OCCUPATIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL TRADITIONS IN A RETAIL COMPUTER CHAIN

INTRODUCTION           

                 Once upon a time in the 1960s, before I knew of folklore as a scholarly discipline, I worked with computers -- maybe “played” would be more accurate -- while I was a student at the University of Chicago High School.  I learned enough programming in Fortran IV to do some very modest statistics work for doctoral candidates in Sociology, who were assiduously following the mandate of their discipline to look at the numbers.   Computers were big and slow then, compared to now, and they were also not very accessible; but all that has changed, and so have some of the circumstances of my own life.

         For the past 18 months or so I have been working in the microcomputer business -- well, a particular segment of the microcomputer business.  For the first half of that time I was directly employed by CBM Computer Center, Inc., of Lexington, Kentucky to help develop a so-called “Supported Systems” program in “Desktop Publishing” for their chain of computer stores.  For the rest of that time, I have worked for CBM and other companies, but as an independent contractor, doing seminars and employee training, and continuing to develop CBM's Supported Systems program in Desktop Publishing. 

         In the course of my involvements with CBM, I have had the opportunity to observe and ponder on a wide variety of traditional and traditionalizing expressive forms and enactments peculiar to this business.

         Some of the kinds of traditional behaviors I encountered and participated in at CBM might be found across the country among ”any• users of this same technology, but some expressions of more limited scope arise because CBM is a business organization of a specialized type.   So let me begin by describing CBM briefly in an organizational sense.

CBM           

In 1978, CBM was founded by Robert Crocker, a former engineer for Texas Instruments who foresaw the advent of microcomputers as a business opportunity.  Crocker's Lexington store sold Atari, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Apple, and other computers at a time when the public was just becoming aware of a new generation of computers.  The company was privately owned, and was called CBM from the start, but it is not clear if that name was intended as an acronym; in fact, Crocker denies that he ever meant it to stand for “Crocker's Business Machines,” in direct emulation of IBM's “International Business Machines.”  In any event, the resonance between “CBM” and “IBM” has been a productive one, for CBM was the first microcomputer dealer in the state of Kentucky to become an IBM dealer in 1981, when the IBM PC came out.  About that time, too, Crocker opened a second store, dropped Atari and most of the other “home-user-oriented” lines, and began to concentrate on selling IBM and closely IBM-compatible micros to both walk-in retail customers and, more importantly, to businesses.  A particularly important segment of the new industry that Crocker pursued was the wholesale end, for medium and large corporations purchase lots of computers and computer peripherals, and though they get excellent discounts for doing so, there's still a lot of profit.

         CBM's business grew rapidly after that, and Crocker added stores to his chain.  By the time he owned six or seven stores, Crocker began to acquire a secondary group of stores that also bore the CBM name, but which were in fact owned by other businessmen.  This is not precisely a franchise arrangement, but something similar to a franchise called a “voting trust,” by which the local owner of the store retains control over the products that are sold, but acquires the use of the CBM company name and, even more importantly, shares in CBM's solid relationship with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and other major vendors.  That in turn means a steady channel for the supply of “product” for all CBM stores to sell. 

                    Today CBM consists of about 70 retail stores in nineteen or twenty states, almost all east of the Mississippi; about 30% of the locations are “company” stores and the rest are VTs. 

CBM ORGANIZATION                   

               CBM managers often describe it as a “product-oriented” and “sales-oriented” business. Like some other computer retail chains, it is perceived by its own management as a hierarchical organization with both internal and external linkages.  Externally, the principal connections are “above,” to the vendors, who manufacture microcomputer products, and “below,” to the business customers or clients who buy such products from CBM. 

         Internally, CBM's organization can very nearly be represented by a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of authority, although it's not a perfectly regular pyramid.  As owner, Mr. Crocker is at the top. He conducts the ultimate negotiations with vendors and manufacturers that result in the flow of products through the organization.  He decides which products will become included in CBM's regular product list and which may not be sold in a CBM company-owned store.  Immediately beneath him are a variety of “managers,” including three regional sales managers, the manager who maintains liason with VTs, the Service manager, the Education Division manager, the manager of my division, Supported Systems, and a corporate manager of operations, which means internal inventory and accounting.  Beneath the corporate operations manager are store-level operations managers, and beneath the regional sales managers are store-level sales managers.  This means that each CBM store has two groups of workers: those in sales and those in operations.  At the bottom of the CBM sales hierarchy -- but still above the end-users -- are those who deal with end-users as customers: the sales representatives (reps, from now on) who actually sell computers, the service techs who configure and fix them, the teachers who conduct computer classes, and the support specialists who work in specialized areas like Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Networking, and Desktop Publishing (DTP), or in so-called “vertical markets” like CPA Financial Analysis or Legal Practice Management.     

