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Reflectionson25YearsofEthnographyinCSCW

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Reflections on 25 Years of Ethnography in CSCW

Jeanette Blomberg1 & Helena Karasti2,31IBM Research, San Jose, CA, USA (E-mail: [email protected]); 2University of Oulu,Oulu, Finland; 3Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden (E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. In this article we focus attention on ethnography’s place in CSCW by reflecting on howethnography in the context of CSCW has contributed to our understanding of the sociality andmateriality of work and by exploring how the notion of the ‘field site’ as a construct in ethnographyprovides new ways of conceptualizing ‘work’ that extends beyond the workplace. We argue that thewell known challenges of drawing design implications from ethnographic research have led to usefulstrategies for tightly coupling ethnography and design. We also offer some thoughts on recentcontroversies over what constitutes useful and proper ethnographic research in the context of CSCW.Finally, we argue that as the temporal and spatial horizons of inquiry have expanded, along with newdomains of collaborative activity, ethnography continues to provide invaluable perspectives.

Key words: anthropology, critical studies, CSCW, connecting ethnography and design, constructingthe field site, ethnomethodology, multi-sited ethnography, sociality and materiality of work, workpractice, workplace studies

1. Introduction

The place of ethnography in CSCW has become rather well established, while at thesame time it continues to spark lively debates about ethnography’s contribution toCSCW; including its applicability given the expanded framing of CSCW beyond theworkplace, its uncertain articulation with design, and its ‘proper’ rendering. In thisarticle we begin by reflecting on the contribution ethnography has made to ourunderstanding of collaborative activity—its sociality and materiality. We then go onto offer some new ways of conceptualizing the ‘field site’ that acknowledge theresearcher’s role in constructing the ‘site’ of inquiry. We then argue that design in thecontext of CSCW is perhaps best enabled through strategies that inextricably tieethnography and design. Finally we address some recent controversies that questionethnography’s value to design and argue that CSCW benefits frommultiple framingsof the ethnographic endeavor.

Our aim is not to provide a comprehensive review of ethnography in CSCWfor this would require more space than we have been given, particularly sinceethnographic research is either directly or indirectly implicated in a vast numberof CSCW writings. We also have chosen not to provide a detailed description ofethnography, its sensibilities, and methodologies. Instead we direct the reader toothers who have offered such descriptions (Agar 1996; Hammersley andAtkinson 1995; Hughes et al. 1994b; Blomberg et al. 1993; Blomberg and

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2013) 22:373–423 © Springer Science+BusinessMedia Dordrecht 2013DOI 10.1007/s10606-012-9183-1

Burrell 2012; Button and Sharrock 2009; Crabtree 2003; Crabtree et al. 2012;Randall and Rouncefield 2007). However, we thought it would be useful to offera few words about ethnography as it has been normatively described for thoseless familiar with the approach.

2. A word about ethnography

Ethnography has its historical roots in anthropology, but today it is an approachfound in most all of the traditional and applied social sciences. Within the field ofanthropology, ethnography developed as a way to explore the everyday realitiesof people living in small-scale, non-Western societies. As ethnography hasbroadened its domain to include the study of industrialized societies some of theimplicit assumptions about non-Western societies (e.g. that they are bounded,closed, and somewhat static) have been challenged and new techniques andperspectives have been developed and incorporated into anthropological andethnographic inquiry. At its foundation ethnography relies on the ability of peopleto make sense out of what is going on through participation in social life and isguided by a few basic principles. These principles include studying phenomena intheir natural settings, taking a holistic view, providing a descriptive understand-ing, and taking a members’ perspective (Blomberg et al. 1993; Blomberg andBurrell 2012; Blomberg and Karasti 2012).

Ethnography is anchored in the underlying assumption that to gain anunderstanding of a world you must encounter it firsthand. As such, ethnographicstudies always include gathering information in the settings in which the activitiesof interest ‘naturally’ occur. Related to the emphasis on natural settings is theview that activities must be understood within the larger context in which theyoccur. This is sometimes referred to as holism which holds that studying anactivity in isolation, without reference to the other activities with which it isconnected in time and space, can result in limited and sometimes misleadingunderstandings of that activity. First and foremost ethnography is concerned withproviding an analytic account of events and activities as they occur, withoutattempting to evaluate the efficacy of people’s practices. These descriptive under-standings however enable the possibility of more interventionist agendas. Finally,ethnography is committed to understanding the world from the perspective of thepeople studied, describing their activities in terms relevant and meaningful to them.In this way ethnographers are interested in the ways people categorize their worldand in the specific language people use in interaction.

This traditional and normative view of ethnography has been challenged inrelation to critical developments in the social sciences which have explored thesocial shaping of scientific knowledge (Harding 1993; Knorr-Cetina 1981); theunarticulated assumptions informing the ‘othering’ of people from non-Westernsocieties (Hastrup 1996; Fabian 1983; Strathern 1987); the crisis of representationthat challenges the authority of the ethnographic voice (Clifford 1988; Clifford

374 Jeanette Blomberg and Helena Karasti

and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986); and the reflexivity of theethnographer’s positioning vis-á-vis her relation to the development ofethnographic knowledge (Woolgar 1988; Bourdieu 1992). These challenges havecome from a number of fronts, most significantly from the ‘subjects’ ofethnographic inquiry who increasingly are able to read ethnographic accounts(Said 1978) and from feminist scholars who have seen in many ethnographicaccounts a ‘bias’ originating from the particular experiences of the ethnographer(Harding 1986; Smith 1987; Wolf 1992; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). Inaddition, social studies of science have shown more broadly how scientificknowledge production is shaped by the larger social and material contexts inwhich scientific inquiries take place (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986;Pickering 1980). Ethnographers have become more aware of and reflective aboutof how their research is shaped by the particular time and place in which it occursand their specific encounters and engagement with the sites of their fieldwork.

3. The sociality and materiality of work

Since the founding of CSCW in the 1980s there has been continued interest inexploring the ‘nature of work’ in an effort to support the design of computertechnologies for the workplace. Prior to this time, to the degree technology wasdesigned with people in mind, the focus primarily had been on individual cognition,psychology, and physiology as constraints on and augmentations to the usability ofcomputer technologies. For example, questions were asked about such things as howlarge a ‘pull down’ menu of options could be before it became difficult for people toselect from the list or what font or font size was easier for people to read on a screen?However, with the attention placed on ‘cooperative’ work in CSCW it was notsurprising that ethnography was proposed as a way of gaining insights into thepractices of people interacting with each other and with computer technologies(Greif 1988). So began a 25 year relationship between CSCWand ethnography.

We reflect in this section on what we have we learned about the ‘nature ofwork’ through ethnographic studies and how these understandings have shapedthe design of computer technologies to support collaborative activities. We arguethat ethnographic studies have changed our understanding of work byhighlighting its sociality and materiality. In particular these studies have beenan essential resource in furthering the development of concepts such as situatedaction, flexible workflows, situated awareness, articulation work, invisible work,material resources for action, and common information spaces. Schmidt (2007,p. 7) put it this way, ‘… understanding of cooperative work is indeed indebtedto … the fantastic body of ethnographic studies of cooperative work that has beenproduced over the years by researchers in CSCWand in related areas…’We brieflyreview these important and influential concepts, showing their connections toethnographic research as well as the technology directions that have been shaped bythem.Wemake no claims to the ontological status of these concepts, recognizing that

375Ethnography in CSCW

they are bound in many ways to their particular expressions in specific places andtimes. However, we argue that these concepts, by drawing attention to the socialityand materiality of work, help us see the ‘here and now,’ identify temporal and spatialconnections among activities, and further our collective understanding of ‘the natureof work’. In fact, we encourage more CSCW research that attempts to synthesizeacross studies and that connects with conceptual work going on in related disciplinessuch as anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and cognitivescience. We now discuss each of these influential concepts in turn.

3.1. Situated action

One of the most cited publications in CSCW is Suchman’s Plans and SituatedAction (1987), which outlined an argument whereby action is understood asalways unfolding in relation to the immediate situation at hand. This argumentchallenged the widely held view at the time that people plan their actions toachieve specific goals and then proceed to execute these plans. If deviations inexecution occur, this indicates that the plans have changed and a new course ofaction is being followed. Suchman showed that this view is unable to account forthe observed interactions of people with each other and with machines. Sheargued instead that plans are better conceptualized as resources for action, notexecutable instructions that people carry out.

Ethnographic inquiry enabled Suchman to observe the ways operators of aphotocopy machine responded to the machine’s actions and adjusted their actionsaccordingly. She argued that the machine, even with its built-in ‘intelligence’was notable to align its actions with the operators’ actions and that the rote execution of themachine’s plans led to trouble in the interaction between the machine and its humanoperators. This led Suchman to suggest that the design of the human-machineinterface might be better served by explicitly acknowledging this asymmetry andbetter providing for the necessarily situated and contingent unfolding of action. Overthe years the concept of situated action has led technology designers to rethink therole technology plays in the unfolding of action. The notion of situated action hasinfluenced much of the conceptual work in CSCW and continues to provide acounter to the view, still present today, which maintains that goals define actions in astraightforward way.

3.2. Coordination through flexible workflows

A central concern of CSCW has been in explaining how people are able to worktogether to get things done. What ‘mechanisms’ and coordinative practices dothey employ? Ethnographic studies have provided the primary means ofexploring these issues by allowing us to ‘see’ coordination in action, detailinghow workers align and adjust their activities in relation to the actions of others.Beginning with early studies of office automation (Suchman 1983; Suchman andWynn 1984; Wynn 1979) challenges were made to assumptions about the efficacy


of strict adherence to formal processes and inflexible workflows. Throughethnographic studies of office work, these authors showed how office workers adjusttheir actions in response to the requirements of the work, which often necessitatesdeviation from the formal processes. In Suchman’s study procedural models wereunable to account for the everyday and exceptional cases of accounting practiceleading her to suggest that systems be designed to ‘…serve as a tool for the work ofaccomplishing procedures, rather than a “black box” that accepts the product of thatwork as input…’(Suchman 1983, p. 327, italics added).

While these early studies showed the impossibility of strict adherence to formalprocedures, alternative approaches to support coordination of actions weredeveloped. One such system which received a great deal of attention in CSCWwas the Coordinator (Suchman 1994; Winograd 1994). It was designed to help orderwork, to facilitate people working together, and to manage interdependencies amongworkers and work tasks (Flores et al. 1988). The system defined a coordination-basedworkflow that was grounded in theories of communication and cognition (Austin1962; Searle 1979; Winograd and Flores 1987). While the aim this system and otherslike it was to support the coordination of tasks thus allowing workers to focus on theparticulars of their individual responsibilities, challenges were made to the efficacy ofthese systems, the underlying assumptions they made about human action, and thepotential for such systems to exert undo control over organizational actors.

