Images of Work

Abstract

The ways in which work gets done are observably different from the ways in which those in positions of responsibility talk about that work or from the ways in which the organizational and business literature portrays work. The ethnographic study of work focuses on work practice, on what is actually done, and on how those doing the work make sense of their practice, but this is rarely part of either corporate or organizational discourse about work This article tries to show what is missing from this discourse and suggests that the corporate model is based on a common misapprehension of the nature of technique and confounds the ways humans work with the ways machines work