This blog is about the social organization of technical work; primarily science (natural history and evolutionary biology especially) but also various kinds of computing work, with side trips into other technical specialties.
My focus is on analyzing the similarites and differences among different specialties: how they recognize and solve problems, how they relate to other specialties and the rest of the world, how these relationships shape the content of their work.
Along the way, I’ll mention some of my own specialty’s problems, especially issues of method: how do we go about identifying and analyzing the important properties of work organizations? What are the trade-offs among abstraction and generalization on the one hand, and careful description on the other?
This is all very ivory-tower sort of stuff. I promise to keep it dull, and useful only to those who need it.
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