Human Studies 13: 275-284, 1990. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Review Essay

Escape from modernity: On the ethnography of repair and the repair of ethnography*

JOHN VAN MAANEN Sloan School of Management, E52-588, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139

This moming I had the passenger window on my 1979 Ford Grenada replaced. The window had shattered a few days before when my 8-year-old daughter closed the door with vigor and authority. Kibitzing with the glass man as he went about his trade, we both wondered whether or not any future displays of similar zeal would have identical consequences. Working through this mundane puzzle led to the discovery of a crink in the liner of the door frame, the liner in which the window sits when it is fully rolled up. This crink could possibly cause the window to slip off its normal course when going up and down in the door frame. Within the door itself was a speaker with a hard metal frame and when the window was rolled down, as it was when it cracked, the plate of glass may have rested loosely against the speaker such that it was merely a matter of time before one slam of the door would be too many. So, with the installation of a new window, out came the old speaker and out came the wrinkle in the door liner. Part replaced, system restored. Perhaps.

Ordinary repair? I would like to think so. However, after reading Douglas Harper's unassuming but convincing Working Knowledge, I see the ordinariness of such everyday matters in a new light. Had I taken the car to the Ford agency out on the strip, there to be whisked back out of sight to a specialist in the auto glass stall for its damage repair, I surely would have gotten a new window but I fear little repair. In the language Harper care- fully develops, my car would have been treated by a "parts exchanger" not a "parts fixer." This distinction is crucial to the book and stands as a powerful way of thinking about all forms of modem repair from the mechanical to the biological, from the plumber's trade to the doctor's.

Harper's tale concerns a self-employed mechanic, an engineer, a body man, a fix-it man, a tinkerer, a junk dealer, an inventor, all rolled into one

* Douglas Harper, Working knowledge: Skill and community in a small shop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 214 pages with index and photographs. $29.95 (cloth).

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person named Willie who lives and works in the far reaches of up-state New York. Between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondacks, lies the North Country, a place of long, hard winters, great isolation, rural poverty, and, aside from a few towns, a sparse population in decline. Like parts of New England, most of Appalachia, northern Maine, the mountainous sectors of the west, and the upper portions of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the North Country remains relatively untouched by mass culture. Its TV stations are few with poor reception. Cable has yet to arrive. Residents have little choice of products, forms of entertainment, or jobs. The nearest airport in Syracuse is 150 miles distant by way of a highway that crosses the snow belt and is often closed in the winter because of whiteouts. Economic survival in the North Country is, for most, a precarious, hard scrabble affair. Agriculture is marginal at best. Family farming persists but with great difficulty as is true for other stubborn forms of small, independent regional enterprise such as maple sugaring and pulp logging.

The major employers of the North Country are four colleges whose impact on the area's economy and culture is seemingly slight. Harper is a sociology professor at one of these colleges and, as a result of this tie with the region, comes this intimate, biographically-focused ethnography of Willie and his work. The story begins with Harper's arrival to the North Country and with his introduction to Willie by way of his departmental chair who, after giving Harper's 8-year old persnickety Saab station wagon a quick glace, says, "Well, you'll be meeting Willie soon."

Ten years and several Saabs later, Harper has written of what he has learned from Willie. The learning is substantial. Working Knowledge is an evocative, tightly focused account of Willie's teachings and the lessons Harper, a most attentive student, has drawn from them. Importantly, woven throughout the book are about a hundred photographs (and a few drawings) designed, in part, to show as well as tell about Willie's work and, in part, to infuse the material with a kind of documentary realism that words alone can not convey. This is not, certainly, a languid coffee table book for up-scale Saab owners to display such that others can admire their affection for the ecologically correct car with the high-priced sticker. It is a deadly serious reckoning with a way of life that is seemingly vanishing from the American scene. A reader would be hard pressed to interpret the black and white hues of Harper's sharply detailed photographs without the narrative to serve as a guide. What, after all, could a close-up shot of Willie welding some high- tensile steel possibly mean to a casual reader?

The photographs of Working Knowledge are stark, direct and unaffect- ing. The most telling pictures are those of Willie's hands involved in some complex task. There is no socially concerned documentation of the sort that

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marked Harper's previous photographic work with tramps in Good Com- pany (1982). The pictures here are without any seductive tints or tones. They serve primarily as denotative, not connotative signs - to help the reader understand what Willie does and does so well. Their function is utilitarian, not decorative. They appear largely without stylistic inflection that would divert attention from the subject to the photograph itself. Harper seems to have perfected a style that seems to be no style at all. While there is an odd beauty to this work, it can be appreciated only by first absorbing the story that Harper tells in the text. In brutally abbreviated form, the story goes something like this.