         With respect to product sales, CBM acts in at least three ways: as a regular retailer for most walk-in business in the stores; as a regular wholesale source for large businesses and corporations which make “contract” purchases in quantity; and as a “VAR,” or Value-Added Retailer or purchasers of systems with the added value of class training or on-site customer support built into the price. 

         Under a recent reorganization within the company, sales reps are all classified into four basic types that reflect these different sales strategies: there are “inside sales reps” (also euphemistically referred to as “small to medium business” sales reps); “corporate account reps,” “education division reps,” and “supported systems reps.”  All sales reps, however, share a world-view in which customers, vendors, and CBM -- or “corporate,” as it's universally called -- are the most significant others. 

         It took me a long time to understand CBM's structure in this way, however.  When I first started, the Supported Systems Division in which I work was only an idea.  It  had no offices of its own, and its manager was then the manager of the Lexington store.  My first contacts and most frequent contacts at CBM in the first six months were certainly sales reps, and it was among the reps working the floor that I first began to to encounter a specific body of occupational folklore in the computer business.  So while various perspectives on the CBM organization will emerge in what follows, the most important perspective I will present is that of the sales reps.

CITATION

Of course I knew ahead of time that there was bound to be folkloric material and folkore processes.   Jan Brunvand's introductory textbook, The Study of American Folklore, observes that:

“…there is already a considerable cycle of exoteric (told by outsiders) oral stories circulating about computers and their designers or programmers, as well as a rich set of esoteric (inside) terms, stories, and pranks that are known to the “hackers” (computer buffs) themselves.  The whole computer industry is loaded with rumors and legends, mostly about future products and their alleged features. . . .

FOLK SPEECH              

Brunvand and many others have commented in particular on the extensive vocabulary of informal in-group folk expressions yielded by the microcomputer revolution, including terms like “bit,” “byte,” “nybble,” “bug,” “glitch,” “crash,” “modem,” “hacker,” “techie,” and “bytehead,” and acronyms like CPU, BIOS, IC, VLSI, CAD, RAM, ROM, PROM, EPROM, PAL, POST, OCR, WYSIWYG, LIFO, FIFO, or the seldom-heard “GIGO,” this last one indicating the programmer's traditional caveat “garbage in, garbage out.” 

         Not all these are elements of folk speech; many are examples of the technologically-grounded formal jargon particular to this occupational domain.   Certain coinages arise from key sources: software and hardware engineers, programmers, schools of Business and Economics (B&E), and major companies, like IBM itself.  IBM Marketing employees are notorious for having a language of their own, with words like “administrivia,” and abbreviations like “T's & C's, (Terms and Conditions)” just as IBM engineers or product development people do (“hard disk”/”fixed disk”). 

         Unlike recent folk coinages like “hacker” -- which has a very different connotation than “computer buff” to people who sell computers, hence the inclusion on your handout of Figure 1 [EXAMPLE: NO HACKERS]  -- real jargon is relatively fixed in meaning, usually contains terms of known derivation, and is learned in both formal classes and in written dictionaries of computer terminology. 

         Still, the process of tradition operates here as everywhere, and the sheer amount of specialized formal jargon inevitably leads to informal usages that catch on, I suppose both because they are artistic and because they denote things that seem to need to be named.  Thus the formal and ubiquitous jargon-based distinction between “software” and “hardware” produced a logical intermediate element of proto-jargon, “firmware” (to describe programs that are permanently or semi-permanently implemented on Read-Only-Memory chips) and also an informal derivative term of particular interest to salespeople, “vaporware,” to name any computer-related product now being advertised or hyped in the press but which isn't actually available yet.  More importantly, tradition hallows the use of such naming patterns to create parody terms, like “hypeware” for heavily-advertised products, or to joke about the terminology itself, as when a recent writer to BYTE magazine wondered in print if new computer products from Australia should properly be identified as “down-underware.”

