Stephen R Barley
Biographic Data
| ID | 195877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen R Barley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen R |
| FAMILY NAME | Barley |
| SIGNATURE | BARLEY S R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3921-3383 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 214 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work
Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the methods they developed over a decade to deal with these and related issues in their ethnographies o…
Managing the Fears of Studying Technical Work
Technical work differs significantly from most other forms of work. This chapter explores those differences and how the differences pose important challenges for ethnographers who seek to study engineers, scientists, and other technical workers. The chapter summarizes the experience of thirty-five years’ of studying technical work to capture the social dynamics of technical worlds in the way that an earlier generation of scholars captured the soc…
JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy
Work and Technological Change
The four chapters of this book summarize the results of thirty-five years dedicated to studying how technologies change work and organizations. The first chapter places current developments in artificial intelligence into the historical context of previous technological revolutions by drawing on William Faunce’s argument that the history of technology is one of progressive automation of the four components of any production system: energy, transf…
Working Institutions
In this chapter Stephen Barley discusses his path to becoming an institutionalist through his immersion in the research of the Chicago School sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Everett C. Hughes and Anselm Strauss. His claim is that the Chicago School sociologists were wrestling with the same problem that currently preoccupies many institutional theorists: the relationship between institutions (or structure) and action. He reviews three…
Shaping the Political Environment
Relying on an ethnographic study of in-house public affairs professionals, this article sheds light on the process by which boundary-spanning occupations can shape an organization's environment. Public affairs professionals are responsible for devising and implementing a firm's political strategy. By focusing on their work practices both internally as they make sense of their environment and strategize, and externally, where they interface with t…
Between Craft and Science
The Changing Nature of Work
Coalface Institutionalism
Be Careful What You Wish For
Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learning's relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated with the postindustrial economy. Results of analyses using data from the General Social Survey suggest …
Structuration
The term “structuration” was coined to refer to the dynamic articulation between structure and action (which Giddens called “agency”).
Ethnography
This has traditionally been the methodology of choice in cultural anthropology, although numerous sociologists and an increasing number of organizational theorists have pursued ethnographic research ( see Research Design).
E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress
The increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people's lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would …
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies
Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to br…
Building an Institutional Field to Corral a Government
Although organizational theorists have given much attention to how environments shape organizations, they have given much less attention to how organizations mold their environments. This paper demonstrates what organizational scholars could contribute if they were to study how organizations shape environments. Specifically, the paper synthesizes work by historians, political scientists and students of corporate political action to document how c…
What’s Under Construction Here? Social Action, Materiality, and Power in Constructivist Studies of Technology and Organizing
Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology’s affects on organizations are socially constructed. Constructivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology’s constraints and affordances, as well as to each other. Although most students of technology and organizing generally agree on the on…
Materiality and change
Coalface Institutionalism
What we know (And Mostly Don't Know) about Technical Work
This article begins by reviewing two major clusters of research on technical work, both developed after World War II when the employment of scientists and engineers began to attract attention. The first cluster, called the Weberian literature, emerged in the 1950s when industrial sociologists were actively exploring the implications and limitations of Weber's theory of bureaucracy. The second cluster ascended during the 1970s, drew its inspiratio…
Why Do Contractors Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor Market
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of contingent work are inaccurate. For example, contrary to the pessimistic “employment relations” perspe…
Bringing Work Back In
In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginalized or ignored. We then discuss methodological requirements for reintegrating work studies into org…
Between Craft and Science
Military Downsizing and the Career Prospects of Youths
In this article, Stephen Barley examines the extent to which the U.S. military serves as a provider of skills in the civilian economy. His investigation centers around the following questions: Do training and education in the military transfer into the civilian workforce? If the military does prepare individuals for civilian jobs, will reductions in accessions constrict the availability of trained personnel, just as firms are realizing that they …
Institutionalization and Structuration
Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a pro cess are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the…
In the Backrooms of Science
This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technician's role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific procedures. The data suggest that technicians possess most of a lab's contextual knowledge and skill and…
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies
Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to br…
Why Do Contractors Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor Market
