Making Matters Speak in Railway Maintenance

Abstract

In this chapter diagnostic practice is conceptualised as the means to ‘make matters speak’: how practitioners make sense of problems through recognising and ordering significant cues from the material stuff that they investigate (Latour, 2004). The chapter is based upon an analysis of ethnographic data of railway maintenance in Sweden. I focus on technically difficult cases, elucidating railway technicians’ diagnostic work through the concepts of situated learning and heterogeneous engineering . The situated learning perspective has emphasised the use of resources such as storytelling, an intimate knowledge of technology, or the use of various sensory cues in diagnostic work (Barley, 1996; Orr, 1996; Mellström, 2002; Henning, 1998). However, it remains unclear exactly how these resources are combined to solve technical problems. To this end, I draw on the notion of heterogeneous engineering — where various elements are amalgamated in a network that can explain the problem (Law, 1987). I highlight the balance of elements that support and threaten the stability of the network (or explanation) to understand this aspect of diagnostic work. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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