Ethnographic studies of workflow systems in CSCW have shown thelimitations of these systems and have pointed to the need for tools and techniquesthat more flexibly align work and workers (Bowers and Churcher 1988;Suchman 1994, 1996). Specifically, these studies of workflow systems have shownhow a lack of flexibility often leads to elaborate ‘work arounds’ where workersbypass the systems or engage with them in unexpected, and not always the mostefficient ways, in order to get their work done (Bowers et al. 1995). These studieshave led some to call for more flexible workflows where the workflow system acts asa resource for coordinating work while at the same time not too strictly regulatingaction (Dourish et al. 1996; Dourish 2001). In addition, ethnographic observationshave guided the development of systems geared toward making the actions of othersmore visible (see Section 3.3 on ‘Situated awareness’) thus enabling the alignment ofwork tasks across workers, groups, and organizations.

While rules, policies, and the explicit renderings of business processes areubiquitous in the workplace, ethnographic studies have pointed to the fact thatthese artifacts, often realized in workflow systems, must be applied in particularsituations. Part of the work of engaging with such artifacts is learning how torespond to ‘problematic’ cases where the stated policies and compulsory processflows must be deviated so that the work can get done.

3.3. Situated awareness

Ethnographic studies also have explored the ways people coordinate with othersthrough both overt and subtle cues that allow others to become aware of their


actions. Such ‘awareness’ is achieved in a myriad of ways, with several studiesexamining the role of ‘overhearing’ in achieving worker alignment (Harper et al. 1991;Heath and Luff 1992). Harper et al. (1991) showed the multiple ways air trafficcontrollers maintain an awareness of the actions of their co-workers through theiruse of artifacts, their following of procedures, and their overhearing the eachothers’ talk. Similarly Heath and Luff (1992) detailed the subtle ways workers inthe London underground orient to each other through speech and gesture. These andother studies point to the importance of physical artifacts (see Section 3.6 on‘Material resources for action’) and the role conventions play in orienting people tothe actions of others. In addition, ethnographic studies have shown how awareness isa dynamic construct that is sometimes intentionally fashioned with considerableeffort exerted in ‘configuring’ awareness (Heath et al. 2002).

The concept of awareness is not unproblematic, particularly in the context ofdesigning for awareness (Schmidt 2002). Pettersson et al. (2004, p. 149) provided acritical reflection on the concept of awareness as used in CSCW and carefullyarticulated through an ethnographic study of emergency call center workers howattentiveness to others is ‘specifically occasioned by a situation, which becomesrecognizable as problematic as the interaction develops.’ In other words, awareness ismotivated by what is going on at the moment and is not a generalized experience.There are many things in the environment that one could be aware of, but it is thosethings that are relevant to the situation at hand that become notable and available forinspection.

Although the theoretical status of the notion of awareness is contested, varioustechnologies have been designed to ‘support’ awareness (Harrison 2009), withearly explorations of the role of media spaces or permanent video and audioconnections to enable awareness, particularly in distributed environments (Dourishand Bly 1992). Motivated by ethnographic studies showing how awareness isachieved among co-located groups, these technologies aimed at providing peripheralawareness, where the actions of others could be casually observed without requiringexplicit or intentional awareness generating actions (Pedersen and Sokoler 1997).Other technologies have been designed to provide a sense of what others are doing asa result of people using shared, synchronous, and asynchronous groupware systems(Bardram and Hansen 2010). In these cases, actions of others are available forscrutiny through the use of these shared technologies, with some systems alsooffering explicit notification that particular actions have occurred.

3.4. Articulation work

The concept of articulation work informs much CSCW research. Drawing on thework of Strauss (1985, 1988), articulation work is described as ‘…work that getsthings back “on track” in the face of the unexpected, and modifies action toaccommodate unanticipated contingencies’ (Star and Strauss 1999, p. 10).Schmidt and Bannon (1992) further specify the concept by pointing to the


fundamental role of articulation work in cooperative activities, managing thedistributed, yet interdependent, nature of work that follows from the division oflabor in the workplace where it is necessary to coordinate workers’ individualactivities. These articulating activities they argue are ‘extraneous to the activitiesthat contribute directly to fashioning the product or service and meetingrequirements’ (Schmidt and Bannon 1992, p. 8).

Articulation work is a fundamental characteristic of all work in that, ‘[i]t isimpossible, both in practice and in theory, to anticipate and provide for everycontingency which might arise in carrying out a series of tasks. No formaldescription of a system (or plan for its work) can thus be complete’ (Gerson andStar 1986, p. 266). As such in order for work to get done the variations,deviations, and inconsistencies must be resolved in the ‘here and now’ throughthe actions of workers.

Ethnographic research with its emphasis on the importance of payingattention not only to what people say they do, but also to what they can beobserved to do has been instrumental in providing in depth analysis of theoften underspecified and sometimes unstated characteristics of articulationwork. The unremarkable, taken for granted character of much of what peopledo has made ethnographic inquiry indispensible in uncovering the ‘machinery’of articulation work—the things people do to integrate and connect people,artifacts, and information. Suchman (1996, p. 407) draws our attention to ‘…the continuous efforts required in order to bring together discontinuouselements—of organizations, of professional practices, of technologies—intoworking configurations.’

Strauss (1988) recognized that organizations at times explicitly acknowledgethe coordinative requirements of work, defining responsibilities across actorsand naming actions to be taken to link one set of activities to another. Butas important, he also acknowledged that much articulation work is implicit(ibid.) which often renders it invisible to “official” descriptions of work andas such unrecognized and unacknowledged by managers, system designers,and the workers themselves. Simply asking people about their work or thework of others does not reveal the articulation work necessary to get thingsdone.

3.5. Invisible work

Invisible work is related to implicit articulation work (as contrasted with explicitarticulation work) originally distinguished by Strauss (1988) in that implicitarticulation work often resides outside or beyond formal descriptions of work andfrequently is unacknowledged and/or unrewarded (Star 1991a, b). Drawingattention to different kinds of invisible work Nardi and Engeström (1999)describe four kinds of invisible work: (1) work done out of view of others, (2)routine or manual work requiring judgment and skill not acknowledged, (3) work


done by people who are not valued, and (4) work that is not part of anyone’s jobdescription, but critical to getting things done.

Ethnographic research has been a resource for making ‘visible’ critical aspectsof work that elude traditional or formal descriptions of work (Blomberg et al.1997; Pratt et al. 2006; Unruh and Pratt 2008). For example, Blomberg et al.(1997) showed how document coders at a law firm exhibited a great deal ofexpertise in understanding document structure, legal practice, and the particularsof the legal case at hand. This expertise was invisible to the lawyers at the firmwho thought the work of the coders could be automated easily using documentrecognition software under development. In this way ethnographic studiesenabled CSCW researchers to identify workplace expertise and effort that was‘hidden from view’ because the accounts of work did not rely solely on verbaldescriptions of the work offered by people who were removed from the day-to-day requirements of the work. As Star and Strauss (1999, p. 20) note, ‘[i]f onelooked, one could literally see the work being done—but the taken for grantedstatus means that it is functionally invisible.’

Star (1999, 2002) has made the point that sociotechnical infrastructures bytheir very nature are hidden, enablers of the ‘real’ work (Bowker and Star 1999)and require paying attention to how they emerge and evolve over long periods oftime (Karasti et al. 2010). These characteristics of infrastructures mean that theprocesses and activities by which they materialize are sometimes obscured fromview demanding of those who study them a fascination with and patience for thelong-term and often slow moving aspects of infrastructuring work.

Ethnographic research also orients us to the multiple perspectives of differentlypositioned actors, including those whose voices are at risk of being left out ofofficial accounts. What is in clear view to some may be invisible to others in asimilar way to how activities that are back stage for some are front stage forothers (Goffman 1969). Star and Strauss (1999, p. 14) state, ‘[w]ithout thatunderstanding [of multiple perspectives and access to the details of work], it maylook as though secretaries are often just chit-chatting with each other or withclients—surely an activity that indicates lack of real work.’ These activitieshowever may be enabling the more instrumental aspects of secretaries’ work andfacilitating interdepartmental or organization cooperation and negotiation.

Understanding the multiple, and sometimes competing, definitions of thesituation can mitigate against leaving out important aspects of the work ininitiatives to redesign work or the technologies that support work. Whenorganizations restructure the invisible work of the organization is oftenoverlooked, rendering critical activities unaccounted for and leading to anunderrepresentation of the time and people needed to do the work. Acknowl-edging invisible work in the design of systems to support cooperative workreduces the likelihood that the new system will increase the burden for some as itsanctions and supports the officially recognized work of others (Star 1992; Starand Ruhleder 1994, 1996).


However there are limits to the ability to make the ‘out of sight’ aspects ofwork visible and to the desirability of doing so, including both practical andpolitical tradeoffs for making work visible (Suchman 1995; Bowker et al. 1995;Wagner 1993). From a practical standpoint reifying invisible work through explicitrepresentation can lead to these once invisible aspects of work being included inbusiness process models and management systems which can over burden workerswho now may be required to report on these aspects of their work. From a politicalperspective, while exposing invisible work can give the work and the workers whodo it greater legitimacy (e.g. Karasti 2003; Bossen et al. 2012), it can also lead togreater scrutiny and even oppressive monitoring (Star and Strauss 1999).

3.6. Material resources for action

Ethnographic research has given us insights into the ways artifacts such as paperdocuments, computer displays, timetables, whiteboard, and maps enable peopleto work together, aligning their actions with those of others. Suchman and Trigg(1991) noting that work takes place in particular times and places draw attentionto how ‘[a]vailable technologies afford certain resources and constraints on howthe work gets done…’(Suchman and Trigg 1991, p.65). In this way getting workdone involves people’s ongoing interaction with the material resources availablein their environment. For example, Heath and Luff (1992) describe how displaysthat show the status of various routes of the London underground allow workersto plan for and enable the smooth flow of underground traffic. Similarly, Hugheset al. (1992) show how flight progress strips, as they are manipulated and shared,present an ‘at a glance’ way to check the status of aircraft in the sky and takenecessary action. In a similar way, Bowers et al. (1995) illustrate how a print shopscheduling board is used to visualize the current status of the printing productionenabling planning and preparation for the jobs in the queue. Likewise, Suchman’snotion of ‘centers of coordination’ points to the way peoples’ interaction withartifacts supports working divisions of labor that define important aspects of theorganization of work (Suchman 1997). These kinds of artifacts provide ways of‘seeing’ the current state and orienting to the situation at hand. Furthermore, Sellenand Harper (2002) questioning the efficacy of the paperless office show how thematerial ‘affordances’ of paper differ from those of digital artifacts and as such areable to facilitate certain activities in the office, including interactions among workers.

