New technologies at work: people, screens and social virtuality

262 Pages·2004·0.81 MB·English

by  Christina Garsten

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New Technologies at Work
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New Technologies At Work
People, Screens and Social Virtuality
Edited by Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff
Oxford • New York
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First published in 2003 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003–4812, USA
© Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff 2003
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New technologies at work : people, screens, and social virtuality/edited by Christina
Garsten and Helena Wulff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-85973-644-0 (Cloth) – ISBN 1-85973-649-1 (Paper)
1. Employees–Effect of technological innovations on–United States–Case studies.
2. Electronic data processing personnel–Supply and demand–United States. 3.
Internet–Economic aspects–United States. 4. Information technology–Economic
aspects–United States. 5. Telecommuting–United States. 6. Information society–United
States. I. Garsten, Christina. II. Wulff, Helena.
HD6331.2.U5N49 2003
331.25–dc22
2003017015
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85973 644 0 (Cloth)
1 85973 649 1 (Paper)
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.
www.bergpublishers.com
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction:From People of the Book to People of the Screen 1
Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff
1.Living with New (Ideals of) Technology 7
Daniel Miller
2.The Computer as a Focus of Inattention:Five
Scenarios concerning Hospital Porters 25
Nigel Rapport
3.Digital Ditches:Working in the Virtual Grass Roots 45
Sarah Green
4.Real-time,Real-place Market:Transnational
Connections and Disconnections in Financial Markets 69
Anna Hasselström
5.Mobile Workplacing:Office Design,Space and Technology 91
Heinrich Schwarz
6.Claiming the Future:Speed,Business Rhetoric and
Computer Practice 119
Robert Willim
7.Networking as a Form of Life:The Transnational
Movement of Internet Pioneers 145
Paula Uimonen
8.Mainstream Rebels:Informalization and Regulation
in a Virtual World 165
Christina Garsten and David Lerdell
9.Steps on Screen:Technoscapes,Visualization and
Globalization in Dance 187
Helena Wulff
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New Technologies at Work
10.Screening the Classroom:Students,Teachers and
Computers in an Urban American School 205
William Washabaugh, Catherine Washabaugh, Mary Roffers
and Kira Kaufmann
11.Open-Source Software Development as Gift Culture:
Work and Identity Formation in an Internet Community 223
Magnus Bergquist
Index 243
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Acknowledgements
The idea for this volume on technology and work practice springs out of the
academic context in which we work. It merges a long-standing interest in tech-
nology and culture on one hand and work practice on the other in the Department
of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. It is a great privilege to have
been socialized into anthropology in such an inspiring milieu. We are grateful for
the intellectual rigour and creative climate in our department. For early support
of this volume, we would also like to thank Keith Hart very much.
Danny Miller has been an important advisor and collaborator from beginning
to end with the volume. It has been a real pleasure to work with him. New
Technologies at Work would, however, not have been completed without Kathryn
Earle’s careful persistence. It is because of her unique combination of warmth,
wit and cunning that this volume is now ready.
Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff
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Notes on Contributors
Magnus Bergquist is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and
researcher at the Viktoria Institute, Gothenburg, Sweden. He is also senior
faculty member of the Department of Informatics, Gothenburg University. His
research focuses on cultural aspects of information technology in organizations,
both on and off the Internet. Special interests are open source, virtual communi-
ties, organizational knowledge sharing and cooperation and methodological
aspects of Internet research. He has published his work in e.g. Journal of
Information Systems, Journal of Information Technologyand AI and Society.
Christina Garsten is Associate Professor at the Department of Social
Anthropology (Stockholm University) and Research Director at Score
(Stockholm Center for Organizational Research, Stockholm University and
Stockholm School of Economics). Her general research interests are in the
anthropology of organizations and markets. She has done research on organiza-
tional culture and globalization in a high-tech company (Apple World: Core and
Periphery in a Transnational Organizational Culture, Almquist & Wiksell,
1994). Later research has focused on the flexibilization of employment,
emerging forms of regulation, and their impacts on the formation of work-related
identities in the temporary-staffing sector (Learning to be Employable: New
Agendas on Work, Responsibility and Learning in a Globalising World, co-edited
with Kerstin Jacobsson, Palgrave, 2003). Current interests are orientated toward
the anthropology of markets, with a particular view to issues of social accounta-
bility in the corporate world (‘Risky business: Risk and (ir)responsibility in
globalizing markets’, with Anna Hasselström, Ethnos, 2, 2003).
Sarah Green is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester. She has carried out ethnographic research on feminist separatism in
London; concepts of place, landscape and the Balkans on the Greek-Albanian
border; environmental problems among citrus farmers in the Peloponnese
(southern Greece); and the introduction of high bandwidth information and
communications technologies in Manchester, the latter as part of the ESRC’s
‘Virtual Society?’ programme, with Penny Harvey and Jon Agar. She has
published Urban Amazons (1997, Macmillan) and is currently completing two
book manuscripts on her work in Greece and Manchester. Her key interests
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New Technologies at Work
include concepts of the person and the anthropology of bodies; the anthropology
of place, space and borders; gender and sexuality; the ethnography of Greece and
the Balkans; and new information and communications technologies.
Anna Hasselströmis a PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology,
Stockholm University. Her dissertation focuses on the production, distribution
and organization of financial-market knowledge in financial markets. Her area
of interest is the fashioning of contemporary markets. She has written articles on
the relation between business and friendship, and co-authored with Christina
Garsten ‘Risky Business: Discourses of Risk and (Ir)responsibility in
Globalizing Markets’, Ethnos, 2, 2003.
David Lerdell currently holds a PhD candidate position for research on
‘Information Technology, Law, Power and Ethics’ funded by the Swedish
Research Council and based at the Stockholm Center for Organizational
Research (SCORE), Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics.
He is working on a dissertation with the preliminary title Organizing the
Internet. It focuses on the development of the Internet, aiming for an under-
standing of the initial organizing of the network, the organizational structure
surrounding the Internet and the critical process in organizational terms, namely
the transition of the system for names and numbers, the so-called Domain Name
System (DNS). His publications include articles on the Internet and security, and
OECD collaboration and organization.
Kira Kaufmann has a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Florida State
University and more than 20 years of anthropological and archaeological experi-
ence. She is currently in her fourth year of doctoral study at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Although she is now undertaking her disserta-
tion work in archaeological studies of Southeastern Wisconsin, she is also
pursuing studies of pedagogical methods, and serving a second year as a research
assistant in the collaborative project at Riverside University High School under
the auspices of the Cultures and Communities Program at UWM.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of
Anthropology, University College London. His previous publications range from
three books on the topic of shopping to three based on fieldwork in Trinidad.
Recent work in material culture include an edited collection about the car (Car
Cultures) and one on the home (Home Possessions). With Don Slater he published
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach,which is an examination of the impact
of the Internet in one region. Currently he is working with Mukulika Banerjee on
a book about The Sariin India, and in the longer term he is working on a project
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