Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, and: Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings (review)

For the most part, histories of technology concentrate on either developers or end users of devices. Yet as anyone who has spent time waiting for a computer repair or the results of a medical test knows, modern technologies also involve a third set of actors: technicians. When machines work properly, those men and women remain invisible; when things break, we expect their skilled service. Calling attention to this overlooked group, two volumes in the new Collection on Technology and Work series from ILR/Cornell University Press analyze the evolution of technicians’ cultural and labor roles.

Between Craft and Science notes that the proportion of workers classified as technicians has risen 240 percent since 1950, overtaking the number of farmers in the United States. Industry employs one technician for every two engineers or scientists; the medical system has two health care technicians per physician. The definition of “technician” can be frustratingly vague, but Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr use the term to refer to jobs that draw on both contextual knowledge and abstract representations, involving relatively complex tools. That interpretation covers an enormous range of positions, from computer specialists, medical technologists, and air traffic controllers to television repairers, nuclear power plant monitors, science and engineering lab staff. Workers in those categories function as “buffers” and “brokers,” mediating between technology and society. Even as technicians link consumers to machines, they use their expertise to shield users from the tricky details. Technicians “are expected to ensure that the ‘system’ runs and to rescue us from the complexities and ‘normal accidents’ . . . of the technologies we create but no longer understand,” Barley and Orr write. “They enable us to get on with our lives without knowing too much about the machinery that runs in the background. . . . In this sense, then, technicians separate us from the technology on which our society is based” (p. 14). The first three essays in Between Craft and Science explore the notion that technical work defies the standard divide between mental versus manual work, blue- versus white-collar labor. The authors contend that technicians represent a unique synthesis, blending elements of both craft and profession.

The book’s second section comprises its core, four essays that assess the nature of technical practice, knowledge, and culture, as revealed in specific case studies. Readers of T&C may be especially interested in Brian Pentland’s piece, “Bleeding Edge Epistemology: Practical Problem Solving in Software Support Hot Lines.” In addition to correcting technical faults, Pentland explains, people who staff computer hotlines must simultaneously repair human relationships, keeping the customer satisfied. As a nice complement, Stacia Zabusky’s article “Computers, Clients, and Expertise: Negotiating Technical Identities in a Nontechnical World” uses the example of microcomputer support personnel in a university to analyze issues of authority, expertise, and status. Bonalyn Nelson’s absorbing piece, “Work as a Moral Act,” looks at how emergency medical technicians make decisions about crisis treatment, negotiating for the patient’s needs while protecting themselves from liability.

The final three essays in Barley and Orr’s volume emphasize the importance of understanding what is really involved in technicians’ daily work. Mario Scarselletta makes a powerful argument that legislation intended to improve the accuracy of medical tests by stipulating education qualifications for laboratory technicians is misguided. His discussion of how lab staff prepare histology samples and troubleshoot hematology machines underlines the notion of skill as something acquired informally and tacitly through experience, rather than something instilled in the classroom. That question about the nature of learning also appears in the essay “Engineering Education and Engineering Practice: Improving the Fit.” Louis L. Bucciarelli...