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Technology
now enables workers to telecommute, communicate via email and text messages
vice person to person, and to create multiple-authored documents without
people being in close geographic proximity. Beyond these common place
technologies, workers can be connected to their offices with cell phones,
wireless internet/LAN connections, and blackberries. All of the above
mentioned contribute to what Howard Rheingold has realized and discussed
in his book Smart Mobs. Even the most public of places are saturated
with people multitasking and connected to others. Because we can be connected
to anyone at any time, demarcating space as public, private, work, school,
or home is problematic. I can be at Starbucks and doing research for work,
or talking to a colleague in Gana about a research paper we will present
in Boston.
With
this said, how will we define the workplace for an ethnographic study.
Non-traditional work hours and spaces problematize notions of being able
to observe interactions among multiple people, who work together to form
an environment. In the past, interactions were an important variable to
study. While the interactions are still there, they are heavily mediated
by technology. The hardware and software mediating the communications
become important-how do they improve or hinder the interactions that are
taking place. Because technology itself changes rapidly and the "hot"
programs of the moment quickly become updated or outdated, the change
in actual workspace is more important than the hard/software being used.
The
general concept of being able to work from anywhere, with the proper devices
and connections, is not likely to change in the near future. This means
there is a need to view technology as both a form of conveyance and as
being able to alter what is being conveyed or how people interact with
what is being conveyed. Language still remains the main form of interaction,
but the lanugage is somewhat mediated by the technology being used. Think
about acronyms in instant messeging, one liners in email, or codes in
text messaging. We lose the ability to examine body language when people
are interacting from a distance, but gain more textual and verbal communication
to analyze and interpret.
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What
does this change in concept of workspace do for those who have relied on
ethnographic research? It does not change the method of ethnography itself,
but how we are willing to carry out ethnographies and what the academic
community is willing to accept as a proper site for ethnography. In ethnography
we are interested in studying interactions and distributions-of power and
knowledge. Those can still be studied, but we must be willing to return
to the questions we are asking, and what they are really trying to get at.
Then we can reshape the method or perhaps combine it with other methods.
For example, when we ask what elements of a genre have remained stable over
time, we are not as concerned with the textual elements as we are with what
pieces of knowledge have remained important and are established in a way
that their means of conveyance have not be altered. We are also interesting
in who and what are served by a generic element; this helps researchers
to uncover who has power and what activities are important. The bases of
our questions do not change. Researchers will still develop questions that
come from an internal sense of dissonance. Heightened awareness of why specific
questions are being asked and what story we will tell with the data is key
to conducting inquiries in professional writing as traditional notions are
being destabilized. Ethnography, in the sense of observation and participation,
is still reliable to provide insight into communications. We need to be
willing to be flexible about the locations and activities we study in the
ethnography. |
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The
movement away from unified office environments offers the opportunity for
researchers to refocus their inquiries onto public spaces. We in professional
writing have spent much of our time examining internal structures. The absence
of these structures provides us the chance to study how the public and users
interact with professional documents that are created for them and what
influences the success or failure of written products. Many business documents
have a large impact on people who will never see the writing themselves.
For example, Purdue University's Strategic plan is available on the internet,
but few students or even faculty and staff will ever read through it word-by-word.
Yet, the document has taken on a life of its own and can be considered an
agent that takes responsibilities for changes on our campus. Changes that
range from alterations in average class size to financial allocations for
stem-cell research. The writers may have composed in a non-traditional setting,
as members of various offices and departments across campus whose only interactions
were in writing the document itself, but the effects of the document can
be studied, as can the changes that are endorsed by those who interpret
the measurements for success. Returning to method, a study of written products
could be done through ethnography, survey, or interviews. The questions
would have to lead the type of research conducted. Studying one environment
through multiple methods may be the most reliable way to address issues
of validity and ideology. Gaining access to multiple audiences in relation
to a text or set of texts (as opposed to a texts generated from one site)
forces the researcher to acknowledge discrepancies in how written documents
are perceived. |
