Working “(to)gather”: Localization of Technoscience in Offices of the IT Industry

Abstract

A significant part of scientific and technological production consists in the elaboration of “the retouching of localities”; additional efforts and means are aimed at making facts and artifacts universal, as well as at coordinating the production process, given the particular spread of the network of producers. The physical place plays a certain role in those spheres of production where the stress is on the visual communication space and remote access ability, as, for instance, in the domain of information technology (IT). The article discusses several theoretical and empirical solutions to the challenge of production necessity for cooperative work: the Foucauldian perspective on ordering and functional division of multiples, the Latourian view of organization of the social by means of material objects, the idea of representation of the production process within a finite space, and the concept of affective atmospheres facilitating intellectual exchange. An IT office is no longer a transit zone, but a specific “home non-place”, where people work “(to)gather”.