Once there were village smiths for whom the distinction between making and fixing an object was often unclear. They held a hard-earned and deep knowledge of the metals and other materials they worked and lived in close contact with those who put to practical use the results of their heated labors. The pace of their work was dictated by the nature of the problems they encountered and the web of local associations within which they operated. They were as much inventors and engineers as service workers and mechanics. They fashioned their products out of whatever materials were on hand and the effectiveness of their labor was controlled by the timely and local features of the environment in which they worked. If Farmer MacDonald broke his plow tilling a rocky field, Smith Brown would take the old plow and repair it out of the stockpiled odds and ends available to him such that the plow was returned as strong and good as new (occasionally, even a little better).

The smith's aim and labor was tied to the practical purposes of the object to be fixed. Such an intimate connection has been severed in modern times. Effectiveness has become an ever more abstract, aimless ideal lodged in technical formulas and standardized products. The intelligence of the smith, tuned to the actual and peculiar circumstances of use, has given way to a detached, externalized intelligence of rules and manuals. Engineering and production are pulled apart and repair is rationalized to the point of com- puterized diagnosis and simple, new-for-old part exchange. Contemporary mechanics, as heirs to the smith's trade, are trained in schools, not shops, by strangers, not kin. They work with baffling machines, not their senses of sight, sound and feel. All purpose screwdrivers and wrenches are displaced by speciality tools for speciality jobs. Metal work becomes a matter of filling and sanding, not reforming, If twisted, bent or gouged parts can not be salvaged by the bubblegum patches of the speedy gas torch, they are discarded. Repair itself becomes something of an assembly process where whatever is thought to be defective is tossed away and replaced. Such work can be accomplished by-the-book and hourly rates calculated. Wage labor and the time-discipline it entails become the governing logic of the

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mechanic's daily work. This is the familiar story of deskilling but it has a twist.

The twist is, of course, Willie and the surrounding community within which he works. Up in the North Country, the surging tide of work rationalization has been slowed and some sense of just what has been lost in the surge seen and evaluated. A good deal has been lost and Harper makes us look closely at the traces of our future as etched by our past. Willie's ability to improvise with the odds and ends that drift down to him or come to him from barter with his associates mark him as a "bricoluer" who, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss (1966:21), must make do with whatever is at hand and gives an account of his life by the choices he makes within limited possibilities. The bricoleur occupies a position in the community similar to the more familiar but apparently disappearing "Jack-of-all-trades" of American folklore - whose tacked-on qualifying phrase, "master of none" now contains a delicious irony. That this Jack-of-all-trades, this bricoleur, has so much to say will come as a happy surprise to most readers accus- tomed to the heavy hand of author and theory cutting through the sociologi- cal text. Willie speaks, Harper writes. Together they have crafted as fine a jointly-told tale as I have read.

The book is split into two parts. The first and longest portion deals with the nature of Willie's work and goes into fine detail and close portraiture of just how it is accomplished and why. The second part of the book takes up the various contexts within which Willie's work is performed. Both sections contain more than enough analytic insight and empirical support for the most dense of joumal articles but, to the author's credit, such formulaic sociology is jettisoned in favor of an elaborated, meandering narrative that seems fully in keeping with the flow and tempo of Willie's work. Harper sums up Willie's approach to his work as "an inductive approach fueled by attention, patience and creativity." The same can be said of Harper's work. Such correspondence between their respective endeavors is not lost on Harper either for at one point in the book he summarizes a particularly trying day for Willie in personal terms:

I think that the pressure of schedules in my own life which sometimes leads to anxiety and to low-quality experience, made the day at Willie's particularly telling. Once I could realize that the work mandated the day's time rather than vice versa, the work could be seen in terms of its particular challenges and rewards. In this way, Willie's shop is an escape from modernity, an escape from the externally imposed schedules that impinge on even the briefest of moments of experience. Willie's apparent peace of mind derives from his ownership of his time, the concentration of means, rather than ends, in the activities of his life ... (When) time is in work, duality disappears. (pp. 145-146)

