, Beth Bechky tells the stories of the forensic scientists who struggle to deliver unbiased science while under intense pressure from adversarial lawyers, escalating standards of evidence, and critical public scrutiny. Bechky brings to life the daily challenges these scientists face, from the painstaking screening and testing of evidence to making communal decisions about writing up the lab report, all while worrying about attorneys asking them uninformed questions in court. She shows how the work of forensic scientists is fraught with the tensions of serving justice--constantly having to anticipate the expectations of the world of law and the assumptions of the public--while also staying true to their scientific ideals."--Inside jacket cover

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Introduction: Welcome to the Crime Lab -- PART 1: THE WORK OF CRIMINALISTS -- Chapter 1. Forensic Scientists at the Lab Bench -- Chapter 2. The Social Worlds of Forensic Science -- PART 2: THE CULTURE OF CRIMINALISTS -- Chapter 3. A Culture of Anticipation -- Chapter 4. Creating a Culture of Anticipation in the Crime Laboratory -- PART 3: THE STRUGGLES OF CRIMINALISTS -- Chapter 5. The Specter of Testifying -- Chapter 6. DNA Envy -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Case Notes on an Ethnography of a Crime Laboratory -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index

Cover -- Series page -- Qualitative Organizational Research -- Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data -- Contents -- CHAPTER 1: Boundaries, Bodies, and Beliefs -- CHAPTER 2: Being Valued and Devalued at Work -- CHAPTER 3: Managing Collaborations at the University-Industry Interface -- CHAPTER 4: Programmers and Professionalism -- CHAPTER 5: The Transformers -- CHAPTER 6: Embodied Relational Competence -- CHAPTER 7: Markets of Availability and the Commodification of Time in 21st Century Work -- CHAPTER 8: Adapting for the Sake of Beauty -- CHAPTER 9: Breaking Class Ceilings in Corporate Careers -- About the Contributors

Most studies of technologies' impact on occupational change focus on occupational groups' adoption and use of particular technologies in a field or workplace. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study of a crime laboratory, I focus instead on "evaluative spillovers": the comparisons that occupations encounter when technologies change the work of neighboring occupations in their field. I explore what happened when DNA profiling was held up as the "gold standard" of forensic evidence, resulting in scientific, public, and legal scrutiny of other forensic science occupational groups. Comparisons with DNA profiling challenged the working techniques and the values of firearms examiners, toxicologists, and narcotics analysts, but each group responded differently, either embracing or resisting changes to their work practices. Their responses were predicated on the institutional pathways that evaluative spillovers traveled through the field in locales such as professional association meetings and court proceedings. These three aspects of the occupational system—technique, values, and institutional pathways—influenced how workers negotiated the impact of technological change in the field of forensic science.

In this essay I argue that organizational theorizing would benefit from incorporating a richer understanding of work and occupations. To demonstrate how, I turn to recent literature analyzing inhabited institutions, occupations as institutions, and occupations as negotiated orders. I explore the theoretical and methodological implications of these approaches to show how they challenge some of our more abstract images of organizations. They do so by grounding their theoretical frameworks in work practices and interaction, interpretation and meaning, and understandings of occupational membership.

Temporary organizations are known to provide flexibility for industries that rely on them, but we know little about their implications for how work is accomplished and coordinated. In this paper, I propose that common portrayals of temporary organizations as ephemeral and unstable are inaccurate: Temporary organizations are in fact organized around structured role systems whose nuances are negotiated in situ. This paper analyzes one type of temporary organization, film projects, exploring the way in which roles both organize immediate work and maintain continuity across different projects. On each film set, role expectations are communicated through practices of enthusiastic thanking, polite admonishing, and role-oriented joking, which enable crew members to learn and negotiate role structures. Two important structural characteristics of film projects provide the organizational context within which coordination takes place: interorganizational career progression and projects as temporary total institutions. By showing how these structural elements and role enactments support one another, this work generates a more complete understanding of the conditions that affect coordination, including role duration, expectations of future interaction, and visibility of work.

This paper suggests that knowledge is shared in organizations through the transformation of occupational communities' situated understandings of their work. In this paper, I link the misunderstandings between engineers, technicians, and assemblers on a production floor to their work contexts, and demonstrate how members of these communities overcome such problems by cocreating common ground that transforms their understanding of the product and the production process. In particular, I find that the communities' knowledge-sharing difficulties are rooted in differences in their language, the locus of their practice, and their conceptualization of the product. When communication problems arise, if members of these communities provide solutions which invoke the differences in the work contexts and create common ground between the communities, they can transform the understandings of others and generate a richer understanding of the product and the problems they face.

Our research examines how parties challenging established social systems collaborate with defenders of those systems to achieve mutual goals. With field interviews and observations from four community projects in the open-source movement, we examine how these projects collaborated with firms defending proprietary approaches to software development. Drawing on social movement and organizational theory, we explain how challenging parties not only mobilize to achieve their goals but how they are able to transform contestation into collaboration. Open-source projects and firms held divergent interests but discovered areas of convergent interest and were able to adapt their organizing practices to collaborate through the creation of a boundary organization. By showing how boundary organizations help challengers and defenders manage four critical domains of organizing practices—governance, membership, ownership, and control over production—we provide analytic levers for determining when boundary organizations work. At the same time, we reveal the subsequent triadic role structure that unfolded among communities, the boundary organizations they designed, and firms.

We examine how different occupational communities that are embedded in organizations exercise control processes to achieve emergent coordination as they create complex products together. We compare two types of organizations, equipment manufacturing and film production, and find that although occupational control was important for emergent coordination in both settings, this relationship varied according to two aspects of occupational embeddedness: organizational acknowledgment of occupational control and occupational interdependence. In the equipment manufacturing setting, occupational control was latent: the communities visibly conformed to organizational control processes while exercising occupational control behind the scenes to coordinate emergently. In the film setting, the organization granted the occupational community significant latitude over its tasks, which enabled members to coordinate emergently to solve problems the majority of the time. We propose that these two aspects of occupational embeddedness must be analyzed together with occupational control processes to explain how integration unfolds in knowledge-based settings in ways that organizational control processes are ill-equipped to manage.

This paper introduces a model of collective creativity that explains how the locus of creative problem solving shifts, at times, from the individual to the interactions of a collective. The model is grounded in observations, interviews, informal conversations, and archival data gathered in intensive field studies of work in professional service firms. The evidence suggests that although some creative solutions can be seen as the products of individual insight, others should be regarded as the products of a momentary collective process. Such collective creativity reflects a qualitative shift in the nature of the creative process, as the comprehension of a problematic situation and the generation of creative solutions draw from—and reframe—the past experiences of participants in ways that lead to new and valuable insights. This research investigates the origins of such moments, and builds a model of collective creativity that identifies the precipitating roles played by four types of social interaction: help seeking, help giving, reflective reframing, and reinforcing. Implications of this research include shifting the emphasis in research and management of creativity from identifying and managing creative individuals to understanding the social context and developing interactive approaches to creativity, and from a focus on relatively constant contextual variables to the alignment of fluctuating variables and their precipitation of momentary phenomena.