Schmidt and Wagner (2004) introduced the notion of coordinative artifactsarguing for the essential role of inscription and material artifacts in cooperativework. They state,

‘… contemporary cooperative ensembles would fail—completely and utterly—intheir collaborative effort if they could only coordinate and integrate theiractivities by means of ordinary discursive practices, whether face-to-faceor remote, oral or written. In fact, contemporary cooperative ensemblesdepend heavily on a range of highly specialized, standardized coordinative


practices involving a concomitant repertoire of equally specializedcoordinative artifacts.’ (Schmidt and Wagner 2004, p. 351)

Bardram and Bossen (2005b, p. 169) add that coordinative artifacts, ‘lessen theamount of ‘articulation work’ needed to achieve alignment’ as workers orient tothese artifacts that define divisions of labor and the ordering of activities.

3.7. Common information spaces

The notion of common information spaces (CIS) draws attention to the social andmaterial context in which information is shared among workers and it offers aperspective on how people are able to perform their work in alignment withothers (Bannon and Schmidt 1991; Schmidt and Bannon 1992). The conceptaugments and expands beyond the workflow approach (see Section 3.2 on‘Coordination through flexible workflows’) where collaboration is viewedthrough the lens of managing the temporal or procedural order of tasks oractivities. In CIS, with its focus on the interrelationships between information,workers, and artefacts, the focus is on managing collections of discreteinformational resources to enable collaboration. Bannon and Schmidt emphazisethat CISs do not consist only of material representations or artefacts (e.g. objectsand events in a shared database), but also crucially involve the joint interpretationof and the meaning attributed to these artefacts and representations by the actorsinvolved. Therefore, CISs can be defined as information spaces that are implicitlyor explicitly co-constructed and shared by cooperating actors with the aim ofinterpreting and articulating their work. In addition, articulation work is requiredto place information in common especially when workers are separted in time andspace and cannot rely on ‘at the moment’ negotiation of the meaning of sharedinformation. (Schmidt and Bannon 1992).

Ethnographic studies have explored an expanding range of CISs in a variety ofcollaborative work settings, including two radiologists interpreting pre-arrangedimages and patient materials in front of light screens (Kuutti and Karasti 1995),cooperation in ‘massively distributed’, physical information spaces (Bertelsenand Bødker 2001), meetings in a heterogeneous range of information contexts(Rolland et al. 2006), and negotiating the temporal and evolving character ofmedical information and work along the illness trajectories of chronic patients(Munkvold and Ellingsen 2007). The mechanisms used to support the ‘holding incommon’ of information in these different settings varies accordingly as theseethnographic studies demonstrate. Attempting to create a systematic way ofdefining CISs, Fields and his collaborators developed a framework for CIS basedon an analysis of air traffic control settings (Fields et al. 2005; Selvaraj andFields 2010) and Bossen identified seven parameters that characterize particularCISs (Bossen 2002) based on empirical studies in diverse settings.

CIS are not fixed as they are co-constructed in action and yet achieve theirvalue by providing a kind of closure in the sense that they become immutable,


allowing for working across contexts and communities of practice (see Bannonand Bødker 1997 for a discussion of the dialectic nature of CIS). Thisimmutablity helps foster understanding of the information’s orginal rationale ormeaning in future use situations. On the other hand, Rolland et al. (2006),emphasizing the dynamic, malleable and open character of CIS, argue thatparticularly large-scale CISs tend to reproduce fragmentation as an unintentionalconsequence of integrating heterogeneous sources of information.

The emphasis on the requirement that CIS be constructed in practice hasreminded technology designers that simply providing a common technologyplatform or shared access to informational resources does not imply fruitfulcollaboration or sharing of information (ibid.). Furthermore, the ideas of CIShave been applied to the design of systems that do not prescribe procedures forhuman interaction and collaboration, but rather facilitate community cooperationby supporting the co-creation of CISs.

While the precise formulation of CIS has come under scrutiny, with questionsasked about what is meant by common or shared (Randall 2000), by information(Bannon 2000), and by spaces (Harrison and Dourish 1996; Spinelli andBrodie 2003), the concept has nonetheless proven valuable in orientingresearchers and designers to the necessary effort required to construct contextsfor collaboration that align and integrate artifacts, people, and processes. In asense CIS points to a related issue concerning how researchers ‘construct’ the fieldsite of collaborative work, realizing that it is not fixed but arranged or assembledfor purposes of the research, including the technology design issues in focus. Inthe next section we explore changing understandings of the ‘field site’ promptedby the increasingly distributed, mobile, virtual, and networked quality of manyactivities and by recent retheorizing the object of ethnographic inquiry.

4. Constructing the field site

Ethnographic workplace studies rely on fieldwork in real-world settings. Thesedesignated ‘field sites’ are an obvious and essential component of allethnographic research. Therefore, it is surprising how little attention has beenpaid to the ‘field site’ in CSCW. Conversely, the ‘field site’ has always been acentral concern for ethnography, particularly in anthropology, and in recent yearsit has become problematized and even more topical.

We organize our discussion of ‘Constructing the field site’ by first tracing howthe ‘field site’ has been conceived in CSCW, focusing in Section 4.1.1 on ‘Single-sited workplace studies’, in Section 4.1.2 on ‘Comparative studies over multiplework sites’, and in Section 4.1.3 on the view ‘Beyond the workplace’. While wedo not propose to present a chronological progression in how the field site isdefined in CSCW, we find that there are elements of change over time in both thediversification and expansion of what is understood as the ‘field site’. Finally, inSection 4.1.4 on ‘Emerging arenas and challenges’ we discuss contemporary


developments and issues that relate to the diversification and expansion of what isdefined as the ‘field site’.

We then continue our discussion by briefly introducing two recent ‘field site’related developments in anthropology that we believe are relevant for addressingcontemporary challenges faced by ethnographic studies in CSCW. In Section 4.2on ‘Constructing the field site in anthropology’ we discuss a development withinanthropology which organizes around an understanding of the field site as‘constructed,’ challenging the notion of the field site as distinct, easily bounded,and waiting to be ‘discovered’. In Section 4.4 on ‘Multi-sited ethnography inanthropology’ we present a second development within anthropology which callsinto question the conventional view of ‘locality’ as spatially and temporallybounded and that introduces the concept of ‘multi-sited ethnography’. Here thestudied phenomenon is understood to be constituted by mobility, intersection, andflow; with a focus on connections, associations, and relationships across spaceand time. These two developments within anthropology are each followed by adiscussion of their relation to CSCW research, beginning in Section 4.3 with howfield sites are ‘constructed’ in CSCW and followed by a discussion in Section 4.5of ‘multi-sited ethnography’1 in CSCW. We conclude our discussion bysuggesting that reconceptualizing the field site as a multi-sited construct mayhelp address recent concerns in CSCW which decenter the workplace as the sitefor theorizing about technology in relation to the support of cooperative activities.

4.1. Field sites in CSCW studies

This section focuses on the ways in which the ‘field site’ has been characterizedin CSCW research, often in terms of spatially and temporally located socio-material processes of interest. We consider the setting of the field site and thetypes of collaborative activities, computer support, and research topics germaneto those settings.

4.1.1. Single-sited workplace studiesMany of the early workplace studies were about technology-intensive forms ofpractice in localized worksites such as air traffic control rooms (Harper et al. 1991;Bentley et al. 1992; Harper and Hughes 1993), control centers in the Londonunderground (Heath and Luff 1991, 1992) and in the Paris Metro (Filippi andTheureau 1993), airport ground operations rooms (Suchman and Trigg 1991;Goodwin and Goodwin 1997; Suchman 1993), and navigation at the bridge of a ship(Hutchins 1990, 1995). In these studies of ‘centers of coordination’ (Suchman 1997),the ‘field site’ is characteristically framed as a densely socio-material location where

1 In fact, the initial, influential article on multi-sited ethnography by Marcus (1995) has been criticized for‘its lack of attention to processes of bounding, selection and choice’ that are central in ‘constructing thefield site’ (Candea 2009, p. 27). We want to avoid this by starting with the topic of ‘constructing the fieldsite’ before continuing to ‘multi-sited ethnography’.


boundaries are assumed and unproblematically defined. These hot-spots ofcommunication and coordination are characterized in terms of patterns of both co-present and technology-mediated interactions, real-time co-location, and immediatepresence of a relatively small group of workers with strong mutual orientation,awareness, and monitoring of each other and the developing situation. This way ofdemarcating the site of study continues within CSCW with research focused onmedical operating rooms (Koschmann et al. 2006; Svensson et al. 2007) andemergency service centers (Pettersson et al. 2004; Paoletti 2009) among others.

Single-sited ethnographic studies of collaborative work have flourished inCSCW (Button 1993; Engeström and Middleton 1996; Heath et al. 2000; Heathand Luff 2000; Pollock and Williams 2010; Randell et al. 2011; Szymanski andWhalen 2011; Fitzpatrick and Ellingsen 2013). However, these single-sitedstudies display a great deal of variety in researchers’ choices and strategies forhow to structure and operationalize fieldwork and data collection within thesingle-sites in order to investigate the complex conditions and activities thatparticular collaborative work involves. For some this has meant focusing onartifacts (Schneider and Wagner 1993; Suchman et al. 2002; Schmidt and Wagner2004; Bardram and Bossen 2005b; Halverson and Ackerman 2008; Bjørn andHertzum 2011) and documents (Luff et al. 1992; Heath and Luff 1996; Hertzum1999; Sellen and Harper 2002; Østerlund 2008; Szymanski and Whalen 2011) incooperative work, and for others it has meant a concern with spatial (Telliogluand Wagner 2001; Bardram and Bossen 2005a) or temporal (Egger and Wagner1993; Bardram 2000; Reddy and Dourish 2002; Reddy et al. 2006) dimensions ofwork. Others have focused on common objects (Rogers 1993), boundary objects(Lee 2007; Bossen et al. 2012), or trajectories (Ackerman and Halverson 2004;Seebeck et al. 2005; Graham et al. 2005; Munkvold and Ellingsen 2007). Otherstrategies include comparisons of physical and digital work practices or workspaces(Luff et al. 1992; Büscher et al. 2001a; Bossen andMarkussen 2010) within the samesettings. Yet others have focused on mobilities (Luff and Heath 1998; Juhlin andWeilenmann 2001; Bardram and Bossen 2003, 2005a; Nilsson and Hertzum 2005)and the integration of real world and virtual environments (Fitzpatrick et al. 1996;Bowers et al. 1996; Hindmarsh et al. 1998). In addition, there are a number of studiesthat define their focus based on certain collaboration technologies where the field siteis delimited by the use of particular technologies.

In single-sited workplace studies it is more common for the study site to bedelimited by situation relevant boundaries, such as physical, technological,organizational, institutional, or geographic borders. However, already thefoundational studies of coordination centers revealed aspects of a moredistributed workplace, where the hot-spot centers are directly connected viatechnologies to distant locations (Suchman 1997) and where ‘moving out fromthe control room’ (Hughes et al. 1994a) to more dispersed worlds of work isevident. This trend has continued in more recent studies of coordination centers,for example, O’Neill et al. (2011) specifically focus on the navigation and


coordination of call center agents as they engage with the distant customers andmachines. Furthermore, some of the strategies used in single-sited studies havecaused the tightly circumscribed boundaries to leak, for instance, followingpatient trajectories as work crosses institutional boundaries (Randell et al. 2011),pursuing mobile work (Nilsson and Hertzum 2005), tracking an experimentalsystem as it traverses institutional boundaries (Karasti 2001b), analyzingindividual worker’s personal social networks (Nardi et al. 2002), and exploringrelationship work in ‘war room’ meetings for global engineering (Bjørn andChristensen 2011). Thus, whether this has been planned from the start of a projector develops as researchers get to know the field with its multiple connections toother sites, the result is more distributed and open-ended field sites.

4.1.2. Comparative studies over multiple work sitesAnalyses of the specificities of particular work settings have been criticized foremphasizing the uniqueness of the setting instead of defining similarities across settings.This is often seen as problematic for systems design since the expectation is that thesesystems will be used in a range of workplace settings. In response, some researcherswithin CSCW have conducted comparative studies over multiple work sites in order toprovide understandings about the similarities and commonalities in work practices, forexample, providing meta-analysis (Martin et al. 2007), analysis of the ‘higher-order’practices (Schmidt et al. 2007), or larger synthesis (Suchman 1997); exploring criticaland disputed design issues (Mackay 1999); developing a typology for health informatics(Balka et al. 2008); and increasing the relevance and generalizability of the findings fordesign (Randell et al. 2011). To achieve these generalizable aims, research is planned,organized, and conducted as comparative from the beginning (Bowers et al. 1995;O’Neill et al. 2008; Randell et al. 2011), or is carried out a posteriori by revisitingand drawing on an existing set of single-sited studies (Martin et al. 2007; Schmidt etal. 2007), or is conducted as a new single-sited study to be compared with a selectedset of prior studies (Mackay 1999). These studies all assemble the field site to allowhorizontal comparison over several single-sited studies.

4.1.3. Beyond the workplaceMany CSCW studies have moved ‘out of the workplace’ altogether as non-worksettings have become saturated with CSCW-type technologies, for example,mobile, ambient, pervasive, ubiquitous, and wearable computing, not to mentiononline social software and collaborative, virtual, and mixed reality environments.There also are increasingly more ethnographic studies of diverse settings of everydaylife, for example domestic (O’Brien et al. 1999; Crabtree and Rodden 2004; Crabtreeet al. 2004; Bell and Dourish 2007; Rode 2010; Massimi et al. 2012), parenting(Rode 2009), children and youth (Taylor and Harper 2003; Schiano et al. 2007;Barkhuus and Lecusay 2012), aging and home care (Palen and Aaløkke 2006;Lindley et al. 2008; Aarhus et al. 2009; Aarhus and Ballegaard 2010; Mülleret al. 2012), leisure (Hindmarsh et al. 2002; Szymanski et al. 2008; Juhlin and


Weilenmann 2008; Durrant et al. 2012), gaming (Brown and Bell 2004; Crabtree etal. 2005; Nardi and Harris 2006; Benford et al. 2006; Crabtree et al. 2007;Ducheneaut et al. 2007; Bennerstedt and Ivarsson 2010), community (Mynatt et al.1998; Ducheneaut 2005; Geiger 2010; Saeed et al. 2011; Baumer et al. 2011), urbansettings and public events (Jacucci et al. 2005; Hindmarsh et al. 2005; O’Hara et al.2003; Paay and Kjeldskov 2008; Schiano and Bellotti 2011), tourism (Brown andChalmers 2003), and socializing and peer social relationships, for example, instantmessaging, text messaging, and social networking (Nardi et al. 2000, 2004; Taylorand Harper 2003; Nardi 2005; Ducheneaut 2005; Perry and Rachovides 2007).

While studies that expand the framing of CSCW beyond the workplace haveinvited reflections about the boundaries of CSCW as a research discipline (e.g.Crabtree et al. 2005; Schmidt 2011a; Star and Strauss 1999), the field site oftencontinues to be conceptualized as single-sited, such as museums, amusementparks, and elderly residences, or as studies of multiple single sites such as acrossmany households (e.g. O’Brien et al. 1999; Rode 2010; Massimi et al. 2012).

4.1.4. Emerging arenas and challengesIn the last few years, new arenas have emerged and old ones have beenvigorously rediscovered in CSCW as a response to contemporary challenges.People are increasingly on the move; flows of goods, information, media images,and services are ever more global; organizations are more fragmented,geographically dispersed, and sometimes virtual; collaborations are progressivelymore large-scale, cross-cultural, and transnational; and technologies are moremobile, ubiquitous, integrated, and infrastructural.

While studies of the virtual have been on the CSCWagenda since at least the mid1990’s, they have become more prominent with the ubiquity of the Internet andproliferation of virtual environments, particularly in relation to social networking andgaming research. Connections over the Internet, including wireless, have renderedthe field site rather ‘unbounded’ as in the case of social networking, spreading overmobile device infrastructures (e.g. Nardi et al. 2004; Schiano et al. 2007), and in thecase of gaming, dispersing to either virtual (e.g. Ducheneaut et al. 2007) or mixedreality environments (e.g. where the field site integrates online on the screen and real-world on the streets, Benford et al. 2006). While many ethnographic studies of thevirtual in CSCW conceive the field site as a mix of the real world and virtualenvironments, in some recent studies the field site has been set up as purely virtual(e.g. Nardi and Harris 2006; Ducheneaut et al. 2007).

Mobility studies that began in CSCW within the framing of single-sitedstudies (see Section 4.1.1 on ‘Single-sited workplace studies’) have expandedboth their spatial and temporal reach. The notions of mobility havediversified (see Büscher et al. 2011) from the corporeal movement of peopleand physical movement of objects or artifacts within bounded field sites (e.g.Bardram and Bossen 2005a) to encompass more open or hybrid ecologiesthat include boundary crossings (e.g. Rolland et al. 2006), global processes


(e.g. Avram et al. 2009), and the use of mobile devices in large-scale events andurban settings (e.g. Lindström and Pettersson 2010; Schiano and Bellotti 2011).Furthermore, nomadic work (Su and Mark 2008), mobile technology, transnationalmigration (Williams et al. 2008), the global mobility of information technologyimages and imagination (Lindtner et al. 2012), and information technology use bypeople in developing regions (Taylor 2011) have captured the attention of CSCWresearchers.

Beginning with the pioneering investigations inspired by Science and TechnologyStudies (STS) in 1990s (Star and Ruhleder 1994, 1996; Hanseth et al. 1994, 1996),there has been a growing interest in topics that necessitate a scope that extends beyondwhat single-sited studies can offer, for example, standardization and/or systemintegration (Hanseth and Braa 2001; Ellingsen and Monteiro 2003, 2006; Ellingsenand Røed 2010; Winthereik and Vikkelsø 2005; Johannessen and Ellingsen 2009;Meum et al. 2011), open source and distributed software development(Ducheneaut 2005; Avram et al. 2009; Bjørn and Christensen 2011), infrastructurestudies of healthcare (JCSCW Special Issue on Information Infrastructures forHealthcare, Bansler and Kensing 2010), and for large-scale scientific collaboration(JCSCW Special Issues on Collaboration in e-Research (Jirotka et al. 2006) andSociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research (Lee et al. 2010)).

On the whole, it has become increasingly problematic in CSCW to conceptualizethe field site as single-sited. The field site has become a multifaceted and intricateconstellation of people, technologies, activities, entities, and relations; and theboundaries of the field site are less clear, even unbounded, involving extended spatialand temporal scope. This raises interesting practical, methodological, substantive,epistemological, and political issues and challenges for ethnography in CSCW.

We now turn our attention to a discussion of issues related to ‘constructing thefield site’ and ‘multi-sited ethnography’, with a focus on the researcher’s locationand position within the sites of CSCW research and on the construction of multi-sited objects and topics of study. Our purpose is not to cover in detail the manytopics of relevance to defining field sites in anthropological and ethnographicresearch. While this is outside our scope, we refer the interested reader tocomprehensive introductions within the cited literature.2

4.2. Constructing the field site in anthropology

Fieldwork and its location have always been of central interest in anthropologywhereresearch relies on intensive participant observation (Gupta and Ferguson 1997;Hannerz 1992; Amit 2000a) and where activities are experienced as performed rather

2 Cited literature include, Marcus’ foundational article on multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) andfurther developments on multi-sited program (Marcus 1998), two edited books that discuss boththeoretical and practical challenges in doing multi-sited ethnography (Falzon 2009a; Coleman and vonHellerman 2011a), and criticisms of multi-sited ethnography (Hage 2005; Candea 2007, 2009).


than only communicated in dialogue. Thus there has been an assumption of thephysical presence of the researcher in the field. Immersion in the field allowed forfundamentally social experiences constituted through the fieldworker’s relationshipwith field site participants. The researcher’s personal relationships served as primaryvehicles for ethnographic insight where ‘data’ are produced in and of ‘thick’interaction between the researcher and the researched.

Recently the notion of field site as distinct and easily bounded has beenproblematized (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Amit 2000a)and what has emerged is an understanding that the field site is (and always hasbeen) constructed rather than discovered.

‘The notion of immersion implies that the ‘field’ which ethnographers enterexits as an independently bounded set of relationships and activities which isautonomous of the fieldwork through which it is discovered. Yet in a world ofinfinite interconnections and overlapping contexts, the ethnographic fieldcannot simply exist, awaiting discovery. It has to be laboriously constructed,pried apart from all the other possibilities for contextualization to which itsconstituent relationships and connections could also be referred. This processof construction is inescapably shaped by conceptual, professional, financialand relational opportunities and resources accessible to the ethnographer.’(Amit 2000b, p. 6, italics added)

Thus, the field site is not out there waiting to be visited; instead it is reflexivelyconstructed by every choice the ethnographer makes in selecting, connecting, andbounding the site and via the interactions through which s/he engages with thematerial artifacts and the people who define the field. Ethnographers define the objectsand subjects of their research during fieldwork, informed by their interests andmotivations. Field sites as unbounded spaces of possibilities are continuously ‘carvedout’ by the ethnographer in relation to specific resources, situations, and opportunitiesin the settings. Thus, ‘constructing the field site’ draws attention to the researcher’sactive role and activities in shaping the ‘field site’ as it becomes formulated anddistinguished apart from a multitude of other ways it could be contextualized.

4.3. Field sites as constructs in CSCW?

The prevalent, taken-for-granted way of conceiving the field site in CSCW is as arather fixed and bounded object of research to be named and described in varyingdegrees of detail much like early ‘discovery’ models of the field in anthropology.With a focus on a single (or somewhat extended) setting, the aim of these CSCWstudies was to gain an understanding of the details of practice in a particularsetting with the particular work/activity domains typically pre-selected accordingto some research interest. The designated field site was viewed unproblematicallyas a predefined object of study to be described in further detail as the studyproceeded.


Even in studies of centers of coordination where the field site may seem ‘cleanand circumscribed’, the ‘walls’ are constantly traversed because various activities‘in-here’ deal with, manage, and coordinate resources ‘out-there’. In addition,researchers have found it useful to focus on ‘subsets of cooperation’ within controlroom settings (Filippi and Theureau 1993) and have utilized opportunities that ariseduring the fieldwork to study changes involved in moving operations from one workfacility to another (Suchman 1997). In these examples the ethnographer(s) constructsthe field site through the activities of connecting, selecting, and bounding—althoughthese activities often remain invisible to the reader.

With the myriad of ways in which fieldwork has been structured andoperationalized in single-sited workplace studies, it seems apparent that fieldsites are not waiting for the researcher to ‘discover’ them, rather the fieldworkerthoughtfully selects to follow artifacts, documents, or people; or map spatial ortemporal trajectories; or trace the movement of boundary objects; or at timesconnect to other sites. What is often missing however is explicit reflection onthese choices other than in terms of adjusting the scope of data collection andanalysis to address specified research interests.

CSCW researchers have not for the most part ‘problematized’ the field site ashas been the case in anthropology where the researchers’ active, reflexive agencyin constructing the field sites is explicitly recognized. So, the more subtle ways inwhich the field site is continuously constructed remain implicit and unarticulated.

There are some exceptions, especially if we look beyond the clearly definedCSCW literature. In reporting on a study of the use of an Electronic PatientRecord (EPR) system in a small General Practice clinic, Winthereik et al. (2002)address the issue of constructing the field site as they discuss negotiating accessto the field site. Based on an analysis of the problematics of doing fieldwork, theyposit how negotiations for site access enable reconsideration of the researchers’assumptions and initial research questions. By raising the issue of what theresearchers can and cannot see, they illustrate how the field site and the object ofstudy are continually transformed and constructed.

In another example Henriksen (2002) explores the fieldworker’s position inconstructing the field site in a study of a web-based information system in amultinational pharmaceutical company. She describes through specific ethnographicencounters how the field site is comprised of distributed and shifting practices whichchallenge her ability to pin-down and identify the dispersed and elusivetechnological phenomenon of her study. The issues Henriksen raises also are relatedto the discussion of multi-sited ethnography presented in the following sections.

Finally Aanestad (2003) draws attention to the role technological ‘actors’ canplay in constructing the field site. In a study of the introduction of a multimediacommunication technology into a surgical operating theatre, she includes thecamera as an ‘actant’ in the processes of constructing the field site. In thislongitudinal study, the field site is shown to be achieved through emergent andsituated processes rather than preplanned.


To elaborate a bit further on this notion of the field site as constructed, let’slook at a current debate in CSCW that concerns expanding the focus of studybeyond the work setting. There are two seemingly opposite stances, one thatemphasizes the differences and another that stresses the similarities between workand non-work settings. Researchers who emphasize the fundamental differencesbetween work and non-work activities hold that work necessitates considerationof effectiveness and efficiency whereas non-work demands a concern foremotions, happiness, playfulness, and enjoyment (Brown and Barkhuus 2007).In addition, it is argued that the complexities involved with heterogeneous worksettings are far more demanding than those involved in any kind of ‘ludic’activities (Schmidt 2011a, b). Others argue for the similarities between work andnon-work settings, noting that both involve socially organized joint activity ofmundane practices (Crabtree et al. 2005). For instance, those working within theethnomethodological tradition are interested in exploring how the methods ofcollaborative organization of joint activities in work environments can betransposed to investigate non-work environments (O’Brien et al. 1999; Crabtreeet al. 2005).

From the anthropological point of view of constructing the field site, the issueis not which stance is correct, but rather that the field site is defined as work ornon-work or both depending on how the boundaries of the research areconstructed. Assumptions about difference and similarity between work andnon-work are influenced by the questions one is asking. In a similar vein Star andStrauss (1999, p. 10) write,

… little is obvious in any general sense about what exactly counts as work.When people agree, it may seem obvious or natural to think of some set ofactions as work, or as leisure. But as soon as the legitimacy of the action quawork is questioned, debate or dialogue begins.

Star and Strauss are referring to debates regarding the status of such activitiesas housework or childcare as non-work, while golf and client dinners are animportant part of sales work. This is related to the earlier discussion in Section 3.5on the relation between visible and invisible work.

If the field site is understood as constructed, it is not all that evident that thework and non-work settings are so clearly differentiated in any absolute way.Elements of playfulness, efficiency, complexity, and collaborative organizationare all potentially present as components of the constructed field site. Inalignment with this argument, some CSCW researchers point out that making asharp distinction between work and non-work settings is problematic (see e.g.JCSCW Special Issue on Leisure Technologies, Barkhuus and Brown 2007).Frequently provided examples of boundary blurring include such things asworking from home (e.g. teleworking, freelancers or remote working days), homebanking, home shopping, education at home, and elder care in the home. Whilepointing to such examples of the conflation of work and non-work activities, the


collaborative practices that blur boundaries, spatially, temporally, and conceptu-ally have not been much explored in CSCW.

Continuing our discussion of the field site as a multi-sited construct, we nowpresent a brief discussion of developments in anthropology regarding ‘multi-sitedethnography’ followed by an examination of the relevance of multi-sited studiesfor CSCW.

4.4. Multi-sited ethnography in anthropology

The notion of the field site as a ‘naturally’ occurring entity, such as theromanticized ‘far away village’ that represents a ‘culture’, has been challenged inanthropology (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1995). Ethnographersencounter an increasingly mobile population,3 calling into question the idea that‘locality’ is a spatially or temporally bounded site of cultural production. Multi-sited ethnography,

‘moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventionalethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings,objects, and identities in diffuse time-space. This mode defines for itself anobject of study that cannot be accounted for ethnographically by remainingfocused on a single site of intensive investigation’. (Marcus 1995, p. 96)

Falzon in discussing Marcus’ notion of multi-sited ethnography continues,

‘The essence of multi-sited research is to follow people, connections,associations, and relationships across space (because they are substantiallycontinuous but spatially non-contiguous). Research design proceeds by a seriesof juxtapositions in which the global is collapsed into and made an integralpart of parallel, related local situations, rather than something monolithic orexternal to them.’ (Falzon 2009b, pp. 1–2)

Thus, multi-sited ethnography addresses culture as constituted by intersectionand flow, and following the features associated with ever more extended andglobal processes, movements, continuities, and discontinuities.

In terms of fieldwork strategies, ‘multi-sited ethnography involves a spatiallydispersed field through which the ethnographer moves’ (Falzon 2009b, p. 2). Thefield site configuration can include modes that lend coherence to research withoutbeing static and spatially bounded. ‘Tracking’ strategies for multi-sitedethnographic research may include following the person, the object, themetaphor, the story, the biography, or the conflict across sites (Marcus 1995,pp. 105–110). Amit adds that ethnographers must purposively create theoccasions for contacts that are ‘episodic, occasional, partial, and ephemeral’ asthey study mobile individuals, diffuse processes, and dispersed and/or fragmented

3 Büscher et al. 2011 offer another way of understanding this shift as a ‘turn to mobilities’.


social networks (Amit 2000b, pp. 14–15). Multi-sited studies often ‘remain moreambivalent about relevant locations’ and actually ‘make it part of their goal tofind out where interesting things might be going on’ (Hine 2007, p. 661). Animportant part of the work of constructing the field site is to define the ‘morecomplex’ multi-sited object of study (Marcus 1998, pp. 13–14). The multi-sitedprogram ‘has played a crucial role in expanding the possibilities of anthropologyand the range of topics which could be considered suitable for “fieldwork”’(Candea 2009, p. 33).

Given new mobilities, intricate socio-technical constellations, and virtualworlds (Beaulieu 2004; Hine 2007; Nardi 2010; Büscher et al. 2011) thatincreasingly constitute the field of inquiry, it becomes challenging to foregroundand pull forward something coherent from such overlapping and intertwinedsocial terrains and this ‘… renders the ethnographer an even more central agent inthe construction of the “field”’ (Amit 2000b, p. 14).

The central role of the ethnographer is noteworthy also in writings that discuss themain challenges of multi-sited ethnography, for example, the lack of depth in suchstudies and challenges to the presumption of holism. Some question if multi-sitedethnography compromises the ‘thick description’ espoused by Geertz (1973) as this‘… type of research implies moving around and ‘following’ horizontally, there islittle time for staying put and ‘following’ vertically’ (Falzon 2009b, p. 7). Given thisreal concern Marcus’ initial response was to call for ‘ethnography through thick andthin’ (Marcus 1998), where there is a ‘strong accountability for intended, structuredpartiality and incompleteness in ethnographic research designs’ (Marcus 2011, p.21). He recognized that the strength of ethnography in multi-sited projects is variableand certain sites are more strategic for intensive investigation than others. Hage’s(2005) critical stance toward multi-sited research cautions that there may be animplication of ‘tacit holism’ and suggests adopting a ‘certain reflexivity concerningthe social relations that one is opting not to cover in depth’ and better define one’spartiality (Hage 2005, p. 466). Candea addresses the issue of ‘incompleteness’ bypointing out that the ethnographer always must make methodological decisions(‘make a cut’) about what’s in and out, reflecting upon and taking responsibility forthese choices (Candea 2007, p. 174).

4.5. Towards constructing multi-sited ethnographies in CSCW

There is a growing awaress of the need for extending the number and variety ofstudy sites in CSCW (e.g. Räsänen and Nyce 2008; Pollock and Williams 2010;Fitzpatrick and Ellingsen 2013; Monteiro et al. forthcoming). Ethnographic studiesof bounded single-sites produce rich and detailed analyses of collaboration, but theyare not able to reflect the ways organizations and activites are becoming increasingly‘unbounded’ with the availability of mobile, virtual, ubiquous, ambient, andpervasive technologies. Initial steps towards conceiving of field sites as multi-sitedcan be found in the Section 4.1.2 on ‘Comparative studies over multiple sites’where


a number of ethnographic studies are brought into a horizontal comparativearrangement, albeit in a rather straightforward manner and often a posteriori. Thereis, however, much more to the shift from the study of small, localized communitiesthan a simple multiplication of field sites (Amit 2000b, p. 13).

The kinds of studies we have discussed in Section 4.1.3 on ‘Beyond theworkplace’ and in Section 4.1.4 on ‘Emerging arenas and challenges’ highlightstrategies for constructing the field site that are not limited to simply increasingthe number of sites. Emergent interconnections and complexities of the studiedphenomenon are reflected in the construction of field sites so that they reach overmultiple temporal and spatial scales and dimensions. It is important to bear inmind—as Marcus reminds—that multi-sited field sites are not isomorphic withreified networks, technical systems, or conceptual models; but more accuratelytrack ongoing processes in relation to such assemblages (Marcus 2009, p. 190).Furthermore, the metaphor of ‘following’ does not imply simply traversing aroute laid out in advance, but rather actively choosing and constituting theethnographic path (Coleman and von Hellerman 2011b, p. 3). In a similar vein,Räsänen and Nyce argue for more analytical and contextually inclusive ways ofunderstanding technology and its design and implementation that ‘pay[s]attention to what goes on beyond the immediate use of technology itself, i.e.turn towards the structures and conventions that constitute technology use andvice versa’ (Räsänen and Nyce 2008, p. 403).

Two recent studies provide examples of how researchers have taken steps toconstruct the object of study together with the field site as part of multi-sitedethnographic research. In addition, these examples explicitly include temporalconsiderations as part of the multi-sited studies. Karasti et al. (2010) present anarrative account of a three-year study of collaborative infrastructure develop-ment that takes place in the context of a decade-long joint research undertaking ofthe US LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) network. The multi-sited fieldstudy ‘followed’ the unfolding development process of a metadata standard andassociated tools for supporting large-scale collaboration in ecological research.The study involved a network of 26 ecological research sites, the network-levelinformation management committee, and the national development organizationthat serves the ecological research domain. Through the analysis of ‘collaborativeinfrastructure development’ the authors develop the notions of ‘infrastructuretime’ and ‘continuing design’ that take into consideration the dispersion of anddifferences in sites, practices, concerns, and temporal scope. These notionsexpand the customary temporal dimension of collaborative development andadvance a view of more diversified temporal hybrids in collaborative infrastruc-ture development.

Another example of an extensive multi-sited ethnographic study is a more thantwo-decade long program of empirical research into the evolution of corporateinformation infrastructures, more specifically packaged enterprise solutions(Pollock and Williams 2009, 2010). Through their research on Enterprise


Resource Planning systems, Pollock and Williams (ibid.) put forward a‘Biography of Artefacts’ (BoA) perspective that emphasizes the value of‘strategic ethnography’ for theoretically-informed, longitudinal, multi-sited field-work. They argue that the perspective is ‘underpinned by the need to addresstechnologies at different moments in the systems development life-cycle(design, implementation, use and further enhancement) and their relation tothe broader product cycle (encompassing the shift from emerging to matureproducts and their subsequent extension and evolution)’ (Pollock andWilliams 2010, pp. 543–544).

The recent challenges of studying extended settings and emerging arenasin CSCW raise questions about the relevance of ethnography for CSCW.However, the spatially and temporally expanded horizons of action arewithin the grasp of the methodological and analytic province of ethnographyif we view the field site as a construct defined at the intersection of thedeveloping research interests, the multi-sited object of study, and theparticular engagement of the researcher. We argue for a willingness topursue emerging and unfolding connections, flows, and discontinuities inconstructing the sites, objects, and topics of ethnographic inquiry. Thisaligns well with the open-ended agenda of CSCW (Bowers et al. 1992;Schmidt 2012), mitigates concerns about ethnography’s continuing relevanceto CSCW, and expands the range of multi-sited ethnographies withinCSCW’s purview.

5. Connecting ethnography and design

During the last 25 years the boundary between ethnography and design has beenexplored and (re)defined (for reviews and discussions see e.g. Anderson 1997;Blomberg et al. 1993; Schmidt 2000; Pors et al. 2002; Blomberg andBurrell 2012; Blomberg and Karasti 2012). Much of the literature on the relationbetween ethnography and design has relied on ‘weak connections’, positioningethnography in the role of informing design, serving a design agenda, orprovisioning implications for design4 (Anderson 1994; Plowman et al. 1995;Dourish 2006). In this section we offer an alternative way of positioningethnography in relation to design. We discuss less frequent strategies thatradically reposition ethnography not as a tool for design, but as deeply integratedinto the doing of design in CSCW. We follow with a discussion of ethnographicresearch that is positioned to proceed relatively unfettered with the problems of

4 We have chosen not to review the literature on the development of formal representations, designmethods, schemas, scenarios, personas, experience models, and the like that have been developed toconnect ethnography and design (see for example Hughes et al. 1995, 1997; Sommerville et al. 1992;Viller and Sommerville 1999; Twidale et al. 1993; Blomberg and Burrell 2012; Carroll 2000; Nardi 1992;Bødker et al. 2004; Pruitt and Grudin 2003; Pruitt and Adlin 2006).


design, as we see its continued relevance and importance in CSCW, especially inrelation to emerging developments.

5.1. Strategies for integration: reconciling differences and finding synergies

Despite the debates about disciplinary discrepancies too great to overcome andperspectives too different to resolve (Grudin and Grinter 1995; Button andHarper 1996; Bader and Nyce 1998), some researchers and research groups haveengaged in exploring in practice how to create opportunities for tightly couplingthe perspectives of ethnography and design. We briefly present five of thesestrategies and highlight how they have reconciled and found synergies forassumptions and expectations regarding the relation between ethnography anddesign. The strategies all involve greater participation of the intended ‘users’ ofthe designed artifact(s) in defining the emerging design and as such drawinspiration from the principles and practices of Participatory Design (Kensing andBlomberg 1998; Simonsen and Robertson 2012). We have chosen these particularstrategies as they each emphasize a particular aspect of the coupling ofethnography and design, including (1) the interleaving of work practice studyand design representations, (2) the direct involvement of practitioners indeveloping analytic understandings along an extended temporal continuum oftheir work and technologies, (3) the iterative evaluation of technology-in-use, (4)the commitment to long-term engagement between designers and users thatrecognizes the inevitability of design-in-use, and (5) the positioning of designintervention as a necessary and equal partner in understanding the present andimagining the future.

5.1.1. Work practice oriented designA group of anthropologists and computer scientists working in the area of WorkPractice and Technology at Xerox PARC explored the integration of ethnographyand participatory design in their efforts to reconceptualize and restructure howwork and technology design were undertaken (Suchman et al. 1999; Blomberg etal. 1996; Trigg et al. 1999). Their work practice oriented design projects in avariety of settings integrated studies of specific worksites with cooperativedevelopment of prototype systems in order to intervene into the processes ofprofessional technology production (Blomberg et al. 1996). Suchman and Trigg(1991) describe a joint enterprise where the three perspectives of research, design,and practice are linked and where the recognition of workers’, researchers’, anddesigners’ situated locations and partial knowledges require ongoing collabora-tions. They stress that the perspectives are not absolute, fixed positions, butrelative to each other, often requiring participants to move between perspectives(ibid, pp. 85–86). As a response to the debate regarding ethnography’s descriptive‘here and now’ approach versus the prescriptive and interventionist stance ofdesign, they proposed that ‘innovation is an imagination of what could be, based


in knowledge of what is’, arguing that awareness of the current context is aresource for proposing meaningful change (Suchman et al. 1999). To disrupt thestaged, sequential approach of first describing the present state and thenproposing a prospective state, they argue for interleaving studies of currentpractice with interventions, coupled with a case-based prototype approach that‘involve[s] cycling among studies of work, codesign, and user experience withmock-ups and prototypes of new technologies… [where] work practice studies[are] embedded in design activities, whereas design efforts contribute to workanalysis’ (Blomberg et al. 1996, p. 240). These strategies for embedding workpractice studies with design and vise versa continue to inform allied researchprograms (cf. Szymanski and Whalen 2011).

5.1.2. Increasing sensitivity towards work practice in designUnder the title of ‘Increasing sensitivity towards everyday work practice indesign’ Karasti explores the integration of ethnographic studies of work andparticipatory design in healthcare settings (Karasti 1997, 2001a, b). Thisexploration began by the researcher reflecting on her role as interdisciplinaryresearcher and her positioning as ‘participant observer’. During longitudinalfieldwork studying work practices and the unfolding of endogenous technologyprocurement and implementation processes she reflectively became a ‘participantinterventionist’ and used this positioning for organizing workshops (Karasti 2001b)that intervened in these processes. Longitudinal fieldwork allowed practitioners togain analytic sensibilities towards their own work and technology use via‘stimulated recall interviews’. These sensibilities were employed later in themultiparty video-based workshops (Karasti 2001a, b) which extended thetemporal horizon of the ‘here and now’ collaborative activities. Furthermore,the analysis and juxtaposition of work with traditional film-based and new digitalimaging system enabled the evaluation and (re)design of the future system. Co-creating shared understandings of these work contexts with different technologyfutures allowed the participants to move along an extended temporal continuumand make use of its temporal qualities for ongoing analysis, evaluation,envisioning, and (re)design of both work practices and system possibilities.

5.1.3. Bricolage, grounded imaging and forcing the futureA group of (mainly) Lancaster University based sociologists and participatorydesigners from Aarhus University explored crossing boundaries betweentechnology production and use in a series of research projects (Shapiro et al. 1996;Büscher and Mogensen 1997; Büscher et al. 2001b; Büscher et al. 2004). Inbringing together system design, work analysis, and user experience, theyemphasized an iterative approach and evaluation of technology-in-use and arguedfor the necessity to use combinations of various methods, such as bricolage,grounded imagination, prototyping experiments in-situ, and future laboratories(Büscher et al. 2004). Bricolage as a design approach is offered as a means of


realizing work affording ensembles of technologies, practices, and procedures(Shapiro et al. 1996). It positions interventions at a number of levels whichinclude technological embedding within the workplace and making technologiesusable. Grounded imagining is argued to bridge the gap between the dual aspectsof practice and imagination wherein researchers ‘need to anticipate and design forfuture practice whilst remaining “grounded” in an inescapably and continuouslychanging environment’ (Büscher et al. 2004, p.193). Relying on succession of‘situated experimentation’ the future is confronted through continuing cycles ofdesign and work practice revisions. The design of technical support, theassessment of outcomes, and the design of further solutions are informed byworking with and between long-term possibilities and current conditions.

5.1.4. Co-realisationCo-realisation is an orientation to technology production that developed out of ‘aprincipled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design’ (Hartswoodet al. 2002, p. 9). It starts from the observation that the full implications of a newsystem for work practices cannot be grasped by studying the work as it is now,but will only be revealed in and through the systems subsequent use. It positionsethnography, design, and work practice in ongoing relation by 1) committing tolong-term, direct engagement between designers and users and 2) moving thelocus of design and development activities into workplace settings where the newtechnologies will be used. The key issue for design is supporting ‘design-in-use’(Henderson and Kyng 1991), recognizing that the information technologies andwork practices co-evolve over time and that new technical artifacts requireeffective configuration and integration with work practices. Co-realizationpromotes long-term immersion in the field site and aims to create a sharedpractice between users and designers that is grounded in the experiences of users,and where users drive the process (Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss 2006). Co-realization insists on maintaining a dialogue between users and designers whichrequires ‘co-realizers’ ‘being there’ in the workplace, becoming a member of thesetting, and acquiring familiarity with members’ knowledge and mundanecompetencies. Thus, it envisages design as a longitudinal process that fostersaccountability and capitalizes on an ethnographic engagement with work practice(Voss et al. 2009b, p. 52).

