ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the similarities and differences between Stacey's conclusions about language and conversation and Boden's views, who works from an ethnomethodological tradition. To research an organisation understood as patterning and repatterning of people's communicative interactions requires that the researcher uses methods which pay attention to exactly this local interplay. This chapter has made the case that the global patterning of interaction in an organisation arises from the way in which people relate to each other in their day-to-day work, which in turn reproduces the global patterning. It describes a number of incidents that happened with colleagues in Latin America and in the UK in narrative form and have started to use them as the basis for reflection. The chapter attempts a review of what the author puts forward as appropriate research methods. It draws on Mead and Elias, that the self is inseparable from other selves.
