Browsing by Subject "Ethnomethodology"
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- Journal ArticleAccountability on the Fly - Accounting for Trouble in Space Operations(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 29, No. 1-2, 43922) Almklov, Petter Grytten; Halvorsen, Kristin; Johansen, Jens PetterThe International Space Station (ISS) is research infrastructure enabling experiments in a microgravity environment. Building on a study of one of the ground control rooms in the ISS network, this paper concentrates on low-level operators and their efforts to display accountability in situations of trouble and problem solving. While the research infrastructure around the ISS is permeated by structural (bureaucratic) approaches to accountability (routines, procedures, audits and verifications), we discuss how real-time operations require a more dynamic form of continuously (re-)established accountability in the network of operators. In time-critical situations, operators need to establish accountability ‘on the fly’ in order to achieve the necessary agency to operate and troubleshoot their system. One key resource for this is the established voice loop system for synchronous communication. With significant constraints on the form and content of speaking turns, operators need to provide appropriate and recognizable accounts that align with the needs and expectations of the network. Based on an extensive multi-method study, with a focus here on recordings of voice loop interactions, we show how accounts of trouble are designed to manage uncertainty in the larger network, while also positioning the operators as competent and reliable members of the network. Conversely, inadequate accounts create uncertainty and delayed resolution of the issue. The design of accounts on the voice loop is crucial for time-critical articulation work in a distributed collaborative setting. The interactional details on the voice loop provide insights into the production and display of accountability, particularly relevant in networked organizations in which personal relations and trust can only play a marginal role and in which temporal constraints are critical. While the research literature has explored a wide variety of dimensions related to coordination and improvisation in distributed, mediated work environments, this study contributes with insights into the functions of verbal accounts in such contexts and how they may serve to supplement formal systems of accountability.
- Journal ArticleData Work: How Energy Advisors and Clients Make IoT Data Accountable(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 2017) Fischer, Joel E.; Crabtree, Andy; Colley, James A.; Rodden, Tom; Costanza, EnricoWe present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the ‘overhead cost’ of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.
- Journal ArticleEncoding Collective Knowledge, Instructing Data Reusers: The Collaborative Fixation of a Digital Scientific Data Set(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 30, No. 4, 2021) Hoeppe, GötzThis article provides a novel perspective on the use and reuse of scientific data by providing a chronological ethnographic account and analysis of how a team of researchers prepared an astronomical catalogue (a table of measured properties of galaxies) for public release. Whereas much existing work on data reuse has focused on information about data (such as metadata), whose form or lack has been described as a hurdle for reusing data successfully, I describe how data makers tried to instruct users through the processed data themselves. The fixation of this catalogue was a negotiation, resulting in what was acceptable to team members and coherent with the diverse data uses pertinent to their completed work. It was through preparing their catalogue as an ‘instructing data object’ that this team seeked to encode its members’ knowledge of how the data were processed and to make it consequential for users by devising methodical ways to structure anticipated uses. These methods included introducing redundancies that would help users to self-correct mistaken uses, selectively deleting data, and deflecting accountability through making notational choices. They dwell on an understanding of knowledge not as exclusively propositional (such as the belief in propositions), but as embedded in witnessable activities and the products of these activities. I discuss the implications of this account for philosophical notions of collective knowledge and for theorizing coordinative artifacts in CSCW. Eventually, I identify a tension between ‘using algorithms’ and ‘doing science’ in preparing data sets and show how it was resolved in this case.
- Journal ArticleEthnography, CSCW and Ethnomethodology(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 30, No. 2, 2021) Randall, David; Rouncefield, Mark; Tolmie, PeterThis paper documents some details and some examples of the influence of ethnomethodological work in the fieldwork tradition associated with European CSCW; in particular what has been termed ‘ethnomethodologically informed ethnography’. In so doing, we do not wish to downplay other perspectival and methodological contributions but to simply suggest that much of the ethnomethodological work that was done in the UK during the early development of CSCW had a distinctive character and made significant contributions to the study of complex organizational environments for design-related purposes that arguably reinvigorated the European fieldwork tradition. The distinctiveness we speak of in ‘ethnomethodologically informed ethnography’ had to do with what it owed to Wittgenstein and Winch as much as Garfinkel and Sacks, was rooted in a contempt for methodological fetishism, and emphasized the centrality of reasoning or rationale in the conduct of working and, more generally, social life. This focus and approach drew heavily on the ethnographic work of the likes of John Hughes in Lancaster, Wes Sharrock in Manchester, Bob Anderson at Xerox in Cambridge, and Christian Heath in King’s, London, where attention was focused on the actual ‘doing’ of work as opposed to work in some idealised form – and it is this that we suggest has become important to design and designers of various kinds and in various domains.
- Journal ArticleMediating Environments and Objects as Knowledge Infrastructure(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 43570) Hoeppe, GötzThe knowledge infrastructures of the sciences have been considered as human-made networks or ecologies of people, artifacts, and institutions that enable the production, calibration, storage, dissemination and re-use of data. Complementing these studies, this paper examines how scientists use the digitally mediated, shared availability of “natural” environments and objects for infrastructural purposes. Drawing on ethnography and informed by ethnomethodology, I focus on the uses of the sky in astronomical observation. Astronomical research is oriented to observing, and re-observing, sources on the sky, making it its topic. Yet, the sky is also an infrastructural resource, as it provides stable saliences that can be used alongside existing records for ordering work, diagnosing trouble with artifacts in data, and repairing data across diverse sites of practice. I consider a case in which such uses of the sky were new to researchers working in a novel domain, and one in which such uses were already established, but new to a student being inducted to its work. In both cases properties of the sky became salient through being mediated digitally. As existing records and new observations were made available to a single computational order, these data became accessible to what Melvin Pollner called mundane reason, wherein ceteris paribus clauses are used reflexively to maintain a world in common. Although the sky may appear to be an extreme case, I argue that other mediated environments and objects, and the reflexive practices through which these are engaged, have similar infrastructural uses in other disciplines.
