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Engineers, computer programmers, and surgeons have begun to develop virtual reality simulators designed to teach the physical aspects of surgical skills, especially the skills needed to perform minimally invasive procedures. The technologies incorporated in these simulations, including graphic modeling, haptic (tactile and kinesthetic) interface design, and haptic cognitive studies, reconstruct surgical knowledge that traditionally remains tacit, such as knowledge of surgeons’ movements and forces used on tissues. A surgeon’s physical experience becomes mathematized when programmers reconstruct it for computers. This paper describes how researchers construct ‘body objects’, representations of bodies and body parts that are engineered to inhabit computer programs. This paper argues that surgical learning occurs at the interface of bodies and instruments, through simultaneous sculpting of the surgical site and training of the surgeon’s body, a process I call mutual articulation.

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Occupational cultures can pose a challenge to organizational change efforts. Despite the importance occupational training plays in organizational settings, researchers have paid little attention to how occupational culture manifests itself in the everyday lives of organizational members. We attempt to demonstrate how the specific work styles enacted by members of an occupation create a culture that guides the acceptance and/or refusal of new work practices. This paper reports the findings of a three-year qualitative study of software, computer, and electrical engineering students. Adopting a constitutive perspective, we identify a dialectic relationship between work styles and cultural themes that both reinforce each other and condition the occupational identity of the engineer as a “lone wolf. ” A consequence of this relationship is that change efforts to introduce teamwork or collaboration will be resisted if they do not align changes in tasks with existing occupational work styles.

Abstract. This paper examines reading as done by programmers engaged in software development. Reading is an activity we feel should be of fundamental interest to studies of programming, but the practical achievement of which has not been closely examined. We give examples of programmers reading in pairs, and reading alone, and show reading in both cases to be explainable in terms of shared social practices. These practices are not determined by the code but nor are they purely socially constructed; rather they lie in the linkage between the code and programmers ’ ways of reading the code. We discuss (1) how features of day-to-day coding work create pertinent occasions for reading a certain piece of code, (2) how programmers order and expect there to be an order to code, and (3) how programmers have ways of analysing code in order to make sense of it. This is an ethnomethodological study that draws from ethnographic fieldwork at a professional software development company.

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