Sticking to the rules
Post-its and members’ competence in a Lean meeting activity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.33806Keywords:
interaction, objects, post-its, Lean, context, professional practice, practice-mapping modelAbstract
In this paper, we take an ethnomethodological perspective to analysing members’ competence in a professional practice. We propose an approach which systematises different levels of analysis to identify the underlying management rules, principles and procedures that are significant for the way members in a Lean department meeting organise their in situ activity. Authentic video footage, on-site observations and ethnographic material form the basis of our research focus. Our analysis suggests that the mere presence of an inscribed post-it within an activity does not automatically render it into an object which facilitates discussions, organises activities or records outcomes, but that it is embedded within the members’ taken-for-granted knowledge and routine ways of doing. As such, it is the larger organisational context and the activity at hand which determine the role of the post-it in the moment-to-moment interaction. In conclusion, we suggest going beyond the conventional understanding of context and participation framework in analysing work practices, as an approach to broadening our understanding of what constitutes context from members’ own perspectives in a professional workplace practice.
References
Abbot, Andrew (1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Asmuß, Birte (2016) Den stabile organisation – rutiner i organisationer. In Mie Femø Nielsen, Brian L. Due, Thomas L. W. Toft, Gitte Gravengaard and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen (eds) Kommunikation i Internationale Virksomheder 2, 23–41. Viborg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur.
Asmuß, Birte and Jan Svennevig (2009) Meeting talk: An introduction. Journal of Business Communication 46 (1): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021943608326761
Bittner, Egon (1967) The police on skid-row: A study of peace keeping. American Sociological Review 32 (4): 699–715. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092019
Boden, Deidre (1994) The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boyer, Dominic (2008) Thinking through the anthropology of experts. Anthropology in Action 15 (2): 38–46.
Brouwer, Catherine E. and Jelle van Dijk (2011) Brainstorming: Talk and the representation of ideas and insights. In Jacob Buur (ed.) Participatory Innovation Conference [PIN-C 2011 Proceedings], 12–17. Odense: University of Southern Denmark.
Caglio, Agnes, Jeanette Landgrebe and Trine Heinemann (2014) The action-possibilities of post-its in collaborative practices of design. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice conference, 10–12 September, University of Geneva.
Castor, Theresa and François Cooren (2006) Organization’s hybrid forms of life: The implications of the selection of agency in problem formulation. Management Communication Quarterly 19 (4): 570–600. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318905284764
Cotter, Colleen (2010) News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Day, Dennis (2008) In a bigger, messo, context. Journal of Pragmatics 40 (5): 979–996. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.011
Deppermann, Arnulf, Reinhold Schmitt and Lorenza Mondada (2010) Agenda and emergence: Contingent and planned activities in a meeting. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (6): 1700–1718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.10.006
Due, Brian L. (2012) Den Sociale Konstruktion af Idéer: En Multimodal Interaktionsanalytisk Undersøgelse af Hvordan Idéer Skabes Socialt via Deltagernes Disaffilierende eller Affilierende Responsformater. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen.
Garfinkel, Harold (1975) Harold Garfinkel’s Boston Seminars on Ethnomethodology. Audio transcriptions. Available online: http://emca-legacy.info/garfinkel.html
Garfinkel, Harold (1984) [1967] Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Garfinkel, Harold (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston (1981) The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (2): 131–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/004839318101100202
Garfinkel, Harold and Harvey Sacks (1970) On formal structures of practical actions. In John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian (eds) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, 337–366. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Gibson, Eleanor. J. (1997) An ecological psychologist’s prolegomena for perceptual development: A functional approach. In Cathy Dent-Read and Patricia Zukow-Goldring (eds) Evolving Explanations of Development: Ecological Approaches to Organism-Environment Systems, 23–45. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10265-001
Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, Charles (1986) Audience diversity, participation and interpretation. Text 6 (3): 283–316.
Goodwin, Charles (2010) Things and their embodied environments. In Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (eds) The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, 103–120. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Goodwin, Charles (2012) The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 46 (1): 8–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.003
Goodwin, Charles and Alessandro Duranti (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie H. (2006) Participation, affect, and trajectory in family directive/response sequences. Text and Talk 26 (4–5): 513–541.
Gravengaard, Gitte and Jeanette Landgrebe (2016) Socialisering i organisationer. In Mie Femø Nielsen, Brian L. Due, Thomas L. W. Toft, Gitte Gravengaard and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen (eds) Kommunikation i Internationale Virksomheder 2. Viborg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur.
Heath, Christian and Paul Luff (2000) Technology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John (2012) Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45: 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646684
Hester, Stephen and David Francis (2004) An Invitation to Ethnomethodology: Language, Society and Interaction. London: Sage.