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For Willie, time is considered in terms of practical labor. Time is not the controlling context into which work must be forced. Time is embedded in activity such that the specific nature of a job determines the length of the work. This reverses what seems to be the ever increasing clock-and- calender discipline of contemporary life. Sensitivity, responsiveness and flexibility are at the core of Willie's work ethics. Jobs expand and contract on the basis of continued discoveries and shifting intentions located in the work itself. To make a good, wise, sensible choice in Willie's workshop is to accept the interconnection of all possible factors involved in a particular problem and avoid the mistake of focusing on any one consideration - cost, time, appearance, efficiency, cleverness, strength, endurance and so forth. Moreover, choices are made in the doing of the work with little or no pause between theory and practice. Decisions, like the actions from which they are inseparable, are always alterable. Willie moves in a given direction but, alive to shifting considerations, he is always ready to change. Plans, schedules, clocks, deadlines are at odds with such an open-ended quality of action. And, as Harper shows, open-endedness encourages a social capacity to improvise and respond creatively to work contingencies. Much of what happens in Willie's shop is neither planned nor expected.

Between chaos and order, lies a work discipline that Harper finds central to Willie's identity. When time, skill and attention are linked, good and fulfilling work results. Willie doesn't rush one job to get to the next or do extra work to add money to a job. Customers soon learn that Willie is almost always behind because he doesn't adjust his work to conform to a time-for-sale enterprise. Customers must trust that Willie will assign a fair dollar value for whatever repair was purchased. Some pay dearly for Willie's work, most do not and few are turned away if they offer challeng- ing work and are willing to wait on Willie's time. But, in the end, it is Willie's assessment of the work performed that determines the value of the job.

This assessment is essentially moral. Harper suggests that one way to grasp the core values that shape the work is to consider Willie as the center of a circle of dependence extending out about eight or ten miles from his shop. Within this circle are normal customers who get book-like repairs and others, "neighbors," who are in on the system. The longer others have been part of Willie's world, the more interest they pay to the job, the more willing they are to help out with the repairs, and the more appreciation they show for the nature of Willie's work and situation, the more likely they will be considered by Willie to be neighbors and let in on the system. As neighbors, they have the opportunity to buy cheaply (or be given) Willie's quite varied talents in a timely manner. If they break the rules by displaying impatience, haggling a price, not helping out, or otherwise taking advantage

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of Willie's trust that favors given will result in favors returned, they will be cut out of the system.

As Harper's photographs attest, people and machines stay in Willie's environment for a long time. His reputation flows from the process of continuing actions and interactions taking place before the watchful eyes of others in the community. Problems faced by neighbors within Willie's circle of dependence come to his attention first and always provide reason to set aside other matters. A farmer whose broken tractor makes harvesting impossible or a family whose wood buming stove refuses to light and draw properly on a bone-chilling night will find Willie on hand and prepared to work until the problem is solved. For these jobs, often no money is ex- changed. The most important work within the circle of neighbors is given not sold. It is not a seamless, harmonious world, however, and Harper goes to some pains in showing just how trust is broken, deals go sour, and misunderstandings set in motion. But, underneath each tale of good deals and bad, Willie's sense of how a life is to be led comes through.

Throughout the book, Harper is quite aware of the "traditionalism" of Willie's ways. It is a traditionalism that is fully inconsistent with the logic and discipline associated with industrial or post-industrial capitalism. Harper attributes a good deal of it to the isolation of the North Country where poverty, need, weather, family, friend and the absence of urban (and suburban) American culture form the basis of life for people like Willie. To readers, this has the effect Of making capitalism appear strange by pointing to some of its historical and cultural peculiarities. Whereas, for example, the modem worker tries to maximize daily earnings by working as hard as possible to purchase more and more goods, Willie follows tradition by keeping his purchases more or less constant and trying to earn today roughly what he has earned in the past. Thus projects of his own get done and small repairs for neighbors accomplished while lucrative jobs for others are stalled or foregone. In this world, each kind of work Willie performs is done through different forms of exchange - cash, barter, gift, or future favor. Crucially, it is Willie's combination of mechanical and engineering skills that makes him indispensable to others in the community who must depend on patched-up machinery, tools, shelters and vehicles that are old, idiosyncratic and often impoverished. The North Country is something of a border zone where the new is constructed from the leftovers of the old. The region is nonstandard, and so is Willie's work.

