10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17251
Notably taking root in the first laboratory ethnography studies and in the interactionist sociology of work, several studies have recently provided an in-depth account of maintenance and repair work in very different sites (workplaces, urban settings, homes). They have provided great insights to not only reconsider largely invisible operations, but also to pursue the discussion of issues such as innovation, ordering processes and materiality in Science and Technology Studies. In this introduction, we focus on two topics of discussion. First, we show how maintenance and repair studies expand our understanding of sociomaterial work and object agency. Second, we highlight reasons for exploring maintenance and repair practices to challenge and decenter innovation studies.
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2038-3460
17251
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en
David Pontille
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
modes of ordering
Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Editorial
2016-01-29
2023-06-17
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
5-15
TS
David Pontille
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17251
5
Mines ParisTech CNRS Paris
2038-3460
2
modes of ordering
en
15
Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17251/16115
6
                                                                     Guest Editors’ Introduction

Maintenance & Repair in Science and
Technology Studies
    Jérôme Denis                       Alessandro Mongili                   David Pontille
      Télécom ParisTech                       University of Padova             Mines ParisTech
                                                                                 CNRS Paris
!
     Abstract Notably taking root in the first laboratory ethnography studies
     and in the interactionist sociology of work, several studies have recently
     provided an in-depth account of maintenance and repair work in very dif-
     ferent sites (workplaces, urban settings, homes). They have provided great
     insights to not only reconsider largely invisible operations, but also to pur-
     sue the discussion of issues such as innovation, ordering processes and ma-
     teriality in Science and Technology Studies. In this introduction, we focus
     on two topics of discussion. First, we show how maintenance and repair
     studies expand our understanding of sociomaterial work and object agency.
     Second, we highlight reasons for exploring maintenance and repair practic-
     es to challenge and decenter innovation studies.

     Keywords: maintenance & repair; vulnerability; innovation; materiality;
     modes of ordering.

     Corresponding author: Jérôme Denis, Département des Sciences
     Économiques et Sociales, Télécom ParisTech, Institut Interdisciplinaire de
     l’Innovation (CNRS UMR 9217), 46 rue Barrault, F-75634, Paris Cedex 13,
     France – Email: jerome.denis@telecom-paristech.fr.



    For several years, interest in maintenance and repair practices have
been growing in science and technology studies (STS), and numerous in-
vestigations have been conducted on the expansion of the seminal works
of Akrich (1993) and de Laet and Mol (2000). The emerging stream of re-
search explores overlooked sites and practices and contributes to various
issues such as “ontological politics” (Mol 1999), “new materialism”
(Coole and Frost 2010), and “knowing capitalism” (Thrift 2005). Consid-
ering papers from different European countries, this special issue of
Tecnoscienza offers ethnographic insight on specific political, economic
and technical configurations. The current work examines the enactment
of material vulnerability in e-waste practices (Blanca Cállen and Tomás
Sánchez Criado), the “distributed correction process” in the design of
!
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
6 (2), pp. 5-15 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                     2015
6                                                            Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

advanced driver assistance systems (Oana Stefana Mitrea), the mundane
interventions of building caretakers (Philippe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel and
Alain Bovet), and a major breakdown in an industrial pharmaceutical
plant (Cynthia Colmellere).
    Before describing the analytical contributions of the articles in more
detail, we outline a brief genealogy of maintenance and repair in STS and
highlight two main topics of discussion that are particularly worthwhile:
1) sociomaterial work and agency and 2) innovation and concrete condi-
tions


