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In spite of a growing corpus of studies concerned with the body and its relationships to organizing and organization, there is a distinct lack of empirical work to take seriously the nature of 'embodiment' in the workplace. This paper presents a video-based study of teamwork in preoperative anaesthesia in order to propose an approach to analysing the body that focuses on organizational members' practical orientations to the body, and in particular dynamic bodies, in the workplace. To demonstrate the value of this approach, the paper considers coordination work among anaesthetic teams and highlights the importance of intercorporeal knowing in the real-time coordination of a team's work. The analytic orientation is drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

This article explores how individuals, both alone and together, examine exhibits in museums and galleries. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it focuses on the ways in which visitors encounter and experience exhibits and how their activities are organized, at least in part, with intimate regard to the actions of others in the domain, both companions and “strangers.” This study contributes to the long‐standing concerns of symbolic interactionism with (mutual) attention and involvement, materiality and social relations, and interpersonal communication. The data consist of video recordings of naturally occurring action and interaction in various museums and galleries.

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This article explores the interactional organization of collaborative work in Lhe Geld of anesthesia. "Anesthetic teams" provide a distinctive case for the analysis of collaborative work, because their work is undcrtakcn with, around, and on an aware and variously involvcd coparticipant. namely, thc patient. To explore such collaboration, this article draws on cthnomethodology and conversation analysis to examine audiovisual data of naturally occurring preoperative anesthetic work recorded in a British hospital. There are three key consequences of the analysis that we elaborate: first, it points toward the limitations of Erving Goffman's regions mctaphor for cxplicating the organization of collaborative work in settings like anesthesia; second, it reveals key organizing practices and skills associated with in situ teamworking that are distinctly absent from the literature on health-care teams; third, it points toward the critical importance of analyzing embodied conduct, not just language or talk, when examining copresent organizational activities.[Practice] . . . includes all the implicit relations, tacit conventions, subtle cues. untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions. specific perceptions. well-tuned sensitivities, embodied understandings, underlying assumptions and shared world views. Most of these may never be articulated, yet they are unmistakable signs of membership in communities of practice and arc crucial to the success of thcir cntcrpriscs. Etienne Wenger, <'ornr?zunitces of Practice, p 47The emergence of multidisciplinary teams in health-care programs has brought with it a complementary sociological literature concerned with the character of medical teamwork. For example, studies have considered decision-making processes, the distribution of power among team members, the importance ot team integration, and members' perceptions of "team" and "teamwork" (e.g., Dingwall and McIntosh 1978;Griffiths 1997; Cott 1998). The focus of the literature has tended toward organizationally prescribed teams which are established in order to discuss and debate individual

It is increasingly recognized that social interaction and collaboration rely on the participants' abilities to access and use a range of resources including objects and artifacts from within the immediate environment. In recent years, system support for remote collaboration has begun to address this issue, and we have witnessed the emergence of a number of technologies designed to provide remote participants with access to (features of) each others' environment. In this article we examine the use of one such system, an innovative mixed media environment designed to enable participants to refer to and point at objects and artifacts within each other's remote environment. The article addresses the ways in which participants use the system to undertake various collaborative activities and discusses the problems and issues that emerge, for the participants' themselves, in coordinating action with and through objects. We then consider these issues with regard to interaction and collaboration in more conventional environments such as work settings, and we discuss the ways in which the interpretation and production of action are inextricably embedded within the immediate environment, an environment of action that is inadvertently fractured in even this more sophisticated media space.

This paper explores and evaluates the support for object-focused interaction provided by a desktop Collaborative Virtual Environment. An experimental “design” task was conducted, and video recordings of the participants' activities facilitated an observational analysis of interaction in, and through, the virtual world. Observations include: problems due to “fragmented” views of embodiments in relation to shared objects; participants compensating with spoken accounts of their actions; and difficulties in understanding others' perspectives. Implications and proposals for the design of CVEs drawn from these observations are: the use of semidistorted views to support peripheral awareness; more explicit or exaggerated representations of actions than are provided by pseudohumanoid avatars; and navigation techniques that are sensitive to the actions of others. The paper also presents some examples of the ways in which these proposals might be realized.