Barley & Kunda Bringing Work Back In

Bringing Work Back In1IIiiiiil..1IiiiII@

Stephen R. Barley; Gideon Kunda

Organization Science, Vol. 12, No.1 (Jan. - Feb., 2001), 76-95.

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Bringing Work Back In

Stephen R. Barley • Gideon KundaDepartment of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, Center for Work, Technology and

Organization, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305Department of Labor Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel 47217

sbarley@ leland. stanford. edu

AbstractIn this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to makesense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearthof detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work providedan empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explainhow such research became marginalized or ignored. We thendiscuss methodological requirements for reintegrating workstudies into organization theory and indicate what the conceptual payoffs of such integration might be. These payoffs includebreaking new conceptual ground, resolving theoretical puzzles,envisioning organizing processes, and revitalizing old concepts.(Work; Organization Theory; Field Methods; Networks;Action; Grounded Theory)

All theories of organizing are at least implicitly linked tosome image of the concrete activities that they purport todescribe and explain. In most instances these activitiesare what people call work. Work and organization arebound in dynamic tension because organizational structures are, by definition, descriptions of and templates forongoing patterns of action. When managers impose neworganizational structures, they invariably alter patterns ofwork. Conversely, when the nature of work in an organization changes, perhaps because of new technologiesor markets, organizational structures either adapt or riskbecoming misaligned with the activities they organize.Because work and organizing are so interdependent, erasof widespread change in the nature of work in societyshould lead to the emergence and diffusion of new organizational forms and institutions. This was preciselywhat Weber, Durkheim, and Marx observed: By the endof the nineteenth century, the shift from agricultural andcraft work to factory and office work had stimulated thebirth and development of bureaucracy, the cornerstone of

ORGANIZATION SCIENCE, © 2001 INFORMSVol. 12, No.1, January-February 2001, pp. 76-95

industrial organization. Over the next fifty years, the investigation and analysis of bureaucracies and their associated patterns of work occupied organizational researchers from Taylor (1911) to Blau (1955). Since then workhas slipped increasingly into the background as organizational theory converged on the study of strategies,structures, and environments as its central and defininginterests. The study of work processes found its home inassociated fields, such as industrial relations, industrialpsychology, and the sociology of work, whose influenceon organizational theory gradually declined.

For most of the twentieth century, the nature of workremained sufficiently stable for organizational scholars toassume that concepts and theories developed for bureaucratic settings were adequate for studying most organizational contexts. There is growing evidence, however,that work in industrial society has now changed sufficiently to render such an assumption suspect. The occupational structure of the United States has changed dramatically since midcentury.l Blue-collar employment hasfallen steadily since the 1950s, while white-collar workhas expanded. Employment in services now outranks employment in manufacturing. Managerial work has becomeincreasingly differentiated and clerical employment hasbegun to wane. Today, professional and technical occupations, which exclude management and administration,employ more Americans than any other occupational sector monitored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Similaroccupational trends are occurring in other Westernnations (Szafran 1992, Barley 1996a, Jonsson 1998).

The dynamics of work appear to be changing withinoccupational clusters as well. Stable employment is declining and contingent work is on the rise, even amongprofessionals and managers (Cohany 1996, Abraham andTaylor 1996, Kunda et aI., 1999). Computers and otherdigital technologies seem to be eliminating some types ofwork, creating others, and transforming a significant portion of what remains (Barley 1988, Adler 1992, Penn etaI., 1994, Bills 1995). Work that formerly required direct

1047-7039/01/1201/0076/$05.001526-5455 electronic ISSN

STEPHEN R. BARLEY AND GIDEON KUNDA Bringing Work Back In

operations on materials can increasingly be performed remotely (Zuboff 1988). Interpersonal skills and the abilityto collaborate in distributed, cross-functional teams appear to be more important than in the past (National Re-

o search Council 1999). Under team systems, even factoryworkers are said to require interpersonal and decisionmaking skills previously reserved for managers, althoughthe scope of this development is disputed (Adler 1993,Appelbaum and Batt 1994, Hackman and Wageman1995, Cohen and Bailey 1997).

Such changes pose an extraordinary opportunity for organizational theorists. Because of the interdependence ofwork and organizing, significant shifts in the nature ofwork should coincide with significant changes in the wayorganizations are structured and in how people experience work in their daily lives. Contemporary organizational theorists may, therefore, face the same challengethat confronted the field's founders: the need to developimages of organizations that are congruent with the realities of work in a new economic order. Recent trendsin organizational theorizing suggest that scholars areaware of this situation. The notion of a new economicorder is precisely what motivates most of the literature on"post industrialism" (Bell 1973, Block 1990), the "knowledge economy" (Stewart 1997), and the "information society" (Porat 1976, Castells 1996). Furthermore, over thelast decade organizational scholars and observers of thebusiness world have proposed numerous concepts forcharacterizing postbureaucratic organizations. Virtualorganizations (Byrne 1993), shamrock organizations(Handy 1989), network organizations (Powell 1990), boundaryless organizations (Arthur and Rousseau 1996) andlean structures (Womack et aI., 1990) are but a partiallist. These attempts at identifying new organizational formsare often provocative, and some have generated fruitfulstreams of debate and research. Yet, on close examination, most fall short of offering either a nuanced description of the attributes of postbureaucratic organizing or afull account of why new forms of organizing haveemerged.

In this essay we argue that both popular and academicattempts to come to grips with postbureaucratic organizing are hampered, in part, by inadequate conceptions ofwork, and that until our images of work are updated, efforts at specifying postbureaucratic forms will continueto be seriously hampered. We begin by explaining whywe believe this is the case and then suggest what organizational theorists may need to do to bring work moreclearly into focus. We conclude by offering illustrationsof how bringing work back into organization studiesmight benefit the field.

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The Search for New ConceptsGiven the recency and complexity of the developmentswith which organizational theorists are grappling, the factthat there is little agreement on the core attributes of postbureaucratic organizing should come as no surprise. Anextended period of exploration, debate, and incrementalapproximation is to be expected whenever scholars mustsift through an abundance of ambiguous data in search ofnew concepts to describe a rapidly emerging and multifaceted situation. In fact, it is worth recalling that scholarsrequired at least fifty years to develop our current comprehension of the dynamics of bureaucracy. Yet, eventhough a postindustrial analog of bureaucratic theory isunlikely to emerge either quickly or easily, it is worthidentifying weaknesses in current conceptualizations sothat better theories can be devised. Two weaknesses thatcan be traced, in part, to insufficient grounding in concrete work activities seem of particular relevance: thestrategy of inverting concepts to sharpen contrasts between the present and the past, and the tendency to explain changes solely in terms of environmental forces.The first is more common in managerially oriented organizational theory, while the latter is characteristic ofacademically oriented research.

Conceptual InversionConceptual inversion occurs when theorists formulate images of postbureaucratic organizing by contrasting traditional models of organizing with their perceived opposites. Consider, for instance, the image of a "networkorganization" which has been widely touted as the antithesis of bureaucracy, especially in the managerial literature (Boddy and Gunson 1996, Chisholm 1998).2 Analysts seem to have embraced the image of a networkorganization largely because of its evocativeness as ametaphor for the widely held belief that firms are becoming less hierarchical and that cross-functional relationships are becoming more common.

Although the dynamics that theorists hope to referenceby speaking of network organizations may be integral topostbureaucratic organizing, the claim that organizationsare suddenly "becoming networks" and that these networks are not hierarchical is overstated. In fact, portraying networks as counterpoints to bureaucracy may actually obscure the utility of network analysis for studyinghow and why organizational forms are changing. As network analysts have repeatedly shown, any organizationcan be depicted as a network by mapping the work relationships that exist among people (Van de Ven et aI.1976, Wigand 1977, Marsden 1981, Mayhew 1983,Nohria 1992). From this perspective, organizations havealways been networks. Furthermore, network analysts

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have shown that hierarchy is a property of a network'sstructure, not something that a network replaces (Whiteet aI., 1976, Krackhardt 1992).3

Network analysts would therefore argue that interest innetwork organizations is warranted not because organizations are becoming networks, as proponents mistakenlysuggest, but because work relations in organizations arechanging and these changes are likely to alter the waynetworks are structured. To determine whether suchchanges are occurring requires longitudinal data on concrete work activities that, in turn, would enable researchers to depict the structure of the networks that those activities inscribe. At the moment, such data do not existbecause those who postulate network organizations rarelystudy work practices and the way they structure interaction. Even more scarce are longitudinal data on workpractices and relations that would allow researchers toassess change in the modal pattern of organizing.

