Making Work Visible : Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice

In the 1970s, Xerox pioneered the involvement of social science researchers in technology design and in developing better ways of working at PARC, its internal research center at the time (now an independent wholly owned subsidiary). The PARC legacy resulting from this work is a hybrid methodology that combines an ethnographic interest in direct observation in settings of interest with an ethnomethodological concern to make the study of interactional work an empirical, investigatory matter. This edited volume is an overview of PARC and Xerox's social science tradition. It uses detailed case studies showing how the client engagement was conducted over time and how the findings were consequential for business impact. Case studies in retail, production, office and home settings cover four topics: practices around documents, the customer front, learning and knowledge-sharing, and competency transfer. The impetus for this book was a 2003 initiative at Xerox to transfer knowledge about conducting ethnographically grounded work practice studies to its consultants so that they may generate the kinds of knowledge generated by the researchers themselves.

Margaret H. Szymanski is a Senior Research Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specialized in the study of language, interaction and social organization. In her work, Szymanski has examined topics such as communication across knowledge boundaries, social engagement at museums around electronic guidebooks, ethnographic training for corporations, and the organization of remote and co-present multi-party conversational interaction. She has published articles in Language in Society, the International Journal of Computer Support for Cooperative Work, Linguistics and Education and Discourse Processes.

Jack Whalen is a sociologist working for Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, an international NGO. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Art and Design at Aalto University, Helsinki. Previously, Whalen was a Principal Scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and Associate Professor of Sociology and Department Head at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (with Richard Flacks); has published articles in Social Psychology Quarterly, the British Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and many other journals; and has written chapters for a number of edited volumes, including Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing Systems Design; Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis; and The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces.