ABSTRACT
Walk with me into Metalco,1 where a kind of industrial magic takes place, three shifts a day. Bars of solid metal are delivered here along with hundreds of widgets, washers and springs. The metal is cut and precisely shaped, and the bits all assembled into useful products that sit in the guts of machines around the world. If you work mostly with words, ideas or people like I do, the tangibility of Metalco’s products is enticing. And the way things happen here is interesting. Metalco is an example of a “new” workplace where literacies and documentation mediate participation in the work, and where external standards and forces ascribe powerful meanings to those same documents as much as individuals do. As we walk around we will see more people and many more documents than you might expect. For every piece of paper, every signboard or chart, there is an unseen world of data and documentation on the company Intranet. For every person there is a complex story that we can only begin to understand. We visit Metalco at the turn of the 21st century, a time of business expansion, purposeful change and optimism for the new millennium.
