Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work

Abstract

Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the methods they developed over a decade to deal with these and related issues in their ethnographies of three engineering occupations: structural engineering, hardware engineering, and automotive engineering. Using dual observers, developing glossaries of technical terms, recording streams of behaviour, developing task tables, creating technology inventories, and creating databases of digital artefacts cross-referenced to one’s fieldnotes are among the 14 techniques discussed and illustrated.