Someone stole my poster during the night from the locked SSIT5 display at LSE. It’s got the link to my blog printed on it, so dear perpetrator, know this: I’ve made the trip to London to present that poster, and I spent a lot of time preparing it. Thanks to you I’ve missed the opportunity to display my work to the other academics here this morning. I wrote on the poster: ‘I’d love to get feedback, so please come talk to me if you find this interesting.’ That does not translate to ‘you can take this poster home with you!’ I hope it reappears upstairs before the afternoon’s PhD students’ session starts.

These are my notes on Gideon Kunda’s SSIT5 keynote about his new book (coauthored with Steve Barley): ‘Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy‘, which examines the social organization of temporary work among engineers in Silicon Valley.

– He describes how his own interest evolved from his previous book, which was a critical ethnography of ‘organisational culture’ in a Route 128 startup. R128 was predominated by a work culture centred around large corporations, whereas the culture of Silicon Valley emphasised temporary work.

– He goes on to tell how he grew increasingly uncomfortable with the glorification of the former in the early 1990s and the latter in the late 1990s. For this book, he and Steve Barley negotiated access to a staffing company dealing engineers on temporary assignments to firms in the Valley. He overviews the history of U.S. labour relations starting from the New Deal. The late 1980s were a critical time for the emergence of temporary working relations in the Valley.

– The nuances of knowledge acquisition and the way how budgets are managed are the critical enablers of Valley-style temporary work. Also, temporary labour is a way to push up the valuation of the company when firms are valuated based on the relation between revenues and the number of permanent employees. Staffing firms are ‘single points of contact, proxies.

– ‘Gurus’ are the most highly valued temps whereas ‘warm bodies’ just fill a slot in the process. Staffing firms typically take a 40% slice of the total fee; that was the economic value of contracting at the time.

– From the contractors’ point of view, face-to-face encounters are essential. The other important thing was to get one’s name and CV out. Staffing firms on the other hand set out two kinds of salespeople: ones who look for the warm bodies, and others who look for open positions. The staffer never tells the contractor how much the company is paying for the position.

– In addition to searching for contractors, there is the step of qualifying them. Contractors constantly sell themselves on skills they can’t do, believing they will learn on the job. When you start on a job, there are always people watching you. Management wants to treat you as a commodity. No hand-holding, no cuddling here. You don’t get employee benefits, can’t go on the company picknick. And permanent employees may get suspicious that you’re taking away their work. Management can call the staffing firm and get you replaced or tell you to shower in the morning. And as you’re working, you need to keep talking to staffing firms to secure the next job.

– Even so this is some engineers’ dream. In practice people are interdependent, and a successful project requires people’s involvement beyond the state of commodities. Project managers are faced with the task of re-personalising the commodity. The more you know about the way work in the company is done, the more difficult (and hence costly) it is to replace you in practice. It’s a mixed message: ‘we don’t need you—we need you’; ‘we disregard you—we love you.’

– Contractors are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. This creates all kinds of identity issues, how do people define themselves. The typical way to deal with this is first by defining yourself as an expert; second, by professionalizing your status as an outsider.

– The typical narrative is that organisation is collapsing back into a market. But here another dynamic is in play, where a distinct professional class is emerging. The bubble’s burst reduced both the permanent and temporary employment by 20%; in many firms, paid employees were the first to go. This suggests that temporary contracting is here to stay. For the contractors, the challenge is how to establish a form of security without heavily institutionalising it.

Comment: To me personally, making sense of the contracting phenomenon is a way to make sense of my professional identity. Aula is one experiment in creating lighter structure for contractors. I also got to look at this from the perspective of a staffer when I worked on ShiftControl. I guess now I’m thinking about this as a potential contractor as I’m trying to figure out what I will do after the PhD.

I’m presenting a poster about my PhD thesis at the SSIT5 workshop at LSE. It’s the first time I’ll talk about my doctoral research in public! Here’s the short text from the poster:

The Practice of Innovation: How New Technology Gets Defined as Sustaining or Disruptive

My thesis is an ethnography about Nokia’s efforts to renew itself through corporate venturing. The proliferation of Nokia’s main product—the mobile phone—is extraordinary, and social scientists across the spectrum have recognized its implications as important. Still, the design and development practices of the mobile phone have been little investigated.

