Technology and social interaction: the emergence of 'workplace studies'

Working from Home During Covid-19: Doing and Managing Technology-enabled Social Interaction With Colleagues at a Distance

With the overnight growth in Working from Home (WFH) owing to the pandemic, organisations and their employees have had to adapt work-related processes and practices quickly with a huge reliance upon technology. Everyday activities such as social interactions with colleagues must therefore be reconsidered. Existing literature emphasises that social interactions, typically conducted in the traditional workplace, are a fundamental feature of social life and shape employees' experience of work. This experience is completely removed for many employees due to the pandemic and, presently, there is a lack of knowledge on how individuals maintain social interactions with colleagues via technology when working from home. Given that a lack of social interaction can lead to social isolation and other negative repercussions, this study aims to contribute to the existing body of literature on remote working by highlighting employees' experiences and practices around social interaction with colleagues. This study takes an interpretivist and qualitative approach utilising the diary-keeping technique to collect data from twenty-nine individuals who had started to work from home on a full-time basis as a result of the pandemic. The study explores how participants conduct social interactions using different technology platforms and how such interactions are embedded in their working lives. The findings highlight the difficulty in maintaining social interactions via technology such as the absence of cues and emotional intelligence, as well as highlighting numerous other factors such as job uncertainty, increased workloads and heavy usage of technology that affect their work lives. The study also highlights that despite the negative experiences relating to working from home, some participants are apprehensive about returning to work in the traditional office place where social interactions may actually be perceived as a distraction. The main contribution of our study is to highlight that a variety of perceptions and feelings of how work has changed via an increased use of digital media while working from home exists and that organisations need to be aware of these differences so that they can be managed in a contextualised manner, thus increasing both the efficiency and effectiveness of working from home.

Ethnography, CSCW and Ethnomethodology

This 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.

Isolation or interaction: healthcare provider experience of design change

Recent studies have drawn attention to the relationship between healthcare environments and patient outcomes. Yet, it remains unclear how changes in the design of healthcare facilities are experienced by providers. To understand this relationship, this study employs an inhabited institutionalist theoretical frame to assess longitudinal ethnographic and interview data collected at a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as it transformed from an open-bay unit, to one with single-patient rooms. Findings show that changing the structure of the NICU interfered with the original local organisational culture of collaboration. While providers actively worked to maintain the original culture, their success in doing so was mediated by the built environment. Responding to the new space, practitioners developed new practices. Some of the practices (such as doorway discussions and increased individual assessments) directly undermined the original organisational culture, whereas others (hallway hangouts and calling out) worked to transpose the original culture into the new space. These findings call for greater attention to the effect of physical space on organisational culture.

Why Kurt Wolff matters for a practice-based perspective of sensible knowledge in ethnography

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the contribution offered by Wolff’s sociology of knowledge to organizational ethnography and to enrich the lexicon of practice-based studies with the concept of surrender-and-catch.

Design/methodology/approach

– Drawing on Wolff’s writing, the surrender-and-catch perspective is introduced and how to be inspired by it is illustrated in relation to three working practices.

Findings

– The centrality of the body and of sensible knowledge for doing ethnographies of working practices is affirmed and the surrender-and-catch perspective is interpreted as an art of seeing connections.

Practical implications

– Surrender-to may be included in the methodology for studying knowing-in-practice and it may help students to get prepared to conduct an organizational ethnography.

Originality/value

– A contribution to frame the legacy of a sociologist of knowledge little known in organization studies. Its contribution stresses the importance of a plurality of forms of knowing alongside the rational-analytic one. Therefore Kurt Wolff’s work becomes relevant within the practice-based studies.

Cutting dark matter. Professional capacity and organizational change

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of organizational change on the competence of controllers in rail infrastructure operations. Controllers are a critical link in providing rail services. They guide train traffic 7/24 in real time from within control rooms by daily responding to a multitude of disturbances. Market reforms have radically changed their work conditions by unbundling and re-bundling control rooms.

Design/methodology/approach

– Ethnographically inspired research has been performed at the work stations of controllers in both unbundled and re-bundled, both Dutch and British control rooms between 2007 and 2011. The author observed how controllers deal with moderate disturbances and discusses the nature of their underlying professional capacities, what guides their decision making in discretion. Implications are discussed how organizational change affects these capacities in case of unbundling and re-bundling control rooms.

Findings

– The paper shows how to gain a more explicit understanding of what controllers, as professionals, essentially think and do. An open-interactive account of professional capacity emerges, in contrast to the private-cognitive view widespread in literature. Both conceptualizations of professional capacities have radically different implications for their susceptibility to organizational change.

Originality/value

– This paper reveals an urgent perspective on the impact of market reforms, through the accompanying organizational change, on professional capacity at the operational level of providing public rail services.

Knowledge Practices in Design: The Role of Visual Representations as `Epistemic Objects'

We use a detailed study of the knowledge work around visual representations to draw attention to the multidimensional nature of `objects'. Objects are variously described in the literatures as relatively stable or in flux; as abstract or concrete; and as used within or across practices. We clarify these dimensions, drawing on and extending the literature on boundary objects, and connecting it with work on epistemic and technical objects. In particular, we highlight the epistemic role of objects, using our observations of knowledge work on an architectural design project to show how, in this setting, visual representations are characterized by a `lack' or incompleteness that precipitates unfolding. The conceptual design of a building involves a wide range of technical, social and aesthetic forms of knowledge that need to be developed and aligned. We explore how visual representations are used, and how these are meaningful to different stakeholders, eliciting their distinct contributions. As the project evolves and the drawings change, new issues and needs for knowledge work arise. These objects have an `unfolding ontology' and are constantly in flux, rather than fully formed. We discuss the implications for wider understandings of objects in organizations and for how knowledge work is achieved in practice.