Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: [Working knowledge as performance. On the practical understanding of machines] Boel Berner’s article uses perspectives from science and technology studies to understand the working knowledge used by operators to understand and handle machines. Industrial production is seen as a heterogeneous assemblage of sociomaterial practices, where machines and humans interact in processes of mutual inscription and modification. Working knowledge is analysed as situated practices of knowing, or performances. This perspective is used in a meta-interpretation of earlier ethnographic research and other accounts of manual, industrial work, focusing on the mental, bodily and emotional understanding employed in crucial situations, as when learning to work, localizing machines, or coping with difficult or recalcitrant machines. Publication history: Translation of the article “Working Knowledge as Performance: On the Practical Understanding of Machines” in Work, Employment and Society , volume 22, no 2 (2008). (Published 23 October 2025) Citation: Berner, Boel (2025) “Arbetskunskap som agerande. Om den praktiska kunskapen om maskiner”, in Tekniken i samhället, samhället i tekniken , special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys , issue 18, pp. 119–141. https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.18.3
Author: Boel Berner
Institution: Linköping University
Language: Swedish
Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4415472502
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: