Ethnomethodological Studies Of Work Research Articles

How may Ethnomethodological Studies be Related to Social Issues: Cases of Studies of Work in Emergency Medical Settings

“Ethnomethodological studies of work” may be located as one branch within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. It is a research program Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology had been concerned with during his later years. Studies of work have investigated how work is conducted in workplaces to feed information about the actual organization of work practices into design of work, technologies, and social policies. Thus, studies of work have been conducted in various interdisciplinary contexts. This paper looks into hybridity, i.e., the ambition to merge ethnomethodological studies with the investigative topics treated within the settings being studied, which Garfinkel introduced as a set of criteria studies of work should satisfy, to reflect on how Garfinkel intended this policy to be implemented. Two studies in emergency medical settings are examined in light of hybridity, and also in light of how studies prompted people to think reflectively about social issues.

Local Division of Labor in Rehabilitation Team Conferences

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life.

What does ‘work’ mean in ‘ethnomethodological studies of work?’: Its ubiquitous relevance for systems design to support action and interaction

In computer systems design, ethnomethodology is seen as a form of ethnography that emphasises situated work practices and the workplace. However, designers have increasingly taken an interest in developing systems to support non-work matters such as social networking, gaming, and fun, and non-work settings such as the home. Some have, therefore, suggested that ethnography driven by interests in work practice is not relevant for these new developments because they do not involve matters of work, and that, consequently, a new form of ethnography is required. This paper critically addresses this argument and contends that ethnography can be analytically grounded in ethnomethodology as a ubiquitous method for building ‘the social’ into systems design.

Games, Pastimes, and Leisure Pursuits

In studies ranging from oracular practices and court proceedings to alternative philosophies, reality disjunctures, and a family’s work in maintaining the normality of a severely retarded child, Mel Pollner put together something like a cabinet of curiosities exhibiting the social character of reasoning’s worldly enterprises. At the same time, he felt that ethnomethodology—and, in particular, ethnomethodological studies of work—had taken a wrong direction, turning away from disciplinary sociology’s sociological project. This paper, by examining the play of bridge, soccer, checkers, and chess, reconsiders this position and illustrates some of the peculiarities of a sociology of the witnessable social order.

Embedding Learning in Work : Revisiting OJT based on Ethnomethodological Studies of Work

Embedding Learning in Work : Revisiting OJT based on Ethnomethodological Studies of Work

Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.

The Emergence of 3D Geometry From Children's (Teacher-Guided) Classification Tasks

Geometry, classification, and the classification of geometrical objects are integral aspects of recent curriculum documents in mathematics education. Such curriculum documents, however, leave open how the work of classifying objects according to geometrical properties can be accomplished given that the knowledge of these properties is the planned outcome of the curriculum or lesson. The fundamental question of the present study therefore is this: How can a lesson in which children are asked to participate in a task of classifying regular 3-dimensional objects be a geometry lesson, given that the participating 2nd-grade children do not yet classify according to geometrical properties (predicates)? In our analyses, which are inspired by ethnomethodological studies of work, we focus on the embodied and collective work that leads to the emergence of the geometrical nature of this lesson. Thus, we report both the collective and the individual work by means of which the lesson outcomes—the complete classification of a set of “mystery” objects according to geometrical (shape) rather than other (color, size, “pointy-ness”) properties—are achieved. In the process, our study shows how geometrical work is reproduced by 2nd-grade children who, in a division of labor with their teachers, produce a particular set of geometrical practices (sorting three-dimensional objects according to their geometrical properties) for the 1st time.

Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies

Known primarily as the author of a method for studying work, Harold Garfinkel — and ethnomethodological studies of work, or workplace studies — also offer an important alternative theory of work. First articulated in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theory of communication, organization, and information, it has been Garfinkel's proposal that mutual understanding (orienting objects, meaning, and identities) in interactions, including technical situations of work, requires constant mutual orientation to situated constitutive expectancies — taken-for-granted methods of producing order that constitute sense — accompanied by displays of attention, competence, and trust. Based on this premise, researchers need to enter worksites to learn the order properties of work. Conventional theories, by contrast, treat social orders (including work) as resulting from individual interests, external constraint, and/or some conjunction between the two. For Garfinkel, however, individual motivation, power, and constraint must be managed by workers in and through the details of work. He insists that the need for participants to mutually orient ways of producing order on each next occasion adequately explains the details of order and sensemaking. Thus, any worksite exhibits the details required to produce, manage and understand local orders of work, including power and constraint — details that are local matters, lost to general formulation, requiring a research approach focused on the order properties of those details.

Protocols, practices, and the reproduction of technique in molecular biology.

Protocols are one of the main organizational resources in molecular biology. They are written instructions that specify ingredients, equipment, and sequences of steps for making technical preparations. Some protocols are published in widely used manuals, while others are hand-written variants used by particular laboratories and individual technicians. It is widely understood, both in molecular biology and in social studies of science, that protocols do not describe exactly what practitioners do in the laboratory workplace. In social studies of science, the difference between protocols and the actual practices of doing them often is used to set up ironic contrasts between 'messy' laboratory practices and the appearance of technical order. Alternatively, in ethnomethodological studies of work, the difference is examined as a constitutive feature, both of the lived-work of doing technical projects, and of the administrative work of regulating and evaluating such projects. The present article takes its point of departure from ethnomethodology, and begins with a discussion of local problems with performing molecular biology protocols on specific occasions. The discussion then moves to particular cases in criminal law in which defense attorneys cross-examine forensic technicians and lab administrators. In these interrogations, the distinction between protocols and actual practices animates the dialogue and becomes consequential for judgments in the case at hand. The article concludes with a discussion of administrative science: the work of treating protocols and paper trails as proxies for actual 'scientific' practices.

Embodied Practices of Engineering Work

This article explores relationships between activity theoretic and ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of artifacts-in-use. I then offer a preliminary account of computer-aided and paper-based design work in civil engineering, informed by both perspectives. My account emphasizes the multiplicity of media and associated objects involved in the work of engineering on the one hand, and their integration in practice into a coherent field of action on the other. The article concludes by returning to the question of relationships between ethnomethodology and activity theory, focusing on differences in their respective stances toward theory itself.

ワークのエスノメソドロジー的研究の意義

This article aims at reviewing the goals and the significances of “ethnomethodological studies of work” and making clear their relations to the classic sociological studies of social order. It is emphasis on the rational properties of indexical expressions that identifies ethnomethodology as study distinct from and in contrast to mainstream or orthodox sociology. Indexicality is a feature that provides ethnomethodology with unique study policies, a part of which, but the most significant, is the respecification of all actions as “locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order”. According to Garfinkel and others, scholars working in classical vein make use of these features of order production-yet have ignored this fact completely. This article attempts to show that ethnomethodological studies of work find and respecify these phenomena in their own right.

Laboratory Space and the Technological Complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work (Garfinkel 1986; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Garfinkel et al. 1989; Livingston 1986; Liberman 1985; Lynch 1985a; Lynch et al. 1983; Bjelic and Lynch forthcoming; Morrison 1990; MacBeth 1989). Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material (and no less social) than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting.