Studying practice and

situating work
Dr. Alessia Contu
IROB Warwick Business School
The University of Warwick
Alessia.contu@wbs.ac.uk

Outline of the seminar

The trajectory of this work:
Why?
What and How?
a) Re-embedding Situatedness: the importance of
power relations in learning theory
b) Studying Practice: Situating Talking About Machine
c) Studying Practice: Situating work in AML, a new
media company

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The trajectory of this work why and how it started

for me?
This area is a long-standing interest of mine.
Masters in Organizational and Management Learning at
Lancaster University
Made a lot of sense; and fascination with ambivalence in the
book
Glitches in the way SLT was popularized. It seemed to do
little justice to the radical and progressive elements of the
theory
Possible contribution to an emerging field in OS

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Re-embedding Situatedness
Shows how popularised versions of situated learning theories tend to
ignore or suppress Lave and Wengers understanding that learning
processes are integral to the exercise of power and control rather
than external or unrelated to the operations of power relations
Looks at how Lave and Wengers idea have been adopted and
popularised
Invites reflection upon:
1. The affinity between the dilution and selective adoption of Lave and
Wengers thinking and its ideological compatibility with dominant
managerial values
2. What can be gained by bringing into the picture a sustained
attentiveness to social structure of work relations through which
learning practices are articulated

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Key Arguments:
Revisiting SLT and L&Ws work stressing and
suggesting that:
COP as an analytical perspective
COP as relational: practice as embedded in sociocultural processes of re-production including
politico-economic ones
COPs as directly involving and addressing power
relations so it is worth developing and studying
work organisational practices in such a way
Hegemony over resources for learning and
alienation from full participation are inherent in
the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality
of participation in its historical realization (L&W,
1991:42)
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Key Arguments:
Indicate how SLT had, instead, been popularised for an
Organization and Management audience (focus on Brown and
Duguid, 1991 key reference in such translation)
Selective reading that marginalises reference to power and its
importance issues of resistance, control, etc. (maybe helped by
L&Ws low focus on power in their empirical
examples/discussions)
Passage from analytical to technocratic tool which makes it
possible for managers to gather a valuable, yet rather ephemeral
and delicate aspect of organisations beyond the
canonical/formal/official
Conservative reading that facilitates managerialist appropriation
and compatibility with managerialist ideology.

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Key Arguments:

Re-interpret Orrs study showing how power relations can

be usefully mobilised in understanding work practices and
processes of learning as participation in a CoP
Questions how the logic of repairing at all cost was
developed
Stresses some elements in Orrs study regarding handbook
and detailed prescriptions of work as involving forms of
labour control
Development of identity as heroic troubleshooters: key to
how logic of repairing at all costs was developed
Such an identity checks the resentment technicians feel
towards attempts to curb their autonomy and discretion,
which furthers their de-skilling and minimizes the value of
Connecting models of work with discourses of power
their work

Money and control of work suggests that managers

would not want to acknowledge the skills and autonomy of
Their technicians as this would make them more valuable
in their discourses Orr, 1998:453

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Contribution and further developments

It seems to be taken as:
a critique of CoPs and SLT
an attempt to introduce and focus on power
relations in this field of studies. Many
seemed to agree this needed to be done
a traditional labour-process theory piece

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Studying Practice: Situating Talking About Machine

Invitation to reflect on Orrs work by Organization
Studies
Decision to draw upon some ideas we had been
developing particularly with relevance to the work
of Laclau and Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek and a
deepening interest in studying Lacan
Possibility of delving into aspects of our previous
analysis, in particular by making clear the
difference with traditional LPT

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Key Points:
Show how the focus on practices of work can
deepen our understanding of the issue of social
reproduction, in this case of relations of
production in liberal workplaces such as that of
the Xeros technicians. In order to accomplish this
we
Mobilize the work of Lacan in the way it has been
taken up in strand of political theory we identified
as Social Theory of Hegemony (see work of
Glynos and Stavrakakis, Laclau and Zizek)
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Key Argument
The way of life of the technicians described so
beautifully in Orrs ethnography shows how:
The technicians dis-identify with the bureaucratic
call of Xerox to follow prescriptions and any kind of
normative form of official corporate cultural control
The technicians misbehave and follow
improvisational practices that could be called
irrational.
Why and what consequences does this have for Xerox
and for our understanding of working practices?
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Why?
Because the lived reality of technicians is
expressed in, and sustained by, a set of images
(the recalcitrant machine, the black arts, the duels
in front of the community etc.) and a fantasy that
enables them to identify themselves as heroes
A fantasy is the name for the scenario, the screen
that supports and gives consistency to a given
reality as mine, their, ours and coordinates
the desire and domesticates the enjoyment caught
in it.

