Summary
This project completed fieldwork for an ethnography of a prominent research and development (R&D) organization in the field of computing, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It involved interviews and museum visits aimed at developing and extending insights acquired during the Investigator’s tenure as an anthropologist and researcher at PARC during the twenty years from 1980 to 2000. A starting premise of the project is that the R&D laboratory is a primary site in which to investigate relations of science in society. The aim of the larger research of which this project is a part is to respecify the workings of ‘innovation’ through ethnographically based analysis of the lived experience and everyday practices of one, particular site of industrial research and development.
The primary results of the project were a series of interviews with scientists and research managers. Eleven in-depth interviews were conducted with central actors involved directly with Xerox PARC between the years 1980 and 2000, or in affiliated academic, industrial and governmental institutions. The interviewees were selected based on: a) their histories with respect to the project’s primary research focus, Xerox PARC, and particularly their connections to the time period after 1980 and/or with PARC’s interdisciplinary cognitive and system sciences laboratories; b) their current positions within sites relevant to PARC’s research network and/or popular representation. In addition to the interviews the Investigator visited the three primary museum exhibitions in the U.S. focused on computing.
Preliminary analysis of these materials was approached as a critical examination of three, inter-related questions:
1. How is the research centre, as a site for the creation of new knowledge and innovative technological forms, produced and reproduced through ongoing practices of strategic boundary work, affiliation, and differentiation?
This question works from the premise that knowledge creation and innovation are not self-evident processes, but the effects of complex symbolic and material practices. The latter include the ongoing reproduction of the research and development laboratory itself as an institution, and as the locus of creative production. Interviews with research managers from PARC and related organizations focused on just what that work involves. A concern with organizational ‘branding’ seems increasingly salient across industrial, academic and governmental sites, as each organization is pressed to demonstrate both its comparability and its distinctiveness with respect to others. Along with competition for funding within larger institutional settings as well as outside, the identity of research organizations rests on the extent of their symbolic as well as economic capital (the two being mutually dependent) within a broader field. For the industrial research centre the latter includes other scientific and technological producers, business analysts and shareholders, and relevant popular media, all of which contribute to the centre’s reputation. In the case of research and development, the question of identity is further complicated by accountabilities to ‘basic’ science, technological ‘creativity,’ and business ‘entrepreneurship.’
2. What practices shape the everyday experience of individuals at Xerox PARC, and what identities are viable there?
PARC’s organizational identity during the 1980s and 90s included commitment to interdisciplinarity, for which anthropology in a sense became emblematic. While researchers with degrees in the social sciences were always in the minority (less than 10% of all researchers during the period 1980-2000), the idea of interdisciplinarity became increasingly prominent in PARC’s organizational identity, and opened up a space for expansion of the research agenda.
Research agendas at PARC, and the scientific and technical identities that they incorporate, are characterised by multiple accountabilities. Interviewees’ reflections on their experience of PARC point to a range of orientations, but values of individual scientific achievement and contribution to the economic success of the enterprise are primary. While commitments to academic discipline and associated identities continue to distinguish research from development, researchers orient as well to the role of entrepreneur as an increasingly obligatory, and at the same time taken for granted, engagement.
Across scientific and entrepreneurial activities, researchers’ accounts of their experience express ambivalence between individual and collective identities, built deeply into discourses and practices of recognition and reward. The latter reproduce longstanding assumptions regarding the individual as the locus of creative production, through competitive assessment of researchers that ranks one against another. At the same time, individuals are assumed to have obligations to the organization acquired through the privilege of employment, and a commitment to collective success. This sense of obligation intensified during the 1990s, as economic instability in the parent corporation and the larger economy increased. Researchers’ commitments to scientific and more generally intellectual agendas were redefined as ‘personal’, to be set aside in favor of contributions to organizational well being. Further analysis will aim at unpacking these accounts in a way that elaborates just how identity and its reworking were enacted in everyday practices of research design, conduct and assessment.
3. Through what cultural and material practices are PARC’s technologies configured, and how do they figure in the ongoing production of the research centre, its inventors and its inventions?
Preliminary analysis of the research materials points to what I have characterised as the ‘affiliative powers’ of objects, and their implications for organizational life (Suchman, forthcoming). Conversely, because relations with objects simultaneously are relations of affiliation, a desire to differentiate oneself from others often requires distancing from objects as well. In the case of research and development, a preeminent value that informs these alignments is that of invention, understood as the act of bringing objects into being for the first time. Objects identified as new are thus preferred over those already in existence, acts of innovation over those of reproduction. A central aim of the analysis is to open up the trope of the ‘new’ to critical examination, taking innovation not as an inherent property of research practices or their objects, but as an ongoing and contingent accomplishment.
A focus on affiliative powers orients as well to the multiplicity of objects, both in the more obvious sense that complex objects can be understood as the alignment of their parts, and in the sense that the singularity of objects is achieved, rather than a property that inheres in them. This argument has been extended in the analysis through an examination of some of the ways in which the constitution of objects as singular or multiple, unitary or fragmented, is a strategic resource in the management of actors’ own professional identities and organizational positionings.
Preliminary results of the research were presented at an invited colloquium in the research seminar series at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, Australia in April, during a visit to France Telecom research laboratories in May, and in a paper presentation at the 3rd Critical Management Studies conference held at Lancaster University immediately following the close of the project.