ABSTRACT
All workplaces contain resources of various types that have been created internally as part of the work process or have been introduced from external sources. These resources are created, used, refined, updated, discarded, and sometimes rediscovered, as part of everyday workplace activity. Some take the form of pieces of equipment provided by employers, such as scissors in a hairdressing salon (Lee et al. 2007), knives in a restaurant kitchen (Kakavelakis 2008) or the headsets used by the call centre operators discussed in Chapter 3. Some are fashioned by workers as personalized tools of the trade: for example, musical compilations copied onto CDs and choreography notes written by the ‘freestyle’ exercise to music instructors discussed in Chapter 5. Some resources, of course, are designed by management to exert control, such as wall charts displaying daily targets or devices for checking faults which may be computerized to make the storage and transfer of performance data easier (for the use of wall charts in commission-based sales, see Kakavelakis et al. 2008). Other resources may have a more symbolic purpose, such as in-company newsletters, designed to encourage a sense of community and shared purpose.
