WORK
Julian Orr's Xerox Technician Studies
Orr's ethnographic research on Xerox field technicians — documenting how effective repair depends on improvisational expertise and war-story knowledge that manuals cannot capture — a parallel and confirming body of work to Suchman's PARC studies.
Julian Orr's ethnographic research on Xerox field technicians, published as Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (1996), documented how the most effective repair workers developed competence not by following procedures but by accumulating improvisational expertise through encounters with specific machines in specific conditions. Orr's technicians shared what he called 'war stories' — narrative accounts of difficult repairs that encoded tacit knowledge about how this specific model failed under these specific conditions in ways the service manuals did not describe. The work confirmed and extended Suchman's situated-action framework from the user side to the repair side, providing one of the richest empirical bodies of evidence for how technical competence actually develops.
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