JOKES                   

Accompanying this common body of technologically-grounded jargon and traditionally processed folk speech in computer store employees' repertoires are other folk or folk-like forms, for example, jokes. 

         At CBM, “inside” sales reps work the floor every day.  While on duty in the showroom part of the store they have plenty of opportunity to exchange jokes on any subject, and a wide variety of humorous material is passed on there.  Many jokes have the sale of computers as a central topic.  The two most common computer sales jokes I overhead repeatedly in the past year have been:

Q. How can you tell when a computer salesman is lying?

A. His lips move.

Q. What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used-car salesman?

A. A used-car salesman knows when he's lying.

         These jokes circulate among computer sales reps, whose living depends on their customers, because the same jokes are known to be circulating among the customers, who depend on the sales reps for technological guidance; when told to one computer sales rep by another they are a kind of exoteric occupational folklore showing “how the customers see us.” The computer sales reps' view of customers reflects the two groups' mutual interdependence, and it can be equally antagonistic.  

[EXAMPLE: No Brains]

         In such a social context, all sorts of traditional jokes may be circulated; some have nothing to do with computers, perhaps, but they may still have everything to do with sales, or marketing, or the relationships perceived both within and outside the company hierarchy.

         Particular vendors or manufacturers of computers provide a sharp focus for occupational jokes and stories.  The computer sales rep depends on manufacturers just as much as on customers, and is an active bearer of computer-industry rumors, gossip, and jokes, all of which reflect current views of various major producers of microcomputers, companies like IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, Apple, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and Toshiba. 

         For example, in the months before IBM brought out its newest microcomputer line, the Personal System/2 series, rumors about the products themselves were rife, and most of the speculations and prognostications were accompanied by reminders that IBM had been suffering a serious loss of market share to smaller, younger companies like Apple and DEC.  At that same time, I began to hear a joke about:

… an IBM engineer's wife who was having a conversation over coffee with her best friend, a DEC engineer's wife.  “How's everything going?” they ask each other.  The DEC engineer's wife says, “Oh, everything is terrific.  My husband works pretty hard these days, but when he gets home at night we give the kids dinner, put them to bed and then go to bed ourselves, and oh! it's so good!”  The IBM engineer's wife says, “My husband's working hard too, but when he gets home we feed the kids, put them to bed, and then go into our bedroom. . . but he just sits on the end of the bed and tells me how good it's ”going to be.”

         If the IBM company can be mocked by computer salespeople for its tardiness in bringing out a new product, IBM employees as individuals can give it right back to other segments of the overall industry.  In a joke told recently by an IBM employee,

. . . there's a car with a salesman, a technician, and a programmer.  When the car has a flat tire, the technician says “Let's try rotating the tires,” and the programmer says, “No, wait, maybe it'll clear itself up,” and the salesman says “We need a new car.”

PRANKS

Prank-playing and practical jokes are also common in the computer sales and support industry.  A practical joke might be broadly defined as socially-focussed humor mediated through material culture.  Since the material culture of computer people is both technological and expensive, practical jokes tend to be enacted in software more often than in hardware.  Programming actually allows for all kinds of practical jokes to be played on other users of the same system (which comprises an interesting kind of small social group).  Some computer buffs -- and this group includes the original hackers -- see the penetration of a remote software security system as both an intellectual triumph and a practical joke, albeit of a type that gets system vendors upset.  There have been documented occurrences of so-called “trojan horse” and “tapeworm” programs being brought into computer systems unbeknownst to the system operators; once in place, such programs can defeat the normal layers of system security from within, can destroy all the data in a system, or, what might be worse, can even effect subtle self-perpetuating changes in the host system.  Whether or not all this meddling constitutes “joking” or “vandalism,” depends on one's worldview and perspective.  At CBM, programmed pranks of which I have become aware are generally non-destructive.         

