EthnomEthodology at Work

When students and other researchers ask me how to go about doing an ethnomethodological study of work, there is no simple answer to give. With this collection, what I can now do is help them see why there is no simple answer while, nevertheless, getting them started on pursuing their first studies in ethnomethodology.

Eric laurier, University of Edinburgh, Uk

Ethnomethodology, unlike most of sociology, looks at social conduct and such things as how people use talk to organise workplaces and how the examination of code in software engineering entails particular types of reading. Because of its remarkable concern for the empirical, ethnomethodology has been widely used outside sociology, in computer science and related disciplines especially, which need such evidence to make better designs. Who the human is and what they do matters to these disciplines.

richard harper, microsoft research Cambridge, Uk

Some sociologists may sigh grow up to the grumpy old men who put their unruly ethnomethodological orientation to work here. But their impatience with conceptual, visionary, fictional interpretive sociology is incisively productive for sociology today (as well as practical endeavours of policy-making and socio-technical design), detailing the power of practical sociological reasoning amongst ordinary members and makers of society. A passionate and useful book for both teaching and research.

monika Buscher, lancaster University, Uk

directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation analysis

Series Editors:Stephen hester, University of Wales, Uk

david Francis, manchester metropolitan University, Uk

Ethnomethodology and Conversation analysis are cognate approaches to the study of social action that together comprise a major perspective within the contemporary human sciences. this perspective focuses upon naturally occurring talk and interaction and analyses the methods by which social activities are ordered and accomplished. From its origins within sociology, EM/CA has ramified across a wide range of human science disciplines, including anthropology, social psychology, linguistics, communication studies and social studies of technology. Its influence is international, with large and active research communities in many countries, including Japan, australia, Canada, France, the netherlands, denmark and Sweden as well as the Uk and USa.

the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation analysis is the major association of Em/Ca researchers worldwide. It was set up in 1978 by Prof. george Psathas to provide a forum for international collaboration between scholars working in the field of studies of social action and to support their work through conferences and publications. It published several books in Em/Ca in association with University Press of america. now reconstituted under the direction of Francis and hester, supported by an international steering committee, the IIEmCa holds regular conferences and symposia in various countries.

this major new book series will present current work in Em/Ca, including research monographs, edited collections and theoretical studies. It will be essential reading for specialists in the field as well as those who wish to know more about this major approach to human action.

Other titles in this series

Preference organisation and Peer disputesHow Young Children Resolve Conflict

Amelia ChurchISBn 978-0-7546-7441-2

analysing Practical and Professional textsa naturalistic approach

Rod WatsonISBn 978-0-7546-7897-7

Ethnomethodology at Work

Edited by

mark roUnCEFIEldLancaster University, UK

and

PEtEr tolmIEUniversity of Nottingham, UK

II

Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie 2011

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

Published byashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing CompanyWey Court East Suite 420Union road 101 Cherry StreetFarnham BurlingtonSurrey, gU9 7Pt Vt 05401-4405England USa

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ethnomethodology at work. -- (directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) 1. Ethnomethodology. 2. organizational behavior-- Evaluation. 3. Work--research. I. Series II. Rouncefield, Mark. III. Tolmie, Peter. 302.3'5'072-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRouncefield, Mark. Ethnomethodology at work / by Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie. p. cm. -- (directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBn 978-0-7546-4771-3 (hardback) -- ISBn 978-0-7546-9135-8 (ebook) 1. Ethnomethodology. 2. organizational sociology. I. tolmie, Peter. II. title. hm481.r66 2011 305.8001--dc22

2010045763

ISBn 9780754647713 (hbk)ISBn 9780754691358 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures viiList of Contributors xiAcknowledgements xvPreface and Overview: Garfinkels Bastards ? xviiMark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie

1 the Sociologist as movie Critic 1 Dave Randall and Wes Sharrock

2 the Project as an organisational Environment for the division of labour 19

Wes Sharrock

3 organizational acumen 37 Peter Tolmie and Mark Rouncefield

4 on Calculation 57 John A. Hughes

5 Plans and Planning: Conceptual Confusions and Empirical Investigations 73

Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield

6 the temporal order of Work 91 Andy Crabtree, Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie

7 talk: talking the organisation into Being 109 David Martin and Jacki ONeill

8 meetings and the accomplishment of organization 131 John Hughes, Dave Randall, Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie

9 documents 151 Mark Hartswood, Mark Rouncefield, Roger Slack and

Andrew Carlin

10 text at Work: mundane Practices of reading in Workplaces 173 John Rooksby

Ethnomethodology at Workvi

11 technology 191 Mark Rouncefield, Roger Slack and Mark Hartswood

12 Conclusion: Ethnomethodology and Constructionist Studies of technology 211

Wes Sharrock and Graham Button

Bibliography 229Index 247

3.1 The first draft of the process map 51

7.1 organisational layout of technical support 122

9.1 a screening reporting form showing annotations made by the radiographer 158

9.2 the bubble diagram 1649.3 Plan of dual carriageway near bridge 165

10.1 a task card 18010.2 the notice board 18010.3 the code 184

11.1 aligning the slab 19611.2 Pulpit controls 19611.3 Repertoires of manipulation: using hand to find position of

feature on CC and oblique views 20011.4 repertoires of manipulation: using a pencil to trace an arc so as

to find a feature in the film 200

list of Figures

This page has been left blank intentionally

list of tables

4.1 Extract from meeting 634.2 Extract from meeting 64

This page has been left blank intentionally

list of Contributors

Graham Button is currently Pro-Vice Chancellor for arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. Prior to that he was the laboratory director for Xeroxs grenoble and Cambridge research Centres. he has pursued ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research since 1973, gaining his Phd at the University of manchester in 1975. his research in ethnomethodological studies of work has ranged across a number of work settings, particularly: engineering, computer programming, law firms, architecture firms, print works, and call centres.

Andrew P. Carlin has published on a range of topics in library and Information Studies and in Sociology. His recent publications explore Garfinkels notion corpus status. his research interests include the social organization of scholarly communication, documents as courses of action, and the linguistic constitution of research practices.

Andy Crabtree is an rCUk academic Fellow in the School of Computing, nottingham University. his work largely focuses on the relationship between computing systems and social interaction. It exploits ethnomethodological studies of human action in context to uncover the interactional work that animates everyday activities in the home, at work, and in play. this kind of research is used to ground systems development in the naturally occurring and naturally accountable organization of human conduct. Beyond immediate practical application, it plays a formative role in our understanding of humanComputer Interaction (hCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

Mark Hartswood is a research associate in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. his research interests concern the interdisciplinary study of user-designer relations in technology production and the impact of technologies on work practice, particularly in healthcare contexts. his work draws upon the traditions of ethnomethodology, participatory design, computer-supported cooperative work and workplace studies in exploring trust, ethics and collaboration in It system production and use.

John A. Hughes is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at lancaster University. For many years he did research in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work as well as, with Wes Sharrock, writing on more general sociological topics to do with the relationship or lack of it between theory and methods. Currently he is enjoying retirement and, for a change, taking the occasional holiday.

Ethnomethodology at Workxii

David Martin is a research scientist working for Xerox research Centre Europe (XrCE) in grenoble, France. he works for the Work Practice technology group. his work involves employing ethnographic techniques to study work and technology use from an ethnomethodological perspective. these studies are used to understand the impacts of technology in real world settings and to feed into the design of innovative new applications. his work has covered a diverse set of topics ranging from ambulance control, to banking, healthcare, eXtreme Programming and now is focused on production colour printing and legal work.

Jacki ONeill is a Senior Scientist in the Work Practice technology group at Xerox research Centre Europe (XrCE) in grenoble, France. She has an mres in Informatics from the dept. of Computer Science, manchester University (1996) and a Phd from the Information Systems Institute, Salford University (2002). her central area of interest lies in the design of useful, usable and innovative computer systems, through both the detailed understanding of work practices and a consideration of the interaction of the social and the technical in prototyping and development work. her current projects span a number of interlinked areas: 1) topics for public administration, including paper reduction and electronic governance; 2) working at the boundaries of organizations; 3) customer care; 4) technology use in rural-inclusive enterprises in India.

Dave Randall is a Principal lecturer in the department of Sociology, manchester metropolitan University. he works primarily in the interdisciplinary research area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). he is particularly interested in the application of the ethnomethodological studies of work programme to problems of new technology and organizational change, and in the conduct of ethnographic enquiry in relation to these issues. he has conducted a number of studies of work in organizations in his career. these include a well-known and extensively cited study of Air Traffic Control as well as studies of retail financial services, museum work, classroom interaction with new technology, ontology-based design, mobile phone use, and smart home technology.

John Rooksby is a research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St andrews. his research interests include socio-technical systems engineering, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, empirical studies of software development, and health informatics. he has a Phd in computer science from manchester University.

Mark Rouncefield is a Senior research Fellow in the department of Computing, lancaster University and a recent holder of a microsoft European research Fellowship studying social interaction and mundane technologies. his research interests are in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and involve the study of various aspects of the empirical study of work, organization, human factors and

List of Contributors xiii

interactive computer systems design. he has a Uka Bronze (highly commended) medal in salsa dancing.

Wes Sharrock is Professor of Sociology in the University of manchester where he has been since 1965. he has a range of book and article publications in the areas of philosophy of social science (especially the philosophy of mind), sociological theory, ethnomethodology, the sociology of work and computer supported cooperative work. recent publications include: Theory and Methods in Sociology (with J. hughes) macmillan, 2007, Brain, Mind, and Human Behaviour in Contemporary Cognitive Science; Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (with Jeff Coulter), Edwin mellen Press, 2008, There is No Such Thing as a Social Science (with P. hutchinson and r. read) ashgate, 2008, Studies of Work and the Workplace in HCI (with g. Button), morgan Claypool, 2009, the structure problem (with g. Button) and the production and reproduction of social order in P. martin and a. dennis eds, Human Agents and Social Structures, manchester University Press, 2010.

Roger Slack teaches sociology and social research methods at Bangor University. his main interests are ethnomethodology, science and technology studies, and ethnography. He has published in a number of areas including CSCW, reflexivity in social science, and medical technologies. Current research includes an ethnographic study of artefact appraisal in antiques auction houses.

Peter Tolmie is the Principal Consultant for Ethnographic Services at the University of nottingham. he was previously an area manager for the Work Practice technology group at Xerox research Centre Europe and began his career in research as an ethnomethodologist at lancaster University, studying a range of topics relating to Computer Supported Cooperative Work. he has published widely in the areas of human-Computer Interaction and CSCW and has conducted studies of a highly diverse set of domains including retail finance, domestic settings, call centres, teleworking, bid management, game-playing, film and television production, and musical performance.

This page has been left blank intentionally

acknowledgements

Firstly we would like to thank all our authors for their hard work, their perseverance and their tolerance of a couple of fretful and nagging editors. We apologise for the extremes of emotional blackmail to which you have all been subjected. We are grateful for and appreciate all your efforts of course, we would have appreciated them even more, and nagged less, if they had arrived a lot earlier We must also, in consequence, thank our editors at ashgate who have, in turn, persevered with us for so long, never suggesting a trace of disbelief in the outrageous lies we offered for the continued non-appearance of the completed manuscript.

Mark would like to acknowledge the financial support of a Microsoft European research Fellowship and a Xerox University affairs project. as always he thanks Caroline who still continues to fascinate, charm and annoy him in equal measure (and yes, thats love). mark would also like to thank his co-editor, Peter tolmie, for his cheerful acceptance of the theft and mangling of his ideas and his kind but largely fruitless attempts to keep him on the ethnomethodological straight and narrow. Finally he would like to thank rob Procter, Connor graham and dave randall, all better friends than he probably deserves.

Peter would like to acknowledge the considerable support he has received, and continues to receive, from his friends and colleagues at the University of nottingham, most notably andy Crabtree, tom rodden, and Steve Benford. he must especially thank Claire, Tris, Ellie, Lew and Sanna, all of whom know first-hand what its like to live in the same house as an ethnomethodologist (penury, long hours of invisibility, impenetrable conversation ). he also wishes to thank mark for his dogged persistence in trying to get this book out there. In addition he would also like to thank the (diminishing) number of enthusiasts for the rather dogged brand of ethnomethodology we practice (though there may be even fewer of them once theyve read this book ).

The editors would like to dedicate this book to John Hughes, Wes Sharrock and Graham Button our friends and mentors.

Preface and overview: Garfinkels Bastards ?

Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie

Some Apologies

this preface and overview presents a brief outline of the book and a similarly brief personal commentary on its motivation and history. In the academic circles in which we work and present our research, there appears a particular, grossly observable, fashion for the presentation of ethnomethodological studies. In general they (we) begin with a form of apology, starting off with a careful outline of the claims that they (we) are not making (sometimes, in fact, they (we) never quite get past that bit); and then theres an effort to delineate and justify the nature of the argument to follow (and sometimes their (our) very existence) before finally presenting the work. Judging by the questions, or usually non-questions, that follow, this effort is almost always entirely wasted nevertheless we will persist in this practice, and begin by offering some apologies for what is to come.

lets begin with some apologies for, and comments on, the origin and motivation for this book and for whom the book is intended or aimed at. a long time ago, far, far back in the mists of time, the editors were discussing the start of their research careers (though career is probably the wrong word) and the lack, at that time, of any obvious, or rather, easy to read, textbook that might provide some examples of how others had approached the kind of phenomena we were interested in, in the way we were interested in. We certainly were not looking for what might be called a paradigm text, but at that time all we had was a haphazard collection of papers, chapters and books we were advised to read: Garfinkels good organizational reasons (Garfinkel, 1967); Orr on talking about machines (Orr, 1996); Suchman on plans (Suchman, 1987); perhaps max and his plate of herrings (Sacks, 1992); that much neglected classic Working for Profit (Anderson et al., 1989) and so on. Indeed knowledge of this disparate collection was probably some kind of sign of competent membership and perhaps contributed to the perception of ethnomethodology as a strange clique or cult (and we admit that there may be some truth in this characterization).

this book is the kind of book we wanted (or at least that was our ambition). In contrast to the normal edited book approach, where authors simply document their latest research we asked our authors to do something far more difficult; to imagine a student coming to the study of work in organizations for the first time and to write something for them, something that would provide an outline, some data

Ethnomethodology at Workxviii

and examples of an ethnomethodological approach to a number of commonplace organizational topics and issues. But what that also means is that if you already have considerable experience of ethnomethodology or ethnomethodological research, this may not be the book for you. If by some chance you are reading this Harold (Garfinkel), or Mike (Lynch), or Jeff (Coulter), put the book down, step away from the bookshelf and keep your money in your pocket theres probably nothing for you here. If however, you are a student, in Sociology, Business Studies, management or Computer Science, who is just beginning to research aspects of the sociology of work or the sociology of organizations, or perhaps has just started to do fieldwork in organizations and has vaguely heard of something called ethno (though its quite likely to have been something bad) then, conversely and perversely, this may be just the book for you. you are our imagined readers. to the extent that books, like any conversation, are recipient designed you were our imagined recipients. We asked, begged and emotionally blackmailed our friends to write for you, to document some of their research, to provide some of their this and that as Garfinkel puts it:

[t]here are now quite a number of persons who, on a day-to-day basis, are doing studies of practical activities, of commonsense knowledge, of this and that, and of practical organizational reasoning. that is what ethnomethodology is concerned with. It is an organizational study of a members knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable. (Garfinkel at the Purdue Symposium: hill and Stones Crittenden, 1968: 10)

of course, the cynical might suggest a simpler motive for our focus on this particular, large, market rather than the dwindling, ageing and increasingly grumpy old men that seemingly form the core of ethnomethodology (we hasten to add that grumpy old men is not intentionally gender specific but something of a stock phrase, which is why we put it in scare quotes). they might say that. We couldnt possibly comment and, of course, we believe there are many other researchers who will find something interesting and valuable in these accounts, in the data and analysis and the organization of the materials. While we appreciate that our peers will know the analytic mentality that drives this book, it is intended more for the student and those academic colleagues, interested in ethnomethodology, who want to know more about the kinds of studies it does of workplaces and the findings these studies can generate. that said, we (the editors) would still want to buy it (but luckily were getting a free copy).

