Between Craft and Science: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City

Book Overview

Between Craft and Science brings together leading scholars from sociology, anthropology, industrial relations, management, and engineering to consider issues surrounding technical work, the most rapidly expanding sector of the labor force. Part craft and part science, part blue-collar and part white-collar, technical work demands skill and knowledge but is rarely rewarded with commensurate status or salary.The book first considers the anomalous nature of technical work and the difficulty of locating it in any conventional theoretical framework. Only an ethnographic approach, studying the actual doing of the work, will make sense of the subject, the authors conclude. The studies that follow report daily practice filled with disjunctures and ironies that mirror the ambiguities of technical work's place in the larger culture. On the basis of those studies, the authors probe questions of policy, management, and education.Between Craft and Science considers the cultural difficulties in understanding technical work and advances coherent, practice-oriented insights into this anomalous phenomenon.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801483662
• ISBN13: 9780801483660
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Epistemology of Work and Learning

This book provides a fascinating view of how people really work and learn. The book is based on a series of ethnographical studies of different technical professions; for instance, software support people and emergency medical technicians. The main gist of the book is that there is a gap between work practice and theory: work practice is filled with disjunctures, ironies, and ambiguities whereas work theory resembles a sterile ideal type.