Of ethnography, ethnomethodology and workplace studies

Abstract

I fully realise that you all wish that Lucy Suchman was standing here to give this plenary talk. Wisely but politely she declined the honour. It is no fun having to give a talk to an audience amply peopled by one's friends, on a Friday when the call of the Grafton is already gathering momentum in the minds of many. What I want to say is a few words about ethnography, ethnomethodology and system design mainly by way of clarification rather than any new insight. Save that for the Grafton. As many of you already know, one of the surprising turns in the last decade is the acceptance of ethnography as an important contributor to system design. As it also happens, many of the people who pioneered this move were also ethnomethodologists. It would of course be easy to construct some high minded story about why it was that ethnomethodology, after being ignored for so long by the sociology mainstream, became accepted by hardnosed system designers. But, as with many such developments, it was much more low-minded and contingent. In fact, it had little to do with ethnomethodology at all and much more with ethnography as fieldwork and a happy coincidence of amiable boozers. I was asked to review all the work in the area focussing on the work at Lancaster (and one might as well include in that Manchester, too), and saying something about its ‘usefulness' an interesting notion and its relevance for foundational issues in ethnomethodology and wider debates in social theory another interesting notion, ‘social theory’. I will, of course, do my best on all of these counts. Perhaps the best way to proceed would be reasonably historical and focus the story around the experiences of Lancaster. This is simply a device to tell a story rather than a claim to any kind of intellectual pre-eminence. Nobel prizes are not at stake here. However, purely contingently, Lancaster has been one of the foremost institutions in CSCW, the major package within which ethnography entered into system design. Notice I did not say ethnomethodology and for reasons which, I hope, will become clearer as the story unfolds.