Stephen Barley

• Stanford University

Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the...

Digital work is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to emerge to capture these activities, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This book brings together some of these techniques in one volume as a sourceb...

Technical work differs significantly from most other forms of work. This chapter explores those differences and how the differences pose important challenges for ethnographers who seek to study engineers, scientists, and other technical workers. The chapter summarizes the experience of thirty-five years’ of studying technical work to capture the so...

This paper proposes a unified approach to studying intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) that extends current studies of design and use. Current discussion of the implication of AI and the future of work gloss four important issues: variation, power, ideology, and institutions. By a unified approach we mean a research agenda...

In this chapter Stephen Barley discusses his path to becoming an institutionalist through his immersion in the research of the Chicago School sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Everett C. Hughes and Anselm Strauss. His claim is that the Chicago School sociologists were wrestling with the same problem that currently preoccupies many instit...

Relying on an ethnographic study of in-house public affairs professionals, this article sheds light on the process by which boundary-spanning occupations can shape an organization’s environment. Public affairs professionals are responsible for devising and implementing a firm’s political strategy. By focusing on their work practices both internally...

Technological innovation is a double-edged sword. It can help solve major problems, such as how to treat cancer, and can be an engine of economic growth, but it can also cost jobs, such as when automation replaces people Both aspects raise issues that have major but so far little-recognized policy implications. One such issue is that new technologi...

This chapter examines the disjunctures between engineering education and practice to identify ways to better connect the two. Qualitative interviews with engineering students and new engineers are used to compare the knowledge and skills that engineers learn in school and those that they learn on the job. Our findings demonstrate that, while engine...

Interest in creativity and innovation has skyrocketed in the past few decades, yet relatively few researchers have paid attention to what happens after an idea is generated. Drawing on an ethnography of architects we examine their day-to-day activities as they respond to unanticipated constraints, especially those that occur after they have settled...

Sociologists have paid little attention to what people mean when they call themselves "professionals" in their everyday talk. Typically, when occupations lack the characteristics of self-control associated with the established professions, such talk is dismissed as desire for greater status. An ethnography of speaking conducted among several techni...

Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learning’s relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated wit...

This essay responds to, largely concurs with, and extends the concerns Jerry Davis expressed in his June 2015 editorial essay in ASQ about the state of research in organizational theory. In particular, it discusses the reasons novelty has become such a valued commodity in organizational theory and its unintended consequences. Fault lies with the wa...

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a two-year period in two car dealerships, this paper employs role theory and a dramaturgical analysis of sales encounters to show how the internet has changed the relationship between car salesmen and their customers. The paper explores why Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to analyzing encounters provides...

This has traditionally been the methodology of choice in cultural anthropology, although numerous sociologists and an increasing number of organizational theorists have pursued ethnographic research (see Research Design).

The term “structuration” was coined to refer to the dynamic articulation between structure and action (which Giddens called “agency”).

Although organizational scholars have begun to study virtual work, they have yet to fully grapple with its diversity. We draw on semiotics to distinguish among three types of virtual work (virtual teams, remote control, and simulations) based on what it is that a technology makes virtual and whether work is done with or on, through, or within repre...

The increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people's lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitativ...

Although organizational theorists have long argued that environments shape organizational structures, they have paid little attention to the processes by which the shaping occurs. This paper examines these processes by showing how environments shape teaching and learning activities, which in turn shape structure. Observational field data from struc...

Although organizational theorists have given much attention to how environments shape organizations, they have given much less attention to how organizations mold their environments. This paper demonstrates what organizational scholars could contribute if they were to study how organizations shape environments. Specifically, the paper synthesizes w...

Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology’s affects on organizations are socially constructed. Constructivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology’s constraints and affordances, as...

This article begins by reviewing two major clusters of research on technical work, both developed after World War II when the employment of scientists and engineers began to attract attention. The first cluster, called the Weberian literature, emerged in the 1950s when industrial sociologists were actively exploring the implications and limitations...