The contrast between the old and the new becomes less salient when the task-characteristics of Willie's work are explored by Harper. A practice theory of sorts, wherein both agency and structure meet, emerges to help narrate and organize the materials (Bourdieu, 1977; Sahlens, 1979; Gid- dens, 1979). In an understated way, Harper questions the received wisdom

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that as one ascends the occupational status ladder, the cognitive demands become more complex, practice more difficult and intense, and wider sectors of one's personality touched on by work demands. From Harper's account, it is clear that Willie's work is central to his being in the world and sense of self. Apparent too is the fact that his knowledge derives from a lifetime of training and learning that is in no way complete but continuing and governed out of practical necessity and the vast array of quite compli- cated puzzles that arise from his work. Most critically, however, Harper shows us that the knowledge Willie brings to the job is socially organized and indivisible from whatever project is at hand. Harper's treatment of Willie's skill provides what Geertz (1983) calls an "outdoor psychology." Such an approach suggests cognition is not divided between, but distributed or stretched over mind, body, activity and culturally-organized settings (including other actors).

This is a radical break from "indoor psychology" that argues knowledge is obtained and put to use in context-free ways. Accordingly, the show of skill in everyday practice is a result of prior learning and experience that has been generalized somehow to encompass more and more problematic situations. The road to expertise consists of rule-learning and rule-following in an increasingly complicated and hierarchically-ordered ways. What professional experts have that just plain folks lack are learned rules and general principles, carried in their heads, ready to be applied to specific problems but essentially independent of and floating above situational concerns. Harper's picture of Willie at work questions such a view. Willie's skill does not rest on complex and ordered guides to practice but on thousands of special cases, each having its own logic and desireable ends to be gained. A live intelligence govems Willie's work in such a way that when asked for the rules supporting a given procedure, Willie responds by giving examples of successful work. The ends and means are inseparable. From Willie's standpoint, as understood by Harper, it is the novice who must operate to rule. The expert follows no rules at all.

The idea of knowledge as organized by situational particulars would, no doubt, give nightmares to the ambitious cognitive scientists modelling expert systems on the basis of what is aptly known as artificial intelligence. Thus, beneath Harper's broad but cunning representation of Willie's working knowledge, is a fresh look at what a skill is and how it is acquired. Practice theory as illuminated by Working Knowledge requires giving up the assumption that experts are continually making inferences on the basis of abstract and interiorized rules and admit to the role of involvement and intuition in the acquisition of skill. In a sense, Harper's treatment of skill follows a social anthropology of cognition, not a psychology or a sociology. It is a view that locates competent practice squarely in the domain of

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everyday life where the routine character of activities performed within settings designed for and by those activities constitutes knowledge itself.

This version of practice theory challenges the Durkheimian separation of individual and collective aspects of cognition. Everyday activities provide the link between social system and individual experience, not ritual or socialization. Willie is then both a product and producer of his social world whose temporal, spatial and structural ordering is embodied in the very routines that make up his everyday round of activities. Willie's working knowledge can not be pulled out of context as stocks-of-knowledge stored in memory. His knowledge is always situationally specific and tied to the matters at hand. In this way, problems to Willie are more dilemmas to be resolved than puzzles to be solved. His efforts are tuned to the conflicts and contradictions associated with the competing demands on his time, fluctuat- ing risks, shifting available resources, variable properties of the materials with which he works, and the always uncertain probabilities of human or machine error. To characterize knowledge as practice is to put aside models of the world that distinguish means from ends or contrast methods and technologies from goals and values (Lave, 1988).

Such a challenge is put forth by Harper in a subtle, almost offhand, way. The weight of theory does not sink the narrative which manages to instruct, amuse, caution and describe in a most accessable manner. Jargon is mini- mal, references to canonical texts spare (but there) and nicely tucked away in usefully elaborated footnotes, and the writing has an enticing, down-to- earth tone. Harper has created a social reality that is exotic, unique to the historical and sociocultural setting he has experienced, and is, at the same time, meaningful to readers who must live that experience vacariously. This has never been an easy matter but, in today's disenchanted if not cynical world, the sort of ethnographic realism I have unflinchingly attributed to Working Knowledge so far is in a spot of trouble. It is in trouble primarily because it postulates an adequacy of words (or pictures) to things, of the description to the experience, and, ultimately, of the ethnography to the native (Clifford, 1989; Clifford and Marcus, 1986).