1. Work and Material Agency: Living in a Vulnerable World

    For a long time, laboratory studies have stressed the material side of
work involved in the daily production of scientific facts, relying on a di-
verse range of documents, machines, instruments, inscriptions, chemical
and physical substances, etc. (Latour and Woolgar 1979). Consequently,
studies have emphasized the role of technicians in the maintenance of
places, instruments, and experimental materials (Mukerji 1989; Barley
and Bechky 1994).
    In a well-known article, Shapin (1989) investigated the work of lab
technicians (“servants,” as they were called in those times) in the 17th
century, showing the crucial role they played in experimental arrange-
ments. Remaining largely invisible in scientific reports, lab technicians
used to regularly prepare and build machines, calibrate and repair in-
struments, and fix damages directly caused by unsuccessful experiments,
sometimes leading to fire or explosions. As Shapin emphasized, techni-
cians not only performed experiments and maintained the different de-
vices assembled in experimental settings, but they also assumed the cor-
poral risks of dangerous experimental trials.
    More recently, Knorr-Cetina (1999) showed that researchers in mo-
lecular biology are also caretakers of the living organisms prepared for
experimental manipulation in laboratories. Animals are bred and nour-
ished, plants are warmed and observed, and other materials (bacteria,
plasmids, cell lines, viruses, etc.) need careful attention on a daily basis.
As she clearly demonstrated, caretaking also encompasses technical de-
vices such as glassware, flasks, pipette tips, and test tubes that must be
cleaned, sterilized, and stored to prevent degradation.
    Laboratory studies investigate maintenance and caretaking practices
from the angle of work organization, indicating the boundary between
the scientist that thinks and produces original ideas and the technical
workers that manipulate instruments and remain in the background. Crit-
icizing the disembodied figures of the scientific genius stressed out by
some historians and philosophers of science (such as the superior mind of
scientists) is related to what Hughes (1962) has shown regarding the na-
Denis, Mongili & Pontille                                                  7
ture of the tasks carried out in workplaces, which are barely considered
honorable or respectful. He emphasized that professions are not just or-
ganized by the technical distribution of tasks, but they are also affected by
a moral division of labor. Every profession, even the most prestigious, in-
volves some “dirty work,” generally conducted by those considered out-
side of the “real” or “core” professional circle. Such a monopoly defines
“what counts” as a job, particularly in the professional world (Strauss
1985; Star and Strauss 1999). At the crossing of laboratory studies and
the interactionist sociology of work, a new domain of research has
emerged, making room for an explicit interest in how “work is the link
between the visible and the invisible” (Star 1991, 265). It has notably laid
the basis for the study of infrastructures and the distribution of work en-
acted through daily functioning, and it has invited us to reconsider the
role of mundane operations, including maintenance and repair, in their
“taken-for-grantedness” (Star 1999).
    On the margins of STS, some scholars have investigated maintenance
and repair practices (Orr 1996; Henke 2000). They notably insisted on
the dynamics of knowledge within occupational communities and high-
lighted the irreducibility of repair work, which inherently resists attempts
of rationalization and planning (Orr 1996). Through in-depth ethno-
graphic investigations, scholars have dramatically enriched previous stud-
ies concerning what Shapin (1989) has termed “invisible technicians”,
foregrounding the crucial role of improvisation in maintenance work (Orr
1996) and the kind of material and bodily commitment required (Henke
2000; Dant 2008).
    More generally, these works aim at expanding one of the main as-
sumptions of interactionist sociology and ethnomethodology, i.e., that so-
cial order is not a given, but the vulnerable outcome of a ceaseless process
which draws on mundane “remedial interchanges” (Goffman 1971) and
on conversation repair (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff 1992; Schegloff et al.
1977). Taking inspiration from these crucial theoretical claims, mainte-
nance and repair studies strive to broaden the focus from conversational
exchanges and face-to-face interactions to the material features of our
daily lives and environment. Social order, then, can be conceived not only
as sociomaterial order, but also as the concrete result of the everyday
practices of material maintenance and repair. Insisting on the perpetual
production of social and material order, these studies stress the instability
and potential failures and fragility beyond a definition of sociomateriality
that only focuses on “affordances” and “scripts” (Jarzabkowski and Pinch
2013).
    A particularly promising set of studies regarding architecture preser-
vation (Edensor 2011; Jones and Yarrow 2013) and art conservation
(Dominguez Rubio, forthcoming) pushes the discussion further, question-
ing the status of the “order” maintenance and repair are supposed to cre-
ate. These studies notably show that authenticity, for which preservation
practices strive, is distributed amongst heterogeneous arrays of agencies
8                                                            Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

and, above all, is always negotiated. Hence, sociomaterial order would be,
by no means, a shared and univocal horizon toward which all repair work
would be oriented; on the contrary, investigations of maintenance and re-
pair foreground the relationality of sociomaterial order. Maintenance and
repair practices are embedded in social worlds that bear specific norma-
tivities (Gregson et al. 2009) and enact various, and sometimes opposite,
orders.
    Similarly, following Mol (2008) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2011), schol-
ars recently discussed maintenance and repair as deeply inscribed in a
logic of care (Jackson 2014; Denis and Pontille 2015) that starts from de-
cay and vulnerability instead of denying them (Tronto 1993). Because
they concentrate on the material fragility of things (Connolly 2013) and
the constant necessity of taking care of them, maintenance and repair ac-
tually offer an opportunity to reconsider the traditional view of the role of
artifacts in society and, more generally, of object agency (Law and Single-
ton 2005), pursuing feminist reflections on human and nonhuman rela-
tionships (Haraway 1991). Studying the ways in which maintenance
workers or mundane users explore matter and its various modes of exist-
ence is thus a particularly efficient means to think materially, beyond iner-
tia (Barad 2003; Ingold 2007) and sturdiness (Denis and Pontille 2014).


