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In the previous chapter we suggested that practical sociology may be studied empirically through the use of ethnography, which entails fieldwork or going and looking at the naturally occurring work of a setting, and the application of an analytic perspective to uncover the organisation of a setting's work. We suggested, too, that there are a great many analytic perspectives available but that we focus exclusively on ethnomethodology and the naturally accountable character of work and its organisation. Uniquely, this perspective concentrates on the methodical ways in which a setting's members assemble, build up or put their work together, and make it accountable to others in doing so. Work practice is another term for the methodical assembly of work and finding it is ethnography's task as it makes visible a social machinery of interaction that a setting's members use to do and organise their work. This machinery is usually 'seen but unnoticed", which is to say that members know and make use of it but pay little heed to it; instead they get on with whatever it is they are doing through its use. Like the animal hiding in the foliage, we need to attend carefully to the machinery of interaction to make it out and make it available to design reasoning. The issue we want to elaborate here is how we can find the machinery of interaction. To put it another way, how do we uncover work practice and make members' methods visible? By way of an answer we want to explore a range of examples which articulate different orders or modal expressions of the phenomenon at work. The examples should not be read as definitions, only as concrete cases that display the methodical character of work.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4471-2726-0_4

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