Communicative Practices at Work: Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm 9781783090464

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Communicative Practices at Work

LANGUAGE, MOBILITY AND INSTITUTIONS Series Editors: Celia Roberts, King’s College London, UK and Melissa Moyer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. This series focuses on language and new ways of looking at the challenges facing institutions as a result of the mobility and connectedness characteristic of present day society. The relevant settings and practices encompass multilingualism, bilingualism and varieties of the majority language and discourse used in institutional settings. The series takes a wide-ranging view of mobility and also adopts a broad understanding of institutions that incorporates less studied sites as well as the social processes connected to issues of power, control and authority in established institutions. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

Communicative Practices at Work Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm

Jo Anne Kleifgen

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kleifgen, Jo Anne. Communicative Practices at Work: Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm\ Jo Anne Kleifgen. Language, Mobility and Institutions: 1 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Multilingualism–Social aspects. 2. Bilingual communication in organizations. 3. Business communication. 4. Language acquisition. I. Title. P115.45.K54 2013 306.44’6–dc23 2013022863 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-045-7 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-044-0 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2013 Jo Anne Kleifgen. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition India (P) Ltd., Bangalore and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

For John

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction: Theorizing Communicative Practices at Work Theoretical Underpinnings Overview of the Book

1 5 11

2

Genesis, Inc. and Its People Why Genesis, Inc? Ethnographic Fieldwork The Setting Management and Employees Workers’ Task Activities Assembling Circuit Boards Discussion

15 17 20 21 26 26 27 36

3

Multimodal Interaction on the Assembly Floor Understanding Multimodality Conversation Analysis at Work Task Activities Working with Languages Working with Other Semiotic Resources: Perceptions and Representations Discussion

39 40 43 44 46

Doing Social Work: Power Relations in Interaction Background: Person-Reference in Vietnamese Power Relations at Genesis: Person-Reference on the Assembly Floor

74 75

4

vii

61 71

77

viii Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

Revisiting the Problem-Solving Event Impressions from Hanoi Discussion

79 90 94

5

Globalizing Forces and Quality-Control Certification Background: What is ISO 9002 Certification? Power Relations: Social Studies of Literacy Collecting Data a Second Time Around Becoming ISO-Certified at Genesis, Inc. Endogenous Quality-Control Practices Discussion: The Social Life of the Verbal Sign

99 100 101 103 104 113 123

6

Learning-in-Practice Theorizing Situated Learning at Work Ways of Knowing and Learning at Work Learning and Ideology

129 130 133 144

7

Conclusion: Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Communicative Practices at Work An Alternate Vision Future Research Directions Exodus

164 165 167 170

Appendix Transcription Conventions and Full Transcription (Chapters 3 and 4)

172 172

References

181

Index

194

Acknowledgments

This project came about fortuitously. The central focus of my academic research had always been on emergent bilingual students’ use of language and other semiotic means with and through new technologies at school. But when my colleague, economist Thomas Bailey, asked me to write an ethnographic research section into a larger workplace grant proposal, my interest in examining language, technology and learning at work was piqued. The resulting grant, awarded by the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, ‘Skills Employers Want, Skills Employers Need’ (Agreement #SA1059-32364Z), took me out of the classroom into a high-tech workplace, an environment steeped in multiple languages and multimodal resources for communication. Beginning in 1994, I initiated a multi-year investigation of communicative practices in a circuit board assembly plant in Silicon Valley, which eventually led to this book. Some of the material presented in this volume includes extensively revised and expanded versions of journal articles published elsewhere and synthesized here into a more comprehensive argument. Permissions to use these were obtained from Research on Language and Social Interaction for two articles (Chapters 3 and 4), Journal of Asian and Pacific Communication (Chapter 4) and Reading Research Quarterly (Chapter 5). All diagrams of the SMT machine and its parts are from the manufacturer’s instruction manual and reproduced with permission from Zevatech, Inc. Many have contributed to the development of the research and to this volume. First, I owe the greatest debt to the president and employees of Genesis, Inc. for opening their doors to me for extended periods, for their generosity and patience in showing me the ropes of the world of manufacturing and for welcoming me back more than once over the life of this investigation. Secondly, I was a beneficiary of the Institute for Research on Learning in California, an intellectual home away from home when the fieldwork was ix

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launched in 1994 and again in 1999–2000. I am deeply indebted to Shelley Goldman for inviting me on board. I owe special thanks to Charlotte Linde, premiere researcher, who became a generous sounding board and friend, and to Ted Kahn, who suggested that I approach the management at Genesis to propose this project. I also thank other IRL researchers and associates, especially Angela Booker, Janet Coffey, Karen Cole, Chris Darrouzet, Penny Eckert, Jim Greeno, Jennifer Knudsen, Ray McDermott, Doris Perkins, Connie Preston and Tina Syer. Finally, I am grateful for the kindness and encouragement of the late Peter Henschel, IRL’s last president. I wish also to thank the cohorts of graduate student participants in the Doctoral Seminar in Language, Literacy and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University for their insights and suggestions. A number of current and former colleagues and students have helped sharpen my insight into communicative practices at work through discussions, seminars and by reading various iterations of this manuscript. I benefited especially from valuable suggestions and critiques offered by Tom Bailey, Lesley Bartlett, George Bond, Patricia Frenz-Belkin, Clifford Hill, Katalin Kabat, Eric Larson, Trang Le, Robbie McClintock, Briana Ronan, Janet Skupien and Hervé Varenne. As to scholars beyond the Columbia community, I am grateful to Donna Alvermann, David Bloome, Shirley Brice Heath, Ofelia García, Charles Goodwin, Herbert Pierson, Robert Sanders, Emanuel Schegloff, Brian Street, David Wible and the late Ron Scollon for their assessments along the way. Special thanks go to Eric Larsen for his meticulous copy-editing, to Karin Fauteck for designing illustrations and to Jean Y. Kim and Daniel L. Hoffman for photographic editing. I am also indebted to Jean for creating the book cover and to Briana Ronan for constructing the index. Above all, I am grateful for the steady patience, support and encouragement of John Borghese, friend par excellence.

1 Introduction: Theorizing Communicative Practices at Work

A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor Vološinov, 1973: 86

Consider this scene: In a small plant that manufactures circuit boards, a machine operator and his supervisor are working at a computerized assembly machine, which has been programmed to load components on a circuit board. They are under pressure to finish a set of boards that is slated for delivery to the customer by the afternoon. They have just discovered that the machine failed to place three microscopic components to their assigned spaces on the board. This is not good news, as the machine’s inability to place these components will slow down the rest of the assembly process. At this point, the machine operator takes the board to an inspection station where two women are working, and the supervisor asks one of them to inspect the board. As she begins to review the board, the supervisor examines the Bill of Materials (BOM) that the customer submitted for this job and asks her to read aloud the numbers on the board corresponding to the components that now will have to be placed by hand: ‘Could you please read the numbers?’ Her gaze scans the three locations on the board as she reads, ‘Seventeen, twelve, thirteen’. The supervisor, searching for the numbers on the BOM, confirms, ‘Seventeen, twelve, thirteen. Is that right?’ and the inspector answers ‘Yes’. Then, looking up from her sources of information, she turns to the supervisor to verify that these are the only components to be checked: ‘Three pieces. Is that right?’ ‘Yeah’, he replies. The supervisor retrieves the components from the machine and gives them to the inspectors, who carefully load them by hand. 1

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One might be tempted to dismiss this as just another humdrum exchange at work. Indeed, this sort of ‘trouble-shooting talk’ is an everyday occurrence in this company, where workers constantly deal with breakdowns in assembly. Yet, brief interactions such as these deserve a closer look. This book is about looking both within and around such interactions and about the convergence of multimodality, learning, and globalization in the workplace. It examines communicative practices in a contemporary American work setting – a small circuit board assembly plant in California’s Silicon Valley – where the employees come from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, their activities involve the use of high-tech equipment and massive amounts of documentation, and their practices are often shaped by, and sometimes contest, larger global forces. One of the things I attempt to show in this book is the various ways in which participants ‘learn’ through conjoint action, drawing on the array of resources available to them, including their ways of speaking (Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, English) and other semiotic modes of communication (writing, gestures, sounds, images) along with mediating tools (circuit boards, components, software, high-tech machines) to accomplish their tasks. Thus, whereas a number of prior studies have focused on talk at work (Atkinson & Drew, 1984; Drew & Heritage, 1992b; C. Goodwin, 1994, 1995b; Sarangi & Roberts, 1999), literacy at work (Hart-Landsberg & Reder, 1995; Hull, 1997, 2000; Tannock, 1997), learning and cognition at work (Chaiklin & Lave, 1993; Darrah, 1996; Engeström & Middleton, 1998b) and work and global capitalism (Gee et al. 1996; Gowen, 1992), this volume examines these different facets as they come together in social interaction. The scene described here is, in many ways, a remarkable achievement. It is steeped in communicative complexity. Language use here is crucial yet is only part of the story. The environment is permeated by tools as well as by different inscriptions, a term first used by Derrida (1977) to refer to all marks – writing, graphs, numbers, blueprints, images – that organize and represent material phenomena.1 These are all contributing elements to communication and action at work. To account for all these resources, I use the broader term communicative practices to encompass languages and language varieties, spoken as well as written forms, and the use of other semiotic building blocks to construct meaning on the job. The term also implies that meaning-making is highly contextualized and permeated by ideology. This concept is developed in depth by Hanks, who argues that the key elements in communicative practice are linguistic (and other semiotic) structures, communicative activities, and ‘the socially specific values that always inform experience’ (1996: 304). Throughout the book, I pay close attention to the complexity of communicative practices at work. For the moment, let us briefly notice the workers’

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use of multiple resources for communication in this interaction. First, they exchange a few words consisting largely of numbers in their native language (to be elaborated below). Other sign systems they deploy include their embodied actions, such as pointing to the ‘problem’ locations on the circuit board and taking the board to people at another station for review. In addition, they draw on inscriptions and relevant objects in the work environment by reading aloud available information and scrutinizing both printed documents and the spatial configurations and inscriptions on the partially loaded board. In short, the social interaction is multimodal, with gestural, spoken, written and visual resources all working together to form a communicative whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. I describe this multimodal complexity in greater detail in subsequent chapters. The scene also evokes other matters that will be explored in this book. For example, though taking place in a specific work context, the participants’ talk and actions reflect local – global linkages and tensions. In this interaction, the workers’ actions reflect the company’s involvement in the broader context of an intensely competitive international market. Many potential customers in Silicon Valley have begun to send their manufacturing to locations abroad. To survive and remain locally relevant, this company must have leading-edge equipment, be able to do a fast turn-around on a job and provide excellent quality control. Employees have a large stake in the success of this firm. The quality of the product determines whether or not the company will win more contracts or simply fold and leave the workers without a job.2 The local–global link becomes even more perceptible in this scene’s verbal exchanges, for the participants happen to be speaking primarily in Vietnamese, one of several languages spoken on the manufacturing floor. The multilingual character of this talk is testimony to one effect of globalization – people crossing national borders to find work. The Vietnamese speakers in our scenario are immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants to the United States. At work, they form what in workplace parlance is known as a ‘natural team’. In this company, workers arrange themselves in groups by ethnolinguistic background and frequently communicate in their native languages while working. We will see that these workers move across teams when needed, and that English becomes the communicative code as urgent tasks are accomplished and deadlines met. At several points in this book, I describe how participants rely on their native languages and cultural practices, and I examine whether and how they are able to shift between these languages and English, the lingua franca, to produce a collaborative and efficacious work environment. This book will also explore the relations of power circulating in this workplace, which emerge at the local discourse level as well as the broader

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societal level. In doing this, we focus on the evaluative element of communicative practice. In the scene we have been considering, the supervisor, an older male, and the inspector, a younger female, use person-reference and other Vietnamese forms to display hierarchy and social distance. Through this ‘social work’, participants effectively manage their ‘professional work’. This book looks closely at social positioning among workers as they coconstruct collaboration at one moment and hierarchy at another. At the same time, larger institutions of power have an impact on the interaction in this scene, in which tensions between meeting deadlines and assembling high-quality products are manifested through concerted action to double-check the circuit board and associated documents. Underlying these tensions is the company’s relationship with its customers and its longstanding effort to become certified by an international quality-control system that requires the standardization of every manufacturing procedure. The workers in this scene are immersed in an ethos that is highly aware of these pressures. In this book, we will examine not only the power relations flowing from the larger societal level but also the ways in which the workers respond to them. Finally, the workers’ communicative practices allow us to explore learning-in-practice: the pooling of distributed knowledge and learning ‘on the fly’. In the scene described above, we are witnessing a ‘task activity’, something different from an ordinary conversation. To accomplish the task, participants pool knowledge as they fashion and assess an artifact. Through the conjoint actions of the machine operator, the supervisor, and the inspector, an error in the production process is detected and dealt with. The machine operator, upon examining the trial board and noticing that three components are missing, shows the problem to his supervisor. Together, they scrutinize data on the computerized machine and call on the expertise of the quality inspector to help them locate the source of the mistake and come up with a practical alternative. Through the pooling of distributed knowledge, they collaborate to find a solution. In this book, learning at work will be shown to include figuring out together ways of fixing mistakes and breakdowns, showing other workers how to perform a task optimally and devising innovative procedures for production and evaluation. I examine how learning occurs when employees deploy the semiotic resources at their disposal, including the languages that they speak and the ways that these are integrated with written, visual and gestural signs during their work activities. Workers’ actions of sharing knowledge and thereby learning something new are illustrated throughout the book as I discuss the notion of learning-in-practice. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore the theoretical underpinnings of this work and then provide a brief overview of the chapters that follow.

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Theoretical Underpinnings The work of Valentin Nikolaevicˇ Vološinov To establish a theoretical foundation for this book, I rely heavily on the thinking of the early 20th century linguist Valentin Nikolaevič Vološinov (1895–1936), whose central thesis about the nature of language as situated utterance is best expressed in his own words: ‘The real unit in language that is implemented in speech . . . is not the individual, isolated monologic utterance, but the interaction of at least two utterances – in a word, dialogue’ (1973: 117). Vološinov was a key member of a group of intellectuals, who came together after the Russian revolution to form a circle and meet regularly in the 1920s to discuss ideas from various disciplinary perspectives. It was known as the Bakhtin Circle after Mikhail Bakhtin, who presided over the group and is today its most prominent member. This intense period of intellectual fervor was soon to be interrupted under Stalin’s consolidation of power (Morris, 1994). Apart from his writings and his association with Bakhtin and the Circle, little is known about Vološinov’s life. He was employed at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad until 1934. It is possible that he was a victim of Stalinist repression; he disappeared from view around that time. Holborow suggests that he ‘probably died in the gulags’ (2006: 11). Morris (1994) states that he contracted tuberculosis in 1914 and died in 1936 in a sanatorium. We may never know how his life ended; what we do know is that he was a visionary ahead of his time. In the short span of his intellectual career, Vološinov produced powerful ideas about language and ideology that have stood the test of time. Much of my discussion about Vološinov is based on Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (hereafter MPL), which he published in 1929 and which is clearly his most important work, although it received little notice at the time. The work generated new interest when it was translated into English in 1973, after linguist Roman Jakobson called attention to the original Russian version (Morris, 1994; Titunik, 1987). I also draw on Vološinov’s earlier book, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1987a), which was originally published in 1927. True to his times, Vološinov used the dialectic approach in MPL to present his arguments about the centrality of language and ideology in social interaction. He argued that the study of language could not be carried out adequately either by what he called ‘abstract objectivism’ or ‘individualistic subjectivism’, two competing positions in linguistics at the time. The former, embodied in the structuralist approach of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure,3 was in his view too abstract, focusing on synchronic structures

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and removed from context of use, where the creative flexibility of language comes to life in changing social and ideological circumstances. In the structuralist view, language is nothing more than an ‘isolated, finished, monologic utterance, divorced from its verbal and actual context and standing open not to any possible sort of active response’ (1973: 73; emphasis in the original). As for individualistic subjectivism, which he began to critique in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch and continued to critique in MPL, this position mistakenly locates the individual’s creative communicative capacity in the psyche rather than in society. Approaching the study of language from a dialogic (rather than monologic) stance, Vološinov can thus argue that human consciousness is not a purely psychological phenomenon, but rather ‘the individual consciousness is a socio-ideological fact’ (1973: 12; emphasis in the original). Vološinov sums up his opposition to both approaches this way: ‘Language acquires life and historically evolves precisely here, in concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic system of language forms, nor in the individual psyche of speakers’ (1973: 95; emphasis in the original). With ‘concrete verbal communication’ as the starting point for a theory of language, Vološinov develops his concept of the construction of meaning as a social, dialogic, and evaluative phenomenon. When he states that we communicate in signs with an ‘evaluative accent’, he is signaling the centrality of ideology in human social interaction. He states: No utterance can be put together without value judgment. Every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. Therefore, each element in a living utterance not only has meaning but also has a value. (1973: 105; emphasis in the original) In order to illustrate his argument for the notion of sign and ideology at the dialogical level, Vološinov offers examples in literary works of how value judgments are conveyed through what he calls ‘expressive intonation’ and through reported speech, which was his dissertation topic. In his technical analysis of reported speech, he shows that language, stored in the eye of the mind through historical experiences in social interaction, represents ideologies that may change over time. Put another way, Vološinov argues that reported speech does not merely contain the interlocutor’s original utterance; instead, the speaker, in reporting the utterance of the other, alters it and cloaks it with an ‘evaluative accent’. Ideology, then, becomes uniquely embedded in reported speech.4 In Vološinov’s view, all utterances are in some ways like reported speech, because they are built on the words of others. Bazerman (2004: 55) remarks on Vološinov’s ability as a linguist ‘to explore the relations among texts technically in order to understand how language

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as utterance works in practice’. In a very real sense, by starting with evidence from literature, he paved the way for future research on how ideology can be indexed in talk-in-interaction. Anyone who wishes to describe work produced by the Bakhtin Circle has to confront the authorship question, so before turning to some key concepts in Vološinov’s writing, let me address this briefly. A debate is still running about whether or not Vološinov was the actual author of the texts bearing his signature. Some attribute these works to Bakhtin (e.g. Clark & Holquist, 1984; Holquist, 1981; Jameson, 1974) or cite the writings by including Bakhtin’s name alongside Vološinov’s (Morris, 1994). Holquist contends that Bakhtin authored 90% of the works. Others, however, question this claim (e.g. Morson & Emerson, 1989, 1990; Titunik, 1987; Williams, 1977) and offer persuasive arguments for Vološinov’s authorship. Morson and Emerson (1990) suggest that Bakhtin’s own work in the 1930s was greatly influenced by Vološinov’s thinking. Indeed, they make the case ‘that the relations among Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Medvedev [another member of the Circle] were dialogic’ (1990: 118). Of all the members of this group, it was Vološinov, the professional linguist, who made the most important and technically detailed contribution regarding the dialogic nature of language (see Bazerman, 2004; Gardiner, 1992; Titunik, 1987). In this book, therefore, I retain Vološinov’s name in discussing writings ascribed to him.

Vološinov and communicative practices The work of Vološinov is not widely reported in research about communicative practices in spite of the fact that his insights anticipate contemporary studies on the social nature of language (for some exceptions, see Blommaert, 2005; C. Goodwin, 2007a; M.H. Goodwin, 1990; Hanks, 1996). A central idea in his writing is that language is organized dialogically, at the level of the utterance, where participants’ contributions shape others’ responses. In words that seem to prefigure the analytical stance taken in the field of conversation analysis (e.g. Sacks, 1992a, 1992b; Schegloff, 1968), Vološinov states: ‘Any utterance – the written utterance not excepted – makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances’ (1973: 72). He insists that language cannot be understood apart from the immediate context of the utterance. Expressed in conversation analytical terms today, every utterance is both context shaped (by the previous utterance/action) and context renewing (shaping the next utterance/action) (cf. Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Heritage, 1984). It follows from this that the meaning of a word may shift from one utterance context to another. He calls this contextual meaning

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‘theme’ (tema) to distinguish it from the abstract, unchanging dictionary definition of a word’s ‘meaning’ (znachenie). Vološinov also considers what he calls the ‘extraverbal’ context crucial in human social interaction. Participants may share a history as well as events occurring in the environment, which also contribute to meaning. In his essay, ‘Discourse in life and discourse in art’ (1987b: 99), he provides this example: Two people are sitting in a room. They are both silent. Then one of them says ‘well!’ The other does not respond. Vološinov argues that this single-word utterance, well, is steeped in meaning, not just because of the dictionary meaning of the word, and not just because the word is uttered with a particular intonation that he says combines indignation and humor. The full meaning can only be understood because the interlocutors experience a shared event outside the window, a shared knowledge and understanding, and a shared evaluation. He writes: At the time the colloquy took place, both interlocutors looked up at the window and saw that it had begun to snow; both knew that it was already May and that it was high time for spring to come; finally, both were sick and tired of the protracted winter – they both were looking forward to spring and both were bitterly disappointed by the late snowfall. (1987b: 99; emphasis in the original) His attention to the evaluative aspect of social interaction ties his theory of language to a theory of ideology, to which I now turn.

Vološinov, utterance and ideology Vološinov is also considered among the earliest to contribute to our understandings about the ideological expression of language in face-to-face interaction (Dentith, 1995; Gardiner, 1992; Holborow, 2006). Vološinov’s great contribution is that he theorizes social interaction and relations of power manifested at the level of the utterance. At the very beginning of MPL, he proclaims, ‘Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside itself. In other words, it is a sign. Without signs, there is no ideology’ (1973: 9; emphasis in the original). He further argues that material conditions set the condition of verbal interaction. The forms of communication ‘are entirely determined by production relations and the sociopolitical order’ (21). Although just as in the field of conversation analysis, face-to-face interaction is considered by Vološinov to

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be the linchpin of human social conduct, he goes a step further and states that within these interactions, participants are at the same time enacting the perspectives of the wider society: ‘I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong’ (86). These interactions are always embedded in a web of social relations, which maintain asymmetries of power. Vološinov ‘s work prefigures later ideas regarding relations of power such as those of Bourdieu (1977, 1991), who uses the concept of linguistic capital to conceptualize discourse as a venue for expressing power relations in variant ways with different groups. For Bourdieu, a given discourse is arbitrarily sanctioned – given legitimacy – because it is uttered by a legitimate speaker, i.e. by the appropriate person, as opposed to the imposter (religious language/priest, poetry/poet, etc.); it is uttered in a legitimate situation, i.e. on the appropriate market (as opposed to insane discourse, e.g. a surrealist poem read in the Stock Exchange) and addressed to legitimate receivers; it is formulated in the legitimate phonological and syntactic forms (what linguists call grammaticalness), except when transgressing these norms is part of the legitimate definition of the legitimate producer. (1977: 650) Vološinov’s work also prefigures Foucault’s (1977) study of ideology. Like Vološinov, Foucault examines how power operates at the local level, not just in the state apparatus. In his view, power relations function at every level of society. He states that power is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere . . . power is not an institution, and not a structure, neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (1978: 93) We can see elements of both these theorists in Vološinov’s writings. While Vološinov recognizes the ideological aspect of language use controlled by larger centers of power, he argues that power relations are expressed even in everyday social interaction. ‘There is no such thing as word without evaluative accent’ (1973: 103). Thus, his conceptualization of power relations compels us to resituate the ideas of Bourdieu and Foucault by moving the more abstract portrayals of discourse/power closer to the utterance.5 This brilliant location of ideology at the level of utterance permits power to be challenged

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discursively. His concept of the multiaccentual sign is manifested in social interaction where moments of consent or contestation unfold with all their complexities, tensions, and contradictions. In his words: Every sign, as we know, is a construct between socially organized persons in the process of their interaction. Therefore, the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction. When these forms change, so does sign. And it should be one of the tasks of the study of ideologies to trace this social life of the verbal sign. (1973: 21; emphasis in the original) Vološinov’s call to examine the ‘social life of the verbal sign’ is taken up in this study of ‘the social organization of the participants’ in the manufacturing plant. In Chapter 6, I elaborate on how Vološinov’s views on ideology can be understood in the context of workers learning.

Vološinov and multimodal communication For Vološinov, ideology is expressed not only through speech and writing but also through other signs. Little attention has been paid to his commentary on multimodality in communication – the relationship between language and other semiotic resources. Indeed, his theory takes into account spoken and written words along with other signs such as images and gestures used in social interaction. ‘Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like’ (1973: 11). Throughout his writing, he reminds us that language is one of many signs that converge to make meaning in interaction. For example, in his discussion about the limitations of psychology, he lays out the role of signs in the human psyche, stating that ‘Consciousness takes shape and being in the material of signs created by an organized group in the process of its social intercourse. … Consciousness can harbor only in the image, the word, the meaningful gesture, and so forth’ (1973: 13). Thus, we might argue with Matejka (1973), who was one of the translators of MPL, that Vološinov’s work is the first Russian prolegomenon to semiotics. Ultimately, though, he argues that language is the primordial vehicle of human social interaction, with other sign systems integrated into and giving support to it: All manifestations of ideological creativity – all other nonverbal signs – are bathed by, suspended in, and cannot be entirely segregated or divorced

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from the element of speech. … It is ultimately impossible to convey a musical composition or pictorial image adequately in words. Words cannot wholly substitute for a religious ritual; not [sic] is there any really adequate verbal substitute for even the simplest gesture in human behavior. … Nonetheless, at the very same time, every single one of these ideological signs, though not supplantable by words, has support in and is accompanied by words. … (1973: 15) Contemporary scholarship on multimodality, while not disregarding language use, has intensified and has expanded our understanding of other semiotic resources, which are essential and richly enhance human communication. Later, I discuss how this more recent scholarship, particularly the work of Halliday, along with Kress, Van Leeuwen, Lemke and others has advanced our understanding of the role of different modes of communication such as sound, gestures and images. I also critique some of the more modular approaches to the study of these sign systems and argue for a unified perspective. Despite the current discourse regarding the ‘visual turn’ in research on multimodal communication, particularly the attention to the proliferation of images with the emergence of new technologies, I remain unswervingly aligned to the centrality of the linguistic modes (spoken and written) in human communicative practices. Language is myriad, made up of multiple codes with all their continuously developing and everchanging forms, registers, genres, styles. More than ever, with increased social mobility and pluralistic social arrangements, communicative practices are seen to be multilingual. Multilingualism, the co-existence and mutual influence of languages-in-use, will take center stage in this work’s study of multimodality.

Overview of the Book In Chapter 2, I offer a rationale for conducting an ethnography of a small, high-tech business and describe the fieldwork covering a span of seven years and entailing two periods of intensive data collection. Using the tools of ethnography, I conducted videotaped observations of workers as they performed their tasks on the manufacturing floor and subsequently of the company’s preparation and use of quality-control documents. Both observation periods were supplemented with formal and extended interviews and were followed-up periodically with meetings and interviews. I discuss the relevance of the larger sociohistorical context of the Silicon Valley during a time of dot-com fervor. I provide a detailed description of

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the physical plant and the artifacts used such as the circuit boards and components, the machines used to assemble them, and the relevant documents. Then, I introduce key participants; I explain their team structures, roles, and tasks and sketch out different worker actions on the floor as one set of boards is assembled for a customer. In this scenario, I signal the informal opportunities the employees have for learning ‘on the job’ and moving along a career path in the company. Using a conversation analytic approach in Chapter 3 allows me to describe in detail the relationship between multimodality and learning during a typical problem-solving event. I analyze the interaction of two workers while they dealt with a breakdown in the computerized machines that assemble the components on circuit boards. The workers, acting collaboratively on an environment permeated by tools and inscriptions, drew heavily on a number of semiotic resources, including the use of two languages, in order to achieve their goal. The workers in this event provide us with a sketch of informal-learning-in-practice – conjoint problem-solving in a high-tech environment. Their actions were accomplished in part through the use of shared knowledge and experience, such as vital information about the production process, the requirements for a particular board and the workings of a sophisticated machine. At the same time, an unexpected conundrum required that the workers pool their distributed knowledge in order to discover something new. They contested one another’s suggested solutions and brought together the knowledge distributed between them and across material inscriptions surrounding them in an effort to reach a common goal. In Chapter 4, I consider the location of power relations in interaction. I relate the professional actions during the problem-solving event described in Chapter 3 to the social alignments that were taking place simultaneously. I pay attention to how Vietnamese immigrants positioned themselves socially, particularly through their selection or omission of certain address forms and other honorific markers in Vietnamese during their talk. The workers situationally negotiated their relationships between self and other in these interactions. Their need to create social alignments during problem-solving tasks functioned as a lubricant to the machinery of high-quality and expeditious work practice. Because the management in this company supported the strategic use of one’s native language along with English, the workers in this event were free to create a mélange of English and Vietnamese to get the work done. Owing to the tight knit between social interaction that does professional work and social interaction that does social work, the freedom to access one’s own home language and culture can be considered both practical and fundamental. In this chapter I also pay attention to the dynamics

Introduc t ion : Theor iz ing Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

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of language change in distinct localities with distinct norms by drawing a comparison of the use of person-reference in the California setting with the use of this system in Hanoi. Chapter 5 connects local communicative practices to wider social relations. It describes an increasingly common communicative practice in the 21st century workplace – the preparation and use of quality-control documents, which are posted strategically throughout the company for employees to follow. This is a regime of power/control, a result of globalization, having a major impact on the company’s practices. I lay out how the company worked towards becoming ISO 9002 certified, a kind of good housekeeping seal of approval for the manufacture of products. In particular, the company had to produce an enormous amount of documentation associated with ISO 9002, making the production of paperwork – printed and digital texts – an effort comparable to the manufacturing of the product itself. I describe the development of this parallel ‘product’ (ISO Documentation) requiring a separate space and a contingent of employees and consultants, whose job was to focus entirely on preparing, disseminating and storing ISO documents. I give an account of worker actions on the manufacturing floor once the company became internationally certified, providing an example of how a master folder containing assembly instructions was developed for each job and how it changed as it traveled from station to station around the floor until final inspection of the product was done. I illustrate how employees integrate the written with the spoken and other modes as they deal with the quality-control requirements. Finally, I describe the endogenous communicative practices of several employees, which complemented and sometimes contested the ISO procedures. I offer examples of individually crafted designs, codes, and lists by employees in different departments. The workers’ creative adaptations were shared across departments and became venues for change of knowledge in work practice. Chapter 6 pays closer attention to the educational import of the study. I draw on the scholarship of Jean Lave (e.g. Lave, 1988, 1993, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) to examine informal learning on the job and link key aspects of Lave’s thinking to those of Vološinov. Based on the contributions of these two scholars, I revisit three ways of learning that emerged in the study, showing the central role of multimodal – including multilingual – means for learning. I then revisit issues of ideology to observe local and global power relations in learning at work. Here, I draw on observations of an upper-level management meeting and of employees’ actions on the assembly floor. These observations along with interviews with key players demonstrate power relations within the company and company members’ differing positions vis-à-vis their relationship with the customers, the value of the international

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quality-control regime and the workers’ multiple-language use. I argue that it is at the level of socially situated discourse and action that ideology and learning come together. Finally, in Chapter 7, I make a summary case for coming to a better understanding of learning-in-practice in work environments, where the complexities and accelerated growth of new technologies along with a globalized world occasion new forms of multilingual and multimodal communication. I conclude with a discussion of research directions that can probe further the discursive process of workplace learning-in-practice.

Notes (1) The term inscription has been used subsequently by Latour and Woolgar (1986) and C. Goodwin (1994, 1995b). (2) Delbridge’s (1998) study of two British factories similarly describes workers’ views about the relationship between quality, competitiveness and maintaining their jobs. (3) Vološinov did not have the benefit of more recent scholarship on Saussure, whose manuscript notes, discovered in 1996 in the Orangery of his family home (Saussure, 2006), demonstrate that he thought of language as an essence double. This discovery casts doubt on the interpretations of Saussure’s students, whose notes based on his lectures became the Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916/1966). We now know that Saussure’s thinking also took account of language in use (see Sanders, 2006). (4) This is likely a primary reason for his decision to devote the last part of MPL to reported speech in literature rather than to aspects of face-to-face communication. Being part of a largely literary circle, Vološinov used literature as a database to support his thesis. This analytical choice does not mean that he dismissed the importance of unfolding meaning in talk-in-interaction, pace Goodwin (2007a). (5) Two insightful comparative analyses of Bourdieu, Foucault and the Bakhtin Circle can be found in Erickson (2004) and in Gardiner (1992). Gardiner has suggested that there are affinities among Vološinov (and the Bakhtin circle), Foucault, and Bourdieu that remain to be explored. This work is an effort in that direction.

2 Genesis, Inc. and Its People

You could say that it all began at a kitchen table in 1979. After a day’s work at a major electronics manufacturer in California’s Silicon Valley, Madge arrived home and began after-hours work hand-loading circuit boards for a client needing immediate attention. The client was pleased with her work; soon, through word of mouth, other clients came along. By 1980, she decided to start her own small company and, together with three employees, began working in a tight-fitting 1200 sq. ft. space. In the summer of the same year, Charlie quit his job with a large manufacturer of silicon products for semiconductors and joined her in the effort. Based on their combined experience working in the electronics industry, the couple was convinced that they would be able to provide superior service for large electronics companies needing small jobs done on tight deadlines. In the beginning, Madge, Charlie and their employees worked in the evenings between 10 pm and 3 am – he soldered and she inspected for quality – to avoid the oppressive daytime heat in the shop. They continued working again in the morning, but everyone was sent home by early afternoon. Initially, the two together put in twenty hours of work daily. Eventually, Madge and Charlie were able to move the company into a larger and more comfortable plant of 8000 sq. ft., which a friend of Madge offered rent-free. Now that they had more workspace, Charlie sold his stock options to invest in their first piece of equipment, a solder machine (at the time, the interest rate that banks charged on loans for equipment was 23%). What began as a homespun kitchen table operation had grown into Genesis, Inc., a circuit board manufacturing firm with Madge as president and Charlie as vice president and general manager.1 After 10 years of dedication to the company’s development, Madge told Charlie that she had held the role of ‘front person’ long enough and turned the title of 15

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president over to him; she preferred to use her skills to focus on the company’s employees in the vice-presidential role. In 1994, when the company was in its fourteenth year of operation and growing steadily, they moved into a 20,000 sq. ft. plant. Genesis operated in a fast-growing, highly competitive field called outsourcing, which boasts its own international organizations and trade magazines. The idea of outsourcing is often associated with larger companies contracting with a company often located outside the country to provide a service or product – originally undertaken in-house – in order to cut costs. A great deal of criticism has been directed at big companies’ outsourcing to other countries, or ‘offshoring’, of manufacturing and other jobs in order to take advantage of lower labor costs (e.g. Carnoy et al., 1993; Derrida, 1977; Gee et al., 1996; Reich, 1992). Outsourcing, however, also occurs within US borders. According to Charlie, larger electronics companies in the aerospace, computer, and medical industries opted to outsource locally what they considered non-critical functions such as manufacturing so that they themselves might focus on engineering and product development. These became Genesis’s customers, and the company looked upon itself as providing a service as well as a product. Because outsourcing had grown so rapidly, however, Genesis was just one of many such firms in Silicon Valley. In Charlie’s words: Eighty percent of contract work is being done in the United States . . . and 50% of the contract work is within a thirty-mile radius of [our] company. So . . . we’re selling efficiency but we’re [also] selling proximity. But if we aren’t as efficient as other people within our geographic area, the customers can see that very clearly and . . . quickly. And they’ve got somebody else that they can go to. So we are constantly being tested. Thus, the company was situated in a highly competitive subcontracting market with at least 200 competitors within Silicon Valley alone. As a researcher, my relationship with this company and its people was to span a period of seven years, beginning in 1994 during the exuberant growth of the dot-com bubble, a time of increasing competition and risk in the electronics industry. In this chapter, I sketch a portrait of the Genesis that I got to know. I describe its physical plant, its various departments, the high-tech equipment used, and the product manufactured. Then, I introduce key participants and explain their team structures, roles, and tasks, providing examples of their communication and action on the plant floor. But first, I must present the rationale for my decision to learn all that

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I could about this small operation and describe the ethnographic fieldwork that I undertook.

Why Genesis, Inc? What is the value of studying communicative practices and learning on the job in a small company such as Genesis, Inc? The choice was not an arbitrary one. First of all, we know little about life in so-called small businesses, in spite of the fact that, by some estimates, 80% of all jobs in the US are in companies that employ fewer than 150 people. Workplace research has been carried out almost exclusively in larger companies, for they have enough personnel to accommodate the disruptions inherent in having visiting researchers, and often they can afford to fund the research. In Silicon Valley, large concerns such as Xerox and Hewlett Packard have benefited both themselves and the community through such funding. For example, in 1987 The Xerox Foundation founded the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in order to gather together anthropologists, linguists, educators, computer scientists and others to conduct interdisciplinary research on learning in the workplace, including the Xerox Corporation itself.2 In contrast, smaller businesses such as Genesis have not received much research attention. (For a rare exception, see Kondo’s (1990) rich description of a family-owned workplace in Japan.) In filling this gap in the literature on the contemporary workplace, I aimed to provide a thorough description that would add to our understanding of the socially situated language, knowledge, and skills required of workers in a small business. This aim could only be realized thanks to the willingness of Charlie, the company president, who at the end of our first meeting decided to invite me in, despite knowing that it would be difficult to accommodate a research project to the company’s tight schedules. He made the case that his employees’ activities would be typical of the demanding work found in small electronics companies. In his words, ‘You will see the best and the worst of us, because this is going to be so busy, high pressure. Everybody has schedules to make, and you will see us in as strained and stressful a situation as exists in our particular environment’. His willingness to open company doors to a researcher under these circumstances speaks to his belief in the educational value of understanding work practices in small companies. A second reason for selecting Genesis was that it belonged to a sector that requires the use of advanced technology, which is becoming increasingly common in the workplace (Hull, 1997; SCANS, 1991, 1992a, 1992b; Stasz

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et al., 1996), and it was located in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of new technology development at the time. The contemporary work environment is especially marked by technological innovations and complex work; it has been called the ‘new workplace’, which requires ‘workers with higher and more varied skills’ (Stasz et al., 1996: xi). As these new technologies emerge, we are witnessing not only global changes in communicative practices but also local changes in the way these practices are appropriated, shaped, and enacted (Castells, 2007). I wanted to observe these local changes up close, since they have an impact on when, where, and how learning occurs (Kleifgen & Kinzer, 2009; Kostogriz, 2006). In addition to its strategic location and use of advanced technology, Genesis’s manufacturing equipment (computerized machines) and products (circuit boards) were constantly changing. To survive, it had to use leading-edge equipment, be able to do fast turnarounds and provide excellent quality control in the face of constant changes in machine and component technology. Workers had to learn new skills continuously and be agile in adapting to work for different customers. The front-line workers generally worked in teams at the four assembly lines and several operations areas, but time pressure often required members of one team to help out workers from other teams, which created a highly fluid environment to which workers had to adapt. The production of circuit boards took from one to five days, and each customer required different boards – some large, some small, each having different components. A description of this complex work, in this place and amidst continuous technological change would provide a measure of understanding of how communicative practices interact with learning on the job in a globalized twenty-first century setting. A third reason for doing my research at Genesis was the diversity of its workforce. I wanted to see how a multilingual group of workers managed to communicate and collaborate at work, and this company afforded the opportunity to observe Chinese, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, and Western European as well as African American and European American workers in a single work setting. It is estimated that between 1980 and 2020, the white working population will decline from 82% to 63%, while the ‘minority’ population is projected to double from 18% to 37% (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2005). Further evidence for these projections is the fact that in the last 25 years, the enrollment of English-language learners has nearly doubled in US public schools, where most of tomorrow’s workforce is being educated (García et al., 2007: 9). Most of Genesis’s employees were Vietnamese speakers, which reflected the ethnolinguistic composition of the local population. They occupied positions ranging from semi-skilled to skilled and supervisory roles.

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According to the 2000 Census, there were 102,841 Vietnamese Americans living in Santa Clara County, where the company was located. Santa Clara is just one of a number of California counties with high concentrations of Vietnamese, many of whom came to the US as refugees after the war in Vietnam and eventually became naturalized citizens. 3 Many of the Vietnamese speakers in Genesis came to the US as refugees, and others were born in the US. With nearly 400,000 Latinos in Santa Clara County, Genesis also employed Spanish-speaking workers. Latinos have a long and complicated history in Santa Clara County and the South Bay area dating from the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century through the time of Mexican rule, continuing into California statehood, migrations to California as a result of the Mexican Revolution and, more recently, arduous labor in the local mines, farms and canneries (Pitti, 2003). Those who worked at Genesis were mostly Latina women, who formerly had jobs in the canneries, an industry in decline by the end of the 1970s. Once the canneries were shut down, those thrown out of work looked for employment in places such as electronics assembly firms, which had positions that did not require postsecondary education. Working alongside these Vietnamese- and Spanish-speakers were a number of Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking women and men as well as immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries, Portugal and the Philippines. Together with their English-speaking coworkers, these workers represented a microcosm of the ethnolinguistic diversity in the region and in many other parts of the US. This would enable me to observe the concerted actions of these individuals and, to use Vološinov’s term, listen to their ‘multiaccentual’ voices at work. In terms of their educational preparation, the majority of the company’s employees had a prebaccalaureate education. Most, including some managers and supervisors, had not pursued further study after they graduated from high school, either in their country of origin or in the US. Although many had some additional training with other companies, they seldom received formal certification. Others earned associate degrees in computer science or electronics from community colleges. Taken together, these employees typified the educational background of the American workforce at the time, in which 75% had completed between 12 and 15 years of schooling (United States Department of Labor, 1994: 160–161). At the time I initiated my study, several employees with only a high school diploma had been promoted from a low-skills to a high-skills function or from entry-level to supervisory positions. This indicated that they were developing new knowledge and skills at work, and that I therefore would be able to observe knowledge change in the workplace.

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Ethnographic Fieldwork The research at Genesis included two extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork, separated by a two-year hiatus, covering in all a seven-year span as shown in the following research timeline: RESEARCH TIMELINE AT GENESIS, INC. 1994 • • • • •

1995–1996

preliminary interviews • follow-up interviews & 3 months observation visits to site video/audiotaping interviews document collection

1999 • • • •

2000

3 months observation • follow-up interviews & audiotaping visits to site interviews document collection

The research was initiated in 1994. At the outset, several weeks were spent on interviews with the management, preliminary introductions to employees and visits to the physical plant. Afterwards, I was given formal entrée to spend an intensive three-month period of research with the company. During this first period, I observed and videorecorded workers as they performed their tasks on the manufacturing floor. With camera in hand, I was able to capture the actions of employees working with machines and other tools; teams of employees’ concerted actions on assigned tasks; sequences of action in the assembly of sets of circuit boards and employees’ use of documentation, software databases, photographic images and blueprints and other drawings. The transcribed video recordings became the centerpiece of my study of social interaction at work. I was given unrestricted access to speak with company management. I interviewed Charlie and Madge on several occasions. In addition, I conducted extended interviews with the director of engineering, four managers, and two engineers in document control. With these interviews, I obtained information on the company’s history and structure along with management’s views about working with a diverse workforce and their hopes and concerns about running an exciting yet highly demanding small business. I was also able to interview frontline workers representing the various levels (supervisor, ‘lead’ or team leader, assembly worker) and roles (programmer, machine operator, hand-loader, solderer, tester, inspector). In my initial interviews with them, I gathered information about their background and education and later training or learning on the job, the kinds of tasks they performed and the functions of the different computerized machines and

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other tools they worked with. In later interviews, I heard stories about their problem-solving experiences, the changes and adaptations they faced (new tasks, new knowledge) and their recollections about mentoring newcomers to their team. In addition, I amassed various kinds of documentation, such as manuals for the computerized machines, blueprints submitted by customers, lists of assembly materials and software programs and administrative and procedural materials. Beyond this initial period of ethnographic work, I continued to arrange follow-up meetings and interviews with key participants – from the president to frontline workers – over a two-year period. The second period of intensive data collection occurred in 1999. I returned at that time in order to document a particular literacy practice: the preparation and use of quality-control documents that would be posted strategically throughout the company for employees to follow. This procedure, known as ISO 9002,4 was only in the planning stage during the first period of research. During the second period, again with observation and interviews over three months, I followed the development of these quality-control materials and the practices associated with them. During this time, I obtained copies of the company’s quality manual, sample folders compiled for each customer with checklists and other procedural materials, copies of signs and monthly surveys of quality ratings, and copies of worker-designed codings and other quality-control inscriptions. I was able to conduct extended interviews as before, this time paying particular attention to the management and employees who were involved in the preparation and implementation of ISO 9002. I also interviewed the ISO 9002 consultant and auditor, who helped Genesis achieve compliance with the certification system. Finally, I held follow-up interviews after this period of data collection. In sum, I paid particular attention to the Manufacturing and Quality Assurance divisions during this project; at the same time, I made contact with employees at all levels of the company and had access to relevant documents from all divisions throughout the study. I now turn to a description of the physical plant and the people of Genesis.

The Setting A new manufacturing plant Just two weeks before my research began, Genesis had moved out of its small plant on the East Bay into a more spacious site (see Figure 2.1). The employees had helped with moving and setting up equipment and materials

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Figure 2.1 Exterior of Genesis, Inc.

over the course of a weekend so that they could start their regular assembly schedules the following Monday. The move from one city to another nearby provided two advantages: the company would operate in a larger, two-story facility, and it would spend less per square foot than in the previous location. This new facility was indeed spacious and in attractive surroundings. Just beyond the sizeable entryway and lobby were sales offices and a stairway leading to administrative offices on the second floor. The various assembly, inspection and quality-control stations occupied a single extensive space on the main floor, with surrounding rooms used for engineering services, duplicating and a dining hall. The frontline workers performed tasks in teams at the four assembly lines and several operations areas (see Figure 2.2). Not all of the employees were happy with their new surroundings. Some thought that moving to a larger space was too expensive and others feared that customers might not be able to find the new plant. Still others did not like having every department on one floor. For example, a Portuguese immigrant complained that the ‘washing machine’, a large piece of equipment used to clean the assembled circuit boards, was too noisy; she preferred the set-up in the prior plant where the machine was in a separate room. Understanding the workers’ actions in this complex workplace entails a brief description of the product they were building, circuit boards, and the equipment they were manipulating on the assembly lines.

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Figure 2.2 Assembly floor

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Circuit boards and components To an outsider such as me, stepping onto the manufacturing floor for the first time was like stepping into a foreign land without knowing the language or understanding its peoples’ ways of acting. I knew right away that I would have to do my homework in order to gain an understanding of this company’s ways of speaking and working. The floor was a maze of sounds and people and objects in motion. There was a flurry of activity amidst a blare of machines mingled with a cacophony of diverse ethnic music playing at different workstations. Printed circuit boards were the objects of attention on this floor. I saw all sizes moving on conveyor belts through noisy complex machines, stacked on carts or spread out on tables for hand-loading and inspection. I had never really paid much attention to circuit boards before this moment. I had taken them for granted. Yet, just as circuit boards were everywhere on this floor, they are ubiquitous in our everyday world – hidden, as it were, inside the things we use. Not only are they used in our computers, iPods, iPads and mobile phones, they are also nestled inside other devices used for homemaking, work, transportation and leisure. Circuit boards contain a variety of interconnected components that vary in size. I saw an array of these components being loaded onto the boards and later learned some of their names: integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, magnetics, crystals and sockets (see sample board in Figure 2.3).

Assembly machines In general, components that are assembled on circuit boards have become much smaller over time. Because circuit board technology is undergoing this

Figure 2.3 Circuit board with components

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rapid miniaturization, manufacturing technology must keep pace. This means that the machines designed to assemble the boards may function only a few years before requiring retrofits or new modules or end their life-cycle and be replaced. I would eventually learn the impact of this rapidly changing technology on the life of the company. At Genesis, several kinds of machines were used. Some customers were still using circuit boards requiring older ‘ThroughHole Technology’, in which components with pins are inserted into holes on one side of a board and soldered in place on the opposite side. Other boards require a newer process known as ‘Surface Mount Technology’ (SMT). With SMT, components are placed directly on the surface and connected to tiny solder pads where solder paste has been applied. This newer machine is programmed to place components on boards at the assigned points on an x/y axis. Still other boards require a hybrid of Through-Hole and SMT placement since, as Gary, the sales manager, told me, ‘Some of our customers have old and new technology sitting on the same application’. Because workers were skilled in assembling boards using both older and newer machines, Genesis became known for its flexibility in building circuit boards.

Figure 2.4 SMT machine

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Figure 2.5 Feeder

Genesis began to purchase the more advanced SMT machines in 1986. In 1992, the company sold these and purchased newer generation surface mount machines such as the one shown in Figure 2.4.5 These computerized assembly machines are equipped with robotic arms and vision systems designed for accurate placement of components. Data are entered and modified using the operator panel and the CRT (cathode ray tube) display on the machines. The components are fed from feeders arranged in slots along the front and back of the machine (see diagram of a feeder in Figure 2.5). The operator and his or her assistants place reels of tape containing these components on the feeders. Each time the robotic arm ‘picks’ a component from the reel, the feeder moves another component into place for the next pick. This second-generation equipment would itself have to be replaced frequently over the next several years. These machine upgrades constituted a major investment for a small firm such as Genesis.

Management and Employees At the time I began my research, Genesis had 120 employees, with 80 of them working on the assembly floor in three shifts. We have already met the owners – Charlie, the president, and Madge, the executive vice-president. The company structure was relatively simple. Madge took on an administrative role in finance, personnel, and benefits. On the next level were the managers of the five divisions – Materials (e.g. review of incoming materials, document control and scheduling), Manufacturing Support (e.g. purchasing and engineering), Manufacturing (circuit board assembly), Testing and Sales. There were to be some changes in this structure during the time of my research. For example, Sales was eventually was spun off into a separate enterprise. Also, a separate Quality Assurance division came into being by

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the time I returned to observe the ISO 9002 implementation during my second period of fieldwork. On the third level were the supervisors of each department on the manufacturing floor – the four assembly machine lines, ‘touch-up’ or soldering, ‘second-assembly’ or cleaning and other post-soldering work, testing and final inspection. A fourth level consisted of leads, individuals who were responsible for the day-to-day planning and execution of the tasks by the frontline workers within their purview.

Workers’ Task Activities I now turn to the kinds of tasks workers performed on the assembly floor. What did workers need to know in order to operate these digital technologies and other tools, and just how did they perform this kind of work? Through my videotaped observations, interviews with workers and collection of company documents, I was able to ascertain both the general nature of the tasks performed by the practitioners at Genesis and the procedures for accomplishing them. Jobs on the floor ranged from ‘semiskilled’, such as preparing parts or hand-placing them on the board, to ‘skilled’, such as operating computerized machines, soldering or testing the completed circuit boards. Almost all jobs had multitask functions, and some tasks required programming skills. Interesting moments occurred when the routine of the work was interrupted by problems in the assembly process. These often were attributable to errors in the paperwork or software that customers sent along with their orders. Customers provided a blueprint and a Bill of Materials (BOM), which lists the components and provides information about their placement on the circuit board. In addition, customers often included a software program with the same information, which could be adapted and transferred to the computerized assembly machine, and occasionally they included a sample board. All the groups involved in the assembly of a specific set of boards were given a copy of the BOM and the blueprint so that they could check the information against the data in the machine’s program and/or the information on the board itself. A customer sometimes provided the wrong information about the size or placement of components, a mistake that often became apparent when the machine operator began a trial-run of the first board of a set (as we saw happen in our scene at the beginning of Chapter 1). The worker then had to determine the trouble source, usually by consulting the BOM to check for discrepancies between data given there and data in the machine’s program. If this was the case, the operator had to make the necessary corrections. Other troubleshooting involved faults in the board’s

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design or limitations in the machine itself, in which case the machine, as one machine operator put it, had to be ‘fooled’, for example, into correctly placing components that were smaller than those customarily placed by the machine’s robotic arm. In any case, the worker who noticed a problem often attempted, when possible, to solve it without having to stop production. Since troubleshooting had to be performed under tremendous time pressure, workers typically worked in teams to minimize the loss of valuable production time. While finding and repairing breakdowns in assembly, workers drew on all semiotic resources at hand to act: they used multiple languages in interaction while manipulating objects in the environment, referred to inscriptions such as the numbers on components and given by the BOM or the computer program and used gestures to draw their coworkers’ attention to areas (e.g. on the board or within the machine) that were affected by the problem at hand.

Assembling Circuit Boards Let us observe workers performing actions at different stations as we follow the path of a set of circuit boards (called a ‘kit’) being prepared, assembled, inspected and shipped to the customer. Focusing on a job requiring both newer SMT machines and older Through-Hole machines, I describe the process by which five large ‘hybrid’ circuit boards got built. Once the contract for this production had been signed (which took a month of preparation and negotiation), the customer provided all the boards and documentation necessary, and Genesis purchased the components for the kit. These materials were subjected to incoming inspection in the materials receiving department to be sure that everything met specifications. From there, they were sent to document control to prepare folders with instructions. Then, on the morning the job was to begin, the folders were distributed to the designated departments. The boards had to be assembled and sent to the customer by the end of the day, so they had to be circulated through the different departments and stations efficiently and with careful attention to quality.

The SMT assembly The assembly began in the SMT department, where Chien and Randy were working. Chien had come to the US as a refugee from Vietnam. Randy was also from Vietnam, but he and his family first went to Japan to live for six years before moving to the US. As a result, Randy was a fluent speaker of three languages, though he stated that he seldom had the opportunity to apply his Japanese skills at work. Although both men spoke English, they

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used their native Vietnamese during their concerted actions on the machines. Before actual assembly could begin, the machines had to be programmed, the circuit boards prepared with solder paste or epoxy and the components put on feeders and attached to the machines. Chien, the machine programmer, programmed the high-speed SMT machines to place components on the boards. He used the customer’s bill of materials, a blueprint and a sample board as a basis for data entry. Then, in a small office just off the floor, he entered the information into a database, converted the program to SMTbased software and took the disk to Randy, the machine operator. Meanwhile, the boards had to go through a screen print process in which a red epoxy (used instead of solder paste on hybrid boards) is applied. Du, the supervisor, took on this task, usually reserved for the machine operator, in order to save time. Using a blade, Du smeared the epoxy over a stencil, and the epoxy was transferred to the designated locations on the board. Du, also a speaker of both Vietnamese and English, was older than his assistants and thus had vivid memories as an adult of his family’s travel by boat from Vietnam to the Philippines and their eventual arrival in the US in 1979. With only a high school education in Vietnam and some training as an electronic technician in California, Du began working for Genesis in its early years. His work as a supervisor is detailed in Chapters 3 and 4. Here, he worked alongside his assistants, Randy and Chien, so that they could focus on setting up the component feeders, which they placed strategically on both sides of the machines. Randy did a trial run of the first board, known as the ‘first article’. The board moved on a conveyor belt through each machine, and the robotic arms picked components from feeders and placed them at designated points. During this trial run, Randy worked with the arm moving in slow motion so that he could watch carefully the pick and placement of each component. At the same time, he referred to the machine’s CRT display to check the software program, which instructed the machine as to which parts were to be picked and where they had to be placed. At this point, Randy and Chien worked together to adjust the machines and the component feeders for optimal assembly. Time was at a premium, and the SMT machines alone were programmed to assemble 300 components. Once they were satisfied with the assembly, Chien returned to his desk to begin working on a job for another customer.

Quality control After the first article was assembled with all the components, Randy took it to Linh, the quality-control inspector, who checked it carefully for discrepancies. She discovered a few ‘empty’ spaces on the board by noticing areas where components should have been placed. Linh returned the board to

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Randy, telling him in Vietnamese what she found and pointing to the spots on the board. Randy scrutinized the program on the SMT computer display. There, he noticed that the missing components had not been programmed into the software. Had Chien made a mistake in his programming, I asked? According to Du, ‘Chien just copies the x/y from the customer program. If the customer left something out, he doesn’t see it’. Du speculated that the data disk provided by the customer did not include some of the components. The customer probably added these components at the last minute and neglected to enter the information on the disk before sending the kit to Genesis. Together, Randy and Linh looked for and wrote down the empty locations on a piece of paper, calling out and confirming the numbers in Vietnamese. They reviewed the bill of materials, the places on the board, and the written information. Next, Randy entered the placement information manually into the computer and ran the first board once more. He then brought it over to Linh and read aloud the numbers off the board while Linh checked them off her list. This time, the machine correctly placed some of the components but was unable to pick components from one feeder because of their microscopic size. With a pair of tweezers, Linh harvested two components from the reel on the feeder and hand-placed them, using a magnifying glass in order to read the corresponding numbers on the board. Once the two workers were satisfied that the first article passed muster, Randy ran the other boards at high speed. In the next chapter, we will observe a different machine operator working with another team to troubleshoot a problem in the assembly of a first article. There, we will see the workers’ concerted action and learning, using the multimodal resources at their disposal. After the SMT assembly, Randy took all the boards to inspection, where Linh and her associate reviewed them to verify that the components were placed precisely on the designated locations on the board. They also handplaced the missing components on the other four boards. Once the boards were completed, Linh took them to the computerized ‘reflow’ oven to melt the solder, thereby fixing the components to the boards so that there would be electrical contact. She then stacked the boards in an upright position on racks and carried them to the Through-Hole assembly department. This inspection work recalls the actions of the inspectors we saw in the scene in Chapter 1; they were likewise checking circuit boards at their station in the SMT department, and we will re-visit their work in more detail in Chapter 4.

Through-Hole assembly When the circuit boards arrived in the Through-Hole assembly department, a similar process occurred. This time, Through-Hole assembly

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machines were programmed to add bulkier components with pins (also called leads) attached that would have to be inserted through holes in the board and later affixed from the back. Sandra, a Cantonese speaker originally from Hong Kong, was the supervisor in this department. She joined Genesis when Ned, her boss in another company, was hired by Genesis and brought along some workers from his previous employer. Sandra had worked her way up the company ladder from auditing clerk to machine operator, then programmer; eventually, she progressed to the current supervisory role. On this day, Sandra was multitasking. Not only was she programming the machines for this kit, she was also supervising the work of a new Vietnamese-speaking employee, Trai, who was working on a machine that loaded Dual In-line Packages or DIPs, special packages containing integrated circuits. (See diagram of DIP package in Figure 2.6.6 ) Sandra had shown Trai how to run this machine the day before. On this day, he had set up the machine and was running it on his own. Sandra told me she mentored new employees by showing them the way and then giving them opportunities to repeat the procedures on their own. For Sandra, the secret to learning how to be a machine operator was practice. In short, one learned by doing. Whereas larger companies often provide formal training for their employees, including courses in ESL and English literacy (e.g. Hull, 1997), such a service is too costly in terms of time and money for small companies. Genesis relied on the mentoring capacity of its people to train initiates. Trai methodically loaded tubes containing sets of DIPs into a carousel located on the top of the machine. Earlier, Sandra had placed the tubes into the labeled pigeonholes of a ‘DIP truck’ so that Trai could find them easily. He then placed the circuit board on the machine tray and pressed start. The machine was programmed to move the tray (and the board) under the arm, which loaded the board. After the board was loaded with the DIPs, Trai removed it, placed a new one and started the machine again. While the new board was being loaded, he checked the loaded board to be sure that the

Figure 2.6 Dual In-line Package (DIP)

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machine had placed the DIPs correctly and that they were fastened tightly. The wires of one DIP had not gone through the board correctly, so Trai took it off and replaced it by hand. His other tasks included checking that the DIPs were facing the right direction on the board and replacing empty tubes on the carousel. As the DIPs dropped down one by one from the tubes to be loaded onto a board, one of them jammed. He consulted with Sandra. The two of them used English, the lingua franca, as she instructed him on the most efficient way to remove the jammed DIP from the tube. Although Trai did not have full control of spoken English, he demonstrated that he could review the charts corresponding to the circuit boards, read the contents such as the name of the customer, the type of board being assembled, and the lists of components to be loaded, and interpret a blueprint of the board itself showing the directionality and order of placement by the machine’s robotic arm. Trai finished this stage of the assembly, and the boards were ready for another inspection and soldering process; these were similar to the processes for the SMT assembly, except that the boards were sent through a computerized wave-solder machine, especially designed for Through-Hole components.

Hand-loading Having been inspected and put through the wave-solder machine, the boards were delivered expeditiously by Du, the SMT assembly supervisor, to Nati, the lead in the prepping department. Du and Maritza, the Latina supervisor of the prep and touch-up areas, decided to put their teams together in order to finish the boards as expeditiously as possible. The supervisors told Nati to stop the kit they were working on because her team was needed to help hand-load several sets of components on this five-board kit. At this point, most of the components were machine-loaded on the boards, but time had been lost owing to earlier problems with the SMT assembly. Nati was a Mexican American who had been working with the company from the early days when Madge was just starting the business. Two of Nati’s assistants were Thi and Thien, Vietnamese-speaking women, who had been working for the company for six years. The workers in Nati’s group usually prepared components in various ways before they were installed by hand on circuit boards at another station. This time, however, the team would also handload components called connectors, which had to be pressed firmly in place on the board. Nati explained the situation to her co-workers using English and an abundance of gestures: Nati:

We have to stop. Stop that kit.

(waving arm over boards they were loading)

Genesis, Inc. and It s People

Thi & Thien: Nati: Thi & Thien: Nati: Thi & Thien: Nati: Thi & Thien: Nati: Thi: Nati:

Hot board. We have a hot board. OK? Hot board. You’re gonna put these in . . .

. . . this board. These. five boards. Just put ‘em in and don’t worry about pressing them all the way down.

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(both looking up, watching Nati’s actions) (pointing to the stack of 5 circuit boards) (nodding)

(begin clearing their work table) (pointing to the packages of connectors for the 5-board kit) (nodding) (handing packages to Thi) (takes packages)

The two women recognized that ‘hot board’ meant that there was an impending deadline for this kit. They began prepping and loading the connectors, briefly speaking among themselves in Vietnamese about aspects of their tasks. Thi was disabled in one hand owing to a stroke, so she placed the connectors while Thien actually did the partial pressing task, which required both hands. After the two women placed the connectors, they covered them and the switch with masking tape and covered other parts with a liquid masking, which would come off when the boards were sent later through the ‘washing’ machine to be cleaned. Meanwhile, the hand-loading team – Nati’s sister, Luz, and three other Latina women, Concha, Gabi and Gloria – were working alongside Thien and Thi to place additional components. Usually, these women used their native Spanish while they worked. Concha had told me that her group liked being able to use Spanish in their team because, in her words, ‘el hecho de que podemos colaborar en español hace nuestro trabajo más fácil’ (being able to collaborate in Spanish makes our work much easier). But on this day, while they worked with the Vietnamese-speaking women, English became the lingua franca as they coordinated with them to place regulators, ICs and diodes onto the boards. Similar to Nati, Concha and Luz had worked for the

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company from its beginning. They were experienced at these tasks and were accustomed to hand-loading several different boards in one day. Sometimes, they were able to memorize where the components should be placed, but most often they referred to the blueprints in the folders that corresponded to each kit. Being bilingual, they were able to shift into English whenever groups were called upon to collaborate on a job. The combined teams added and soldered the necessary components to the five boards, and a ‘touch-up’ team then repaired any problems found on the boards and completed the required hand-soldering. Once Luz checked all the hand-loading and soldering work, she turned the boards over to Nati, who delivered them to the next department. The prep team then returned to their area to take up the work they had to set aside in order to help hand-load the ‘hot boards’.

Second assembly The boards were now in the final department in the Manufacturing division, a small department called ‘second assembly’, which dealt with any post-soldering work on the board. The teams in this department took care of ‘in-process’ quality control and final hand assembly. The boards first went to quality control, where they were inspected by Fatima, a Portuguese immigrant who had completed a high school education and initial nurse’s training in Portugal; in this country, she had some training in soldering in her prior job with another assembly plant before joining Genesis. Like Sandra, she was hired by Ned, who had been her boss at the other plant. As manufacturing manager, he valued her kind of inspection skills over someone without soldering experience because ‘having soldering ability greatly enhances ability to do the quality-control job, especially if you understand why things happen the way they do. Otherwise, it becomes a textbook exercise.’ She told me she liked her role in this company because ‘every day you learn something new’. Whenever customer boards and components changed, she would ask her supervisor, Lahn, to explain why they were different. However, Lahn was said by his subordinates to have ‘mood swings’. Fatima said that she typically avoided talking to him in the early part of the day and learned to save her questions until later. In her words: When I ask him in the morning, he doesn’t answer me very good. But when I ask him in the afternoon, he helps me more than in the morning. So I wait until the afternoon. … He doesn’t like too many questions. She explained that in the morning she preferred working with her Vietnamese coworker, Leo, who she said ‘knows what he is doing’, so that she could seek out his help when necessary ‘and together, we solve the problem’.

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Fatima’s task was to check the boards and components carefully before sending them to final hardware placement. Using the customer’s BOM and the blueprint, she meticulously examined the five boards for missing parts, wrong polarity or value, tilted or misaligned components, placement in the wrong location on the board, bent pins (leads), missing or too much solder or solder splash that had to be removed. With regard to soldering problems, rather than returning the boards to the touch-up workers and logging the errors on a check sheet, she used a soldering iron to repair the mistakes she found on one of the boards herself. She stated that this action, which she knew did not conform to company policy, would both save time and avoid the ire of her supervisor. When she was satisfied that the boards were flawless, she stamped each one, indicating that it had passed inspection. When her inspection work was done, she notified Hung, the lead of the second assembly department; he worked with the group that hand-placed the final hardware such as sockets and labels before sending the boards to testing and final inspection. Hung was a Vietnamese refugee who had left Saigon at the age of 18 after completing high school. He began working for Genesis as soon as he came to the US and started out in prepping. He wanted a career path in the company, so he decided to take courses at a public high school in California for one year in order to better his English. In his words, ‘I think English is a tool for learning on the job. Learning here [at Genesis] is “self-learning”’. In addition, he earned an Associate of Arts degree at a local community college. Hung’s efforts paid off. He worked up to the position of lead within four years. Hung retrieved the boards from Fatima and reviewed them once more to be sure they were clean and had inspection stamps on them. Then, referring to the BOM, he added the final items to one of the boards to be used as a model for his three coworkers. His team used the model to add a few pieces of hardware and then to add labels, including the assembly number, warning sign and barcode. They stamped the company name and date code, including the date of the board’s manufacture. They checked component leads with an electronic digital caliper to be sure they were exactly 0.040 inches long. Finally, they checked to be sure that the boards were free of fingerprints or other impurities. (Hung had to remove a hair stuck to one of the boards.) The employees in this last department were intensely focused on inspection and quality control. As lead in second assembly, Hung had strong opinions about the role of each worker under his charge. In his view, people working in touch-up and QC were supposed to avoid communicating with co-workers; the more they talked, he said, the less they could concentrate on their tasks. Hung told me that his group combined personal responsibility and crosschecking each other’s work: ‘We also help each other, we look for that too,

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but we mainly look for what we [ourselves] did’. Because this was the end of the manufacturing road just before testing and final inspection, he said that his entire staff had to be satisfied that the boards were without flaws. If their team was successful, he reasoned, then the final quality check would ‘only have to take a look . . . take a quick look, then out the door’. Hung’s final task was to fill out an inspection checklist, which would include the total number of errors found at this stage. Then he took the completed boards to the testing department.

Testing At this point, the five boards underwent a rigorous testing phase initiated by Frank, a European American testing engineer with a degree from a local community college specializing in technology. Prior to employment with this company, he had suffered an industrial accident and was subsequently retrained for electronics. Frank told me that today was his second ‘anniversary’ on the job, meaning that he had just completed the requirements of California’s return-to-work program, an incentive program that helps small businesses bring injured employees back to work. Frank conducted an in-circuit test of each board to determine whether it had been assembled according to the customer’s specifications and to uncover soldering problems or missing or incorrect components. Frank found an incorrect result for one of the boards and printed out the information. He then passed the problem board and the printout on to his colleague, Jay, a bilingual speaker of Tagalog and English from the Philippines, who subjected it to a functional test in which the board is powered up and output signals are measured to determine whether they conform to specifications. Jay also used a microscope to look for tiny cracks or broken traces anywhere on the board; at the same time, he used a probing wand connected to a computer to obtain a readout of the circuitry. He then compared the readout with the circuit list of values, found a disjuncture between the computer reading and the list and pinpointed the problem by referring to a large blueprint. Next, he probed further, eyeing the ohm readings on the computer, and found that they did not match the information on the blueprint. After shifting his gaze between the microscope, the blueprint and the board, he discovered that one of the labels placed on the board was covering a critical ‘spot’. After moving the label, the computer test yielded a ‘pass’. He explained it to me this way: Okay, what I found out about this guy [board]. Eh, I should have caught that earlier too, the sticker’s touching uh the sticker was over here earlier. It was blocking this test point and was causing the board to fail.

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Jay then demonstrated that the board was now working and the computer signaled ‘PASS’. He took the set of boards to final inspection, and they were shipped to the customer that afternoon. The employees had met the deadline and delivered five flawless and functional circuit boards.

Discussion It should be evident from following the travels of the circuit boards through different departments that the pressure was twofold: the boards had to be built expeditiously and the workers had to perform flawlessly. The workers teamed up to carry out their tasks while enhancing speed and accuracy. In order to get the five boards to the customer on time, the hierarchy on the floor was ‘flattened’, that is, all employees – from supervisors and programmers to inspectors and prep workers – had a direct hand in loading the boards.

Expeditious work The pressure to meet the afternoon deadline induced workers to make decisions and to perform tasks flexibly. All along the way, people made decisions either to combine forces or to work alone in order to save time. Some decided to break with the usual ways of working owing to the small number of boards in the kit. A supervisor put her trust in a novice machine operator to run a machine and check the boards so she could continue programming and setting up other machines. Two other supervisors asked the prepping team to stop work on one project in order to help with hand-loading on this one; one of them also became an extra hand, taking on the epoxy-stenciling task usually reserved for the machine operator. A programmer helped a machine operator set up the machine before beginning his own work on another job; a QC inspector retrieved components from the feeder tapes and hand-placed them so that the machine operator would not have to spend time troubleshooting the machine for a ‘small’ job. Another inspector repaired some hand-soldering mistakes instead of taking them back to her colleagues in touch-up so she could both avoid her supervisor’s criticism and get the boards to the next station right away.

Flawless work Throughout the process, ‘multiple eyes’ were checking for any defects in the assembly. Workers coordinated inspection procedures – one reading out component numbers, the other scrutinizing the board – and had to

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troubleshoot persistent machine errors, particularly because some components were too miniscule for machine loading. They discovered and corrected customer errors and each other’s mistakes, not just at quality-control stations, but also during all task activities, thereby fashioning the product to perfection. Charlie characterized his employees’ tasks throughout the assembly floor as imbued with constant awareness of quality, saying, ‘Our goal is an openness such that even though each station has done policing on its own, they’ll go back [to prior stations] and talk to people about any errors they have found. We want everybody to understand that good quality assurance is part of the job’. We saw that this vision of quality control was not observed in the case of an inspector who, in an effort to expedite the work, failed to notify her co-workers, an action that Charlie argued could result in repeating the same flaw in subsequent jobs. The travels of these five circuit boards took place before the ISO 9002 certification program had been put into place. In Chapter 5 we will see the effects of this certification on quality assurance at Genesis. This chapter has provided a description of the worksite and the organizational structure as well as the equipment, tools and documents in the environment. It has also introduced some of the people, describing their educational backgrounds, bilingual skills and roles. The chapter also offered an overview of the task activities, teamwork, pressures and tensions involved in building a set of circuit boards on the assembly floor. In the next chapter, I conduct a detailed analysis of the communicative practices of a team of workers as they bring two languages and other multimodal resources into play along with shared and distributed knowledge while troubleshooting a machine.

Notes (1) The company and personnel names are pseudonyms. (2) Sadly, IRL closed its doors in 2000. (3) According to Igasaki and Niedzwiecki (2004), 753,518 Vietnamese refugees entered the US between 1975 and 2000. Orange County in Southern California has the highest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam itself. (4) ISO 9002 is an international quality assurance program for business and industry. In Chapter 5, I provide a detailed description of how Genesis became ISO-certified. (5) All diagrams of the SMT machine and its parts are from the manufacturer’s instruction manual and are reproduced with permission from Zevatech, Inc. (6) The DIP diagram has been reprinted with permission from Computer Desktop Encyclopedia (c) 1981–2013 The Computer Language Co. Inc. (www.computerlanguage.com).

3 Multimodal Interaction on the Assembly Floor

Signs also are particular, material things; and, as we have seen, any item of nature, technology, or consumption can become a sign, acquiring in the process a meaning that goes beyond its given particularity. A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality – it reflects and refracts another reality. Vološinov, 1973: 10

When I began to observe people’s work practices at Genesis, I, as any ethnographer, expected to find themes and patterns of participant action and interaction. I supposed that the workers would display recurrent behaviors that optimized a meaningful accomplishment of their tasks. Indeed, as we observed in the previous chapter, there were routinized procedures for assembling circuit boards. As Charlie observed about the employees on the floor and in circuit board manufacturing worldwide: These people, they can take a look at a board, and [snapping his fingers] they’ll take a look at both sides, and they’ll be able to tell you within three minutes – no matter what the technology – ‘I’m gonna have to do this, I’m gonna have to do that, it’s going to require three separate steps, to do bang-bang-bang’ because [of the] similarity [in] . . . the manufacturing process. … But what emerged in reviewing my videotapes and field notes were events occurring at the interstices. That is, the most salient moments during these tasks had to do with disruptions of the routine: troubleshooting moments that dealt with breakdowns in the assembly and repairs of errors along the way.1 These moments became occasions of concerted action and knowledge change, and they turned out to be the focus of my research.2 They also became the site for a better understanding of the ways in which communicative practices 39

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are intricately tied to their contexts and reliant on a range of at-hand semiotic means. Semiotic means – or signs, as Vološinov characterized them – are co-constructed by participants in their particular social milieu, and ‘every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like. … Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces (all those actions, reactions, and new signs it elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience’ (Vološinov, 1973: 11). Worker attention to troubles during a task occurred at every stage in the assembly and around different technologies – from machines for computerized assembling, soldering or testing to hand tools, components and board – as well as documents sent to the floor from either the customer or the company’s engineering department. We have already noticed in the first two chapters some examples of these disruptions of the work routine. This chapter offers a fine-grained analysis of two other troubleshooting moments. The focus is on the interactions of two workers dealing with breakdowns in the assembly of a circuit board using two SMT machines. I analyze the workers’ coordinated actions around these machines while they were using other tools and material objects in the work environment and drawing on the semiotic resources of bilingual talk, sound, gesture and inscriptions, all of which were contributing elements to the workers’ activities. In short, I analyze multimodal interaction during troubleshooting moments. I preface this analysis with a word about current research on multimodality and the application of conversation analysis in studies of communication at work.

Understanding Multimodality In the first chapter, I argued that Vološinov’s ideas about language use coupled with other semiotic means anticipated future thinking and research on multimodal practices. Most would acknowledge that such ‘future thinking’ started with M.A.K. Halliday’s social semiotic theory (1978, 1985, 1993; Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Halliday’s theory of social semiotics views language as a system of signs that is socially constructed and that interacts with other semiotic systems in the culture. Language and these other systems are also called modes. Halliday introduced the concept of semiotic resources – actions and objects that people draw on to make meaning (see van Leeuwen, 2005: 3). Although the link with Vološinov is not always made in current studies of multimodality, Hodge and Kress (1988) recognize the relationship between Vološinov’s notion of signs and Halliday’s notion of semiotic resources. Both notions refer to elements with meaning potential that can be realized

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in social interaction. Hodge and Kress state that, while Vološinov’s work does not specify ways of examining the interrelationships among signs in the construction of meaning, his outline of the socially situated nature of human interaction is foundational for later work in social semiotics. Halliday’s own work has been concerned primarily with the spoken and written modes of communication; yet, he has recognized that social semiotics can encompass ‘many other modes of meaning, in any culture, which are outside the realm of language. … Indeed, we can define a culture as a set of semiotic systems, a set of systems of meaning, all of which interrelate’ (Halliday & Hasan, 1985: 4). Research on multimodality recognizes the meaning potential of a range of modes and ultimately studies the interrelationships among these systems. In describing how communication varies across social contexts, Halliday points out that semiotic resources simultaneously fulfill three metafunctions: first, they represent the nature of events in the world – the ideational (experiential/logical) function; secondly, they represent the statuses and role relationships among participants in the social interaction – the interpersonal function; thirdly, they represent what the communicative forms are accomplishing in the situation – the textual function.3 These metafunctions are realized within a context of situation, which Halliday describes using the three broad features of field, tenor and mode. The field of discourse is expressed by the ideational (experiential/logical) function, the tenor of discourse by the interpersonal function and the mode of discourse by the textual function. For Halliday, these features, taken together, constitute a context (Halliday, 1985). Threadgold (1986), in drawing parallels between Halliday and Vološinov, highlights the alignment of Vološinov’s discussion of the text–context relationship with Halliday’s metafunctions. In this chapter, in a social activity called a troubleshooting task (field), workers interact (tenor) to co-construct meaning using language and other modes of communication (mode). A central argument in contemporary studies of multimodality is that research on social interaction has been too logocentric, that is, too focused on the linguistic sign and neglectful of other modes that are integral to human communication (Goodwin, 2007b; O’Halloran, 2006a). Thus, researchers have extended Halliday’s work by focusing analytical attention on other semiotic resources. Building on the social semiotic approach, Kress (2003) describes the affordances offered by other modes, such as images, in a multimodal situation. Going beyond Halliday’s historical focus on the spoken and written modes, Kress provides examples in which texts and images are juxtaposed and argues that ‘meaning is realized differently in different modes’ (2003: 170). For example, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) have developed parallels to field, tenor and mode in the analysis of images, and van Leeuwen (1999) has

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examined the commonalities across music, speech and other sounds. Much work in this field has focused on developing a ‘grammar’ of images (e.g. Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996), sounds (e.g. van Leeuwen, 1999), color (e.g. van Leeuwen, 2011) or other semiotic modes, then looking for common principles across these modes. As Kress states, the making of meaning multiplies ‘in multimodal ensembles, of writing and image, or of writing, speech, image, music and so on . . .’ (2003: 170). A great deal of multimodal analysis has been undertaken on ‘designed’ forms rather than on socially situated dialogic interaction. O’Toole (1994, 2004) uses Halliday’s theory to examine the semiotics of painting, sculpture and architecture. Lemke (1998) analyzes the semiotics of words and images in science textbooks, and Jewitt (2002, 2003) compares static multimodal features in books or drawings with the more dynamic features in computer software. Others have analyzed multimodality in film (O’Halloran, 2006b), advertisements (Thibault, 2000), performance (Martinec, 2000) and so on. Taking research on multimodality a step further in Multimodal Discourse (2001), Kress and Van Leeuwen look for common semiotic principles across modes and emphasize that all semiotic resources in a context of situation can potentially contribute to meaning. Thus, they sketch a multimodal theory of communication in which both the features of semiotic resources and their use in communicative practices must be taken into account in analysis. Their work discusses the importance of analyzing the relationship among modes that people draw on in socially situated communication (see discussion in Kleifgen, 2006). Kress (2010) further develops a social semiotic approach to communication that moves beyond the linguistic modes (speech and writing) to a range of other modes, recognizing their situational and societal variations. From the 1990s, research began moving in the direction of this kind of analysis. For example, Lemke (1990) shows that, in classroom interaction, scientific talk and texts necessarily entail multimodal communication using language, graphs and mathematical notations. Goodwin describes a number of different communicative situations in which participants draw on different modes to make meaning within sequences of human interaction, such as archaeologists producing a map of layers of dirt (1994), lawyers shaping perceptions of evidence in a trial (1994), scientists obtaining samples beneath the ocean (1995b) and family members engaged in spoken and gestural communication with an aphasic participant (1995a, 2006). How can we best account for the functions of talk, inscription, gaze, gesture, ambient sound and the use of relevant objects in people’s actions on the assembly floor? Studying situated social interaction in its sequential unfolding and examining closely how participants deploy the various semiotic resources available to them at any given moment allows us to see how

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these resources elaborate each other in the construction of meaning. Thus, following both Vološinov and Halliday, who theoretically integrate the linguistic mode with other modes of communication, I analyze worker actions as they occur sequentially within a rich semiotic environment. I take seriously Goodwin’s note on the necessity of examining all sign systems in human interaction in a concerted way because ‘neither talk, nor language itself, are self-contained systems, but instead function within a larger ecology of sign systems’ (Goodwin, 2007a: 27–28). Research has shown that there are clearly situations in which gesture comes into the foreground and talk is less salient, such as between participants who do not speak a common language (Saville-Troike, 1987) or among participants interacting with an individual with aphasia (Goodwin, 2006). These situations highlight the existence of other semiotic resources that always surround words. At the same time, I do not wish to diminish the central role language plays in human social interaction. Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) argue that language is the prototype of meaning systems because it is the only one that evolved specifically as a semiotic system; it is the one semiotic into which all others can be ‘translated’; and it is the one whereby the human species as a whole, and each individual member of that species, construes experience and constructs a social order. (1999: 509–510) I want to argue that within an ecology of semiotic systems, language is the primordial source of human communication, and, in the case of workers’ activities at Genesis, multiple languages came into play. I discuss in later chapters the importance of including multilingual elements within any multimodal approach.

Conversation Analysis at Work Many of the tenets in the field of conversation analysis were anticipated in the work of Vološinov. Central to this approach is the notion that words in utterances are indexical to a specific context and are co-constructed by the speaker and hearer, two ideas that are reiterated throughout MPL. Multimodality has also always been at least implicit in conversation analysis, since, along with talk, all actions, all semiotic resources that the participants are attending to are to be accounted for in the analysis, including such aspects of communication as gaze, gesture, and body position (Goodwin, 1981, 2007a; Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Heath, 1986). The analysis that follows is based

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partly on the conversation analytical framework that Drew and Heritage (1992a) propose with regard to the study of institutional talk. Investigations of talk in institutional settings have shown that this form of talk differs in many ways from informal face-to-face conversation in terms of overall and sequential organization of discourse, constraints regarding the contributions that participants can make to the interaction and lexical and other semiotic choices made by participants. Although there are variations among different kinds of institutional talk, it has been found that many institutional interactions share some basic features. First, they are oriented toward some goal or task that is associated with the institution in which they occur. Second, they are often characterized by specific constraints regarding what contributions by participants are allowable during the task at hand. Finally, institutional talk may be based on inferential frameworks or procedures inherent to specific situations (Drew & Heritage, 1992a; Levinson, 1992). Schegloff (1992) notes that a satisfying account of workplace interaction must show how the participants, by their talk and actions, are oriented to the relevance of the work setting and to how the context itself is procedurally consequential to the way participants communicate with one another. Moerman (1988, 1990/91) argues that a satisfying account must be grounded in ethnographic study of the social group under consideration, so that the researcher is competent to show the consequentiality of talk in the production of the activity. As already noted, I isolate for analysis two troubleshooting moments, since troubleshooting is a recurrent event around high-tech machines (e.g. Orr, 1991a, 1991b; Suchman, 1987, 2007) in which a breakdown is recognized by workers, who then draw on language, sound, gesture and other modes during their concerted actions to repair the problem. Task activity is a term I introduced in describing the scenario in Chapter 1, noting that the social interaction was different from an ordinary conversation. Following M.H. Goodwin (1990), who uses the concept of task activity to describe how ‘children worked together to manufacture something’ (1990: 63), I am extending the term to the workers’ concerted action to accomplish a task on the manufacturing floor. What do task activities look like, and how do the workers display their orientation to the activities we examine here as troubleshooting moments? I use the tools of conversation analysis to address these questions, and I describe the analytical procedures in the next section.

