To seethat working, learning, and innovating are interrelated and compatible and thuspotentially complementary, not conflicting forces requires a distinct conceptual shift.

we have been arguing throughout, to understand the way information isconstructed and travels within an organization, it is first necessary to understand thedifferent communities that are formed within it and the distribution of power amongthem

This architecture should preserve andenhance the healthy autonomy of communities, while simultaneously building aninterconnectedness through which to disseminate the results of separate communi-ties' experimen

semiautonomous, self-constituting communities and not a brittle monolith

dominant world view

communities-of-practice must be allowed some latitude to shake them-selves free of received wisdo

Alternative world views, then, do not lie in the laboratory or strategic planningoffice alone, condemning everyone else in the organization to submit to a unitaryculture

he two changes wentalong togethe

Conversely, -hey can be granted peripherality but denied legitimacy. Martin(1982) gives examples of organizations in which legitimacy is explicitly denied ininstances of "open door" management, where members come to realize that, thoughthe door is open, it is wiser not to cross the threshold.

, not by explicating abstractions of individual practice.

the question arises, how is it possible to foster learning-in-working

If this distinction is correct then it has two particularly important corollaries. First,work practice and learning need to be understood not in terms of the groups that areordained (e.g. "task forces" or "trainees"), but in terms of the communities thatemerg

Learning, from the viewpoint of LPP, essentially involves becoming an "insider."Learners do not receive or even construct abstract, "objective," individual knowledge;rather, they learn to function in a community-be it a community of nuclearphysicists, cabinet makers, high school classmates, street-corner society, or, as in thecase under study, service technicians. They acquire that particular community'ssubjective viewpoint and learn to speak its language. In short, they are enculturated(Brown, Collins, and Duguid 1989). Learners are acquiring not explicit, formal"expert knowledge," but the embodied ability to behave as community members. Forexample, learners learn to tell and appreciate community-appropriate stories, discov-ering in doing so, all the narrative-based resources we outlined above. As Jordan(1989) argues in her analysis of midwifery, "To acquire a store of appropriate storiesand, even more importantly, to know what are appropriate occasions for telling them,is then part of what it means to become a midwife" (p. 935)

f social construc

to Levi-Strauss's (1966) concept of bricolage

they meet for coffee or for meals andtrade stories back and forth

She studied the clash between midwifery as it is prescribed by officials fromMexico City and as it is practiced in rural Yucatan.

thick description

As a result, a wedge is drivenbetween the corporation and its reps: the corporation assumes the reps are untrain-able, uncooperative, and unskilled; whereas the reps view the overly simplistictraining programs as a reflection of the corporation's low estimation of their worthand skill

performing their jobs according to formal job descriptions,

Often it has its moreimmediate cause in the strategy to downskill positions

We begin by looking at the variance between a major organization's formaldescriptions of work both in its training programs and manuals and the actual workpractices performed by its members. Orr's (1990a, 1990b, 1987a, 1987b) detailedethnographic studies of service technicians illustrate how an organization's view ofwork can overlook and even oppose what and who it takes to get a job done. Basedon Orr's specific insights, we make the more general claim that reliance on espousedpractice (which we refer to as canonical practice) can blind an organization's core tothe actual, and usually valuable practices of its members (including noncanonicalpractices, such as "work arounds"). It is the actual practices, however, that determinethe success or failure of organizations.

By reassessing work, learning, and innovation inthe context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connectionsbetween these three become appare

What the evaluations saw was that an expensive machine was not needed to make arecord copy of original documents. For the most part, carbon paper already did thatadmirably and cheaply. What they failed to see was that a copier allowed theproliferation of copies and of copies of copies. The quantitative leap in copies andtheir importance independent of the original then produced a qualitative leap in theway they were used. They no longer served merely as records of an original. Instead,they participated in the productive interactions of organizations' members in aunprecedented way. (See Latour's (1986) description of the organizational role o

LATOUR, B. (198

Figure 3 shows a second way of searching for the information. Moreexperienced users may wish to go directly to the information, and they canuse the grapher view of the same diagnostic questions.

The students are presented with about 500 of these cases in the course of their studies, themain goal being to school their decision-making behavior. The large number of cases is notseen as an inductive basis for statistically generalizable knowledge, but rather as preparationfor a maximum number of diverse situations.

archaeological reading is a means of constantly locating a text’s arguments, statements, and metaphors within a set of other discourses (see Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, “What is an author?”

A positive reading to me is one which aims to create new concepts or arguments, or to elaborate on existing ones in order to articulate them with current issues.  As I discussed today, I think a negative reading is one which is addressed to one’s own limitations as a cautionary tale.