One of the best, in my opinion, consisted of a self-executing program which could be loaded onto another person's computer while he wasn't around; the program would automatically start when the system powered up.  It would send to the screen a preliminary message, saying, “UNRECOVERABLE DISK ERRORS DETECTED,” followed automatically, and unstoppably, by the “FORMAT C:” command.  This command, if confirmed by the user, will result in the destruction of all data and programs on the user's hard disk.  The prank program displays the format command and its usual warnings, but then supplies its own confirmation and displays the messsage “NOW FORMATTING DRIVE C:,” to the horror of the poor unsuspecting system user.  Of course, nothing has been destroyed, and the prank program even eliminates itself after it is done.  This prank appears to confer perfect anonymity on the prankster, too, which is an oft-stated goal of prank aesthetics, but in fact the prankster always made himself known anyway at CBM.  Moreover, he was admired for his programming skill amongst the other members of his work group, who all share what they might all call a “techie orientation.” 

         Where the prank is always a social enactment, another type of humor in a material medium is essentially asocial; these show up on paper, in the mode of the xerox copier or paperwork lore surveyed by Dundes & Pagter and others.  But there have been technological developments, and in fact the very area of my specialty, Desktop Publishing, is grounded in software that expands and alters the process of producing paperwork lore.  All three of the examples on the sheet I've handed out were ones that I had a hand in creating or modifying, though all are based on traditional material now circulating amongst computer users.  Such printer-matter materials play a regular part in the personalizing of work space, too.

ORGANIZATIONAL FOLKLORE at CBM  

The kinds of terms, jokes, and pranks I have been describing are probably correctly thought of by most employees as “mere” entertainments.  We are surely equally correct in thinking of such material collectively as occupational folklore, and in thinking of the functions that underlie its actual performance in terms that are traditional for us: these items and processes embody education, entertainment, the ongoing revalidation of a technology-based culture and the reinforcement of specific group memberships.

         Many items and performances, however, take the company itself as a central reference point and subject; an even larger number of expressive performances seem unrelated on the surface to CBM, but probably arise and are perpetuated in response to the flow of events experienced by groups of CBM employees in the course of work.  These performances reflect what Gary Alan Fine has called an “idioculture”: the lore of a small face-to-face group of workers.  “Idioculture” is not precisely the same thing as folklore, but idiocultural knowledge can certainly become the basis for traditional expressions, and it is certainly susceptible to the same sorts of cultural dynamics as folklore, e.g., continuity, variation, and selection.  For example, when a group of CBM Supported Systems people put on a so-called “product fair” last year in Evansville, Indiana, we went out to a terrible Chinese restaurant called the “House of Chong.” Amidst boisterous semi-drunken exclamations that we would surely be happier if we had dined at the House of Cheech, one fully-lubricated industry expert named Bruce persisted in greeting every appearance of our Chinese waitress with “Konnichi wa,” which is Japanese for “good morning.”  Since then “Konnichi wa” has become Bruce's usual greeting to all others, and other mock-Japanese references to John Belushi's Saturday-Night-Live samurai characterizations have taken hold with Bruce and his co-workers and been adapted to the social give-and-take in our offices.  “Konnichi wa” still denotes only “good morning” in Japanese, but to Bruce and his co-workers, it has become a greeting formula signaling feelings of special revelry and in-group membership.  The use of a Japanese phrase has other connotations that are meaningful to this idioculture, too, reminding Bruce and the others of the successes of Japanese computer companies in American markets and of the well-known paradox of Japanese industrial organizations in general, which are thought to be even more rigidly hierarchical than American businesses, yet which provide much more long-term occupational security for the workers themselves.

         More clearly focussed stories, rumors, legends, and gossip are a constant part of the work experience.  Persistent subjects for organizational narrative performance among CBM sales reps include customers, sales managers, fellow sales reps or other CBM employees, and the sayings and doings of Crocker himself. 

         Customers remain the focus of a sales reps attention for a period of time known as the “sales cycle,” which is how long it takes to either sell something to the customer or determine that the customer is not a customer at all.  When a customer is considering buying a particularly complex or expensive computer system, the sales cycle can be very long indeed, entailing many demonstrations, meetings, and presentations of proposed solutions.  During this whole period, the usual greeting to the rep trying to make the sale is:

"Did you close the Jockey Club yet? [or Bristol Publishing, or the Chamber of Commerce?]

And throughout the sales cycle, oral reports and stories about the customer's perceived readiness to buy or unreasonableness in questioning the solution excessively will be a constant topic of conversation among the sales reps.  

