Eric Laurier

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

This article takes the motorway seriously as a place where the society of traffic can be found and studied. While many kinds of activities are done by drivers and passengers in parallel with driving on the motorway, such as listening to the radio, eating lunch or caring for, or being, children, I focus here on office work. Empirical material from a video-ethnography of one driver doing paperwork and overtaking a slow-moving vehicle ahead is used to examine in detail some of the practices of combining driving and office-duties in the car while in motion. Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, the article examines how this mobile society is naturally organized as an architectural configuration brought to life in the practices of driving in traffic. Overlooked phenomena that are orderly stable features of being mobile are analysed, such as ‘overtaking’, ‘tailgating’ and ‘cruising’. Where other writers have used ‘speed’ to theorize the contemporary period, a brief re-specification is offered in the light of the uses, moral and otherwise, of speed within, and as made apprehensible in relation to, traffic.

Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls

An often-noticed feature of mobile phone calls is some form of ‘geographical’ locating after a greeting has been made. The author uses some singular instances of mobile phone conversations to provide an answer as to why this geolinguistic feature has emerged. In an examination of two real cases and a vignette, some light is shed on a more classical spatial topic, that of mobility. During the opening and closing statements of the paper a short critique is put forward of the ‘professionalisation’ of cultural studies and cultural geography and their ways of theorising ordinary activities. It is argued that a concern with theory construction effectively distances such workers from everyday affairs where ordinary actors understand in practical terms and account competently for what is going on in their worlds. This practical understanding is inherent in the intricacies of a conversational ‘ordering’, which is at one and the same time also an ordering of the times and spaces of these worlds. By means of an indifferent approach to the ‘grand theories’ of culture, some detailed understandings of social practices are offered via the alternatives of ethnomethodological and conversational investigations.

The region as a socio-technical accomplishment of mobile workers

If you work in an office. If you go to the same place every day to work. If you do the same hours, Monday to Friday every week. Maybe you see the same faces, pick up your lunch from the same sandwich maker, drive the same route or take the same train to get there. When you’re at work, you have the same conversations about what you did at the weekend, what you read in the paper that morning or what you saw on television last night. You fill in the same forms. You answer the phone with the same name. It’s stable, yes. Predictable, yes. Inevitable, no.

X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology

An extended review is presented of Bruno Latours book Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Harvard University Press, 1996). Attention is paid to the textual style and strategies in the book, and also to how it fits in with, and exemplifies, many of the more abstract claims central to Latours actor-network theory. In particular, consideration is given to the provocative arguments in the book about the status of nonhuman beings in social-scientific research, and to the specific manoeuvre whereby Aramis, this transportation project which never quite made it from being an idea to being a completed object, is accorded agency—and even a voice—in the text. The ‘x-morphising’ which underpins Aramis in this respect is examined, and is subsequently criticised for a flattening out of agency which permits humans and nonhumans to be regarded as ‘social’ equivalents. Although attracted to Latours radical emancipation of nonhuman things from a social-scientific netherworld, we nonetheless conclude by worrying about the flat and undifferentiated ‘spatial imaginary’ at the heart of what he is attempting to do for actors of all kinds in Aramis.

Putting the Dog Back in the Park: Animal and Human Mind-in-Action.

In this article we use actual instances of human conduct with animals to reflect on the debates about animal agency in human activities. Where much of psychology, philosophy, and sociology begin with a fundamental scepticism over animal mind as the grounds for its inquiries, we join with a growing body of work that examines the continuities between animals and humans, and accepts the positive possibilities of anthropomorphising animals. We are interested in the reason and intelligence that animals display in their activities with humans. Inverting the typical approach of explaining canine reason by reference to the behaviour of their wild counterparts, we describe human-canine action as it occurs in the widespread, historically assembled, and spatially situated activity of dog walking in parks. We treat dog walking as a living accomplishment of owner and dog methodically displaying intent and producing social objects.