2. Maintenance, Repair and Innovation

    Within STS, maintenance and repair, as a matter of concern and as a
field of inquiry, challenge the more widespread images of innovation. In-
novation is “a highly politicized construct taken up by specific actors and
made to work in particular ways” (Suchman and Bishop 1999, 7).
    We can clearly distinguish two ideas of innovation: a more widespread
series of representations focused on the relation between designers and
users or a series of analyses focused on the overall articulation process.
The spectrum can be characterized following the roles played by things
and matter (Barad 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).
    Innovation has been mostly defined as a successful two-step process
consisting of relevant actors articulated in invention and diffusion. Inno-
vation in public space and discourse is accepted without specifying con-
sistency or characteristics (Godin 2013). However, if we consider every
change in processes and products, in use and configurations, and in tasks
(touching the sociotechnical or hybrid sets as an element of process inno-
vation), we must admit that heterogeneous actors in common settings of
maintenance and repair continuously produce a large amount of innova-
tions (Jackson 2014). Unfortunately, these innovations are not easily
acknowledged as such (Mongili 2015).
    Largely drawing on feminist studies, maintenance and repair studies is
concerned with “decentering” sites of innovation (Suchman 2009) and
Denis, Mongili & Pontille                                                      9
widening the interest in design, use, organizations, corporations, and
markets (Graham and Thrift 2007; Graham 2010). Because maintenance
and repair studies take the fragility of technology as a starting point (Den-
is and Pontille 2014) and focus on object breakdown rather than closure
(Jackson 2014), maintenance and repair studies explore overlooked inno-
vation practices. Graham and Thrift (2007, 5) state:
         But when things break down, new solutions may be invented. In-
         deed, there is some evidence to suggest that this kind of piece-by-
         piece adaptation is a leading cause of innovation, acting as a con-
         tinuous feedback loop of experimentation which, through many
         small increments in practical knowledge, can produce large chang-
         es.
     Most designers limit themselves to assembling elements that already
exist, rarely introducing new elements. They verify or produce interoper-
ability among the elements driven to converge in a new device, and their
job is characterized by an extended use of the tools, infrastructures, and
materials at hand (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003; Mongili 2014; Sefyrin
2012; Suchman 2002). Therefore, repair is at the heart of a continuous
process that includes patching up, reconfiguring, interpolating, and reas-
sembling settings from previous forms of existence.
     Repair practices show that the “articulation” of a device is as relevant
as its design. The concept of articulation is derived from interactionist
matrices. Geoffrey Bowker and Leigh Star (1999, 310) defined “articula-
tion” as a “work done in real time to manage contingencies: work that
gets things back on track in the face of the unexpected, that modifies ac-
tion to accommodate unanticipated contingencies.” Decentering our in-
terest from design, conception, projects, and stabilization and moving
toward the big domain of articulation, we have found a junction element
between innovation and maintenance and repair studies because changes
and innovation occur during articulation. In studying maintenance and
repair, we shift toward more ordinary technical devices (Denis and Pon-
tille 2014) and their fluidity and fragility (de Laet and Mol 2000). Outside
and beyond representational understandings of innovation, we consider
innovation as occurring every day, but we consider it often invisible.
Shifting to the ordinary has important consequences. First, the changing
processes of devices and their assemblages must be studied in unexpected
places and temporalities. In particular, the extension of sociotechnical
networks to the countries of the South, transformations endured during
those processes, and the changes they enact all seem particularly interest-
ing. Second, the changing processes should be investigated in studying
design and use, maintenance and repair, and their convergence, specifi-
cally, the convergence between these aspects digitally. As Suchman re-
cently asserted, the digital “undoes professional boundaries historically
drawn between making and using” (Suchman 2014, 129) and, we can
add, between making, using, and repairing.
10                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

    STS have insisted on the role of crises and breakdowns in innovation
processes for years. Research in the social construction of technology no-
tably highlighted how innovation occurs far after its last official steps and
how technologies constantly oscillate from open states to closed ones.
However, considering the many possibilities of innovation, maintenance
and repair practices show differences in foundational studies. Indeed, the
constant ordering processes that maintenance and repair studies have
foregrounded (Orr 1996; Henke 2000; Denis and Pontille 2014) have lit-
tle to do with closure or the dynamics between the moments of crisis and
stabilization. Through dismantling, disassembling, and reassembling ac-
tivities, maintenance and repair practices are grounded in a disordered
ground, not in an immanent order to be reproduced or defended. They
enact multiple realities (Mol 2002; Law 2004) and multiple “vulnerabili-
ties” (Callén and Sánchez Criado, in this issue) that are the grounds for
innovation.