We should probably also apologize for our title Ethnomethodology at Work since, as the more perceptive of you are no doubt eager to point out, ethnomethodology argues that all activities, not merely those that attract some kind of monetary reward, involve work they are all effortful accomplishments, often seen but unnoticed and, following Wittgenstein, elusive as objects of inquiry precisely because they are always in front of our eyes (and you will encounter this

Preface and Overview xix

argument again in Chapter 2). For the ethnomethodologist there is no domain of human practice that is exempt from this. human action and interaction does not just tumble from the sky ready formed. Instead, even the most mundane of actions have to be produced somehow, somewhere, somewhen. this is a job of work. Walking down even the quietest of streets is an artful matter. try doing it without attention to any of the things around you or where you place your feet. try engaging in a conversation without bothering to take turns or give any consideration to what topics you are speaking to. try sitting back to listen to some music without any of those annoying trifles such as selecting the music, putting the headphones on or else choosing where to sit or what room to sit in, setting the music going in the first place, or paying any attention to the fact the music has stopped. Try dancing for five seconds without any of the work of its production but without being beaten and battered or trampled underfoot. try eating a dinner together without the artful use of cutlery Well, by now you get the point. Wherever ethnomethodologists cast their gaze they see work of some kind going on and there have been some fine resounding defences of this view in recent years (see Crabtree et al., 2005, 2009).

here, of course, we are using the title Ethnomethodology at Work in an ironic sense. We are using it to do contrastive work with conventional sociological approaches to the study of work and trading, at first sight, upon what conventional sociology itself takes to be work. But this is no mere sleight of hand. Ethnomethodology suggests that conventional studies standard sociological emphasis on work as socially produced, shaped and constructed in various ways stands the risk of hiding the phenomena. Instead of examining what it is to work; what it is that makes working the recognizably distinct phenomenon it is understood to be, conventional sociological studies tend to present an analysis of the societal forces that supposedly shape the form, structure and experience of work. and each and every setting becomes just one more arena in which to observe these societal forces and processes (of whatever kind) at work. So what supposedly starts out as a sociological concern with work becomes instead a vehicle for trotting out, once again, the same old range of worn out and general sociological theories and interests. these studies, by and large, ignore the everyday world of doing work; the routine, trivial, practical accomplishment of work; sacrificing this if indeed sacrifice is the right word for not attempting to do something you appear to have no real interest in to focus instead on a standard set of theoretical issues that actually tell us very little about work, or what it means to be doing work at all.

We should also, however, perhaps admit that the title is what it is because we want to redress a balance and right a wrong against all of those poor students of ethnomethodology who went to some great lengths to seek out a copy of Garfinkels Ethnomethodological Studies of Work (Garfinkel, 1986). Whilst we tried hard to embrace the ethnomethodological spirit of how work should be understood as set out above, we must admit to a little disappointment when we opened the covers to encounter various essays upon topics such as kung Fu, truck wheel accidents, lecture notation, and alchemy, however fine those essays may subsequently have proved to be. hopefully this is one kind of disappointment

Ethnomethodology at Workxx

you wont be confronted with here (though we cant promise you wont be disappointed in other ways instead).

While were at it we should do some other apologizing as well.So, we apologize to anyone who has bought this book expecting some

account, some detailed definition, of what ethnomethodology is. In brief, ethnomethodological analysis proceeds through the faithful description of the social practices through which the witnessed activity was observably produced and achieved. as Benson and hughes (1991) write: the analytic task is to explicate and describe the members methods that could have been used to produce what happened in the way that it did. (Benson and hughes, 1991: 132). the ethnomethodologist seeks to explicate the social practices the cultural machinery in and through the accomplishment of which patterns, structures, processes, and the rest, are produced. there, thats clear enough isnt it? For reasons of space, thats all youre going to get. If, for some reason, you find you are still struggling, there are already plenty enough books on this subject go and read The Ethnomethodologists (Sharrock and anderson, 1986) or The Perspective of Ethnomethodology (Benson and hughes, 1983). If you are in a hurry, read Chapter 1 of lynchs Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action (lynch, 1993) or the Introduction to Buttons Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (Button, 1991).

another thing we should do is apologize to anyone who anticipated any detailed exposition of the methodological approaches or data collection choices of our authors. In part this omission is a consequence of ethnomethodologys seemingly stubborn refusal to fetishize data collection techniques. mainly it was a simple product of lack of space and so even where our authors offered such a methodological account we edited it out. In general our authors employed some variant of ethnomethodologically-informed (or inspired) ethnography (what John hughes calls that cowardly phrase). In ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic research the understanding of any work setting is derived from the study of that setting itself, it ties itself closely to the observed data, it is data-driven. A central precept of ethnomethodological ethnography is to aim to find the orderliness of ordinary activities, an orderliness accomplished by social actors, unreflectively taken-for-granted by them and constructed with their common-sense knowledge of social order. For those interested there are more than enough books on this topic we recommend Button and Sharrocks (2010) Studies of Work and the Workplace in HCI: Concepts and Techniques; randall et al.s (2007) Fieldwork for Design and Crabtrees (2003) Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (if its not too shameful for us to blatantly plug our own books).

Garfinkels Bastards?

Whilst we wont spend much time saying exactly what ethomethodology is, or the methods our authors used, we would like to say a little about their general (and

Preface and Overview xxi

particular) ethnomethodological approach. Some years ago Harold Garfinkel, the founding father of ethnomethodology, commented:

everybody knows the ethnomethodologists are a bunch of bastards. But nobody knows whose bastards they are. (Garfinkel in Hester and Francis, 2000: 13)

We know whose bastards we are. most of the authors in this book have a particular take on ethnomethodology, a take that is a product of practical, philosophical and geographical circumstances, so the best that we can offer regarding our own views on ethnomethodology here is that, even if we are a bunch of bastards, there is a family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953) between us. thus we are all British ethnomethodologists, predominantly linked to what Psathas (2008) has called the manchester School which involves a particular (Wittgensteinian) approach to data and analysis and to us has also meant Wes Sharrock and John hughes (and John lee and rod Watson and dave Francis and many others) and Friday lunchtimes in the grafton and expanded in more recent times to be the manchester-lancaster-nottingham School (or the axis of evil as it is sometimes (fondly?) called). We dont want to make too much of these origins; the grafton on a Friday was/is certainly no Vienna Circle, and conversation was/is as likely to be about football or Buffy the Vampire Slayer as ethnomethodology (thankfully) and of course more formal academic meetings and conferences have also played their part. nevertheless this is the origin for much of the approach and analysis offered here. We may be bastards but we know our parentage. And so (Wes and John and Graham aside) we are not Garfinkels bastards but manchester/lancaster bastards, that is, Wes Sharrocks bastards, and John hughes bastards and graham Buttons bastards and rod Watsons bastards. and most of us have come to ethnomethodology not through Sociology or Philosophy but through Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Computer human Interaction and design. So we are, or have become, sort of hybrid researchers. Garfinkel (2001) had the notion once of ethnomethodology as a hybrid discipline. What he meant by this was that, in their very quest for members competence in a setting, ethnomethodologists would effectively become practitioners within the setting. thus Eric livingston, who wrote so knowingly about the work of arriving at mathematical proofs (livingston, 1986), became to all intents and purposes a mathematician. david Sudnow, who sought to instruct us in the competence of the pianist in his book Ways of the Hand (Sudnow, 1978), spent many years teaching students jazz piano. the strange thing is that, although many of us inhabit computer science departments rather than sociology departments, very few of us would dare to code (or even claim to know how to). We are doubtless much influenced by the daily work of explaining our findings to systems designers, but we have not quite made the journey into systems design ourselves yet. a part of the story here is that sociology departments have been reluctant to own us we are largely seen as perverse, troublesome and argumentative. another part of it is that we are, at heart, quite practical folk. We like to speak of real world things, to

Ethnomethodology at Workxxii

provide worldly explications for worldly things and see our work put to real world uses. the tangible products of sociology are largely hot air. Even if we too have a tendency to produce hot air, we like to see it filling balloons or channelled into hypocausts. and it is in this moment of trading ethnomethodological insight for actual schemes of production that our work becomes most truly hybrid.