As the case of Nokia illustrates, these practices take place in corporations faced with the pressures to innovate and grow. Here, the technical and the organizational work through each other. In Nokia’s case, the historical context was one where the company had reinvented itself once before, and now faced a situation where it needed to do the same again. My interest centres on how innovation in this situation was performed by way of an institutional arrangement known as internal corporate venturing, which was linked with the notion of organizational ‘renewal.’ It was not just about coming up with the next new technology; it was about giving the organization a new life.

At the same time, the study is also about something much more general. Prevailing thinking on innovation assumes that new technologies are inherently either sustaining or disruptive to the organization. In aligning myself with the practice turn in social theory, I argue that the sustaining or disruptive character of innovation is not a given; it is achieved through practices of alignment that work on and through materials and stories.

I justify this argument by showing how the ventures at Nokia aligned themselves in relation to the company’s strategic narratives and other practices in the outside world. The work of alignment involved the ordering of materials to support the stories that the ventures told about themselves. A venture’s success in the internal competition for resources depended on its ability to make the materials speak for its potency in the context of prescriptive frameworks, which the management of the company mobilized to make resource allocation decisions. I discuss how these frameworks were reproduced and reconfigured, and reflect on how my own role as an ethnographer evolved from an apprentice, to a participant, to a commentator who responded with an alternate framework for conceptualising the relationship between the ventures and the main business. I suggest that coming to grips with interventions of this kind is practice theory’s most compelling promise, as well as its toughest future challenge.

TheFeature.com has an article by Howard Rheingold on mobilities research at Lancaster. I’m quoted near the beginning on my research on the RFID phone, which is one of the ventures that I’ve been studying at Nokia over the past two years. The discussion started when we met on May Day at Howard’s with Aleksi, Ulla, and Justin and the five of us hiked up Mt. Tamalpais for views of the ocean. Justin blogged the hike.

Back in Lancaster, working intensely now on the scraps of notes, fragmented narratives, fuzzy ideas, whatever there’s to go on in the general direction of a PhD thesis. Yet it’s June, and there’s always much happening in June: local Lancaster highlights include the Interface workshop (starting today!) and the What’s Life Got to Do with It symposium. I’m also hosting the Word in Edgeways lunch next Tuesday; I’m planning to discuss the technologies of ethnography there. I’ll miss the EVA party in Helsinki (featuring Joi Ito and Jorma Ollila among others). Steve Woolgar’s organizing an interesting workshop titled Does STS Mean Business over at Oxford later this month, which I am planning to attend. One last thing: up until now I purposefully haven’t blogged about the substance of my PhD research, but might start to experiment in that space… still need to do some thinking on that.

Dvora Yanow recently quoted a study from the 1970s according to which only 7% of face-to-face communication is verbal (some claim the percentage is around 10). In online interaction, such as the sending and receiveing of social network-service invitations, the ‘rich’ embodied expressions and gestures have to be inferred from ‘poor’ codified information (e.g. tickboxes and a few lines of text explanation). The forced codification that such invitations require has annoyed even the most prolific of the online textual expressionists.

Social sofware developers appear to be grappling with the broad issue of codifying embodied knowledge into computer-readable ‘information’ on many fronts (annotating photos, simplifying moblogging, FOAF… the list goes on). Much of this very interesting work is characterised by a strong epistemological buy-in to the cybernetic worldview formalized by Shannon and Wiener, according to which the world is made of definite entities and ‘information’ can be abstracted from its material embodiment.

A set of critical analyses of this worldview and its practices also exists. Its range includes interesting work by Brian Bloomfield on the assumptions of inscriptions like requirements analyses, Lucy Suchman on situatedness, Geoff Bowker on the cybernetic concept of information, and Leigh Star on classification, only to name a few. Chuck and Candy Goodwin’s work at UCLA is particularly striking in its visuality. In Chuck’s words, meaning is enacted by way of ‘an ecology of sign systems that includes not only talk, but also a range of different kinds of displays made by the body, and structure in the environment.‘

A welcome stab at the lacklustre ROI vs. Strategic Fit dichotomy that motivates many “theories” of corporate venturing: “The Future of Corporate Venturing” by Andrew Campbell et al. in the recent MIT Sloan Management Review. They distinguish four venturing strategies: ecosystem venturing, innovation venturing, harvest venturing and private-equity venturing. Sine qua non, venturing attempts to grow a new billion-dollar leg outside the core business always crash in flames because they lead to endless strategy-changing (i.e. lack of strategy). Instead, companies should ascetically practice the venturing strategy that leverages their market position and assets: thy perseverance shall be rewarded…