Tinkering with technology: Human factors, work redesign, and professionals in workplace innovation
✍ Scribed by Richard Badham; Pelle Ehn
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 231 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1090-8471
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
I have been an organisation tinker for about twenty years. I tinker for, and with, many types of organisations. . . The Concise Oxford Dictionary (21951) defines a tinker (among other things) as: "a mender (especially itinerant), a rough and ready worker, a botcher, one who patches in an amateurish and clumsy fashion by way of repair or alteration. . . ." Organisation tinkers patch, alter, and repair organisations in a rough and ready fashion. The practice has a long and honourable history . . . but whatever tools he may be carrying in his knapsack, whatever his sales pitch, the tinker is fundamentally a botcher, a patcher, and, in the pejorative sense of the word, an amateur. His approach is that of trial-and-error, suck-it-and-see. His tools are simple, his techniques crude and clumsy, his familiarity and understanding of his raw material relatively slight. To tinker with something is not to know what it is you are doing . . . Few organisation development consultants are craftsmen. Most of us are tinkers exhibiting some degree of skill but little artistry. Our practice runs well ahead of our understanding. . .