Observation of Work Practices in Natural Settings

Abstract

Keywords: Ethnography, Workplace Study, Practice, Participant Observation, Ethnomethodology, Lived Work Introduction Expertise is not just about inference applied to facts and heuristics, but about being a social actor. Observation of natural settings begins not with laboratory behavioral tasks – problems fed to a “subject” – but with how work methods are adapted and evaluated by experts themselves, as situations are experienced as problematic and formulated as defined tasks and plans. My focus in this chapter is on socially and physically located behaviors, especially those involving conversations, tools, and informal (ad hoc) interactions. How an observer engages with practitioners in a work setting itself requires expertise, including concepts, tools, and methods for understanding other people's motives and problems, often coupled with methods for work systems design. By watching people at work in everyday settings (Rogoff & Lave 1984) and observing activities over time in different circumstances, we can study and document work practices , including those of proficient domain practitioners. This chapter introduces and illustrates a theoretical framework as well as methods for observing work practices in everyday (or natural) settings in a manner that enables understanding and possibly improving how the work is done. In the first part of this chapter, I explain the notion of work practices and the historical development of observation in natural settings. In the middle part, I elaborate the perspective of ethnomethodology, including contrasting ways of viewing people and workplaces, and different units of analysis for representing work observations.

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