Overview

the structure of the book does have a certain logic to it. Borrowing heavily from mike lynchs (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action and the conceptualization of Buttons (1991) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences we may be said to have pursued a broadly epistopic approach. there are certain recognizable features of work and the workplace that just anyone knows. these are things like: theres usually some kind of a division of labour; people calculate and/or measure things; people make plans; they schedule things; they have meetings; they talk to customers; they use documents and tools and technology; they read things; and so on. these are the mundane social facts people orient to. their facticity is as much taken for granted by the sociologists who would talk of work, as it is by the practitioners themselves. What we have sought to do here, in the usual perverse way of ethnomethodologists, is to respecify these seemingly mundane facts as topics for investigation in their own right. Instead of just assuming that people do planning we have posed the question what does the actual work of planning look like?. Instead of just assuming there will be a division of labour, we have posed the question how is a division of labour practically accomplished?. and so on. these are the hidden phenomena we were speaking of earlier. By probing these matters we are able to uncover some part of the work involved in making work recognizably what it is.

Inevitably there are some topics we have neglected. Sorry. the list was long and we had to make choices. That and (as we imagine Garfinkel discovered in his own edited collection) we had to make use of what people were willing to give us. anyway, power is something we only manage to touch upon tangentially. Space would have been nice to have (in more ways than one) especially as we managed to get something on time but what are a few less dimensions between friends? It would have been lovely to be able to talk about problems instead of just having them. and skill weve been wishing for that for some time. anyway, the chances are your favourite topic is missing. live with it.

What you do get is a bunch of topics we were able to write about (and not one of them is a martial art). So, in Chapter 1, dave randall and Wes Sharrock use the metaphor of the movie critic to explore the relationship of conventional sociology of work to its topic. against this they set the programme of ethnomethodology and its goal of uncovering the missing what. this effectively sets the agenda for the rest of the book. In Chapter 2 Wes Sharrock takes on the topic of how a working division of labour might be arrived at as a practical accomplishment

Preface and Overview xxiii

within the work itself and how it stands as a feature of how people reason about their work themselves. In Chapter 3 the editors themselves broach the topic of organizational acumen, making particular use of Bittners (1965) notion of the gambit of compliance and exploring how organizational acumen is made visible in matters such as prioritization, adherence to organizational policy, and the work of representing the organization to others. all of the other topics tackled within the book could be said to be particular workings through of the knowing exercise of organizational acumen in the context of particular accomplished divisions of labour, hence the position of these two chapters at the start. the rational calculability of organizational performance as a worked up accomplishment within the everyday business of meetings between the managers of an entrepreneurial firm is the subject of Chapter 4 by John Hughes. This builds upon the local production of rational, organizationally reasonable argumentation touched upon in the preceding two chapters. Planning and its artful accomplishment sits somewhere between the art of calculation and its actualization in a temporally coherent workflow and Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield take this as their topic in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6 Andy Crabtree, Mark Rouncefield and Peter tolmie take an initially historical view upon the topic of how time is oriented to as a feature of working environments and relate their discussion to the topic of workflow. They make an active distinction between reasoning about time as a feature within the work itself and reasoning about time as a topic imposed by sociology from without, emphasizing once again the difference between conventional and ethnomethodological points of view. In the following chapter dave martin and Jacki oneill set the theme for much of the rest of the book by exploring how organizational incumbents effective talk the organization into being through their interactions with clients and amongst one another. talk, of course, is a central feature of meetings and in Chapter 8 dave randall, mark Rouncefield, John Hughes, and Peter Tolmie use an ethnomethodological treatment of the interactions in meetings to challenge a common complaint from conventional sociology that ethnomethodology has nothing to say about organizational matters such as power. meetings and many other organizational phenomena are, to varying degrees, premised upon the production and use of physical components such as documents. this is the topic of Chapter 9 and within it Mark Hartswood, Roger Slack and Mark Rouncefield explore the organization of work around documents in fine-grained detail documenting the special and fundamental standing of paper records within our culture. of course, an inevitable counterpart of documents is reading and this is the subject examined by John rooksby in Chapter 10. John uses examples from both medical and software design settings to reveal how reading is an ordinary everyday accomplishment within mundane working practice. In Chapter 11 mark hartswood, roger Slack and Mark Rouncefield make technology their central topic, building upon Buttons (1992) observations regarding how conventional treatments of technology almost always manage to lose the technology along the way. In the concluding chapter Button and Sharrock neatly complete the contrastive work begun in the first

Ethnomethodology at Workxxiv

chapter, by drawing a distinction between ethnomethodological interests in work and the themes and topics that exist in more recent constructionist studies of science and technology such as activity theory and distributed cognition. they point to two general distinguishing issues; the preoccupation that constructionists have with the meaning of technology or science; and the status of the fact that the social and the technical/scientific are entwined.

A Final Apology

Our original intention was to use the final chapter to draw out some general conclusions about characteristics of everyday organizational working life that emerge from ethnomethodological studies of work. In doing this we wanted to answer our legions of critics that have plagued us over the years. our critics when they are not simply moaning about our prose style generally suggest that ethnomethodology, with its apparent fixation on minute features of face-to-face social interaction and the techniques of capturing and cataloguing them, has nothing to say, indeed can have nothing to say about the larger social structures within which these interactions take place. Ethnomethodology generally bewilders its sociological critics because it apparently and stubbornly refuses to get the big picture or buy into the big idea. (to which some of us might reply that: half the worlds suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality earnestness is just stupidity sent to college (orourke, 1989: 12).)

But ethnomethodologists have grown accustomed to having to constantly justify themselves and having their analyses, methods, and occasionally even their sanity, open to dispute. Ethnomethodology has never really been granted the fictive consensus generally afforded to other approaches in Sociology that allows them just to get on with their work. Since ethnomethodology is supposedly dealing in, if not peddling commonsense, then commonsense, a different commonsense of course, is apparently all that is required to refute our arguments. growing baffled by questions that rarely amounted to very much, that seemingly lacked any reference to anything remotely resembling ethnomethodological analysis or the data presented and therefore, growing tired of effectively having to teach undergraduate Ethnomethodology 101 every time they defended their work, it is hardly surprising that ethnomethodologists have developed a reputation for being grumpy old men. So those who have chosen the ethnomethodological path are used to being the source of some disappointment for their parent discipline, Sociology. and yet we persist in presenting our work in the, usually forlorn, hope of parental approval or at least minimal recognition. In part this book represents just such a forlorn hope (and it may be significant that historically the forlorn hope was an action in which nobody expected to get out alive). So this final chapter was originally intended to be payback time our attempt to put the record straight, to answer our misguided critics. But gradually, over time, this

Preface and Overview xxv

intention faded. as ethnomethodologists we have grown accustomed to being mischaracterized, maligned and misunderstood so, in the end, knowing that any effort would also be mischaracterized, maligned and misunderstood, to employ an old northern English phrase, we just couldnt be arsed. and for that, of course, we also apologize.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

the Sociologist as movie Criticdave randall and Wes Sharrock

In this chapter, we discuss differences between what we will characterise as sociological treatments of work and organisation and ethnomethodological approaches to the same topic. We will try to demonstrate that the sociology of work and organisation is something of a misnomer, insofar as the nature of work and organisation is hardly its central topic. rather, and as we will show, sociological theorising of a certain kind is sociologys main concern. although sociological theories come and go, and can be thought of as distinguished according to whether they are high, middle or low level theories (although no-one would want to be associated with a low level theory), and may encompass a variety of specific topics and conceptual orientations, they broadly share certain characteristics. these are such that, in some respects, the work of the sociologist can be thought of as analogous to that of the movie critic. the following quote from huczynski and Buchanan illustrates exactly this point:

Hassard and Holliday (1998) note that film and television plays out sex and violence, emotion, power struggle, the personal consequences of success and failure, and disorganization upon its stage To what extent do film and television re-inforce or challenge popular stereotypes of work, authority, power, status and organisation structure? Indeed, it can be argued that popular media are at least partly responsible for creating, embellishing and maintaining those stereotypes. Nelson Phillips argues that the use of narrative fiction, in film and other media, is a way of strengthening the connection between organizational behaviour as an academic discipline and the subjective experience of organizational membership . hassard and holliday argue, however, that the media reinforce conservative values, reflecting social realities, albeit in a stylized manner, rather than presenting fundamental challenges. read their text and you will never again watch police and hospital television dramas without boring your companions with critical commentary on the traditional portrayal of hierarchy, group dynamics, sex role stereotyping, power relations, the role of authority figures and dysfunctional bureaucratic rules. (huczynski and Buchanan, 2007)

When, in this case, the organisation theorist (as someone engaged in a branch of sociology) seeks to approach, analyse and understand what is going on in any particular movie, it will be done in a fashion such that, firstly, the relevant aspects of the material of the movie its narrative and its images will be selected according

Ethnomethodology at Work2

to the interests of the critic/sociologist, drawing on the comfortable knowledge that these interests are common to all the other critics in the auditorium (and with indifference to other candidate themes) and secondly it will be expected that the critic/sociologist will be able to reveal features of the movie that were unobserved by lay folk watching the same movie and the revelations may well be such that, as the above quote makes explicit, the average punter will indeed never see things in the same way again. We should perhaps admit at this point, because we do not want to push the metaphor too far, that there is one telling difference between the two (with apologies to cahiers du cinema) and that is that the business of movie criticism is not, for the most part, a theoretical business.1 the business of sociology is nothing else but. We will have something to say below about how the will to theory ramifies.

Proceeding from this, and as has been observed on many occasions, the phenomenon of work is largely missing from these sociological accounts. It was, in fact, Harold Garfinkel (1967) who first pointed to what he termed the missing what of studies of work. the complaint was that sociology (and we consider sociology to be representative of most of the social and to a degree human sciences in this respect) has singularly failed to encompass the problem of trying to capture what work might be like for the people who are engaged in it. talking about numerous aspects of workplaces and organisational settings but excluding the organisation of the work that went on there, the interest in sociology of work has been almost entirely titular, with occupational titles standing on behalf of any understanding of how the work itself was put together and carried out, and this has led to what is termed, the ethnomethodological studies of work programme (see Garfinkel, 1986). Garfinkels concern for how we might remedy this omission was one reason why he stressed the notion of vulgar competence in his explication of what ethnomethodology might be and how ethnomethodologists might conduct themselves for the purposes of enquiry. Vulgar competence here might mean more than one thing but most certainly points to, at the very least, a certain attention to how the job gets done and what might be necessary, in terms of skilful, or artful, performance in order that this happens. at a minimum, this would suggest that vulgar competence would entail the recognition of skill or competence in such a way that one could grasp what it means to be good at a job of work. For the most part we can treat the notion of vulgar competence as an ambition, one which ethnomethodologists would hold to such that they can aspire, for instance, to the conversation with people who competently perform job functions that would go, yes, you really do understand what it is we do. 2 In the extreme, the requirement

1 although it quickly becomes one when academic sociologists get involved (see Stacey, 1994).

2 We do not wish to over-emphasise this point. there is obviously a vast difference between vulgar competence in respect of our understanding of complex or technical jobs of work say, Air Traffic Control or Ontology-building in the computer sciences and in respect of matters such as crossing the road or queueing.

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 3

of unique adequacy demands that the sociological researcher acquire the same skills as those owned by members in the activity under study (as david Sudnow taught himself jazz piano playing (Sudnow, 1978), or Eric livingston was trained in mathematics (livingston, 1986)). Ethnomethodologys use of the term member (one which also causes a certain degree of confusion) is closely related to this, for member is to be treated less as a jargonistic alternative to words like person or participant than as a placeholder for precisely the set of skills or competences which are such that a membership claim could be reasonably made. We specify the meaning of such terms at the outset because a fundamental difference between the concerns of sociology-at-large and of ethnomethodology lies in the treatment of skill or competence. For the former, skill is a generic term, and one which resides in a particular job. It can thus be measured, and arguments produced about the relationship between the degree to which it inheres in particular occupations and how that might relate to other factors. this might pertain, for instance, to the amount of skill deemed necessary for the completion of tasks measured against other factors, such as the amount of computing power or other automating capacity to be applied to the job, or otherwise to such matters as alienation, job satisfaction, and so on (not to mention the relation to scales of social stratification connected to occupation and to the grading of these as skilled, unskilled and so on). Ethnomethodologists treat skill endogenously. that is, seen from the point of view of the person doing the work the member in the sense we describe above skill resides in a series of egological questions: what do I have to do next?; what do I need to know?; what do my work colleagues know that might prove useful?; how can I best do this without unnecessary complication?, how do I solve this problem that has cropped up? etc.

Charles Sabel once made the following observation:

Shop-floor managers and sociologists of work have long recognised that even the most exact plan of production must constantly be readjusted to meet changing circumstances; and that semi-skilled workers must draw on a large stock of tacit officially unrecognised knowledge about particular machines, their workmates, or, say, the effect of humidity and heat on certain materials in order to maintain the flow of production. (Sabel, 1994)

however, for the most part the sociology of work and organisation remains (as does the discipline-at-large) largely unconcerned with what it no doubt considers to be an unnecessary focus on such extra-sociological and processual matters, on the trivial details that preoccupy those immersed in some task, and ultimately on what ethnomethodologists might have in mind when they (as opposed to other, more interpretive, sociologies which might make similar references) refer to the actors point of view (Button and Sharrock, 1991). Contrary to the anxieties created by ethnomethodologys first public appearances in sociology (in the mid to late 1960s), ethnomethodology is not a programme to replace other sociologies, not least because it itself originates in a decision to elect one of a diversity of

Ethnomethodology at Work4

possible ways in which one might develop a sociology. It is not, therefore, intrinsically objectionable to develop a sociology which elects to disregard the very things that might be central to some other possible sociology. though this last observation ought to hold reciprocally, it does not do so, and ethnomethodology is very commonly criticised on the grounds that it does not recognise what other kinds of sociology count as their constituent priorities. Ethnomethodologys elections enable it to access the problem of social order in a completely different way to that available to other kinds of sociology, investigating social order as a real time production through the performance of everyday activities (hence the emphasis on the way in which workplaces are organised in and through constituent work activities). thus, ethnomethodological work leaves sociology untouched in the sense that the corpus of studies that ethnomethodology produces have no significant relation to, nor are they critical of, the business of sociological theorising, nor of sociologys methodological concerns. this does not, of course, mean that ethnomethodologists themselves have no criticism of how sociologists might go about their business how they construe their data, and where they find it, and how they go about making the leap from evidence to theory. Indeed, we will reflect on this at greater length below.