Another example of the logic of conceptual inversionand its evocative power is the idea that organizations andcareers are becoming "boundaryless" (Arthur andRousseau 1996). Theorists who speak of boundarylessorganizations do so to call attention to the fact that contemporary organizations increasingly rely on strategic alliances, extended supply chains, and distributed workgroups, all of which involve relations that span and perhaps integrate collectives previously thought to have distinct identities and memberships. Although these trendsare reasonably well documented, the claim that they yieldorganizations without boundaries seems overstated. To besure, organizational theorists have often written as if bureaucracies are surrounded by the social equivalent of abold (and occasionally perforated) line that demarcatesthem from their environment, but on close examinationthe notion of a boundary has always dissolved into a problematic construction (Bittner 1965, Brown 1978, Star andGriesemer 1989). Boundaries are social objects fashionedout of spatial locations, personal identifications, patternsof interaction, and legally defined distributions of rightsand obligations. It is unlikely that boundaries are any lesssocially constructed today than they were in the past. Todetermine whether organizational boundaries are constructed differently today requires data on where peoplework, with whom they work, and, most importantly, howthey conceptualize their identities and the social collectives of which they are a part. In short, the issue is notwhether boundaries do or do not exist, but how and wherepeople draw boundaries in the world of work and whetherthe nature of the boundaries they draw has somehowchanged.

Similarly, researchers have used the term "boundaryless career" to denote that people are increasingly moving

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between organizations, and that stints of employment arebecoming shorter as firms jettison promises of job security, dismantle internal labor markets, and turn to contingent labor. Without doubt, these represent substantialchanges in the institutions of employment that emergedover the first half of the twentieth century (Osterman1996, Cappelli et aI. 1997, Cappelli 1999). To argue thatfewer people are playing out their careers within the confines of an organization or that employment relations arechanging is different, however, from saying that careersno longer have boundaries. Hughes (1958) noted long agothat all careers traverse a series of statuses, only some ofwhich consist of hierarchically ordered jobs within an organization. Significant numbers of people have alwaysdevised careers against the background of an occupation,an industry, or a subculture (Glaser and Strauss 1971,Barley 1989, Thomas 1989). Moreover, the boundariesof a career are partially determined by the sense that individuals make of the flows, sequences, and locations oftheir work activities. By speaking of boundaryless careers, theorists risk characterizing an important change inemployment relations in a way that focuses attentionaway from a crucial empirical question: When people areno longer able to use a single organization as the backdrop for their career, how do they lend meaning to andset boundaries around their trajectories? Answering thisquestion requires researchers to study work practices,work biographies, and how people interpret both. Simplynoting that the objective structures of careers are changing is insufficient warrant for inferring a lack of boundaries.

EnvironmentalismMacrotheories of postbureaucratic organizing encounterdifficulties insofar as they attempt to account for new organizational forms and practices solely as responses tochanging environments. The issue is not whether environmental conditions playa role in the rise and spread ofnew forms of organizing: They most certainly do. Organizations would have little pressure to change withoutsuch developments as globalization, intensified competition' changing political climates, new technologies, integrated financial markets, and reductions in product lifecycles. Rather, the problem lies in trying to explain newpatterns of organizing without taking into accountstreams of action that mediate the effects of environmental change.

As Pfeffer (1982) noted, organizations do not respondto their environments like billiard balls struck by a cuestick; nor do they mindlessly await their fate like members of a species suddenly subjected to climatic change.Because organizations are composed of people who react



or fail to react to perceived changes in the environment,it is the activities of people that determine how organizations become structured. Human action generatesorganizational variation. Failing to link macroorganizational changes to microorganizational processes, therefore, risks not only overlooking the proximal reasons forvariation; it risks promoting an overly homogeneous andundifferentiated image of socioeconomic development.

This problem can readily be seen in arguments that linknew forms of organizing to changes in technology. Anumber of theorists have tied the emergence of new formsof organizing to the spread of digital technologies whichare said to undermine job structures, increase the complexity of production processes, and require a morehighly skilled workforce (Johnson and Packer 1987). Others have argued equally forcefully that technology engenders precisely the opposite developments (Aronowitzand De Fazio 1994). More grounded studies indicate,however, that digital technologies are used in a variety ofways and have a variety of effects on the way firms organize. They can automate or informate work (Zuboff1988), they can create or eliminate jobs (Barley 1988),they can deskill, enskill, or reskill work (Spenner 1995,Diprete 1988), and more often than we think, they mayoccasion no change all (Gallie 1994). Thus, whether andhow a digital technology affects the wayan organizationis structured depends on how the technology is designed,the way it is deployed, and how it is used and interpretedin a specific organizational context.

A Grounded ApproachConceptual inversion and environmentalism are troublesome because they are manifestations of contemporaryorganization theory's tendency to distance itself from adetailed understanding of work and how it may be changing. This distancing produces images of organizing thatrest more on the persuasive power of metaphor than ondata. Eliminating the distance would enable organizational theorists to account for new trends in organizingwith greater scope, depth, and accuracy. For example,consider how organizational theory currently treats onesuch development, the spread of contingent employment,and how a more grounded approach might open widervistas for theorizing.

Most organizational researchers treat contingent employment either as evidence for boundaryless organizations or as a strategic issue posed by an increasingly volatile and competitive economic environment (Pfeffer andBaron 1988, Handy 1989, Cohen and Haberfeld 1993,Davis-Blake and Uzzi 1993, Matusik and Hill 1998).From this point of View, contingent employment is portrayed as a means by which organizations can reduce


costs, gain flexibility, or acquire knowledge.4 This emphasis on the firm's perspective and its demand for laborleaves unquestioned the assumption that work occurswithin an employing organization and that the primarytheoretical issue is a shift away from long-term employment. Although how firms manage employment relationsis certainly an important issue, if one looks at contingentwork from the point of view of those who perform it, thefirm becomes less figural than organizational theoristscurrently presume, and other relevant social structurescome into view.

The most important issue facing any contractor is theneed to enter the labor market repeatedly to find new jobsand build a career. Highly skilled technical contractorsattempt to resolve this problem in a variety of ways(Kunda et al. 1999, O'Mahony 1999). Most make use ofstaffing firms that specialize in matching technical professionals to positions in client organizations that requirethe professionals' skills. Most technical contractors alsoestablish and maintain a network of relationships withother technical professionals, both contractors and permanent employees, who do similar work. Some participate in users' groups to acquire leads on job openingswhile also enhancing their skills. Others have formed collectives and partnerships to manage the job search process. In every case, however, highly skilled technical contractors envision their career as a sequence of projects.When seeking and accepting a contract, the identity ofthe organization in which the project is located is generally secondary to personal and professional considerations, ranging from hourly rates to opportunities for learning new skills to the intrinsic challenge of the work itself.These criteria are defined by the technical parameters ofa project, not by the employment strategy of the firm thatoffers the contract.

Examining contingent work from the perspective ofskilled contractors fosters a different view of firms thanthe one traditionally found in organizational theory. Withrespect to the firm's internal structure, projects are a moresalient structural feature for contractors than are the managerial hierarchies and functional departments that haveplayed such a large role in organizational theorizing. Thisraises the question of whether a theory of postindustrialorganizing might usefully reconceptualize firms as contexts for projects. Suppose projects have increasingly become a primary locus of affiliation and decision makingand, hence, an appropriate focus of theorizing. A comprehensive understanding of organizing would then require greater attention to the logistical, technical, temporal, and managerial dynamics of project life. To explorethe full ramification of this framing, researchers wouldhave to go beyond studying high-end contracting, which

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is undoubtedly a special case, to investigate the work ofproject managers, human resource professionals, toplevel decision makers, and others who affect project dynamics before they could develop a grounded and comprehensive theory of postbureaucratic organizing inwhich projects playa pivotal role.