Husserl, Edmund (1970) [1954] The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Karlsson, Anna-Malin (2009) Fixing meaning: On the semiotic and interactional role of written texts in a risk analysis meeting. Text & Talk 29 (4): 415–438. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2009.022
Karlsson, Anna-Malin and Zoe Nikolaidou (2016) The textualization of problem handling: Lean discourses meet professional competence in eldercare and the manufacturing industry. Written Communication 33 (3): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088316653391
Kendon, Adam (1982) The study of gesture: Some remarks on its history. Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 2: 45–62.
Kendon, Adam (1985) Behavioral foundations for the process of frame attunement in face-to-face interaction. In Gerald Phillip Ginsburg, Marylin Brenner and Mario von Cranach (eds) Discovery Strategies in the Psychology of Action, 229–253. London: Academic Press.
Kendon, Adam (1990) Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behaviour in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, Adam (1992) The negotiation of context in face-to-face interaction. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 323–334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larsson, Magnus and Sandra Bothmann (2016) Globalt lederskab. In Mie Femø Nielsen, Brian L. Due, Thomas L. W. Toft, Gitte Gravengaard and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen (eds) Kommunikation i Internationale Virksomheder 2, 135–161. Viborg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur.
Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger (2001) [1991] Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511815355
Liberman, Kenneth (2015) A guide to ethnomethodology’s program: Chapters 6 & 7. Video lecture, uploaded to YouTube by social.objects.sdu. Available online: https://youtu.be/UdYj2JS1YdM
Liker, Jeffrey K. (1998) Becoming Lean. New York: Free Press.
Livingston, Eric (1985) The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lynch, Michael, Eric Livingston and Harold Garfinkel (1983) Temporal order in laboratory work. In Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds) Science Observed, 205–238. London: SAGE.
McHoul, Alec, Mark Rapley and Charles Antaki (2008) ‘You gotta light?’ On the luxury of context for understanding talk in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 40 (1): 42–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.03.006
Moerman, Michael (1990) Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mondada, Lorenza (2014) The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 65: 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.04.004
Mortensen, Kristian (2013) Writing aloud: Some interactional functions of the public display of emergent writing. In Helinä Melkas and Jacob Buur (eds) Proceedings of the Participatory Innovation Conference PIN-C 2013, 119–125. Lahti, Finland: Lappeenranta University of Technology.
[Name redacted.] (2014) Lean Administration Manual (version 3, October). Unpublished internal company document.
[Name redacted.] (2015) Introduktion til nye medarbejdere. Unpublished internal company document.
Nevile, Maurice (2004) Beyond the Black Box: Talk-in-Interaction in the Airline Cockpit. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Nielsen, Mie Femø (2012) Using artifacts in brainstorming sessions to secure participation and decouple sequentiality. Discourse Studies 14 (1): 87–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445611427211
Nielsen, Mie Femø (2016) Kultur. In Mie Femø Nielsen, Brian L. Due, Thomas L. W. Toft, Gitte Gravengaard and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen (eds) Kommunikation i Internationale Virksomheder 1, 35–63. Viborg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur.
Norman, Donald A. (1993) Things that Make Us Smart. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Norman, Donald A. (1999) Affordance, conventions, and design. Interactions 6: 38–42.
Polanyi, Livia and Remko J. H. Scha (1983) The syntax of discourse. Text 3 (3): 261–270.
Rawls, Anne W. (2008) Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology and workplace studies. Organization Studies 29 (5): 701–732. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840608088768
Roth, Wolff-Michael and Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi (2013) Pictures in biology education. In David F. Treagust and Chi-Yan Tsui (eds) Multiple Representations in Biological Education, 39–54. Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4192-8_3
Sanders, Robert E. (2003) Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech: Controlling Understandings in Conversations and Persuasion. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Schegloff, Emmanuel A. (1992) In another context. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 193–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiffrin, Deborah (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schön, Donald A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Schütz, Alfred (1945) On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (4): 533–576.
Simonsen, Jesper and Toni Robertson (2013) Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. New York: Routledge.
Streeck, Jürgen (1996) How to do things with things: Objets trouvés and symbolization. Human Studies 19 (4): 365–384. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00188849
Streeck, Jürgen and Siri Mehus (2004) Microethnography: The study of practices. In Kristine L. Fitch and Robert E. Sanders (eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, 381–404. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sudnow, David (2001) Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Suthers, Dan and Richard Medina (2011) Tracing interaction in distributed collaborative learning. In Sadhana Puntambekar, Gijsbert Erkens and Cindy Hmelo-Silver (eds) Analyzing Interactions in CSCL: Methods, Approaches and Issues, 341–367. Boston, MA: Springer Science+Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7710-6_16
Weilenmann, Alexandra and Gustav Lymer (2014) Incidental and essential objects in interaction: Paper documents in journalistic work. In Maurice Nevile, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann and Mirka Rauniomaa (eds) Interacting with Objects. Language, Materiality, and Social Activity, 319–338. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wenger, Etienne (1999) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
