Selling Technology

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...

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

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.