5.1.5. Design ethnographyResearchers primarily in Denmark have been developing a strategy forintegrating design and ethnography into a ‘single movement’ where they arguethat we ‘… abandon the idea that the field of use is a place to visit and to beknown, and that the design studio is a privileged place for invention…’ so we can‘…unleash a greater potential of combining anthropology and design’ (Halse etal. 2010, p. 15). Through a series of case studies they argue for an interventionistdesign research approach that integrates participatory design with a critical mode


of inquiry, drawing on actor network theory (ANT) to question distinctionsbetween subject and object in the context of ethnographic inquiry. They arguethat interventions ‘open new ways of conceiving the world’ and enable a deeperintegration of design and anthropology (Halse 2008). Interventions are positioned‘… in-between what is already there and what is emerging as a possible future’(Andersen et al. 2011, p. 8). The interventionist experiment not only proposes arelevant ‘solution’ to a ‘practical problem’, but also enables the researchers todeepen their understanding of the complexities of the domain of their research—and project a future ‘reality’ (ibid).

In a related vein, proponents of the Design Anthropological Innovation Model(DAIM) argue that ‘… it is not enough for each expert [e.g. ethnographer,designer] to bring her side of the story to the others. These horizons must activelybe brought together in concrete terms to really take the full synergetic effect’(Halse et al. 2010, p. 14). Building on earlier work by Buur and his colleagues(Buur et al. 2000; Buur and Bødker 2000) where ‘ethnographic’ video is used asdesign material they develop a hybrid practice between ethnography and designwhere imagining the future is not separated from understanding the present.

The above strategies have challenged many of the customary boundariesbetween ethnography and design. In their practical attempts to get the work donecollaboratively with the participants and given the expertise and resourcesavailable within their particular, situated settings; these researchers have created avariety of socio-material contexts where the relations between ethnography anddesign are reimagined. They do not argue for a singular relation to design, but avaried contribution shaped by the everyday ‘realities’ of the sites of design andintervention, informed by the possibilities of participation given local contingen-cies, and iteratively allied with both observation and intervention, and the sourceand outcome of design. The strategies convey a growing awareness of thebenefits of developing more longitudinal and iterative approaches for connectingethnography and design. However, there is still much work to do in exploringhow to connect ethnography and design in spatially and temporally extendedsettings and for emerging arenas of CSCW.

5.2. Ethnographic studies unencumbered by design

Ethnography unencumbered by design has been primarily concerned withunderstanding social phenomena via detailed, analytic descriptions of workpractice and with exploring conceptual and theoretical issues in the socialsciences (e.g. Bucciarelli 1995; Henderson 1991; Luff et al. 1992, 2000; Sharrockand Anderson 1994; Star and Ruhleder 1994, 1996; Suchman 1983; Suchmanand Wynn 1984; Wynn 1979). These studies proceed relatively unfettered by theproblems of design (Anderson 1997). While the studies are designed andundertaken without a specific design agenda, they may later lay the groundworkfor design oriented projects, for example, studies of air traffic controllers


(Harper et al. 1991), airport ground operations (Suchman 1993), and large-scale scientific collaborations (Star and Ruhleder 1996).

The influence of these types of studies on system design has been significant,making important theoretical contributions (Anderson 1997; Plowman et al. 1995;Schmidt 2000, 2011b). Some of these studies have also played an important role inshaping the agenda, concerns, and central questions of CSCW, most recognizablySuchman (1987). Others have contributed to the conceptual foundation of the field,as we have seen in Section 3 on ‘The sociality and materiality of work’, informingand contributing to the development of such concepts as situated action, flexibleworkflows, situated awareness, articulation work, invisible work, material resourcesfor action, and common information spaces. These studies have—over time—incited and inspired design professionals to explore ways these concepts mightinfluence and guide in the development of new technologies.

In the current landscape of CSCW, we see the continued relevance andimportance of the ‘innocent’ ethnographies, particularly for the extended andemerging arenas in CSCW where multi-sited, mobile, and virtual ethnographiespresent new challenges. We are seeing some examples of new conceptualizations,for example, with notions of ‘human infrastructure’ (Lee et al. 2006) and‘infrastructure time’ (Karasti et al. 2010) in investigations of cyberinfrastructureand e-research collaborations. As we continue to gain experiences in constructingand carrying out multi-sited ethnographies, we believe new connections betweenethnography and design will emerge.

6. Whose ethnography?

The role of ethnography in design-oriented fields has been debated since the earlydays of CSCW. Beginning with Anderson’s (1994) Representations and Require-ments: The value of ethnography in system designwhere he argues that ethnographyhas been misunderstood and often misappropriated in the context of design.Anderson contends that instead of looking to ethnography to provide descriptions ofwork andwork settings for the purposes of design, the proper andmore powerful roleof ethnography should be analytic, providing designers with new ways of seeing andunderstanding human conduct. Button (2000) later makes a similar distinctionbetween what he calls ‘scenic fieldwork’ and ethnomethodological ethnography.Anderson further maintains that if designers only want ‘requirements specifications’they don’t need ethnography to offer views on users’ worlds, as any relativelycompetent observer can deliver these (scenic) accounts. Anderson states,

‘This is not to say that getting to know users and their knowledge and practicesis unnecessary or irrelevant or that observational fieldwork and impressionisticreportage can be of no value in this. Far from it! It is simply that you do not needethnography to do that; just minimal competency in interactive skills, awillingness to spend time, and a fair amount of patience.’ (Anderson 1994, p. 155)


While there may be some truth in this argument, Forsythe (1999) rightlycontends that being a competent observer involves a wide range of skills that arenot that easy to acquire, including knowledge of particular theoretical constructsand ways of seeing. She goes on to caution that important aspects of work areoften deleted (not seen) by observers without training in ethnography, offering asan example system designers who leave out of their descriptions of work theinformal interactions that take place among colleagues.

Leaving aside the question of what it takes to be a competent ethnographer,both Anderson and Forsythe are pointing to the fact that interpretive work isrequired to develop ethnographic descriptions. As Anderson (1994, p. 155) notes,‘The ethnographer’s eye is always interpretive.’ It is not enough to simply recordwhat is seen or heard in a straightforward way. Accounts are informed by theethnographer’s analytic eye and are shaped by frameworks and theories that bothemerge from the ‘data’ and build on previous research. Just what is meant by theinterpretive character of ethnography has fueled more recent debates in CSCWconcerning the place of ethnography in CSCWand other design-oriented disciplines.

Confusion concerning the value of ethnographic research in the context of CSCWcan also be attributed to the prevalent view in design-oriented fields that ethnographyis ‘… a corpus of field techniques for collecting and organizing data’ and is a ‘…shorthand for investigations that are, to some extent, in situ, qualitative, or open-ended’ (Dourish 2006, p. 543). Similar to Anderson’s (1994) argument, Dourish(2006, p. 542) cautions that reducing ethnography to a set of techniques ‘… mayunderestimate, misstate, or misconstrue the goals and mechanisms of ethnographicinvestigation.’ On this view the ethnographer ‘…is a passive instrument, a lensthrough which a specimen setting might be examined, with the ethnographyproviding an objective representation of that setting’ (ibid, p. 544).

Dourish (2006) goes on to argue, following Plowman et al. (1995), thatexpecting ethnographic studies to deliver ‘implications for design’ reduces thevalue of ethnography and too often results in rather simplistic, gratuitous, and notvery useful design recommendations. As Plowman et al. observe,

‘Authors of studies5 which make a valuable theoretical contribution to CSCW feelobliged to force design guidelines from their data, resulting in the classic‘implications for design’ section at the end of a paper.’ (Plowman et al. 1995, p. 314)

In addition, too close a coupling of ethnographic studies to specific technologydesigns, undervalues the contributions these studies can make to future designconsiderations (Schmidt 2000, 2012). Moreover, evaluating ethnographic studiesbased on their implications for design privileges designers as ‘gatekeepers’ indeciding on the merit of the research (ibid). Schmidt’s caution is not the first timethat the ‘politics’ of what is considered valuable ethnographic research in thecontext of CSCW and other design-oriented discipline has been called into

5 Plowman et al. (1995) note that most workplace studies in CSCW employ an ethnographic lens.


question. Shapiro (1994) raised the issue when he argued that the strong programin ethnomethodology might not be tenable in relation to the practical entailmentsof design. Arguing for ‘hybrid forms’ of ethnography, Shapiro reflects that, ‘…when we are concerned with matters in the real world, theoretically-basedcritiques are simply not a sound enough basis for rejecting contributions whichmight be useful’ (Shapiro 1994, p. 421).

Even if we agree that ethnography is more than a set of field techniques fordoing qualitative research and has value beyond providing bulleted lists of‘implications for design’ there remains a question of what is meant by the call foranalytic and/or interpretive ethnography. Ethnographic research in CSCW hasbeen deeply influenced by ethnomethodology, beginning with Suchman’s Plans andSituated Action (1987) and elaborated through studies by researchers associated withLancaster University (e.g. Bentley et al 1992; Hughes et al. 1992, 1994a; Randall etal. 1995). Ethnomethodology developed in sociology as a counter to prevailing waysof describing social life and institutions (e.g. Garfinkel 1967). Unlike traditionalsociology where sociological categories (e.g. gender, class, power, religion) are usedto describe and explain phenomena, ethnomethodology makes visible participants’situated methods for creating the coherence of phenomena. The analytic task forethnomethodology is to ‘…explicate and describe the members’ methods that couldhave been used to produce what happened in the way that it did’ (Benson andHughes 1991, p. 132).

Some of those working within the ethnomethodological tradition haveexpressed concern that CSCW and other design-oriented fields have failed torealize the consequences of what they describe as a move away fromethnomethodological ethnography (Crabtree et al. 2009). They offer as evidencefor this turn the increasing number of ethnographic studies that are informed byother social science traditions, most notably interpretive anthropology and criticalstudies. As Bell et al. (2003, p. 1063) emphasize, ‘[c]ritical readings of the socialcontext of use and the codification of meaning can generate innovativesuggestions for and approaches to design problems.’ Bell et al. draw on thehighly influential work of Geertz (1973) who argues that the ethnographer’sanalytic purchase is as an interpreter of the symbols of a culture. However, Geertzcautions that to divorce interpretation ‘…from what happens—from what, in thistime or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, fromthe whole vast business of the world—is to divorce it from its application andrender it vacant’ (ibid, p. 18). Not unlike ethnomethodology, interpretiveethnography makes a strong commitment to what is observable and contestable.Geertz writes (ibid, p. 29), ‘to commit oneself to … an interpretive approach tothe study of [culture] is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as,to borrow W. B. Gallie’s by now famous phrase, “essentially contestable.”’

