Graham Button

Workflow from within and without: technology and cooperative work on the print industry shopfloor

This paper reports fieldwork from an organization in the print industry, examining a workflow system introduced to the shopfloor. We detail the indigenous methods by which members order their work, contrast this with the order provided by the system, and describe how members have attempted to accommodate the two. Although it disrupted shopfloor work, the systems use was a contractural requirement on the organization to make its services accountable. This suggests workflow systems can often be seen as technologies for organizational ordering and accountability. We conclude that CSCW requirements should acknowledge such exigencies and the organizational status of workflow technologies.

Ethnomethodology and the human sciences

Preface 1. Introduction: ethnomethodology and the foundational respecification of the human sciences Graham Button 2. Respecification Harold Garfinkel 3. Logic Jeff Coulter 4. Epistemology Wes Sharrock and Bob Anderson 5. Method: measurement Mike Lynch 6. Method: evidence and inference Douglas Benson and John Hughes 7. The social actor Wes Sharrock and Graham Button 8. Cognition Jeff Coulter 9. Language and culture John R. E. Lee 10. Values and moral judgement Lena Jayyusi References Index.

Talk and social organisation.

This volume contains a collection of original studies in conversation analysis (C.A.) arranged and presented both to introduce the discipline to the newcomer and to reveal some of the expanding range of discoveries which conversation analysts are making in the course of their distinctive enquiries into the order and organisation of natural language. Though sociological in its orientation. C.A. and the papers here represented are of direct methodological and substantive interest to linguists, philosophers, discourse and speech analysts and social anthropologists. Indeed the strict adherence to the methodological principle that analysis can and must be shown to be grounded in data represents a challenge to all those disciplines which set out to use their materials as mere hand-maidens to support preconstructed models, theories and hypotheses. In this series of papers which includes previously unpublished works of the late Harvey Sacks and the last completed joint researches of Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff ordinary talk is shown as consisting of a variety of previously unnoticed socially organised practices which conversationalists engage in to generate the organisation which talk has. The methods and the analytic mentality of conversation analysts are, and are here shown to be, designed to make conversationalists methods, structure and modes of orientation available for empirical study. The search for order and organisation reveals it everywhere. Laughter is shown to be concertedly organised and negotiated in the finest detail. The machinery of delicate repair systems is revealed. Conversational completions are shown to be the product of elaborate negotiating machineries. Conversationalists are revealed as subtly orienting-to and invoking the visual contexts of their interaction within the framework of the turn-taking organisation of conversation. This volume also contains examples of conversation analytic work into the talk produced in organisational settings such as courts and Doctor/Patient interviews. Such analyses reveal the contribution that the discipline might make towards the exploration of the kind of social phenomena traditionally researched by sociologists, social psychologists and social anthropologists.

On Technomethodologyn;: foundational relationships between ethnomethodology and system design

Over the past 10 years, the use of sociological methods and sociological reasoning have become more prominent in the analysis and design of interactive systems. For a variety of reasons, one form of sociological inquiry-ethnomethodology-has become something of a favored approach. Our goal in this article is to investigate the consequences of approaching system design from the ethnomethodological perspective. In particular, we are concerned with how ethnomethodology can take a foundational place in the very notion of system design, rather than simply being employed as a resource in aspects of the process, such as requirements elicitation and specification. We begin by outlining the basic elements of ethnomethodology and discussing the place that it has come to occupy in computer-supported cooperative work and, increasingly, in human-computer interaction. We discuss current approaches to the use of ethnomethodology in systems design, and we point to the contrast between the use of ethnomethodology for critique and for design. Currently, understandings of how to use ethnomethodology as a primary aspect of system design are lacking. We outline a new approach and present an extended example of its use. This approach takes as its starting point a relationship between ethnomethodology and system design that is a foundational, theoretical matter rather than simply one of design practice and process. From this foundation, we believe, emerges a new model of interaction with computer systems, which is based on ethnomethodological perspectives on everyday human social action.

Technomethodology: paradoxes and possibilities

The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology’s overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.

