Action at a Distance

This book examines the nature of work and management, centring on documents as a class of management objects that play a central role as ordering devices, in the social organisation of patterns of coordinated action in situations in which the usual resources of face to face communication are absent. With a focus on managers, the authors offer a description of the interior configuration of the world of senior management, drawing on first person experience rather than ethnographic fieldwork to shed new light on the importance of third person reflection upon practical understandings.