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Fantasy brings affect and discourse together

The fantasy of the technicians as victorious heroes in
winning against the recalcitrance of the machine.
This has at its centre the machine, which is: attractive,
recalcitrant, fascinating and mysterious
Beatific fantasy but also constant fear of horrific fantasy
The different identities and levels of engagement are: each
individual with the machine (conquest through analysis and
logic, intuition and improvisation); and all of them (the
technicians) in their relationships with the machines
(talking of themselves and amongst themselves). All of
them in with customers and management.

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In and Through This Fantasy:

The hero emerges as an identity symbolically
that stands for the liberal autonomous subject
that is not duped by any corporate bureaucratic
ruling
Such free subject emerges as positivity/identity
which engages his labour in following its passion
and desire which, in this case, is more important
then what might appear the rational, bureaucratic
and instrumental logic of organizing work and
getting the job done.
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Consequences 1:
This is an example of how, in practice, instances of what
appears as resistance and misbehaviour in the underground
and in the unofficial crevices of organised life is actually decaf
resistance (Contu, 2008)
This is a resistance that actually serves Xerox bottom-line by:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Reducing the cost of expensive exchanges of machines

Making sure customers are kept happy and therefore reducing
complaints and loss of customs and image
Keeping technicians labour at a low/intermediate level of skill
Providing technicians with their human dignity, pride and sense
of themselves as worthy, capable, autonomous individuals
while at the same time they have to sell their labour to live. In
such condition in fact they officially sign away their autonomy
and freedom in how to accomplish their work task as
established in their employment contract and job description.

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Consequences 2:
This case, therefore, illustrates how social
reproduction of liberal workplaces happens in practice
i.e. by involving complexities of images, desires and
passions in which identities, meanings and objects
emerge and are shaped in very specific ways of life.
Indicates how capitalist liberal ideology does not only
work and does not necessarily involve the
identification with formal and/or concerted
managerial organizational control. Dis-identification
often works just as well, often, even better.

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Studying Practice: Situating work in a new media

company
The case based on a vignette of working practice in
a new media company, AML. Specifically a team of
three people working on the detailed content design
of a messaging system
Discussion of the vignette with a community of
practice lens, a practice-based approach.
Why? To continue on the trajectory of the work
developed so far by developing an empirically based
study of situated practice attentive to issue of power
relations, conflict and antagonism and/or how
consent is reproduced in such situated practice.

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Monday Morning Team Meeting

The Vignette:
Shadowing Laura,
relative newcomer
to AML practice

Lunch time/early afternoon:

talks about the project
Laura (CD) and Amber (MD) joined
by John (D) and then by Simon (TD)
and Mark (Com.D.)
Doing: Interstitial, in-formal
conversations
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Participants: Laura (CD), Teresa (P), John

(D)
Formal Work: creating the detailed
content design
Doing: discussion of proposal from Laura
And exchange of views on details, John
leaves
the meeting twice
Note: Teresa supportive of Laura
John slightly upset with Laura
Afternoon
Team
Meeting
Laura
works by
herself
in her work
station
Participants: as above plus Amber
(MD)
Formal work: Amend and perfect DCD
Doing: Questions, Drawings,
Discussions, Drinking Teas
Laura works alone again, Joanne
(CD) passes an old CD Project

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Features
Simultaneous engineering anarchic
qualities
Heterarchical qualities: minimal
hierarchies, high heterogeneity,
immediatism and anarchic qualities
Characteristics of creative industries

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Abrasions and tensions

Laura and John
AML practice and techie client: John in the middle of this as TD
Amber and production of team working on CD: Laura in the
middle of this
And Teresa?
Conflict & tensions? In the interstices between practice-based
theory and creative industry literature: Creative abrasions;
hegemonisation of user point of view; nomadic settlements
Is that enough to explain what is happening in our practice?