3. The Papers in this Issue

     The papers gathered in this special issue emphasize, revisit, or pursue
the aforementioned topics, investigating distinct empirical cases.
     We saw that maintenance and repair studies highlight the material
vulnerability of our world. In “Vulnerability tests. Matters of ‘care for
matter’ in e-waste practices”, Blanca Callén and Tomás Sánchez Criado
try expand on this stance, exploring the diversity of the ways in which
vulnerability is experienced in practice. Studying the case of electronic
waste, they show that mending, fixing, and maintaining obsolete comput-
ers involves at least three kinds of, what they term, “vulnerability tests:”
sensing matter, setting up informal experiments, and intervening in obso-
lescence. These tests bear witness to very different ways of enacting vul-
nerability through specific and situated “care for matter” practices.
Moreover, they each participate in sustaining a particular ethical and po-
litical alternative order that resists the current e-waste regimes and their
focus on obsolescence. Using these vulnerability tests, the authors, follow-
ing Puig de la Bellacasa (2011), ask us to think about how we, as STS re-
searchers, can approach fragility with care, and they ask us to not quickly
see maintenance and repair processes as mere restorations of a preexisting
sociomaterial order.
     In “Instances of Failures, Maintenance, and Repair in Smart Driving”,
Oana Stefana Mitrea questions the designers’ point of view on mainte-
nance and repair in investigating the ways that failures are envisioned in
advanced driver assistance systems. In autonomous car experiments,
which actually appear semi-autonomous, repair is not perceived as a
mainly human practice to help objects or technologies retrieve their full
functionalities; conversely, they are perceived as complex technological
Denis, Mongili & Pontille                                                 11
activities aimed at surveilling humans, which are considered major, if not
unique, causes of failure. Such a specific case invites a more symmetrical
view on maintenance and repair, sometimes made of “distributed recip-
rocal monitoring.” Moreover, it shows the importance of considering the
broad ecology of maintenance and repair and questioning, beyond the
situated practices, the ways that failures or weaknesses are attributed in
sociotechnical structures.
    The ethnomethodological roots of maintenance and repair studies
have been stressed many times. Garfinkel (1967) and Schegloff and his
colleagues (1977) have been crucial in studying the vulnerability of social
order and the continuous role of repair in its daily accomplishment. In
“Reassembling Repair: Of Maintenance Routine, Botched Jobs, and Situ-
ated Inquiry”, Philppe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel, and Alain Bovet return to
these early questions, investigating the daily maintenance of a building.
Drawing on video ethnography, they investigate maintenance and repair
as a practical issue instead of a theoretical topic. The authors examine the
methods of situated inquiry conducted by professionals (plumbers) and
laypersons (tenants) to recognize and fix particular housing problems
(such as sink and bathtub aerators). At the core of these situated inquir-
ies, the practices of reassembly emerge as crucially at stake. Repair opera-
tions draw upon the coordination of different participants who, as Sor-
mani, Strebel and Bovet put it, “configure the very site and situation of
their (inter-)action in vivo.” Thus, the participants evolve during the
course of their actions (for instance, switching from a maintenance rou-
tine to an urgent repair) and are defined in their own terms, concepts and
distinctions, which do not necessarily fit with the researcher’s preconcep-
tions.
    In “Repair in socio-technical systems: The repair of a machine break-
down that turned into the repair of a shop”, Cynthia Colmellere address-
es the issue of crisis in repair, analyzing the implications of a major
breakdown occurring in a large sociotechnical network; namely, in an in-
dustrial plant. In particular, she focuses on negotiations that emerge be-
tween different actors trying to identify the needs for repair, produce a
reliable diagnosis, and designate the actors entitled to repair. The author
points out the specificities of repair, and she identifies how repair inter-
twines with power, social relations, and technological issues as activities
characterized by contingency management and bricolage. Maintenance
and repair are here characterized as a distributed activity within an organ-
izational framework, and they raise important organizational questions in
terms of their visibility as a recognized activity and their relevance in the
workplace and in organizations.
    This collection of articles does not cover the range of topics falling
under the extensive scope of maintenance and repair studies. Based on an
in-depth case study, these articles investigate maintenance and repair
practices in contrasting sites and workplaces that involve distinct occupa-
tional communities. By doing so, the articles do not exclusively focus on
12                                                                Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

the singularities at play. Rather, they simultaneously examine the ways in
which the peculiar issues addressed are related to larger topics such as
planned obsolescence and tinkering, the distribution of action and the as-
cription of responsibilities in innovative sociotechnical networks, and the
ongoing process of reassembling people and things in particular settings.


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