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of contingent work are inaccurate. For example, contrary to the pessimistic “employment relations” perspe…
In the Backrooms of Science
This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technician's role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific procedures. The data suggest that technicians possess most of a lab's contextual knowledge and skill and…
Be Careful What You Wish For
Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learning's relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated with the postindustrial economy. Results of analyses using data from the General Social Survey suggest …
Shaping the Political Environment
Relying on an ethnographic study of in-house public affairs professionals, this article sheds light on the process by which boundary-spanning occupations can shape an organization's environment. Public affairs professionals are responsible for devising and implementing a firm's political strategy. By focusing on their work practices both internally as they make sense of their environment and strategize, and externally, where they interface with t…
Military Downsizing and the Career Prospects of Youths
In this article, Stephen Barley examines the extent to which the U.S. military serves as a provider of skills in the civilian economy. His investigation centers around the following questions: Do training and education in the military transfer into the civilian workforce? If the military does prepare individuals for civilian jobs, will reductions in accessions constrict the availability of trained personnel, just as firms are realizing that they …
The Codes of the Dead
Academic Gamesmanship
The Codes of the Dead
America's Working Man
The Awakening Giant
First published in 1985, this book is about Imperial Chemical Industries’ response to the changing social, political, business and economic environment over the past twenty years. Using personal interviews and archival material, Andrew Pettigrew examines the evolution of business strategy, organisation structure and culture, technology and union-management relations within this corporate giant over an extended period of time. It is a compelling a…
Job Redesign
The Social Construction of a Machine
Careers, identities, and institutions
A sociology which forgets its past may be committed to the continuous rediscovery of old ideas. When the provenance of thought is unknown, authorship can be claimed by those who lack any proper title to it. Old issues are proclaimed innovations, only to recede again into the limbo from which they were retrieved. The unstated component ... is a fertile culture for the emergence of a cyclical pattern of recovery and loss.Paul Rock, 1979
The Human Side of Factory Automation
Research in the Sociology of Organizations
In the Backrooms of Science
This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technician's role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific procedures. The data suggest that technicians possess most of a lab's contextual knowledge and skill and…
Institutionalization and Structuration
Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a pro cess are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the…
Between Craft and Science
Military Downsizing and the Career Prospects of Youths
In this article, Stephen Barley examines the extent to which the U.S. military serves as a provider of skills in the civilian economy. His investigation centers around the following questions: Do training and education in the military transfer into the civilian workforce? If the military does prepare individuals for civilian jobs, will reductions in accessions constrict the availability of trained personnel, just as firms are realizing that they …
Bringing Work Back In
In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginalized or ignored. We then discuss methodological requirements for reintegrating work studies into org…
Why Do Contractors Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor Market
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of contingent work are inaccurate. For example, contrary to the pessimistic “employment relations” perspe…
What we know (And Mostly Don't Know) about Technical Work
This article begins by reviewing two major clusters of research on technical work, both developed after World War II when the employment of scientists and engineers began to attract attention. The first cluster, called the Weberian literature, emerged in the 1950s when industrial sociologists were actively exploring the implications and limitations of Weber's theory of bureaucracy. The second cluster ascended during the 1970s, drew its inspiratio…
Materiality and change
Coalface Institutionalism
Building an Institutional Field to Corral a Government
Although organizational theorists have given much attention to how environments shape organizations, they have given much less attention to how organizations mold their environments. This paper demonstrates what organizational scholars could contribute if they were to study how organizations shape environments. Specifically, the paper synthesizes work by historians, political scientists and students of corporate political action to document how c…
What’s Under Construction Here? Social Action, Materiality, and Power in Constructivist Studies of Technology and Organizing
Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology’s affects on organizations are socially constructed. Constructivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology’s constraints and affordances, as well as to each other. Although most students of technology and organizing generally agree on the on…
E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress
The increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people's lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would …
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies
Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to br…
Structuration
The term “structuration” was coined to refer to the dynamic articulation between structure and action (which Giddens called “agency”).
Ethnography
This has traditionally been the methodology of choice in cultural anthropology, although numerous sociologists and an increasing number of organizational theorists have pursued ethnographic research ( see Research Design).
Be Careful What You Wish For
Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learning's relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated with the postindustrial economy. Results of analyses using data from the General Social Survey suggest …
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Work (physics) (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)