Making (new) things together. Everyday collaborative improvisation and the role of ethnography

How do everyday human activities come accomplished? How is it that people make things together? Furthermore, which is the sociological implication of the phenomenological principle of fundamental intersubjectivity? And what are the epistemological and methodological tenets we should gather from it? I believe the key of all the above mentioned questions is the following: interaction, or, better, action-in- interaction. Interaction is the very locus where work gets (collaboratively and situatedly) done. As such, it should also be the main focus of social research, and ethnography, from this point of view, represents an invaluable tool. Collaboration and co-operation in social (working) groups are phenomena that lay behind and beyond formal distribution of duties, roles and responsibilities; they rather emerge from the situated interaction of the members of a working group (and/or an occupational community [Van Maanen & Barley, 1984]) who share a mostly practical, tacit, and embodied corpus of knowledge and know-how. The collaborative improvisation taking place in and through interaction, in fact, constitutes the primary tool through which people everyday co-ordinate, carry on and accomplish activities. Ethnography enables to catch, in its minute details, the endogenous organization of activities in a field, thus allowing the researcher to bring to light the situated meaningfulness of everyday practices and the tacit logic underlying them. Starting from an ethnomethodologically oriented ethnography [e.g., Crabtree et al., 2000; Fele, 2008; Sharrock & Randall, 2004] that I have been carrying out in a medical emergency dispatch "centre of coordination" [Suchman, 1993, 1997] before, during, and after a techno-organizational change, the paper focuses on the role that ethnographic research could take in(/for) organizations as well as in(/for) the process of design and management of workplace change and innovation. I argue that ethnography's potential goes far beyond the role of problem solver [Akdere, 2003; cf. Kemmis, 2001; Maures & Githens, 2010]. Finally, I direct attention towards the properties - so to speak - of a "useful" ethnography. The research on which the paper is based has been carrying out at the medical emergency response centre of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy): "Trentino Emergenza 118". Data include: field notes, informal interviews, photographs, screen captures and other documentary materials collected on the field; audio-recordings (about 39 hours) of the phone calls and video-recordings (about 56 hours) of the everyday work in the centre, then transcribed and analyzed accordingly to conversation analysis [e.g. Jefferson, 1984; Heritage, 1984] and video-based research [Heath, Hindmarsh & Luff, 2010] principles.