The ethnographic tradition and design

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the emerging uses of ethnography in engineering and systems design. Although ethnography is often equated simply with fieldwork, a driving force in the early development of classical ethnography was to provide accounts for what is observed in terms of a priori anthropological and sociological theories. Recent studies of collaborative work systems informed by ethnomethodology have exposed the shortcomings of classical ethnography, and have shifted the emphasis of fieldwork towards describing the accountable practices through which those in work constitute and organise their joint activity. However, a second wave of fieldwork-based studies of work systems and design is now gaining force that threatens to dilute this analytic emphasis. Using examples drawn from the production printing industry, I argue that recent examples of scenic fieldwork—fieldwork that merely describes and codifies what relevant persons do in the workplace—may well be missing out on the constitutive practices of how they do what they do, the `interactional what' of their activities. Rather than ethnography, or even fieldwork itself, it is the explication of members' knowledge—what people have to know to do work, and how that knowledge is deployed in the ordering and organisation of work—that provides the key to understanding the contribution of sociology to engineering and design.