Everyday sociology

Design research has long recognised the importance of understanding setting - that designing systems that are effective and efficient and product-service solutions that meet real needs requires an understanding of the social context in which they will be used. This recognition has led to the incorporation of ethnographic methods into design research, allowing designers to gain a deeper understanding of the social character of work and the organisation thereof. As a method of observing and analysing human behaviour in its natural setting, ethnography has proven to be an invaluable tool for designers looking to create more effective and human-centred systems.

In the Springer Human-Computer Interaction Series book Doing Design Ethnography (Crabtree et al 2012), the authors propose an ethnomethodological approach to design ethnography that requires a distinctive orientation; one that is sociological, yet without the requirement of prolonged training in the formal discipline of Sociology. Rather, ethnomethodology proposes that sociology is something we are all competent in as members of society. We are all, in fact, practical sociologists.

A fundamental premise of ethnomethodology is that the ordinary activities that make up our everyday lives are sociological achievements that in many respects are dependent on others for their accomplishment:

“Whether getting up and out the door in the morning, travelling to work, doing our jobs, or resting and relaxing afterwards, all of these things and more implicate others in their accomplishment even if we live and work alone. Ethnomethodology suggests that we know and recognise this as members of society, know that our ordinary activities involve others, and know that the ways in which we do our activities rely on our mastery of practical sociology: on our mastery of working with others and the things that others do to get the activities we find ourselves engaged in done.” (Crabtree et al 2012:2)

Ethnomethodology invites us to investigate the everyday mastery of sociology as it appears to us in the many and varied settings in which people live and operate and in the lived details of the many and varied activities that people do.

Principles of an Ethnomethodological Approach

Ethnomethodology focuses on naturally occurring activities, on human action as it spontaneously arises and as it is performed by whoever is party to it. It does so through fieldwork - through going and looking at what people do. First principles of an ethnomethodological approach, as proposed by Crabtree et al (2012:23-28), guide fieldwork in making visible to design reasoning the “distinctive activities that populate particular settings, the work involved in doing them, and the work practices that members use to concert their actions with those of other parties implicated in the conduct of a setting’s work” (Crabtree et al 2012:2).

Work

Ethnomethodology focuses on the practical efforts required to accomplish naturally occurring activities in human action. Such practical effort, referred to as the “work” that a setting’s members engages in, can apply to any activity, whether it is a mundane conversation, walking down the street, or processing a customer order. Work, in other words, is not necessarily paid labour but rather refers to the necessary practicalities people must address to get activities done. The primary focus of ethnographic studies thereby becomes work in its respective setting, and the goal to understand how people make their activities ordinary and accountable to themselves and for those around them. This involves investigating what doing “being ordinary” (Sacks & Jefferson 1995) consists of for the members of the settings being studied and how they put their activities together to make them something they can account for - something ordinary. Ethnomethodology-informed ethnographic studies are, thus, focused on how people do the things that they ordinarily do in their respective settings.

Natural accountability

Natural accountability means that members of a setting can see the work that is going on around them and know what they and others are doing; they can offer an account of what they see and do that others will recognise, which enables them to make their activities into the ordinary things that they are for themselves and others.

The achievement of natural accountability is a result of members’ conduct in making their activities happen. In doing their work, members display for others what they are doing and make it visible, which allows others to see and recognise what is being done and to coordinate their own actions accordingly. Practical sociology is situated in the ways in which work is made naturally accountable, and the primary concern of ethnomethodology-informed ethnography is to unpack the naturally accountable work of a setting.

Reflexivity

As a way of studying the naturally accountable character of a setting's work, ethnomethodology examines how members reflexively organise work as a practical sociological enterprise. While reflexivity has several differing meanings in the social sciences, it is commonly used to remind researchers of the risk of projecting their interests onto the lives of those being studied and of the impact of researchers’ representations of them. Practical sociology, however, is less concerned with the crisis of representation in the social sciences than with how members of a setting see what is going on around them in naturally accountable ways which are intersubjectively recognisable. Ethnographers can look at how members make their activities naturally accountable in the course of doing them such that any other member can see what it is that they are doing; what a member of a setting sees in the setting is something that is utterly familiar and usually unnoticed or taken for granted, but it is still something that other members can know - yet have no need to speak of as such. There is, then, an incarnate reflexivity built into naturally occurring activities. This kind of reflexivity is not an intellectual reflexivity, something one has to think about as a researcher or analyst; it is an essential feature of the work involved in assembling and accomplishing an activity. Ethnomethodology therefore provides an alternative approach to studying practical sociology that focuses on naturally accountable work and the ways in which members reflexively organise it as a practical sociological enterprise.

Why study work?

These first principles turn reflexivity into a problem of assembling naturally occurring activities and, in the course of doing so, making them accountable to others so that they can concert their actions accordingly. Paying close and careful attention to whatever is happening when people do their work enables the design ethnographer to see what’s happening from the perspective of members doing the work and thus to develop an appreciation of the competences involved in doing it. Ethnomethodology is a call for the ethnographer to go back to the work itself (with apologies to Edmund Husserl).

According to Tom Rodden (cited in Crabtree et al 2012:15), the contribution of ethnomethodology is mundane: “It isn’t dramatic or revolutionary. It’s about the everyday nature of work, the mundane everyday nature of the world.” So why care about the natural accountability of work? As Rodden continues, ethnomethodology’s contribution is “one of working through what the doing of an activity, an endeavour, is in sufficient detail so that you can understand enough about what a technology will need to do to survive.” As complex systems become more intertwined with daily life, it is crucial to recognise their social nature and to design for them accordingly. The principles of ethnomethodology provide guidance for studying work, natural accountability, and reflexivity in order to make visible the distinctive activities that populate particular settings, the work involved in doing them, and the work practices that members use to concert their actions with those of other parties implicated in the conduct of a setting's work. As we put in place systems and technologies and introduce design interventions in such settings, understanding the detail of the work of the settings and what the issues that might emerge from that are becomes important. An ethnomethodological approach “tries to tell you something of the consequences of the choices that you make” (Sommerville cited in Crabtree et al 2012:14) in the design of such systems and solutions.

References

Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M. and Tolmie, P., 2012. Doing Design Ethnography. Springer Science & Business Media.

Sacks, H. and Jefferson, G., 1995. Lectures on conversation. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781444328301.