Task Activities The focal participants in the interactions analyzed here are two Vietnamese workers: Trân, a machine operator, and Du, his supervisor, whom

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we met briefly in the second chapter. Trân was a younger Vietnamese man, born in Laos, whose family settled in New Orleans, where he attended high school; later, he received an associate degree in computer science at a California community college. Trân and Du were working with two SMT machines that were programmed on that day to build large prototype boards for a major computer corporation. Earlier in the morning, Trân had set up the machines for the job, a task that took nearly five hours. The set-up entailed offsetting the board,4 which required mathematical calculations by hand since the machine was not designed to offset boards of this size, checking that the feeders were located in the right slots, observing the location of the robotic arm over each pick point (on the feeders) and place point (on the board) and adjusting the computer data when necessary by using either the operating panel or the hand-held device connected to the machine. Having completed this preliminary work, Trân was ready to run the test board, also known as the ‘first article’ as we learned in Chapter 2. He occasionally set the fast-moving robotic arm to slow motion in order to observe the accuracy of every pick and placement. He had at his disposal the vision display, the CRT display recording the ongoing placement, a printout of the data entry and a blueprint of the board. Du was working with him because the boards were slated to be completed and shipped to the customer that same afternoon. At this point, disruptions in the routine began to occur. After some collaborative troubleshooting in Vietnamese, the men succeeded in getting the board through the first machine, which assembled about half of the components. Then the partially assembled board moved along the conveyer belt to the second machine. Here, the two men confronted and solved a new breakdown in the assembly, which I call a ‘pick’ problem. Just after this remedial action, a ‘placement’ problem occurred, which was also dealt with successfully. These two troubleshooting moments are analyzed in detail here. I analyze this interaction around the pick and placement problems in two parts. The first part focuses on how the workers’ amalgamated use of two languages contributed to the solution. Their language use in this interaction accomplished at least two things: professional work – displaying a common orientation to the task and engendering problem-solving actions – and social work – manifesting role relationships between the workers either as co-equal partners or as supervisor and subordinate. (The latter kind of talk will be analyzed in Chapter 4.) In the second part of this analysis, I focus on the workers’ skilled use of other semiotic resources – perceptual and representational – embedded in the talk-in-interaction. The findings in the second part explicate further the account given in the first part. For the transcribed

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data, I use a slightly modified version of the system originally developed by Gail Jefferson (Sacks et al., 1974: 731–733). (The notational conventions and the full transcription for the task activity analyzed in this and reanalyzed in the next chapter are in the Appendix.5) At this point, let me give fair warning that the sequential analyses in this and the following chapter are fine-grained, but it is hoped that patience in the reading will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the human capacity for concerted purposeful action.

Working with Languages The pick problem Trân set the robotic arm to its usual high-speed placement. The arm’s rapid movements (which were captured by the camera and examined later in slow motion) can be described as follows: Within five seconds the arm picked and placed ten components on the board before moving to a feeder with a large reel containing sockets. The machine had been programmed to pick and place four such sockets on this board. However, after the first socket placement, the arm tried and failed twice to pick the second one. The second socket was finally placed on the third try. This rapid trial-and-failure sequence (two misses before one successful pick) happened again for the third socket, and the machine came to a halt as the arm tried to pick the fourth. Here are the first thirty seconds of the workers’ talk during the machine’s actions:6 1 2 3 4

Du: Trân:

MIS-PICK – Oo: : : h. ˚One two three.

5 6 7 8

˚Hai cái. Two

(presses stop) (counts on fingers, gazing at sockets already picked from feeder tape and placed on board) (presses start) (presses button for slow motion) (begins gaze directed at pick point) (observing robotic arm’s attempts to pick fourth socket)

Mult imodal Interac t ion on the A ssembly Floor

˚Ba cái Three

9 10 Du:

11

Trân:

Có phải chinh con ổc o duoi khổng? Need to fix the screw [stopper block] underneath? Ù. Yeah.

47

(machine comes to a stop on initiating third pick try)

The first noticeable feature in this stretch of interaction is the parsimonious use of two languages, including utterances comprising only numbers. I explore the efficiency of the talk by paying particular attention to three aspects: the shift between Vietnamese and English (the latter often for the use of English technical terms such as ‘mis-pick’), how the sequential organization of this talk proceeds so that problem-solving is achieved and how the workers’ use of numerical expressions at critical moments in the sequence gets the work done. We return to the first two utterances. Du calls attention loudly to the problem as soon as the arm fails the first time: 1 2

Du: Trân:

MIS-PICK – Oo: : : h.

This verbal exchange in English marks the beginning of their efforts to find the source of the trouble. The expression, mis-pick, part of the register of circuit board assembly, is elliptical. It could be expanded into a statement such as Look, the robotic arm has failed to pick a component from this particular feeder tape at the precise moment in which it should. Du’s timely announcement and Trân’s response expeditiously align them to the same problem area, narrowing their field of observation to certain aspects of the machine. There are several possible causes of the pick failure. For example, the data entry in the machine’s computer could have an incorrect z-axis value. This value corresponds to the vertical path of the robotic arm as it moves down to pick a component from the feeder tape, and its length depends on the thickness of a particular component. If the z-value is too great, the arm knocks the component off the tape to the floor. If the z-value is too small, the arm comes up ‘empty-handed.’ Another cause of the pick failure (which

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the workers soon hypothesize to be the case in this instance) could be an incorrect feed pitch, which is the distance from the midpoint of one component on a feeder tape to the midpoint of the next. When the pitch is correctly calculated, the tape is fed forward a precise distance as soon as a component is picked from it, so that the next component is ready for the robotic arm to pick it. Just after Du’s mis-pick announcement, Trân directs his gaze toward the circuit board. He stops the machine just after the third socket was picked from the feeder tape, leaving the robotic arm with the socket poised over the circuit board, peers inside and in soto voce says (line 4) ˚One two three. Given the need for speed and efficiency in fixing the problem, it would appear that Trân’s turn in this sequence deviates from the goal. In other words, if Trân is in agreement with Du’s announcement, why does he attend to the circuit board rather than to the feeder, which is the actual zone of the mis-pick? We observe again his actions accompanying the utterance. As he trains his eyes on the circuit board, he counts on his fingers. The large sockets are easily distinguishable among the hundreds of miniature components that had been placed already. Trân is establishing how many sockets have been picked so far (two already placed on the board and the third about to be). Recall that the workers knew that four of these sockets were to be placed on the board. By counting the number of sockets already picked (three), they confirm that one socket remains. Trân’s next action makes clear how methodical this first counting move was. He observes the sockets for a few seconds and starts the machine again as shown in Figures 3.1 and 3.2.

Figure 3.1 Examining the circuit board

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Figure 3.2 Restarting the machine

By reactivating the machine, Trân gives himself and Du the opportunity to observe the picking of the fourth socket more closely. In rapid succession, the arm places the third socket on the board and swings back to pick up the fourth. At this point, they shift back into Vietnamese as Trân sets the machine to slow motion and shifts his gaze toward the arm’s actions over the feeder: 7 Trân: 8

9

(begins gaze directed at pick point) ˚Hai cái. (observing robotic arm’s Two. attempts to pick fourth socket) ˚Ba cái Three. (machine comes to a stop on initiating third pick try)

With his adjustment of the machine and shift in gaze, Trân is signaling a change in focus from the board’s landscape to the pick point. The numbers Trân uses at this moment in Vietnamese are indexed to the arm’s actions: He is counting each time the arm moves down to the feeder. The men are now able to see that the feeder is not pitching the components forward sufficiently. The component becomes available to the arm only on the third try. Trân’s counting of the arm’s movements is also a signal to Du that he is positing a pitch problem. This is reflected in Du’s next inquiry to Trân about whether they would have to adjust a part on the feeder called the stopper

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block that controls the pitch. The exchange has now shifted primarily to Vietnamese as their conjoint focus on the problem intensifies: 10 Du:

Có phải chinh con ổc o duoi khổng? Need to fix the screw [stopper block] underneath? 11 Trân: Ù. Yeah. Taken together, the counting and the question-response do more than display orientation to the same problem area. With his inquiry, Du is not only looking to confirm Trân’s posit of a pitch problem but also proposing a possible source of the pitch problem; Trân concurs with Du’s proposal. The workers thus narrow further the field of scrutiny. They begin next to examine the parts of the feeder associated with pitch. Du reaches for a ruler on a table next to the machine. Kneeling down at the base of the machine, he grasps the end of the feeder tape in one hand and takes a measure with the ruler. Trân leans over to watch Du measure the tape and utters another series of numbers: 14 Trân: Hai. Two. 15 Du: ⎡(xxxx) Trân: ⎣Hai ba rưỡi. Two, three and a half. 16 Hai mươi va hai mươi lăm. Twenty and twenty-five. 17 Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. 18 Du: Từ cái mỏ này tới cái mỏ này. (hand traces distance) From this point to this point. 19 Trân: Ù. Yeah. 20 Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. While Trân pronounces the numbers, Du holds the ruler against the tape with one hand and with the other traces a line between two components on the tape. This series of numbers is tied to Du’s actions with the ruler and his

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words, (Từ cái mỏ này tới cái mỏ này /From this point to this point). They are determining the pitch – the distance from the midpoint of one component to the midpoint of the next. Trân utters several numbers in the process of coming up with the words Hai mươi bốn /Twenty-four, moves that I discuss more fully in the next section. For the moment, let us note that the unit of measure arrived at here is twenty-four. Trân next utters the following: 21 Trân: Hai mươi bốn la mươi hai. Twenty-four, therefore twelve. So far, the numbers used by Trân are indexed to the counting of objects and actions, and to measuring distance. To an outsider, saying the number twelve appears irrelevant to the actions of the moment – calculating a distance in millimeters. But these two experienced practitioners are demonstrating their shared understanding about the constraints of the SMT machine, which is not designed to handle a 24 mm pitch. Twelve is the greatest pitch distance that can be used on this machine. In uttering the elliptical la mươi hai /therefore twelve, Trân is referring, not to another measure of distance, which has just been established to be 24 mm, but, as we will see in the actions that follow, to a setting on a machine part. In other words, Trân is making an assertion regarding which available pitch setting should be used to maximum advantage – twelve. Therefore twelve is a propitious move within this sequence, as it foreshadows the two men’s upcoming actions directed toward a solution. At this juncture, the workers test their agreed-to hunch (lines 10–11) that the pitch is set incorrectly and has to be fixed. Trân removes the feeder from the machine and holds it up for them to examine more closely (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 Examining the feeder

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They both direct their attention to the stopper block, a small, adjustable part resembling a sprocket, which determines the pitch this feeder will apply (see Figure 3.4). Feeders for this SMT machine are designed to hold stopper blocks having anywhere from two to four teeth, or pitch points. Du notes that the stopper block on this feeder has four points (an example of a stopper block with three pitch points is in Figure 3.5). He signals each of the points on the block as he itemizes the four pitch choices to Trân: 24 Du: Có mấy How many? 25 Bốn saú tám mươi. (pointing to pitch points) Four, six, eight, ten. In pointing while naming the pitch values, Du is aligning himself with Trân’s attention to the pitch points on the stopper block. At the same time, he is noting what setting choices are available for adjustment. Notice that the 12 mm setting preferred by Trân is not available on this stopper block.

Stopper block

Figure 3.4 Feeder with stopper block

Figure 3.5 Stopper block showing pitch point of 12

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The two men identify different setting possibilities – Trân suggests a 12 pitch, whereas Du proposes the pitch options available on this stopper block. Trân places the feeder on a nearby chair while Du goes to get the digital calipers, which measure more precisely than the ruler does. He returns with the instrument and measures the distance between components on the feeder tape again while Trân looks on. Du, shifting from Vietnamese to English, confirms an exact 24 mm measure and then observes that the stopper block is set to a 10 mm pitch: 26 Du: Yeah? (measuring with calipers) 27 Twenty-four. 28 This one only uh ten? (looking at stopper block) The two men are now in agreement about the trouble source and the need to make adjustments to compensate for the machine’s shortcoming, but they contest one another’s proposed solution. In the talk that follows, the men shift easily between Vietnamese and English. (I discuss their bilingual practices below.) Trân restates his preference for a 12 mm setting and suggests looking for a different stopper block, one with a 12 mm pitch point, whereas Du suggests setting the current stopper block to an 8 mm pitch point: 29 Du: 30 Trân: 31 32 Du: 33

34 35 36 Trân:

Twenty–⎡fou: : r? ⎣Phải c`ân đến mươi hai. [We] must set it to twelve. Let’s see if I can find twelve. (walks some distance away) Twenty-four= =so you have to put this one to (looking back at Trân; EIGHT. using heightened tone of voice) NUMBER EIGHT. So this HIT NEXT THREE TIMES.= =˚No.

If they take up Trân’s suggestion, the robotic arm would pick the component on the second try (2 × 12 mm = 24 mm); if they decide on Du’s advice to work with what they have, it would pick the component only on the third try (3 × 8 mm = 24 mm), as Du himself has stated. In the latter case, the machine action would absorb more of the time they have left in order to

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meet the afternoon deadline. Trân leaves momentarily and returns with another feeder. The stopper block on this second feeder has three pitch points, one of which is labeled 12, as shown in Figure 3.5. Looking at the second feeder, the two men continue to negotiate what action to take. Trân urges trying the stopper block on this feeder because it has a pitch point of twelve, while Du continues to favor using the one they already have: 37 Trân: Let’s see if we can put this. 38 Du: No cái đó không có đúng. No, that’s not the right one. 39 Trân: (xxxx) 40 Du: Bây giờ ở đây nè. Right now it’s here. 41 (xxxx) 42 Tâ`m bốn. Eight, four 43 Trân: Mươi hai. Twelve.

(gazing at second feeder) (pointing to the 12 pitch point) (pointing to the 10 pitch point on original stopper block) (pointing to alternative settings) (pointing again to the 12 pitch point)

One can observe in their actions a concerted effort to achieve the best possible solution given the machine’s limited capabilities. In the next utterance, Du tells Trân to place the second feeder beside the first on the chair with the two stopper blocks in view: 44 Du: Thẩy cái đó đây. Put this [feeder] here.

(pointing to chair)

In order to try out Trân’s suggestion, both men retrieve screwdrivers; they each unscrew one of the stopper blocks and try to exchange them, only to find that the second stopper block does not fit on the first feeder. So, they are left with the original stopper block and are forced to choose between pitch options (other than 12) that are factors of 24: 45 Trân: No? 46 Too (xxxx). 47 Du: T`âm bốn no cho có hai cái ha. Eight, four, it allows two only. Although the men can set the stopper block to the 8 mm pitch, which is the most efficient choice given the limitations of the machine and its parts, the work is not yet complete. A full application of their assembling knowledge must include a tie between the circuit board, components, mechanical

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parts they have been manipulating and the machine’s computer. This is precisely what happens next. While they are returning the stopper blocks to their original feeders, Du directs Trân to check the component identification number (ID) in the computer database. By retrieving the ID, Trân can bring up for display all the numerical commands corresponding to the component. Both men move to the machine and examine the CRT display. They begin looking in the program for the pitch value that was assigned for the socket: 48 Du:

Trân u:h Trân ⎡coi cái component ID. Trân uh Trân |look at the component ID. 49 Trân: ⎣(begins moving toward machine) 50 Du: Coi coi ở trong đó. (turning head, following Trân’s arrival at machine) 51 (getting up, pointing to CRT display) 52 Trân: (pressing buttons on operator panel; watching display) 53 Du: Coi coi bao nhiêu. See, see how much. 54 Bỏ cái đó cho nó chạy lại. (standing next to Trân at Let it run through it again. machine) Du issues a set of directives in this stretch of discourse. We would expect, therefore, a response in word or action to follow. Yet, Trân anticipates Du’s first instruction by beginning to move toward the machine as soon as Du utters his name. Likewise, for the next directive, Trân is already examining the screen and reviewing the data by the time Du asks him to do so. The simultaneity of Trân’s actions with Du’s words demonstrates their shared knowledge that examining the computerized data is the logical next step in the problem-solving, now that they have adjusted the stopper block. Upon conducting the search in the database, the workers discover that the customer erroneously provided a 12 mm pitch. Du then summarizes their findings by stating that they must correct the pitch information in the database to 24 mm. He also affirms that the stopper block on the feeder should be left at 8 mm (his idea in the first place), which means that the machine will pick the component successfully only on the third try: 55 Trân: Mươi hai. Twelve.

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56 Du: 57

58

59

Mươi hai. Twelve. Chút nừa phải cho nó hai mươi bốn. After this [we] must give it twenty-four. Hai mươi bốn chẻ số tám chẻ làm ba cái. Twenty-four divided by number eight is three. Yeah nó sẽ chẻ ba cái. Yeah, it divides into three.

Du’s last utterances contain a synopsis of the numbers used sequentially and in various contexts – 12, which is the incorrect pitch data provided by the customer; 24, which refers to the actual distance between components and is the ideal pitch; 8, which is the new setting selected on the stopper block; and 3, which refers to the number of pick tries that the robotic arm will have to make in order to get a successful pick. The numerical expressions now reappear together in a display of the relationships among them.

The placement problem This work just accomplished had its consequences for the continued assembly. One consequence was the additional time that was required to finish the task. Aside from downtime during troubleshooting, time would be lost in missed picks. Secondly, the solution was a local one; it solved the pick problem for the components on one feeder. Yet picking, however successful, is only part of the process. Accurate placement is another concern. When a component is placed, it joins a constellation of other parts sharing limited space on a board. The men noted a discrepancy between the numbers in the computer program and the actual pitch for this socket. Trân was directed to correct the numbers in the program, but before doing so, he examined the sockets in their context – on the board itself. At this point, he discovered a second problem. When Trân pulled the board off the conveyor belt and looked at it, he noticed that the three sockets just placed were larger than the spaces assigned to them. These sockets were taking up some of the adjacent space that had been designated for other components.

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I analyze the interactional sequence, which begins as follows: 60 Trân: ˚Oo: : : h thôi không duoc rôi. Oo: : :h no it doesn’t work. 61 (xxxx) socket. Trân calls Du over to observe the problem. Du draws near to examine the board with him. Trân signals each of the three sockets with his little finger, and traces over empty spaces on the board surrounding them. His pointing displays to Du how the sockets are encroaching into areas where other components are to be placed. He tells Du that eleven other components will be affected. 62 Trân: Dâu có láp socket duoc. [It’s] impossible to install the socket. 63 Thê này dâu có láp socket (pointing to spaces around the duoc. 3 sockets) Like this [it’s] impossible to install the socket. 64 Du: Cái? Which? 65 Trân: Quên. Forgot.7 66 Cái gì wrong. Something is wrong. 67 Du: Ba con hay là mây. Three [of the surrounding components], or how many? 68 Trân: Tói muòi môt con. Up to eleven [of them]. Now the magnitude of the placement error emerges. Trân and Du discover that the customer’s circuit board designers had not, in fact, programmed the sockets at all. Instead, they erroneously calculated only enough space on the board for the components that go inside the four sockets: 69 Du:

Nó không có dua cho mình. It doesn’t give it [space for sockets] to us.

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70

71 Trân:

Nó dâu có dua cho mình con nào dâu. It didn’t give us anything. Nó dua mình bôn nam còn gì dó. It gives us four, five or so [components].

Once again, the workers have to make a choice. If they leave these sockets on the board, the surrounding components will not fit. If they remove the sockets, the components that were to be held by them will have to be fixed directly on the board. Their decision, like the pitch choice made earlier, must be based on efficiency and accuracy. Given the number of other components affected, Du makes the decision that the sockets must be removed, and that the computer program should ‘skip’ placement of sockets on all the boards: 72 Trân: Mà chua có program=không có bo vô. There’s no program, it wasn’t put in. 73 Du: Bo me cái này bo luôn cái này. Get rid of this one and the other one also. 74 Trân: Skip? 75 Du: Skip. 76 Skip it. Using pincers, Trân removes the sockets, which had come from the feeder that they had worked so hard to troubleshoot. He then goes to the computer to write a command in the program to skip the placement of these sockets altogether. The company will inform the customer of this decision and suggest that the components, which originally were to be inserted into the sockets, would have to be placed directly on the board. Later, Du explained this to me as follows: The uh customer they give you some part but it’s not programmed, okay? They want a socket in there. But . . . it doesn’t fit in that location. . . . So we decide here we’ll take it out and we’ll tell customer, ‘No

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good. You guys have to, after you guys, you know, program the part, you guys drop it in by yourself’.

Bilingual practices The analysis so far has demonstrated the workers’ speed and efficiency in troubleshooting a machine during this six-and-a-half-minute interval. Trân and Du moved through these procedures with parsimonious use of two languages. They relied on efficient use of their home language during much of the interaction (described more fully in Chapter 4), while they drew also on English, in many instances using assembly terminology (mis-pick, component ID, socket, program, skip). At one point in the exchange (lines 26 to 37), the workers’ shift to English appeared to take into consideration my presence, since I do not speak Vietnamese. Du and Trân debated how to resolve the problem in English while Trân was moving some distance away to retrieve another feeder, which left me in the ‘line of communicative fire’ between the two workers. When Trân returned to work with Du, they shifted again to Vietnamese (lines 38–59). In sum, their flexible language practices took into account the moment-by-moment configuration of resources and participants. Most of the utterances in Vietnamese were series of numbers that would appear quite literally indecipherable to an outside observer. In fact, the workers’ language-in-action, taken alone, can be characterized as markedly sparse. Certainly, their prior troubleshooting experiences and shared understandings may partially explain why they did not engage in extended discussions about which actions to take. The level of machine noise and the pressure of customer deadlines may also have been contributing factors to this reduced speech. But their bilingual practices, as we shall see in the next section, realized full meaning in conjunction with other semiotic resources. We have seen that the sequence of the workers’ talk unfolded methodically and aligned them with successive areas of focus and action until the breakdown was fixed. Moreover, the numerical expressions they uttered were at once precise and dependent on the context for their meaning. Sacks (1992a) offers an example of how speakers use numbers in ordinary conversation: The use of numbers seem (sic) to be divided into two sorts, ‘approximate numbers’ and ‘precise numbers.’ Now all numbers could be considered equally precise, I suppose, but if you want to do something approximate you use 15, and if you want to do something precise you use 19. And they’re received that way. (742)

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In this example and others suggested by Sacks in other lectures, people are seen to use ‘usualness measures’ (1992b: 235) in conversations and storytelling. Lynch (1991) illustrates Sacks’ measurement distinction in this way: ‘Precise’ and ‘approximate’ expressions are not placed along a continuum defining the degree of correspondence between numbers and measured properties, since to propose, for example, ‘I’ll meet you at 4:03’ is to presume a qualitatively different state of affairs than would be the case for ‘I’ll meet you at 4:00’. In other words, the ‘precise’ time ‘4:03’ indexes a particular kind of conjoint activity for which time pieces are synchronized and a minor lapse can make a difference. (94) Whereas approximate measures are typically used and precise numbers call attention to special circumstances during ordinary talk, the reverse holds for talk on the assembly floor. Regular pursuit of precision in numbers during this sequence is vital to the speed and accuracy of work with a computerized machine. To illustrate the difference a context can make, I provide an example of how Du used numbers while conversing with an English-speaking visitor during the lunch break. Referring to the fact that the company had just recently moved to this site, which was more spacious than the one they worked in previously, Du offered a tongue-in-cheek description of how the size of the assembly floor affected his day as supervisor. The approximate measures in his talk are given in italics: Everybody happy because there is alot of room. But I uh not me. I have to walk so much. It hurt my leg you know? Heh-heh. It too big heh-heh, you know? . . . I have to walk around so much. Ten miles a day! Here in the context of ordinary conversation Du was ‘doing something approximate’ (though exaggerated for humorous effect). The men evoked ‘doing troubleshooting’ at a computerized machine with exchanges of precision numbers, which were sometimes embedded in other lexical items, or often stripped down to the bare numbers. It is likely that such reductions to the bare numbers in ordinary conversation would be taken as odd or would suggest a distinctive activity. As this troubleshooting moment unfolded, the men did not take time to verbally clarify a number’s meaning, even though it could have had different referents: measurements, time, pitch points, counting, component sizes, placement direction, x/y axis, z-value, trial and error sequences, and so on. One of the most powerful examples of this is hai mươi bốn/twenty-four, a precise measure in the workers’ talk, which from one moment to the next shifted in meaning from a setting on a machine part, to

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a forward pitch, to a measure of distance taken. It must be emphasized that the precision measures uttered while the workers were engrossed in their task were not disembodied entities; they were indexed to the physical and social context in which they were embedded. In brief, the workers’ strategic and parsimonious use of two languages-inaction got the work done. In the following section, I address further how the two men accomplished the troubleshooting. I examine their skilled use of other semiotic resources: machine sounds, spatial relations, gestures and various inscriptions. The analysis begins where they notice each problem and continues as they detect the source of the problem and search for an optimal solution.

Working with Other Semiotic Resources: Perceptions and Representations Consider how the two men recognize the initial breakdown in the first place. Their perceptual skills are especially evident during the first 44 seconds of the pick problem when they are involved in noticing. When set to high speed, the SMT machine has an audible click-click–swish–click-clack rhythm from pick to placement. The arm can be seen to dance, as it were, to these sounds as it shifts from the feeder to the board and back again. In the following excerpt, we see that the rhythmic sound and movement, maintained up to the placement of the first socket, are broken when the arm tries and fails to pick the second socket. The pick sound is repeated (click-click, click-click) as the arm attempts twice to pick the socket. The men put each other on verbal notice just after the break in the rhythm: Machine: click-click click-click 1 Du: MIS-PICK— Machine: click-click 2 Trân: Oo: : : h. Machine: swish—click-clack

(first pick try) (second pick try) (successful pick) (socket placed)

As the arm swings back for the third socket, Trân combines kinesthetic and visual action to stop and start the machine at key moments in the pickplacement sequence and to observe the movement of the robotic arm over the pick and place points. The broken rhythm continues – two mis-picks before a successful one. As the arm begins to carry the third socket to its placement point, Trân presses the stop key, counts the number of sockets

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already taken from the feeder and observes for several seconds the position of the arm over the third place on the board: Machine: click-click click-click click-click—swish 3 Trân: 4 ˚One two three.

(first pick try) (second pick try) (successful pick) (presses stop) (counts on fingers; gazing at sockets already picked from feeder tape and placed on board) (leans inside machine toward robotic arm poised over the board) (straightens up, hand on button, looks at screen)

Then Trân presses start (line 5). He observes the arm rapidly place the third socket and swing back to the feeder (click-clack – swish). As soon as it reaches the pick point again, he presses a button on the SMT operator panel and the arm begins to pick the fourth socket in slow motion (lines 6–7). Trân lifts the protective screen to observe these actions more closely. The two workers are able to see the downward movement of the arm (z-axis) together with the forward movement of the feeder (pitch). With slow motion, it is possible for them to see that the feeder pitches the tape forward three times before the socket is within the reach of the arm: 5 Trân: (presses start) Machine: click-clack — swish (placement and return ) Trân: (leans in to watch placement and arm’s return to feeder) Machine: click-click (first pick try) 6 Trân: (presses button for slow motion) 7 (begins gaze directed at pick point) (lifts plastic shield as arm goes down in slow motion to pick socket)

Mult imodal Interac t ion on the A ssembly Floor

Machine: click-click 8 Trân:

9

˚Hai cái. Two. ˚Ba cái. Three.

63

(second pick try – slow motion) (observing robotic arm’s attempts to pick fourth socket)

(machine comes to a stop on initiating third pick try)

Recall that Du, observing these actions, asks about adjusting the stopper block and Trân agrees. This is the moment in which they are suggesting to each other that the possible source of the problem is an incorrect pitch point on the stopper block (Có phải chinh con ổc o duoi khổng?/Need to fix the screw underneath? Ù./Yeah.). In this troubleshooting event, the workers’ sharing of the semiotic resources of sound and vision was embedded in their talk and actions on the computerized machine. In events such as these, workers both compared and converted the perceptual boundaries they had shaped to representations of them. For comparing purposes, they referred to ready-made inscriptions (or knowledge artifacts) such as a blueprint of the board, which is a graphical representation or the machine’s instruction manual, which combines text and graphics. Just as numbers dominated the talk, inscribed numbers were by far the most pervasive of the visual representations in this work environment. Workers compared numerical representations found on the components and machine parts, in the customer’s bill of materials and in the computerized numerical controls. Additionally, they created their own inscriptions by writing down calculations on scraps of paper or by measuring objects and modifying information in the program. Let us look more closely at the moment in which the two workers in this event convert specific spatial perceptions – the forward pitch of the feeder and the distance between components on the tape – to numerical representations by taking measurements. At this point, they test their hypothesis about the source of the mis-pick by using a metric ruler (and later, digital calipers) to verify their perceptual impressions. While they continue to draw on perceptual structures, these are given new representations with the help of the tools. To determine the pitch value, Du places a ruler on the tape while Trân looks on. At the moment the ruler and tape are aligned, Trân assesses what he sees: 13 Trân: ˚K`y ta. Strange.

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Figure 3.6 Aligning the ruler with the components

His utterance makes it clear that, by his own lights, the measured pitch length is going to be unusual. Then Du adjusts the ruler so that one end is placed directly at the center point of one component as shown in Figure 3.6. Now the men are ready to calculate the pitch: 14 Trân: Hai. Two. 15 Du: ⎡(xxxx) Trân: ⎣Hai ba rưỡi. Two, three and a half. 16 Hai mươi va hai mươi lӑm. Twenty and twenty-five. 17 Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. For their purposes, this ruler is an inexact measuring instrument, as it is marked only in inches and centimeters. His eyes on the ruler, Trân reads the distance marked in centimeters (Hai ba rưỡi./Two, three and a half.) and begins converting the calculation to millimeters (Hai mươi va hai mươi lӑm. /Twenty and twenty-five.), the units of measure used for feed pitch. He comes up with a 24 mm measure. Trân is adapting the representations provided by the marks on the ruler to those needed for their work in a millimeter-based representational world. Applying another semiotic resource, gesture, Du links the talk and the inscriptions on the ruler to the pitch trajectory by tracing the distance with

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his little finger. In his talk and gesture, Du shifts from Trân’s mathematical representation of distance back to a perceptual one as shown in Figure 3.7 and the excerpt that follows: 16 Trân: Hai mươi va hai mươi lӑm. Twenty and twenty-five. 17 Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. Du:

18

(begins tracing little finger from midpoint of one component to next component)

Từ cái mỏ này tới cái mỏ này. From this point to this point. (ends tracing little finger up to midpoint of next component)

19 Trân: Ù. Yeah. 20 Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. Du’s gestural marking of the start- and end-points to be measured permits the men to focus on the same bounded space. Trân acknowledges these boundaries and reiterates the numerical representation. The multimodal

Figure 3.7 Tracing the pitch size

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resources that these workers draw on, to apply Goodwin’s terms, ‘mutually elaborate each other’ (1996: 385). Thus far, the analysis has pinpointed these practitioners’ actions taken on machine parts and components and observed how they fashion numerical representations as well as how they adapt a measuring instrument to their needs. Next, to gain a fuller understanding of the complexity of their actions, I examine the workers’ displays of knowledge about how the computer in the SMT machine itself works. Their actions on machine parts and their work with numbers have wider consequences – at the level of the computerized machine. How do the two men display this understanding? Having converted their perceptual assessments to numerical representations of them, they check the computerized database. They make sure that the information in the computer program conforms to component sizes and the movements of mechanical parts. In this case, the stopper block on the feeder has to be set at a pitch point that accommodates the large sockets on the reel, and the information displayed on the screen must correspond to the actual pitch for that reel. Recall that, when the men finished working with the stopper block, they moved to the machine to look for information about the component in the program. Their talk and actions follow: 48 Du:

Trân u:h Trân ⎡coi cái component ID. Trân uh Trân | look at the component ID. 49 Trân: ⎣(begins moving toward machine) 50 Du: Coi coi ở trong đó. (turning head, following Trân’s arrival at machine) 51 (getting up, pointing to CRT display) 52 Trân: (pressing buttons on operator panel; watching display) 53 Du: Coi coi bao nhiêu. See, see how much. In order to find information on the screen, Trân and Du must be familiar with the screen organization, the functions of the dialog boxes and the ways to select a menu. They have to be able to manipulate complex set-up commands, data entry and data editing. They must also understand the functions of the keys and switches on the operator panel keyboard. In short, they must be proficient in all the basic operating procedures of the machine. We have already seen Trân’s lapidary style of managing the operator panel in

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order to start and stop the robotic arm and change it to slow motion. At this point in the activity, Trân uses a search command to find information about the socket in question, as seen in Figure 3.8. The component data appear on the screen and the two men turn their attention to these numbers. They have now shifted their focus from machine parts and their own calculations to the on-screen data representing these elements; in doing so, they signal their understanding of the interdependence between the mechanical and computerized features of the machine. How do they show each other that they are converging on the same unit of data – the feeder pitch value – nestled among dozens of numbers on the screen in arrays of five to six columns? Trân does not point to the desired number since, as we see in Figure 3.8, both hands are occupied with the operator panel. Instead, he reads aloud the number from the screen, which Du repeats, signaling their alignment with the same information: 55 Trân: Mươi hai. Twelve. 56 Du: Mươi hai. Twelve. Their use of repetition in this situation is congruent with studies of groups learning together at a computer, in which users signal to one another that they are focusing on the same on-screen referent either by pointing to areas on the screen or repeating aloud the information (Huss-Lederman, 1994; Kleifgen, 1992; Pujòl-Ferrán, 1993).8 In the end, because the on-screen numbers (representing computerized controls) did not conform to their own

Figure 3.8 Checking data on the CRT display

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perceptions and calculations, the workers corrected the numbers in the software. In sum, numerical inscriptions had to be verified and, if necessary, changed, so that the digital technology could function accurately. Workers made sure that the information displayed on the screen conformed to each component’s assigned place on the board. The x- and y-axis values are numerical controls directing the arm to place the component at a precise point; the z-axis value directs the arm to reach down the distance needed to pick and place a component having a given thickness. And, as we observed, the pitch values for every feeder had to be correctly entered. These workers not only adjusted machine parts, they also interpreted and manipulated the data in the computer program that runs the machine. They recognized these digital inscriptions as representations of the computerized commands to be executed by the machine, and consequently, as numbers that require careful assessment by comparing them against other inscriptions and, in particular, against their own perceptions. But their work entailed more than a straightforward matching function. As we have seen, these inscription–action relationships often do not hold. Newer components and boards may be outside the range of sizes the machine was designed for. The workers have to know how to adapt the machine to these changes. In the words of Randy, another machine operator, ‘you sometimes have to fool the machine’ by adapting machine parts or entering numerical controls that do not actually correspond to board or component sizes. Embedded within all the speed and precision of digital equipment, human ingenuity lends other shapes to the machine’s actions in order to reach a desired goal. The second problem – the placement problem – is also detected perceptually. Trân has just changed the pitch value in the computer program from twelve to twenty-four, twice the amount originally assigned to the socket. Before restarting the machine to finish the assembly, Trân takes the board from the conveyor belt, holds it in both hands, and looks down closely at the sockets placed on it. With this close look, he notices that something is wrong: 60 Trân: ˚Oo: : : h thôi không duoc rôi. Oo: : :h no it doesn’t work. 61 (xxxx) socket. 62 Dâu có láp socket duoc. [It’s] impossible to install the socket. Then, still holding the board, he calls Du over to look. Trân displays the problem to Du by tracing a series of spatial boundaries over the board with his finger (see Figure 3.9).

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Figure 3.9 Signaling spaces on the circuit board

These gestures frame the problem’s effect on the entire board. Trân’s finger first swings from one socket to another in a large sweep, then marks spaces around the sockets in small loops and finally traces another large sweep between two sockets. 63 Trân: Thê này dâu có láp socket duoc. (pointing to spaces around the 3 sockets) Like this [it’s] impossible to install the socket. 64 Du: Cái? Which? Trân: (sweeps finger right to left, socket to socket) 65 Quên. Forgot. (makes small loops with finger around socket)

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66

Cái gì wrong. Something is wrong. (makes small loops with finger around socket)

67 Du:

Ba con hay là mây. Three, or how many? 68 Trân: Tói muòi môt con. Up to eleven [of them]. (sweeps finger left to right, socket to socket)

Trân’s smaller loops with his finger coincide with and surround his verbal notification that a problem exists. The ‘something’ that is wrong is signaled gesturally. Du’s query along with Trân’s response (Tói muòi môt con. /Up to eleven.) are evidence that they both are associating the gestures with the smaller components that are affected. It has already been noted that Trân’s shorter gestures are further enclosed by the larger sweeps of his finger from socket to socket. With these distinguishing gestures, the two workers shift their concerted attention back and forth between the sockets and the eleven other components affected by their presence. That is, the layout of the sockets on the board’s landscape provides more insight into the program error. The men have determined that the numerical information provided by the customer and programmed for the machine corresponded, not to the sockets, but to the smaller components that were to be plugged into them. In sum, these gestural practices elaborating the bilingual talk serve conjoint problem solving, enabling the workers to establish the scope of the placement problem and to hypothesize its source as a customer design error (Mà chua có program=không có bo vô /There’s no program, it was not put in).

Discussion To summarize, circuit board assemblage is all about goodness of fit. The robotic arm has to be in harmony with the components it picks and places. Workers intervene when there is a breakdown in this harmony. Their own talk and actions during the problem solving achieve a good fit with one another and with the machine. This analysis of the workers’ multimodal communicative practices shows that their bilingual talk-in-interaction was

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oriented to the relevance of the activity as a troubleshooting moment (c.f. Schegloff, 1992). First, the sequential organization of the talk methodically oriented their actions to particular sections of the machine, ranging from the source of the problem to the repair sites. Second, their strategic shift between Vietnamese and English served as shorthand in meaning-making under the pressure of time. Third, numerical expressions predominated in their bilingual talk. Notably, the numbers in the talk were precision measures. They typically appeared in ellipted utterances at critical moments in the interaction, thus having meaning only within the context in which they were immersed and with speakers who were aligned to the same problem area. The workers were able to construct and shift meanings for the numbers, which became saturated by the here-and-now context in which they were uttered. In addition, there was precision timing in the way talk was placed in relation to sound, vision and gesture. Workers were, literally, sensitive to the connections between the machine parts, as eyes, ears and hands detected relationships. They observed the relationships among the forward pitch of the feeder, the height of the component and the downward movement of the robotic arm as it picked and placed components. Amidst a cacophony of other sounds, they detected the rhythmic movements of the robotic arm. They stopped and started the machine at precise moments. They also recognized and represented numerical versions of what they perceived. They assessed perceptual structures with the use of other tools and inscriptions – by measuring distances with various instruments and converting them to numerical values, and by matching what they observed and measured to numerical representations programmed into the software. This assessment was bi-directional; the use of numerical representations was inextricably tied to objects and actions in the work setting. In short, different sign systems were deployed together to formulate the whole of the event and were taken up variously over the course of the event. In this regard, Scollon (2001) draws attention to the importance of the locus of the social interaction, which he calls the site of engagement, in accounting for the construction of meaning in interaction. Scollon defines the term as ‘(t)he real-time window that is opened through an intersection of social practices and mediational means . . . that make that action the focal point of attention of the relevant recipients’ (2001: 3–4). Goodwin uses the term contextual configuration to describe the selective use of available resources – language, gaze and gestures – in the telling of a story (2002: 30); as the story unfolds, the addressee must synthesize ‘the projections provided by different kinds of sign systems working together in a rich multimodal performance’ (2002: 33). Goodwin makes the point that a satisfactory analysis of

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such stories must take into account all aspects of the story’s telling, including words and other semiotic means. The workers’ skillful integration of two languages with other modes was particularly manifest during disruptions in the routine of assembling circuit boards – troubleshooting moments, which in this assembly plant occurred with high frequency and were associated with computerized machines and numerical inaccuracies. In an ethnography of repair technicians’ work with copy machines, Orr (1991a, 1991b) notes that as these machines age, the technicians have to deal with their quirks. Given the protean nature of applications technology, circuit board assemblers are often faced with the task of having to adapt the machine to the requirements of a specific job. In this activity, they adapted machine parts creatively to accommodate special component sizes, reshaped and give new meaning to marks inscribed on the ruler and changed the inscriptions in the software so that the robotic arm could pick and place more accurately. Here, a digital machine performed imperfectly in a work context permeated by an ethos of quality and speed, shaping the bilingual talk into a simplified register expeditiously charged with precision numbers. The workers’ multimodal communicative practices in this event have provided us with a sketch of a particular cognitive activity – conjoint problem-solving in a high-tech environment infused with sound, talk, gesture and inscription. I elaborate on Genesis as a ‘learning space’ in Chapter 6. In the chapter that follows, we take a fresh look at this stretch of social interaction and consider the ideological aspect of communicative practices on the assembly floor, keeping in mind that communication always entails, as Vološinov puts it, an ‘evaluative accent’.

Notes (1) I occasionally refer to troubleshooting moments as problem-solving moments (see also Kleifgen & Frenz-Belkin, 1996, 1997). In this work, problem-solving is defined as a cognitive activity that is socially constructed. Although the term is often associated with ‘higher order thinking’ and restricted to what is happening inside a person’s head, such an individualized psychology of human cognition would be antithetical to the arguments I wish to make about the social nature of learning. (2) I wish to acknowledge the valuable contributions made by Patricia Frenz-Belkin, who was a true partner in the analytical work done here. (3) For Halliday, the term text refers to ‘any instance of living language that is playing a part in a context of situation. . .. It may be either spoken or written, or indeed in any other medium of expression that we like to think of’ (Halliday & Hasan, 1985: 12). (4) Offsetting is a complex procedure in which the computerized machine must be programmed to ‘read’ the size of the board and calculate the grid for placement of the components along an x/y axis.