The relevance of “work-practice” for design

Designers are increasingly being urged to take account of the situated and contingent organisation of the work that their systems are to support or automate. Within CSCW the concept of work-practice is a much used token for the organisation of work. This paper develops the debate about the position of work-practice in design by recognising that it is an ambiguous concept in sociology that is used to refer to different orders to work organisation. It is argued that as such it is as likely to mask the situated and contingent organisation of work as it is to make it visible. In order to fully realise the radicalisation of design portended by the deployment of the concept of work-practice and in order to make visible thein situ organisation of work it is argued that full and due weight has to be placed upon grounding the concept inanalytic explications of the interactional ordering of work. This stands in contrast to grounding work-practice in the formalisms of work emanating from theoretical debates about work in a capitalist economic/social structure; documentations of work; the narratives of workers, managers, and purchasers; dialogues with users, and mere observations of work. Two studies are invoked to substantiate this argument, one involving a sales ordering and invoicing system, the other a crime reporting system.

The production of order and the order of production: possibilities for distributed organisations, work and technology in the print industry

Drawing on a fieldwork study, this paper considers different design options for the development of a system for facilitating distributed organisation and distributed working within a sector of the print industry. The relationship between the design of the system and the design of the organisation is also examined. It is concluded that if organisations are to practically benefit from the continued evolution of communication infrastructures, CSCW should attend to the appropriate development of information and work coordination systems. It is also concluded that CSCW should develop measures of the value of proposed systems for organisations and users.

Supporting the design process within an organisational context

This paper attempts to take what has been essentially abstract thinking about how to support the design process and relocates it within the working and organisational context of design. Through a single case analysis we analyse how organisational exigencies affect design activities and design train of thought. On the basis of this study we consider how tools that have been developed to support the design process do not take account of the collaborative, interactional, and organisational ordering of the design process and make recommendations as to the features that one family of support tools, design rational tools, should poses.

On the Relevance of Habermas‘ Theory of Communicative Action for CSCW

We examine the argument put forward by Ojelanki Nygwenyama andKalle Lyytinen that Juergen Habermass theory of communicativeaction is relevant for the analysis and design of groupwaresystems. We suggest that CSCW champions of Habermas oftenoverlook the fact that his theory can be criticised in itsown right, and go on to outline its contestable character inan appraisal of his understanding of the ‘ideal speech situation’.We then move to Nygwenyama and Lyytinens implementation ofHabermass schema and argue that their categories of analysisare both arbitrarily constructed and applied. In conclusion,we question the extent to which grand, holistic, synthesisingsociological theories offer a way forward for designers andpoint to the difficulties of practically applying Nygwenyamaand Lyytinens categories of analysis.

On the poverty of a priorism: technology, surveillance in the workplace and employee responses

Abstract Many debates about surveillance at work are framed by a set of a priori assumptions about the nature of the employment relationship that inhibits efforts to understand the complexity of employee responses to the spread of new technology at work. In particular, the debate about the prevalence of resistance is hamstrung from the outset by the assumption that all apparently non‐compliant acts, whether intentional or not, are to be counted as acts of resistance. Against this background this paper seeks to redress the balance by reviewing results from an ethnographic study of surveillance‐capable technologies in a number of British workplaces. It argues for greater attention to be paid to the empirical character of the social relations at work in and through which technologies are deployed and in the context of which employee responses are played out. In particular, it suggests that the resistance/compliance couple is too blunt an analytic instrument to capture the richness of those social relations. It argues, moreover, that there is an urgent need to reinstate the social in analyses of workplace relations just as respondents in the study frequently found themselves struggling to reinstate the social dimensions of work in the face of individualizing technologies. At the same time all parties to working social relations bring with them to the workplace understandings and definitions of legitimacy that have their origins at least partly outside the world of work. These definitions of legitimacy exercise a powerful influence on employee responses. Nowhere is this clearer than in the context of privacy where our respondents’ expectations and understandings diverged significantly from those to be found in much academic literature and social commentary—itself frequently framed in terms of a range of a priori assumptions about the priority attached to privacy at work.