GoKawiilTTHEY ATE TOGETHER every chance they could. They had to. The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care. The core of their operational knowledge was social. That’s the subject of this chapter.
It was the mid-1980s. They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration. The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room.
An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.
The cover of Julian Orr’s influential Talking About Machines shows technicians working on the Xerox 5090 photocopier, introduced in 1990. Though they were doing messy blue-collar work, Xerox required the technicians to act and dress white-collar. They carried their tools in a briefcase. Source
The anthropologist was Julian Orr. In 1979, he was hired by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in northern California to provide technical support for two machines being developed there—the Alto computer and a color laser printer. By 1984 he had migrated to studying Xerox service technicians, encouraged by John Seely Brown, then a lab manager, later director of PARC. Orr’s research culminated in a remarkable book titled Talking About Machines : An Ethnography of a Modern Job, published in 1996. His book shows that the most baffling problems the technicians faced in their machines were solved by discussion, and the most instructive element in their conversation was what Orr calls “war stories”—narratives the technicians told each other about how they worked through a bewildering problem in a machine to arrive at a satisfying solution.
The stories also establish the teller’s contribution to the local community of technicians. Orr writes:
Given that the only status within the community is that of competent practitioner, fame can only be based on a reputation for extraordinarily competent practice, the ability to solve newer and harder problems. Since technicians normally work alone, achievements will only be known if the person responsible tells them. Moreover, technicians want the information to circulate, so that others can address similar problems. A team shares responsibility for its calls, so there is incentive to have all members competent for as many problems as possible.1
Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users. That, too, was considered fixable. Orr declares that the technicians’
practice is a continuous, highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine…. Narrative forms a primary element of this practice. The actual process of diagnosis involves the creation of a coherent account of the troubled state of the machine from available pieces of unintegrated information…. A coherent diagnostic narrative constitutes a technician’s mastery of the problematic situation.
Narrative preserves such diagnoses as they are told to colleagues…. The circulation of stories among the community of technicians is the principal means by which the technicians stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behavior in the field.2
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