Communities of Practice: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

The first section of Ch. 3 of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance on Books in Progress

In Chapter 3 of Maintenance: Of Everything, Stewart examines the social dimensions of maintenance. This first section tells the story of the technician teams tasked with maintaining the Xerox machines that supplied offices around the US with “vast quantities of photocopies and frustration” in the 1980s. 

Stewart writes:

An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily.  The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.

Read the piece, and add your own contributions, here.