Interview Project:

Traveling Facts, Reproducing Sites

The second project is about situated knowledge, culture, and production. The challenge is to find a way to apply some of the topics we have talked about in class to interviews with differently situated people within a site of knowledge production. How do they understand the world they inhabit? How do they do so differently than others?

Your assignment is to:

1. Pick a site of knowledge production and fact flow
   • Business/Industry
   • Department
   • Laboratory
   • Agency
   • Medical Office
2. Map the different kinds of positions within it
   • Organization Chart, with dotted lines outside the site
   • Hierarchy Chart
   • Career Path
   • Network Chart
3. Find three people to interview who are in different positions
4. Ask them questions about their position
   • What do they actually do? (% time spent on different activities)
   • How do they talk about these activities (by project, by task, by people)?
   • How do they keep up with knowledge (division, site, customers, profession, world)?
   • Sources (meetings, networking, conferences, internet, newsletters/journals, magazines)?
   • What makes a person good in that position? In other positions?
   • How much is learned, how much has to be already in the person?
   • What qualities beyond merit does a person need to succeed?
   • What kinds of pressures are there (publish or perish, sales quota, networking)?
   • e.g. How important is loyalty in this industry?
   • Are there some aspects of the job that they didn’t know beforehand, no one told them, but that turned out to be incredibly important?
   • How are decisions made (company wide)? How does the person come to know about them?
   • How are local decisions made (democratic, committee, autocratic, modeling)?
5. More specific questions related to a topic in our class:
   • Information control, knowledge production in-house, risks?
   • Different measures of risk, differing styles of belief?
   • Explanations of the behaviors of others (even customers, activists, competitors. etc.)?
   • Changing times, importance of financial aspects, globalization?
   • Job/Company/Department structure differences? Outsourcing?
   • Industry-University collaboration (how has this changed)?
   • Official politics (Washington), what roles are there?
   • What qualities do good students/recruits have? Have they changed over the last 10 years?
   • How are new projects chosen? How are folks targeted (or not)?
6. Discuss your findings in a paper:
   • How do the differently positioned folks inhabit different worlds?
   • What kinds of assumptions do they share?
   • What roles might these similarities and differences play in the reproduction of the site?
   • Reproduction at other levels (individual, group, division/department, discipline/profession)?
   • What do you notice about behavior, demeanor, dress, style, neatness, etc.? How are these important?
   • What areas did you find difficult to find out about? Why do you think so?
   • Relate your analysis to some of the papers that we have read and talked about.
   • Length: 5-7 pages / 2500 words.