Cristina Zucchermaglio

‘Afterwards we can understand what went wrong, but now let’s fix it’: How Situated Work Practices Shape Group Decision Making:

The paper proposes an ethnomethodological approach to the study of naturalistic decision making. We present an analysis of design practices in an Internet company, showing that, besides ‘professional design’ of technological systems, designers are continually involved in an activity of maintenance and replanning of these same systems (‘design-in-use’). Through an interaction-based analysis, we describe a serious emergency design-in-use situation. Results show that (1) decision-making activities are not clearly identifiable in ongoing problem-solving action but are embedded in complex work practices; (2) work practices and organizational features shape when, how and which decisions are made, underlying the situated character of the decision-making process; (3) considering the group of designers as unit of analysis allows the complex and distributed nature of decision making in organizations to be described.

FROM ORAL TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE: PRESCHOOL CHILDREN DICTATING STORIES

This study, part of a larger longitudinal research project, examined the process and products of story dictation of beginning readers. The subjects were 14 six-year-old Italian school children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who were interviewed four times (March, May, December and May of the following year) over a period of 16 months. In the interviews, the subjects were asked to construct and dictate a story in response to a picture stimulus, to reflect on their own stories, and to respond to questions from the scribes. The products (the stories) were analyzed for story structure elements, variety of verbal tenses, use of connectives, and anaphoric references. The processes (metatextual elements of interaction with the scribe) were analyzed according to variations in dictation speed, text segmentation, terminal signalling, and indications of revision. Results support an emergent literacy perspective, provide direction for further research, and are related to the needs of the early childhood curriculum.

Modes of differentiation in children’s writing construction

In this paper we aim at analyzing the modes of differentiation in children’s writing development during the presyllabic phase that, in the theoretical framework developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky, comes before the discovery of sound correspondance. Seventeen Italian children were interviewed seven times during the implementation of research on «Educational Continuity» between «scuola materna» and primary school. We first examine how minimum quantity and internal variation rules appear in Italian children as organizing principles for controlling quantity and quality of writing, and as necessary conditions for the differentiation process. Starting from this, it is possible to find two differentiation modes in writing; aformal one, and a mode in which some type ofexternal referent is used (meaning or object features). For most children the two modes are alternatives, and passing from one to another is a possible but not necessary step. The external group (which is older) has significantly less quantity repertoire than the formal one: this can explain why looking for an external point of reference can be an outcome of the child’s formal research for differentiating writings.RésuméOn se propose d’apporter quelques éclaircissements sur les modes de différentiation qui caractérisent la production d’écritures d’enfants pendant la phase dite pré-syllabique qui, dans le cadre théorique developpé par Ferreiro et Teberosky, précède la découverte de la correspondance sonore. Dix-sept enfants ont été interviewés sept fois dans une recherche longitudinale de «continuité éducative» entre école maternelle et primaire. En premier lieu, on examine comment — dans ce groupe d’enfants italiens — s’actualisent les principes de «quantité minimale» et de «variation interne» en tant que principes organisateurs de la quantité et de la qualité des lettres et en tant que conditions nécessaires pour que le processus de différentiation puisse démarrer.A partir de cela, on retrouve dans la période présyllabique deux modes de différentiation entre écritures: un mode exclusivement formel et un mode dépendant de certains éléments extérieurs au système (signification ou référent). Les données montrent que ces deux modes sont en général alternatifs et liés à l’ampleur du répertoire de signes (plus nombreux dans le groupe «formel»). Le passage de l’un à l’autre est possible mais non nécessaire. Les deux modes sont en tout cas ordonnés: chercher un référent extérieur peut être un des débouchés de la recherche «formelle» de l’enfant.

My selves and I: identity markers in work meeting talk

This paper is concerned with the indexical meaning of the pronoun ‘I’, in its marked use, in Italian work-meeting conversation. The hypothesis driving the study is that, in a context in which situated identities are manifold, marking the pronoun is a device to highlight the most official of ones selves, thus changing the status of the utterance containing the marker. A typology of I-marked utterances is presented and the relative frequency of use is shown to vary with the organizational role of the participants. Detailed analysis of epistemic and performative I-marked utterances shows how role-identities are variously manipulated and mitigated through conversational devices such as self-repair, word delay, and metaphorical work. The discussion highlights how indexical meaning is a property of situated conversational practices and how marked pronouns can foreground selected identities in the cluster of selves that members of a work group can present to each other.

Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity

Abstract Drawing on a set of workplace interaction corpora, both dyadic and multiparty, we present three narrative forms departing from the established notion of storytelling. These have been called Rewindings, collaborative reconstructions of yet-unknown past events; Fictions, the creation of imaginary scenes; and Templates, condensed versions of experience providing information on unexpected outcomes or controversial occurrences. Without denying specificity to narrative discourse, we extend its definition here to the displacement of the described actions. We propose that, similarly to what is done in other social and human sciences, conversational studies ought to take into consideration the description of events that are not fully known at the onset of narration and that are partially or entirely suggested by the narrators. The study also contributes to the field of workplace studies, providing an illustration of the functioning of distributed cognition and situated knowledge by showing how narrative is a collaborative enterprise facilitating problem solving and the dissemination of competence.

Teaching Economics in Primary School: The Concepts of Work and Profit:

Research on childrens social cognition has dealt mainly with face to face relations; only a few studies have considered how children understand impersonal aspects of society such as economics. This study involves an investigation of teaching the concepts of work and profit to third-graders. Five instruction units were created and during a one-month period these were presented to five classes at different schools in Rome. A sample of 80 pupils was interviewed before and after teaching aimed at ascertaining their ideas on prices, profit and product distribution. Childrens responses were scored on several scales, on which separate ANOVAs (class x sex x repeated measures or class x repeated measures) were carried out. The results show an overall improvement in childrens knowledge, with differences that may be related not only to the complexity of the different concept but also to childrens initial levels of competence.

Embodiment at the interface: Materialization practices in web design

In this article, we describe some of the results of a research project that studied Web design practices in an Internet company. In this work setting, technology acts as both the instrument of mediation, which supports the shared realization of work practices, and as the product of that work activity. For this reason, of particular importance are the social practices by which the designers (a) incrementally and jointly imagine the portal that they have to develop and (b) make visible hidden parts of technologically mediated activities supporting processes of interpretation of user-interface interactions. The results show that these design practices are essentially realized through sociomaterial arrangements of designers and technologies (talk, body, computer, whiteboard, space, etc.). Designers use these arrangements to make phenomena collectively visible and tangible in relation to the aims of the design activity. These results show that design is a complex, situated, and distributed phenomenon to be studied as a rational and individual task whose features emerge only through detailed analysis of the groups work practices.

Diagnostic Decision Making in Oncology: Creating Shared Knowledge and Managing Complexity

Drawing upon the concept of practice, the article explores diagnostic decision making in oncology through the analysis of informal conversations between doctors in an Italian hospital. The analysis shows that doctors rely on three collaborative practices: (a) joint interpretation, (b) intersubjective generation and validation of hypotheses, and (c) postponing the diagnostic decision. Through such practices, doctors jointly handle tough issues such as managing complexity, dealing with cognitive difficulties and limits of knowledge, and avoiding diagnostic errors. The article addresses some lacunae in the literature by providing empirical access to how decision making is done in an understudied and specialized branch of medicine.

Time, Narratives and Participation Frameworks in Software Troubleshooting

The paper problematizes diagnostic work as a solely technical and rational activity by presenting an analysis focused on the social and organizational practices in which diagnosis is embedded. The analysis of a troubleshooting episode in an Italian internet company shows how diagnostic work is realized: 1) through collaboration sustained by specific knowledge distribution among designers (different but overlapping competences); 2) intersubjectively and discursively as an activity characterized by specific and diverse forms of participation and interwined with material intervention in the system; 3) following a situated rationality which proceeds by gradual approximations to achieve partial or provisional solutions while also taking account of organizational goals and needs. In particular the paper discusses how diagnosis is shaped by time pressure, flexible roles and distributed responsibilities, absent participants, narratives as specialized discourses.

Planning and assessing performance through narratives in soccer team meetings

Soccer teams, as many other sport teams, need, among other activities, to plan their behaviours for future matches and to reflect upon their past performances on the pitch. Within a discursive perspective, we aim to analyse how narratives contribute to shape these team activities during technical meetings. The analyses are based on naturally occurring interactions of an Italian soccer team, recorded during three technical meetings (after a victory, after a defeat and before a match). In particular, our goal is to analyse the relation between type of activity and narrative forms, focusing in particular on the role of the coach. We found that he used different forms of narratives to lead different team activities. In particular, the pre-match ‘fictional’ narratives evoke characters and actions in possible scenarios in order to plan and coordinate future team actions during the match. The after-match narratives are instead ‘rewindings’, reconstructions of past events through which the coach leads the team through a shared interpretation of the team’s behaviours on the pitch. More in general, the research suggests a way to empirically observe and understand how coaches build and lead a team ‘in practice’, that might integrate more widespread questionnaire-based methods of measurement of individual abilities.