Understanding contractors' work also offers an alternative view of firms' roles in the labor market. From thecontractors' point of view, firms are less figural than mediators who broker information and match individuals topositions. The labor market, therefore, appears as a tripartite structure consisting of contractors, clients, and mediating institutions (such as staffing firms, users' groups,and online resume services), not the bipartite structures(firms and contractors) implicitly envisioned by strategictheories of contingent labor. Furthermore, the tripartitestructure appears to be overlaid with and laced togetherby multiple loose networks of contractors organizedaround technical specialties. Because these personal networks are based on similarity of skill, they tie employingorganizations into a higher-order network of work sitesthat offer similar types of work. In short, by examiningthe work of technical contractors, organizational theoristscan move toward a more nuanced view of organizing asa set of work processes and relationships that straddle theboundaries of more traditionally defined entities and thatinvolve multiple types of actors and social collectives.

Although it might seem that studying the work ofhighly skilled contractors leads to an image of organizingsimilar to that found in the literature on boundaryless network organizations, there is a crucial difference: The image is grounded in specific, verifiable details that providea foundation for broader comparative analysis. For example, one might expect research to show that the dynamics and structures of unskilled temporary labor markets differ from those of highly skilled contingent labormarkets. However, they may resemble, in important respects, the organization of markets for other types ofgoods and services in which mediating actors playa significant role. In other words, the insights derived fromclose studies of work in limited arenas alert researchersto patterns of variation and possible sources of comparison that are prerequisite for rigorous, grounded theorizing. As organization theory's intellectual history reveals,detailed comparative studies of work were crucial for successfully articulating a theory of bureaucratic organizing.

Organizational Theory and WorkStudiesMost early organizational theory was tightly linked to thestudy of work. For example, Frederick Taylor (1911) and

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other advocates of Scientific Management, the first systematic theory of organizations, formulated their principIes of efficiency by studying and altering specific workpractices in factories and offices. Close encounters withwork also inspired the Human Relations Movement,which modified Scientific Management's rational theoryof organizing by focusing attention on social motives andgroup norms. The Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger andDickson 1939), which began as an experiment in environmental design, provided detailed observational data onwork practices on which an entire generation of theoristsanchored their theoretical claims (Homans 1950, Argyris1956, Likert 1961). In fact, the Human Relations Movement made much use of anthropological techniques(Warner 1947, Whyte 1948) and situated field studies(Lewin 1951) to formulate theories of group dynamics inwork settings. Industrial sociology of the 1950s, whichelaborated Weber's theory of bureaucracy and gave birthto modern organizational theory, also built on situatedobservations of work. The classics of industrial sociology, such as Walker's and Guest's (1952) and Chinoy's(1955) studies of automobile plants, Gouldner's (1954)study of a gypsum mine, Dalton's (1950) study of managers, and Blau's (1955) study of a social service agencywere field accounts of routine work in organizations.Even the roots of job design lay in field surveys of workers' practices and attitudes toward particular tasks(Seeman 1959, Hertzberg et aI., 1959, Hackman andLawler 1971).

The Shift Away from Work StudiesDuring the 1960s and 1970s, however, organization studies gradually drifted away from the study of work. Theshift was associated with a number of trends in the discipline's development, including a turn to systems theoryand greater levels of abstraction, changing methodological norms, and increasing specialization among studentsof social organization.

Systems Theory and the Environment. Although it isdifficult to specify exactly when the shift away from workstudies began, 1967 is a reasonable estimate. That yearsaw the publication of James Thompson's Organizationsin Action, E. J. Miller's and A. K. Rice's Systems of Organization, Charles Perrow's "A Framework for theComparative Analysis of Organizations," and PaulLawrence's and Jay Lorsch's Organization and Environment. These works captured the field's imagination withan idea that Woodward (1958) and Burns and Stalker(1961) had articulated earlier; namely, that organizationsare systems that adapt to their environments, in particular,to attributes of technologies and markets. Although interest in systems theory eventually waned, the rise of

ORGANIZATION SCIENCENol. 12, No.1, January-February 2001


population ecology and neoinstitutionalism has continuedthe field's preoccupation with the organization's relationship with its environment.

Organization studies' turn to the environment was accompanied by a substantial change in style of explanation. In general, researchers abandoned more concrete,situational accounts of organizational dynamics in favorof more abstract and, hence, presumably more generalizable concepts. The intellectual history of socia-technicalsystems (STS), the field's most concerted attempt to unravel the intricate ties between technology, work, and organization, illustrates how this occurred. Socio-technicalsystems theory emerged from a series of socialpsychologically informed field studies conducted by researchers at London's Tavistock Institute in the 1950sand early 1960s. Most notable among these were Tristand Bamforth' s (1951) investigation of coal mines,Fensham and Hooper's (1964) study of textile mills,A. K. Rice's (1963) research on a textile mill in India,and Mumford's (1967) research on computer-mediatedwork. Each of these studies contained rich descriptionsof work practices associated with different technologiesand forms of organizing. By the late 1960s, sociotechnical systems scholars had turned their attention toformalizing abstract concepts that could be used acrosssettings. Key to their theorizing were ideas shaped bytheir encounters with general systems theory: variance,equifinality, boundaries, transactions, and flows. In fact,in Systems of Organization, Miller and Rice (1967) presented socio-technical systems theory as a variant ofgeneral systems theory in which an organization's transactions with its environment became the organizing concept. From this point forward, with several exceptions(most notably Herbst 1974), socio-technical researchersceased writing about work practices and focused insteadon elaborating abstract frameworks for analyzing organizational processes as open systems and on promotingautonomous work teams.

Methodological Norms. Reinforcing this substantiveand stylistic shift in theorizing was a change in methodological norms. Because it is difficult to discuss workwithout an intimate knowledge of the practices involved,studies of industrial work frequently entailed some typeof field research and often made use of qualitative data.In the 1970s, however, qualitative research began to fallout of favor. As computers became more widely available, the field turned to large-scale surveys, archival data,and quantitative analysis as methods of choice (VanMaanen 1998). In recent years, qualitative research hasenjoyed something of a resurgence. However, contemporary qualitative researchers tend to rely more heavily


on interviews and content analysis than observation. Although useful for studying points of view and meaning,such techniques are less adequate for studying work because most work practices are so contextualized that people often cannot articulate how they do what they do,unless they are in the process of doing it (Schon 1983,Harper 1987, Suchman 1987). Consequently, whetherqualitatively or quantitatively oriented, most contemporary students of organizing employ methods that distancethem from the kind of data needed for making groundedinferences about the changing nature of work and workpractices.

Specialization. Increasing specialization also contributed to the demise of organizationally oriented studies ofwork. A hallmark of industrial sociology of the 1940s and1950s was that it wove together the study of work, occupations, and organizations, while also drawing on thefindings of industrial psychologists and students of industrial relations (for example, see Blauner 1964). Duringthe 1960s, however, industrial sociology split into twosubfields: "organizational theory" and "work and occupations." To solidify their claim to a unique jurisdiction,the former relegated studies of work to the latter and distanced itself from other disciplines that studied work. Organizational theorists founded their own journals (Administrative Science Quarterly; Organization Studies) andbegan attending the meetings of different professional associations, in particular, the Academy of Management.Sociologists of work and occupations, industrial psychologists, and experts in industrial relations also foundedtheir own societies and journals. The separation was symbolized within sociology by the fact that throughout the1970s and 1980s the American Sociological Associationhad a section on Work and Occupations, but no sectionfor organization studies even though organizational sociologists eventually outnumbered sociologists of work.5

Substantive specialization was further reinforced by theexodus of organizational theorists from departments ofsociology into business schools, where most organizational theorists are now trained. With several notable exceptions (Mintzberg 1975, Van Maanen 1978, Kotter1982, Hill 1992, Orlikowski 1996), organizational researchers based in business schools have typically focused on organizational performance, strategy, and structure. Issues of work are generally relegated to colleaguesin human resource or production management, wherework processes are usually treated as problems of personnel management and logistics. By the 1990s academicinterest in situated work practices was largely confined tosociologists of work, industrial engineers (Bailey 1998,Konz and Johnson 2000), industrial psychologists

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(Fleishman and Reilly 1992, Peterson and Jeanneret1997, Peterson et al. 1999), students of industrial relations(MacDuffie 1995, Batt 1999) and computer sciencewhere a cadre of designers and social scientists had become interested in computer-supported cooperative work(Button 1993, Heath and Luff 1992, Suchman 1996).