While Anderson (1994), working within an ethnomethodological tradition,argues that analytic ethnography is always interpretive, it is unlikely mostethnomethodologists would agree, at least in the Geertzian notion of interpretation.


Clearly Crabtree et al. (2009), in their critique of critical studies, were contrastingethnomethodology with those approaches that adopted an interpretive lens. In factGarfinkel, who is regarded as the founder of ethnomethodology as a field of inquiryin sociology, claims,

‘Ethnomethodology is not in the business of interpreting signs. It is not aninterpretive enterprise. Enacted local practices are not texts which symbolize“meanings” or events. They are in detail identical with themselves. Thewitnessably recurrent details of ordinary everyday practices constitute theirown reality. They are studied in their unmediated details not as signedenterprises.’ (Garfinkel 1996, p. 8, italics added)

In what sense ethnography is an interpretive endeavor is at the heart of therecent controversies concerning the relation of ‘critical’ ethnography to CSCWand other design-oriented fields.

Crabtree et al. (2009) contrast ethnomethodological ethnography that has ‘…largely focused on detailed empirical studies of what people do and how theyorganize action and interaction in particular settings of relevance to design’ withethnography that ‘… engage[s] designers instead in a critical dialogue based oncultural interpretations of everyday settings, activities, and artefacts’ (ibid, p. 880,italics added). In this sense ethnomethodology disavows the role of the researcher asan interpreter of signs, while asserting an analytic role for ethnomethodologywherein the structuring and organization of action and interaction are described.Conversely interpretive ethnography is interested in the meanings that are ascribed tothings in the world, while acknowledging that those interpretations, by actors andresearchers alike, are shaped by their particular positionality. While these differencesare epistemological at their core, the debate in CSCW has mainly centered on theefficacy of the two approaches for design. Crabtree et al. (ibid) contend that thecritical readings in the end will prove less valuable for design.

Confounding the confusion over what is considered ‘proper’ ethnography inthe context of CSCW and design more broadly is an unfortunate positioning of‘critical’ or ‘interpretive’ ethnography as more appropriate for studying ludic,domestic, and consumer activities (Bell et al. 2003) whereas ethnomethodologicalethnography is associated with workplace studies where design emphasis often isplaced on productivity and efficiency (Schmidt 2011a). As Schmidt writes incontrasting ludic activities with work, “That is, central to the concept of work, theprimary cases of work designate activities that are considered ‘necessary oruseful’, either in terms of the concrete fruits of the labor (food, clothing, timber,tools, machines) or in terms of some other reward (recognition, salary) (ibid, 361).Bell et al. further argue that ‘… current understanding of user needs analysis,derived from the world of work … is not adequate to this new design challenge’asserting that the social and cultural impact of new technologies ‘… areparticularly relevant to the home, where technologies are situated or embeddedwithin an ecology that is rich with meaning and nuance’ (2003, p. 1062). While


arguments of efficiency and productivity may seem more relevant to theworkplace, notwithstanding the findings of the study of Silicon Valley familiesby Darrah et al. (2007), we agree with Crabtree and others that there is no a priorireason to expect that critical studies or interpretive ethnography are moreappropriate to non-work contexts, nor that ethnomethodological ethnography ismore applicable to work contexts. But we do contest Crabtree et al.’s implicationthat interpretive ethnography is not focused on ‘detailed empirical studies of whatpeople do and how they organize action and interaction in particular settings’(2009, p. 880). To the contrary, as Geertz (1973) argues, ethnography is alwaystied to the details of the lived experiences of the people studied.

While beyond the scope of this article, also confounding the debateregarding whose ethnography is best aligned with CSCW’s agenda is theconcern with the ways in which ethnographic accounts can be characterized as‘scientific’ renderings.6 Distancing themselves from claims to being scientific,Bell et al. (2005), referring to their use of the literary technique ofdefamiliarization, state that it is ‘… explicitly not a scientific method’ andassert that in this context the value of ethnography is not to ‘better understandtarget users and their practices [in a scientific way]’ but to ‘provide alternativeviewpoints’ (p. 154). The scientific veracity of the accounts is not on offer.Instead the interest is in providing designers with alternative ways ofunderstanding a phenomenon that are shaped by their ‘critical and alternative’readings of the situation.

Ethnomethodology insists on strong linkages between ethnographic accountsand what is observable and reportable and in this sense displays a distinctivelyempiricist and inductive rhetoric (Atkinson 1988). As Randall et al. (2001, p. 40)argue, ‘… what justification we have for arguing that any particular thing is“going on” should be evident in the data and open for inspection.’ Perhaps on thispoint ethnomethodological and interpretive ethnography can agree. Accountsmust be tied to what is observable and reportable and therefore they arecontestable. As Geertz (1973, p. 29) observes, ‘… progress is marked less by aperfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate.’

We have no intention of resolving these fundamental epistemological debatesand we fully expect (and hope) they will continue in CSCW. In fact we believethey are important in charting the role of ethnography in CSCW in the years tocome. However, we do not concur with those who suggest ‘new’ criticalethnographic approaches do not provide a valuable contribution to CSCW, andnot the least with regard to CSCW’s design agenda. On the contrary, we believeas the saying goes ‘the proof is in the eating’ and these studies have engageddesign(ers) in ways that have opened up design possibilities and guided designagendas in support of collaborative practices.

6 Randall et al. (2001) makes a similar argument in response to Nardi’s (1996) critique of situated action.


So returning to the question of what is ethnography good for, we offer thesemultiple articulations that reflect possibilities espoused by researchers in the field.

‘In summary, the advantage of applying ethnographic “methods” lies in the‘sensitising’ they promote to the real-world character of activities in context and,consequently, in the opportunity to ensure system development resonates with thecircumstances of systems use. In attempting not only to document or describeactivities but to explicate (or make observable) their real-world organisation,ethnography seeks to answer what might be regarded as an essential question indesign: what to automate and what to leave to human skill, competence,judgment, experience and expertise.’ (Crabtree et al. 2000, p. 667)

‘Rather than ethnography, or even fieldwork itself, it is the explication ofmembers’ knowledge—what people have to know to do work, and how thatknowledge is deployed in the ordering and organisation of work—thatprovides the key to understanding the contribution of sociology to engineeringand design.’ (Button 2000, p. 319)

‘Critical approaches to technology design are therefore of both practical andpolitical importance in … find[ing] strategies to identify and break out of thecentral metaphors dominating current domestic information appliance design.’(Bell et al. 2005, p. 149)

We do not advocate settling on a single ‘proper’ rendering of ethnography forCSCW and we do not provide a straightforward way to mitigate fundamentaldisagreements. But we do argue that CSCW should continue to distinguishanalytic and interpretive ethnography from studies that are content withproviding ‘reports from the field’ or lists of ‘design implications.’ By takingthis ecumenical position we are not excusing ‘bad’ ethnography, instead weare suggesting that our criteria for evaluation needs to include considerationof the claims being made for the value of the ethnographic account and thenturn our critical eye to assessing their success.

7. The next 25 years

As we reflect on the last 25 years of CSCW we ask what challenges recenttransitions in CSCW pose for ethnography. It is perhaps clear that there is a needfor more conceptually synthetic work that draws on an ever widening range ofethnographic studies coupled with new technology contexts. In a similar vein towhat has been done with the concept of ‘coordination’ (Ackerman et al. 2008;Schmidt 2011b), efforts should be undertaken to synthesize research on keyconcepts in CSCW, for example, concepts of awareness, invisible work, andflexible workflows. In addition, we will most likely need to develop new conceptsto help us understand collaboration in organizationally complex, widelydistributed, temporally expanded, and large scale settings.


Acknowledging that CSCW is a research field firmly grounded in ethnographicstudies of collaborative activities, we see a need for greater attention to definitionsof the field site, including how we construct multi-sited ethnographies. This will bekey to our ability to address emerging developments in CSCW, such as the blurringof the boundaries between work, community, and domestic life; the extensibility ofthe field site to encompass globally distributed partner organizations; theincreasingly loose coupling of people to their workplaces and co-workers; theaccretion of layers of technology in support of nearly all aspects of people’s lives;and the global scale of activities in for example political activism that have emergedin recent years.While this is a great challenge for future work, it is vital for our abilityto advance methodological as well as analytical frameworks required to support thecall for more conceptually oriented and synthetic research.

In addition, how we conceptualize the sites of ethnographic research willcontribute to new ways of ‘connecting ethnography and design,’ an essentialelement of CSCW. For most of the last 25 years we have framed the designquestion as rather bounded, tied to the local ‘requirements’ of the work. However,as CSCW has broadened its scope, both temporally and spatially, assumptionsabout users and context are more difficult to maintain. As Lindtner et al. (2011, p. 1)remark, ‘… we lack conceptual tools for understanding these complex webs ofmulti-sited technology use and design.’

Our approaches for integrating ethnography and design will have to develop aswe find ourselves adapting our methods to become more agile, itinerant,emergent, and attentive (Hine 2007, p. 669). Monteiro et al. (forthcoming) havesuggested a ‘constructive alternative’ to CSCW design, noting that design hasoften been assumed to be a relatively local activity in CSCW. They argue for ‘…analytical tools for capturing how technologies are shaped across multiple spacesand timeframes…’ and for ‘… concepts for informing infrastructure design … ofkey design qualities’(ibid, pp. 22–23). We believe that multi-sited ethnographies notonly allow for studying practices of technology production and use that aredistributed in time and space, but also for design that stretches out over temporal andspatial horizons (e.g. Karasti et al. 2010). In this we encourage more ‘integrative’ways of connecting ethnography and design.

As ethnography is being interleaved with design in more complex and variedways, new questions are raised about how to support interdisciplinarycollaboration and learning. Researchers and designers are finding themselves innew terrains and unaccustomed positions with respect to the ‘subjects’ of studyand to the design of the sociotechnical systems in focus. This argues for increasedflexibility (at times interchangeability) in roles vis-à-vis the dual ambitions of‘theorizing’ about the organization, including the structuring of cooperative activityand ‘participating’ in shaping future (design) possibilities. Taken together thissuggests there is value in greater reflexivity in how we see ourselves and define theaspirations of CSCW going forward (Karasti 2001b; Voss 2006; Voss et al. 2009a;Simonsen et al. 2010; Wagner et al. 2010; Andersen et al. 2011).


Finally, we believe there is ample room for contributions from people with diversebackgrounds, theoretical and methodological commitments, and practical entail-ments. We need to push each other to critically evaluate our assumptions, assess thelimitations of our approaches, and look for ways to benefit from each others’ efforts.

Acknowledgments

Karasti’s work has been supported by the Academy of Finland.

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