The Sociology of Work and Organisation

there is no point in extensively reviewing the sociology of work or its cognate interests in a book of this kind, and we make no attempt to do so. nevertheless, we will attempt for contrastive purposes to isolate the kinds of thing that look interesting to someone engaged in that endeavour. these interests can, of course, be traced back a long way at least to the time of marx. they are, put simply, consistent. the point is that the consistency is generated out of the sociologists professionally supplied interest in social scenes, which, so far as they are concerned, pre-empt the members own understandings of the same scene. they deal with issues of the form of production and the way it might (or might not) be changing; the relations of production; the labour process; flexible specialisation; the structure of capitalism. the result of this predictable set of interests made manifest is that we can more or less guess what themes of interest will emanate from any particular topic. We can demonstrate this by referencing some summaries of sociological concerns in this area. harper et al. (2000) in their study of the work of bank operatives (see also Chapters 3, 5, 8 and 11 in this volume) point to how, by way of example, studies of the retail financial services sector are geared less to having some influence on organisational and work practices than on the refinement of debate about a set of sociological issues. they point to the major themes that are to be found in research around banking and identify:

a concern with how current banking structures reflect much larger scale transformations, particularly globalisation, knowledge accumulation and new

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 5

foundations for individual identity. For example, in Economies of Signs and Space, lash and Urry (1994) advance an account of economic growth in modern industrial societies based on a process of reflexive accumulation suggesting it provides a better account of contemporary socio-economic processes than other frameworks such as flexible specialisation, flexible accumulation and Post-Fordism. lash and Urry suggest that these other approaches are characterised by a series of conceptual and empirical inadequacies and fail, for example, to recognise the importance of services. A reflexive economy, Lash and Urry argue, increasingly involves services such as banking, insurance, stockbroking and so on (as against the production of things in traditional capitalism). Information and knowledge are fundamental to economic growth in these areas. they go on to argue that other explanatory frameworks place insufficient emphasis on consumption and, relatedly, fail to understand the extent to which cultural and symbolic processes, including an important aesthetic component related to design, have permeated both production and consumption.

they go on to specify a variety of research interests which have informed research in this sector. they identify, for instance, developments and changes in the economy such as the weakening of the welfare state; an increasing dependence between the state and capital; the breakdown of the mass market and the need for new forms of production and their impact on specific organisational forms, encompassing Post-Fordism and Postmodern forms of organisation and theories of the flexible firm; changes in consumption patterns and life styles and major technological innovations; the virtual organisation and its relationship to postmodern forms; and to problems of task, environmental uncertainty and knowledge generation.

another major set of themes in the sociological literature evince an interest in researching particular features (as against organisational forms) of organisational behaviour as indicators of more general economic and organisational structures and changes. this is perhaps most obvious in the traditional studies of those who have been primarily interested in bank workers as instantiations of white-collar workers. historically this can be seen in the early work of lockwood (1958) and the Blackcoated Worker, although it is a tradition resurrected by more recent studies by Stovel et al., (1996), and Gallie (1996) which specifically examine the work of clerks (although the emphasis is primarily on pay, conditions and status rather than actual work). these studies relate descriptions of work to theories about changes in the class structure of modern capitalist society.

Essentially similar approaches are adopted by those whose interest is in aspects of alienation and clerical work and in more recent studies on the career structure of bank clerks relating them to notions of social change and the concepts of ascribed and achieved status (Stovel et al., 1996). In part this is because banks have provided a rich resource for documentary research and consequently have enabled the historical examination of change. other studies focusing on this theme include the various debates surrounding the issues of skill, managerial control

Ethnomethodology at Work6

and resistance following Braverman (1974) and applied to financial service organisations in the work of Smith (1989) and Smith and Wield (1988). these and other writers have used the issue of skill related to changing organisational forms (notably flexible specialisation) to examine employment patterns within banks. Discussion of the model of the flexible firm and the extent to which it matches the reality of bank work is relevant here. this model is predicated on evidence suggesting that there are increasing numbers of part-time workers in banking.

the point is obvious: whatever one makes of the quality of the empirical work mentioned above, the selection of the themes that will be investigated, and the direction that analysis will take, is provided by a set of theoretical interests that can be developed quite independently of any knowledge of what competences are required of bank employees for carrying out practically adequate day-to-day banking transactions.

lest one imagines that sociological theory is, bizarrely, an obsession only for those who investigate banks, similar conclusions can easily be reached about organisational studies in a broader context. manning makes the following observation (cited in harper et al., 2000):

organizational analysis faces a turning point as the now tired functionalism, including the systems theory and organic models of another generation, seems exhausted. In functionalism, systems theory, marxism, structuralism and semiotic-influenced work, system and structure precede content and pattern agency. these outlines of the possible seem blurred now, and exhaustion is perhaps less accurate than desuetude. a cursory examination of research in organizational analysis suggests a proliferation of new journals with a continental flair, combining ethnography and case studies with a dash of semiotics and poststructuralism. If an intellectual centre now exists, it is loosely articulated. these versions of organizational analysis have not been widely accepted. Several reasons for this can be noted. Some are a cluster of critiques, shaping an anti-theory of sorts. they draw on unfamiliar and abstract models (structuralism, semiotics, population biology), cite difficult (perhaps even unread) sources (derrida, lyotard, kristeva, Baudrillard) and walk the blurred line between organizing, a focus on meaning creation and ordering, and organization as a product and determinant. Some argue from philosophical premises free of empirical data. (manning, 1997)

We are not supposing that there is no truth in the observations that sociologists make. that networks of computers are increasingly prevalent and affect work arrangements, that there is some sense in which knowledge might be more important in production than it once was, and so on, seems entirely plausible. that is not the point. If, as we assert, serious empirical work is less evident, there is a conflation of quite different kinds of problem and an obsession with a narrow critical perspective, the question is whether these theoretical insights actually

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 7

have any significant status outside of the visionary (U. Beck, 2000), or in our preferred language, the speculative.

approaches to the sociology of work and organisations are, of course, many and varied. drawing on the above, however, it does seem apparent that certain common features of sociology-at-large are evident in the sociology of work and organisation. these include, we suggest, three main elements:

1. A standard assumption that the sociological viewpoint is privileged in some way

the social sciences, in their evolution, have developed a principled position which emphasises their ability to reveal aspects of social reality and the construction of knowledge hitherto unknown to participants in the social world, not least because it conceives doing sociology as its professional monopoly, and knowledge of social reality as a product of doing sociology (once again, also see the final chapter in this volume). ontological and epistemological concerns shaped on such assumptions have enabled a continuing distinction between appearance and reality to be maintained, such that members are directly acquainted only with the appearances of social order. this would be, we think, a largely unremarkable insight in the social scientific world for to think otherwise is to dismiss the practices of a profession. nevertheless, and this is perhaps the core of ethnomethodologys disagreements with sociology, there are good reasons for, at the very least, wanting to scale down the pretensions of social scientific enquiry. The idea that, you will never again watch a film or TV series after being exposed to a sociological analysis is, we would venture, both a pompous and imperialistic suggestion. not for the first time, with the advent of subaltern or postcolonial studies, we are left wondering why it is that sociologys own subjects can be treated in so evidently a colonial fashion. Ethnomethodologys incursion into these assumptions was formed with its insistence that there is lay as well as professional sociology, and that amongst the otherwise unremarkable competences of members are those of practical sociological reasoning. rather than thinking that the standard, and order producing, properties of social order become manifest only through inspection of aggregate facts gathered in places that no single experience can possibly encompass, it holds that social order can be found within a social setting, through the practical analysis of features of the social setting, as part of the practical production of the activities of that setting. many sociologists, however, retain the assumption that the ordinary person (without sociological training) will not have the concepts to correctly understand their own experience. Sociology and its cognates have long debated the role of the concept (see, for instance, marvin harris (harris, 1968), or Clifford geertz (geertz, 1973)), and the possible relationship there might be between the -emic and the -etic. the argument would go that the ordinary person lacks the conceptual apparatus to understand clearly what is going on around them, having only their -emic formulations to fall back on. The social scientific move to the -etic of course implies some sort of superior precision or clarity (or both). It may be that the social sciences provide a theoretical resource framework

Ethnomethodology at Work8

of one kind or another which enable us to relate various aspects of social life aspects which we might otherwise think of as discreet and unrelated and thus which constitute guides for further research. Sociological and related concepts (the -etic), of course, will exist in some relationship to the facts. this makes our second point all the more remarkable.

