| Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy (Collection on Technology and Work) | 
 enlarge | Author: Asaf Darr
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1898542
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 168
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.5
ISBN: 0801473195
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.82
EAN: 9780801473197
ASIN: 0801473195
Publication Date: March 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Unreadable October 11, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Do you remember in the movie Beetlejuice when, upon reading the "Manual for the Living and Dead", Charles, the family father, says, "This is like reading stereo instructions"? Well, reading this book is worse.
The father character was referring to the kind of book that, no matter how many times one reads a sentence, it is so swollen with bombast that it is truly unintelligible. This book is, in a word, unreadable.
I have no doubt that Dr. Darr spent a great deal of time researching and thinking about this topic and his thesis. Having worked for the last eight years myself in the social sciences, I respect that. But if there are pearls of wisdom and insight in this book, I will never know because, even though I've been reading and writing for peers myself, I can't get past the first chapter. I've tried three times now. It just isn't happening.
Dr. Darr, an Israeli researcher whose first language may not be English, really should take a few English creative writing classes at Haifa University. He also needs to spend the next year or so reading nothing but Hemingway and Updike to learn athletic English prose styles. He should also read Rilke, Frost, Whitman and Wordsworth to learn cadence, meter, and imagery. He should attempt his own poetry. Through this year's study, he will learn the allure of alliteration. He will learn the grace and power of parsimony on a page.
Then, Dr. Darr should come back to his research and try again. Re-write this book. If he needs help from a fellow academic, I am happy to help him vanquish the great dragon Bombast so we can all get at the treasures of wisdom hidden behind this brimstone smoke facade.
Respectfully...
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