Abstract
The previous chapter considered the emergence of systems designers’ concern with practical sociology, specifically the lack of fit their systems had with the real world character of work and its organisation and the need to develop a sociological sensitivity in order to address the problem. This chapter explicates the sociological foundations of the ethnographic approach adopted by the Lancaster School. It first and briefly considers the emergence of ethnography as a social science approach, then, in more detail, our use of it to study practical sociology. We articulate the first principles of an ethnomethodological approach to ethnography, including the key notions of work, natural accountability, and reflexivity. We present and elaborate a set of sensitising concepts supporting the study of work, including practical action and practical reasoning, interactional work, work practice, and the machinery of interaction before turning to consider the ethnographer’s task, including the practical consequences of the ethnographer as an adjunct to social life and the commensurate need to develop ‘vulgar competence’ in a setting’s work. In conclusion, we review the key issues discussed in this chapter and present a series of practical guidelines that may be derived from them for the conduct of ethnographic studies.
If we figure or guess or decide that whatever humans do, they are just another animal after all, maybe more complicated than others but perhaps not noticeably so, then whatever humans do can be examined to discover some way they do it.
Harvey Sacks
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Notes
- 1.
See, by way of notable examples, Franz Boas’ 1883 study of Eskimos on Baffin Island in Canada, Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen’s 1894 study of aboriginal life in central Australia, and Alfred Cort Haddon’s 1898 ‘Cambridge Expedition’ to the Torres Straits.
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You will also see that some people routinely violate the method: children and old people frequently dash across unannounced or shuffle out into the highway with head fixed on the road beneath their feet. From the members’ perspective, these are not competent ways in which to cross a busy road: one need not necessarily sit inside a car on such occasions to see and hear what drivers make of it.
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Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., Tolmie, P. (2012). Our Kind of Sociology. In: Doing Design Ethnography. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2726-0_3
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