In sum, beginning in the late 1960s, organizational theory gradually ceased to generate its own understandingof work and became dependent on sources outside of itself for data and images of how work was changing. Iforganizational theorists could have imported the conceptsthey needed from elsewhere, this dependency would nothave been detrimental to organizational studies or its ability to characterize postbureaucratic organizing. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Only recently havesociologists and anthropologists of work begun to studynew forms of work in situ (for example, Leidner 1993,Zuboff 1988, Kunda 1992, Smith 1996, Orr 1997,Hutchins 1995, Whalley 1986, Wellin 1997). Althoughsuch efforts are crucial, they are still relatively rare. Forinstance, most research in the sociology of work and occupations still focuses on traditional areas of interest:lower-status blue-collar and white-collar occupations, traditional professions, and occupational mobility and prestige. Although these lines of research are important, withthe exception of the proliferation of studies that focus onthe roles and experiences of women in the workplace,most represent extensions of lines of research developedduring the 1960s and 1970s.

Students of industrial relations began to study thechanging nature of blue-collar work and to pay attentionto service work and other occupations more characteristicof a postbureaucratic economy in the mid-1980s (Kochanet al. 1986, Keefe 1991, MacDuffie 1995). Their agenda,however, has been driven by a theoretical interest in atheory of employment relations, rather than by an interestin specifying new forms of organizing in general. Industrial psychologists have for many years studied the workof a wide range of occupations, but much of this researchhas focused on designing job requirements and compensation systems (see Fleishman and Reilly 1992). Becauseof disciplinary boundaries and different theoretical andpractical agendas, organizational theorists have not recognized the potential contribution that such studies couldmake as a source of data for theorizing about the changingnature of work and organizing.

Conspicuously rare across all disciplines are studies ofoccupations that have come to dominate the occupationalstructure and define the changing nature of work in thelate twentieth century: managers, engineers, technicians,sales personnel, and service workers. As a result, our images of work have failed to keep pace with the changing

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division of labor. Evidence that our concepts of work remain rooted in industrialism can be found in the languagewe use to talk about work, in the images of occupationsthat serve as archetypes for our theories, and in the formalsystems by which we classify work.

Petrified Images of Work

The Language of Work. Our everyday language ofwork indexes our assumptions about how work is organized. Consider the notion of a job, which has long servedas the cornerstone for our thinking about internal labormarkets, work redesign, compensation, and other aspectsof organizational life. In preindustrial societies work wasunremarkable: It was woven seamlessly into the fabric ofeveryday life (Thompson 1967, Applebaum 1992). Activities were governed by the cyclical rhythms of natureand the necessities of living: the passing of the seasons,alternations of day and night, pangs of hunger, the needto mend torn clothing, and so on. During the IndustrialRevolution, however, people began to segregate workfrom other spheres of life. Segments of the day were setaside for work and separated from family, community,and leisure by the punching of a time clock or a blast ofa factory whistle. Work was also segmented in space;people began to go routinely to a particular place in orderto work and then returned from that place when work wasdone. This temporal and spatial localization of work stimulated a change in the meaning of "job" and gave rise toa larger lexicon for talking about work and the divisionof labor.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, "job" simply referredto a discrete task of short duration with a distinct beginning and end (Oxford English Dictionary 1989, Bridges1994). Only among craftsmen and soldiers were specificjobs attached to distinct identities and roles. People "did"jobs; they did not "hold" them. By the mid-twentieth century, however, "job" had come to signify an ongoingstream of activities attached to a role in a division of laborthat was held for an indefinite period of time. Such "jobs"had clear beginnings, but no foreseeable end (Abbott1989). Organizations, rather than tasks, now gave jobstheir warrant and integrity. From an individual's perspective, when strung together in meaningful sequences, jobsnow comprised "careers," which often entailed advancement within an organization and a source of identity.From an organization's perspective such sequences comprised internal labor markets, the vertical backbone ofbureaucracy itself. Furthermore, broad groupings of jobsoffered a colloquial taxonomy for talking about the division of labor. "Blue-collar" and "white-collar", "mental" and "manual," and even "exempt" and "non-exempt"traced a status structure in which social standing rested



on whether people's hands were clean or dirty at the endof the day.

Recent developments suggest that our language of jobsmay no longer adequately represent the world of workand there is mounting evidence that work life may bereacquiring some of its preindustrial parsing. Labor market churning has increased over the last two decades, especially among managers (Heckscher 1995). The CensusBureau recently reported that median tenure in jobs hasfallen for American men in all age groups even thoughmedian tenure for the entire population has remained relatively stable (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1997).6 Engineers in the Silicon Valley, to take a perhaps extremeexample, now change employers, on average, every twoyears (Saxenian 1994). By even conservative estimates,roughly 10% to 12% of the labor force have contingentrelationships with their employers (Cohany 1996). Suchdata suggest that the temporal and spatial structuring ofwork, characteristic of the industrial system, may havebegun to break down (Hochschild 1997, Perlow 1997).

Although still important, the utility of distinguishingbetween "blue-collar" and "white-collar" or "mental" and"manual" work fades with each passing year as factoryand other traditional blue-collar jobs disappear. Lowlevel service work may be just as unappealing as factorywork, but service workers cannot easily be classified asblue-collar or manual. Even the term "employee" requiresrethinking as firms contract for a growing proportion oftheir technical and professional talent.

Ideal Typical Occupations. Just as one can speak ofideal types that inform our thinking about organizations(Weber 1968/1922), so one can speak of ideal types ofwork. An ideal type of work is an abstraction that captureskey attributes of a family of occupations. As Webernoted, ideal types are useful not because they are descriptively accurate-actual instances rarely evince all of theattributes of an ideal type-but because they serve asmodels that assist in thinking about social phenomena.By reducing the diversity of work to a few modal images,ideal-typical occupations help us comprehend the complexity of the division of labor and assign status to individuals. They help parents shape their children's aspirations; they provide designers of technologies with imagesof users; and they assist sociologists in developing formalmodels of attainment. In fact, it is not clear how we couldthink in general terms about worlds of work without suchanchors.

The "worker-on-the-assembly-line" is one such idealtype. It invokes images of an individual, often in an automobile factory, standing beside a swiftly moving conveyor, repeatedly performing the same operation on each


assembly that flows by. Boredom, fatigue, routine, lackof autonomy, and little need for education or thought arethe hallmarks of such work. Although factory jobs havealways been more varied than this, the ideal type nevertheless evokes a constellation of attributes that capturesthe family resemblance among many factory jobs. Theclerk, the professional, the secretary, the farmer, and themanager are other prominent ideal-typical occupations.

Like the language of work, however, ideal-typical occupations are temporally bound, historically situated, andbeginning to show signs of age. When the nature of workchanges, the continued use of an ideal type may obscuremore then it reveals. For example, the ideal-typical farmerconjures up an image of an independent landowner laboring in the fields from sunrise to sunset with the assistance of a tractor, a few hired hands, family members,and little formal education, but extensive practical knowledge of crops, weather, animals, and soils. Modern farming bears little resemblance to this image. Today, manyfarmers are subcontractors for agribusiness, have a college education, understand chemical properties of soilsand fertilizers, and manage their farms with the help ofcomputers. Nor is the farmer the only ideal-type whosevalidity can be questioned. Occupational sociologistshave argued that because many professionals now workas salaried employees, our notion of the professional requires significant modification (Derber and Schwartz1991, Wallace 1995). Functional specialization evenleads one to question whether ideal-typical images of amanager are still useful without extensive differentiation.