2. The conflation of the empirical and the theoretical and a preference for the theoretical.

It would be ludicrously unfair to suggest that the social scientist engaged in studies of work and organisation never engages in anything empirical, and we are not doing so here. the work of, for instance, anselm Strauss and colleagues stands ample testimony to the fact that it has been done (although we would point out that Strauss fame stands as much on his and glasers grounded theory as anything else. Further, glaser and Strauss (1967) are insistent that sociologys important claims are theoretical). nevertheless, if we can be forgiven a half-jocular observation, it seems that a broad sociology of knowledge, or as it would be more fashionably termed, social constructionist viewpoint, to sociology itself would lead to the very plausible conclusion that empirical investigations are a relatively low-status activity compared to the production of generalised theory (see also the final chapter in this volume), a fact which might easily be explained by an institutional cost-benefit analysis: a kind of, if you will, regulation-theoretic approach which looks at the political economy of the sociology department and discovers that promotional opportunities and academic status are given much more readily to low-cost output. We would defend the proposition that empirical work is no less subordinate to preconceived theoretical ambitions today than it was before. What we are saying is that the long complained about disjunction between theory and research persists undiminished into the present, with sublime indifference to some of the classic problems of sociological enquiry. When critics of Emile durkheims work on suicide (1951) suggested that his reliance on secondary sources was deeply problematic, they were instantiating a more general point, which is that sociologys dependence on databases created by and for organisations, whether state or business, legal, educational, medical, etc, meant invocation of data that could not possibly be deemed valid for sociological purposes. the result has not been that sociology has occupied itself with generating data that would be exempt from the problems involved in creating organisational statistics for it has instead focused on how to make better use of existing databases. this is exampled in the work of Ulrich Beck (2000). Beck suggests,

this approach has long ceased to correspond to the fact that all the social sciences, including economics, are faced with the same questions and difficulties. For it is as problematic to infer the future from current trends and data as it is to read it from the tea leaves this book represents one attempt to do this which is why it belongs to the category of visionary non-fiction. The argument is

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 9

non-fiction because, in describing both the present and the future state of things, it has recourse to all imaginable and available arguments, data, concepts and models. (p. 8)

What is striking about this recourse to all imaginable data, etc., is that no attempt is made, anywhere, to assess the reliability of the data when put to this kind of broad comparative purpose precisely the kind of problem that durkheims critics were quick to seize upon more than a century ago. Equally significantly, what passes for empirical work is, of course, already serving a set of theoretical and conceptual interests before the sociologist ever embarks on it. the sheer stability of the themes covered in the literature is quite remarkable given the extraordinary possibilities inherent in all possible approaches to data collection. It results, we think, from the narrow theoretical and disciplinary interests with which social science is obsessed. a casual review of some well-known texts rather confirms the point.

By definition, any sociological work which utilises concepts drawn from sociology (the -etic), rather than from ordinary experience (the -emic) must entail a specific relation between whatever concept(s) are in play and the data which results. one of the consequences of this is an endless debate about what the right concepts might be. grint (1998: 644), for instance, discusses the problem of what is work? and offers a variety of definitions drawn from the literature. Grint also (briefly) draws on ethnomethodological literature to show how the term cannot have an objective and transcendent meaning (p. 8). he goes on, however, to discuss various usages that sociologists typically apply to their work, and these include the relationship between work, the economy and the State; work as employment; the contrastive nature of work and non-work; the language of work; work and power; work and Christianity; work and social class; radical approaches to work; work satisfaction, alienation and other socially constructed meanings; domestic labour, and unemployment (pp. 643). Chapters in the book include, contemporary theories of work organisation; class, industrial conflict and the labour process; gender, patriarchy and trade unions; race, ethnicity and labour markets; working technology, and globalisation and work. It is not difficult to see from this what the standard sociological preoccupations might be. Similar preoccupations are evident in other texts. thus and for instance in The Transformation of Work, a well-known edited collection (Woods, 1989), which consists in a discussion of the debates over capitalisms dependence on the labour process and of the new possibilities inherent in flexible specialisation, we find an article by Sarah Kuhn on software development in a large commercial bank (kuhn, 1989). now, we do not wish to suggest here that there is anything wrong with this work. We select it merely because we too have been involved in both studies of banking and of software development. It does, nevertheless, highlight the difference between an orthodox sociological treatment and a broadly ethnomethodological one. For kuhn, the analytic issue is the degree to which the labour process is as Braverman predicted in the context of banking. She carefully

Ethnomethodology at Work10

analyses the main elements of Bravermans definition of deskilling and then argues point by point that this is not what we find in banks. She suggests:

the evidence from the bank did not confirm Bravermans (1974) predictions about the reorganization of programming work. First, conceptual work, or analysis, was not substantially separate from execution or coding. although some employees performed analysis but wrote no code, there were no programmers who were solely coders. (p. 268)

Now, we have no reason to take issue with this. Our own experience confirms that the separation of engineers or analysts is a function of design methodologies usually imposed by managers, and oriented to in various satisficing ways by the people who have to make the code executable. the difference lies in the evidently sociological purpose of this work, and the absence of any warrant for describing the work as consisting in either analysis or coding in the first place. Indeed, she goes on to say,

programmers found it difficult to say where analysis ended and coding began, and when pressed [our emphasis] one programmer seemed to suggest that analysis was endemic even to the writing of code itself this suggests a degree of overlap- of conception and execution for which Bravermans theory does not allow. (p. 270)

note here that no evidence is presented as to why any initial separation of work into analysis and execution is warranted in the first place, other than it fits a discussion of the theoretical model that Braverman initially proposed (if only to reject it). Surely, we are entitled to ask whether systems analysts and computer programmers typically make those distinctions in the course of their work, especially when not pressed. Rather, we might find that, when left to their own devices and talking about the relationship between what they do and what methodologies, plans, procedures, technologies and other agencies of deskilling might indicate, they typically express mild surprise that anyone could imagine that these things are anything but resources for doing the work they know they have to do. that is, there might be good reasons to suppose that analysis and execution are in no sense descriptions of reality as it is experienced, but are rather convenient analytic categories with which (justifiably) to beat Braverman.

the notion of experience looms large in other sociological work in this area (littler, 1985) and again demonstrates the distinction we wish to make concerning ethnomethodological as against sociological interests. littlers edited collection ranges over a number of cases and here we pick one: Cynthia Cockburns well-known analysis of the printing trade (Cockburn, 1985; see also Cockburn, 1983). We select it because the title of the essay promises so much the nature of Skill: the case of the printers and delivers nothing related to the nature of skill which might answer the egologically-framed questions asked above. What, in fact,

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 11

we get are three definitions of skill: skill that resides in the man himself; skill demanded by the job; and that which a group can successfully defend . a brief excursus into the relevant skills is still useful, as with, some of the mens old knowledge, spelling, an aesthetic understanding of how a newspaper page should look, or how, as the men have found to their cost, typing is quite hard to learn (p. 134). however, much more time is spent on an analysis of how the different definitions of skill might be disentangled in such a way that the merits of the deskilling thesis might be assessed. thus, while as littler suggests, the concept of skill is unpacked in such a paper, we would assert that nothing much is said about its nature at all. the questions that we might be interested in would include, how are the aesthetics of page construction constituted? What troubles are resolved by such aesthetic awareness? on what occasions do we see it in use?.

Schegloff (1992) sums up this complex of evidence, concept and theory in professional sociological work nicely:

once we recognize that whoever can be categorized as male or as protestant, or as president or whatever, can be characterized or categorized in other ways as well, our scholarly/professional/scientific account cannot naively rely on such categorizations, that is, cannot rely on them with no justification or warrant for their relevance.

roughly speaking, there are two types of solution to this problem in the methodology of professional analysis. one type of solution can be characterized as the positivist stance, in one of the many senses in which that term is currently used. In this view, the way to warrant one, as compared to another, characterization of the participants (for example, in interaction) is the success of that way of characterizing in producing a professionally acceptable account of the data being addressed. Success is measured by some technology by statistical significance, a preponderance of historical evidence, and so forth. Sometimes, there is an additional requirement that the characterization which produces successful analysis be theoretically interpretable; that is, that the selection of descriptive terms for the participants converges with the terms of a professional/scientific theory relevant to the object of description. In this type of solution, which I am calling positivistic, it does not matter whether or not the terms that are used to characterize the participants in some domain of action, and which have yielded significant results, are otherwise demonstrably oriented to or not by the participants being described. that is what makes this solution of the problem positivist. (pp. 10910)

the argument, so often wilfully misunderstood, is as follows. Whatever passes as evidence, or relevant concept, or appropriate theory, does so entirely independently of any evidence that might demonstrate what participants themselves think they are talking about. Even where that evidence consists in people talking, it is of course typically people talking to sociologists what is professionally

Ethnomethodology at Work12

understood as the interview that counts as evidence, regardless of the fact that the sociologist-as-participant plays a significant role in making the topic of the talk just what it is, deciding relative to sociological schemes with which their inquiry is affiliated what the members have to be talking about (Hester and Francis, 2000).

