Organizational Culture in Tracked Changes

Tracked changes, usually thought of as preliminaries to the work documents do in organizations, are themselves an important digital residue of work, a site at which workplace culture and politics can be articulated and identified. In this chapter, I address tracked marginalia on a consequential workplace document, a draft academic workload model, as naturally occurring qualitative data. Institutional ethnography and ethnomethodology are brought to bear, respectively: to conceptualize and describe the workplace and the central role documents play in its administration; and to build up a close analysis of the strategies and positions taken by collaborators on the document, as evidenced in tracked comments. I argue that combining these analytical perspectives permits critical insights, into the local organization of work through documents and documentary processes, and the affordances of tracked changes as a communicative backchannel.