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(5) The full transcription also includes time stamps to indicate temporal unfolding of actions. These are omitted in the text for ease of reading. (6) In my descriptions of what I observed on site, I use past tense. However in the analytical portions of my work, I use a kind of ‘historical present’ to bring the reader into the moment. (7) Trân is likely referring here to the fact that the customer ‘forgot’ to account for the space needed on the board for the sockets. (8) See also Zimmerman (1992) for the use of repetition to verify information in calls for emergency assistance.

4 Doing Social Work: Power Relations in Interaction

There is no such thing as word without evaluative accent. Vološinov, 1973: 103 Không tiến không bạc cõn bẽ bạn. Có tiến có bạc hết ông tôi. In hard times we are all friends; in good times, you should know your place. Vietnamese proverb

The previous chapter described the professional actions of workers during a problem-solving event. We saw that the workers were using language – their native Vietnamese along with English – and other semiotic means to accomplish tasks. In this chapter, we take a second look at the event, this time to analyze the social alignments that took place simultaneously. Vološinov tells us that social interaction always entails some form of value judgment, an ‘evaluative accent’ (1973: 103); thus, ideology is expressed in signs, which people can deploy to bring about change. Particular attention in this chapter is paid to the participants’ use of linguistic signs as they negotiated what actions to take in order to fix a problem with the assembly. I consider their use of certain elements in language to encode valueorientations, thereby displaying relations of power and resistance in the face of local and global political and economic circumstances. These elements include person-reference (terms of address) and other honorific markers in Vietnamese and directives, negative particles and the ‘inclusivewe’ in English. Before presenting this analysis, I describe the complex system of person-reference in Vietnamese and give an example of how it is used on the assembly floor to express power relations. In the remainder of this chapter, I re-examine the problem-solving event to show how the workers positioned themselves socially, particularly through their selection 74

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or omission of address forms during their talk. I show the distinctiveness of this particular high-pressure task activity by comparing the workers’ talk in the California context with the use of the person-reference system in Hanoi, Vietnam. I end with a discussion of the extent to which the frame of solidarity invoked by the discourse of ‘flexible teams’ and ‘flattened hierarchical structures’ in US work settings may be influencing the language use of immigrant workers.

Background: Person-Reference in Vietnamese The Vietnamese language has an intricate system of person reference, which is made up of dozens of address forms (Cooke, 1968).1 Speakers assume particular positions of status or relationship by using these forms along with honorific markers and other expressions in their talk. For self and other reference, a speaker may choose not only among personal pronouns, but also proper nouns (surnames, given names, nicknames) and common nouns such as kinship and status terms. But because personal pronouns are used rarely (Luong, 1990), the I–you relation in Vietnamese is expressed most often with terms indicating social relationships. Let us examine a few hypothetical examples of talk at work. If a young male employee wants to tell an older male co-worker that he has left documents for him on the co-worker’s desk, he would not use personal pronouns as in English (‘I left those documents for you on your desk’). Rather, he is likely to show deference owing to their age difference by referring to himself as em (younger brother) and to his colleague as anh (elder brother): (1) Em để mấy tài liệu đó trên bàn của anh cho anh rồi. (I [younger brother] left those documents on your [elder brother’s] desk for you [elder brother] already.) If the young man were to use his elder co-worker’s personal name while saying this, he would probably use his given name accompanied by a kinship or status term: (2) Anh Cam, em để mấy tài liệu đó trên bàn của anh cho anh rồi. (Elder brother Cam, I left those documents on your desk for you already.) As these examples show, kinship terms are often extended to non-relatives in order to mark social solidarity or hierarchy. In a more formal situation, such as an off-site conference, the speaker might use a title and/or the kinship term ông (grandfather) with or without

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the addressee’s given name. For example, if during the conference a co-worker asks his engineer-colleague for an opinion, he might say: (3) Thưa ky ˜ sư Tân, xin ky ˜ sư cho biê´t ý kiê´n vê` vâ´n đê` này ạ. (Engineer Tan, could you please give an opinion about this issue?)2 This talk in a conference venue evokes a ‘status-marked situation’ (ErvinTripp, 1972: 220) during which the form of address used signals the colleague’s professional identity. In using personal names, speakers generally use the given name of the addressee accompanied by a kinship or status term; the surname is used only in very restricted circumstances. Given names and nicknames are rarely used by themselves, and if they are, they tend to imply either less respect to the addressee or to show solidarity and informality with people of the same or younger age. Generally, there is a native taboo on the utterance of the superior party’s name. Pronouns such as tao (I), bay (you, formal) or mày (you, familiar) are seldom used. Emeneau (1950) characterizes the status system in Vietnam as highly developed, and notes that speakers must overtly demonstrate politeness, stating that ‘the greater the disparity in age or rank, the greater the marks of politeness in the inferior’s behavior’ (1950: 206). He further argues that age is the most important factor in the selection of certain kinship terms. A study by S. Nguyen (1990) confirms that age is the strongest factor in a Vietnamese speaker’s selection of address terms, and that speakers also give strong consideration to the social situation, the length of time speakers have known each other and gender differences. He also notes that speakers may omit the use of address terms in rare circumstances for fear of offending the addressee (1990: 66). In his analysis of interactions among Vietnamese speakers at home and in the workplace, Luong (1990) shows that the choice of these terms dynamically structures the interlocutors’ interactional stance vis-à-vis each other, displaying either authority or solidarity. He provides a striking example of shifts in the choice of speaker–addressee referring terms within a brief exchange between a supervisor and an employee who had returned after missing a day of work. When asking the employee to fill out a report of his daily tasks in the register, the supervisor was using the common nouns tôi (subject/person) to refer to himself and ông (grandfather) to refer to the employee, which, taken together, displayed his position of authority. But, after the employee asks what he should write in the report for the day he missed work, the supervisor responds by switching to em (younger sibling)

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and anh (elder brother) to highlight his temporary subordinate position on the day he had to fill in for his employee: Bữa đó anh kêu bệnh, em phải làm thay anh cả buổi sáng đo anh nhố khôg? That day elder brother (employee) claimed illness; younger sibling (supervisor) had to work in elder brother’s place the whole morning, does elder brother remember? That day you claimed illness, I had to work in your place the whole morning, don’t you remember? (Luong, 1990: 14; underline added) To the Vietnamese ear, this shift conveys an ironic tone, since in most circumstances only the employee would address himself as a subordinate (S. Nguyen, personal communication). In this exchange, the supervisor’s use of a range of common nouns and kinship terms signaled redefinitions of the interactional situation within a single activity. This last example illustrates the creative use of a system at the utterance level. Terms of address are not fixed normative structures. Instead, as we shall see in the talk-in-interaction on the assembly floor, speakers make creative communicative choices that span two languages and cultures and constitute value orientations. I argue here that the workers’ communicative choices grease the engine of professional action and, in doing so, express their various value orientations in specific work contexts.

Power Relations at Genesis: Person-Reference on the Assembly Floor Let us now explore relations of power that take shape at Genesis, Inc. These relationships are manifested in the evaluative elements of communicative practices on the assembly floor, evoked in this case by Vietnamese speakers especially through the use (or omission) of address forms and other honorific markers. We first return to the scene in Chapter 1, in which a team of workers – a supervisor, a machine operator, and a qualitycontrol inspector – were troubleshooting the assembly of a circuit board. Having discovered that the machine was not able to place three of the components owing to their miniature size, the machine operator (Trân) notified the supervisor (Du) (both of whose actions we have seen in prior chapters). They took the board to one of the QC inspectors, an older female employee called Hoa, asking her to inspect the board. While she

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reviewed the board, Du asked her to read aloud the numbers printed on the empty locations on the board so that he could scan the bill of materials provided by the customer for the corresponding components. Du would subsequently harvest these components from the reels and bring them to Hoa for hand placement. This time we examine the exchange in its original Vietnamese. In examining the Vietnamese exchange between Du and Hoa, we see that, just as in the examples provided at the beginning of this chapter, they use personreference and other honorific forms which display hierarchy and social distance. In line 1, Du uses the address term cô (younger aunt) when asking his older female employee to read the numbers to him. In turn, in line 6, Hoa uses the term anh (elder brother) to express deference to her superior. In addition, their choice of different forms for yes, the formal term da (line 4) used by Hoa as opposed to Du’s informal Ù (line 7), also signal social hierarchy between a supervisor and his female assistant. The key words in this stretch of interaction are underlined: 1 Du:

Cô, đo.c cái con? Younger aunt, [could you please] read the numbers? 2 Hoa: Mười bảy, mười hai, mười ba. Seventeen, twelve, thirteen. 3 Du: Mười bảy, mười hai, mười ba phai không? Seventeen, twelve, thirteen, is that right? 4 Hoa: Da. Yes. 5 Du: Mười bảy, mười hai, mười ba – cộng bằng. Seventeen, twelve, thirteen – correct. 6 Hoa: Ba con, đó có đúng không anh? Three pieces, is that right, elder brother? 7 Du: Ù. Yeah. By means of these linguistic elements, Du and Hoa are co-constructing asymmetrical power relations in their discourse. During the time I spent with the company, I observed such politeness forms being used among Vietnamese-speaking employees on and off the assembly floor. Younger workers often addressed their older counterparts or supervisors by using terms such as ông (grandfather), cô (younger aunt) or anh (elder brother) to signal politeness and deference. In turn, older workers addressed younger ones and assistants using terms such as em (younger sibling).

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Revisiting the Problem-Solving Event Let us turn again to Du and Trân’s social alignments during the problemsolving event analyzed in Chapter 3. In taking this second look, I describe how the workers’ social positioning shifted between a co-equal partnership and a supervisor-subordinate hierarchy. I show that, contrary to the conventional ways of displaying relative status in Vietnamese through the use of person reference and honorifics, in this activity the workers omitted these forms. I analyze these absences along with their use of certain forms in both Vietnamese and English and positioning signals in embodied action.

Displays of symmetry At the beginning of the activity, the workers positioned themselves in ways that diverge from the prototypical supervisor-subordinate hierarchy; that is, their social organization was, to a great extent, an ongoing effort to accomplish a symmetrical alignment. For example, the supervisor Du plunged into the problem-solving task from the first moment, thus positioning himself as a coequal-worker with his assistant, Trân. During the problem-solving process, the two workers displayed a common orientation to the task by aligning each other toward the key areas of the machine, thereby assuming a kind of worker solidarity. Additionally, sometimes Du took actions that are typically associated with a subordinate position. For example, he conferred with Trân to get his ideas ratified when he asked whether the stopper block would need to be adjusted in line 10 (Có phải chỉnh con ốc ở dưới không? /Need to fix the screw underneath?) and when he asked Trân to confirm his measure of the pitch distance between two components on the reel in line 18 (Từ cái mỏ này tới cái mỏ này/From this point to this point). In turn, Trân acted in ways often associated with a supervisor, such as when he issued a directive to Du to release the tape so he could resume running the machine in line 12 (Được, cho nó đi./Okay, let it go). We see further evidence of symmetry with Trân’s unabashed contesting of Du’s proposed solution to the problem. That is, in spite of his subordinate position in the company, Trân did not defer to his supervisor’s preferences. Recall the following sequence where Trân wanted to replace the feeder with another, but Du wanted to adjust the stopper block on the current one: 37 Trân: Let’s see if we can put this. 38 Du: No cái đó không có đúng. (gazing at second feeder) No, that’s not the right one.

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39 Trân: (xxxx) 40 Du: Bây giờ ở đây nè. Right now it’s here. 41 (xxxx) 42 Tâ`m bốn. Eight, four 43 Trân: Mươi hai. Twelve.

(pointing to the 12 pitch point) (pointing to the 10 pitch point on original stopper block) (pointing to alternative settings) (pointing again to the 12 pitch point)

In troubleshooting the machine, time was at a premium, so, while behaving as co-equal workers freely contesting one another’s ideas, they did not take time to formulate mitigating talk in order to soften directives or to use indirection when offering opinions (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1978). Indeed, the workers’ talk was methodical and parsimonious; it was stripped down to a few ellipted utterances. In short, we see an economy of words in this highpressure moment. Another linguistic feature was stripped away in this event, which by Vietnamese cultural standards is extraordinary: there were no Vietnamese terms of address in the workers’ talk. As I have already noted, troubleshooting events such as these were ubiquitous on the assembly floor; I found that these forms were largely absent from talk during these high-pressure problem-solving activities. As we see in this example, in spite of their differences of age and status, neither worker used kinship or status address forms when talking to each other. By omitting these, Trân and Du sidestepped another way of displaying social hierarchy. Let us examine these absences more closely. At the beginning of this event, Du consulted with Trân about adjusting the stopper block. Contrary to expectation, he used no terms of address, either to refer to himself or to Trân: 10 Du:

Có phải chinh con ổc o duoi khổng? Need to fix the screw underneath? 11 Trân: Ù. Yeah. Du’s words are in striking contrast to the example in Luong (1990) provided at the beginning of the chapter in which a supervisor’s words are saturated with person-reference terms that display the speakers’ social positions. Here, Du’s stripped down utterance sets the tone for a symmetrical social

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stance between himself and his assistant. Trân’s response, using an informal term in Vietnamese for yes (Ù/Yeah), indicates his alignment with this social arrangement. A second opportunity for Du to use terms of address was again bypassed when he showed Trân how he was measuring the feeder tape, and Trân concurred with the same informal reply: Từ cái mỏ này tới cái mỏ này. (hand traces distance) From this point to this point. 19 Trân: Ù. Yeah. 18

Later on, Du reminded Trân of the component’s identification number. As supervisor, he could have chosen a directive utterance form and included references to himself and Trân to indicate their hierarchical relationship in the company. Instead, he again omitted terms of address and, in addition, used the term, nhe, which indicates deference to an addressee’s point of view; Trân offered another informal response (Có/Got it): 22 Du:

Mot trӑm tư, nhe? One hundred forty, okay? 23 Trân: Có. Got it.

In effect, Du did not use Vietnamese kinship or status terms to establish his higher social status at any time during this interaction. As for proper names, Du uttered Trân’s given name twice in succession towards the end of the activity in line 47. (The significance of this choice from several personreference terms available in the system is discussed below.) Turning now to Trân’s talk, we find that he also omitted person-reference terms in Vietnamese. Significantly, he did so even when presenting his wishes or opinions to Du, which, because he was speaking to his supervisor, could be construed as face-threatening or impolite acts. The first opportunity for using these terms, thereby signaling his subordinate position, could have taken place in line 12, where Trân wanted to observe the forward pitch of the tape without interference from Du. Instead of addressing him in the usual way, as in Elder brother (Ahn), please release the tape, Trân said, Được, cho nó đi/Okay, let it go. In telling Du to release the tape, he used what appears to be a bald directive, further intensified by the term được, which in Vietnamese conveys an authoritative stance. There were no mitigating person-reference signals in his utterance. Du complied with the directive.

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Later, Trân bypassed another opportunity for using person-reference terms when he asserted his opinion regarding the solution to the pitch problem: 30

Trân:

Phải câ`n đến mươi hai. [We] must set it to twelve.3

With this utterance, Trân did not propose a solution in the mitigated form of a suggestion, nor did he use the expected address terms to establish Du’s higher ranking. Instead, he described what to him was the only action to take in order to achieve their common goal to assemble a high-quality product as efficiently as possible. If we are to take language use as a form of action, we can adopt Schegloff’s (1995: 186) argument that ‘the absence of actions can be as decisive as their occurrence for the deployment of language and the interactional construction of discourse’. Ordinarily, the norm during talk between two Vietnamese speakers is to display, through person-reference terms, their respective roles at any given moment. In this activity, Trân and Du did not use such terms, which would have displayed the differential status in their working relationship. Although in itself the omission of Vietnamese person-reference terms is unusual, merely pointing out the absence of a preferred form of talk is insufficient to provide a satisfying account of what the missing element signals. Let us examine what actions co-occur with the absence, thus revealing its significance. Three kinds of action surrounding the utterances just highlighted are salient. The first kind of action to consider is that of the computerized machine. As we look again at the context surrounding Trân’s utterance telling Du to release the tape in line 12, recall that at this moment the men were focused on two different fields of scrutiny that might help to determine the cause of the mis-pick – Trân was watching the forward pitch of the feeder and Du was preparing to measure the feeder tape. Both of these actions had to be in synchrony with the motions of the machine. Because the robotic arm had moved to placement position and the feeder was about to pitch the tape forward, Du’s actions on the tape had to be put temporarily on hold so that the men could take full advantage of each other’s observations. Trân’s rapid-fire utterance, in which he omitted person-referring terms, is precisely located just after a key movement of the robotic arm and just before the forward pitch of the reel. In response to this utterance, Du loosened his grasp, a signal that he was interpreting the talk in terms of urgency rather than as a sign of disrespect. As soon as Trân was able to note the imperfect forward pitch of the tape, he turned to Du’s measuring actions to confirm the actual pitch, thus signaling further that the prior utterance was not a

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command to eliminate the measuring activity altogether. The utterance has the syntactic shape of a directive, but in context, the participants did not apprehend it as an assertion of authority or control; it was interpreted as something necessary to meet the requirements of the task. In brief, the actions of the machine lent shape to worker talk and actions. Along with the machine actions, a second set of actions, which has already been alluded to, co-occur with the omission of person-reference terms. These are Trân’s verbal actions given in response to Du’s talk, which overtly signal co-worker solidarity in the task activity. In expressing agreement with a statement or directive, a Vietnamese speaker would be expected to apply honorific terms – da or vâng (yes) – to show deference generally given to a recipient of a certain age and higher status. However, as we have seen, Trân did not select honorific forms but rather replied Ù (yeah) and Có (got it), expressions generally used between co-equals. As the recipient, Du did not take umbrage at Trân’s informal responses in this interactional context. Another set of verbal actions gives further evidence that the workers were co-constructing a symmetrical alignment. The workers made strategic use of English terms during the problem solving. First, Trân made passing use of the inclusive-we (Let’s) in English, which has the force of a suggestion for a next action (Levinson, 1983). He used this term to propose that they try out another stopper block, one with a pitch point of 12. The proposal was offered in a twostep process. First, he suggested simply looking for such a stopper block: 31

Trân: Let’s see if I can find twelve.

(walks some distance away)

To paraphrase, ‘Let’s first see if a stopper-block with a pitch point of 12 is handy’, thus implying that if he should find one, they should try using it. Returning with the new feeder and stopper block in hand, he offered this follow-up proposal to Du: 37 Trân: Let’s see if we can put this. Thus, Trân made symbolic use of the English inclusive-we to indicate a symmetrical relationship, a solidarity of purpose. M.H. Goodwin makes clear the function of let’s when she states that the expression implies a proposal that ‘shows neither special deference toward the other party (as a request does) nor claims about special rights over the other (as a command does)’ (1990: 111). An interesting contrast to this mitigating talk occurred with the second way the workers used English to display symmetry. Both men initiated a turn by using No to express disagreement over each other’s proposed

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solutions. Trân used the word first. His no, uttered sotto voce, is latched to Du’s prior turn, which conveys a quiet but firm disagreement with Du’s idea to set the stopper block to the 8 pitch: 34 Du: 35 36 Trân 37

NUMBER EIGHT. So this HIT NEXT THREE TIMES. = =˚No. Let’s see if we can put this.

As they examined the stopper block attached to the second feeder, with a single turn Du uttered his disagreement in English (No) and switched back to Vietnamese to justify his assessment: 38 Du: No cái đó không có đúng. (gazing at second feeder) No, that’s not the right one. As an expression of polarity, the word no invokes a symmetrical alignment between two workers freely contesting each other in the interest of dealing expeditiously with the task at hand. Thus, signals of symmetry through actions and Vietnamese talk have overflowed into relevant linguistic forms in English. In sum, among the array of choices across languages, the two participants chose to bypass certain ‘obligatory’ forms (kinship and status terms); concurrently, they selected non-honorific markers and incorporated forms from another language. These were strategic moves to let each other know during these moments that ‘we’re co-equal partners’. In the talk that followed, there were subtle shifts in the way the workers structured their social relationship, even as the structure of professional collaboration remained.

Displays of asymmetry During the first part of the activity, the men had been acting primarily as confederates, even openly challenging each other’s proposed solutions. In this second part, where they were on the verge of a solution, Du began in subtle ways to position himself as supervisor. He issued a series of directives, actions that appear to conform to the norm of a supervisor manifesting his authoritative role. However, the occupational status category alone cannot explain the force of each directive. For this interpretive analysis, we identify, not just who issues the utterance, but also its place in the sequence of the exchange along with attendant words and other actions. We notice that Du’s

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first directive comes after Trân returns with another feeder and, by pointing to the stopper block, continues to insist on using a 12-pitch setting: 43 Trân: 44 Du:

Mươi hai. (pointing again to the 12 pitch point) Twelve Thẩy cái đó đây. (pointing to chair) Put this [feeder] here.

In order to maintain the coordinate stance they had been taking up to this point, Du could have shown acceptance of Trân’s idea with something such as: ‘Okay, we’ll try that one’. Instead, his concession to Trân’s proposal takes the shape of a directive, and Trân’s action placing the second feeder next to the original one is thus made to look like a compliance. With one utterance, two things get accomplished, forming a kind of transition between symmetry and asymmetry: Du has acquiesced to Trân’s proposal and positioned himself hierarchically as supervisor. They silently unscrewed the two stopper blocks and attempted to exchange them. Trân was the first to acknowledge (lines 45–46) that the new stopper block did not fit. As Du stated, they would have to adjust the block from a pitch point of ten, where it was originally, to one that is a factor of twenty-four (line 47). Together, they replaced the stopper blocks and adjusted the original one to the pitch point of eight. Next, Du asked Trân to take certain actions at the machine monitor. Let us examine them one at a time: 48 Du:

Trân u:h Trân ⎡coi cái component ID. Trân uh Trân |look at the component ID. 49 Trân: ⎣(begins moving toward machine) Syntactically this is another imperative, but is the perlocutionary effect of the directive achieved? This would be so if Trân’s action had happened subsequent to Du’s instruction. Rather, Trân ‘anticipated’ the instruction by beginning to move toward the machine as soon as Du uttered his name. In other words, the imperative was issued while the recipient was already performing the action. The directive was rephrased and given again, but by the time Du asked him to do so, Trân had already begun reviewing the data he had located on the machine’s computer display: 50 Du: 51

Coi coi ở trong đó. (turning head, following Look, look in there. Trân’s arrival at machine) (getting up, pointing to CRT display)

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52 Trân:

(pressing buttons on operator panel; watching display)

At the time of this directive, Trân was busy examining information on the screen, oblivious of Du’s pointing behind him. Trân’s actions during Du’s instructions cannot be taken as compliance with his directives, because they are not timed to follow the verb (coi/look). While he continued to give orders, Du also moved to the computer display so that he, too, could look for the information they needed. 53 Du: Coi coi bao nhiêu. See, see how much. 54 Bỏ cái đó cho nó chạy lại. (standing next to Trân at Let it run through it again, machine) Du’s movement to the machine signaled his alignment with Trân’s effort to find information on the screen, a continued coordination in terms of ‘professional work’, whereas his talk signaled an assertion of power – that he was the one in charge. Next, we re-examine the moment in which Du addressed Trân by his given name, the only time in the interaction in which a personal name was used. Du’s use of Trân’s name in this utterance is a vocative, and its function in this context is at first puzzling. In general, a vocative is a form that can be used in one of two ways. The first is an ‘address’, a signal encoding certain aspects of the interlocutors’ social relationship. The second is the way used by Du, which is a ‘summons’ or ‘call’, a linguistic strategy to get the attention of an addressee (Schegloff, 1968). Levinson (1983) states that a summons, which is prosodically set off from the rest of an utterance, behaves as an independent speech act. It is often found in multiparty interaction to single out an interlocutor from the rest of the group. A summons can, of course, be used in a two-party interaction such as the one we examine here to get the listener to pay special attention to what is about to be said. Like any other summons, it invites a response or uptake by the conversational partner, thus resulting in a summons-answer sequence. Unpacking Du’s directive, then (in boldface), we note that Trân was summoned a first time: 48 Du: Trân⎤ u:h Trân Trân: ⎣ (no uptake) At this point, a response – a turn of the head or a verbal answer – is expected. Trân’s behavior immediately following the first summons was to

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get up and move away. In the absence of a response, Du summoned him a second time: 48 Du: Trân u:h Trân⎤ Trân: ⎣ (no uptake) Again, there is no uptake. We have here two speech acts, neither of which achieves its expected effect. In searching out the purpose of Du’s summons, it should be noted that, like address vocatives, summonses also enable the speaker to express social relationships. For example, a student may position himself in a subordinate relationship to his professor through the use of title plus surname, as when he goes to the entrance of the professor’s office and says, ‘Professor Smith?’ I, on the other hand, may take a position of colleague or friend by using his given name, ‘Jim?’ Recall that Vietnamese speakers’ use of a given name without an accompanying kinship or status term traditionally portrays the recipient either as degraded to a subordinate position or as a close friend or relative. The fact that Du used Trân’s given name may be taken as an expression of informality or as a way of constituting his supervisory identity. One clue might be in the placement of the summons. Vocatives are optional elements, which can occur initially, in the middle, or at the end of an utterance. Du used a personal-name vocative to open the series of directives, serving the dual purpose of establishing his status and calling special attention to what he was about to say. The summons in this activity is especially noteworthy because it deviates from the strategy of parsimony and efficient use of time in talk adopted by these men up to this point. Rather, its intended effect is to delay the action. If the summons-answer sequence had been achieved, it would have deferred Trân’s movement toward the machine. This would have enabled Du to coordinate his directives with Trân’s actions. As we have seen, the summons did not have this effect. So neither the summonses nor the accompanying directives (coi cái component ID/ look at the component ID; Coi coi ở trong đó/ Look, look in there) brought about actions on the part of Trân, although Du seemed to stake a claim about the role relationship between himself and his subordinate. We have seen that workers’ bilingual talk, gestures, and actions on the machine constituted a complex negotiation of social positions during the pick problem event, with a primarily symmetrical alignment at first and later shifting to a primarily hierarchical one. It is true that at first, when a problem with the assembly was discovered and concerted action was applied to find a solution, the two men worked hard to develop a symmetrical alignment by avoiding person-references and other honorific terms in Vietnamese.

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The pressures and goals of the task seemed to override these traditional displays of social hierarchy. It is also true that, as the solution was found, the supervisor began in subtle ways to assert his authority through utterances whose forms indicate a hierarchical stance. The Vietnamese have a saying that nicely encapsulates this shift: Không tiến không bạc cõn bẽ bạn. Có tiến có bạc hết ông tôi. (In hard times we are all friends; in good times, you should know your place.) But we have also seen that these alignments were constantly negotiated. For example, we noted that Du was collaborating on the data search on the monitor even during his directive utterances (lines 53 to 54), and if we revisit the entire interaction, we can see that the social hierarchy was made present at both the opening and closing boundaries of the activity. It was Du, the supervisor, who announced the problem in the first place (MIS-PICK – ), and it was Du who established the climate of symmetry by working alongside Trân and by seeking his point of view (Có phải chỉnh con ốc ở dưới không?/ Need to fix the screw underneath?). The activity came to an end with another announcement by Du, which was a summary rationale for adjusting the existing stopper-block to a pitch-point of 8, something he had argued for all along: 57 Du: 58 59

Chút nừa phải cho nó hai mươi bốn. After this [we] must give it twenty-four. Hai mươi bốn chẻ số tám chẻ làm ba cái. Twenty-four divided by number eight is three. Yeah nó sẽ chẻ ba cái. Yeah, it divides into three.

These opening and closing statements, given with an announcement tone, subtly established Du’s authoritative control as supervisor at work and as elder in the Vietnamese community. Just as subtly, Du shifted this hierarchical frame during the ongoing task with his actions and words, and in collaboration with those of Trân. Asymmetry was also prominent in the placement problem event, which occurred immediately after the pick problem was solved. The problem was discovered by Trân, who called Du over to take a look. Using Vietnamese along with key terms in English, he showed Du where the sockets were infringing on other component spaces on the circuit board: 60 Trân: ˚Oo: : : h thôi không duoc rôi. Oo: : :h no it doesn’t work.

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61 (xxxx) socket. 62 Trân: Dâu có láp socket duoc. [It’s] impossible to install the socket. 63 Thê này dâu có láp socket duoc. Like this [it’s] impossible to install the socket. 64 Du: Cái? Which?

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(pointing to spaces around the 3 sockets)

After Trân pointed to the affected components the circuit board, Du directed the next action to take. He told Trân to remove the sockets that had been placed so far. 73 Du Bo me cái này bo luôn cái này. Get rid of this one and the other one also. Trân then suggested the final step – add a command in the software program to ‘skip’ placement of all sockets. This was posed in the form of a question, thus allowing Du to announce the decision, again in the form of a directive: 74 Trân: Skip? 75 Du: Skip. 76 Skip it. As in the prior problem-solving situation, the workers’ talk was bilingual, parsimonious, and they omitted the use of Vietnamese kinship or status address forms when speaking with each other. The positioning was made clear through Trân’s initial action of consulting his supervisor about the design error and deferring the decision to him by ‘suggesting’ a solution in the form of a question. Du also deferred to his assistant with questions, but in the end, he issued the deciding directives. Interestingly, Du positioned himself once more as the person in charge when, shortly after this event, as Trân returned to the assembly machine to change something on the screen, I wanted to confirm what he was

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doing. Before Trân could reply, Du provided the answer, and Trân’s efforts to explain were commandeered by Du. Thus, though I was questioning the machine operator, it was the supervisor who provided the answers. (I return to this incident in Chapter 6.) The shifts in frame such as this one to a more authoritative position were more evident when workers moved from high-pressure situations to calmer activities on the floor. Another example occurred just after this exchange. Trân and Du were helping two other Vietnamese speakers in one of the hand-loading units, where they were placing components by hand on a different set of boards. In the course of their talk, the three workers used the kinship term, anh, when addressing Du. This social positioning is similar to Hoa’s interaction with Du described earlier in the chapter, where terms of address were used to constitute role relationships. In a follow up interview, Du commented on the ordinariness of such talk by saying, ‘Because Trân is younger, he always call me anh Du’. In sum, these problem-solving events were made up of a complex of sequentially constructed social positionings between a supervisor and his assistant and skillfully signaled through the use of two languages. The analysis demonstrates that social categories, such as the prototypical hierarchical relationship of supervisor–assistant, do not automatically structure power relations; rather, they are made relevant in the moment-by-moment linguistic choices made by participants. And these relationships may vary from one context to another even within this workplace, where Vietnamese terms of address to express value orientations endure in ‘off-line’ social interaction.

Impressions from Hanoi We have seen the effects of globalization on ways of speaking at work in a US high-tech firm. The striking omission of person reference terms during high-pressure situations at Genesis may be evidence of a shift in the norms of language use by Vietnamese speakers living and working in the United States, and may be providing us with ‘live examples of this process [of language shift] in action’ (Troike, 2000, p. 350). Research has shown that people who immigrate to, or have some extended contact with, another speech community often adapt their use of address forms when faced with new situations. To take two brief examples, Oyetade (1995), in his descriptive analysis of address forms in Yoruba, shows that some Western-oriented university students are shifting away from the Yoruba terms that express deference. He also documents merchants’ borrowing of English kinship terms as

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they address their educated customers. Zhucheng (1991) describes changes in the use of certain terms of address in China and suggests that they are related to recent socio-political and economic changes. Might we see speakers omit terms of address and other politeness forms in similar high-pressure work situations in Vietnam? I had been invited to offer seminars in the College of Foreign Languages at Vietnam National University in Hanoi. While there, I recruited nine volunteers to participate in a constructed context – a variation on a discourse completion task.4 I introduced them to the setting, the employees, and the high-tech machines at Genesis, with particular attention to the ethos of high-quality production and the intense competition with other companies in the region. The participants observed the problem-solving event on videotape and were invited to comment on the workers’ talk. Upon viewing the videotaped event, they reacted with surprise at the parsimony of the talk and especially at the omission of ‘politeness’ conventions during the interactions around the machine. The Hanoi participants completed the task by re-examining four specific utterances in the transcript, three made by the supervisor to his assistant (asking for advice, disagreeing, and issuing a directive) and one by the assistant to his supervisor (issuing a directive). On a separate form, with the utterances reproduced in the original sequential order, I asked them to imagine a context in Hanoi similar to the one that they saw on videotape: How would workers in a Hanoi manufacturing facility speak to each other in similar high-pressure circumstances? I invited them to respond to these California ‘models’ by composing utterances that they would consider appropriate for use between employees. In spite of the parameters given them, the participants constructed utterances that contained a variety of address terms and politeness forms. In constructing equivalent utterances to Du’s request for advice, in which the roles are momentarily reversed with a superior deferring to a subordinate (Có phải chỉnh con ốc ở dưới không?/ Need to fix the screw underneath?), the supervisor was typically portrayed by the Hanoi participants as choosing to use a kinship term for uncle – cậu (mother ’s younger brother) – in asking for help from a younger person. Here is a sample construction: (1) Cậu xem có phải chỉnh con ốc ở dưới không? Could Uncle see if (we) have to fix the screw underneath? Next, using the example of Trân’s directive to Du to release the tape (Được, cho nó đi/ Okay, let it go), I also asked them to construct what they

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considered an appropriate way for a younger assistant to issue a directive to his supervisor. Nearly all the Hanoi constructions contained address forms, mostly the kinship term anh (elder brother) and an additional politeness marker (ạ) to soften the subordinate’s directive as in this example: (2) Được, cho nó đi anh ạ. Okay, let it go, elder brother. The third example was taken from the series of turns in which Trân and Du openly disagreed with each other about a solution to the machine breakdown. At one point in the exchange, Du disagreed with his younger machine operator’s selection of another feeder (No, cái đó không có đúng/No, that’s not the right one). The seminar participants were asked to construct two utterances, one in which the supervisor was the speaker expressing disagreement, and another in which the one disagreeing was the assistant. When the supervisor expressed disagreement, all Hanoi participants chose to omit address forms altogether, just as speakers in California did. The second prompt, however, yielded a rich variety of constructions: when the assistant expressed disagreement, all but one respondent used address forms signaling a deferential stance, as in the following: (3) Cái đó không đúng đâu anh ạ. That one’s not right at all, elder brother. As an illustration of the complexity of choices when displaying social alignments, I present in the example that follows a respondent’s use of two kinship terms, one for self-reference, cháu (nephew), and another for the addressee, chú (father’s younger brother). Pairings such as this are commonly used in everyday Vietnamese talk. Here we observe the pair, nephew . . . uncle (cháu . . . chú) along with a politeness marker ạ at the end: (4) Cháu nghĩ không phải cái đó đâu chú ạ. Nephew thinks it’s not that one at all, uncle. This construction, with three separate politeness terms, illustrates the extent to which the Hanoi participant thought the younger worker should show deference to the older supervisor when disagreeing with him, even under pressure to meet a work deadline. In all but one of the constructions, it appears that the addressee’s age combined with his company position required, in the eyes of the Hanoi participants, the use of address forms along with other politeness signals. Their responses reflect the norm that, for the sake of politeness,

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Vietnamese people generally avoid showing strong disagreement with an interlocutor who is older or who has a distant social relationship or higher position. These responses are in sharp contrast with the California data, where Trân bypassed the use of terms of address as he openly disagreed with his supervisor, Du, when they were pressed to find the best solution to the problem. Finally, the Hanoi participants were asked to construct utterances based on the fourth California example in which, after the solution was found, the supervisor began to issue a series of directives to the assistant. In the first of these, Du summoned Trân and told him to search the machine’s computer for the component ID (Trân u:h Trân, coi cái component ID/Trân uh Trân, look at the component ID). This prompt resulted in a variety of constructions, ranging from utterances identical to the original to those containing kinship terms and other markers. An example of the latter is: (5) Trân ơi, em xem cái component ID đi. Trân, younger brother, look at the component ID. This participant replicated the first part of the California utterance by beginning with the addressee’s personal name (and adding an accompanying vocative marker, ơi) but then included the kinship term em in the command, which attenuates the directive and at the same time establishes the speaker’s role as superior. In sum, more than two-thirds of the constructions describing how workers in similar high-pressure work situations in Vietnam would interact included person reference and politeness forms. Aside from personal names, all the address forms were kinship terms, which, according to Luong (1990: 37), are the ‘single most important subset’ in the Vietnamese person-reference system; they are pervasive in interactions not only between relatives but also between unrelated persons, as we have observed in this chapter. Other honorific and politeness forms were incorporated into many of the constructions, often softening directives and disagreements in the verbal exchanges. Less than a third of the constructions were devoid of address forms or politeness markers, and these were all supervisor utterances. As with Du’s utterances in the California talk, these constructions showed the supervisor disagreeing with the assistant without using any politeness forms, and the supervisor using the assistant’s given name while issuing a directive after the problem is solved. Unlike the California talk, however, the supervisor was portrayed using kinship terms in half of the utterances made by the person in authority.

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The portrayal of an assistant’s utterances differed markedly from Trân’s utterances in the California data: all the Hanoi participants’ constructed utterances contained a term of address and/or a politeness marker. The assistant’s directives and expressions of disagreement were attenuated with the use of kinship terms, often accompanied by honorifics at the beginning and/or end of the utterance. Thus, to the Hanoi participants, a subordinate might give a directive or show disagreement with a superior, but such speech acts require overt expressions of deference. In short, age and status differences appeared to influence the Hanoi respondents’ generous use of these address forms and other politeness markers in their constructions. Their responses to the prompts suggest that the normative societal frame of social hierarchy may still predominate even in high-tech work settings in Vietnam. However, to confirm this trend, research would have to go beyond constructed utterances such as these to ethnographic research in highly competitive and fast-paced work settings in Vietnam. The important message remains. People move across borders, take their languages with them and adapt their ways of speaking in new linguistic environments, often displaying a creative mix of two languages with novel evaluative accents in particular contexts.

Discussion The evaluative accent in utterances The talk-in-interaction between Du and Trân accomplished essential ‘social work’ – manifesting role relationships between the workers either as co-equal partners or as supervisor and subordinate – while troubleshooting a breakdown in the assembly machine. The two men exerted a great deal of interactional effort in order to achieve a symmetrical relationship during this high-pressure activity. One way in which they did this was to bypass the use of Vietnamese person-reference terms, which, if used, would have clearly defined the hierarchical relationships between them as supervisor and subordinate, elder and younger. Instead, they selected non-honorific terms and other markers of informality in Vietnamese along with expressions of solidarity in English – all within a parsimonious verbal and interactional milieu. Another way they positioned themselves symmetrically was by contesting each other’s proposals for solving the problem. This directness in the workplace has generally been considered atypical up to now, particularly where the participants have unequal status; generally, the subordinate defers to the person of higher rank. For example, Linde (1988) shows how mitigated

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statements in the cockpit by crew members to the captain can result in airline disasters. The National Transportation Safety Board has recognized this asymmetry and has recommended ‘assertiveness training’ for subordinates. In other words, even in situations where deference is discouraged, the tendency persists. At Genesis, openly debating optimal ways of getting the job done were semiotic actions that reflected and responded to the high-stakes manufacturing environment in Silicon Valley at the time, where survival depended on maintaining quality and meeting deadlines. These actions were congruent with many of the workers’ own claims in my interviews with them that they felt compelled to catch one another’s mistakes, for the customer had to be satisfied. The shift to an asymmetrical positioning, signaled by the supervisor through a series of directives in both events, demonstrates the linguistic and interactional choices that participants in a high-tech setting have for displaying these relationships. Rather than falling back on the use of person reference terms in Vietnamese to constitute hierarchical positioning, the supervisor selected other means to assert his authority, such as the nuanced use of directives, the strategic placement of the vocative, and a summary announcement of the solution at the end of the activity. Further, just as the supervisor’s concession to the assistant’s idea offered in the form of a directive served a dual function of worker-solidarity and hierarchy, his use of the vocative to get the assistant’s attention before issuing directives also served a dual function. One function was an effort to achieve a hierarchical stance: The vocative was meant to delay the assistant’s actions so that he would appear to be obeying his supervisor’s orders. We saw that this effort failed. At the same time, in addressing the assistant by his given name, he may have also signaled a kind of solidarity. This case of a Vietnamese speaker using the addressee’s name without an accompanying kinship or status term may be an indication of adaptation to a new culture in which co-workers are on a first name basis and are encouraged to work in teams. Luong (1990) has shown that such adaptations are slowly taking place among same-age Vietnamese immigrants: Friends, siblings, and same-generation cousins close in age today do not infrequently use nicknames and personal names instead of other personreferring forms . . . in order to structure informal interactions in solidarity relations. (1990: 120-121) In sum, in spite of a cultural and linguistic disposition for hierarchical positioning, the workers’ actions as co-equal partners predominated within the boundaries of high-stakes problem-solving. Yet, signals of asymmetrical positioning managed to leak through these boundaries. The ever-present and

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sustained negotiation of participants’ positions vis-à-vis each other during talk-in-interaction has deep roots in Vietnamese society and language. Indeed, all human interaction entails negotiation of social identities and relationships – evaluative accents – though the resources for displaying them may differ from one language group to another and across contexts. As we noted in Chapter 2, not all supervisor-subordinate relationships ran so smoothly. In some cases, a worker reported occasionally avoiding contact with the supervisor and instead turned to co-workers for assistance on tasks.

