Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy / Edition 1

by Asaf Darr

Overview

Selling Technology offers a look at high-tech markets from within, through the experience of salespeople, purchasing agents, and engineers who construct markets for emergent technologies through their daily engagement in sales interactions. Although sales occupations comprise 12 percent of the American labor force, sales work has been a neglected area of study. Asaf Darr's ethnographic exploration of the sales process for standard and emergent technology argues that our cultural stereotypes of sales work and salespeople, shaped during the industrial era and through popular images of the Yankee peddler and the car salesman, no longer apply to the changing nature of sales in an information economy.

In the high-technology settings in which cutting-edge artifacts are traded, Darr finds that sales work deviates sharply from our traditional cultural images. The educational level and technical skills of the sales force are increasing, sellers' and buyers' engineers engage in co-development, and long-term collaborative relationships are replacing brief sales encounters. A growing number of work tasks and skills previously performed and mastered in the design or production phases have become part of the sale of emergent technology. New control mechanisms over the work of the sales engineers are also appearing. Unlike most ethnographic studies of salespeople, which focus on the insurance, finance, and retail sectors., Darr's groundbreaking book turns to the daily sales practices of an information economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801473197
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2006
Series:	Collection on Technology and Work
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Asaf Darr is a Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel.

What People are Saying About This

Charles Darrah

Asaf Darr provides us with a much-needed look at the work of sales. While sales is an important part of the service sector, it is surprisingly understudied by social scientists. Yet information about the work of sales, and service work in general, is critical in an economy where jobs increasingly move across national boundaries. Darr puts a human face (or perhaps more accurately, faces) on such work. He demonstrates that salespersons come in a wide variety of forms, and the skills they use and the settings they work in are varied. In this sense, the very word 'salesperson' obscures as much as it reveals. Selling Technology encourages us to get behind the often inadequate labels of jobs in the information economy in order to ask, What is this work really about? Yet Darr's book is of more than academic importance, for it reminds us that preparing ourselves and other people for future worlds of work is best grounded in a firm understanding of how work is accomplished today. It is thus essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the growing worldwide importance of service work.

Editorial Reviews

"Asaf Darr provides us with a much-needed look at the work of sales. While sales is an important part of the service sector, it is surprisingly understudied by social scientists. Yet information about the work of sales, and service work in general, is critical in an economy where jobs increasingly move across national boundaries. Darr puts a human face (or perhaps more accurately, faces) on such work. He demonstrates that salespersons come in a wide variety of forms, and the skills they use and the settings they work in are varied. In this sense, the very word 'salesperson' obscures as much as it reveals. Selling Technology encourages us to get behind the often inadequate labels of jobs in the information economy in order to ask, What is this work really about? Yet Darr's book is of more than academic importance, for it reminds us that preparing ourselves and other people for future worlds of work is best grounded in a firm understanding of how work is accomplished today. It is thus essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the growing worldwide importance of service work."

--Charles Darrah, San Jose State University

From the Publisher

"Asaf Darr provides us with a much-needed look at the work of sales. While sales is an important part of the service sector, it is surprisingly understudied by social scientists. Yet information about the work of sales, and service work in general, is critical in an economy where jobs increasingly move across national boundaries. Darr puts a human face (or perhaps more accurately, faces) on such work. He demonstrates that salespersons come in a wide variety of forms, and the skills they use and the settings they work in are varied. In this sense, the very word 'salesperson' obscures as much as it reveals. Selling Technology encourages us to get behind the often inadequate labels of jobs in the information economy in order to ask, What is this work really about? Yet Darr's book is of more than academic importance, for it reminds us that preparing ourselves and other people for future worlds of work is best grounded in a firm understanding of how work is accomplished today. It is thus essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the growing worldwide importance of service work."

Charles Darrah