Network
Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications

Spinuzzi examines the networks of activity that make a telecommunications company work and thrive.

Clay Spinuzzi (Author)

9781107564862, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 December 2015

242 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.5 cm, 0.36 kg

"Network is a well written, very useful organizational ethnography, raising a series of significant issues about how to conceptualize organizations."
Canadian Journal of Sociology, Alex Preda, University of Edinburgh

How does a telecommunications company function when its right hand often doesn't know what its left hand is doing? How do rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary organizations hold together and perform their knowledge work? In this book, Clay Spinuzzi draws on two warring theories of work activity - activity theory and actor-network theory - to examine the networks of activity that make a telecommunications company work and thrive. In doing so, Spinuzzi calls a truce between the two theories, bringing them to the negotiating table to parley about work. Specifically, about net work: the coordinative work that connects, coordinates, and stabilizes polycontextual work activities. To develop this uneasy dialogue, Spinuzzi examines the texts, trades, and technologies at play at Telecorp, both historically and empirically. Drawing on both theories, Spinuzzi provides new insights into how net work actually works and how our theories and research methods can be extended to better understand it.

1. Networks, genres, and four little disruptions
2. What is a network?
3. How are networks theorized?
4. How are networks historicized?
5. How are networks enacted?
6. Is our network learning?

Subject Areas: Communications engineering / telecommunications [TJK], Occupational & industrial psychology [JMJ]