Teams and communicative practices at work In Chapter 2, I noted briefly that there has been considerable research showing the importance of teamwork and communication in the American workplace. Many firms have moved toward flattening hierarchical structures and focusing on self-managed teams. Case studies have demonstrated that these team structures outperform groups working under traditional supervision (cf. Pfeffer, 1998; Wilms et al., 1994). Teamwork effectiveness does not occur automatically. Employees have to believe that they really do have decision-making powers; if they distrust the employer’s motives, the incentive to make teams function effectively will fall apart (cf. Darrah, 1996). Management and employees are successful in this flattened structure if they develop good coordination, cooperation, and communication strategies (Engeström, 2008; Engeström & Middleton, 1998a; see also Hart-Landsberg & Reder, 1995; Pfeffer, 1998). In this chapter, we looked to see who was ‘qualified’ to say what as teams of workers accomplished their tasks. Under what conditions was Trân qualified to disagree with his supervisor? And under what circumstances was his supervisor willing to accept it? To understand these processes, I examined teamwork with a close-up lens and traced the moment-by-moment talk and actions of workers. The choices they made during task activities are better understood if we review the larger organizational structure at Genesis. How the workers chose to constitute themselves was shaped to a large degree by the company ethos. To survive, the company had to own leading-edge equipment, do a fast turn-around on a job, and provide excellent quality control. Employees had a large stake in the success of the firm. The company president chose to have them organize their own groups and to use their shared language and cultural understandings for the good of the company. (In the next chapter, we shall find that not all the managers at Genesis subscribed to this view.) This analysis revealed the intensity of effort required to reach the common goal of doing the task well and meeting the deadline. Social organization, including the strategic use of more than one language,

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was designed to achieve the timely completion of the circuit board assembly. Workers’ actions and words reflected a shared goal of keeping the company afloat, thereby keeping themselves employed. Because the management in this company supported the judicious use of one’s native language along with English, the workers in this activity were free to make strategic use of both English and Vietnamese to get the work done. Like this company, other workplaces in this country are rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, and this diversity is likely to increase. The examination of multiple-language use at work can increase our understanding about this phenomenon and challenge some of the assumptions regarding human potential within the immigrant and minority workforce. Even though the number of employees with diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds is increasing, and more of them are working in companies who have implemented team structures, little research on this phenomenon is available (for two notable exceptions, see Goldstein, 1997 and Roberts et al., 1992). The trend in most workplace research is to assume that working immigrants and language minorities lack strong communication and literacy skills. Hence, studies focus almost exclusively on learning English as the path to improved work performance.5 The freedom to access one’s own native language and culture is of further importance because of the tight knit between talk that does professional work and talk that does social work. Goldstein (1997) describes how Portuguese is used as a way to develop and maintain friendships and mutual assistance among women working on the production floor of a manufacturing company in Toronto. In the present study, the human need to create social alignments during tasks functioned as a lubricant to the machinery of high-quality and expeditious work practice. To summarize, we have seen how team members drew on multiple linguistic and interactional resources to display their social relationships within the constraints of problem-solving activities at work. Languages have different forms of expression to signal social relationships, such as personreference systems, honorific alternants and politeness terms. The two Vietnamese employees at Genesis were making a number of decisions in the course of their talk. Their choices spanned two languages and cultures – one which tends to prefer overt manifestations of asymmetrical social roles and another which tends to prefer covering up the asymmetries. Within each culture there is a range of forms of expression and strategic language use; taken together, the choices are immense. The workers could have summoned aspects of their Vietnamese linguistic repertoire for these displays (e.g. by using the rich person-reference system). They also had recourse to western norms (e.g. by displaying ostensible solidarity in work and action while suppressing the overt display of status differences through forms of address) for

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the establishment of these relationships. They were also free to accept or contest others’ words since ‘every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation’ (Vološinov, 1973: 105; emphasis in the original). The assembly floor became multiaccentual: sites of creative construction of meaning and action. As a result, participants potentially could co-construct new ways of accomplishing tasks. Erickson (2004), in a perceptive volume considering the importance of analyzing on-the-ground communication and its relation to broader social processes, tells us that ‘talk in interaction may or may not constitute transformative social action but it is always tactical, local social action. Sometimes such action involves small-scale innovation that is no less novel for its being subtle and situated . . .’ (2004: 174). In the next chapter, I move from the local social action described in this chapter to examine the effect of wider relations of power on work and communicative practices at Genesis. Specifically, I explore the process through which the company became certified by an international qualitycontrol system and examine participants’ subtle and situated responses to the system.

Notes (1) Cooke’s (1968) volume examines person reference in Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese. Examples of other languages having complex systems of address are Lao (Enfield, 2007), Korean (Howell, 1968), Japanese (Bachnik & Quinn, 1994) and Yoruba (Oyetade, 1995). For some interesting examples of social-relationship indicators in various languages, see Anderson and Keenan (1985). This chapter is an expanded version of the analysis reported in Kleifgen (2001). (2) These Vietnamese address terms are routinized titles such that the meanings of kinship terms such as ông, anh, or em are not taken literally. Thus, ông could be translated roughly as Mr. (P. Nguyen, 1995). (3) It is notable that two Vietnamese informants who supplied and verified the translations, inserted the personal pronoun, we, parenthetically into the English translation, underscoring their interpretation that the proposed action is assumed by the speaker to be a conjoint one. (4) For a detailed report of this phase of the research, see Kleifgen and Le (2007). I wish to acknowledge Trang Le’s essential role in this section’s analysis. Clearly, videotaping natural interaction in a similar situation would have been an ideal way to compare language use in the two settings. But, my observations of work at a software design company did not yield comparable data, as the software engineers generally worked alone at their computers. Given these circumstances, using an elicitation format provided an initial comparison. (5) This is not to dismiss the importance of English language and literacy in the workplace. The workers in this study often referred to their need for these skills: spoken English as the crucial lingua franca in the company and written English for interpretation of manuals, graphs, blueprints and memos.

5 Globalizing Forces and Quality-Control Certification

The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine – and determine from within, so to speak – the structure of an utterance. Vološinov, 1973: 86 And since...discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is a struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized. Foucault, 1984: 110

I returned to Genesis in 1999 for a second period of research in order to focus on the changes the company had been undergoing in quality control. When I arrived, Jim, the director of engineering services, explained why the company, which was already highly regarded for the quality of its production, was compelled to make further changes in quality control: The quality generated from this factory has always been good quality. Any system can be improved, but the majority of our customers just like doing work here. … But we realized that we would no longer be competitive unless we were ISO 9002 certified, also. Because if we weren’t, and the other guy across the street basically had the same capability except that he was 9002 certified, he would get the job. In this chapter, I examine the ISO certification process at Genesis. In doing so, I shift the focus from local to global power relations and their effect on workers’ task activities. And, although talk and other semiotic resources remain in play in this chapter, I now pay special attention to the written mode – printed and digital texts and other inscriptions that people make 99

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and use. We will see that the ISO system, requiring the production and use of quality-control documents, was in effect a regime of power, a result of globalization, which would affect every manager and employee across all divisions in the company. After presenting a brief background on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) system, I situate my investigation of the company’s certification process in the research on social studies of literacy. Next, I lay out how the people at Genesis worked towards becoming ISO 9002 certified. In particular, I give an account of the massive ISO-related documentation that they had to produce, thus making the paperwork a parallel production alongside the manufacturing of circuit boards. Then, I describe the endogenous communicative practices of several employees, whose actions complemented and sometimes contested the ISO procedures. I argue that the creation of an international quality-control system in a milieu of globalized competition gives ISO documents and procedures broad international status as an ‘official literacy’, thereby wielding immense power over working lives. At the same time, people in this milieu have the potential to adapt to and even challenge larger centers of power through their endogenous communicative practices (Foucault, 1980; Vološinov, 1973). This chapter, then, illuminates another layer in workplace social action – the global – and the mutual influence of local and global in communicative practices at work.

Background: What is ISO 9002 Certification? ISO certification, entailing the preparation and use of quality-control documents, which are posted strategically throughout a company for management and employees to follow, is an increasingly common practice in the 21st century workplace. ISO is a non-governmental organization, which at this writing has a membership of over 160 countries. According to the organization’s website (ISO, n.d.), the acronym was standardized across languages as ISO, based on the Greek isos, meaning ‘equal’. ISO’s history stretches back to the 1940s, when a variety of international standards, such as International Standard Book Numbering (ISBN), began to be developed. The idea of an international quality assurance program for business and industry began to be conceived in the 1980s. Since then, many companies have ‘voluntarily’ adopted this program, known generically as ISO 9000, which is a family of standards. Within this family, IS0 9002 was developed in 1994 for organizations that manufacture and/or service products; it was the set of standards used at Genesis at the time of this study.1 Today, ISO registration has spread across

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diverse work environments including automotive, health care, aerospace, telecommunications, construction, chemical and other industries (cf. Peach, 2003). ISO has also moved into new fields such as environmental regulation (aka ISO 14000), food safety (aka ISO 22000), and corporate social responsibility (aka ISO 26000) (ISO, n.d.; Johnson, 2000; Murphy & Yates, 2009). Being ISO 9002 certified represents a kind of ‘good housekeeping seal of approval’ for services and the manufacture of products, and the pressure on companies to participate, especially in this era of globalization, is intense. The self-proclaimed goal of ISO is to eliminate quality standard variation across countries and create a universal way to develop and test products and perform services. It is claimed that, by adopting this quality assurance system, the world will be unified ‘into a single marketplace in which goods, services, and capital can move freely from one country to another’ (Johnson, 1997: 138). In particular, high tech work environments must produce and continuously update an enormous amount of documentation associated with ISO 9002. The quality-control documentation is assumed to give employees shared understandings with regard to procedures for accomplishing a task. Employees are expected to follow the posted procedures in order to make the work consistent and the product devoid of defects. With a few exceptions discussed below, there is very little in the research literature describing a company’s ISO certification process and the implementation of these procedures. I returned to Genesis to do just that with two overarching questions in mind: How are these documents made and used in actual practice? What is the relationship between these standardized procedures and individual and group communicative practices in a context of the wider world of commerce enveloping these practices?

Power Relations: Social Studies of Literacy To address the network of relations among ‘official’ documents, various literacy practices and power, I took into account perspectives offered in social studies of literacy (Barton, 2000; Gee, 1990, 2000; Heath, 1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Street, 1984, 1995, 2000, 2003), in which literacy is understood as a social practice rather than a discrete set of skills. Street, in reviewing the research foci of New Literacy Studies (NLS), notes that literacy practices also entail privileging some forms of literacy over others. Street makes this point as follows: NLS … takes nothing for granted with respect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematizing what counts

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as literacy at any time and place and asking ‘whose literacies’ are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant. (2003, para. 2) The theme of power relations has become an important focus in social studies of literacy. Scholars often draw on the ideas of Bourdieu (1977, 1991), who introduced the concept of linguistic capital – the ability to wield power or authority with ways of speaking that are valued and respected by the interlocutor. They also rely on the work of Foucault (1977, 1978), who described the relationship between power and knowledge circulating through all levels of society. I have in this work called attention to the thinking of Vološinov (1973) because he, like Bourdieu, conceptualizes discourse as a venue for expressing power relations in variant ways with different groups, and, like Foucault, gives local knowledge and practice their rightful place in any study of social interaction. Yet, as I have argued in the first chapter, Vološinov’s conceptualization of power relations extends these ideas further. His approach moves from these more abstract portrayals of discourse/power closer to the level of linguistic practice, or ‘utterance’, where interlocutors take up and interpret language. He writes, ‘any utterance – the finished, written utterance not excepted – makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn’ (1973: 72). He characterizes verbal interactions (spoken and written) as organized across a range of social situations and notes that people have a repertoire of ‘genres’, which they evoke according to these situations. These interactions are always embedded in a web of power relations. Yet, he argues, because language is dialogic, it can become the locus for challenging asymmetries of power. Vološinov himself takes up the challenge, when he critiques the efforts of the ‘ruling classes’ to claim a unified set of meanings. He challenges this orthodoxy by introducing the concept of the multiaccentual sign, thus moving both spoken and written language into the realm of social interaction where moments of consent or contestation unfold in diverse and complex ways. His notion of meaning or theme (tema) is contextual, thus not given or permanent. It is worth reiterating his words: Every sign, as we know, is a construct between socially organized persons in the process of their interaction. Therefore, the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction. When these forms change, so does sign. And it should be one of the tasks of the study of ideologies to trace this social life of the verbal sign. (1973: 21; emphasis in the original) As we shall see, the employees at Genesis confronted and responded to a set of regulating texts in the ISO 9002 system that were considered

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immutable. Vološinov’s call to examine the ‘social life of the verbal sign’ is taken up again in this chapter to examine ‘the social organization of the participants’ coping with the realities of an external quality-control regime brought into a manufacturing plant. The analysis in this chapter builds on the body of research on social studies of literacy in the workplace (e.g. Belfiore et al., 2004; Gowen, 1992; HartLandsberg & Reder, 1995; Hull, 1997; Iedema & Scheeres, 2003; Jackson, 2000; Katz, 2001; Scribner & Sachs, 1990). Hull’s (1997) edited volume of studies on literacy programs and practices in the workplace challenges reductionist conceptions of workplace literacy skills and explores what literacy means in increasingly complex work environments. In one contribution to this work, Jolliffe (1997) notes the pervasiveness of quality assurance procedures in contemporary US work sites. In Belfiore and colleagues’ edited volume on literacies in the Canadian workplace (Belfiore et al., 2004), quality standards and documentation are addressed in greater depth; the authors analyze data collected in four different settings, all of which engage with various quality-control issues: a food processing plant, a textile factory, a tourist hotel and a metal parts manufacturer. Folinsbee’s (2004) chapter in particular describes the different interpretations of ISO documentation by managers and workers in the textile factory. In this chapter, I take up further examination of literacy practices that are prescribed by document-driven quality control. In this workplace, I ask ‘what counts as literacy’ in an ethos of highly structured quality-control procedures, which are designed to maintain a disciplined workforce and take priority over individuals’ practices.

Collecting Data a Second Time Around The ISO 9002 certification process was just in the planning stage during my first period of data collection at Genesis. In conducting observations and interviews this second time around, I focused on ISO 9002 documentation and attendant communicative practices. I obtained copies of the company’s ISO documents, forms and procedures produced by the engineering and document control departments; I also collected lists, graphs and coded inscriptions devised by employees on the manufacturing floor. Most importantly, I interviewed employees and observed their quality-control activities in engineering, document control and on the assembly floor in order to see texts being used and made in practice. I present the analysis in two sections. The first reveals the magnitude of the ISO documentation process and implementation, and the second lays out employees’ own endogenous practices as they relate to quality control and thus to the ISO system adopted by the company.

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Becoming ISO-Certified at Genesis, Inc. The first part of the analysis relates to how the quality-control system was developed and implemented in the company and the relationship between ISO documentation, company documents and actual performance on the manufacturing floor. In the words of originators of this qualitycontrol system, to be ISO-certified means that a manufacturing firm such as Genesis ‘documents what it does and does what it documents’. In order to become certified, Genesis was required to define explicitly the manufacturing process and make the procedures consistent thereby becoming part of an internationally sanctioned quality system.

Getting started Implementing ISO 9002 in this company called for the development of a parallel ‘product’ (ISO documentation) requiring separate offices and a contingent of employees and consultants whose job was to focus entirely on preparing, disseminating and storing ISO documents. Two rooms in the plant were set aside solely for document control. During the first period of my work with Genesis, the company had contracted with an ISO auditing firm, which assists companies in earning ISO recognition. But after two years, the president terminated the company’s association with the firm, when he ascertained that the relationship was not meeting expectations. Later, Derek, a consultant who specialized in ISO audits, was hired to work with management and employees to develop the documentation systems at every level, a process that stretched over an additional two years. For example, Derek worked with groups performing certain functions on the manufacturing floor and helped them write the procedures. He also trained Ned, the manufacturing manager, to carry out internal audits as a preparation for the official ISO audits that would take place later, as companies are generally internally audited every six months and externally audited every two years to see whether ISO guidelines are being followed. Once the system was in place, outside auditors, authorized ‘interpreters’ of the official literacy, arrived to visit the various departments at Genesis, where they asked employees to describe or show how they performed certain tasks – a kind of oral ‘pop quiz’. The auditors then compared employee responses with the documentation and flow charts posted in their departments. At the end of their review, the auditors wrote a report giving their approval of the system, and the company became ISO-certified. After this initial certification process, the primary function of the document control offices shifted to the control of documentation accompanying

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every new assembly job, and this documentation would also be subject to the ISO guidelines. This new documentation activity at Genesis resonates with suggestions by Reich (1992) that one major category of work emerging in the new world economy is ‘symbolic-analytic services’ – information delivered in multiple forms and modalities. The document control department was characterized by another feature related to the globalized economy: multilingualism. Whereas the language in the documentation was exclusively English, talk in these offices could be heard in multiple languages. Like employees on the assembly floor, those in document control came from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds, and their talk shifted between codes as the situation arose in their preparation of documents for the assembly process. Developing the system, keeping documents in a centralized area, and going through a procedure by which work orders were issued to the manufacturing floor – all these time-consuming actions were meant to make the work of the employees charged with building and inspecting the circuit boards proceed smoothly and flawlessly.

A brief anatomy of ISO documentation Based on the categories of requirements defined by ISO, the company developed a Quality Manual made up of interrelated documents covering the company’s overall quality policy, the procedures followed to meet the ISO requirements and work instructions detailing how work is to be carried out in every department. These all had to be approved under the signature of the appropriate person in charge. ISO requirements were organized into several categories – the company’s quality policy, management responsibility, document control, product identification and traceability, process control, inspection of testing, corrective action and control of quality records, among others. The Table of Contents of the company’s ISO Quality Manual displaying the full range of requirement categories is reproduced in Figure 5.1. Next, copies of ISO operating procedures for every department were placed on the manufacturing floor. The documentation was supposed to be a ‘true statement of practice’ (Merrill, 1997: 237). Customers visiting the manufacturing floor would be invited to notice manuals of ISO-approved instructions that had been fastened to posts at strategic locations with the expectation that employees might refer to them easily. ISO procedures for machine operation and maintenance were also within immediate reach in pockets taped to the machines as illustrated in Figure 5.2. Large banners and signs were posted in key areas in order to guide employees to attain, according to the message on one sign, ‘perfect quality (no defects)’ in circuit board assembly. For example, operators of SMT

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GENESIS QUALITY MANUAL

PAGE 1 OF 29

CONTENTS

PAGE

CONTENTS

1

RE-ISSUE AND AMENDMENT INFORMATION

2

AMENDMENT RECORD

3

DISTRIBUTION RECORD

4

COMPANY QUALITY POLICY

5

4.1

MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITY

6-7

4.2

QUALITY SYSTEM

8-9

4.3

CONTRACT REVIEW

10

4.5

DOCUMENT AND DATA CONTROL

11

4.6/4.7

PURCHASING AND PURCHASER SUPPLIED MATERIAL

12-13

4.8

PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION AND TRACEABILITY

14

4.9

PROCESS CONTROL

15

4.10

INSPECTION OF TESTING

16

4.11

CONTROL OF INSPECTION, MEASURING AND TEST EQUIPMENT

17

4.12

INSPECTION AND TEST STATUS

18

4.13

CONTROL OF NON-CONFORMING PRODUCT

19

4.14

CORRECTIVE AND PREVENTIVE ACTION

20

4.15

HANDLING, STORAGE, PACKAGING, PRESERVATION AND DELIVERY

21

4.16

CONTROL OF QUALITY RECORDS

22

4.17

INTERNAL QUALITY AUDITS

23

4.18

TRAINING

24

4.19

SERVICE

25

4.20

STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES

26

INDEX TO QUALITY PROCEDURES

Figure 5.1 Genesis quality-control manual: Table of contents

27-29

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Figure 5.2 Procedures for operation and maintenance affixed to machines

machines were reminded of the criteria for completing the assembly without mistakes (see Figure 5.3). In addition to these broad guidelines, ISO specifies that procedures must be developed for completing every assembly job requested by a customer. When a customer sent Genesis a kit (recall that the kit is the set of circuit boards and components to be assembled for a customer) and documents pertaining to a job, these arrived first in the materials-receiving department for review, and subsequently to the document control department for audit. Sinh, a Vietnamese-English bilingual, was a process engineer in document control who audited all the materials that had been put together by the receiving department. He explained: The receiving people receive the packages – the kits – from customers. From there they match them with the documentation that they receive

Figure 5.3 Sign in the Surface Mount Technology (SMT) department

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with the kits. After that, they will have a big list [for each kit] in order to expedite all the parts from the stock room and package it into one work order. Part of Sinh’s audit of the package entailed ‘translating’ customers’ different ways of laying out materials and procedures into a common company ‘language’ for the Manufacturing Process Instructions. He also created tools specific to each job such as stencils to be used for the screen print process. Once prepared, all documents then had to be organized into folders by Sinh’s associate in document control, Cam, a recently hired young woman from the Vietnamese American community. Cam prepared the master folder, which contained a work-order documentation form, identifying everything the customer provided as well as company-made documents. Customersupplied documents included a number of items. As we learned in the first two chapters, a key document was the Bill of Materials (BOM), containing the list of all the components that would be loaded onto the circuit board, their values and their locations on the board. The folder also contained a blueprint for assembly and a diskette of database files. Along with these customer-supplied documents, the folder held two key company-made documents: the manufacturing flow chart, which tells any worker who opens the folder the sequence of actions that are to be performed on this board, and a set of specific instructions telling equipment operators and teams working at various other stations exactly what to do. (The company-designed documents are discussed in greater detail in the following section.) Besides the master folder, Cam produced four other copies in color-coded folders corresponding to the different departments so that they could begin preparing for their specific upcoming tasks. The master folder was reviewed once more by Sinh before it began its ‘travels’ around the manufacturing floor with the circuit boards as they proceeded from one part of the assembly to another, beginning with the materials-receiving station and continuing to the machine-assembly of components onto the boards, ‘prepping’ those components that had to be placed by hand, then on to hand placement, machine- or hand-soldering, ‘washing’ completed boards and testing – all the way to final inspection before shipment to the customer. Let us look at an example of a master folder that was developed for a job requested by a customer, in which the circuit boards were to be assembled using SMT machines. The document control team created the master folder with all approved documentation for the kit. The work order documentation sheet was placed in a pocket on the left side of the folder, and all back-up documentation was placed on the right side. Once he reviewed all the details,

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Sinh released the folder (and the kit) to the floor. In this case, the folder was taken by Cam to the SMT department to begin the work. This department prepared the computerized machines and did a test run of one board (the ‘first article’) before running the entire job and sending it to the next department (see Chapter 2). After each step in the process was completed, the corresponding sheet was moved from the right to the left side of the folder, which became the history side. Thus, when a manufacturing group in each department got the master folder, the workers knew that everything yet to be executed was on the right. Sometimes changes were made along the way by the customer or a company employee. Sinh told me that one of the most vexing parts of the documentation process was dealing with customers who were making constant changes in their circuit boards, sometimes in the middle of production. He said, ‘The other day a customer gave me one change in the morning, one at lunch time, and another one in the afternoon. … Three different BOMs in one day!’ These changes were reflected in the master folder, with all old versions of documents moved to the pocket on the history side. Figure 5.4 presents a schematic version of the assembly

Figure 5.4 SMT assembly process from beginning to end

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process (in this case using SMT machines) as the circuit boards being built travel with the master folder around the assembly floor.

Keeping records Another major aspect of ISO certification required that records of everything done related to quality had to be preserved. In accordance with ISO specifications, the company’s quality manual states, ‘Genesis provides procedures for the systematic retention, storage, maintenance and disposition of quality records. Records shall be retained in order to demonstrate objectively that the required quality of products and systems has been achieved’ (Genesis, n.d., Section 4.16: 22). Document records included all ISO documents, all posted instructions and all company-designed procedures outside the realm of ISO. If special instructions had to be prepared at some time during the manufacturing process, Cam would take copies from document control to the floor, insert them into the master and color-coded folders corresponding to each department and let the supervisors know of the changes. She explained that these procedures were important records to have ready when ‘ISO comes in to check’. She added that even email communications about this job had to be kept in the master folder. The archiving of these records was a full-time and expensive task. Given the volume of paperwork produced within the ISO framework, the company began to run out of space for storage. Management was forced to consider the possibility that records would have to be archived off-site or be digitized – another costly measure. In sum, the process of becoming and remaining ISOcertified was arduous and exacting. Moreover, the investment in new office space, new personnel and massive ongoing documentation and storage – in effect, a parallel operation dedicated to quality control – implied an additional burden of investment and labor for a small business such as Genesis. In light of the varieties and multiple layers of ISO-related texts prepared according to policy, procedures and specific work instructions, it can be appropriately argued that this complex system should be characterized, not as a single official literacy, but as a set of literacies that dominated quality practice.

Discourse of the official literacies With the new documents in place, these precise norms (normalization; Foucault, 1977), ‘officially sanctioned’ by ISO, were imposed at all levels from management to employees. In spite of the complexity of texts involved, people at Genesis often talked about ISO as if it were a unitary phenomenon. When I pointed to signs and folders strategically posted around the assembly floor and asked about them, workers’ shorthand responses generally were

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‘That’s ISO’. ISO appeared to be in the air the company breathed, with ISOrelated documents, signs and other inscriptions cloaking the walls, posts, and machines. Indeed, many employees and people in management reported that they were feeling more secure about consistency in practice under this regime. Their words reflected a central theme in ISO discourse, which states that, in producing the manual you ‘say what you do’ and while working on the floor you ‘do what you say’ (Merrill, 1997). Ned, the manufacturing manager who had seen the shift in quality-control procedures at Genesis and had become the company’s ISO liaison, described it to me this way: When you were here before, did we have a drawing? Yeah, maybe somewhere around here, maybe it’s out in the back, maybe it’s on the floor, somewhere. There was no procedure to find out if that’s the most recent drawing, matching with our quotation and the Bill of Materials. [Now], each kit that we produce has its own documents. It’s kept track of so that, for each kit that’s being released, you make sure that the documents are proper, that you have the right Bill of Materials and right drawing. In the days that you were here, we’d get that stuff and just kinda throw it out on the floor, sometimes in a folder, sometimes not. And it would stay on the floor. Well, what happened is we produced the products wrong because [the customer] had changed specs and we didn’t have a procedure for [tracking] that. Ned painted a before-and-after sketch of Genesis, which embraced the belief that, with ISO documents in place and visible to workers, the texts would keep everyone on track. Employees’ comments to me around quality generally held to this script. In the words of one worker, ‘since everybody reads the same thing, you assume that everybody would go in the same direction; that nobody would go off on a tangent’. In addition, any mistake found by one employee during the assembly process was to be written up on a checklist called a Discrepant Material Report (DMR) and handed to the supervisor. These all became part of the record. In other words, the ISO regime and its surrounding discourse fomented an ethos of self-surveillance, calling to mind Bentham’s Panopticon, which Foucault (1977) used as a metaphor for power networks that become decentralized, thereby controlling and ‘naturalizing’ certain practices at all levels of the institution. Foucault’s thinking aligns with Vološinov’s (1929/1973) characterization of verbal interaction organized in a network of hierarchical relations such that those who are marginalized often conform to authoritative language. These notions, in turn, resonate with Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of linguistic markets, environments in which people adapt their verbal signs to conform to expectations.

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The linguistic ‘products’ of ISO are naturalized in the workplace environment. But let us remember that, for Vološinov, people can also reinterpret and contest these official literacies. While the discourse around ISO at Genesis was generally accepting, there were differences of opinion on how the system should be executed. Danilo, of Filipino background, who was recently hired as manufacturing manager for the second and third (evening) shifts, complained that the company’s ISO discipline did not go far enough. Taking something akin to a Fordist perspective, which assumes that workers’ tasks should be repetitive and mechanically followed with no input in the process, he asserted that his job was ‘to manage that labor resource’ by making some changes. First, he disagreed with the company philosophy of teams and cross-training. In his words, it was bad policy to have ‘people on the floor learn so many things interconnected with their function,’ which did not directly ‘affect the performance towards revenue’. In short, he did not approve of workers learning multiple skills; he thought that different individuals should be trained for specific functions matching specific ISO procedures in order to avoid mistakes on the assembly line. He especially disapproved of ‘boom boxes’ with ‘ethnic’ music playing at different workstations; for him, these boom boxes took up space in the work area and had no direct effect on revenue. Second, he thought the company should streamline the ISO process by reducing the number of steps in assembling the circuit boards. Above all, he disapproved of workers doing problem-solving, for it meant that the company was too dependent on ‘particular people on the floor. … Everyone should be expendable’. Danilo asserted that these ‘deficiencies’ were ‘some of the things on my agenda that I will be changing’. Responding to Danilo’s views, Charlie, as company president, demurred. He offered a perspective on the implementation of ISO that implies a more complex relationship between written standards and human activity around them. His words illustrate the dilemma posed by the introduction of fixed written prescriptions into a field of resourceful activity where human intuition is valued: ISO has to be flexible enough not to be restrictive – not go into so much detail that it becomes like the bed of Procrustes. We want a kind of flexibility. We don’t want something that will leave no room for individuality. Front line employees did not always follow the ISO procedures to the letter. Some deliberately covered for their fellow workers’ mistakes. Recall Fatima, the quality-control inspector for the second assembly department whom we

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A memo from Ned, July 28th Information ISO Audit Scheduled August 22, 2000 Please review your quality procedures Update training records

Figure 5.5 Posted memo announcing ISO audit

met in Chapter 2; she continued the practice of repairing others’ soldering errors herself, which was a violation of ISO rules for process control, and declined to write up DMRs for these errors, also an ISO requirement. There were other employees at Genesis who appeared content to offer little more than a passing nod to the quality assurance standards, and some even mused about whether the all the procedures were ‘worth the trouble’, especially given pressures to meet customer deadlines. Hung, lead employee in second assembly, for example, argued ‘quality control should be 100% accurate, but I’m not sure how ISO can help’. Several employees I spoke to admitted that their attention to the ISO regime frequently faded into the background in the course of their work. A confirmation of this came in the form of an announcement on a small sign that Ned, in his role as manufacturing manager, posted near the building entrance a few days before an up-coming audit, with a reminder of the need for ISO compliance. The text from the sign is reproduced from my fieldnotes in Figure 5.5. In sum, ISO discourse was taken up differently by different individuals. Talk around the ‘official literacies’ in the ISO system could be a source of commonality, disagreement, tensions and different interpretations. Yet with all this discourse on the floor and elsewhere about control and standards, the ISO procedures could also be occasions for creativity and initiative. We turn now to employees who responded to the ISO standards by designing their own ways of measuring quality in the course of their work.

Endogenous Quality-Control Practices Was it enough for the employees simply to follow these official written guidelines and procedures that were now in place? According to Harrington

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and Mathers (1997), the broad categories specified in ISO 9002 (as seen in the table of contents in Figure 5.1) lay out what should be done without prescribing how it should be done. The how is reported here as we turn to the second analysis – the development of parallel endogenous literacy practices by people in various departments, particularly on the manufacturing floor. Their practices complemented the ISO procedures or existed outside them, and they sometimes led to modification of these procedures. Some people designed additional quality records and shared them with colleagues; others recommended improvements in existing documents; in the process, new knowledge about quality was constructed. Some examples are provided here.

Engineering services Jim, whose words introduce this chapter, discussed his way of enhancing quality control in the company. I first met Jim, an African American employee who had been with the company from its early days, when he was manager of the testing department; by the second period of my research, he had been promoted to director of engineering services (where document control was housed). Recall that engineers in document control audited all documentation provided by the customer. In addition, they prepared the folders with instructions. For every job, the engineers developed a manufacturing flow chart, a kind of map of the board’s travel around the floor, and a set of Manufacturing Process Instructions (MPIs). The MPI tells employees at every station exactly what to do. Jim described his unique contributions to this quality-control process. He developed a ‘history log’ attached to the last page of the MPI. This was a novel twist in the MPI process. Every change that was made to the manufacturing instructions along the way was logged by hand into the history log, including the date, the revision and a description of the change. In Jim’s words, ‘Any operator or any supervisor can flip to the last page of this MPI and see this little history log’. Another of his contributions was to photograph components using a digital camera and to include these images with arrows pointing precisely to placement on the board, which visually clarified the instructions in the MPIs. He explained: For me to explain in the MPI, it would take me a paragraph or two, before I got enough words out to explain what I’m talking about here, and still nobody on the floor would understand it. I don’t need words if I put this picture in the MPI. Then the operator says, ‘Oh, I know, that’s a bridge’. We started this, and we also started doing more with pictures to interface with customers.

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We will see the impact of Jim’s use of multimodal resources such as digital photographs, arrows and other iconic signs on the instruction forms for assembly workers in another example of local literacy practices below. Jim also developed a way to make people on the floor aware of the weekly inspection reports. In the past, these inspection reports had been regularly posted on walls near their stations. These were summary charts based on daily inspection records submitted by every department, which were then collated by engineering and represented in graphical form to show each department the percentage of error-free products made during the course of a week. During my first series of observations at Genesis, I was curious about these charts but could not get an explanation for their purpose from the workers on the floor. For example, when I asked Fatima – whose job was quality control in the second assembly department – about them, she shrugged her shoulders and replied that they were probably for the customers who visited the floor. In fact, these were ‘inscriptions of accountability’ (Ueno, 2000) designed for both workers and customers. While company customers did look to them for evidence of quality production, workers had not paid attention to these measures of quality. A few years later, when Jim took over as director of engineering, he walked around the floor asking people about the reports that were posted near them. His experience was similar to mine: most pleaded ignorance. Jim described to me how he approached one machine operator to ask about the charts: I pointed and I said, ‘Do you know what these charts mean?’ He says, ‘What charts?’ This guy has been working here for four years; he turns around and he looks up at the thing and says ‘Yeah those have always been up there’. He didn’t even know they’d been changing [from week to week]. Jim explained that, in order to make the workers aware of the quality reports, he instituted short weekly sessions, which he called ‘pow-wows’, with all the department supervisors to discuss the results for that week. He documented these meetings and distributed these to all the managers. For these sessions, he said that he often invited special guests and gave out prizes. Word got around quickly. ‘They come out of the meeting just telling some of the others. “boy, he gave out these prizes”’. As a consequence of these actions, there was enhanced awareness of the posted quality reports. During the second period of observations for this study, when I again asked workers about these charts, most people knew that they were the weekly quality numbers. Maritza, the supervisor of the prep and touch-up areas, pointed out, ‘They’re “quality”, and here’s one [pointing to the wall] showing a

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monthly report’. Sharing information about quality, not simply posting it, appeared to contribute to favorable outcomes. Jim pulled out recent inspection reports showing over 95% error-free products since the weekly sessions began. He attributed this change to the heightened awareness of quality goals on the floor. In short, Jim inserted his own creative impress into the quality-control process.

On the assembly floor We now turn to the work of employees on the manufacturing floor itself. In Chapter 2, we were introduced to Nati, the Spanish-English bilingual who was lead employee in the prepping department. Workers in this group had two principal tasks: to prepare components in various ways before they were installed by hand on circuit boards, and to place masking tape in strategic locations on the loaded boards before they were sent through a wave-solder machine. The first thing in the morning, Nati set up the day’s work for her team by removing all the components from the kit and organizing them according to the information provided in the BOM. When I observed her work one such morning, she noticed that a label on one packet of components had a number crossed out and another written over it. She checked the BOM to verify the actual number and also compared that against the blueprint of the board. She announced her assessment: ‘It has to be a four’. She arranged the components in hollowed-out organizer trays, each with a handwritten strip of paper indicating the part number and location on the board. This procedure conformed to an ISO requirement that ‘The material identity is to be maintained throughout the manufacturing process’ (Genesis, n.d., Section 4.8: 3). The employees in her department had to be able to follow documents showing them where the masking tape and components were to be placed. Nati was responsible for interpreting the documents and directing her team in the prepping process. I watched her pick up a yellow folder corresponding to her department (which had been brought down from document control by Cam) and look for any special instructions on how to handle parts. Holding up a component called the Light Emitting Diode (LED), she commented, ‘The LED right here has to be prepped at a certain height with a special tool’. She made sure that her team was apprised of this and other special instructions. But Nati, who had been an employee in Genesis for more than fifteen years, did more than organize materials according to the MPIs in her folder. She devised her own personal system to keep track of the work orders that moved through her department (see Figure 5.6). During a morning break, she took me aside to show me a small spiral notebook: ‘Le

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Prep List

Date Name Work order Total boards

_____ _____ _____ _____

Figure 5.6 Nati’s personal prep department records

voy a mostrar mi documentación personal’ (I’m going to show you my personal record keeping). In essence, her system was a simple daily log that she maintained separately from the data placed in the folders; she entered these notes once her department had completed its portion of the job. At the end of each day, Nati, if asked, was able to refresh her memory by referring to her own records showing which work orders (kits) had been completed. In her words: Say this kit right here that’s gonna go out to loading. I get the name of the board, like I did here. I’ll write the name of the company, the work order, how many boards. When they [her assistants] finish, they say, ‘we sent so many to loading’. Then I mark it down. This way . . . anybody comes and asks me, ‘how many boards?’ I can [tell them]. When I asked Nati why there were no official forms issued by the management for her record keeping, she replied: It’s because it’s just for my purposes. I just wanna make sure I know what’s coming in and going out of my area. So at the end of the day, they’ll come to me and sometimes they’ll ask, ‘Nati, did this kit go out already?’ Then I’ll look back and ‘Yeah, it’s out of my area’. Nati’s careful assessment of materials that came to her department and meticulous record keeping were recognized by her superiors. In the words of her boss, Ned, ‘Nati is really an engineer. She’s doing engineer’s work’. As with Nati’s endogenous literacy practices on the manufacturing floor, the case of another employee, Lola, who worked in the surface-mount assembly department, also illustrates the importance of such localized literacy practices. Lola was a bilingual Spanish-English speaker, who had worked previously in the final inspection department and recently moved to her current position in SMT quality control. She told me that in her new

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department she used English almost exclusively because both her supervisor (Du) and a majority of her co-workers spoke Vietnamese and English. She inspected the first article, which, as we learned in Chapter 2, is the first board produced in a series, and compared the board and its components with all the documentation supplied in the folder. Charlie told me that he valued Lola’s work highly, because she was consistent in her quality inspections. In the following, Lola described to me the procedure for first article inspection (see Figure 5.7): Do you know, like, my day starts out I come and check what they’re gonna be running. I have to get myself organized, too. Because it’s hard once you get into this first article. I have to go over here and check in the machine. I find out what [boards] we’re running. I go make copies [of the documentation]. I usually make my copies like this because the girls need their folders, and I use this for my references. I stamp ‘copy’. This is the bill of materials from here (begins pointing), my special instructions I need, and this is the drawing from here. This is the board that I’m doing now. She commented on why the word copy must be stamped on a duplicate document: ‘[The stamped document] becomes mine. That’s my property.’ She was aware of the ISO requirement that all paperwork be tracked and labeled. When I asked what happened to her copies after she finished her inspection, she responded that they would be filed in the archives along with the other forms in the folder. Surrounded by documents, drawings, and numerical inscriptions, she was ready to inspect the first article. In Lola’s view, the ISO quality-control system did not make her an automaton. Rather, she asserted that she was improving on it. She told me that she relished finding discrepancies in the folder and asserting her

Figure 5.7 Lola organizing documents and artifacts she uses to inspect the first article

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Figure 5.8 Jim’s photographic image on the MPI in the folder

authority within this seemingly rigid system. Here is an example, where she paid close attention to a specific section of the MPI in the folder. In this section, the instructions included an image photographed by Jim in engineering to show the required location on the board for a key component – a tuner with its cable – using the digital photography discussed above. For Jim, this image would be an obvious indication of how to proceed (see Figure 5.8). However, Lola had noticed that the location in question, labeled J3, where the tuner was to be attached, was not included in the customer’s BOM, yet it was in the company’s MPI. As quality inspector, Lola’s job was to notice these discrepancies. She explained what the difficulty was and how she would proceed: If I have any questions, which I do in this case, this is J3. We always load this part – I know from past experience. But for some reason it [the part in question] is not on the BOM at all, but they’re giving me this like they want it [loaded], and there’s a picture here telling me that they’re going to use it; this is where it is (pointing to the image). So I don’t know what happened, I have to talk to Du. That’s the only question. … It could be a documentation error; it could be they’re not going to put it on this particular board, so I have to ask.

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Lola called her supervisor to her station to ask for an interpretation of the instructions. By turning to him, she was following a procedure in the company quality manual regarding quality inspection: ‘Do not proceed to inspection until all attributes of the product requirements … are clearly understood’ (Genesis, n.d., Section 5.3: 4.1). Du explained to her that the component could be loaded only after the circuit board was ‘washed’ (recall that a machine cleaned the circuit boards after the components had been loaded). That is, it would be hand placed and soldered on the board towards the end of the production process. With the MPI and first article (first board assembled) in front of them, they went over these procedures. Here is their interaction: 1

Lola:

2 3 4 5 6

Du:

7

8

J3 . . . (pointing to location on . . . I know it’s a through-hole, circuit board) but because they have a special instruction on it, I wanted to ask you why it’s not on the Bill of Materials. J3. . .OK that’s in the module (pointing to the image on the MPI) . . . OK now it’s combined (tracing the sequence of and it’s one part. instructions) Yeah, one unit. It’s what they call the tuner. This one is on the last step. (pointing to where the cable will be attached later) So we put everything in. (waving hand across board) Including this side. (pointing to other side of circuit board) So whenever they put in (pointing to location) this one, the last one, (pointing to image on they will drop this one in. the MPI)

9

Lola:

This location – J3.

10

Du:

This one.

11

If we drop it in, we cannot clean [the board] up.

(pointing to location on board) (pointing to image of cable shown on the MPI)

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12 13

After, we will hand solder, and not clean it. This one . . . we cannot put it in the water.