         Managers provide another focus.  A sales manager has to hire, motivate, cajole, lead, dominate, inspire, and organize his sales reps, and no matter how well he does these things, his statements carry with them the authority of the organization.  From the sales rep's point of view, the manager is the most immediate authority figure in the organization.  The sales manager often decides which among several contending sales reps (e.g., major accounts or supported systems) will get the business of a particular customer.  Narrative oral traditions about managers range from gossip about good and bad decisions to rumor-filled anecdotes to recommended strategies for coping with specific managerial personalities or the political entanglements that occupy managers with their bosses, the regional managers.  One frequently hears admonitory phrases like:
  

“Oh, just disregard everything Ted (a regional manager) says, he's always mad at everyone in the Support division,”

Or

“Claude (another regional manager) gives his sales managers a hard time about everything; he won't let them have enough demo equipment in their stores,”

    or one encounters advice like:

“Harold (another manager) is just too busy and accepts too many interruptions when you're trying to talk to him in his office, so it's a lot better to take him out for coffee if you have something serious to ask him.”

         Customers and sales managers provide convenient topical focuses for anecdotal narratives and reworked aphorisms in part because they are hierarchically-immediate: they fill the slots above and below most sales reps in the organization.  But the owner, Crocker, represents a special case.  Since he gives the company its overall direction and both shapes and constrains the actions of all who work for him, he is constantly the subject of observations and anecdotes which circulate quickly among the employees.  Many brief stories about Crocker are told, some of them only a line or two long, e.g.,

“Did you see Crocker last Saturday during the sale? He was in the warehouse himself, moving boxes around.”

 Another recounts a sales manager coming to Crocker to complain that the rate of sales rep turnover was ridiculously high, 23 “new hires” in his store alone in three months, and being told “we don't consider that a problem.”  Such tales have Crocker's admitted reluctance to spend money as a focus; the stories can be used to explain why the company won't give sales reps what they want, whether that means more commission money, better access to products, or improved internal communications.  People talk about the irony of Crocker pitching in and moving boxes around himself in the warehouse when he won't address what they see as burning issues of company policy.   But the same brief stories may be used by other employee in admiration of the boss's willingness to work hard; from this perspective, it's a good thing that Crocker isn't afraid to get his own hands dirty.

         In many of the expressive performances I've observed at CBM, “occupational” and “organizational” folklore perspectives seem to coincide.  In much of this material the manifest functions of traditional occupational performances are complemented by other functions, perhaps normally latent.  These functions surely include coping with one's place in the company's organizational hierarchy, bypassing (or otherwise working around) ineffective or difficult managers,  understanding the decisions made by the company's leader, and relieving the tensions that arise from incomplete knowledge of the vendors above, the customers below, and the rapid shifts in the technology that lies at the heart of this business.

One final thought:  the material presented here, brief and general as it might seem to all of us, is sensitive to the extent that it refers specifically and directly to the CBM organization. I did not ask permission from Mr. Crocker, my manager, or any other CBM employee to make the observations I've made or to write these few pages in the way I did.  Although I did conduct some taped interviews with Crocker and other managers and employees, the context for those interviews was that of developing materials for a company brochure, not doing fieldwork for this paper.  Despite the brevity and generality of this presentation -- and this is really just the tip of a very large iceberg -- I do not regard any of this material as publishable anywhere, not even with the substitution of pseudonyms for informants.  Just the bare-bones description I gave of CBM's organizational structure is regarded by Crocker and most of his upper management as an “industry secret.”  The problems experienced and commented on by CBM employees and their managers are hardly unique, yet they may be taken as critical of CBM in its present state.  And that, in turn, reveals again the methodological and ethical dilemmas of organizational folklore: to be useful in a scholarly way, the information ought to be specific and particular, and should relate to a real human organization's particular structure and dynamics.  But to reveal even the particular structure of an organization in terms that make the most sense to employees may violate both the trust of those employees and their management's sense of business security.  Through this contemplation of the expressive materials circulating in CBM today I have come to appreciate the positions of both proponents and opponents of the study of organizational folklore a bit better.  Organizational folklore is not a new name for occupational folklore; but when we view occupations being carried out in economically-organized contexts, our simple act of highlighting the expressive aspects of people's working lives shows even more clearly than before the economic structures that can and do dominate those lives in an economic sense.

Thomas A. Adler
Lexington, Kentucky

October, 1987