Julian Orr's Xerox Technician Studies
In The You On AI Field Guide
Orr conducted his fieldwork as a corporate anthropologist at Xerox through the 1980s and early 1990s, riding along with service technicians as they diagnosed and repaired photocopiers in customer sites. The work required extended field observation — weeks and months spent with specific teams — and produced detailed ethnographic portraits of how technicians actually performed their jobs. What emerged was a systematic divergence between the engineering model of repair (diagnosis from error codes, procedure from manual) and the actual practice (improvisation from accumulated experience, diagnosis from listening and feeling).
The technicians' war stories were the key discovery. When a technician faced an unfamiliar problem, she rarely consulted the manual first. She consulted her memory and her colleagues — recalling similar situations, asking whether anyone had seen this specific symptom pattern, swapping narratives that encoded the particular ways specific machines failed in specific conditions. The stories were the medium through which situated knowledge circulated among technicians. The manual was a resource of last resort, consulted when the narrative tradition failed to provide a match.
Orr's work was foundational to the community of practice literature — Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave drew on it extensively — and to the broader development of situated learning theory. It provided empirical confirmation of what Suchman's framework predicted: that competent practice is improvisational, that expertise is tacit and domain-specific, and that the knowledge through which practitioners function cannot be extracted from the community that produced it.
The relevance to AI is direct. When Xerox deployed centralized knowledge management systems intended to capture the technicians' expertise in searchable databases, the systems failed — not because the technicians refused to participate but because the knowledge could not be extracted from the narrative practice that held it. The situated knowledge that enabled effective repair was not storable; it was a feature of the community's ongoing practice. Contemporary efforts to use AI to 'capture' expert knowledge encounter the same structural problem: the knowledge that matters is not a corpus of text but a relationship between practitioners and domains that continues to develop only as long as the practice continues.
Origin
Orr's fieldwork was conducted through the 1980s as part of a broader research program on workplace practice at Xerox PARC and the Institute for Research on Learning. His PhD dissertation and subsequent book (Talking About Machines, 1996) became foundational texts in the ethnography of work and in situated learning theory.
The research paralleled Suchman's PARC studies and influenced her framework extensively. Where Suchman focused on the user side of the human-machine encounter, Orr focused on the technician side; together the two bodies of work produced one of the most comprehensive ethnographic accounts of how people actually engage with computational technology.
Key Ideas
War stories carry expertise. The technicians' narrative tradition encoded situated knowledge that formal documentation could not capture.
Improvisation beats procedure. The most effective technicians were not the most procedure-faithful but the most responsive to specific circumstances.
Expertise is community-maintained. Individual technicians developed competence through participation in a practice community that circulated knowledge through narrative exchange.
Listening and feeling. Competent diagnosis required embodied engagement with specific machines — the tilted head, the hand on the frame — not abstract reasoning from error codes.
Capture resists automation. Attempts to extract the technicians' knowledge into searchable databases failed because the knowledge existed as a relationship, not as content.