121

(pointing to image of cable)

In this interaction, Lola and Du are drawing on available semiotic resources to come to an understanding of proper assembly of the circuit board – talk, gesture, image, text. With Du looking on, Lola first highlights the problem source on the circuit board (line 1). Then, taking the MPI, she points to the image of the tuner and cable and traces the instructions for connecting one end of the cable to the tuner (lines 2–3). Du explains that all the other components must be loaded on both sides of the board and ‘washed’ before the tuner and its cable can be placed (lines 4–8). Together, through talk and gestures, they link the cable in the image with the location on the board where it is to be soldered (lines 9–10). Du points out again the need to solder the tuner and cable after the board is cleaned, because the tuner cannot be immersed in water (lines 11–13). In short, Lola and Du participated in a learning moment, where knowledge from distinct perspectives was pooled: In a text-centric world, the MPI should be the last ‘word’. But, as we have seen, even with the inclusion of image technology, the MPI was better interpreted through social interaction surrounding how to produce a product flawlessly. Lola now gained new knowledge – ‘cables-can’t-get-wet’ – and came away from her consultation with Du with a clearer interpretation of the instructions. She completed her inspection with this assessment: ‘We’re done, this board’s beautiful, solder’s good, every part’s there, except for J3’ (which would be added later in the assembly process). After clarifying doubts regarding the digitized photograph of the cable in the instructions, she reported the experience back to Jim, director of engineering, who, as a result, further refined his design of the MPIs. Jim told me that he relied on Lola and others for their feedback on his own quality efforts: ‘She checks us all out. … She helps us explain [in the MPIs] more carefully’. During inspection, Lola occasionally found that one item on the Bill of Materials did not match what was on the first completed board. In that case, she developed a DMR for the supervisor so that the program manager and the customer could resolve the error (see DMR form in Figure 5.9). The DMR was an official ISO form; as we have seen, other employees were supposed to follow this procedure whenever they came across non-conforming material. Besides following (and assessing) the MPI, however, Lola developed her own set of procedures for inspecting the board. She constructed a grid made up of color-coded quality items. She attributed a particular meaning for each

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Discrepant Material Report Genesis Customer:

Genesis W/O

Assembly #

Customer DMR #

Genesis RMA:

MRB Member in Charge

Customer PO #

Inspected at Genesis:

Item

Part Number

Qty

DMR # Rev Lot (Kit) Quantity Customer Svc. Rep Date of Inspection:

DESCRIPTION OF NON-CONFORMANCE

RESPONSIBILITY CODE _ Genesis _ Customer _ Material Supplier MRB Meeting Date: Notes taken by: Disposition

MRB NOTES

Is car required? YES or NO (circle one) If yes CAR # MANUFACTURING QUALITY ENGINEERING

OTHER

Disposition: 1. Rework 2. Return to Vendor 3. Use As Is 4. Scrap 5. Other (Describe) Distribution ( ) Quality Manager ( ) Customer Svc Rep ( ) Customer ( ) Material Supplier

Figure 5.9 Discrepant Material Report (DMR) form

color and applied these symbolic meanings as she examined the board and the corresponding documents in the folder (see Figure 5.10). As she continued to examine the board described in the example above, she ticked off the coded sheet that she developed. She explained: And you know it really helps because a couple of times we had things come back from the customer, or there’s a question down the line and I say ‘Heck no, this is what we had, this is what we received’, because I write down what the part was. I put the code on there. This is what we received, and I’m sure we didn’t miss it because I wrote it, we checked it, my first article’s documented, the serial number’s here. We’re clear, we’re OK. That’s my back up. She said that she designed this coding method because it helped her to examine the product systematically and in greater detail than would be possible using only the standard ISO procedures. This personalized coding system was used more broadly, as well. Her co-workers learned how to

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Figure 5.10 Lola using her personalized coding system to inspect the first article

interpret the color-coding on her grid – another semiotic resource to enhance communication about quality. For example, they knew that Lola had assigned a green mark to refer to a space on the board that should be left ‘open’; that is, no component was to be placed in that location up to this point. Lola’s yellow mark was to be interpreted as components to be loaded using surface mount technology, and her pink mark referred to components that would be loaded using Through-Hole technology. In her own words: And it also helps for here [on the manufacturing floor]. These people are looking and go ‘Lola, how many parts are we, uh, are these supposed to be missing?’ And I don’t have time to talk to them, I say, ‘Here’, I say, ‘take this’. The green represents ‘should be open’. Yellow is the surface mount for the top, the pink is a through-hole, and it helps them, too. This is just something that I made up. She reported that her grid had inspired her colleagues to look at the circuit boards and corresponding folders with a more critical eye. She continued: It’s a little time-consuming but you know it really helps, because they all come to me for questions and it helps them. Also it helps them to start looking through this when they weren’t looking through it before. And I show them how. It’s an aid for everybody. In brief, Lola’s work had repercussions throughout the company. Personnel in engineering took up her suggestions for improving the ISO-mandated manufacturing instructions, and her department associates relied on her guidance and coding system to resolve their doubts about loading the circuit board. In effect, this individually designed set of representations mediated new knowledge – learning – on the job.

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The endogenous literacy practices constructed by Jim, Nati and Lola are examples of dynamic, contextualized human activities that served as a corrective to a static, context-free ISO system. ISO 9002, the ‘official’ system of literacies for quality control in the manufacturing world, had become the measure of quality par excellence to the company’s auditors, present and future customers and, ultimately, consumers. Yet the effectiveness of the system depended on the professional literacies, including multimodal signs such as lists, photographs, arrows and color codes, developed by people in their everyday work activities.

Discussion: The Social Life of the Verbal Sign Many companies publicize their ISO certification with statements such as ‘This Company is ISO 9002 Certified’ displayed prominently over the entrance to their buildings, on their web sites, on product packages or in other public venues. These companies make a major investment of time and funds to get to this point. The management at Genesis determined that the massive effort to document quality control under the ISO system was necessary for survival in a competitive market. The company was aware of the need for continuous quality improvement, and, although it was capable of developing its own updated quality-control system, the people there made the decision to adopt the official literacies around quality in the corporate world. They felt compelled to use the ISO framework for improvement as a way to retain customers and attract new ones. This chapter establishes just how costly, laborious, and time consuming a small company’s commitment to ISO certification had been.2 A parallel operation had to be created to produce and distribute a complex web of inscriptions for all to follow. This entailed a collective course of action, involving participants ranging from the president and outside consultants to employees in management and in divisions and departments throughout the company, including those on the manufacturing floor. Throughout this process, there was an assumption – one that was made explicit in ISO official statements and often echoed by management and employees – that the constructed texts would contain all the information needed (‘say what you do and do what you say’) so that they could be interpreted universally, without regard to any specific context. In effect, the discourse of ISO assumes that certification is based on the making of foolproof documentation, which, if strictly adhered to, will result in manufacturing perfection. The claim that all meaning can be found ‘in the text’ calls to mind a body of research developed decades ago by Goody and Watt (1963), Olson (1977), Ong (1982) and others regarding what it means to be

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literate. As Street (1995) has argued, such research advanced an ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. Literacy in this view is decontextualized, neutral, universal. It requires the precise encoding of meaning – so that meaning becomes as fixed as possible – and the faithful decoding of that meaning. The strong form of this model was later softened but still holds out the ideal of autonomy (c.f. Goody, 1987; Olson, 1989). For example, Olson, in an article addressing the authority ascribed to textbooks in education, states: These attempts to make meanings explicit reflect the more general attempt to create texts which are autonomous, texts which say what they mean and mean precisely, neither more nor less than, what they say. Although never completely successful, these texts are an attempt to construct statements in which the literal meaning is an adequate reflection of the speaker’s intentions, and which, as a result, preserve their meanings across speakers and situations. (1989: 237; emphasis in the original)3 As with textbook writers, it is precisely the intent of the ISO regime to construct quality-control texts that ‘preserve their meanings across speakers and situations’. We saw that an autonomous view of literacy entered into the vocabulary of Genesis members at various levels when ISO standards were adopted. Although there were different responses to the standards – with one member taking up an extreme version, wishing to press the regimen further to ‘error-proof’ the workers, and a few others minimally conforming to the written procedures – for the most part, the official discourse of the ISO dominating the globalized manufacturing world permeated the company’s documents and much of the talk around quality. The notion that texts hold meaning – or that they represent an attempt to hold meaning – without regard to the contexts in which they are used is contested by Vološinov, who asserts that utterance and context are inextricably intertwined: Any utterance, no matter how weighty and complete in and of itself, is only a moment in the continuous process of verbal communication. But that continuous process of verbal communication is, in turn, itself only a moment in the continuous, all-inclusive, generative process of a given social collective. An important problem arises in this regard: the study of the connection between concrete verbal interaction and the extra-verbal situation – both the immediate situation and through it the broader situation. The forms this connection takes are different, and different factors in a situation may, in association with this or that form, take on different meanings. …

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Verbal communication can never be understood outside of this connection with a concrete situation. (1973: 95; emphasis in the original) Similarly, social studies of literacy have shown that the interpretation of texts depends on a range of factors, including participants’ relative social positions, the specific texts involved and the particular settings for their use. For example, Ueno (2000) shows how ISO’s ‘invariant information’ used for quality control in a Japanese manufacturing plant is in fact transformed by workers across various divisions. Thus, to use Vološinov’s language, although there may be attempts to impose official literacies that are ‘eternal’ and ‘uniaccentual’, participants may respond to these forms differently, in ‘multiaccentual’ ways. These multiaccentual responses are highlighted even more vividly in the second part of the analysis, where workers were seen to position themselves across shifting fields of compliance with ISO guidelines and local, onthe-ground readings. The highly structured quality-control procedures were originally designed to take priority over individuals’ practices, which could be laden with flaws. Yet, in this company, there were people who began developing their own texts to accommodate this universal standard to their local contingencies, co-opting the official language of ISO to fashion their own micro quality systems (see also Farrell, 2003). Lankshear (1997: 76) points out what can happen when workers gain meta-level understanding of the discourse of quality control: They are able to ‘analyse the purposes and processes of quality control and, by application of this analysis, contribute to enhancing and transforming quality-control practices – including, specifically, the literacy components of quality control’. Their understanding also can lead to promotion or other job opportunities and even to resistance and critique of the official literacies. We saw that an innovative use of the digital camera by the director of engineering provided images to elaborate the textual instructions required by ISO that were given to employees on the manufacturing floor. Further, his weekly inspection reports did not languish on the walls; rather, the integration of these documents in a context of human interaction gave them life and meaning. And, on the floor, what appeared at first blush to be a mundane list written by the lead employee in the prepping department turned out to be a local improvisation proudly designed for personal recordkeeping and line of defense so that the supervisor and others in her department could learn, if they needed to, what actions were performed and when. Similarly, a personalized coding system worked not only for the quality inspector and her colleagues in the SMT department, but also for upper level managers, who filed her coding for each work order and, based on her suggestions, developed new ways of constructing work-order documentation.

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In effect, the non-ISO sanctioned texts, images and color-codes elaborated by employees were not simply inscriptions that gathered dust. Instead, they were part of the social interaction in which they were embedded and interpreted (cf. Lemke, 1995) and through which the participants jointly worked toward the goal of producing quality products. These localized literacy practices developed as a result of conversations with others across departments and organizational levels around a course of action in the manufacturing process – just the kind of flexibility and creativity that ISO requirements stifle (Seddon, 2000). When these company members discussed their roles in quality control, they acknowledged the role of the ISO regime, while at the same time they spoke of leaving their own imprint on quality. This chapter has not been about humans caught in a dichotomous powerstruggle, with people at Genesis either complying as mere cogs in a qualitycontrol wheel or resisting the ISO regime. Instead, the analysis shows company members ignoring or invoking the power of ISO in some situations and invoking local power and agency in others. The story of endogenous communicative practices by Genesis employees provides a ray of hope for those who have come across the somewhat pessimistic accounts of work conditions in Gee et al. (1996) and others, who describe workplaces caught up in the ‘new work order’, where competition, innovation and globalization put workers in situations requiring that they perform more work for less pay and ultimately become expendable. Workplace studies have been conducted most often in large company settings, where, indeed, such actions may be company policy. However, there is a danger in assuming similar employer– employee relationships in all firms; in particular, further studies should examine practices in small businesses, where most wage earners in the United States – and around the world (c.f. Kondo, 1990) – spend their working day. If there is pessimism to be had in this account, it is not about workers as victims of management; the managers were largely reasonable and the employees were generally creative and empowered to develop better ways of getting work accomplished. It is an account of a small company competing in a capitalist economy and feeling the pressure to adopt the official literacies around quality, which were established in the context of a highly competitive globalized market. Having come to an understanding of the ISO ‘language game’ (Wittgenstein, 1958), the members took up the regime in a mixture of consenting to, coping with and contesting its authority. The resulting mix of communicative practices, developed within the context of a raised quality-consciousness, represented their efforts to position themselves as creative contributors to the assembling of a product without flaws. There is optimism here: it is that the verbal sign had a social life in Genesis, enabling

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participants to respond to the official literacies in variant ways, including constructing new inscriptions that became mediating tools for enhancing the quality of the work. As such, these practices served as a corrective to the putative monologic function projected by a bureaucratic and procrustean standardization regime. This chapter has highlighted workers’ uses of endogenous literacy practices in which various participants creatively re-shaped and sometimes circumvented the ISO system – the official set of literacies related to quality control. In prior chapters, we examined employees’ spoken language and gestural choices along with other signs in their concerted actions. We saw that disruptions in the routine became the site for understanding the ways in which communicative practices are intricately tied to their contexts and reliant on a range of at-hand semiotic means. In the next chapter, we reconsider all these practices, this time recapitulating ways in which semiotic resources served as mediating tools for sharing knowledge and affording learning on the job.

Notes (1) The ISO 9002 standard was later replaced by ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 9001:2008. Murphy and Yates (2009) provide an update on the history, current workings, and impact of ISO standards on global markets. (2) For industry critiques of ISO, see Brown (1994) and Seddon (2000). (3) See de Castell et al.’s (1989) response to claims by Olsen about the discursive power of school textbooks.

6 Learning-in-Practice

Four eyes are better than two eyes Machine Operator, Genesis Inc.

In this chapter, I take stock of learning at Genesis, Inc. My overarching goal in this book has been to understand how working people of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds learned as they drew on an array of available semiotic resources and mediating tools in order to accomplish their tasks. Assuming learning to be integral to all forms of practice, I have endeavored to cast light on learning in moment-by-moment courses of action at work. I made the case in the second chapter that learning at work is seldom studied in small business settings, where most people around the world make their living; it was time for a study of learning in such a setting. I also argued that a high-tech business, where technologies and customer requirements are constantly changing, would be an optimal site for locating learning within people’s everyday work activities. Bringing together these two notions with the contemporary reality of mobility – flows of goods, services, people and multilingual communicative practices within and across national borders, we have in Genesis a snapshot of learning in today’s globalized world. In Chapters 2 through 5, we observed moments of learning and knowledge creation. Indeed, analyses of the data showed that learning occurred when workers engaged in concerted action and made strategic and flexible use of various modes of communication, including their home languages (and attendant cultural knowledge) as well as English, the lingua franca. I noticed learning especially during instances in which they faced collective problems or challenges that invited a solution or creative design. Here, I want to consider more closely the educative aspects of work in this high tech company. I preface this examination by discussing ways in which situated learning is theorized. As promised in the introduction to this book, I highlight the thinking of contemporary scholar, Jean Lave and show how her work complements Vološinov’s theory of language and ideology. 129

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Building on these theoretical moorings, I then address the learning and knowledge question by revisiting three ways of learning that I observed most closely – showing other workers how to perform a task optimally, collaborating on solving problems in the assembly and devising innovative procedures for production and evaluation. Along the way, the terms ‘teach’ and ‘instruct’ are used figuratively, as those who mentored others in various ways did not think about themselves as teachers and did not actually carry out formal instruction as we have come to understand the term. I consider these moments of learning and knowledge creation through the lenses of multimodality (of which multilingualism is an often neglected integral part) and local and global relations of power – recurrent themes in this project. In addressing power relations, I describe learning from the inside-out – examining how value-laden language and actions are accomplished within the company and then exploring the wider relations of power that impact work practices at Genesis, though they are simultaneous and interrelated. I conclude with a discussion of the role of multilingualism juxtaposed against the presence of an English-only ideology in the US with its potential detrimental impact on the use of multiple linguistic resources for learning at work.

Theorizing Situated Learning at Work At the beginning of this book, I pointed out that the ways of learning to be examined here would not include formal instructional events since there were no on-the-job training programs or English language or literacy courses available at Genesis. After all, as both management and employees often reminded me, such formal instructional programs were beyond this small company’s means. Individual employees interested in supplementing their prior schooling with an additional certificate or a college degree did so on their own time and paying out of pocket. Indeed, many company employees did attend formal classes at educational institutions after work hours. For example, Hung, the Vietnamese immigrant who was lead of the second assembly department, was studying automotive engineering as well as Chinese. Randy, a machine operator who also emigrated from Vietnam, took ESL classes in the evenings. I chose to conduct research at Genesis precisely because I wanted to understand ways in which learning happens through language and other semiotic means in the midst of work practice. Thus, theorizing learning at work within a setting such as Genesis would have to account for a conception of the educative experience that is broader than conventional ‘schooling’. There is a body of educational research that attempts to mark a contrast between ‘informal learning’ and ‘formal learning’ or ‘schooling’. Marsick and

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Watkins (1990) state that informal learning ‘includes incidental learning, may occur in institutions, but it is not typically classroom-based or highly structured, and control of learning rests primarily in the hands of the learner’ (1990: 12). Other terms have been used to characterize this concept, including ‘self-directed learning’, ‘tacit knowing’, ‘non-formal learning’ and ‘outof-school learning’, among others (Marsick & Watkins, 2001). However, as Colley et al. (2002) point out, the discourses surrounding these terms are limiting. They state that, however carefully we try to define these terms and distinguish among them, they can only be understood in relation to the particular contexts under consideration. And Varenne (2009a) warns us against a rigid informal–formal learning dichotomy because it does not take into account the complexity of learning moments within any given context such as ‘any attempt to find deliberation in family life or the unplanned in school’ (2009a: 16). A different line of research on ‘situated learning’1 (e.g. Chaiklin & Lave, 1993; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Wertsch, 1985) is a more attractive theoretical point of departure for our purposes because it emphasizes the fact that cognitive activity is constructed socially and occurs in all kinds of situations both inside and outside formal schooling. As anthropologist Jean Lave has shown in studies of everyday practice, ‘situated activity always involves changes in knowledge and action’ and these changes ‘are central to what we mean by learning’ (Lave, 1993: 5). Lave’s early work on Vai literacy practices in Liberia (1977, 1985) was contemporary with Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s scholarship (Scribner & Cole, 1973, 1978, 1981), which challenged assumptions that privilege school-based learning over everyday learning. Lave argues that social theory can account for learning in ways that conventional psychological theory misses, as illustrated in her study of everyday arithmetic problem-solving by people shopping for groceries or dieting (Lave, 1988). A view of learning as a kind of disembodied cognitive function dissolves when we understand learning as a practice. She writes: Knowledge and learning will be found distributed throughout the complex structure of persons-acting-in-setting. They cannot be pinned down to the head of the individual or to assigned tasks or to external tools or to the environment, but lie instead in the relations among them. (1993: 9) In an influential volume written with the aim to re-conceptualize learning, Lave and her co-author Etienne Wenger (1991) describe the learning taking place within any given social group or community as a process of

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participation that moves gradually from being ‘legitimately peripheral’ to being fully engaged in what they call a community of practice, ‘a set of relations among persons, activity and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice’ (1991: 98). Their argument is fleshed out in a set of case studies of new members (midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics), who, through apprenticeship, become full-fledged participants. For Lave and Wenger, learning means ‘increasing participation in communities of practice’ (1991: 49), and this happens through social interaction. Lave and Wenger also make clear that situated learning in communities of practice entails power relations because people-learning, as they attain newly acquired knowledge, re-position themselves vis-à-vis other members. Learning introduces different interests, knowledge and viewpoints into members’ concerted actions, and these may bring about interdependencies, disagreements and conflicts. Learning in this complexity of relations also involves a process of change in identity formation as members (attempt to) gain full rights of participation in the group. Moreover, for Lave and Wenger, learning is integral to ‘generative social practice in the lived-in world’ (1991: 35). That is, learning in communities of practice takes place in a relationship with wider social structures. They say, We think it is important to consider how shared cultural systems of meaning and political-economic structuring are interrelated, in general and as they help to coconstitute learning in communities of practice. (1991: 54) In short, Lave and Wenger state that learning, power relations, identity work and the world are mutually constitutive.2 Important connections can be drawn between a practice theory of learning proposed by Lave and others and Vološinov’s theory of social interaction and ideological expression. First, both take human social interaction as the locus of their analyses. For Lave, the ‘unit of analysis is the whole person in action, acting with the settings of that activity’ (1988: 17). Vološinov states that the central thesis in MPL is ‘the productive role and social nature of the utterance’ (1973: xv; emphasis in the original). For him, meaning (tema) is constructed in context at the level of the utterance, for ‘meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener. … Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning’ (1973: 102– 103). But neither Lave nor Vološinov limits the examination of meaningmaking to the local interactional context alone. Thus, a second shared

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perspective is that both scholars locate their work in the relationship between on-the-ground dyadic interaction and macro social structures. Recall that Vološinov’s great contribution is to illuminate the ideological expression of language in all socially situated discourse. He says, ‘I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong’ (1973: 86), and ‘In the vicissitudes of the word are the vicissitudes of the society of word-users’ (1973: 157). A third area of concurrence is that both challenge certain ideologies about human behavior and cognition. Just as Lave argues against contemporary ‘functionalist psychological theory’ (1988: 24), which decontextualizes learning, and instead argues for a socially and culturally specific cognitive theory (cognition in practice), Vološinov rejects a prevailing ideology of his time – subjectivism, which locates meaning in the individual psyche – because it severs the human mind from the social world of communication. Vološinov instead embraces ‘a theory of mind in society’ (Dore & Dorval, 1990: 78). With these connections in mind, let us re-visit learning-in-practice at Genesis by examining, first, ways of learning that unfold in moments of interaction and, second, the place of learning embedded in relations of power – all the while bearing in mind that these are inextricably intertwined.

Ways of Knowing and Learning at Work In Chapter 3, I pointed out that communicative practices in many work settings share some family resemblances, including orientation to tasks or goals, constraints regarding what communicative contributions are allowable, and shared inferential frameworks (Drew & Heritage, 1992a; Levinson, 1992). There are, of course, considerable differences across these settings. One difference relates to distribution of knowledge among participants and the way knowledge is used to accomplish the goal of the interaction. In situations such as doctor-patient interactions (Tannen & Wallat, 1987), calls for emergency assistance (Zimmerman, 1992; Heath, 1992) and job interviews (Button, 1992), where a professional representative of an institution interacts with a lay person, talk is characterized by an asymmetrical distribution of knowledge between participants and attendant relations of power. Studies akin to Lave and Wenger’s, examining apprenticeships in a wide range of occupations such as navigation (Hutchins, 1993), midwifery (Jordan, 1989), stockroom work (Scribner & Sachs, 1990) and archaeology (Goodwin, 1994), where there is a more knowledgeable participant (cf. Vygotsky, 1987), show similar asymmetrical relationships. For example, Goodwin’s research describes the work of an archaeologist and her student assistant in the field.

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The archaeologist corrects the student’s way of observing an excavated dirt wall; the student is learning how to see with an archaeologist’s eye. Goodwin notes that, even in interactions where knowledge about something may be unevenly distributed, all participants contribute to the task in some way. In his words, archaeological work entails the integration of ‘talk, writing, tools, and distributed cognition as two parties collaborate to inscribe events they see in the earth onto paper’ (1994: 612). In studies of complex work settings such as Genesis, where tasks are carried out in groups and where the work is technologically mediated, participants are seen to bring shared knowledge as well as complementary cognitive contributions to the activity. Shared knowledge is not something that remains statically in the background during an action at work. Rather, the mutually understood elements, those considered typical in the experience of the actors, are signaled in the temporally unfolding exchanges and gestures tied to artifacts in the surround. In short, the participants use what Garfinkel calls the ‘documentary method’ to select from alternative courses of interpretation. Garfinkel states that the documentary method ‘consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document of,’ as ‘pointing to,’ as ‘standing in behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern’ (Garfinkel, 1967/1984: 78). As with shared knowledge, complementary or distributed knowledge is also signaled in social interaction. Workers’ complementary contributions to tasks are illustrated in a series of publications that examine one technologically mediated workplace, where researchers describe the multi-activity responsibilities of employees in an airport ramp and operations (Ops) room (C. Goodwin, 1996; M.H. Goodwin, 1996; Goodwin & Goodwin, 1996; Suchman, 1993). In the Ops room, the employees’ job is to coordinate the ground operations for the airline – baggage transfer, contact with arriving and departing planes, management of statistics. Personnel in the Ops room work with a variety of electronic tools, such as computers, radios and monitors connected to TV cameras outside the gates. In his analysis, Charles Goodwin shows how workers’ talk-in-action and their perceptions of what is on the monitors mutually inform each other. Their vision is ‘something that is artfully crafted within an endogenous community of competent practitioners’ (1996: 383). These studies not only demonstrate the application of shared and/or differential distribution of knowledge but they also confirm Lave’s argument that learning is present in everyday routines and actions in the lived in world – not in some decontextualized problem-solving exercise. So, where was learning located at Genesis? Well, everywhere. During my fieldwork, I observed shared and distributed knowledge and learning-ininteraction taking place both within and around routine tasks on the assembly floor as well as in the engineering and document control offices. In this chapter, I focus on three recurrent learning practices that I observed, without

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claiming in any way that these are exhaustive or even exclusive of one another: I saw novice workers learning routine tasks from more knowledgeable members. I also noticed experienced team members building on shared and distributed knowledge to figure out together ways of fixing mistakes and breakdowns. Finally, I saw people devising knowledge artifacts: innovative procedures for production and evaluation. Let me review each of these in turn.

Learning a new task I begin with the first of these, learning how to perform a new task, an activity not unlike the learning in situ cases that Lave and Wenger describe, in which novices are inducted into a community of skilled practitioners through legitimate peripheral participation, that is, through socially situated learning at the periphery, gradually moving towards full participation. The practice of instructing an employee on a new task was not uncommon at Genesis partly because the company often provided a mix of technologies to customers (such as a combination of Through-Hole and surface-mount assembly on the same circuit board), which meant that people skilled in one kind of assembly process occasionally were called upon to learn how to work in another. As Sandra, the supervisor in the Through-Hole assembly department mused, ‘every [customer] is different and the machines are changing constantly [so] you have to learn on the job continually’. In addition, as Charlie, the company president had explained, he had to accept a fact of life at Genesis: employee turnover. Some employees, once having acquired new knowledge, took jobs in larger companies that could pay workers higher salaries. Hence, with these turnovers, a continuous flow of entry-level workers went through a process of gradual engagement in ways of doing work at Genesis. In Chapter 2, I provided an example of this apprenticeship, describing how a novice worker, Trai, was engaged in learning-by-doing under the guidance of his seasoned supervisor, Sandra. Trai was learning how to operate a Through-Hole assembly machine to load DIP packages on a circuit board. When the DIPs jammed during the loading process, Trai turned to Sandra for advice on how to proceed. She demonstrated the procedure and gradually gave him greater control of the operation until he gained expertise at the task. A crucial test of workers’ machine-operating skills is their ability to respond appropriately to breakdowns (Shaiken, 1998). Sandra noted that Trai had the qualities the company needed in a full-fledged member because he was very careful and responsible, [showed] attention to detail and a willingness to problem-solve, [and] asked why something was different or unusual about a task or board – in case there might be a mistake.

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Sandra told me that not all her experiences in inducting employees into new task activities were equally smooth. For instance, she had faced conflicts with one of the older male employees in her department, who, by her lights, resented having a woman as his supervisor: ‘The younger ones are more willing to take my directives than the older ones’. She also noted that, just the day before our conversation, a worker in another department had been let go because he was not willing to ‘take guidance’ and develop the skills and responsibilities expected of him. These stories provide evidence that novices’ ‘peripheral participation’ must be ‘legitimate’ as Lave and Wenger describe. I discuss the power relations implied here in the next section. Sandra’s own work history at Genesis provides a good example of how learning on the job opened up career path possibilities within the company. She had worked her way ‘up the ladder’ by learning from other members. Recall that she began as an auditing clerk and was promoted to machine operator and then programmer before she was made a department supervisor. In her words, ‘the best way to prepare . . . for my current job was by starting at the bottom’. She went on to give an example of how her learning experiences helped her along the way. She talked about building on her auditing knowledge as she learned to become a programmer: In auditing, you learn about the components of a circuit board and learn to match the [electrical] values with the color code. When [as programmer] you begin to set up the computer program, you need to know if the value for a component written on the customer’s Bill of Materials matches the actual value on the component. If the value on the Bill of Materials doesn’t correspond to the color of the component, then you have to talk to the customer to resolve the problem. Craig, who was Sandra’s manager during the first period of this study, told me a similar story about his own learning. In an interview, he explained that his management approach evolved based on his prior experience working and learning on the assembly floor: I try to be somewhat hands-on; [you need to] have some idea of the physical nature of a job, so that you get an idea of what production people go through to get the job done. We all started at the bottom. My approach has evolved [based] on the different jobs that I did. In sum, it was not uncommon to find workers developing competencies in new tasks on the assembly floor; having become skilled in a particular

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task at Genesis did not mean that their learning came to an end. In the words of Lave and Wenger, ‘everyone can to some degree be considered a ‘newcomer’ to the future of a changing community’ (1991: 117). I observed ‘experienced’ employees in perpetual states of ‘becoming’ in terms of knowledge change no matter how long they had been in the firm. Even within so-called routine tasks, new challenges presented themselves as diverse customer requirements, advanced assembly machines and the miniaturization of components induced learning and adaptation. It is to these experienced workers learning in concerted action that we now turn.

Learning at the interstices of routines Upon my arrival to the company and after spending a short while on the assembly floor, my first impressions went something like the following: ‘These people at Genesis really know what they are doing. These are complex, high-tech routines, yet they execute their tasks quickly and effortlessly.’ But as I soon discovered and as we have seen throughout these pages, the ‘routines’ were often disrupted at different stages in the assembly process. It was at these interstices – moments such as assembly machine breakdowns, discovery of errors in the documentation or faulty circuit boards – where I focused more intensively on learning. Opportunities for me to observe knowledge display and learning came primarily during conjoint problem-solving among teams of employees. Through close analysis of these events, I documented the sequential actions of workers in an environment enveloped in resources for meaning-making – talk, gestures, sounds, images and inscriptions. In Chapter 3, we observed Du and Trân’s simultaneous discovery of a problem with the assembly (signaled by the sound of the robotic arm’s mis-pick) and their methodical use of this semiotic resource, their strategic use of Vietnamese and English, gestures and other resources to take each other to successive areas of focus and action (pick and placement locations, the feeder tape, the feeder and stopper block, the computer screen and the geography of the circuit board) and to compare and contest each other’s assessments until, with combined knowhow, they repaired the breakdown. We saw a second problem-solving event immediately following the first, beginning with Trân’s discovery of a socketplacement problem. With the circuit board in hand, he used talk and gestural practices to confer with Du about the best way to handle the sockets’ encroachments on surrounding spaces that had been programmed for other components. Their talk and actions made visible (to them and to us) their shared knowledge and expertise as experienced practitioners. First, they had

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common understandings regarding the numerical expressions they uttered, which invoked different meanings depending on the ‘sites of engagement’ they were focusing on during the task activity (Scollon & Scollon, 2004: 12; see also Scollon, 2001). For example, the workers uttered numbers for the counting of objects (components placed on the circuit board) and actions (movements of the robotic arm during a pick and placement sequence), and for measuring distance or pitch (between components on a feeder tape). The utterances, combined with other signs such as workers’ gestural behaviors and use of numerical inscriptions in both events, demonstrated their shared understandings and signaled their alignments to these sites of engagement as the troubleshooting ensued. The numbers uttered were indexed to several other sites of engagement that provided frameworks for shared interpretation: examining stopper block settings, indicating component sizes, noting placement direction and announcing x/y axis and z-value. They also shared historically constituted experiences about the constraints of the SMT machine, such as its inability to accommodate certain circuit board and component sizes or pitch values, as well as recurrent customer errors in programming, design and paperwork. Finally, their talk and other actions demonstrated shared knowledge about the relationships among the various functions and elements of the machine, such as the link between the circuit board, components and feeders they were manipulating and the machine’s robotic arm and computer. These workers’ skilled actions around computerized machines belie arguments made as far back as the 1970s that automation in the workplace was leading to a degeneration of work skills, particularly in the area of craft work. According to writers such as Braverman (1974) and Zimbalist (1979), workers who operate computerized machinery need fewer skills than workers who use traditional machines because the modern machine presumably performs most of the tasks that were formerly carried out by a skilled worker. In their view, the worker was becoming an ‘unthinking’ adjunct to a ‘thinking’ machine. Noble (1979) noted that a traditional machine operator was once able to ‘transmit his skills and purpose to the machine by means of cranks, levers, and handles. Feedback is achieved through hands, ears, and eyes’ (1979: 21). In contrast, a worker operating a computerized machine has little more to do than push a button. Because of the complexity of modern machinery, Noble claimed, workers in automated work settings have little knowledge about the workings of the machines; rather, such knowledge is concentrated in the minds of engineers and programmers. This de-skilling view of work became widespread. But, around the last decade of the 20th century, this notion began to be challenged. Bailey (1989), based on case studies of two manufacturing and two service industries,

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pointed out that these workplaces had to give up the de-skilling strategies that some pursued in the 1970s. Firms whose management attempted to transfer all skills to machines soon realized that skilled workers could not be replaced easily by machines. Taking a similar perspective, Levine (1995) cited an article in the Economist, which describes the fiasco in a ‘high-technology’ General Motors plant in Detroit, Michigan, where robots were to take over most of the tasks previously carried out by humans. These robots turned out to be highly unreliable in that they started to dismember each other, smash the Cadillacs they were assembling, spew paint all over manufacturing floor, and install the wrong equipment. Levine stated that the company had to give up its plans for full automation and return to the approach of hiring skilled workers to operate high-tech machinery. Neurologist Antonio Damasio argues eloquently in Decartes’ Error (1994) that the workings of the mind are understood only by taking into account the integrated organism of body and brain immersed in the physical and social environment, for ‘nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it’ (1994: 128; see also Damasio, 1999). The workers at Genesis show us that it takes thinking humans’ embodied actions on a so-called ‘thinking’ machine to accomplish a task. We observed closely their participation in a particular cognitive activity – conjoint problem-solving in a hightech environment. They collaboratively deployed semiotic resources, including multiple languages, and assembled their shared and distributed knowledge to learn something new, such as adapting machine parts creatively to accommodate special component sizes, reshaping and giving new meaning to marks inscribed on measurement tools and changing the inscriptions in the software so that the robotic arm could pick and place accurately. In short, the workers’ actions at Genesis constitute what Lave (1993) calls learning-in-practice – changes in knowledge that took place, not in an individual mind alone, but in the social environment of the conjoint problemsolving situation. I have noted that these problem-solving events recurred across the manufacturing floor and throughout the day. My observations of these events were further corroborated both in interviews and in conversations around the assembly floor and dining room, during which people recounted their problem solving experiences. Just as Sandra and others told stories about novice members’ induction (or not) into full participation through learning, experienced members also had problem-solving stories to tell. Craig as manufacturing manager related a number of stories about learning in the various departments on the assembly floor. For example, he described scenarios in the second assembly department (for final hand-loading before testing and

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inspection), where workers had to be prepared every day to encounter tasks that varied from their routine activities: With second assembly, there may be very simple things such as adding ICs, sockets, labels. The following day, there may be a very intricate mechanical bracket going on several places on the board that requires some thought process and some scrutiny or some torque specs that may be out of the ordinary. Perhaps they will have to press parts in with an arbor press. [If they’re working on] PCMCIA cards, they may need to press special cases together and put labels on with no air bubbles. In the following exchange recorded on the assembly floor, Randy, the experienced machine operator we met in Chapter 2, told me a story about ‘coming to his supervisor’s rescue’ when one of the assembly machines stopped working. He said that Du was working at a ‘chip-shooter’, an SMT machine for smaller components, that kept stalling every time he pressed the ‘start’ button: Randy:

Jo Anne: Randy: Jo Anne: Randy:

Jo Anne: Randy:

The other machine over there (pointing), the chip-shooter . . . when Du was working on it, he tried to set up a new job. When he pressed the start key, it automatically shut off. He couldn’t find out what happened. He did it a few times and waited and stood there and couldn’t find out what was going on. He [came to me and said] ‘a few hours before it was working, but now it’s not working’. I went to the back of the machine and took a look at the emergency stop switch. And it was loose. So I just pressed it in [off], and I told him to try again and it started working (laughs). Oh no-o-o! Yeah. And uh. … What made you think to go look at that switch? Because uh, I [thought], uh it’s not the fuse that’s burned out, it’s the emergency switch that has problems, because when you press start, it won’t run; it shuts off the whole thing. … Otherwise someone can put their hand in and it could hurt you, so it automatically shuts off and won’t let you run any more. The loose connection means the machine ‘thinks’ the emergency stop switch is on? Um . . . Yeah. Yeah. I told him [Du] to buy me a lunch and he never did (laughs). Because I always help him out.

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Randy said he relished telling this story for a laugh, often in the supervisor’s presence, (which suggests a kind of barbed humor meant to challenge his supervisor’s authority). Sinh, the process engineer in the document control department recounted another story about Du, this time illustrating his creative problem-solving talent. A customer had sent a board for SMT assembly that did not fit on the company’s assembly machines. The company was faced with the prospect of returning the job to the customer and losing that business. Sinh said that Du came to him with an idea. He would fashion a frame for the board that would be ‘attached to the rail so that it can run into the machine. The frame goes in, the components are placed, then it has to be taken back for new boards’. Du built the frame; it worked, and the boards were assembled successfully. Sandra told me about an employee who first worked as a machine operator in her department and who eventually was promoted to lead in the afternoon shift because he was ‘a willing learner’ and could ‘troubleshoot machines that break down’. She added, ‘he can teach me how to do things; he’s a good teacher’. Sandra’s central theme in her descriptions about life at Genesis was continuous learning on the job. Like the ‘war stories’ among copy machine technicians described by Orr (1991a, 1991b), the stories workers told to each other were additional sites for deploying knowledge at work. For the purpose of my analysis, the stories I heard provide additional data about people’s general willingness (and occasional reluctance) to collaborate in problem-solving events. With collaborative engagement, knowledge is distributed across participants. Randy put it best when he went on to say Some problems are just like playing chess. You’re into the chess game and you don’t see that move, that problem, but the person outside that can see that move, that problem. Four eyes are better than two eyes. To summarize, workers’ learning at interstices of routine work around machines on the assembly floor were moments of uncertainty or ignorance (Varenne, 2009b), during which they assessed one another’s suggested solutions and assembled, as it were, the knowledge distributed between them and across material inscriptions in the surround to accomplish their goal. I made mention of the ways in which participants in problem-solving activities brought prior knowledge (shared or not) to their social interaction. Knowledge histories were also chronicled in ‘knowledge artifacts’ such as printed and digitized documents providing information and procedures for practice, which I discuss next.

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Creating and interpreting knowledge artifacts Throughout the company, employees created, adapted, and interpreted a variety of inscriptions (Derrida, 1977). Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) two-year study of representational practices in a science laboratory at the Salk Institute provides rich detail about the production of scientific knowledge. In this book, I have argued for the importance of treating these objects in the work surround not as isolated entities, but as artifacts meant for collective use and which attain significance – become signs – embedded in social interaction. In other words The sign is a creation between individuals, a creation within a social milieu. Therefore the item in question must first acquire interindividual significance, and only then can it become an object for sign formation. (Vološinov, 1973: 22; emphasis added) Workers’ communicative practices included the production and interpretation of multimodal inscriptions – knowledge artifacts – which became objects for sign formation through concerted action. The Genesis life world was replete with work-relevant inscriptions that were fashioned from without and within the company. Some of these were brought to the company from the outside. Those inscriptions that customers brought into the company included Bills of Materials, blueprints, diskettes of database files and sample circuit boards, among others. Added to these, the externally enforced system of international quality control (IS0 9002) meant that ISO guidelines and training materials for certification had to be brought in and applied to the company’s context; these in turn required ‘translation’ into sets of regulating texts to be distributed throughout – banners and signs, manuals hung on posts in every department and printed procedures for every assembly job. From within the company, additional inscriptions were designed at every level. Managers kept employees informed through memos and notices such as announcements about upcoming company socials or auditors’ visits on a bulletin board outside the employee dining room. The engineering department displayed weekly graphical representations around the assembly floor showing percentages of error-free production. The document control department assembled folders containing the customer’s documents as well as companydesigned documents for every station along the assembly process – work-order documentation forms, manufacturing flow charts and specific Manufacturing Process Instructions (MPIs), which consisted of texts, graphs and images. Programmers used customer documentation to prepare programming code for assembly machines; machine operators interpreted vision displays

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sent from the robotic arm’s camera and interpreted data on the CRT displays during assembly. Some of these visual representations circulated through departments and assembly stations, some remained in ‘place’. Most were eventually archived by document control. It is important at this point to recall that knowledge creation was the central task of document control – made visible through documents distributed throughout the assembly floor. Here, I wish to highlight ways in which employees on the manufacturing floor either adapted these ‘official literacies’, as I characterized them in Chapter 5, or created their own significant inscriptions as means of making knowledge distributable to others. These included lists of component numbers and values written by hand on scraps of paper, hand-written logs of the tasks done on a given day, color-coding systems for ease of quality inspection, images added to MPIs and records of information corrected in computer programs. These endogenous creations were embedded in workers’ talk and actions during assembly. In Chapter 5, we observed reciprocal knowledge production, interpretation and exchange within the context of ISO 9002, the international quality-control system. Two examples of this conjoint design of knowledge artifacts occurred between engineering services and workers on the assembly floor. First, when Jim became director of engineering, he realized that the weekly statistics based on inspection reports, which were produced and posted on the walls of the assembly floor, had little significance for the workers. It was through talk – weekly meetings discussing the results of quality-control inspection – that these inscriptions took on meaning for the workers on the floor. We also saw that Jim developed innovative ways to document changes to the manufacturing instructions by adding a history log attached to the last page of the MPI. With this tool, workers could inscribe by hand each change made during the assembly process. The MPIs also included Jim’s photographic images of selected components, a semiotic resource clarifying actions to be performed. Even with these semiotic enhancements, understanding the directions on the MPI was constituted through the cooperative talk-in-interaction between a supervisor and a quality-control inspector so that next steps could be taken to accomplish the task. Finally, we review the creative quality adaptations among workers on the assembly floor. Lola’s personalized set of procedures for inspecting the boards, a grid made up of color-coded quality particulars, provides us with another example of endogenous knowledge creation. These color-coded procedures were soon added to the folders circulating around the floor because her co-workers wanted to use them to check the quality of their own work. In her view, the color coding she devised helped them to focus more closely where ‘they weren’t looking through it before’. By making her unique

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knowledge artifacts available to others, Lola opened access to new understandings. Nati, the lead employee in the prep department, devised her own personal log to keep track of the multiple work orders she had to oversee in a given day so that she could review them with her supervisor or manager, if asked. These notations served a day’s working memory, and the page in her notebook was turned when she cleared her desk at the end of the day. She told me that she would check her log whenever asked. In short, these knowledge artifacts were not static, isolated objects. Everything from scribbled notes to images and from color-coding procedures to computer displays took on life through human interpretation and adaptation and formed part of the social creation and publication of knowledge at Genesis. This brief review of ways in which learning to become a member, learning through collaborative problem-solving and the creation and collaborative use of knowledge artifacts occurred at Genesis begs the question of the role of power relations and ideological positions and identity in these learning events, to which we now turn.

