[Air-l] Organisational differences?

[Casey O'Donnell]

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 at 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 at lse.ac.uk
> >