Formal Classifications. Finally, occupational sociologists generally agree that the formal occupational categories by which the federal government classifies jobs areoutdated (Spenner 1983, 1995; Miller et al. 1980;Attewell 1990; Steinberg 1990). Conk (1978), a historianof occupational classification, has shown that from 1870to 1940 the Bureau of the Census specifically designedthe core of our contemporary occupational classificationsystem to chart the rise of industrialism and what werethen perceived as its associated social problems. To thedegree that contemporary census categories map the occupational structure of an industrial economy, and to thedegree that our economy is now more properly understood as postindustrial (Bell 1973, Block 1990), it islikely that the census's image of the past is more validthan its image of either the present or future.

Such an interpretation is consistent with what we knowabout other occupational classification systems, especially the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT)(Spenner 1983, Steinberg 1990). Since 1939 the Department of Labor has only incrementally revised the DOT,

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cUITently the best source of data on the content of jobs inthe United States. Cain and Treiman (1981) reportednearly twenty years ago that 76% of the listings in theDOT cover blue-collar jobs. Although the DOT has subsequently undergone further modification, it is still thecase that we can presently make much finer distinctionsamong blue-collar work than among managerial, clerical,service, sales, professional, and technical work. Yet, only26% of all employed Americans are blue-collar workers,a decline of 14% since 1940. Although the Departmentof Labor is exploring an approach to occupational analysis and classification that should be more sensitive tochanges in the nature of work, the new system has yet tobe fully authorized or funded (National Research Council1999). Consequently, we continue to chart trends in thenature of work with occupational categories and systemsof analysis developed for an economy that existed somewhere between a quarter and a half century ago.

Methodological ImplicationsReintegrating the study of work and organizing impliesnot only blun"ing the conceptual boundary between organizational theory and other disciplines, but reaffirmingthe importance of systematically investigating the concrete activities that constitute the routines of organizing.Such reaffirmation would in no way preclude theoristsfrom attending to environmental change. In fact, becauseone goal of reintegration would be to explain more clearlyhow environmental change and change in the nature ofwork are linked, studies of environmental dynamics areas critical as ever. But reintegration would demand thatresearchers work with grounded and, in this sense, lessabstract notions of organizing. Grounded empiricism isrequired because developing new languages and imagesof work, new occupational archetypes, and new occupational classifications are primarily inductive, comparativetasks. Accordingly, if organizational theorists are to reintegrate the study of work and organizing, they will needto embrace methodologies strong on descriptive accuracyand designs that facilitate comparative analysis. In short,reintegrating studies of work and organizing has methodological implications.

Field TechniquesBecause scholars cannot develop comparative theories ofphenomena that they cannot describe, bringing work backinto organization studies means embracing methods thatyield detailed descriptions of work life. Particularly crucial are field studies that examine work practices and relationships in situ. Students of work have repeatedlyshown that work practices are highly situated: Skillfulbehavior is not only contingent on the local circumstances

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of its production, but most people cannot talk about thespecifics of what they do outside of the context of actuallydoing it (Collins 1974, Suchlnan 1987, Harper 1987). Infact, people are likely to misreport with whom they interact over the course of a day (Bernard et al. 1985). Without detailed, contextually sensitive data on work practicesand work relationships, the best researchers can hope foris a thin, functional understanding of what a line of workentails and how it fits into a division of labor. For thisreason, ethnography, participant observation, and otherqualitative methods have continued to playa more prominent role in the sociology of work and occupations, andin industrial relations, than they have in organizationstudies.

Although qualitative fieldwork is indispensable forcompiling an adequate corpus of data on postindustrialwork, it is important to recognize precisely where itsvalue lies. Champions of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing often speak of their Inethods' capacity to capture and reveal emic concepts-the "nativepoint of view," or what is today more fashionably knowas "subjectivity." Grasping the insider's perspective issurely necessary for appreciating the meaning of workand work practices, but for students of work, ethnography's capacity to generate analytic (or etic) constructsthat are removed from the native point of view may bejust as important. Participant observation forces researchers into direct contact with social phenomena for an extended period of time. As a result, researchers inevitablyacquire an appreciation for patterns of work and workcontexts of which insiders may be unaware. Identifyingsuch "etic" concepts is the foundation for building comparative theories because, by definition, insiders are unlikely to have a purview that spans multiple types ofwork. We therefore see no reason for ethnographers ofwork to embrace an overly subjectivist position that privileges emic over etic concepts. Furthermore, we believethat participant-observation-based research need not preclude, and may benefit from, the use of quantitative data.In fact, grounded quantitative data are likely to prove indispensable for specifying patterns and for gauging thegenerality and distinctiveness of the attributes of particular types of postindustrial work.

Students of work and organizing must also appreciatethe relative advantages and disadvantages of variousmethods for getting close to work and how they constrainthe kinds of inferences that researchers can make. Forinstance, interviews are especially useful for understanding how people make sense of their work and the issuesthey believe are important. As previously noted, however,they are not particularly credible sources of informationon what people actually do or how they do it. Observation



mixed with real-time interviewing is better suited forstudying work practices. Particularly challenging is thequestion of how to study work that entails few physicalor interpersonal acts, or work whose physical traces areephemeral. Consider, for instance, the act of working ona computer, where traces of activity appear and disappearin a matter of seconds. Traditional forms of observationare inadequate for such situations simply because eventshappen too quickly for observers to register and record.Because there is reason to believe that a significant portion of postindustrial work is computer mediated, researchers may need to devise and adopt ways of augmenting their observational capacities via technologicalmeans. This could be accomplished by videotaping worksessions or developing software programs that log activities at a computer's interface (Blomberg et aI., 1996,Nardi et al. 1996). Researchers might also make greateruse of the traces that computer work leaves (or can bemade to leave) behind, for instance, successive versionsof documents, electronic mail, and other files.

Comparative DesignsSociological and anthropological ethnographies of workhave traditionally focused on single occupations. Although the detailed depictions of work that emerge fromsuch ethnographies are eminently valuable, studies of single occupations are, at minimum, inefficient and perhapsineffective for building grounded theories of postbureaucratic organizing. Linking variations in attributes of workto variations in patterns of organizing demands that analysts identify types of work, specify dimensions alongwhich work may vary, and articulate relations betweenwork practices, situational contingencies (such as differences in technology or market structure), and organizational patterns. Because these activities assume that analysts can specify similarities and differences forgrouping lines of work into meaningful clusters, comparative analysis is prerequisite for integrating theories ofwork and organizing.

Three broad comparative research designs would beparticularly useful for mapping the contours of postindustrial work. The first, the "within-family" design, focuses on comparing and contrasting two or more lines ofwork that bear a strong family resemblance. This designis well suited for delineating the core characteristics ofan ideal typical occupation and its major variants.Zuboff's (1988) research on control room operators inthree highly computerized paper mills approximates awithin-family design. By examining similarities in thework of the three groups of operators and how their workdiffered from its more manual precursors, Zuboff inferredcore attributes of what she called "informated" factory


jobs: jobs that require workers to monitor and controlcontinuous production processes via a symbolic interface.By analyzing the differences between plants, Zuboff wasable to speculate on the organizational contingencies thatamplify or suppress attributes of such work. A more fullyrealized within-family design would have included control room operators from a wider range of manufacturingenvironments such as oil refineries, food processingplants, nuclear power plants, and computer-integratedbatch-manufacturing facilities. Such a design would enable greater resolution of the ideal type by encompassingvariants whose subsequent study has been used to challenge rather than refine Zuboff's depiction of informatedcontrol work (see Vallas 1998, Wellin 1997). Althoughthey did not use the term, Barley and his colleagues chosea within-family design to develop a grounded model oftechnician's work and the role that technicians play inorganizations (Barley 1996b, Barley and Bechky 1994).Over a period of four years, the research team conductedethnographies of eight different technicians' occupations.Each ethnography served as a case in a comparative analysis that led to the identification of two different types oftechnicians.