Learning and Ideology The process of learning cannot be examined without taking into account the way value is accorded to human action. We have already considered Lave and Wenger’s discussions about how knowledge takes on value and about the link between knowledge and power in communities of practice as well as the wider social world. Let us now turn again to Vološinov, who subscribes to the notion that actors are both subject to a society’s prevailing beliefs and values – ideologies – and at the same time can exercise agency in contesting these.3 In using his work as a theoretical foundation to study social interaction at Genesis, I took the view that learning in practice could be more fully understood in the context of wider social relations such as power and identification, particularly because the company was a site for transnational linguistic flows and the pressures of a globalized economy. I wish to make this relationship more explicit here. But first, it is worth taking a moment to expand on Vološinov’s ‘“dialogic” theory of ideology’ (Gardiner, 1992: 8) because it can illuminate a theory of learning situated in a web of power relations and identity formation.

Ideology and the sign Although Vološinov himself does not provide a definition of ideology in his writings, his line of thinking about the concept is nicely pinpointed by Gardiner (1992) as ‘the process whereby meaning or “value” is conferred on

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the natural and social worlds. Ideologies are also “material,” not only because all possible forms of human action and cognition are embodied in some kind of semiotic sign (e.g. words, gestures, facial expressions, and so on), but because such signs elicit real effects in society’ (1992: 13). Vološinov wished to make a distinction between his dialogic and actionoriented notion of ideology and that of his contemporaries who were writing in the Marxist tradition, which took the position that ideology was essentially a dominant set of ideas and beliefs that distorted consciousness. For Vološinov, ideology as expressed in Marxism4 was fundamentally a psychological phenomenon, yet ‘consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction’ (1973: 11). At this point, it is worth examining Vološinov’s own words on this issue in some detail. His move was to argue that language forms the nexus between a dominant or ‘official ideology’ that has been normalized and perceived as self-evident – embodied in the domains of science, religion, philosophy, politics and so on – and what he termed ‘behavioral ideology’ (zhiznennaia ideologia), the kind of ideology that stems from everyday life. These two categories of ideology are interdependent, ‘extreme links in the single chain of ideological creativity’ (Vološinov, 1987a: 87). He explains: We shall use the term behavioral ideology for the whole aggregate of life experiences and the outward expressions directly connected with it. … The established ideological systems of social ethics, science, art, and religion are crystallizations of behavioral ideology, and these crystallizations, in turn, exert a powerful influence back upon behavioral ideology, normally setting its tone. At the same time, however, these already formalized ideological products constantly maintain the most vital organic contact with behavioral ideology and draw sustenance from it; otherwise, without that contact, they would be dead … . (Vološinov, 1973: 91; emphasis in the original) Thus, whereas dominant or official ideologies (‘established ideological systems’) may shape the practices of everyday life, the practices themselves are also the source of ideological meanings (‘behavioral ideology’). And these are expressed dialogically through signs, in human social interaction. In his discussion of Vološinov’s project on language and ideology, Tihanov (1998: 605) states that zhiznennaia ideologia, rendered above as ‘behavioral ideology’, would be more appropriately translated as ‘life-ideology’, a term that better describes in English Vološinov’s characterization of value-charged communicative practices in the world.

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In sum, for Vološinov, ideologies are manifested, activated, and shaped through signs made public through social interaction. Ideologies are articulated in and through the use of discourse to take positions vis-à-vis the interlocutor and to evaluate the other’s discourse. Vološinov argues that words can have different ‘evaluative accents’, that is, they not only reflect, but also ‘refract’ external reality. He says Existence reflected in the sign is not merely reflected but refracted. How is this refraction of existence in the ideological sign determined? By an intersecting of differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community. … Differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. … This social multiaccentuality of the ideological sign . . . maintains its vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development. (Vološinov, 1973: 23; emphasis in the original) Because signs can be multiaccentual (can take up different meanings), they become an arena of struggle between social value judgments: Referential meaning is molded by evaluation; it is evaluation, after all, which determines if a particular referential meaning may enter the purview of speakers – both from the immediate purview and the broader social purview of the particular social group. Furthermore, with respect to changes of meaning, it is precisely evaluation that plays the creative role. A change in meaning is, essentially, always a reevaluation; the transposition of some particular word from one evaluative context to another. (Vološinov, 1973: 105; emphasis in the original) We can observe the ‘evaluative accents’ among company members in their use of signs – language and other semiotic means – to respond to local and global social perspectives and make them occasions for learning in practice. Discourse is a site where ideology and learning meet. To examine this more closely, let us start with discourse, learning and relations of power circulating throughout the company – from management to employees on the manufacturing floor.

Power relations within the company As in most businesses, there was a hierarchical organizational structure at Genesis. Some members had titles signaling their authority to ‘preside’, ‘manage’, ‘supervise’ or ‘lead’. With these titles came various degrees of and potential for power and responsibility to see that the goals of the company

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were met by encouraging efficacious work practices and guiding newcomers to become competent members. This work has shown that these structures often became ‘flattened’ as company members came together to diagnose machine breakdowns and or fashion better solutions to quality control, thus leading to knowledge change. Yet, although many times those in charge afforded occasions for learning in practice, sometimes they hindered learning opportunities. Moreover, employees in subordinate positions also could instruct each other and their supervisors, and they could choose either to take up or subvert their own learning. Observational, documentary and interview data provided me with insights into discourses with evaluative accents circulating in the company.

Opposing ideologies within management Within management, there were conflicting views/beliefs about two key interrelated areas that impacted front-line workers’ knowledge creation: the value of team structures and language choice. Throughout, I have argued that team practices such as developing and distributing inscriptions or participating in collaborative problem-solving were propitious moments for learning in interaction. In Chapter 4, I pointed out that company management supported team structures at work. However, for Charlie and Madge, the co-founders, opening up the option for workers to form so-called ‘natural’ teams, which at Genesis, meant forming groups by ethnolinguistic background, did not happen without a struggle. Charlie had explained to me that they both believed strongly in the value of employees using shared language and practices and pooling their distinctive stores of knowledge for assembly work. In the beginning, however, this team concept was not well received by some of their associates in upper management who favored a task-based division of labor for a small company such as Genesis. These opposing ideologies were aired out in one of the management meetings that I observed during the first phase of the research; the meeting was among several that were held to address the subject of quality control.5 The main item on the agenda focused on fostering favorable customer impressions of work quality at Genesis. The participants at this meeting considered plans for new ways of collecting data on quality control on the assembly floor and sharing results with customers as evidence of the company’s attention to quality. While they were discussing upcoming customer visits to the plant so that they could observe production first-hand and review the quality information posted around the assembly floor, the question arose about the way teams had organized themselves according to ethnolinguistic groups. Individuals expressed different orientations towards teams and the use of languages other than English at work. In a lively exchange, Danilo (the manufacturing

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manager for the second and third shifts) and two representatives of the sales department maintained their opposition to natural teams and the use of multiple languages by employees on the assembly floor, contending that worker talk in their home languages would distract from their tasks. They recommended that English be the mandatory language on the assembly floor. Charlie and two plant managers countered that they favored workers forming natural teams and strongly supported multilingual practices as the best use of workers’ ways of knowing. (I revisit the question of language ideology at work later in the chapter.) Danilo and his confederates went on to argue that this use of multiple languages along with workstations personalized with family photographs, ethnic music playing on stereos and other items would give visitors a negative impression about work focus and efficiency. These verbal and non-verbal signs, in other words, would leave the impression that workers did not take their work seriously. Danilo added, ‘the boom boxes have no direct effect on revenue. They take up space in the work area where you could place things that could generate revenue’. Ned, the manufacturing manager for the first shift counter-argued that in all his years at Genesis he had never once heard a complaint from customers about the way teams were organized. Jim, director of engineering added that the workstations of one of the company’s largest competitors also were highly personalized, so this team arrangement was not unique to Genesis. By the end of the meeting, the natural teams argument prevailed. Charlie stated that the policy would remain in place because there was evidence that workers were happy and that teams fostered distinctive ways of collaborating to solve problems, learn from each other and get work done. His views resonate with Jean Lave’s vision that knowledge trajectories require participation in groups: ‘A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 98). Charlie and his associates’ arguments favoring such team arrangements also reflected the discourse in the research literature of the time about the benefits of using teams in the workplace. One team endeavor in the US that received a great deal of attention was the joint venture that began in 1984 between GM and Toyota in Fremont, California, not far from where Genesis was located. The venture, New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), was known for teams and extensive worker involvement in decision-making (Adler, 1990). It was described as the creation of a ‘hybrid’ organizational culture, in which the workers’ knowledge and skills would be valued and their actions looked upon as responsible and collaborative with a stake in the quality of the product (Wilms et al., 1994).6 In more recent research, Engeström and his colleagues (Engeström et al., 1995; Engeström & Middleton, 1998a; Engeström, 2008) have contributed case studies of teamwork in the US and

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Finland that show the fluidity of teams and the expansive nature of learning at work. ‘The process of expansive learning should be understood as construction and resolution of successively evolving tensions or contradictions in a complex system that includes the object or objects, the mediating artifacts, and the perspectives of the participants’ (Engeström, 2008: 131; emphasis in the original). Similarly, at Genesis no single person was expected to hold all the knowledge about circuit board assembly. The resolution of the managers’ conflict about the formation of teams and attendant communicative choices gave rein to power/knowledge on the floor. Workers combined their knowledge with different co-workers, in different situations, and using different artifacts to construct new knowledge together. Opportunities for learning occurred with relative frequency since market demands required that workers be flexible enough to shift occasionally to different teams, assignments and procedures. Because tools, products and tasks changed rapidly, workers were challenged daily by new situations with their attendant problems that needed solving and new domains to learn about. A refrain I heard throughout the company was also Trân’s comment during an interview, ‘I learn something new every day’. The benefits of team arrangements at Genesis have been borne out, but not without conflicts and occasional malfunctions precisely because discourse and action at work are evaluative and saturated with power relations. Evaluative action opened possibilities for change of knowledge, for contesting others’ ideas, for assessing courses of action where there was a struggle. As we shall see next, employees’ evaluative actions bear out the nuanced assessment by Engeström (2008: 182), who states that teams are neither panaceas for workers nor conspiracies developed by managers.

Evaluative accents on the assembly floor We return to the assembly floor to summarize power relations taking place during concerted action in a number of different contexts. I spoke with and observed supervisors in their roles as mentors. For example, Sandra mentored her novice assistant, Trai towards becoming a skilled machine operator in the Through-Hole assembly department, and Du explained to Lola, his quality-control inspector in the SMT department the rationale for one of the procedures she noticed on the Manufacturing Process Instruction (MPI) form. Nati, the lead in the prep department demonstrated to her Vietnamesespeaking assistants how to load connectors in a new way for a customer. These individuals’ instructions to their subordinates entailed language (in all the above-mentioned cases, English, the lingua franca used by interlocutors whose home languages – Cantonese, Vietnamese, Spanish – were different) and action tied to various objects and inscriptions in the environment.

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We also found that some in authority were not always forthcoming with positive mentoring of subordinates. For instance, Lahn, the supervisor of second assembly occasionally intimidated employees such as Fatima, his quality-control inspector; this meant, in effect, that he was withholding her legitimate peripheral access to new knowledge-in-practice. As a result, Fatima, in spite of her curiosity to learn more about changes in circuit boards and components, steered clear of asking Lahn ‘too many’ questions. In addition, though her role as quality inspector was to make her co-workers accountable for their work by returning boards with soldering mistakes to them for repair, she said she covered for their mistakes by fixing the problem herself because in this way she could help prevent potential employee confrontations with their supervisor. Clearly, Fatima’s actions had the effect of depriving her colleagues of the opportunity to learn from their errors.7 In effect, a supervisor’s unpredictability about providing instruction had repercussions throughout his department. Danilo, the manufacturing manager for the evening shifts told me in an interview that he opposed any notion of workers learning additional skills; rather, he favored a kind of Taylorist model requiring that each individual master a single repetitive task matched with a specific ISO procedure. He wished, in effect, to control their access to knowledge. In his view, permitting employees to learn multiple tasks could risk too many mistakes made on the floor and threaten company profits. Besides those in leadership positions, co-workers also had license to instruct others on how to carry out new tasks, for, as we noted earlier, both novice and experienced front-line workers who attained new knowledge and skills could re-position themselves in relation to other members. The discourses of knowledge exchange were not unidirectional but dialogic. Every member of Genesis was potentially in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ or changing knowledge no matter how long each had been in the firm or how high up in the organization the member had gone. For example, Jim began as manager of the testing department, where he gained knowledge and experience before he was promoted to director of the division of Engineering Services; yet, in this new capacity he still learned from frontline employees such as Lola, who recommended ways to improve engineering’s procedural instructions. Randy, a machine operator in the SMT assembly department, showed Du, his supervisor how to repair a glitch in the computerized assembly machine. Trân, also a machine operator in SMT offered Du a solution to a pick problem. Sandra described to me how she learned from one of the machine operators she supervised, and Nati, a lead in the prep department spoke of how she valued the ‘critical eye’ of her counterpart in hand-loading, who showed her how to spot errors on the board.

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Central to this research, however, were the conjoint problem-solving events among experienced workers, which became sites for knowledge change – moments also made visible to me as researcher. In these events, employees with differential positions of authority were brought together into teams, thereby opening arenas of potential conflict of ideas and social interest. Chapter 4’s analysis of a problem-solving activity exposed elements in language used by a supervisor and his assistant that indexed value-orientations, in other words, displaying relations of power and resistance. As a result of this give and take, the two members experimented with each other’s ideas in spite of their relative status (and the supervisor’s subtle and strategically placed signals of power) and eventually found a solution to a problem with the assembly. Their creative use or omission of Vietnamese terms of address and other honorific markers as well as English directives, negative particles, and the ‘inclusive-we’ signaled during these moments a largely symmetrical alignment that opened the way to knowledge change – not merely agreeing on courses of action but also overtly challenging each other. These positionings were sequentially constructed, and they varied over time and from one site of engagement to another. Conflict is inevitable in situated activities (Lave, 1993: 15), particularly in a workplace such as Genesis with its diversity of people, experience, interests and backgrounds, whenever they are brought together to solve a problem. The contested actions between Du and Trân resonate with the concept of ‘constructive controversy’ in teamwork reported by Tjosvold and Tjosvold (1994), the positive potential of conflicts discussed by Bartunek and Reid (1992) and the argument by Engeström (2008: 163) that challenging ‘accepted wisdom’ triggers novel ideas and learning. There were creative shifts in power-relations and social identification: for Du, from person-in-charge to co-worker and for Trân, from subordinate to co-worker. Du’s case is especially illustrative of this shift and the attendant nuances and complexities involved in knowledge exchange across these orientations. In his interactions with the workers in his department, he occasionally made clear that he was in charge, as demonstrated in his use of hierarchical terms of address in Vietnamese while issuing directives to his assistants (instructing) during routine tasks or in his more subtle signals when high pressure problem solving moments reached their denouement (such as his announcement tone summarizing what actions had to be carried out once a breakdown was diagnosed). Let me return to an ‘instructional’ moment that I mentioned briefly in Chapter 4, a revealing moment in which Du made his authoritative voice clear to me. It happened at the end of the ‘placement problem’. After Du directed Trân to ‘skip’ the placement of sockets on the circuit boards (lines 74–76), Trân complied by turning to the assembly machine and entering a

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computerized command (line 77). Meanwhile, just as Du had begun to walk away to another work station, I addressed a question to Trân in order to understand his actions at the computer (line 78). Trân began to reply to my query (lines 79, 82) but was interrupted by Du (lines 80, 83). 74 75 76 77

Trân: Du:

78

Jo Anne:

79

Trân:

80 81 82 83

Du: Jo Anne: Trân: Du:

84 85 86

Jo Anne: Du:

Trân:

Skip? Skip. Skip it.

(begins to walk away) (moves to computer) (presses buttons on operator panel) (observing Trân’s actions)

So Trân right now you’re programming it to skip that location? Yes. All this delete it | |AND UH (turning around) I couldn’t hear= (addressing Trân) Yeah try to uh | |SKIP the uh socket. Skip the socket. Yep. And uh he will try to uh put that board back in the machine, place wherever last time he made a mistake. Put a wrong key, the board coming out.

My effort as researcher to learn from Trân was diverted as Du stepped in to provide the information I had requested. Du went on to describe a ‘mistake’ that Trân had made earlier, when he pressed a key that sent the circuit board through before the last components were loaded, and he informed me that Trân would have to remedy the error (line 85–86). Relations of power at the individual level were on display here as the supervisor deemed it necessary to inform the visiting researcher about an action taken in his department. Because of Du’s higher position, his rather than Trân’s was the ‘legitimate language’ (Bourdieu, 1991) to be recognized in this interactional exchange. Despite these controlling measures, Du’s shifts to co-worker status during

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trouble-shooting moments demonstrated a preponderant effort to support team collaboration, minimize power struggles and be open to problem-solving ideas when it came to getting a job out the door on time. In short, Du demonstrated a willingness to learn from subordinates – whenever it made a difference in satisfying a customer. The evaluative actions observed during talk in management meetings as well as talk on the manufacturing floor did not happen in isolation. Rather, they reflected wider relations of power affecting Genesis from the outside. I turn to these next.

Wider relations of power The local struggles and challenges among employees with diverse skills, experiences, and backgrounds at Genesis were influenced by wider historical, cultural and political-economic patterns of control and inequality (Lave, 1993: 15; Lave & Wenger, 1991: 54). Using Lave and Wenger’s phrase, learning at Genesis was not just about the person in a particular work context but also about ‘the person-in-the-world’ of economic and political institutions and relationships. Genesis, as with many companies, was subject to the demands of a number of these. I focus here on two: the customers it served and the international quality certification agency, ISO.

Genesis and its customers In discussing wider relations of power, we begin with the outside entities immediately linked with Genesis: its customers, who, in this case, were larger electronics companies in aerospace, computer and medical industries. It is stating the obvious to point out that customers wielded a great deal of power – ultimately, the power of the purse – vis-à-vis contract manufacturers such as Genesis. As I detailed in Chapter 2, many world-renowned electronics companies whose sprawling headquarters stretched across the Silicon Valley preferred to focus on product development rather than to concern themselves with in-house assembly of circuit boards for their products. Thus, they looked to outsource their work to a competent assembler. What is more, they had many contractors to choose from, and so the pressure on Genesis to be counted among the most respected assembly board manufacturers in the Valley was intensive. As we have seen, the niche Genesis developed was its expertise in assembling hybrid boards (those requiring both Through-Hole and Surface Mount technology). With this expertise, the company built its reputation as a provider of a service and a product for larger electronics companies. Knowledge exchange was crucial in order for Genesis to maintain a strong relationship with its customers. What was the nature of this knowledge flow? I have already called attention to the knowledge artifacts that

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customers brought into the company. Let me elaborate by revisiting this point of contact. Before beginning the assembly of a set of circuit boards, a customer first provided a kit containing items with extensive information – blueprint, database, Bill of Materials (BOM) and objects with inscriptions of various kinds such as printed circuit boards, components and sometimes a sample assembled board. The reception and interpretation of these knowledge artifacts were time consuming and occasionally vexed. After staff in the materials-receiving department reviewed and cross-checked the contents to confirm that the kit was complete, it was sent to document control. There, process engineers audited these materials to ‘make sense of them’. Before they could be released to the floor, the engineers re-worked them into new knowledge artifacts – instructions (MPIs) compatible with the manufacturing procedures at Genesis – a kind of ‘translation process’ that I described in Chapter 5. Recall Sinh’s story about certain customers whose engineers constantly sent him changes in the design of their boards even after production had begun. He put forward a reason for this behavior: ‘It’s the wireless links and telecommunications technologies that make it easier for their engineers to send us new instructions’. In spite of these occasional snags, the process engineers’ task was to manage the information flow so that production could continue as smoothly and expeditiously as possible and ‘to the customer’s satisfaction’. All changes in procedure and action were documented, and the records had to be made available to customers upon request. Customer pressures occasionally caused conflicts between departments, which sometimes led to sets of contradictory directions sent down to the assemblers. From his point of view as manufacturing manager, Craig complained about conflicts of interest between the company’s heads of production and heads of sales and marketing. A few people in sales and marketing were so anxious to please the customer they had landed for the company that they tried to alter the assembly schedule in their customer’s favor. In his words: The sales and marketing people may try to drive the floor for their specific interests, trying to influence the [assembly work] based on their projects. We [in manufacturing] may try to run jobs in a chronological order of receipt, and they may come down and try to bump customers based on what they want to do for a particular customer. Craig went on to say that these tensions ‘might be one of the biggest irritants to people working on the floor’. (These conflicts between manufacturing and marketing may have been a major factor that led to the later split of the Sales and Marketing department from Genisis into a separate company.)

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As for knowledge flow from Genesis back to its customers (aside from providing assembly process documentation just noted), the company for its part felt compelled to maintain open doors so that customers could observe the quality of the assembly. The ISO-related documentation and other inscriptions such as statistical information, which showed percentages of errors and productivity scores at each stage in the assembly process, were posted around the manufacturing floor not only for the workers but also for outsider scrutiny. During customers’ visits to the floor, they could examine the posted quality procedures and data and watch the assembly process, during which they might occasionally interact with the frontline workers. When I learned about these visits, I began to wonder which members within the company had license to engage in work-related knowledge exchange with customers. Based on front-line workers’ comments about ‘the customer’, I had assumed at first that they were free to discuss their work and to point out errors in the objects and inscriptions that the customers had provided to the company. The videotaped data showed that when workers ran into errors in these materials, such as mistakes in the BOM, the blueprint, or the software program, they often used the first-person plural pronoun we either in comments to co-workers or their explanations to me that the customer had to be contacted (‘We need to inform the customer’). Let us review some examples of this language choice. Revisiting the socketplacement problem described in Chapter 3, after diagnosing the problem, Du stated the following regarding informing the customer about placing the missing components: So we decide here we’ll take it out and we’ll tell the customer, ‘No good. You guys have to . . . drop it in by yourself’. During another videotaping session, Hung, lead in second assembly, walked over to tell me that one of the company’s regular customers had just arrived to say he wanted the boards right away – even after Hung told him of a discrepancy in their documentation. Hung told of his discovery that the location information for one component on the blueprint and the BOM was different and concluded, ‘we had to ask the customer to sign off’ on the removal of the boards before Hung would release them. In both these situations, the pronoun we appeared to index the speaker and his confederates, that is, the workers themselves, as having agency in the action to tell or ask the customer to do something. However, social relations expressed through such terms are complex (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Ward, 2004); I came to understand in follow-up interviews that the use of we largely referred to the company (represented by the department managers) rather than

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the individual workers themselves in the immediate context (cf. Quirk et al., 1985: 350–354). A line was drawn regarding who was officially authorized to exchange information with customers. When I asked members to elaborate on the extent of their contact with customers, leads and supervisors clarified that it was not their ‘place’ to report problems or errors to customers directly, a policy that the company president and one of the managers later confirmed. Hung’s supervisor, Lahn, told me that Hung, as a skilled and trusted worker might have worked in the past with customers directly as described above, but this was no longer possible – ‘not under the rules of ISO’. Whereas within the company there was an ethos that anyone could learn something new from anyone else regardless of level, it was also clear that only management had the authorized voice to communicate new information about the assembly process to a customer. Any information the workers might have that was important for the customer to know about was supposed to flow up the chain of command to the supervisor, who in turn reported it to the manager. In some cases, a worker may have challenged this division of labor, taking the knowledge flow onto an unauthorized path. In spite of the fact that frontline workers had autonomy in terms of troubleshooting machines, devising innovative ways of keeping track of actions performed and so on, in terms of power operating at the level of customer relations, the workers’ direct participation in knowledge exchange was not considered legitimate. In short, there were power imbalances in knowledge flow both between customers and the company and between individual frontline members within the company vis-à-vis its customers; these relations required delicate actions and interactions to adapt to and learn from each other in order for customers and company members to ‘co-configure’ a service and a product (Victor & Boynton, 1998, as cited in Engeström, 2008).

Genesis and global quality control Insights regarding company–customer power and knowledge flow lead us directly to global economic pressures enveloping companies large and small and shaping these relationships. Specifically, the power that customers wielded over the company was tied to the ISO quality-control regime described in Chapter 5. Management at Genesis was compelled to adopt the international quality assurance system since, without participating, the company could not compete for customers, who looked upon ISO certification as evidence of high quality production. Charlie told me that, from his vantage point as president, the ISO system was a necessary evil and even deceptive in its claims to improve a company’s ways of working. In his words, ISO ‘was like a parasite and we were the host. It was something we had to do in order to satisfy the customer’.

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In effect, quality-control systems such as ISO 9002 attempt to be a leveler in a globalized world where there are expectations of sameness despite different geographies and varied work practices. These systems assume a homogenous use of inscriptions that simplify and streamline instructions to workers, thereby resulting in better quality products. Put another way, a consequence of ISO is the control of knowledge practices rather than the encouragement of ‘innovation and production of new knowledge’ (Engeström, 2008: 11). A fatal flaw in the ISO ideology is that texts are designed to be portable yet are assumed to retain a stability of meaning in work contexts across oceans and continents. But although the forms remain the same, their meanings and functions shift according to the norms of interpretation within particular sites. Recall that, to attain ISO certification, the company was required to develop a company handbook of standardized procedural knowledge and practices, implement them and then be subjected to an outside auditor’s periodic auditing to test the employees’ work procedures against these standards – this set of official literacies – to assure conformity. Notably, Charlie maintained that ‘standards of workmanship’, which for him entailed ‘talent, consistency and mastery of skill’, were never really part of the ISO discourse. Instead, its quality-control regime was only about ‘procedures’. To become ISO-certified, he said, all the company had to do was to ‘set up procedures and follow them’; the certification did not take the quality of execution into consideration. As a result, ‘if we made crap, we could still pass their audits, but we could end up being put out of business’. For him, the true measure of workmanship was not based on following ISO procedures, but on his employees’ endogenous knowledge and skills in fashioning the highest quality circuit boards. Once the controlling system was approved and put into practice, it impacted management by requiring a parallel ‘assembly’ of knowledge artifacts and a paper trail for every job for a customer, and it impacted workers’ professional life worlds by penetrating their local ways of knowing and acting. Such a regime offered a set of official literacies for all to follow, but, if followed to the letter, it was liable to suppress and exclude opportunities for workers to access their endogenous knowledge resources in order to afford a common ground for making sense of their specific task-activities. I mentioned Lahn’s recognition of ISO’s restrictions on the work of Hung, his lead in second assembly. He lamented the fact that even though his workers were able to fix minor problems easily, because of ISO, ‘if there is anything wrong with the paperwork, they cannot fix it even if they know what is wrong. They have to call me and I have to call document control’ to determine whether the document is correct or not. Then the customer would be contacted by the manager. In this study, we observed employees interpreting ISO’s ‘dominant literacies’ with various levels of conformity, attention and skill. We observed

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people who complemented, contested and sometimes modified ISO texts by fashioning their own knowledge artifacts. In engineering, Jim developed an innovative text, a history log for folders with ISO-approved texts that were sent to the manufacturing floor; this addition captured at a glance the changes like those Sinh had to add to the MPIs whenever customers changed their own instructions mid-stream. Jim also added photographic images to MPIs to clarify interpretation on the assembly floor. Nati kept her own personal records of the prep work that moved through her area so that she had information ready at hand for her supervisor and co-workers; Lola generated a color-coding system for herself and her colleagues in quality control to make quality review more transparent. These creative designs contributed to an ‘ecology of inscriptions’ (Ueno, 2000) that made quality of work visible to participants at various points in the manufacturing process. The few studies that have considered quality assurance systems have generally contended that these systems do not operate in the interests of workers nor do they encourage innovation and knowledge creation (e.g. Belfiore et al., 2004; Delbridge, 1998; Gee et al., 1996; Jackson, 2000). Rather, the argument goes, quality-control practices satisfy the interests of employers and are a tool for management to discipline and control workers. Here, I have shown, through the observation of moment-by-moment practice, that the relationship was not uniformly top-down and deterministic; it did not originate from nor was it controlled by company executives. As we have seen, management at Genesis was itself controlled by an outside coercive institution, ISO, whose system was adopted reluctantly. Workers responded to the system variously, but there were ample instances of workers who responded in creative ways using complex ensembles of linguistic and other semiotic means to fashion knowledge artifacts that would promote quality work. The workers’ capacity for agentive action confirms that they, as Willis (1977) puts it, ‘are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation, and a partial penetration of those structures’ (Willis, 1977: 175). Their lived experiences also confirm Vološinov’s important focus on zhiznennaia ideologia – life ideology, to use Tihanov’s (1998) translation – born of creative dialogic action that responds to official ideologies. Both management and employees at Genesis responded to the ISO regime with various ‘evaluative accents’ – conforming, contesting, adapting, re-creating.

Language ideology in the US workplace Up to this point, we have been discussing the ideology manifested in power relations and learning during the course of communicative practices at work. In this section, I revisit the question of people’s ideologies about

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language itself at Genesis. Power is manifested, not only through spoken and written language use, but it is also ‘sedimented in language’ because ‘language itself is an object of inequality and hegemony’ (Blommaert, 2005: 67; emphasis in the original). Language is a resource, to be sure, but individual languages are deemed more or less valuable under different conditions and spaces. Here, we address how multilingualism is typically evaluated in the American workplace, where members often bring distinct linguistic repertoires to a space in which spoken and written English are deemed to have the greatest communicative value. As I described earlier, management-level disagreements about authorizing the formation of natural teams at Genesis entailed an animated exchange about language choice on the assembly floor. Those at the meeting who argued that workers’ home languages should not be permitted reflect the commonly held policies and beliefs around language found in US companies, where workers frequently are subjected to negative evaluations about their multilingualism and criticized about their uneven proficiency in English. Many company executives pass regulations that prohibit the use of languages other than English in their work sites. Workplace language policies are a constant reminder to immigrants and ethnolinguistic minorities about the hegemony of English. They are told that to become hired in the US, command of English is required, and low English skills may incur negative consequences in terms of finding and keeping a job (Barrett, 2006; Urciuoli, 1996). Moreover, they are advised to enroll in workplace ESL programs because English will be beneficial to them outside as well as inside the workplace (Katz, 2001). While proficiency in English is valuable, the tendency to disregard a worker’s home language as an important resource is reflected in this folk wisdom; even today many employers continue the policy of prohibiting the use of languages other than English on the work site.

Language ideology in the courts There is nothing in the US Constitution or its federal laws prohibiting language discrimination. Whereas there is no official English policy at the federal level, 31 of the 50 states have passed laws making English the official language; the passage of these laws has often coincided with waves of immigration. Some of the provisions have led to an increase in legal challenges and judgments (Hill et al., 2009). In terms of workplace policies, the requirement that employees speak exclusively in English has been tested in the US courts, and unfortunately, if not surprisingly, judges have found in most cases that English-only rules for people on the job are not discriminatory (Gibson, 2004; Hill et al., 2009). Let us take an example. One case that made its way through the courts was Garcia et al. v. Spun Steak Co. Though the company Spun

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Steak, producer of poultry and meat products in California, allowed all its employees to converse informally during certain times while on the job, all talk, including informal talk, was permitted only in English. A lower court held that the company’s English-only work rule had a discriminatory impact against bilingual Spanish-speaking employees; however, an appeals court reversed the decision and upheld the company’s right to prohibit the use of other languages. The plaintiffs took their fight to the US Supreme Court. But, despite the urging of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which had developed guidelines on discrimination based on national origin (EEOC, 1994), the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case on appeal. I argue with Ainsworth (2010) that court rulings, which uphold English-only policies at work, are based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of multilingualism. Language ideologies such as US English-only policies privilege the language of power and monolingual speakers and erase other languages from the workplace scene (Irvine & Gal, 2000).

Responding to sociolinguistic regimes This conflict about which linguistic code(s) should be permitted at work bears out Hymes’s (1996) point that, though all languages are equal in theory, society assigns unequal value to them in particular contexts. Blommaert et al. (2005) have argued, following Hymes, that as people move between different social spaces, their multilingual practices can be enabled or constrained, valued or devalued. These spaces organize ‘sociolinguistic regimes’ (2005: 203) with their sets of norms regarding linguistic practice. As I hope this book has shown, however, the fact that norms/language policies are upheld within given social spaces does not necessarily mean that they are in the best interest of the members. In the case of regulating language use in the US workplace, an English-only policy that constrains the use of multiple languages may in fact be detrimental to workplace goals. Such regulations are based on faulty understandings and claims that certain languages or language varieties are ‘unusual’, even ‘deficient’ and without educational, social or economic value (cf. Stroud, 2001). For DeGraff (2005, 2009), these false values or beliefs about languages constitute a discourse of ‘exceptionalism’, a term to which DeGraff assigns a negative valence. Linguistic exceptionalism has prevailed, not only in the workplace, but also in education. A substantial body of research in the context of schooling has shown that linguistic exceptionalism bears a social cost for speakers of marginalized languages and for the larger polity since schools are charged with preparing an educated workforce (e.g. Gándara & Contreras, 2009; García & Kleifgen, 2010; Heller, 1996; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001; Lippi-Green, 1997; Wolfram, 1998). This deficit approach to evaluating languages for schooling and work,

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as I have said elsewhere, places mistaken emphasis on languages as bounded entities, separating them from people who draw on various languages, dialects and registers for different social situations to accomplish a diversity of meanings (Kleifgen, 2009; see also Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). It is precisely this deficit view of languages that manifested itself during the management meeting at Genesis. In their attempts to prevent the use of multiple languages on the manufacturing floor, some in management argued that restricting communication to English would ensure mutual understanding, harmony and efficiency. In fact, this study shows that quite the reverse was true: implementing this American ‘monoglot standard’ (Silverstein, 1996) would have impeded workers’ strategic use of linguistic resources and diverse ways of knowing in order to accomplish tasks effectively. Here it is important to emphasize the obvious – that English was the dominant language at Genesis. It was the language of all documentation and it was the lingua franca on the assembly floor. Employees were expected to have basic proficiency in spoken English and to read and interpret the English texts – including ISO documents and procedures – that were tied to their particular responsibilities. In short, the verbal repertoire of all employees at Genesis included some degree of control of English. Further, having a high level of proficiency in spoken and written English was also a measure by which an employee could move into certain departments or upper level management at Genesis, where spoken and written language were central to the job description. For example, an employee wishing to move into a position in engineering or document control, areas that were tasked with production of texts and charts, would have to possess particular literacy and numeracy skills, that is, have facility with the linguistic register of software engineering. McAll (2003) examined a similar linguistic differential in a Montreal aerospace firm, where language intensive work in the dominant language (English) was reserved for those in upper level positions, whereas workers who spoke a subordinated language (French) were in positions where spoken and written modes of communication were not ‘central’ to their work. In another Canadian study, English was also the language of management in a toy factory, whereas production line workers who were immigrant women tended to use their Portuguese language for solidarity and collaboration (Goldstein, 1997). These two cases describe a separation of languages in the workplace, a phenomenon that Heller calls ‘parallel monolingualisms’ (Heller, 1999: 3). In the case of tasks at Genesis, however, the distribution of languages was more nuanced. Both spoken and written English circulated throughout the company since even work on the assembly floor required attention to quality assurance documents and written manufacturing procedures for every job. At the same time, talk in other languages was heard everywhere

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from the assembly floor to other so-called language-intensive work spaces such as the document control department and in supervisors’ offices. Participants’ use of languages varied and English was often used efficiently albeit with uneven proficiency. On the floor, Nati, in directing a ‘rush job’ to get a set of circuit boards without flaws to a customer by the end of the work day, shifted from a simplified English register that she used to communicate with co-workers, whose dominant language was Vietnamese, to the inclusion of her native Spanish alongside English when she turned to work with other Latina co-workers. In the text-saturated document control office, process engineers Sinh and Cam, bilingual in Vietnamese and English, shifted between languages in their talk as they audited customer documents (written in English); they also shifted languages as they engaged with different ethnolinguistic groups on the assembly floor. Written texts were uniformly English, yet other languages were spoken along side them. I return to the point about nuanced and varied proficiency in the final chapter in a discussion of the notion of ‘plurilinguistic practices’. Other modalities entered into this multilingual mix: While troubleshooting an assembly machine, Du and Trân were constructing meaning in an ecology of Vietnamese, English, sound, gesture, inscriptions and tools. Jim inserted images into the text of the MPIs, where warranted, for workers to ‘see’ where to attach a cable on a circuit board. Lola used Spanish with coworkers who shared her home language, but she also employed a different mode – color (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2002; van Leeuwen, 2011) – to develop a set of quality-control categories; the color-coded grid became a non-verbal, visual lingua franca that ‘translated’ the categories for her colleagues who were speakers of various languages. Thus, whereas language choice may have become a flashpoint at management meetings and whereas English was the prevailing language used throughout the company, in practice, multiple languages were brought to bear in efficacious ways. Because of the company’s open policy regarding self-selected teams and multiple-language use, workers adeptly shifted between their home languages and English integrated with other modes of communication as each situation presented itself. In short, the multilingual practices at Genesis provide evidence of their value for learning and knowledge creation in the workplace. If these practices were to be accepted in other places of work in the US, indeed, if they were to be supported and implemented, today’s diverse workplace might escape the social and economic cost of linguistic exceptionalism. To summarize, taking situated learning as a theoretical frame, this chapter has revisited workers’ learning-in-practice at Genesis, which entailed relations of power diffused both inside and outside the company. I have put forth the argument that workers’ concerted actions using multiple semiotic

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means can contest regimes of power and control in small, yet significant ways, which in turn can unleash learning and creative knowledge construction at work. The analysis suggests the need to rethink prevailing beliefs about knowledge, skills and communication in the workplace. How might we re-conceptualize learning-in-practice, and how might future research projects contribute further to better understandings of communicative practices in work settings? I discuss these questions in the final chapter.

Notes (1) Distinctions have been drawn between related terms such as ‘everyday cognition’ (Rogoff & Lave, 1984), ‘situated cognition’ (Brown et al., 1989; Clancy, 1997), ‘distributed cognition’ (Hutchins, 1995; Salomon, 1993) and Lave and Wenger’s focus on ‘situated learning’, which I use here. For details on these various foci and associated research traditions, see Henning (2004). (2) For related research on the relationship between knowledge, power, and identity, see discussions by Contu and Wilmott (2003) in the context of learning in organizations and by Wortham (2006) in a classroom setting. (3) The concept of ideology has had a range of meanings in social theory, which cannot be duly elaborated in this volume. For more extensive discussion, see Gardiner (1992) and Hanks (1996). (4) Williams (1977) summarizes three versions of the Marxist concept of ideology: ‘(1) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group; (2) a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; (3) the general process of the production of meaning and ideas’ (1977: 55). (5) Video- and audio-recordings were not permitted in my observations of management meetings. The description here is based on my field notes. See Mumby (1988) for a treatment of meetings as sites of engagement around an organization’s ideologies. (6) In the 2009 economic climate, NUMMI workers were asked to take a reduced workweek, but soon, GM faced bankruptcy. By 2010, in the midst of a major job crisis in California, the plant closed. (7) We should add that Fatima’s development of an avoidance strategy in these situations was also a kind of learning.

7 Conclusion: Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Communicative Practices at Work

Any human verbal utterance is an ideological construct in the small Vološinov, 1987a: 88

In this book, I have presented an ethnography of multimodality, learning and work in the age of globalization. In order to understand communicative practices in a contemporary work setting, I chose to examine the social interactions of workers with different ethnolinguistic backgrounds in a small circuit board manufacturing plant in the Silicon Valley of California. These company members typified individuals who are brought together into places of work as a result of the increased flow of diverse people, languages, and ‘evaluative accents’ across national borders. My investigation into this company showed how visual, audio and gestural signs were integrated with participants’ use of multiple-language signs as resources for making meaning as they accomplished their task activities. By drawing on this broad ecology of semiotic resources to get work done, these workers engaged in change of knowledge, or, put another way, learning-in-practice. This notion, learningin-practice, not only accounts for learning as an ongoing human activity but also recognizes that ideology pervades learning. I believe this study has shown that, what could be construed as everyday mundane work on a circuit 164

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board assembly floor can in fact hold fascinating and complex qualities, which suggest the need for a broader approach and further investigations in order to flesh out our knowledge of the contemporary workplace.

