Doing Phenemological Research in the Workplace

Abstract

Having discussed the workplace researcher I now want to linger a while on the workplace learning offering two short and one long vignettes to illustrate Heidegger’s approach before closing. To recap the premise of this analysis is that we do not first encounter something in terms of its attributes, for example, a set of buttons with letters on them and a screen. Instead, we directly encounter computers in the same way as we encounter as meaningful entities such as desks or lathes, rather than as objects deconstructed to their individual attributes. This is not a phenomenological but a physical deconstruction. That is, to investigate human activity we encounter meaningful things in the first instance. This meaningfulness fits in with our practices for using them. Simply put, without practices in which items of equipment, gaining their meaning from our familiarity with the totality of equipmental references, were incorporated, we would encounter them as mere artefacts.

The work as works sets up a world… . But what does the work set forth? We come to know about this only when we explore what comes to the fore and it customarily spoken of as the making of production of works.

(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1975a, p. 44)