The second comparative approach, the "key parameter"design, seeks to compare and contrast lines of work selected for their differences and similarities along dimensions that seem fruitful for explaining variation in typesof work. The design's forte is that it enables researchersto articulate more clearly how key contingencies differently shape work practices and, hence, engender differentpatterns of organizing. For example, Darr (1997) hypothesized that the nature of sales work in high-technologymarkets should be strongly influenced by how well suppliers and buyers understood the use to which the technology would be put. Darr found that when a technology's use was well understood by both parties, sales workdemanded relatively little technical knowledge on the partof salespeople. Instead, sales skills were largely interpersonal in nature. In contrast, when neither party fully understood the component's intended application, salespeople tended be engineers with advanced degrees.Salesmanship pivoted not only on managing interpersonal relationships, but also on engaging with clients intechnical problem solving and development work.

Batt (1999) also employed a key parameter design toinvestigate how market structures affect the work of customer service agents who handled complaints and requests that originated from different groups of subscribersto a telecommunication company's services. Although allagents provided customers with similar information andworked with similar technology, those who served residential customers worked in pools, were assigned calls

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randomly, were subjected to electronic monitoring, werestrictly supervised, and were evaluated on minimizing theamount of time they spent on a call. Agents who workedwith commercial customers were assigned specific accounts, handled all inquiries from those accounts, wereallowed to spend as much time as necessary on a call,were encouraged to provide follow-through, and weresubjected to less strict supervision. Batt's research suggests that service work might be structured according tothe status of clients being served-a principle relativelyforeign to manufacturing but which might prove to bequite relevant for developing theories of organizing in aservice economy.

A third comparative approach entails an "acrossfamily" design, the comparison of broadly dissimilar linesof work drawn from different occupational families: forinstance, marketing and engineering or radiologists andradiological technicians. Unlike a key-parameter design,which highlights the dynamics by which contingenciesinfluence the organization of work, an across-family design's forte is the identification of dimensions that differentiate types of work and that might be subsequentlyemployed in a key-parameter study. Across-family designs have been profitably employed by researchers whohave studied the relationship between professionals andsemiprofessionals (Etzioni 1969, Larkin 1978).

Although within-family, key-parameter,_ across-family,and other comparative designs are essential for mappingthe contours of contemporary work, the analytic leveragethat any single study can achieve falls short of the scopenecessary for developing a global image of the changingnature of work. Building a broad conception of postindustrial work analogous to our image of industrial workwill require a comparative understanding of many occupations and, hence, many studies. Although in theory thedata for a more comprehensive image of postindustrialwork would emerge in time as published records of individual studies accumulate, such a process would beslow. Moreover, there is significant risk that accumulating studies might not allow the comparisons necessaryfor developing a taxonomy of work simply because different scholars are likely to focus on different aspects ofwork. The process of mapping the changing nature ofwork would be greatly facilitated by a concerted attemptto build a repository of empirical data on work in varioussettings that could be used for broad comparative analysis. Efforts to build such a repository would need to bestimulated and coordinated by a focal agency, perhaps theNational Science Foundation or the Department of Labor.?

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Potential Payoffs of ReintegratingStudies of Work and OrganizingAlthough we cannot predict precisely how reintegratingstudies of work and organizing would alter organizationaltheory, we can illustrate why doing so might assist thefield in developing better images of postbureaucratic organizing. Existing research suggests that grounded studies of work may enable theorists to break new conceptualground, resolve existing theoretical puzzles, and even revitalize older concepts by which we envision the natureof organizing.

New Conceptual GroundBeing forced to work with concepts developed for an industrial economy is one of the most significant handicapsthat scholars face in building theories of postbureaucraticorganizing. As previously discussed, some have tried tocircumvent the problem by simply inverting attributes ofbureaucracy, but with less than satisfactory results. Because field studies force researchers to encounter themundane activities that constitute contemporary work,they are likely to generate concepts that can serve as moreecologically attuned building blocks for postbureaucratictheories. That some of the most promising images of postbureaucratic organizing have emerged from studies ofwork testifies to this conceptual payoff. As an illustration,consider briefly two such contributions: the concept of"emotional labor" and the notion of a "career of achievement."

Emotional Labor. Perhaps the most widely acknowledged trend of the last thirty years has been the growthof service industries. In fact, services have become sointegral to the contemporary economy that some scholarsspeak of a "service" rather than a postindustrial society.Economists generally agree that service economies differsubstantially from goods-producing economies and, as aresult, some fear that economic indicators developed foran industrial era no longer give an adequate account ofthe state of nations (David 1999). The difficulty that economists face is how to conceptualize value that has notangible embodiment. The primary difficulty for organizational theorists is to determine whether the productionof that value entails a different logic of organizing and ifso, why? Because we know that organizational structuresare contingent on the attributes of the work they organize,to answer this question organizational theorists lTIUSt, atminimum, distinguish between types of service work.

An important attempt to specify types of service workoriginated with Hochschild's (1983) ethnography of airline flight attendants and the concept of "emotional labor." Hochschild observed that a significant portion of a



flight attendant's work consists of convincingly simulating positive emotions to ensure that passengers have apleasant journey. By articulating the concept of emotionallabor and its implications for customers, employers, andemployees in a variety of occupations, Hochschild(1983), Rafaeli and Sutton (1989), Sutton (1991), Kundaand Van Maanen (1999) and others forged the notion thatservice workers traffic in interactions. One upshot hasbeen the emergence of typologies of service work basedon role relations between customers and providers.Leidner (1993), for instance, distinguished between service work in which interactions are what customers actually purchase (i.e., child care, massage); service workin which interactions are important to, but not coterminous with, what is purchased (flight attendants); and service work in which interactions are peripheral to the purchase, but which nevertheless affect the provider'ssuccess (salespeople). Gutek (1995) contrasted "relational" with "rationalized" service work. The former emphasizes bonds of trust and interdependence between provider and customer (hairdressers, housekeepers) while thelatter consists of highly scripted interactions based onstandardized rules (flight attendants, telephone operators,etc.). Like Batt's (1999) research on customer serviceagents, these studies suggest that the social organizationof service work revolves around differences in how customers are treated, a distinction not only irrelevant in abureaucracy, but one which Weber (1968/1922) claimedbureaucracies were designed to eliminate.

Careers of Achievement. No principle of organizingis more paradigmatic of bureaucracy than hierarchy. Hierarchy not only defines the distribution authority in abureaucracy, it provides a blueprint for constructing organizational careers. Over the twentieth century, organizational careers became so prevalent and hierarchical advancement so synonymous with success that careerresearchers largely confined themselves to studying thetrials and tribulations of vertical mobility (Van Maanenand Barley 1984, Barley 1989). Today, it appears thatbureaucratic employment relations are disintegrating andthat vertical careers-at least those played out within aninternal labor market-are less common, particularlyamong managers and administrators (Osterman 1996,Heckscher 1995). Because career theory has been sotightly tied to vertical mobility, the demise of bureaucratic employment has left researchers with few guidingconcepts.

The notion of a boundaryless career is an attempt todeal with this situation. As we have suggested, however,the concept probably tells us less about the structure ofpeople's lives than it-does about the state of our field. We


suspect that the term will eventually prove to be a placeholder for yet to be elaborated concepts that are moreattuned to the plots of postindustrial biographies. Studiesof work and work roles are the most likely source of thoseconcepts. For example, in analyzing data from severalethnographies of technicians' work, Zabusky discoveredthat few technicians either had or desired vertical careers(Zabusky 1997, Zabusky and Barley 1996). Most playedout their career in a single position in one organization,across multiple organizations but within a single occupational community, or across a series of closely relatedoccupational communities. Despite the absence of vertical mobility, technicians nevertheless thought of themselves as having had meaningful careers which they measured in increments of technical expertise and challenge.Zabusky and Barley (1996) noted that although such "careers of achievement" seemed to lack coherence from anorganizational perspective, they were well structuredwhen viewed from the perspective of an occupationalcommunity. Because engineers, scientists, and other professionals frequently speak of their careers in a similarmanner (Van Maanen and Barley 1984), with the growthof knowledge-based work, careers of achievement maybecome increasingly common.