Researchers have had difficulty accommodating materiality in voluntaristic theories of organizing. Although materiality surely shapes how people use technologies, materiality’s role in organizational change remains under-theorized. We suggest that scholars have had difficulty grappling with materiality because they often conflate the distinction be...

Organizational theorists have had much to say about how environments affect organizations but have said relatively little about how organizations shape their environment. This silence is particularly troubling, given that organizations, in general, and corporations, in particular, now wield inordinate political power. This article illustrates three...

Executive Overview Contract work and outsourcing represent widely acknowledged manifestations of the groundswell of economic change that is shaking the foundations of work and employment in the United States. While these emerging forms of employment have become harbingers of new ways of working, they remain poorly understood; efforts to explain the...

Academic papers are a bit like rock and roll bands: whether an audience finds them interesting is a matter of perspective, if not taste. We all know there's no accounting for taste. There's no unanim-ity of taste, either. This is why readers seem to disagree vociferously with every list of the Top 50 albums Rolling Stone publishes. For proof that a...

After World War II, bureaucratic employment relations, rooted in the ethos and institutions of the New Deal, dominated cultures of work for nearly three decades.1 The bureaucratic bargain was simple: As long as firms remained profitable and the economy strong, employers would provide employees with secure jobs in return for effort and loyalty. Sinc...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [468]-483). Photocopy.

Industrial engineering was originally founded as a discipline that focused on the study and design of work. Yet, today the field has largely distanced itself from this early concern. This paper tracks the decline of work studies in industrial engineering and explores the question of why the discipline lost its concern for work and, ultimately, its...

CSCW as a field has been driven primarily by researchers' desire to solve real world problems of groups and organizations, and to use new technology to solve these problems. The field has accumulated a set of empirically-based interdisciplinary studies and many interesting new applications. The question to be addressed in this panel is whether CSCW...

This paper uses data from career histories of technical contractors to explore how they experience, interpret, and allocate their time and whether they take advantage of the temporal flexibility purportedly offered by contract work in the market. Technical contractors offer a unique opportunity for examining assumptions about organizations, work, a...

Sociologists and other observers often contend that white-collar workers are unable to achieve work-life balance because they cannot effectively resist the normative pressures that organizations place on them as employees. Analysts imply that if people could but free themselves from organizational control, they would enjoy greater flexibility and b...

Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas...

This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of co...

We argue that because of important epistemo- logical differences between the fields of informa- tion technology and organization studies, much can be gained from greater interaction between them. In particular, we argue that information tech- nology research can benefit from incorporating institutional analysis from organization studies, while orga...

In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginal...

Objective: To examine the extent to which patient re-sponses to a commonly used patient satisfaction instru-ment are due to organizational factors rather than the direct physician-patient interaction. • Design: Patient survey with linear regression analysis. • Setting and participants: 291 patients selected from those making an office visit to a pr...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68533/2/10.1177_105649269981007.pdf

This paper reviews empirical evidence on how telecommunications technologies affect the context of work and organizations at the individual, group, organizational, and inter-organizational level of analysis. Telecommunications is defined broadly to include both networks themselves and applications that enable not only computer-mediated communicatio...

This article focuses on exploring what technology scholars and students of management of technology stand to benefit most by foraging through the history of technology. In order to show how historical sensitivity could sharpen scholarship, three strategies for complicating the simple are drawn from the historian's toolkit. Implications for research...

In this article, Stephen Barley examines the extent to which the U.S. military serves as a provider of skills in the civilian economy. His investigation centers around the following questions: Do training and education in the military transfer into the civilian workforce? If the military does prepare individuals for civilian jobs, will reductions i...

This study examines how occupational mandates-the socially conferred right to perform a given set of tasks-are negotiated by nascent occupations. Because researchers typically examine occupational formation long after it has begun, they neglect activities that occur prior to the acquisition of key institutional supports. The commodification of work...

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because...

