Electronic Technologies and Instruction: Tools, Users, and Power

Frank Dubinskas is the Howard W. Alkire Chair in International Business and Economics and associate professor of anthropology at Hamline University, which he joined in September 1993. His research and writing include a decade of work on the interface of technology, organizations, and culture, both in the United States and in Europe and Japan. Much of this work has been conducted in high-technology firms, and he has written on product development and manufacturing in the automobile, biotechnology, and computer industries; on concurrent engineering in manufacturing automation; and on knowledge management and collaboration in complex organization. His work has focused on the interactions among users, organizations, and flexible technologies, including electronic conferencing and other flexible software-based systems. Publications include the volume Making Time: Ethnographies of High-Technology Organizations (Temple University Press, 1988), as well as articles and case studies in management and anthropology. Before joining Hamline University, Frank Dubinskas was assistant professor in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College (1987-92); associate in research at the Harvard Business School (1985-87); and Exxon Fellow and visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT (1983-85). During 1991 and 1992, he was NEH Resident Fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on research materials from his (1990) field study of a manufacturing automation project at Apple Computer, Inc. Since 1988, he served on an AAA Panel on Disorders of Industrial Society, which will publish its work in Diagnosing America (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).