Undisciplined disciples: everything you always wanted to know about ethnomethodology but were afraid to ask Yoda

Abstract

As computing technologies become ubiquitous in social life, social science increasingly becomes the study of those technosystems. Similarly, as technology corporations compete to design new ubicomp products, social science research is recruited as a design method. This paper presents an interpretive bricolage, exploring the relationship between social science and corporate technology research. It draws on a specific case study: the history of ethnomethodology during the lifetime of the Xerox Euro-PARC laboratory. This interpretation relates to the ways that social and organisational authority is maintained through scientific knowledge, and the ways in which interdisciplinary design research engages with product users, customers and markets.

Ethnography, CSCW and Ethnomethodology

“…This may be why certain kinds of rather strange understandings of what ethnomethodology might be have come to be published (e.g. Blackwell et al 2017). We will argue here that we subscribe to no epistemology (in its proper sense of a 'theory of knowledge'), no commitment to a 'method', and a skepticism about theory (as distinguished from some kind of generalisation (of which more below)).…”

“…Having said all this, in this final section we want to reconsider the ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic approach to CSCW in the light of a range of criticismsmost of which singularly fail to hit the mark. As Sharrock and Anderson noted some time ago, there have been few cogent criticisms of ethnomethodology (at least until recently, see Hammersley 2018) with most of them being either conceptually confused or just plain silly (Gellner 1975;Blackwell et al 2017). The same goes for criticisms of EIE and 'workplace studies' and their relationship to Designwhere there appear to be an equal number of confused responses and where the abiding question remains, 'what are workplace studies for" (Plowman et al 1995).…”

Enacting Entanglement: CreaTures, Socio-Technical Collaboration and Designing a Transformative Ethos

“…In its practice-based approach (Kuutti and Bannon 2014) and interest in how groups achieve collaboration, the CSCW community is often implicitly considering practices as manifestation of a worldview. The commitments of ethnomethodology have been core to framing CSCW (Blackwell et al 2017), with an interest in how members speak about their work. Kuutti and Bannon (2014) comment that, nonetheless, interest in agency has been muted and, perhaps, theories of agency even more so.…”

Ethnographic artificial intelligence

“…The rest of this paper sets out an agenda that comes from exploring these concerns from within the technical establishment, using the ethnographic methods of HCI research, together with the historical/sociological perspective that I have previously used to pursue internal reflections on my discipline (e.g. Blackwell 2006; Blackwell, Blythe, and Kaye 2017). In what follows, I first propose an alternative critical perspective from which to think about AI in relation to historical cultural practices of the African continent, rather than the European one.…”