Broken Ladders: Managerial Careers in the New Economy provides the first comprehensive view of how the careers of managers in organizations are changing. Broken Ladders reports on the employment security, advancement prospects, skills, and wages of managers in a wide range of firms and industries. These cases show that one myth--that the number of...

This paper lays the groundwork for new models of work and relations of production that reflect changes in the division of labor and occupational structure of a postindustrial economy. It demonstrates how new ideal-typical occupations can be constructed, drawing on a set of ethnographies to propose an empirically grounded model of technicians' work....

We argue that the initial three-part mandate for organization theory contained study of (1) internal organization structure and process; (2) relations between organizations and environmental actors; and (3) the impact of organizations on the broad social systems in which they were embedded. Though the influence of organizations in society has incre...

This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technician's role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific proc...

This paper challenges the prevalent notion that American managerial discourse has moved progressively from coercive to rational and, ultimately, to normative rhetorics of control. Historical data suggest that since the 1870s American managerial discourse has been elaborated in waves that have alternated between normative and rational rhetorics. We...

This paper discusses the problems and processes involved in conducting longitudinal ethnographic research. The author's field study of technological change in radiology provides the context for the discussion. Specific attention is paid to how researchers can design a qualitative study and then collect data in a systematic and explicit manner. Cons...

This paper outlines a role-based approach for conceptualizing and investigating the contention in some previous research that technologies change organizational and occupational structures by transforming patterns of action and interaction. Building on Nadel's theory of social structure, the paper argues that the microsocial dynamics occasioned by...

retrace the circumstances that encouraged early sociologists to study careers / explicates more fully the concept of career as it was employed by sociologists of work trained by Everett C. Hughes / concludes by showing how one might reformulate career studies in order to amass the conceptual leverage necessary for building an empirical account of h...

This paper presents a method for assessing whether members of two subcultures, in this case academics and practitioners, have influenced each other's interpretations. Conceptual and symbolic influence are seen as special instances of acculturation, and their occurrence can be studied by specifying changes in the language that members of different s...

That technology can disrupt the tissue of experience and overturn taken for granted assumptions is a fundamental premise in all science fiction involving time travel. Thrust suddenly into a future whose principles are unknown, time travelers are forced to unravel a new world’s logic so as to act knowingly amidst strange socio-technical surroundings...

New medical imaging devices, such as the CT scanner, have begun to challenge traditional role relations among radiologists and radiological technologists. Under some conditions, these technologies may actually alter the organizational and occupational structure of radiological work. However, current theories of technology and organizational form ar...

Although organizations are often said to have cultures, it is perhaps more accurate to conceive of organizations as collections of subcultures. This paper first proposes an abstract model of organizational subculture defined in terms of structural constraints of time and space, an interactional matrix, collective understandings, a transformation of...

Semiotics offers an approach for researching and analyzing systems of meaning that undergird occupational and organizational cultures. Following a synopsis of semiotic theory, this paper presents data from an ethnosemantic study of a funeral home and demonstrates that semiotically identical codes structure a funeral director's understanding of his...

The organization is but one frame of reference for understanding work behavior. Equally powerful but largely unexplored social forces in the workplace are groups sired by the perception of common task. After developing the concept of an occupational community as a framework for analyzing the phenomenological boundaries of work worlds, the authors s...

StephenR.BarleyandGideonKunda* ExecutiveOverview Contract work and outsourcing represent widely acknowledged manifestations of the groundswell of economic change that is shaking the foundations of work and employment in the United States. While these emerging forms of employment have become harbingers of new ways of working, they remain poorly unde...

[Excerpt] The lack of research and, by extension, the paucity of empirically grounded theory on organizations and occupations have left unanswered questions that are critical for understanding the social organization of work in post-industrial economies. Under what conditions are organizations likely to bureaucratize professional tasks? What types...

[Excerpt] In the late 1960s and early 1970s American students were told that the value of a college education was declining (see Freeman 1976). Although liberal arts students were particularly discouraged by reports of recent graduates driving taxicabs, even the demand for engineers and other technical specialists seemed bleak. Two decades later, t...