While the importance of ethnographic research for causal understanding is widely recognized, the logic of this argument has not been well articulated. The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions under which direct field observations become essential for causal studies. It is argued in...

Visions of future computing in residential settings often come with assumptions of seamless, well-functioning, properly configured devices and network connectivity. In the near term, however, processes of setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting are fraught with difficulties; householders...

Service skill definitions have been over-extended, by equating compliance with skill, and underdeveloped, by not recognising service jobs' invisible social and organisational aspects. Existing approaches to determining service skill levels draw on occupational qualifications and capacity for...

A current theme within debates over interactive service work is that many routine service jobs are ‘skilled’ because they require workers to perform ‘emotion work’ and ‘articulation work’. Drawing upon workers’ views of their skills in two mass...

The paper, as such a draft of a chapter for the second edition of the 'Handbook of Economic Socielogy', Edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, is meant to offer some sort of roadmap accross a few fields of investigation concerning the relationships between technological learning and...