Healthcare practitioners struggle to adapt to the changes that new digital media entail for social interactions, but what does the struggle look like, and how is it embedded in these professionals’ everyday experiences? I investigate these questions in this study of how digitalisation conditions social interactions in the context of the Danish medical setting by drawing on ethnographic work. Moreover, via a video-recorded case study, this article shows how two practitioners organise social actions by exploiting features of a digital communication system in a situation where they manage a practical problem. I propose the concept of hybrid presence related to the scientific fields of dialogism and distributed cognition as an explanation of how the participants are capable of immersing themselves with both the digital technology and the social interaction. Hybrid presence thus proves useful in the discussion of how practitioners may struggle with technology.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to gain insight into the interaction-sensitive skills medical practitioners enact as they manage multiple organizational factors in the context of discharging patients.Design/methodology/approachFor that purpose, we carried out a cognitive ethnographic study in a Danish hospital, where we video-recorded three pre-ward round meetings, five discharge conversations and conducted seven semi-structured interviews. Fieldnotes and interview transcripts were analyzed using the method Cognitive Task Analysis, and video-recordings were analyzed via the interactivity-based approach Cognitive Event Analysis.FindingsOur findings show that practitioners coordinate multi-scalar resources (e.g. verbal patterns and cognitive artifacts) in order to discharge patients in a safe and integrated way, which we propose amounts to the social and intercorporeal ability to align simultaneously emerging factors, like organizational procedures in the hospital, artifacts in use, sociocultural resources and the individual medical expertise of the practitioner in the emerging social interaction with the patient. In pursing this claim, we investigate the linguistic and cognitive processes emerging in a single case study of a nurse who discharges a patient. We propose that the interaction-sensitive skill which enables the nurse to solve the task of discharging the patient can be characterized via hybrid cognition.Originality/valueThus, the value of the article is dual: On the one hand, it empirically contributes with knowledge of the complex organizational structures that constrains micro-level medical interactions in discharges, and on the other, the article contributes theoretically with a hybrid cognitive framework that allows organizational researchers to understand and assess complex cognitive and linguistic processes that goes into the social micro-coordination in complex organizational-medical task.

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Email is a born-digital form of communication, which can be studied in a number of ways using a variety of methods, as with any other socially and culturally mediated phenomenon. However, despite a great number of studies, the methodologies of the studies have attracted only little attention. In this paper, we wish to extend our knowledge regarding methodological challenges in studying emails. In particular, we will consider the methodological challenges, which any scholar will encounter when email in its digital form is transformed to and preserved as an object of study. Based on a review of existing studies’ archiving strategies as well as our own study on email consultations in a healthcare setting, we will examine and discuss analytical and methodological consequences of different approaches to archiving and data management of emails. We demonstrate that the archived record is shaped by its context of creation. Since collection methods and archiving tools are not neutral, we call for a greater attentiveness to this part of the research process. We conclude by outlining implications for systematic empirical research into emails as a form of communication.