From Well-Bounded Ethnographies to Intervening in Mycorrhizae Activities

Julian Orr’s book is a carefully crafted ethnography of a well-bounded and stable occupational community obsessed with control and largely dependent on stories as mediating epistemic tools. Today’s world of work is going through, or at least making possible, some major transformations: from control to swarming, from bounded occupational communities to mycorrhizae-like formations, from latent dilemmas to dynamic contradictions, and from singular epistemic tools, such as stories, to multilevel instrumentalities. The emerging landscapes of work call for radically revised methodologies of research that carry out interventions to find developmental potentials in the contradictions of work in capitalism.