Ethnographic Studies

Seeing Danger: Safety on an Offshore Oil and Gas Platform

Tom Anderson — 2022-12-01

Oil and gas (O&G) production platforms are intrinsically risky environments. They are also highly visual and sensory environments. To manage hazards associated with North Sea O&G extraction operations, organisations responsible expend time and effort to ensure the workers’ safety. This article shows how construction workers see and make sense of safety and danger. The setting is an ageing O&G production platform in the North Sea undergoing extensive upgrade. In this rich sensory environment, workers interact with safety by colour, local interpretation, and demarcation of habitats and areas. The nature of the North Sea construction environment demands that they also bodily recognise their own activities as embedded in a larger, dynamically changing workplace where safety is locally produced. In this workplace, safety knowledge is achieved through the platform workers deliberately constructing the environment, outside formal safety guidelines.

Co-Construction of Teacher-as-Observer

Eric Hauser — 2022-12-01

The paper presents an analysis of how a status of teacher-as-observer is co-constructed by a teacher and students during a discussion task. The data are drawn from video-recordings of a student discussion in an English language class at a Japanese university. Affordances of the spatial organization of the classroom for participant action and interaction are discussed. The analysis shows how the teacher does a display of just observing, how the students disattend the teacher, how the teacher may respond to student talk, and how the teacher’s actions are sensitive to the state of student interaction. It is argued that the participants contribute in different ways to the co-construction of the teacher-as-observer. It is also argued that this teacher in this classroom is thereby co-constructed as not only an observer, but an attentive observer and good teacher.

Ayer, Schutz and Garfinkel: Ethnomethodology and the Impossibility of a Social SCIENCE

Richard Heyman — 2022-12-01

A. J. Ayer distinguishes between synthetic propositions, which must be tested against the facts of the empirical world, and analytic propositions, which depend for their validity on the definitions of the symbols they contain. Alfred Schutz writes, “The facts, data, and events with which the natural scientist has to deal are just facts, data, and events within his observational field but this field does not “mean” anything to the molecules, atoms, and electrons therein. Yet the facts, events and data before the social scientist are of an entirely different structure … It [the social world] has a particular meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, thinking and acting therein.” Harold Garfinkel, in his formulation of the work of ethnometholodogy, combines the concepts of indexicality and reflexivity to argue that these are irremediable properties of all social phenomena, thus making these phenomena massively contingent, created and intersubjective. Taking the arguments of these three scholars this paper argues that a science of the social world is an impossibility because understanding the nature any phenomenon has more to do with the ontology of the phenomenon than with the method used to study it. There can be no scientific claims to knowledge from the social sciences because social phenomena don’t exist as meaningless constructs as do physical phenomena; they exist as meaningful constructs and can never be more than examples of Ayer’s analytic propositions, Schutz’s meaningful relevance structures and Garfinkel’s indexical and reflexive expressions. Social phenomena are inescapably ambiguous, analytic and tautological.

On Detail* and Its Conceptualisations

Douglas Macbeth — 2022-12-01

The ‘detail’ of social action was a founding preoccupation for ethnomethodology and conversational analysis [EMCA]. EMCA proceeded to write a critique of and alternate to the conceptual habits of normative social science, and each [EM and CA] addressed the play of ‘constitutive detail’ in the organizations of social action, structure, and common understanding. At the same time, ‘detail’ is among the perfectly ordinary words that social science relies upon for the familiarity and fluency of its professional discourse. Garfinkel assigned to it and other familiar natural–language borrowings an asterisk [detail*, order*, structure*, methods* reason*, etc.], to alert the reader that he intends a ‘tendentious’ usage (Garfinkel, 2002: 197; see especially 146n). As a covering account, he was pointing to the occasioned detail* of the temporal–material productions of ordinary actions and objects, an order of detail* that, while in plain view, had escaped the notice of social science. In the bargain, diverse grammars and laic methods of common understanding, and thus action, order and recurrence, were lost as well. EMCA studies began—and begin—with single settings and occasions, and yielded, for conversational analysis, collections of an array of sequential organizations. The alternate renderings of ‘detail’ that we find in this paper’s exhibits, and the relationships of those cases to the collections they join, are its central topics.

'Rigorous Qualitative Analysis'

Digby C. Anderson — 2022-12-01

Research Activities and Professional Practices

R. J. Anderson — 2022-12-01