Resolving Theoretical PuzzlesIn addition to generating concepts for building new theories of organizing, situated studies of work can potentially resolve puzzles that have stymied older, less wellgrounded theories because they produce more concreteimages of organizing. Organizational learning offers acase in point. An important dilemma for theories of organizational learning concerns the legitimacy of extending a process originally conceptualized at the level of theindividual to a collective. The dilemma frequently manifests itself in the pragmatic issue of how organizationscan capture and retain what their members know. Recentstudies of work practices provide insight into the first issue and suggest that the second may be misspecified.

Ethnographies that examine how people solve problems at work suggest that neither the individual nor theorganization may be the appropriate locus for conceptualizing collective learning. Especially when work is technical, knowledge is best viewed as residing in a "community of practice" whose boundaries sometimes extendbeyond the organization (Lave and Wenger 1990,Wenger 1998). Communities of practice are comprised ofpractitioners who do roughly similar work. Becoming amember of such a community typically involves a periodof learning and socialization, which may entail some formof apprenticeship. As members acquire new knowledgethrough their practice, they contribute what they learn to

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the collective. Communities of practice do not, however,function as centralized repositories of knowledge, evenwhen they have formal training programs. Instead, skilland information are unequally distributed within the network of practitioners, and learning occurs when individuals mobilize the network to access the community's collective expertise.

Julian Orr's (1997) research on Xerox's copier repairtechnicians illustrates how learning takes place in communities of practice and why organizations have difficulty capturing what the members of such communitiesknow. Xerox runs an elaborate training program and publishes extensive documentation to assist technicians in repairing machines. However, technicians find neither theprograms nor the documentation helpful, because bothare too abstract and lack context. Technicians experiencetheir work as a stream of idiosyncratic problems with specific machines. Thus, when they require information, theytum to colleagues. Because the technicians' knowledgeis so situated (Lave and Wenger 1990), they face theproblem of knowing which bits of knowledge are relevantfor a particular case. To resolve this problem, technicianstell "war stories" about fixing machines which the storytellers perceive as similar to the case at hand. As in preliterate societies, technical knowledge is encoded in andtransferred through the narratives that technicians recountfor themselves and each other. Although managementrecognizes that technicians possess substantial knowledge, they are unable to capture it because encoding requires that the knowledge be separated from its contextand expressed abstractly. Ironically, of course, the organization already possesses the knowledge: It simply resides in a set of roles and work relationships that corporate management neither acknowledges nor facilitates.

Bechky's (1998) recent ethnography of engineers,technicians, and assemblers in high-tech manufacturingfurther illustrates the relevance of communities of practice for understanding how learning occurs in organizations. The assemblers, technicians, and engineers thatBechky studied had different understandings of the machines they were building. Each group also had knowledge that was crucial to the process. Bechky shows thatknowledge was more successfully transferred betweengroups when communication remained focused on theconcrete and when there existed individuals who wereable to speak the languages of two or more occupationalcommunities. Bechky's work indicates that it is possiblefor organizations to capture, disseminate, and preservewhat members of a community of practice know. Thetransfer, however, takes place across occupational ratherthan bureaucratic boundaries. Bechky's (1998) and Orr's(1997) studies both suggest that theories of organizational

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learning would be greatly strengthened by taking communities of practice as the primary unit of analysis.

Envisioning Organizing ProcessesThe call to reintegrate studies of work and organizingrests on the premise that human action and social structure are inextricably bound. The benefits of bringing workback into organization studies are, therefore, not simplyto develop better images of postbureaucratic organizingor to resolve existing theoretical dilemmas, as crucial asthese may be, but the promise of improving our understanding of organizing itself. As Karl Weick (1979) hasnoted, organization studies has been less effective at understanding verbs than nouns: We tend to study organizations, not organizing. Because research on work practices emphasizes actions and interactions over attributesand structures, bringing work back into organization studies may focus more sustained attention on the dynamicsof organizing. The promise can be glimpsed in severalrecent lines of research on work.

Most discussions of postbureaucratic organizing routinely highlight an increasing reliance on teams. Yet, howwork teams organize and operate, whether on factoryfloors or in R&D labs, is poorly understood, in part because mainstream organizational theory continues todraw inspiration from images of teamwork rooted in laboratory studies of group dynamics and decision making.Although some organizational scholars have recently returned to the field, especially the factory floor (Barker1993, Ezzamel and Willmott 1998) to examine teamworkin situ, the most extensive body of research on collaborative work is presently to be found in the literature onComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

In the last decade, CSCW has attracted a cadre of ethnographers who study coordination in such complexsocio-technical settings as air traffic control rooms(Harper and Hughes 1993), airplane cockpits (Hutchinsand Klausen 1996), surgical suites (Nardi et aI. 1996),airport ground operations (Suchman 1993, 1996;Goodwin and Goodwin 1996), subway control rooms(Heath and Luff 1992, 1996) and the bridges of ships(Hutchins 1995). Because these researchers work withinthe traditions of activity theory and ethnomethodology,rather than organization studies, they have made no attempt to develop a general theory of collaborative organizing.8 Nevertheless, they have developed concepts fordescribing situated decision making and mutual adjustment to the rapidly changing microcontingencies thatseem to characterize all such settings. These include centers of coordination (Suchman 1993), working division oflabor (Hughes et aI., 1993), articulation work (Heath andLuff 1996), distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), andcommon information spaces (Harper and Hughes 1993).



What sets these studies apart from most research onteamwork is their attention to the moment-by-momentflow of activity and their emphasis on the situated integration of tools, documents, action, and interaction. Incontrast to studies of decision making in organization behavior where decisions seem to be deliberate, distinctacts, in the CSCW studies one encounters flows ofchoreographed attending, prescient anticipation, mutualadjustment, and entwined action, out of which routinelyemerge without remark a stream of decisions that oftenhave life-or-death implications. Team work is shown tobe a process of continual structuring and restructuringdone through, to, and with both technology and people inan unselfconsciously conscious manner. In short, theCSCW literature offers insights into processes of organizing that Weick and Roberts (1993) have called mindfulheeding. What the CSCW literature reveals is that suchorganizing depends heavily on tools, technologies, andenvironments as integrating mechanisms for the socialproduction of action.

The potential contribution that studies of work canmake to how we conceptualize organizing is even betterillustrated by Pentland's (1992) research on software support hotlines. Whereas CSCW's contributions are byproducts of a research program with other objectives,Pentland explicitly set out to develop a situated approachto specifying organizing processes. Pentland showed thatit is possible to parse the stream of activity that constitutessoftware support into a series of primitives that he called"moves." Moves consist of specific operations and interactions that simultaneously constitute and are constitutedby the physical, ritual, and competence structures of theworkplace in which they occur. In the case of softwaresupport, relevant moves included: "taking a look," "assigning problems," and "referring problems." Pentlanddemonstrated that the relative prevalence of these movesdistinguished between the way software support was organized in two firms. Pentland (1995) has argued thatidentifying and analyzing moves is a step toward conceptualizing social organization as a grammar. If it were possible to develop viable grammatical models of organizing, the stage would potentially be set for a paradigmaticrevolution that could overturn functional approaches toorganizational analysis much as transformational modelsof grammar overturned functional analysis in linguistics(Salancik and Leblebici 1988).