An Alternate Vision Thus, in this concluding chapter, let me offer for consideration the beginnings of an alternate vision of communicative practices and learning at work. Here, I propose a social semiotics that returns language to its rightful place as the preeminent resource, a social semiotics in which all other modes of communication ‘are bathed by, suspended in’ language (Vološinov, 1973: 15). Yet, language cannot be divorced from the other meaning-making resources people draw on. And language itself, situated as it is within this constellation of modes, must be understood differently, plurally. Thus, most importantly, I propose a semiotics that recognizes multiple-language use as an increasingly common practice in human social interaction. In a word, we need to put the ‘multilingual’ back into the ‘multimodal’. The use of multiple and creative adaptations of language often gets lost in the multimodal discourse literature. This is unfortunate, given the field’s emphasis on design, interest and relations of power/ideology in multimodal meaning-making (Kress, 2010). If a social-semiotic theory of multimodality entails asking questions about participants’ interest, agency and power in the making of meaning, then the examination of value-laden multiple-language use as an integral part of any ensemble of modes should open important doors to some answers. This study showed that the verbal repertoire for many workers included innovative and adaptive uses of more than one language. Their languagesin-interaction carried with them evaluative loads, signaling power relations between superiors and subordinates or between participants and larger social structures. The participants’ multilingual practices in this research thus demonstrate the truth of Vološinov’s claim that the ‘human verbal utterance is an ideological construct in the small’ (1987a: 88). Many of the people at Genesis, who spoke a home language other than English, exhibited differing levels of English competence as part of their linguistic repertoire and put their English to use strategically as they worked. Jan Blommaert (2010: 23) proposes the term ‘truncated multilingualism’ for this phenomenon. I prefer to put mixed and uneven competences in a more positive light by adopting the term ‘plurilingualism’, first proposed by Coste (2001; see also Clyne, 2003; García et al., 2007; Kleifgen, 2009). At Genesis, employees’ language choices were demonstrations of plurilingualism – the use of different linguistic resources in integrated fashion and with varying proficiency, both

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spoken and written. The notion of plurilingualism entails both ‘unevenly developed competences in a variety of languages, dialects and registers as well as the valuing of linguistic tolerance’ (García et al., 2007: 208; emphasis in the original). The term thus not only accounts for more nuanced interpretations of various competences but also leaves room for discourse with an evaluative accent: People communicating often effectively through these uneven linguistic resources and, I might add, even challenging how their linguistic choices are received by their interlocutors. In today’s environment of intensified mobility and language contact, it seems appropriate, as Blommaert (2010) has suggested, to expand Gumperz’s (1964, 1971, 1982a, 1982b) notion of the verbal repertoire to account for the lifelong expansion of one’s use of languages, including those they use with uneven proficiency. Following Vološinov (1929/1973: 103), I add to this expanded notion the potential of people to surmount power and inequality through their own evaluative accents in interaction. This book tried to demonstrate the complex plurilinguistic competences of Genesis employees: their tasks were interwoven with creative mixtures of spoken and written language as part of the multimodal sense-making process. Three examples will suffice here. Frontline workers throughout the assembly floor used their home languages as well as English, like the lead in the prep department who used English along with gestures and objects in the environment to rally two teams of workers in the successful hand-loading of a set of ‘hot’ boards. The members of each team – prepping and hand-loading – often spoke in their native tongues, Vietnamese and Spanish respectively, but this time they relied on English as the lingua franca to complete the urgently needed hand-loading tasks together. Workers at assembly machines invoked the semiotic resources of gesture, sound and vision embedded in their creative mixture of Vietnamese and English talk. They shifted strategically across language systems to contest one another’s suggested solutions and eventually come upon optimal solutions. Likewise, the bilingual qualitycontrol inspector could at one moment shuttle between Spanish and English as appropriate with those who shared her home language; at another moment she could skillfully shift into English to communicate with her Chinese-, English- and Vietnamese-speaking co-workers and superiors to assist as well as to challenge. For her colleagues with more limited competence in English, she fashioned knowledge artifacts, a set of color-coded procedures, to further support their concerted action. Individuals across the manufacturing floor drew on linguistic resources, sometimes with different degrees of proficiency in a given language, other times using mixed codes as needed, and often adapting one or another language according to the co-workers they were addressing and the tasks they were accomplishing in a complex field of action teeming with other modal resources and tools.

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The close-up look at participants’ task activities in this study has allowed for some insights into communicative practices and learning at work. But it also leaves unanswered questions, suggesting the need for further scholarship.

Future Research Directions We need to open new research avenues toward a more comprehensive understanding of communicative practices and learning at work – research directions that will account for the global convergence of individuals who bring diverse ways of acting, speaking and knowing into places of work. Specifically, I propose more on-the-ground ethnographic observations of workers working. Such research can more fully investigate their learning as they use mediating tools and draw on a broad range of semiotic resources, and, crucially, it will account for the powerful semiotic potential of their multilingual practices. I begin first with the need for further intensive ethnographic observation of workers’ concerted actions – the most direct way to tell the story of learning through communicative practices. In spite of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work pointing the way toward understanding complex layers of meaning developed through communication and action within communities of practice, close analysis of how participants deploy linguistic and other semiotic resources is largely missing (Kleifgen, 2007). Moreover, even in the large body of research on work teams, workers’ talk and social interaction on the factory floor, where texts and other artifacts are developed and/or evoked, scarcely have been analyzed. Engeström, who has conducted extensive research on workplace teams, points to the difficulty of capturing stretches of discourse among team members in the midst of their task activities, particularly ‘long multiparty conversations that are embedded in practical activity’ (2008: 166). There are reasons for the lack of this type of data. We researchers, armed as we are with cameras and other paraphernalia, can get in the way of work. Too often, ethnographic researchers’ requests to gain access are rejected because of management’s fears that the research might interrupt workplace goals, as in the case of manufacturing where products must be delivered on time and without flaws. Thus, to-date, learning in the workplace has been studied largely in indirect ways, such as observing meetings and formal training sessions, interviewing workers outside of work hours and examining workplace texts and other inscriptions independent of their context of use. In a review of language socialization in the workplace, Roberts (2010: 213) similarly says that ‘many studies of language use in the workplace are connected to language and cultural training, since this may be

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the only way in which employers are willing to offer their organization as a field site for research’. The up-close and intensive collection and analysis of data reported here was realized thanks to the long view taken by the company president and individuals in upper management, who, during my initial meetings with them, saw the value of this kind of study for advancing the education of a diverse workforce. Even with this initial support, however, I knew that, once I had gained access, the work of building and maintaining trust and respect with company members had to continue throughout the extensive and ‘everpresent’ observations of their tasks. So, most crucially, my long-term relationship with Genesis happened thanks to the generosity and openness of its people. Because of them, this work was able to respond to the call by Engeström (2008: 166) and others for sustained, on-the-ground examination of team members’ communicative practices as they unfold over the course of the work day. Surely there are others in the world of work, who would welcome such research inside their own doors if convinced of its educative value. Secondly, I have argued that a full description of communicative practices must account for all mediating tools and semiotic resources that people bring to their concerted actions. Accounting for these objects and resources can reveal more about participants’ learning-in-practice. A more comprehensive description is especially called for in today’s computerized work environments, particularly because reductionist discourses that characterize workers as ‘bundles of skills’ (Urciuoli, 2008) demand scrutiny. Findings in this study challenge these discourses. Instead of encountering workers who unquestioningly followed narrowly prescribed skills, this research observed workers achieving complex and flexible professional ways of knowing and doing. I observed the concerted actions of employees learning in an advancedtechnology work environment as they relied on their hands, eyes, and ears while setting up high-tech equipment for a specific task, recognizing the change in the rhythm of machine sounds, watching machine movements closely in slow motion during trial runs, creating or adapting knowledge artifacts, assessing online or printed documents and examining the quality of loaded circuit boards. Workers’ skilled use of the vast array multimodal signs and tools in the workplace was particularly manifested during trouble-shooting moments at the machine. We saw that rapid changes in machine technology, products and Internet communication compelled workers to adjust to different circuit board jobs, to more advanced equipment and to customers’ constantly changing designs. Working under tremendous time pressure, they carried out much of the problem-solving on-the-fly, drawing strategically on the meaningmaking resources of language, sound, gesture and inscriptions. Workers

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169

adapted machine parts creatively to accommodate special component sizes, altered software data so that the machine would be able to offset boards of unusual size and even developed ways to work around faulty assembly designs. Lévi-Strauss (1966) formulated the notion of bricoleur to describe the person who uses tools in creative ways, including ways that go beyond the original purposes for which the tools are designed. Ethnographies of work have characterized workers as bricoleurs in their uses of machines. Kusterer (1978), having studied so-called unskilled workers who knew how to adapt materials and machines across several industries, made this point about the way skills in the workplace have been mischaracterized: . . . the use of the ‘unskilled’ label has led to a gross underestimation of the amount of working knowledge actually necessary in these jobs. There is no such thing as unskilled work. This term demeans the workers involved, and it misleads all who seek to understand the nature of their work. (Kusterer, 1978: 179) Some (e.g. Harper, 1987) have argued that the traditional workers’ skills at bricolage have been lost with the advent of computerized technologies. Adler and Borys (1989: 393) rightly point out that operators of computer-controlled machines need an abstract knowledge of the machinery in order to detect and solve problems. However, their claim that tasks have shifted from machining to monitoring, with the result that workers place less emphasis on perceptual processes, has been challenged in this ethnography. Workers can be contemporary bricoleurs, adapting even the digital tools to everchanging circumstances. In sum, research providing close examinations of embodied practices at work can challenge the reductionist skills discourses circulating in education, business and the public media and demonstrate upclose how people actually go about learning at work. This brings us to a third challenge for future research on communication and learning in the contemporary workplace, and that is to bring our efforts in line with the realities of globalization. Our research on multimodal meaning-making will be comprehensive only to the extent that we recognize that globalization leads to an increasingly diasporic workforce, whose multiple linguistic modes have to be taken into account in any future multimodal analysis. This consideration of the multilingual as part of the multimodal is not a new idea. It is worth recalling that, in a seminal article in the field of education, the New London Group (1996) called for a fresh look at literacy pedagogy, which they labeled ‘multiliteracies’, a term that encompasses two major social changes in the contemporary technology-saturated and mobile world: the increasing availability of multiple modes of communication and

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the increasing linguistic diversity in the school, workplace and other aspects of life. With regard to linguistic diversity, they argued: Dealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives. Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries. (1996: 64) The authors went on to draw attention to language, discourse, and register variation in the workplace, in the public sphere, and in private life and recognized the important role of multiple-language use as part of multimodality. Their call to action resulted in renewed research attention to multimodality in school-based research, such as examining ways of integrating multimodality in learning and instruction, encouraging the incorporation of other modes into written language and analyzing the role of other modes in relation to reading and writing. At the same time, recognizing the increased linguistic diversity of students in the world’s classrooms (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009), other research focused on the educational benefits of multiple-language use in the classroom (cf. Baker, 2007; García et al., 2007; Genesee et al., 2005). But these semiotic means are still largely studied separately – not only in classrooms but also in the workplace. Taking a unified perspective, let us explore how people carrying out their task activities in these spaces draw on the various arrays of modes that become available to them in shifting sites of engagement over the course of their day. It is time for another manifesto to bring multiple languages back into the multimodal research fold.

Exodus So, it is here that our story of work in a small, high tech company concludes. This account of a single worksite is partial, with a particular group of participants and situated in a particular place and point in history. The company grew from two people working at a kitchen table to a large plant with 120 employees from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and flourished as a small business, but not without struggles to retain its niche in the highly competitive Silicon Valley market and through a dot-com boom and bust period. In spite of the company’s leadership and its members’ skilled, high-quality labor, imaginative learning and knowledge creation on the job, and its success in coping with ISO constraints and building and

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retaining a strong and loyal customer base, larger outside forces strained the company’s existence. In Chapter 2, I had noted that the miniaturization of component technology required frequent upgrading of expensive assembly machines. But banks were (and still are) unwilling to leverage small businesses, and so investing in upgraded high tech equipment became increasingly unfeasible. Smaller firms were swallowed up as contract manufacturing began to consolidate, and the few large firms that remained built dozens of factories outside the US so they could perform their work as lower cost ‘global suppliers’. Charlie and Madge were among the casualties of these vicissitudes and were forced to close the plant after 23 years. But because the doors of Genesis, Inc. were opened to us for a time, we now have a promising account of concerted work and learning in an ecology of semiotic systems that include multilingual utterances and embodied actions. It is hoped that this exploration into the world of Genesis demonstrates that radically different conditions are possible for efficacious situated learning and communicative practices in our age.

Appendix

Transcription Conventions and Full Transcription (Chapters 3 and 4) ˚

Soft voice

CAPS

Loud voice

:

Elongation of sound

⎡

Overlapping utterances

⎣ =

Contiguous utterances

.

Downward intonation contour

?

Upward intonation contour

!

Animated voice tone

—

Abrupt cut-off

( xxxx )

Unclear speech

italics

Machine sounds English embedded in Vietnamese talk English translation of Vietnamese talk

172

6

5

3 4

2

1

10:33:12 10:35:04 10:35:07 10:35:13 10:35:21 10:35:25

10:29:19

10:15:14 10:17:03 10:17:16 10:18:11 10:18:16 10:18:27 10:19:22 10:21:05 10:22:13 10:22:17 10:25:23

Pick Problem

TIME

Machine: Trân: Machine: Trân:

Trân:

Du: Machine: Trân: Machine:

Machine:

ACTORS

click-click

click-clack—swish

˚One two three.

click-click click-click MIS-PICK— click-click Oo: : : h. swish—click-clack click-click click-click click-click—swish

TRANSCRIPTION

(Continued)

(socket placed) (first pick try) (second pick try) (successful pick) (presses stop) (counts on fingers; gazing at sockets already picked from feeder tape and placed on board) (leans inside machine toward robotic arm poised over board) (straightens up; hand on button, looks at screen) (presses start) (placement and return) (leans in to watch placement and arm’s return to feeder) (first pick try) (presses button for slow motion)

(successful pick)

(first pick try) (second pick try)

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

Appendix 173

Trân:

Du: Trân:

Trân: Du: Trân:

10:47:28

10:53:15 10:54:27

10:55:03 10:55:17 10:58:04

11:00:25 11:12:23

11

12

13

Du:

Machine: Trân:

10:42:19 10:45:15

10:39:22

10:37:23 10:38:25

10:35:45 10:36:18

ACTORS

9 10

8

7

TIME

˚Kỳ ta. Strange.

Ðược, cho nó đi. Okay, let it go

Có phải chỉnh con ốc ở dưới không? Need to fix the screw underneath? Ù. Yeah.

click-click ˚Hai cái. Two. ˚Ba cái. Three.

TRANSCRIPTION

(presses stop as arm begins movement to placement)

(picks up ruler on table next to machine) (presses start and slow-motion buttons; arm continues downward path) (gaze toward arm picking socket from (kneels down to measure pitch on the tape) (telling Du to release tape)

(machine comes to stop on initiating third pick try)

(begins gaze directed at pick point) (lifts plastic screen as arm goes down in slow motion to pick socket) (second pick try – slow motion) (observing robotic arm’s attempts to pick fourth socket)

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

174 Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

11:19:06

11:25:14

16

17

11:30:20

11:31:05

11:32:15

11:39:29

11:40:01

20

21

22

23

11:27:29

11:27:22

19

18

11:16:10

15

11:27:05

11:15:10

14

Trân:

Du:

Trân:

Du:

Du: Trân:

Ù. Yeah. Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four. Hai mươi bốn la mươi hai. Twenty-four, therefore twelve. Mot trăm tư, nhe? One hundred forty, okay? Có. Got it.

Từ cái mỏ náy tới cái mỏ náy. From this point to this point.

Hai. Two. ⎡(xxxx) ⎣Hai ba rưỡi. Two, three and a half. Hai mươi va hai mươi lăm. Twenty and twenty-five. Hai mươi bốn. Twenty-four.

(Continued)

(ends tracing little finger up to midpoint of next component)

(begins tracing little finger from midpoint of one component to the next component)

Appendix 175

13:03:00 13:04:00 13:06:05 13:08:05 13:14:00

13:15:03 13:27:10

13:28:26

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

12:49:27 12:51:01

26 27 28 29 30

12:51:15 13:00:03

11:44:30

25

31 32 33

11:44:05

24

TIME

Trân: Du:

Du:

Trân:

Du:

Trân:

Du:

ACTORS

Có mấy? How many? Bốn saú tám mươi. Four, six, eight, ten. Yeah? Twenty-four. This one only uh ten? Twenty- ⎡ fou: : r? ⎣Phải c`ân đến mươi hai. [We] must set it to twelve. Let’s see if I can find twelve. Twenty-four= =so you have to put this one to EIGHT. NUMBER EIGHT. So this HIT NEXT THREE TIMES.= =˚No. Let’s see if we can put this. No cái đó không có đúng. No, that’s not the right one. (xxxx) Bây giờ ở đây nè. Right now it’s here. (xxxx)

TRANSCRIPTION

(pointing to the 12 pitch point) (pointing to the 10 pitch point on original stopper block)

(gazing at second feeder)

(looking back at Trân; using heightened tone of voice)

(walks some distance away)

(looking at stopper block)

(measuring with calipers)

(pointing to pitch points)

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

176 Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

13:32:25

13:37:10

14:34:00 14:35:01 14:44:12

43

44

45 46 47

Trân: Du:

14:55:07 14:56:08 14:57:59

15:04:00

15:20:19

51 52 53

54

55

Trân:

Trân: Du:

Du:

Trân:

Du:

Trân:

49 14:52:13 50 14:54:00

48 14:51:00

13:29:27

42

(Continued)

Tám bốn. (pointing to alternative settings) Eight, four. Mươi hai. (pointing again to the 12 pitch point) Twelve. Thẩy cái đó đây. (pointing to chair) Put this [feeder] here. No? Too (xxxx). Tám bốn no cho có hai cái ha. Eight, four, it allows two only. Trân u:h Trân ⎡coi cái component ID. Trân uh Trân ⎣ look at the component ID. ⎣(begins moving towards machine) Coi coi ở trong đó. Look, look in there. (getting up, pointing to CRT display (pressing buttons on operator panel; watching display) Coi coi bao nhiêu. See, see how much. Bỏ cái đó cho nó chạy lại. (standing next to Trân at machine) Let it run through it again. Mươi hai. Twelve.

Appendix 177

15:27:55

15:29:27

15:39:00

57

58

59

Du:

ACTORS

16:09:00

16:09:23

63

64

61 16:02:26 62 16:05:66

Du:

Placement Problem 60 15:59:29 Trân:

15:25:19

56

TIME

˚Oo: : : h thôi không duoc rôi. Oo: : : h no it doesn’t work. (xxxx) socket. Dâu có láp socket duoc. [It’s] impossible to install the socket. Thê này dâu có láp socket duoc. Like this [it’s] impossible to install the socket. Cái? Which?

Mươi hai. Twelve. Chút nừa phải cho nó hai mươi bốn. After this [we] must give it twenty four. Hai mươi bốn chẻ số tám chẻ làm ba cái. Twenty four divided by number eight is three. Yeah nó sẽ chẻ ba cái. Yeah, it divides into three.

TRANSCRIPTION

(pointing to the spaces around the 3 sockets)

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

178 Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

70

16:19:50

16:18:04 −16:18:14 69 16:19:03

Du:

Trân:

68

16:17:07

Du:

Trân:

16:13:09 −16:16:29 67 16:16:05

16:11:21 −16:13:08 66 16:13:09

16:11:02 −16:11:20 65 16:11:20

Nó không có dua cho mình. It doesn’t give it to us. Nó dâu có dua cho mình con nào dâu. It didn’t give us anything.

Ba con hay là mây. Three [of the surrounding components], or how many? Tói muòi môt con. Up to eleven [of them].

Cái gì wrong. Something is wrong.

Quên. Forgot.

(Continued)

(sweeps finger left to right, socket to socket)

(makes small loops with finger around socket)

(makes small loops with finger around socket)

(sweeps finger right to left, socket to socket)

Appendix 179

16:25:27

16:27:18

16:31:10

16:54:00 16:55:12 16:56:13

71

72

73

74 75 76

TIME

Trân: Du:

Du

Trân:

ACTORS

Nó dua mình bôn nam còn gì dó. It gives us four, five or so [components]. Mà chua có program=không có bo vô. There’s no program, it wasn’t put in. Bo me cái này bo luôn cái này. Get rid of this one and the other one also. Skip? Skip. Skip it.

TRANSCRIPTION

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

180 Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

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Index

address forms, 12, 75, 77, 80, 89–90, 92–94 Adler, P.S., 148, 169, 181 Ainsworth, J., 160, 181 Anderson, S.R., 98, 181 assembly floor, 13, 26–27, 38, 42, 60, 72, 74, 77–78, 80, 98, 103, 105, 110, 134, 136–37, 139–43, 147–49, 158–59, 161–62, 165–66 assembly lines (department), 18, 22, 27, 112 assembly machine, 1, 24–27, 89, 94, 135, 137, 140–42, 150–51, 162, 166, 171 Atkinson, J., 2, 181 autonomous model of literacy, 125

Borys, B., 169, 181 Bourdieu, P., 9, 14, 102, 111, 152, 182 Braverman, H., 138, 182 bricoleur, 169 Brown, J.S., 163, 182 Brown, P., 80, 182 Brown, R., 128, 182 Button, G., 133, 182 Cantonese, 19, 31, 149 Carnoy, M., 16, 182 Castells, M., 18, 182 Chaiklin, S., 2, 131, 182 Chinese language, 2, 130 employees, 18, 166 circuit boards, 1–4, 12, 15, 18, 20, 22, 24–32, 37–40, 47–48, 54, 57, 69–70, 72, 77, 88–89, 97, 100, 105, 107–10, 112, 116, 120–21, 123, 135–38, 142, 149–54, 157, 162, 164, 168 Clancy, W.J., 163, 182 Clark, K., 7, 182 Clyne, M., 165, 182 Cole, M., 181, 190 Colley, H., 131, 182 communicative practices, 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 17–18, 38–39, 42, 70, 72, 77, 96, 98, 100–1, 103, 127–29, 133, 142, 145, 158, 163–65, 167–68, 171 meaning of, 4 communities of practice, 132, 144, 148, 167

Bachnik, J., 98, 181 Bailey, T., 138, 181 Baker, C., 170, 181 Bakhtin Circle, 5, 7, 14 Barrett, R., 159, 181 Barton, D., 101, 181 Bartunek, J.M., 151, 181 Bazerman, C., 6–7, 181 Belfiore, M.E., 103, 158, 181 bilingual practices, 34, 38, 40, 53, 59, 70–72, 87, 89, 166 bilingual employees, 36, 107, 116–17, 160, 162, 166 Bill of Materials (BOM), 1, 27–30, 35, 63, 78, 108–9, 111, 116, 118–21, 136, 154, 155 Blommaert, J., 7, 159–60, 165–66, 181–82

194

Inde x

competition, 16, 91, 100, 127 Contreras, F., 160, 184 Contu, A., 163, 182 conversation analysis, 7–8, 12, 40, 43–44 Cooke, J.R., 75, 98, 182 Cope, W., 170, 182 Coste, D., 165, 182 Damasio, A., 139, 182 Darrah, C., 2, 96, 182 de Castell, S., 128, 183 DeGraff, M., 160, 183 Delbridge, R., 14, 158, 183 Dentith, S., 8, 183 Derrida, J., 2, 16, 142, 183 dialogic utterance/interaction vs monologic utterance, 6–7, 102 and multimodal analysis, 42 and knowledge, 150 dialogic relations among Bakhtin Circle members, 7 dialogic theory of ideology, 144–45, 158 Dual In-line Package (DIP), 31–32, 38, 135 See also Through-Hole Technology directives, 55, 74, 79–81, 83–89, 91–95, 136, 151 discourse socially-situated, 3, 14, 55, 78, 82, 133 ‘Discourse in life and discourse in art’ (Vološinov), 8 and power relations, 9, 102, 146–47, 149, 166 and multimodality, 11, 165 field, tenor, and mode of (Halliday), 41 in institutional settings, 44, 170 and teams, 75, 148, 167 discourse completion task, 91 of the official literacies (ISO), 110–13, 124–26, 157 and learning/change of knowledge, 131, 149–50 of exceptionalism, 160 reductionist, 168–69 Discrepant Material Report (DMR), 111, 113, 121–22 distributed knowledge, 4, 12, 38, 133–35, 139 document control (department), 20, 26,

195

28, 103–5, 107–8, 110, 114, 116, 134, 141–43, 154, 157, 161–62 Dore, J., 133, 183 Dorval, B., 133, 183 Drew, P., 2, 44, 133, 181, 183 Emeneau, M.B., 76, 183 Emerson, C., 7, 189 endogenous communicative practices, 13, 100, 127 endogenous literacy practices, 114, 117, 124, 128 Enfield, N.J., 98, 183 Engeström, Y., 2, 96, 148–49, 151, 156–57, 167–68, 183 Engeström, R., 148 engineering (department), 16, 20, 22, 26, 40, 99, 103, 114–15, 119, 121, 123, 126, 134, 142–43, 148, 150, 158, 161 English, 2, 5, 12, 19, 28–29, 34–36, 47, 53, 59–60, 71, 74–75, 79, 83–84, 88, 90, 94, 97–98, 105, 107, 116–18, 130, 137, 145, 147–48, 151, 159–62, 165–66, 170 as lingua franca, 3, 32–33, 98, 129, 149, 166 English language learners, 18 English literacy, 31, 98, 161–62 English-only ideology, 130, 159–61 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 160, 183 Erickson, F., 14, 98, 183 Ervin-Tripp, S., 76, 183 ethnography/ethnographic, 11, 17, 20–21, 44, 72, 94, 164, 167, 169 evaluative accent, 6, 9, 72, 74, 94, 96, 146–47, 149, 158, 164, 166 Farrell, L., 126, 183 final inspection (department), 13, 27, 35–37, 108, 117 first article, 29–30, 45, 109, 118, 120, 122 Folinsbee, S., 103, 181, 183 Foucault, M., 9, 14, 99–100, 102, 110–11, 183–84 Frenz-Belkin, P., 72, 187 Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (Vološinov), 5–6 front-line worker, 18, 147, 150, 155

196

Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

Gal, S., 160, 186 Gándara, P., 160, 184 García, O., 18, 160, 165–66, 170, 184 Gardiner, M., 7–8, 14, 144, 163, 184 Garfinkel, H., 134, 184 Gee, J.P., 2, 16, 101, 127, 158, 184 Genesee, F., 170, 184 Gibson, K., 159, 184 globalization, 2–3, 13, 90, 100–01, 127, 164, 169 Goldstein, T., 97, 161, 184 Goodwin, C., 2, 7, 14, 41–43, 66, 71, 133–134, 184–85 Goodwin, M.H., 7, 44, 83, 134, 184–85 Goody, J., 124–25, 185 Gowen, S.G., 2, 103, 185 Gumperz, J.J., 166, 185

115, 118, 124, 127–28, 137–39, 141–43, 147, 149, 154–55, 157–58, 162, 167–68 inspector, 1, 4, 20, 29–30, 37–38, 77, 112, 119, 126, 143, 149–50, 166 See also quality control Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), 17, 38 International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 13, 99–105, 107, 110–14, 116–18, 121–28, 150, 153, 155–58, 161, 170, 186 Irvine, J.T., 160, 186 ISO. See International Organization for Standardization; ISO 9002 ISO 9002, 13, 21, 27, 38, 99–05, 114, 124, 128, 142–43, 157

Halliday, M.A.K., 11, 40–43, 72, 155, 185 Hanks, W., 2, 7, 163, 185 Harper, D.A., 169, 185 Harrington, H.J., 113–14, 185 Hart-Landsberg, S., 2, 96, 103, 185 Hasan, R., 40–41, 72, 155, 185 Heath, C., 43, 133, 185 Heath, S.B., 101, 185 Heller, M., 160–61, 185 Henning, P.H., 163, 185 Heritage, J., 2, 7, 43–44, 133, 183, 186 Hill, J., 159, 186 Hodge, R., 40–41, 186 Holborow, M., 5, 8, 186 Holquist, M., 7, 182, 186 honorifics, 12, 74–75, 77–79, 83–84, 87, 93–94, 97, 151 Howell, R.W., 98, 186 Hull, G., 2, 17, 31, 103, 184, 186 Huss-Lederman, S., 67, 186 Hutchins, E., 133, 163, 186 Hymes, D., 160, 186

Jackson, N., 103, 158, 186 Jameson, F., 7, 186 Jefferson, G., 46, 190 Jewitt, C., 42, 186 Johnson, P., 101, 186 Jolliffe, D., 103, 186 Jordan, B., 133, 186

ideology, 2, 5–10, 13–14, 74, 102, 129–30, 133, 144–48, 157–60, 163–65 Iedema, R., 103, 186 Igasaki, P., 38, 186 informal learning, 12–13, 130–131 See also learning inscriptions, 2–3, 12, 14, 21, 28, 40, 42, 61, 63–64, 68, 71–72, 99, 103, 111,

Kalantzis, M., 170, 182 Katz, M.L., 103, 159, 187 Keenan, E.L., 98, 181 kinship terms, 75–77, 80–81, 84, 87, 89–95, 98 See also person reference Kinzer, C., 18, 187 kit, 28, 30–34, 37, 107–9, 111, 116–17, 154, 170 Kleifgen, J., 18, 42, 67, 72, 98, 160–61, 165, 167, 184, 187 knowledge artifacts, 63, 135, 141–44, 153–54, 157–58, 166, 168 knowledge change, 19, 39, 137, 147, 151 See also learning Kondo, D., 17, 127, 187 Kostogriz, A., 18, 187 Kress, G., 11, 40–42, 162, 165, 186–87 Kusterer, K.C., 169, 187 languages Chinese, 2, 19, 31, 130, 149, 166 See also Cantonese, Mandarin

Inde x

English, 2, 3, 5, 12, 18, 19, 29, 31–36, 47, 53, 59, 60, 71, 74–75, 79, 83–84, 88, 90, 94, 97–98, 105, 107, 116–18, 129–30, 137, 145, 147–49, 151, 159–62, 165–66, 170 Tagalog, 36 Portuguese, 97, 161 Spanish, 2, 19, 33, 149, 160, 162, 166 Vietnamese, 2–4, 12, 18–19, 29–30, 33, 45, 47, 49–50, 53, 59, 71, 74–84, 87–90, 92–98, 118, 137, 149, 151, 162, 166 Lankshear, C., 126, 184, 187 Latinos, 19, 32–33, 162 Latour, B., 14, 142, 187 Lave, J., 2, 13, 129, 131–37, 139, 144, 148, 151, 153, 163, 167, 187–88, 190 Le, T., 98, 187 learning, 2, 4, 10, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 30–31, 35, 67, 72, 97, 112, 121, 123, 128–37, 139, 141, 165, 167–71 problem-solving as, 4, 12, 129, 147 and ideology/power, 144–58 See also informal learning; knowledge change learning-in-practice, 4, 12, 14, 133, 139, 162–64, 168 Lemke, J., 11, 42, 127, 188 Levine, D.L., 139, 188 Levinson, S., 44, 80, 83, 86, 133, 182, 188 Lévi-Strauss, C., 169, 188 Linde, C., 94, 188 Lindholm-Leary, K., 184 Lippi-Green, R., 160, 188 literacies, 101–3, 110, 112–13, 124, 126–28, 143, 157, 169 Luong, H.V., 75–77, 80, 93, 95, 188 Lynch, M., 60, 188 machine operator, 1, 4, 20, 27–31, 37, 44, 68, 77, 90, 92, 115, 129–30, 136, 138, 140–42, 149–50 Makoni, S., 161, 188 manager, 15, 19–20, 25–26, 34, 96, 100, 103–4, 111–15, 121, 126–27, 136, 139, 142, 144, 148–50, 154–57 Mandarin, 19

197

manufacturing firm/plant (Genesis), 1, 10, 15, 21–23, 103–4, 164 manufacturing floor, 3, 11, 13, 20, 24, 27, 44, 103–5, 108, 114, 116–17, 123–24, 126, 139, 143, 146, 153, 155, 158, 161, 166 manufacturing flow chart, 108, 114, 142 Manufacturing Process Instructions (MPI/s), 108, 114, 116, 119–21, 142–43, 149, 154, 158, 162 Marsick, V.J., 130–131, 188 Martinec, R., 42, 188 Martin-Jones, M., 160, 185 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (MPL) (Vološinov), 5–6, 8, 10, 14, 43, 132 master folder, 13, 108–10 Matejka, L., 10, 188 Mathers, D.D., 114, 185 Matthiessen, C.M.I.M., 43, 185 McAll, C., 161, 188 Merrill, P., 105, 111, 188 Middleton, D., 2, 96, 148, 183 modes of communication, 2, 11, 13, 40–44, 72, 99, 129, 161–62, 165, 169–70 See also semiotic resources Moerman, M., 44, 188 Morris, P., 5, 7, 188 Morson, G.S., 7, 189 MPI/s. See Manufacturing Process Instructions multiaccentuality/multiaccentual, 10, 19, 98, 102, 126, 146 multilingualism/multilingual, 3, 11, 13–14, 18, 43,105, 129–30, 148, 159–60, 162, 165, 167, 169, 171 multimodality, 2–3, 10–12, 13–14, 30, 38–43, 65, 70–72, 115, 124, 130 142, 164–66, 168–70 centrality of language in, 10–11, 165–66 Mumby, D., 163, 189 Murphy, C.N., 101, 128, 189 National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 18, 189 New Literacy Studies (NLS), 101 New London Group, 169, 189 Nguyen, P.P., 98, 189

198 Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

Nguyen, S., 76–77, 189 Niedzwiecki, M., 38, 186 Noble, D.F., 138, 189 O’Halloran, K.L., 41–42, 189 O’Toole, M., 42, 189 Olson, D.R., 124–25, 189 Ong, W.J., 124, 189 Orr, J.E., 44, 72, 141, 189 outsourcing, 16, 153 Oyetade, S.O., 90, 98, 189 Peach, R.W., 101, 189 Pennycook, A., 161, 188 person reference, 4, 13, 74–75, 77, 79–83, 87, 90, 93–95, 97–98 See also kinship terms Pfeffer, J., 96, 189 Philippines, 19, 29, 36 Pitti, S.J., 19, 189 plurilingualism, 165–66 See also multilingualism politeness forms, 76, 78, 91–94, 97 Portuguese language, 97, 161 employees, 22, 34 power, 4, 5, 9, 13, 86, 96, 100, 102, 111, 127, 144, 146, 149, 151–53, 156, 159–60, 162–63, 165–66 power relations, 3–4, 8–9, 12–13, 74, 77–78, 90, 98–99, 101–2, 130, 132–33, 136, 144, 146, 149, 151–53, 158, 165 prebaccalaureate education, 19 problem-solving, 12, 21, 45, 47, 55, 70, 72, 74, 79–80, 83, 89–91, 95, 97, 112, 131, 134, 137, 139, 141, 144, 147, 151, 153, 168 See also trouble shooting programmer, 20, 29, 31, 37, 136, 138, 142 Pujòl-Ferrán, M., 67, 189 quality control, 3, 14, 18, 29–30, 34–35, 38, 96, 99, 103, 110, 112–17, 126–28, 143, 147, 149–50, 162 system/requirements, 4, 13, 96, 100, 103, 111, 118, 124, 126, 143, 156–58 See also ISO

documents, 11, 13, 21, 100–03, 124–26, 142 stations, 1, 22, 38 certification, 21, 38, 99–101, 103–4, 110, 124, 142, 153, 156–57 See also ISO manual, 21, 105–6, 110, 120 inspector, 1, 4, 20, 29–30, 37–38, 77, 112, 119, 126, 143, 149–50, 166 and endogenous practices, 13, 103, 113–14, 117, 124, 127–28, 143, 157 Quinn, C., 98, 181 Quirk, R., 156, 189 Reder, S., 2, 96, 103, 185 reflow oven, 30 Reich, R.B., 16, 105, 190 Reid, R.D., 151, 181 Roberts, C., 2, 97, 167, 190 Rogoff, B., 131, 163, 190 Sachs, P., 103, 133, 190 Sacks, H., 7, 46, 59–60, 190 Salomon, G., 163, 190 Sanders, C., 14, 190 Sarangi, S., 2, 190 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5, 14, 190 Saville-Troike, M., 43, 190 Scheeres, H., 103, 186 Schegloff, E.A., 7, 44, 71, 82, 86, 190 Scollon, R., 71, 101, 138, 190 Scollon, S.W., 101, 138, 190 screen print, 29, 108 Scribner, S., 103, 131, 133, 190 second assembly (department), 27, 34–36, 112–13, 115, 130, 139–40, 150, 155, 157 Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), 17, 191 Seddon, J., 127–28, 191 semiotic means, 40, 72, 74, 128, 130, 146, 158, 162–63, 170 semiotic resources, 4, 10–12, 28, 40–43, 45, 59, 61–64, 99, 121, 123, 128–29, 137, 139, 143, 164, 166–68 See also modes of communication semiotics, 2, 10, 40–44, 145, 165, 171 See also sign Shaiken, H., 135, 191

Inde x

shared knowledge, 8, 12, 55, 134, 137–38 sign (in semiotics), 3–4, 6, 8, 10–11, 39–41, 43, 71, 74, 102–3, 124–28, 138, 142, 144–46, 148, 164, 168 See also semiotics Silicon Valley, 2–3, 11, 15–18, 95, 153, 164, 170 Silverstein, M., 161, 191 situated learning, 129–32, 135, 162–63, 171 social interaction, 2–3, 5–6, 8–10, 12, 20, 41–44, 71–72, 74, 90, 102, 121, 127, 132, 134, 141–42, 144–46, 164–65, 167 soldering, 27, 32, 34–37, 40, 108, 113, 150 Spanish, language, 2, 33, 149, 162, 166 employees, 19, 116–17, 160 Stasz, C., 17–18, 191 Street, B.V., 101, 125, 191 Stroud, C., 160, 191 Suchman, L., 44, 134, 191 supervisor, 1, 4, 18–20, 27, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 44–45, 60, 76–81, 84–85, 87–96, 110–11, 114–15, 118, 120–21, 126, 135–36, 140–41, 143–44, 147, 149–52, 156, 158, 162 Surface Mount Technology (SMT), 25–26, 28–30, 32, 38, 40, 45, 51–52, 61–62, 66, 105, 107–10, 117, 123, 126, 138, 140–41, 149–50, 153 Tagalog, 36 talk-in-interaction, 7, 14, 45, 70, 77, 94, 96, 143 Tannen, D., 133, 191 Tannock, S., 2, 191 task activity, 4, 44, 46, 75, 83, 138 teams, 3, 12, 16, 18, 20–22, 28, 30, 32–38, 75, 77, 95–97, 108, 112, 116, 137, 147–49, 151, 166–68 natural teams, 3, 147–49, 159, 162 tema, 8, 102, 132 testing (department), 26–27, 35–37, 40, 105, 108, 114, 139, 150 Thibault, P.J., 42, 191 Threadgold, T., 41, 191 Through-Hole Technology, 25, 28, 30–32, 120, 123, 135, 149, 153 See also Dual In-Line Package (DIP) Tihanov, G., 145, 158, 191

199

Titunik, I.R., 5, 7, 191 Tjosvold, D., 151, 191 Tjosvold, M.M., 151, 191 touch-up (department), 27, 32, 34–35, 37, 115 Troike, R.C., 90, 192 troubleshooting, 27–28, 37–41, 44–45, 56, 59–61, 63, 71–72, 77, 80, 94, 138, 156, 162 See also problem-solving Ueno, N., 115, 126, 158, 192 United States Department of Labor, 19, 192 Urciuoli, B., 159, 168, 192 utterance, 5–9, 43, 47–48, 54, 56, 59, 64, 71, 76–77, 80–88, 91–94, 98–99, 102, 125, 132, 138, 164–65, 171 Van Leeuwen, T., 11, 40–42, 162, 187, 192 Varenne, H., 131, 141, 192 Vietnam, 19, 28–29, 38, 75–76, 91, 93–94, 130 Hanoi, 13, 75, 90–94 Vietnamese language, 2–4, 12, 29–30, 33, 45, 47, 49–50, 53, 59, 71, 74–84, 87–90, 92–98, 137, 149, 151, 162, 166 employees, 3, 12, 18–19, 28–29, 31–35, 44, 45, 78, 88, 90, 93–94, 97, 107, 108, 118, 130, 149, 162 vocative, 86–87, 93, 95 Vološinov, V.N., 1, 5–10, 13–14, 19, 39–41, 43, 72, 74, 98–100, 102–3, 111–12, 125–26, 129, 132–33, 142–46, 158, 164–66, 192 Vygotsky, L., 133, 192 Wallat, C., 133, 191 Ward, M., 155, 192 Watkins, K.E., 131, 188 Watt, I., 124, 185 wave-solder machine, 32, 116 Wertsch, J.V., 131, 192 Williams, R., 7, 163, 192 Willis, P., 158, 192 Wilms, W.W., 96, 148, 192 Wittgenstein, L., 127, 192

200

Communicat ive Prac t ices at Work

Wolfram, W., 160, 192 Woolgar, S., 14, 142, 187 Wortham, S., 163, 192 Yates, J., 101, 128, 189

zhiznennaia ideologia, 145, 158 Zhucheng, J., 91, 192 Zimbalist, A., 138, 193 Zimmerman, D.H., 73, 133, 193 znachenie, 8