Last updates

The DE module is totally sucking all my available time (and the brains too).
Last updates on the research site:

- Marina Jirotka replied to my email saying we could either talk on the phone or I could go to Oxford. Great!
- Had a meeting with Andrew Harder, from Flow Interaction, who did an ethnographic study of the London Underground for his theses a couple of years ago. He told me he used to sit in the back of the room, 2 or 3 hours per day and observe, literally. He let the data talk to him. He says it is agonizing, but things start shaping up little by little. He didn't use any kind of tool (like the Ethnographer or Atlas) to analyze the data, he used post-its that he stuck on his bedroom wall. A good point he made is the post its give a better visualization of the data and he found it easier to find patterns. That's valid point. He also said he didn't worry much about the implications to design, because as it was -- a MSc thesis -- it was already valid just as sn observation study.

The career of information

So, in response to my worries, yes, I just need to read more.
Harper agrees with me that there is very little in the literature to guide the novice ethnographer, who just goes to the field with fingers crossed and good faith he/she will "bump into" something interesting. That is why he decides to explain HOW he did his ethnographic research.

Summarizing it all, he bases what he calls his "field work programmes" into 3 main components:

1. Following the career of information
2. Rituals of induction
3. Undertaking interviews and observing work.

I am still trying to absorb this, but the idea of "following a career of information" sounds very appealing. Else, it fits perfectly into the AT framework, where the artefact plays a central role. Understand how a story is prompted, written, edited and published could be a good way to start.

"My view is that reference to the career of information (irrespective of whether that career might be manifest in a document or other artefacts) is a technique through which nearly all organizations can be mapped" (Inside the IMF - Harper - p. 70)

Lots of "why", lack of "how"

I am curious about something I had noticed and then Harper put into nice words: why is it that we find a lot of texts and papers defending the usefulness of ethnography as a method for collecting information about the context where activity is performed, but very very rarely we find a paper that actually describes HOW the ethnographic observation is done.

Maybe is it because I am only in the beginning of my reading and still didn't find much about it.

Harper's explanation is actually very convincing: he argues that by mid-1980's organizations were tired of being fooled by vendors, who promised a lot of things that technology at that stage couldn't do. So these companies started to make up their own way of finding out WHAT exactly workers need in these terms to improve their performance.

And that is, for example, when Participatory Design comes in. And also, that is when mangers realize that having an anthropologist to take a look at their company and help them in the task could be a good idea. So, basically, the first sparkle for the ethnographic approach started in the commercial world, not in the academia, where the REAL anthropologists are. By no means this diminishes the work of Suchman and Lyin, quite the opposite: they were the first to show that even in ORGANIZations, things don't happen quite in a ORGANIZide and rational way.

So, managers don't really want to know how ethnographers arrived at the conclusions they arrived: they are interested in the results, punto.

I think I need to read more. Need to find HOW to ethnograph.

Quote - Harper

"According to the sociological view, documents are tools in the construction of fixed and shared meaning. (...) Without them, organizations would collapse". (Harper, p 42)

Inside the IMF

I just started reading this book by Richard Harper. He analysis the "document careers", i.e. the paths of documents inside the Fund, and how this picture contributes to understanding the institution dynamics as a whole. So far, I am truly amazed.
This book was not available at UCL's library and I had to request it to be purchased. I hope other people enjoy it as much as I am.
Besides that not much work done in the the project front. Emailed Jirotka asking her if she would talk to me. Fingers crossed!