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A critical approach following on the trajectory

discussed so far:
Accepts that contradictions and struggles are inherent to social practice and
the formation of identity (L&W, 1991:57); primacy of power and antagonism in
sustaining and reproducing the social
Deciphering :
The process of community reproduction as historically constructed, ongoing
and conflicting structuring of activities and relationships amongst practitioners
(p.56)
The hegemony over resources () in the shaping of legitimacy and
peripherality of participation in its historical realization (p.42)
A broader conception of individual and collective biographies (p. 56)
Methodologically & Analytically:
Investigate what actors are saying about themselves and their relations with
others.
Focus on how they reflect and talk about their conditions of existence
Document broader historical and social elements: existing discourses

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Experts and Old timers: between management and

passionate practice
Amber MD : New, formal management structure Amber MD, all original founders with
managerial responsibility but still informality in processes, rules and procedures
Modular organization: this repeats the original team formula through which
they think interactively from the start thereby providing successful solutions . This,
however, is not sustained by a team ideology.
Fantasy of sameness: sharing equality in a practice they are passionate about;
differences in practice are smoothed over through participation and learning in which
they become competent members
Hope more than rational strategy and design: beatific fantasy, as it worked for the
founders it will work for everyone else. Key difference, however, is the employment
relation

Struggle of investment in new identity, attraction of old passionate practice,

insecurity of current working practices
Personal involvement of Amber which simultaneously if spuriously is exactly how
Laura learns and is suggestive of the progressive journey to competence
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The point of view of Teresa

The puzzle of Teresa: knowledge sharing, knowledge retaining
Impossibility of training Laura on the job: signal commitment but resists
Ambers decision by intensifying Lauras work
Such unsatisfied promise bring frustration in the cheap people working in
AML. As if there was a very exploitative management but you know it did
not happen on purpose it was just a lot of things at the same time,
needing more people not having money to pay them and poor Laura found
herself doing all of it knowing nothing of it at all
Cheap people as the symptom : it is what makes possible for AML to
continue to operate but at the same time dislocate the fantasy of
sameness and promise of progressive acquisition of craftsmanship and
competence in practice.
AML practice is overdetermined by commodification and harnessing labour
power for valorization with added savings.
Does the fantasy of sameness in sharing passionate practice with present
and/or future recognition has some hold or is it only for Amber and Teresa?
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John and Laura:

(Professional) identity and the importance of (not)
being a team member
John: My job is technical while now we keep on working on
CD the creative side .. And I do not mind doing that .. But
then thats it.. You have to say ok you are doing that thats
fair enough but its like Jooohn [as if someone is calling
him] I dont know I just did not feel comfortable with it at
times really because somebody should be dedicated to doing
this job and its not like you come in every two minutes I
dont know it just wasnt working
Laura: For an organisation that is about teamwork it is
essential that everyone can work as a team member and he
came across as quite negative and it was difficult to cope
with all the time (Laura)

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Laura: the learning signifier at work

Well I think there was a desperate situation as for S4 staff
and things.. And I was doing a lot of overtime which I
was not particularly happy about but it just needed to
be done. I was not the only one though when Amber was
also involved and people at a high level were all doing
overtime, we had various stages in which we worked
late at night trying to get things done (Laura)
you know I have been working hard and perhaps it has
not been rightly scheduled not given the right amount
of time and not because I could not do it (Laura)

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Conclusions on employing a revised CoPs

lens:

Spurious and problematic centrality of Laura to the DCD

in this process; tensions in the participation of all
Lack of legitimacy and recognised mastery played up at
various level;
Work intensification and subjection to it with
increased personal commitment/effort
Fantasy of sameness in the love and passion for their
practice and recognition by broader community of
practitioners still has a hold. This is what facilitates that
works get done in such a way
Even in conditions in which cheap people are brought
to continue re-production of the whole social system.
This is at once stretched, can continue to exist, but is
infected.

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Interesting in this fantasy is the significance of the signifier

learning which can be linked to the broader historical presence
of the learning discourse
I am learning a lot some whilst I am learning I am quite happy
you know I am getting the experience of working in a
commercial environment, how to work with deadlines, how to
get a structure and work in teams. I am building up my portfolio
getting more work together that I can show to people (Laura)
Laura subjectivation would appear cold, instrumental
identification and subjection but :
Labour in exchange of future riches, recognition etc.
domesticate anxiety of uncertainty and signal a leap of faith in
the fairness of the capitalist system

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Returning on abrasions and tensions in situated

practices of creative work
The abrasions we have seen are not only creatively motivated but are
also positive signals of dislocation of a new media design practice that
is overdetermined as practice of passionate creation and valorization
based on the relation of production and the management of such
production process in an employment relation.
We have seen the infected character of a managerial discourse which
relies on, if clumsily (or maybe cunningly), the fantasy of sameness in
the passion of doing new media design
Does it lack the discursive sophistication to become proper
management-by-community?
Or is this an example of hyper or super management-by-community
the very exemplar of management-by-community which facilitates
and harnesses high commitment as widespread ideology, regardless of
how good or not a local management is in harnessing and developing
it through official if delicate control strategies of cultivation?
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