Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge-Building

Abstract

The project of building a bridge is a canonical example of what John Law (1987) has termed `heterogeneous engineering', involving the arrangement of human and nonhuman elements into a stable artifact. This paper reports ethnographic research on the work of civil engineers engaged in designing a bridge scheduled for completion by the year 2004. My emphasis is on a view of bridge-building as persuasive performances that both rely upon and reflexively constitute the elements to be aligned. The work of designing a bridge, on this view, is as much a matter of story-telling as of analysis, calculation, and work with concrete and steel.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 239 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.