- Journal ArticleOn the social organisation of organisations(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 1, No. 1-2, 1992) Jirotka, Marina; Gilbert, Nigel; Luff, PaulThis paper considers a range of theoretical approaches to the understanding of organisations and the implications these views have for the design of computer supported cooperative work systems. Organisations have often been seen as structures which can be divided into hierarchically ordered parts or as networks of informal relations. Organisational theorists have also considered organisations to resemble organisms with needs for survival in potentially hostile environments or as information processors, with decision-making as their most important characteristic. More recently, developments in the social sciences have suggested that radical reconceptualisations are necessary for the study of work settings. Consequently, these developments have attracted attention due to their potential to inform system design. This paper reviews some of these efforts and comments on some of the outstanding problems that have to be overcome if studies of everyday work settings are to inform the design of systems to support collaborative work.
- Journal ArticleRadicalism, beliefs and hidden agendas(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 3, No. 1, 1994) Harper, R. H. R.
- Conference PaperRepacking ‘Privacy’ for a Networked World(Computer Supported Cooperative Work 26(4-5)- ECSCW 2017: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2017) Crabtree, Andy; Tolmie, Peter; Knight, WillIn this paper we examine the notion of privacy as promoted in the digital economy and how it has been taken up as a design challenge in the fields of CSCW, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing. Against these prevalent views we present an ethnomethodological study of digital privacy practices in 20 homes in the UK and France, concentrating in particular upon people’s use of passwords, their management of digital content, and the controls they exercise over the extent to which the online world at large can penetrate their everyday lives. In explicating digital privacy practices in the home we find an abiding methodological concern amongst members to manage the potential ‘attack surface’ of the digital on everyday life occasioned by interaction in and with the networked world. We also find, as a feature of this methodological preoccupation, that privacy dissolves into a heterogeneous array of relationship management practices. Accordingly we propose that ‘privacy’ has little utility as a focus for design, and suggest instead that a more productive way forward would be to concentrate on supporting people’s evident interest in managing their relationships in and with the networked world.
- Journal ArticleRepacking ‘Privacy’ for a Networked World(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 0, 43070) Crabtree, Andy; Tolmie, Peter; Knight, WillIn this paper we examine the notion of privacy as promoted in the digital economy and how it has been taken up as a design challenge in the fields of CSCW, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing. Against these prevalent views we present an ethnomethodological study of digital privacy practices in 20 homes in the UK and France, concentrating in particular upon people’s use of passwords, their management of digital content, and the controls they exercise over the extent to which the online world at large can penetrate their everyday lives. In explicating digital privacy practices in the home we find an abiding methodological concern amongst members to manage the potential ‘attack surface’ of the digital on everyday life occasioned by interaction in and with the networked world. We also find, as a feature of this methodological preoccupation, that privacy dissolves into a heterogeneous array of relationship management practices. Accordingly we propose that ‘privacy’ has little utility as a focus for design, and suggest instead that a more productive way forward would be to concentrate on supporting people’s evident interest in managing their relationships in and with the networked world.
- Journal ArticleRoom for Silence: Ebola Research, Pluralism and the Pragmatic Study of Sociomaterial Practices(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 3-6, 43435) Holeman, IsaacThe notion of sociomaterial practices speaks to a view of routine work in which people and materials are always already entangled. This implies that the commonsense tendency to treat concrete materials and social activity as separate analytical categories may actually muddy more than illuminate our understanding of practices. Engaging work from science and technology studies, this broad view of materiality refers not only to the physical properties of machines but also to software and algorithms, electrical grids and other infrastructure, buildings, human bodies, ecological systems etc. Despite remarkable enthusiasm, the conversation about sociomaterial practices occasionally has devolved into philosophical turf wars, engendering pleas for pluralism. All too often, such lofty conceptual debates lose sight of pragmatic concerns such as technology design work or humanitarian action. This essay traces both issues to a tension between adopting a grand philosophical Ontology, versus undertaking detailed empirical studies of particular concrete work practices. I argue that studies exploring the practical specifics of particular sociomaterial practices should be granted room for silence with respect to some theoretical commitments, on the grounds that this will afford a more lively pluralism. For ethnomethodologists, this re-orientation to grand theory is a matter of methodological rigor and theoretical sophistication. For pragmatists, room for silence has to do with the dilemma of rigor or practical relevance. This is not to say that key concepts are unnecessary—they can provoke us to look beyond narrow disciplinary confines and standard assumptions about the scope of field studies. Through an account of the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I show how these conceptual debates matter for empirical research and for design practice. In this case, complex technical and biosocial processes made a concrete difference in the course of the outbreak and the humanitarian response to it. For practitioners no less than for researchers, this case throws into sharp relief the real human stakes of grasping how the material world gets caught up in workaday human activity.
- Journal Article“What do you want for dinner?” – Need Anticipation and the design of proactive technologies for the home(Computer Supported Cooperative Work 27(3-4)- ECSCW 2018: Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2018) Hyland, Lewis; Crabtree, Andy; Fischer, Joel; Colley, James; Fuentes, CarolinaThis paper examines ‘the routine shop’ as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the ‘work’ involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, ‘seen but unnoticed’ methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members’ methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.
- Journal Article“What do you want for dinner?” – need anticipation and the design of proactive technologies for the home(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 3-6, 2018) Hyland, Lewis; Crabtree, Andy; Fischer, Joel; Colley, James; Fuentes, CarolinaThis paper examines ‘the routine shop’ as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the ‘work’ involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, ‘seen but unnoticed’ methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members’ methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.