Engineering Identity in a Japanese Factory

Martin Kilduff, Jeffrey L. Funk and Ajay Mehra
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Martin Kilduff: Smeal College of Business Administration, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
Jeffrey L. Funk: Smeal College of Business Administration, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
Ajay Mehra: Smeal College of Business Administration, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802

Organization Science, 1997, vol. 8, issue 6, 579-592

Abstract: Based on 11 months of participation in a Japanese high-technology factory, our account follows the working lives of 11 engineers involved in the development, building, and servicing of wire bonding machines necessary for the production of semi-conductors. We examined how the technologies that structured time and space shaped the identities of the engineers. Despite crises of project development, the engineers sustained a group identity by participating in routines such as daily meetings, by the physical arrangement of the work site, and by team members' identification with the high-technology products they produced. In this system preoccupied with the construction of zero-defect machines, the engineers were vigilant in preventing the structures of work life from unraveling. We looked in detail at one project that linked wire bonder machines with other machines and found that problems with machines were related by the engineers to problems of group interaction. The engineers promoted an isomorphism between the structure of the group and the structure of technological design: the group was mirrored in the high technology it produced.

Keywords: organizational identity; Japanese organizations; high-technology organizations; sensemaking; alienation; enactment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
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