This article presents findings from a research study (Trace, 2004) that looked at a particular aspect of human information behavior: children’s information creation in a classroom setting. In the portion of the study described here, naturalism and ethnomethodology are used as theoretical frameworks to investigate informal documents as an information genre. Although previous studies have conside...

This thesis investigates how museum companions organise their conduct regarding their engagement with the exhibition and their social interaction with each other in the course of a visit. The main objectives of the thesis are the empirical investigation of social conduct in casual group museum visits and the exploration and understanding of social conduct in real-time distributed museum visits ...

Various social and technical imperatives permeate discussions around information technology (IT) implementation. Given the importance of both social and technical elements in IT implementation, IS researchers have begun exploring how implementation outcomes emerge from an unpredictable interaction between these two elements. In this paper, we explore the use of conversation analysis, with its r...

Editors’ Abstract During the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in Sociology Department at University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage has not been discussed much length Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment Gestalt theory, and particularly themes “phenomenal field”...

What kind of things are social rules? The paper starts from the critique of social rules articulated by ethnomethodologists and proposes an alternative conception of rules as situated, often tacit, imperatives. This ontological theorization borrows insights from critical realism and post-structuralism to explore general features of rules. For instance: they under-determine fields of legitimate ...

This article analyses the accomplishment of boundary work performed by professionals engaged in inter-agency collaboration. As a means of building authority within a particular field, boundary work is found to be a common feature of most professional practices. By analysing the talk of Finnish professionals who work in the field of supported housing in mental health, the article investigates th...

From discussions with senior managers, project managers and site managers at a national contractor, it became clear that the labels they applied to things, the terms which they used to describe circumstances, had influence over their subsequent actions. In particular, the same situation on a construction project may be described as ‘chaos’, or as ‘disorder’. If ‘chaos’ is chosen, a sense of unc...

Correspondence: Amanda Henderson, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Ipswich Road, Woolloongabba, Brisbane, Queensland 4068, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] HENDERSON A. (2005) Journal of Advanced Nursing 52(5), 554–560 The value of integrating interpretive research approaches in the exposition of healthcare context Aim. This paper discusses the use of a nested set of methodolog...

This study looks at the practice of thoracic radiology and follows a group of radiologists and radiophysicists in their efforts to find, discuss, and formulate issues or troubles ensuing the implementation of a new radiographic imaging technology. Based in the theoretical tradition of ethnomethodology it examines the local endogenous practices pertaining to the radiologists’ expertise in the in...

This article offers an approach that combines, on the one hand, the philosophical notion of reflexivity, which is related to the ideas of self-reference and paradox, and, on the other hand, the sociological discussion of epistemic reflexivity as a problem of coherence, which was mainly initiated by certain branches of ethnomethodology and social constructionism. This combinatory approach argues...