Our topic this morning is making work visible. This is an important topic, and one dear to my heart; it has always astonished me how little is known about how work gets done, outside the ranks of those doing any particular job. It is my privilege to introduce the topic and then the panel.

I wish to illustrate the importance of making work visible with a slightly indelicate parable, for which I apologize in advance. On the other hand, given that the general ignorance of work approaches the obscene, achieving mere indelicacy on the topic is no mean feat. I have cribbed this story from Utah Phillips, so this introduces a vein of broad western American humor which may be unfamiliar to some, and I apologize for this, too.

Some of you know that Willie Sue and I enjoy the opera; fewer of you know that we like to eat at the Hayes Street Grill beforehand. The Hayes Street Grill is a thoroughly admirable restaurant; the kitchen is excellent, the foodstuffs of the highest quality, and the wait staff impeccably professional. No one ever approaches your table saying, "Hi, my name is Ronnie and I’ll be your waitperson tonight." However, over the years, one becomes known and gets to know some of the staff, so I felt free to ask questions when I observed some changes the other night.

As our waiter, Frank, turned away after taking our orders, I noticed a teaspoon in his hip pocket; upon looking around, I noticed all the wait staff was so armed. When Frank returned with our salads, I asked him about the spoon and was greeted with a tale of woe. It seems the owner had been led down the garden path by a time and motion specialist promising increased productivity, the possibility of a smaller work force, and, for all I know, 90% fewer cavities. The time and motion specialist claimed that every diner drops a spoon sooner or later in the course of a meal, and it takes thirty seconds for the wait staff to replace it, which could be saved if they simply put one in a pocket against the need.

"But you know," said Frank, "half the time it’s a fork, not a spoon, and even if it is a spoon it might be a soup spoon or a desert spoon instead of a teaspoon, but, to these time and motion guys, it’s all silverware. He says ‘Carry a spoon’, so we do."

Well, the Hayes Street Grill serves a nice crusty sourdough, and while there may be those who can eat it without leaving crumbs all over the place, I am not one of them, and apparently few are. The wait staff all have little scrapers to clean off the table when they clear your main course. As Frank did so, his apron swung forward, and I noticed a piece of string hanging out of his pants, so I asked him about it.

Scientific management had struck again. Now, managers in meetings schedule "bio breaks", although they often use these breaks to check their voice mail, which hardly counts as biology. They are less considerate when it comes to their subordinates and bathrooms, and I refer you to Raymond Williams’ wonderful piece on "Personal Relief Time" for some astute commentary on the presence of such topics in labor negotiations and the inherent meanness of attempting to limit people to nineteen minutes per shift. Closer to home, a manager with whom I worked on the radio project was also part of an effort to reform the way service technicians report their time; the goal was to account for all but ten minutes, an even smaller allotment of ‘personal relief time’, and smaller than any single ‘bio break’ in a managers’ meeting. And this mentality had struck at the Hayes Street Grill. You will have noticed the signs in all the restaurant toilets, enjoining the staff to wash their hands before returning to work; this is required by the health authorities. The T&M guy had deduced that washing takes two or three minutes for each person, two or three minutes which HE could save . . . . The theory was that it would not be necessary to wash if you did not actually touch yourself . . . and so the string.

"Of course," said Frank, "this ignores the fact that about 40% of our staff are women, and even for men, it only deals with part of the job, because the string doesn’t help you get back in your pants." Then he went on, "We figured that out for ourselves . . . I use the spoon."

This, I submit, is exactly the problem with any implementation of a plan for work which does not begin with a detailed understanding of how the work gets done: It tends to leave things dangling. This is as true for technological solutions as those arising from time and motion studies.

Making work visible, and, for that matter, making visible the work of maintaining appropriate invisibility, has a long history as a minority pastime in both the U.S. and Britain; its history is equally long elsewhere but I am unsure that the status is the same. I was surprised, after all, to discover that Sweden (perhaps among others) has a national Museum of Work. We have museums of science and industry, but workers and their activities largely remain invisible. I am not, however, going to try to summarize the history in various traditions of making work visible. Time is short, and I am not feeling sufficiently scholarly. Instead I am going to wonder, very seriously, why we do it.

When I began the studies of technicians that eventually became Talking about Machines, I quickly discovered that most of what my colleagues and I had been told by the corporation about technicians’ activities was at best incomplete and frequently just wrong. There were many ways in which management decisions about technicians were clearly uninformed by an understanding of their work, usually to the detriment of that work. I assumed, with a naivete that I now find astonishing, that management would be eager to mend their ways and begin contributing to technicians’ work, rather than interfering, once I told them how little they knew and how much damage their ignorance caused. They were not eager and they did not change.

While it is entirely possible that I was something less than perfectly diplomatic about conveying this information to various managers, nevertheless there is something else going on here, and I do not know what. Part of the problem is that no one has yet made visible the work of managers. Obviously most of us have encountered managers of one or more varieties in the course of our research and observed their actions with reference to the subjects of our studies, but we have not studied their work, and we do not know why they seem so little interested in the work they manage.

I have speculated on this at some length, and I shall not do so here, but the disinterest with which management greets new visibility of the work they manage suggests that we should not be thinking of managers as our primary audience, even if they do pay for the work or even commission it. We could be devoted to our disciplines. We can do the research for ourselves; it is fun, and it makes for amusing papers. Ultimately, I think my goal is political. I think we must be doing it so that how work gets done does not get completely deleted from the discourse of our times. Contesting the ahistoric narratives of millennial capitalism requires a different version of events, we may hope a truer version of events, from that told in Forbes, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal and others of that ilk, and while at times it appears that the contest is hardly occurring at all, and certainly no great progress is being made, I think we go on writing, making work visible, in the hopes that some day the material will be useful in changing the social and political discourses of work and industry in our world.