ABSTRACT
This chapter builds upon the description of Garfinkel's program in ethnomethodological studies of work examined in Chapter 3, and discusses two contemporary developments. The first concerns attempts to produce such studies of work focused upon the professions. The chapter argues that these studies have only partially realised Garfinkel's programmatic aims. One reason for this is an overly optimistic evaluation of what they could achieve. The second concerns a prolific area of study focused upon ‘work practices’ and ‘the workplace’. These studies draw upon Garfinkel's description of the “missing interactional what” in social science accounts of work. Their main emphasis is on the design of interactive computing systems to support practices in specific workplaces by focusing on everyday, naturally organised, practices witnessed in those settings. However, these studies have become increasingly narrow in their attention to organisational practices at work across the settings they investigate. This chapter suggests that there are two consequences of such narrowing. First, ‘workplace’ and ‘work-practice’ studies, like others discussed in this volume, are gravitating towards constructive analytic treatments that administer pre-defined categories of action. Second, ‘work practice’ and ‘workplace’ are being reified as heuristics for various ethnographic approaches to the design of interactive systems, to the point of obscuring how members organise their work activities.