3. The assumption that the work of the social scientist is to be thought of as critical

one last observation about the nature of the sociological enterprise: the critical nature of the social sciences is evident everywhere, and again no great purpose is served in trying to demonstrate it. We content ourselves with brief reference to another standard text, thompson and mchugh (1990). thompson and mchugh make much of the way in which organisational psychology has been made to serve a set of organisational, or managerial, interests through the manipulation of theoretical constructs into measurement tools that relate motivation, personality and what have you to organisational efficiency. They call this a prescriptive turn, and point to the job design perspective which we have referred to above as an example of exactly that. they also point (and we have no objection to this either) to the way in which these largely cognitivist approaches ignore the sociality of motivation (see harper et al., 2000 for further discussion). this, in their view, justifies a move to a more sociological and critical perspective and the sociological concept of identity is used to focus on the reproduction and transformation of those identities in the context of work organisations. (Ibid, pp. 2867). Quoting from harper et al. (ibid), they further argue that:

new and theoretical knowledge often becomes part of the repertoire of the science of organisational behaviour, functioning as technologies of regulation which are used to control and discipline employees. (p. 297)

the sociological rendering of behaviour through notions of identity is, in effect, a vehicle for critical renderings of motive as social constructions.

We will suggest here that sociology at large and the sociology of work and organisations is, of course, only a very small subset of that sprawling discipline can be thought of as akin to the business of movie criticism. as indicated above, this is hardly a novel view. nevertheless, we will use this device to suggest something different. What is evident in the above quote is precisely the stuff of sociology and its cognate disciplines the concern with power, structure, hierarchy and subordination, gender roles and so on. Equally evident is the standard social scientific assumption that a critical view (because we are, after all, academic movie critics as opposed to popular ones) will reveal something startling to the viewer. It seems the invisible props will be revealed to you by just such academic critics. or will they? the movie critic, after all, sees the movie after it was made, after scenes are constructed, after the director has organised shots in whatever manner s/he has

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 13

seen fit, after due discussion, no doubt, with lead actors, after the sets have been constructed, scripts have been written, and so on. the movie critics job is, once this assembly is in place and ready for screening, to sit through it and comment, roughly speaking, on whether it was any good or not, how it fits into the history of film-making, consider the role, perhaps, of the auteur in the organisation of the final product, identify the various tropes or themes that underpin the movies narrative and point to, especially in full-on critical mode, the underlying structure of the film and when academic criticism is invoked, present a fundamental challenge (all of which is done independently of any knowledge of how this movie was put together in production). In this way, genres are uncovered for us, and revelations made. In this way, we might discover the fact that the typical hollywood action movie constructs its first set piece so that it can be displayed roughly one-third of the way through the movie, anticipating the second, and orgasmic climax which will, of course, take place just before the final resolution. When the credits roll, however, the critic leaves. S/he has no interest in, and will not discover, who the carpenter, or gaffers grip was, or what they did. they will show little or no interest, that is, in the very ordinary work that was done so that the movie could have been made in the first place. How did the producer go about persuading backers to cough up money, carpenters organise themselves so that they could turn ideas into physical constructions, scene shifters mobilise to get settings ready just in time, and so on, who put the tape down in that just-so fashion so that actors have an indication where they should stand? how do actors go about the business of deciding how best to conduct their business in front of the cameras?

the sociologist, then, stands in relation to society as the movie critic is in relation to the movie for them the observable affairs of society do not give a sight of society in production but can be treated as the finished product. The availability of societys everyday affairs is simply treated as a given, and an assessment of some of their features can be made relative to the standards the sociologist thinks apposite for assessing whether there is order, whether something works and so forth. We should at least note that the social science disciplines have taken on board with unseemly haste the notion of social construction, which on the face of it would seem to nullify our complaint. attention to the way in which the movie has been constructed will surely produce the results we desire. apparently not, for the results are too often a form of radical social determinism, the main result of which is to reassert that the world could be some other way from the way it actually is if only people would recognise the need to confront the fundamental challenges offered by the critic. the force of the constructionist argument, then, is akin to arguing that it would have been better if another movie had been made, one which dealt in the themes that the critic has identified as important something that movie critics are wont to do.

Ethnomethodology at Work14

What Does an Ethnomethodological Study of Work and Organisation Consist of?

Sociology, then, has for the most part emphasised a range of theoretical models, and the notion of critique, wherever it has turned its eye, for such is the sine qua non of its existence. Its foundations may be found on the evidence of what we discuss above in gender division, hierarchical institutions, various hidden power formations, and so forth. there is, of course, nothing much wrong with paying attention to such matters (although we, like many, are not at all convinced that it is done well). our task in this chapter is, however, to spell out what it is, in contrast to these concerns, that ethnomethodologists want to do when they pay attention to work.

Ethnomethodologists work, to the consternation of some social scientists, the indifference of others, and the non-comprehension of most3, seems to view most sociological debates as irrelevant when it comes to their programme of studies. Perhaps this is why ethnomethodologically-trained researchers have become relatively rare in sociology departments in Britain and the USa. they have not, note, become rarer per se, but have experienced a diaspora, such that they are to be found everywhere but the typical Sociology department. this is arguably because they do not appear to share the sociological interests we have rehearsed above, and seem to pursue other matters with a will. It seems that sociology cannot forgive ethnomethodology for not being critical of society, and at the same time, for being (apparently) critical of sociology. In the words of a colleague, it is as if, they want to criticise cricket for not being football. We insist that, whether or not ethnomethodologists have a critical view of sociology, their programme of study in and of itself is not critical. their empirical work is resolutely indifferent to the concerns of sociology at large and does not reflect any of the conceptual or theoretical interests that determine sociologys empirical choices. It is in this sense that ethnomethodologists insist on their indifference or innocence in respect of those matters. again, this does not suppose some claim to objectivity a claim which the social sciences have, for the most part, long since abandoned.

they appear to value above all an empirical approach which does little more than provide detailed description of what is going on in particular settings and, moreover, to resist any form of conceptualisation which would allow for the reality-generating machinery associated with sociology to get into gear. Ethnomethodology, unlike sociology, seems to conflate appearance and reality and

3 harper et al. (2000) point out that Burrell and morgan (1979), for instance, in their discussions of the various paradigms associated with organisational research, argue that it is sociologys interest in, on the one hand, issues of regulation and social change, and on the other, methodological concerns with subjectivist as against objectivist sociologies, that determine the functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist and radical structuralist paradigms. oddly, they seem to think that ethnomethodology forms part of the interpretivist paradigm.

The Sociologist as Movie Critic 15

treat them as if they are the same. What could possibly be the purpose of such a treatment? how trivial must its results be if it merely reports on what participants already know about their world? Instead, it wants to treat as a topic the resources that sociologists and other theoreticians bring to bear on their work, and often appears to be making an appeal to common sense. Common sense is a much abused term, and needs some explication. there can be no doubt that ethnomethodologists are very much concerned with common sense. nevertheless, there is a tendency when reading such a statement to assume that ethnomethodologists must have some underlying and unitary conception of what common sense might be. In other words, that it might, for instance, be a contrast class for more theoretical work (its just commonsense), or might (astonishingly enough) be a reference to some kind of universal cognitive capacity that members of society have or possess. It is neither of those things. Common sense here refers, quite simply to the way in which member