Practice as a Members’ Phenomenon

Abstract

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this article explores the relation between practice and activity; between recruitment practice and the ordinary activities of the job interview. Job interviews are recognizably and accountably different from other interview-formats, such as broadcast news or academic research interviews. Such differences are instantly hearable because ordinary activities are built systematically so as to reveal an orientation to 'practice', distinctive purposes, entitlements, presuppositions, identities and definitions of acceptable conduct. The article illustrates analytic procedures for recovering such orientations and thus for understanding how people embed and reveal practice, with and for one another, in interaction. It is argued that the practice-turn should not overlook the fact that practice is, in the first instance, a members' phenomenon, something that members draw upon, monitor and orient to in real time interaction.

Coordination-Artifacts Suiting

“…The objective of the data collection was the study of the operators' planning practices in allocating resources. We followed Llewellyn and Spence's [32] conceiving practices as members' phenomenon. Therefore, data collection was oriented to the identification of patterns of activities that are intersubjectively organized and recognized by operators as embodying (or not) a certain practice.…”

Calendars: Time Coordination and Overview in Families and Beyond

“…plan setup among the operators, following Llewellyn and Spence's (2009) suggestion for conceiving practices as members' phenomenon for the accomplishment of an EM-oriented study of practices. Therefore data collection was not oriented to the mere identification of patterns of activities, but to the study of the details of interactions so as to determine how activities are intersubjectively organised and recognised by operators as embodying (or not) a certain practice.…”

Language and Communication at Work

“…The first stream has generated propositions on when and how moral judgments are possible and desirable (Beadle and Moore, 2006;Holt, 2006;MacIntyre, 1981MacIntyre, [1985; Moore, 2012;Morrell, 2012), engaging with the work of important moral philosophers, such as Aristotle (Morrell and Clark, 2010;Tsoukas, 2004;Tsoukas and Cummings, 1997) and Alasdair MacIntyre. iv The second stream has focused on the equally important and influential work of Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology (Fox, 2008;Garfinkel, 1991;Llewellyn and Spence, 2009) to empirically investigate the situated production of social-cum-moral order.…”

“…Such studies have been a great intellectual inspiration to organizational scholars, who have sought to understand the practical methods through which social and moral order is produced effortfully and on an ongoing basis (Fox, 2008;Llewellyn and Spence, 2009;Suchman, 2000). Fox (2008), for example, argued that, <EXT>from the outset, Garfinkel's "breaching experiments" showed that social order is inseparably moral order and that the organization of interaction is itself morally done.…”

“…(2008: 734; emphasis original)</EXT> <P>From an ethnomethodological point of view, morality is not to be found in treatises of political philosophy, but in the everyday accomplishments of social actions and interactions. Such accomplishments always entail "morally accountable work" (Fox, 2008)-such as work to cope with exigencies of reciprocity in interactional encounters-and sustain a sense of togetherness held by members of a practice (Llewellyn and Spence, 2009). For ethnomethodology-inspired organizational scholars, morality is thus seen as a practical matter, of any "witnessable" activity, which is locally produced.…”