Convergent activities: Line control and passenger information on the London Underground

Abstract

[T]he relevance of the works of the Chicago sociologists is that they do contain a lot of information about this and that. And this and that is what the world is made up of. Sacks, H. (1964/1992, p. 27) “Shared Agreement” refers to various social methods for accomplishing the member's recognition that something was said according to a rule and not the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. The appropriate image of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than a common intersection of overlapping sets. Garfinkel, H. (1967, p. 30) Introduction Some of the finest work within the sociology of organizations began to emerge from Chicago following the second world war. Due in no small way to the lectures and essays of E. C. Hughes, social science witnessed the emergence of a substantial body of naturalistic studies of work and occupations that began to delineate the practices and reasoning that provide the foundation for tasks and interpersonal communication throughout a range of organizational settings. Hughes and his colleagues powerfully demonstrated through numerous empirical studies how organizational life is thoroughly dependent upon and inseparable from a tacit and emergent “culture” that is fashioned and continually refashioned in the light of the problems that personnel face in the routine accomplishment of their day-to-day work (see, for example, Hughes, 1958, 1971; Becker et al., 1961; Goffman, 1968; Roth, 1963; Strauss et al., 1964).

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