Ecologies of Inscription: Technologies of Making the Social Organization of Work and the Mass Production of Machine Parts Visible in Collaborative Activity

This article focuses on technologies for making social organization, work, and mass production mutually visible in collaborative activity. I describe how practitioners in a manufacturing factory mutually organize accountability of their own social organization, the work, and the mass-produced products through using various inscriptions and other technologies along with concretely demonstrating these presuppositions of society and work. Among them, I focus on how multilayered accountabilities are organized and on how the multilayered accountabilities or multiply-organized activities are linked up and coordinated with inscriptions and other technologies. At linking points, mutualities of various divisions of labor are organized. In addition, at a linking point, what occurs is not the transmission of invariant information, but the transformation of the information. Imaging the relations across inscriptions as a linear chain can be viewed as one of the more popular inscriptions locally utilized by management on specific occasions.