In an attempt to understand some of the issues involved in the problem of mobility, the author examines the notion of mobility by locating it in the actual and local context where people try to deal with it as their practical problem, following ethnomethodological policy. This way of understanding the local character of mobility has two advantages: one is that it allows us to understand the notion in terms of the social organization of activities as part of which it is managed by relevant members, rather than understanding it in a purely theoretical manner. The other advantage is that it offers us a detailed and concrete understanding of the environment in relation to people's activities that potentially can be used as a basis for some sensitive tools for designing or redesigning the environment in terms of its specific arrangement of mobility. Detailed observations are made on the emergency medical system to illustrate the complex temporal and spatial arrangements involved in moving a patient from one place to another, providing necessary medical treatment on the way, and coordinating different expertise in organizationally and geographically different locations.
In 2004 Fujitsu asked PARC to carry out an ethnographic investigation of their software business, focusing on their development processes, and while doing so to build an ethnographic capability in their own organization. One of our biggest challenges was to convince Fujitsu's system engineers — and the development organization more generally — of the value of ethnography for their business. They are used to translating what they hear from customers about the workflow into a standard framework of system requirements and specifications; it was difficult for them to see the relevance of putting any significant focus on understanding what is going on in the workplace at the level of everyday work practices. Moreover, in their work with customers, system engineers commonly proceed in a carefully planned and highly structured manner, where every activity is expected to yield predictable outcomes. For them, the open‐ended nature of ethnographic fieldwork seemed dangerously chaotic and unpredictable. The lessons learned from our experience with both our initial teaching of the engineers and the organizational fieldwork we later did together helped us design a new ethnography‐training course that incorporates the task of conveying the full value of organizational and business ethnography.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.