Neighbouring as an occasioned activity: "Finding a lost cat"

To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting, an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds, and property maintenance, suburbia suffers perhaps worst of all from weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary is frequently a premise for social scientists to define their version of “the good community,” bemoan its absence or decline, and has little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to advance one or another political agenda conventional stipulative studies miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level. Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice we proffer an alternative approach to the study of community and its moral and spatially implicated organisation. From our ethnographic fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat, how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours.

The region in the boot: mobilising lone subjects and multiple objects

Company regions are forms of space busy with the sorting and distributing of objects from one location to another. We argue here, in sympathy with actor-network theory and nonrepresentational theory, that space is formulated by and formulative of its objects in mutually elaborating occasions and chains of action. The handling of objects that produces regions requires not simply that they are put in a place, but that they are put in a relevant place. Finding the relevant where is bound to the relevant when in the sense that the uses of objects are bound to sequential considerations of the kind: what happens next? Regions are cultural, social, political, and sometimes theoretical entities for economists, geographers, and other professional social scientists, but they are also topics of concern to regional managers of business companies, who are unavoidably and pervasively involved in the practical activities of spatial organisation. In this paper we are pursuing the situated replication of sociospatial technologies, or, in other words, how the same thing is done over and over again by local employees, with both the materials that they have at hand and the contingent circumstances in which they locate themselves. In pursuing our analysis we follow one particular mobile worker as she goes about her daily work of managing her region. What we attempt to excavate from our ethnographic material is the order that is endogenous to those activities. It is an everyday order that does not turn on spectacular technologies but turns, rather, on mundane ones such as stacking cardboard boxes, arranging items in the boot of a car, and driving around a city.

Eliciting the smoker's agenda: implications for policy and practice

Existing health promotion messages and advice on smoking cessation focus upon the negative aspects of continuing to smoke and contrast these to the benefits of giving up. Benefits of cessation are invariably linked to reduced risks of illness and disease with the process of cessation framed as a largely positive and certainly a health enhancing one. In this paper we present an analysis of data from a cross-sectional, exploratory study in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland, undertaken with 54 people, aged 18-44, who are or have been smokers. The multiple and often contradictory agendas of everyday life, smoking and health are explored. Participants spoke of the dangers of smoking and the potential benefits of giving up as these are considered by health promotion and medical research. However, many smokers experienced a number of benefits from smoking (such as socialising with others and breaks from boredom), and health and social problems with the process of cessation (for example, weight gain, stress, colds, flu). Participants appeared to query the validity of the risks of continuing to smoke and yet indicate a range of health and social difficulties in giving up. The authors assert that an acknowledgement of the attractive, pleasurable aspects of smoking may be seen as unacceptable and irresponsible but this could well provide an opportunity to relate to the everyday and multiple practices of smoking and smokers themselves as illuminated by this research.

Daily and lifecourse contexts of smoking

Smoking remains a key topic of research and debate within the field of health research in the social sciences. This article seeks to add the dimension of the smokers’ and ex-smokers’ perspectives to the debate in order to ground the importance of smoking in people’s everyday lives. Data are drawn from 54 semi-structured interviews with smokers and ex-smokers involved in a study of their experiences and understandings of the place of smoking in their daily and long-term biographies. The rich accounts given by the respondents are interpreted through Van Gennep’s (1960) notions of rituals and rites of passage. By examining the contexts within which the practice of smoking and the rite of giving up occur, a sense of the effort required to break ‘the habit’ is given, which adds much to more physiologically-based explanations of the difficulties of smoking cessation.

Designing electronic maps: an ethnographic approach

While ethnographic methods are an established tool for requirements analysis in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), they have seldom been used for the design of electronic map systems. This chapter presents an ethnographic study of city tourists’ practices that draws out a number of implications for designing map technologies. We describe how tourists work together in groups, collaborate around maps and guidebooks, and both ‘pre-’ and ‘post-visit’ places. These findings have been used in the design of the ‘george square’ system which allows tourists to collaborate around an electronic map at a distance.