The contribution of studies of work to our theories oforganizing need not be so revolutionary. Work studieswould make a significant contribution if they did no morethan revitalize concepts that have ossified over time. Forexample, organizational theorists have long recognized


that roles are the principle building blocks of organizational structure. They have tended, however, to adoptfunctional definitions which equate roles with normativeobligations and duties attached to identifiable positions.As a result, roles are often treated as if they were a kindof a job description. Although such a conceptualizationis useful for some purposes, it is suboptimal for studyingwork and organizing because it presumes more stabilitythan is warranted and because norms rarely capture theexigencies of ongoing activity (McCall and Simmons1978, CicoureI1974). In everyday life, roles are dynamicand behavioral; not only are their components negotiatedand renegotiated in the flow of activity, but over time oldroles disappear and new ones emerge. By studying situated rather than idealized roles, organizational theoristscould revitalize our appreciation of how roles link workto forms of organizing. What is required is a conceptualization of role that emphasizes action and interactionand that also articulates with an image of organizationalstructure in an empirically specifiable manner.

In a much overlooked manuscript, Siegfried Nadel(1957) offer the rudiments of such a conceptualization bydistinguishing between "non-relational" and "relational"aspects of roles, which are roughly equivalent to the notions of action and interaction. The nonrelational elements of a work role can be viewed as a set of recurrentactivities that do not involve interpersonal interaction andthat fall within the purview of a person who does a particular task. These would encompass where a task is done,what is done, and how it is done-what we commonlythink of as skills, tasks, and practices. Included would bethe ways in which a worker deploys technologies, materials, and information.

Changes in the nonrelational aspects of a work roleshould be tightly coupled to changes in the role's relational elements-with whom one interacts and what thoseinteractions involve. For example, altered tasks may narrow or expand role sets, shift dependencies, or change thefrequency and content of encounters. In fact, since nonrelational roles largely comprise solitary actions, one cannot properly speak of social change until changes in workpractices affect interactions. With such spillover onemoves from an individual to a dyadic level of analysis, aposition from which it is possible to explore whether roletransformations confirm or alter forms of organizing.

If one conceives of an. organizational structure as thepattern that emerges from real interactions among people,it is possible to link shifts in work practices directly tochanges in organizational structure by examining properties of social networks. As noted earlier, network theorists hold that social structures can be described as configurations of interaction among incumbents of specific

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roles. SOlne have even argued that roles are synonymouswith a uniquely patterned set of ties (Burt 1982, White etal. 1976, Winship and Mandel 1983). From this perspective, any modification in an organization's structure mustbe grounded in changes that occur at the level of dyadicencounters. Alterations in dyadic relations may inducesuch structural changes as the reforillulation of cliques,the weakening of bridges between sectors of a network,or the differentiation of statuses. Such changes may occurbecause new forms of work reduce or create dependencies, because they require interactions among people whopreviously did not interact, or because they alter the tenorof supervision, collaboration, and other social relationships.

Taken together, these notions offer investigators a lensfor viewing the link between work and organizing in amanner that allows one to move from action to structure.FrOln this vantage point, activities, skills, and other nonrelational aspects of work shape relationships, and thesein turn inscribe the social networks that constitute organizational structures. Changes in the nature of workshould, therefore, affect the structure of an organizationprimarily by altering or reinforcing role relationships. Tothe degree that role relations involve actors in other organizations or spheres of life, researchers should also beable to link changes in organizational fields and changesin institutional patterns to changes in the nature of work.

ConclusionThe field of organization studies currently confronts a significant challenge: discovering, documenting, analyzing,and perhaps even shaping, the organizational implicationsof the shift froln an industrial to a postindustrial economy.We have argued that facing this challenge of conceptualizing the future may ironically require a renewed appreciation for organizational theory's past. In particular,we contend that organization theory's effort to makesense of the postbureaucratic organizing is hampered bythe absence of what once served as its empirical foundation: detailed studies of work. The dearth of data onwhat people actually do-the skills, knowledge, and practices that cOlllprise their routine work-leaves us withincreasingly anachronistic theories and outdated imagesof work and how it is organized. We have attempted toshow why studies of work are central to good organizational theorizing, where such studies are currently found,why the field ignores theIn, what would be required iforganizational theorists were to reintegrate the study ofwork into their research efforts, and what the conceptualpayoffs of such an approach might be.

Some Inight interpret our argument as nostalgic longing for a glorious past. We do believe that fields of inquiry

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are not well served by pressures for constant conceptualinnovation or the search for a unique identity that requiressevering intellectual ties with what has gone before. Nostalgia, however, is not the impetus for our argument. Thepast never repeats itself. Instead, our call is for a modeof scientific inquiry that rests on close empirical observation of the phenomena that we hope to explain and arecognition that emerging social developn1ents cannot beneatly compartmentalized by the boundaries of established specialties. Grounded eillpiricism and disciplinaryeclecticism are particularly crucial in the social sciencesduring periods of large-scale institutional and infrastructural change. We have recalled the era of Industrial Sociology as an inspiration for and an exemplar of such anapproach. Whatever its shortcomings, there can be nodoubt that industrial sociologists enabled us to solidifyour theories of bureaucratic organizing, in large part bybuilding on close observations of work and by drawingon data and ideas generated by researchers in related disciplines. Our hope is for a "postbureaucratic" organizational theory that will make comparable empirical andconceptual contributions.

AcknowledgmentsAn earlier version of this paper entitled "Saolples of the Future" was de

livered at the SCANCOR conference held at Stanford University, Septelll

ber 20-22, 1998. We thank our colleagues Diane Bailey, Panlela Hinds,

Robert Sutton, and Wanda Orlikowski, and Organization Science's three

reviewers, who provided useful C01111nents for revision.

Endnotes1See Silvestri (1997) for data on occupational trends.

2"Network organization" currently has two quite different denotations.

SOlnetinles the term is used to describe relationships within an orga

nization. Other researchers use the tenn to denote relations between

organizations. Our COlnlnents are confined to the first usage.

3Specifically, an organization's network is hierarchical to the extent

that every pair of nodes in the network has one and only one least

upper bound. Krackhardt (1992) has developed an algorithn1 for de

tennining the extent to which a network is hierarchical.

4Most research on contingent work has been produced by students of

industrial relations and not by organizational theorists (see Kalleberg

et al. 1997, Barker and Christensen 1998, Ostennan 1999, Cappelli

1999). These studies tend to take a labor Inarket perspective on enl

ployment relations and focus, for the Inost part, on the experiences of

"low-end" temporary enlployees. This literature adopts a nonnative

stance and concerns itself with the potential for exploitation and the

possibility of reform. Relevant issues include wages, benefits, and work

conditions. Unlike the organizational literature, a nUlnber of these stud

ies do examine the work and work experiences of temporary elnployees

(e.g., Parker 1994, Rogers 1995). They therefore represent a source

data which could be conlbined with evidence frotn studies of tnore

highly skilled contractors to build a grounded theory of contract work.

SIn 1996 organization studies was formally recognized by the ASA



when the section of Work and Occupations was renamed Work, Occupations, and Organizations. For the most part, however, the symbolicreintegration of the subfields has yet to result in substantive reintegration.6Aggregate stability reflects the entry of women into the workforce forwhom job tenure is increasing, compared to earlier eras when fewerwomen held full-time jobs. The aging of the workforce is a secondfactor: Older workers tend to hold their jobs longer.7The concept is not dissimilar to the organization database effortsfunded by the National Science Foundation during the 1980s with thedistinction that a database on work would contain considerable descriptive data. The coordinating agency might solicit research on particularlines of work and, in return for funding, demand that researchers develop descriptive information covering specified aspects of the workunder study. One way of thinking about this is the accumulation of amore carefully chosen and more extensive version of the descriptionsthat accompany the jobs indexed by the Dictionary of Occupational

Titles. This descriptive data might augment attempts to collect morestandard quantitative measures on the nature of work, such as thoseproposed by the Department of Labor's O*Net initiative. O*Net isconceived as a flexible, more easily updatable replacement for the Dic

tionary of Occupational Titles. Rather than a manual, O*Net consistsof an occupation-by-attribute data matrix that can be searched using abrowserlike interface. The large number of attributes contained inO*Net covers a wide variety of information, including skills, training,and contextual information. For a description of O*Net, see Petersonet al. (1999).8In fact, the ethnomethodologists would resist developing such a theoryon epistemological grounds.

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