Harper has written an ethnography to be sure but it breaks with realist conventions in a number of ways. It is a novel work, experimental in composition, and avoids many of the dated, naive and, by current standards, epistemologically and socially indefensible practices of ethnographic representation. Agency, structure and events are mixed in an impressionistic fashion through narratives which are central, not marginal, to the book. Harper's stories, like his photographs, are not mere ornaments designed to provide a dab of local color and make his analysis of ethnographic details more palatable to the reader. They operate as a form of analysis. They do so in at least three ways.

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First, Harper does not bracket himself out of many of his tales. He is very much present in Willie's workshop and, thus, we gain a glimpse of both the social construction of the ethnography and of the person who stands behind it. His own voice in the narratives, often first person, present tense, converts the object of the description - Willie's working knowledge - to a subject as the reader learns how Harper has come to the understanding of the materials he presents to his audience. This is hardly a confessional tale however. It is Willie's world and work that are at issue thoughout the manuscript, not Harper's. What the author's presence provides is an account of the interpre- tive angles and self-conscious choices represented in the arrangement of the ethnography. The truth of the work can then be judged by a reader aware of the author's stance and position toward the material he presents. The observer and observed merge in the text.

Second, Harper moves toward an intersubjective ethnography by giving Willie voice in the book. This is done largely through the frequent presenta- tion of situated dialogue taking place between Willie and Harper, the recreation of numerous events Harper witnesses in the field, and, impor- tantly, the inclusion of many of Willie's own stories told (apparently) in his own words. Intersubjectivity takes shape then in narrative form, as vignettes, rather than by discombobulated quotations scattered throughout the book or by illustrative snippets of observed behavior designed to drive home some theoretical or topical point. The appeal of these vignettes stems from the way they allow a vivid portrait of Willie to emerge in the text. Harper explains his method early in the book:

As I begin writing the manuscript I thought that though I might be able to include excerpts from these vignettes, there would be no place for them to appear intact. I eventually reconsidered this decision when I saw an important voice being lost. The book now includes Willie's voice and mine, both moving from analysis to narrative. By keeping these voices intact I retain the nuances of meaning embedded in each. To organize the book, I have worked partly like a film editor - juxtaposing images to text and laying on different levels of sound as I build from narrative to analysis. The physical structure of the book thus becomes an important element in itself. (p. 13)

Third, the tales themselves make an important theoretical point by way of their stand-alone character. Since Harper places his "results" in narrative form, a reader is offered few, if any, detachable conclusions that can be ripped from the book as general axioms of social life or, even, of Willie's life. Classical ethnography characteristically treats specific events as if they were programmed cultural routines thus reducing both the mundane and the dramatic, the ridiculous and the sublime, to formula. Stories, on the other hand, give testimony to human agency as character develops through the

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unfolding of choices as revealed by the storyteller. Moreover, stories linger in the mind in ways formulas do not. We recall Harper's tale of Willie pulling a neighbor's tractor from the mud during harvest season and can, as a result, reconstruct some of the reasons he may have done so without recourse to a contolling social theory. By accumulating memorable tales - and there are many in the book - readers can actively construct an explana- tion for Willie's activity on their own. Narratives invite contemplation and, like experience itself, remain open to interpretation.

None of this should suggest that Willie's world is somehow made transparent in Working Knowledge. An ethnography of any kind is born in choice and the final product is a series of choices made over time by the ethnographer. The subjects, places, people, perspectives, durations, se- quences and events reported or omitted mark the construction of an ethnog- raphy as a craft process. The written account stands as a provisional interpretation made by a positioned subject who is prepared to know and learn some things in the field and not others. Ethnography is as arbitrary, biased, partisan, compressed and subjective as any of its brotherly or sisterly forms of reality representation. The fact is that Douglas Harper has made different choices than conventionally associated with ethnography and these choices are to be welcomed. He has cobbled together a compell- ing account of a distinct form of life in a novel form using stories and pictures as his two-penny nails. It is as lofty, simple, humble and generous an account of another's life as one is likely to find anywhere.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, J. (1989). The predicament of culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, J. and G.E. Marcus (Eds.) (1986). Writing culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, C. Local knowledge. New York: Basic. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory. Berkeley: University of

California Press. Harper, D. (1982). Good company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M. (1976). Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.