Fieldwork introduction

In this lecture we highlight the difference between fieldwork as a method for studying human behavior and other ways of conducting research –interviews, telephone surveys, and controlled experiments. We stress that fieldwork includes the doing of in-situ observation. We also give a short history of how the method was developed in early anthropology to study of foreign cultures, but then adopted by sociologists of the Chicago school to study local culture (city life in neighborhoods) and finally how some corporate research centers have started to use fieldwork to study people at work and PARC’s leading role in establishing the use of fieldwork to evaluate and inform technology design, highlighting the work of Lucy Suchman (1987) among others. Fieldwork has been used to study cultures and to study the details of people’s work practices. We also compare the advantages–it is the most ‘real’ access you can get to really understanding people’s work–and disadvantages of fieldwork–it is very labor intensive and not necessarily best-suited when you are pursuing a more narrowly defined hypothesis. Finally we stress how fieldwork can be particularly important for SEs because designing a new system involves redesigning work, and so going into a system engineering project with an understanding of the current work practices heightens the chance that the system will be successful and accepted by the user community.

The fieldwork way

In this lecture we explain that the aim of doing fieldwork is to understand people’s work from their perspective and give an example of the difference between describing things from an outsider’s and insider’s perspective. The example we use was inspired by a paper on fieldwork written by other PARC researchers (e.g. Jeanette Blomberg et al. 1993). Then we give a number of practical tips.

1. Stay close to the work. Being in the location where work takes place and directly observing people doing that work is what fieldworkers should strive for.
2. Do not dismiss anything as trivial or non-important. It is important to open one’s mind and see, hear, sense and smell as much as possible and to record your impressions faithfully.
3. Be an observer and stay out of the way. Know when to ask questions and when to shut your mouth.
4. Be an apprentice and take a learning stance. See the natives as teachers. It is helpful to consider what one would have to learn and what one would have to be able to do if one were to this job oneself.
5. There is always something going. Pay attention to whatever is going on even if it is not work.
6. Reflect on what you have collected. Resist the urge to just collect more data; instead take time to reflect; a little fieldwork goes a long way.

Fieldwork hints

This is a lecture with many practical suggestions for what a fieldworker could look at when studying people’s work practices; the hints are both observational and analytic in nature. Perhaps the most common challenge for new fieldworkers is to determine what of the many things one ‘sees’ ought to be ‘noticed’. Fieldwork does not appear to be much of a method when you don’t know what you should be looking at especially since ‘unmotivated observation’ is what seems to be at the heart of the method. To help the trainees in making observations we developed a set of ‘fieldwork hints’ that contains a lot of examples of different aspects/themes of work and workplaces that a fieldworker can examine. The current list of topics includes the following:

1. The organizational context. One perspective to take on organizations is that they are social structures that pursue goals. To an extent, at least, organizations are designed rationally, and therefore one approach you can take when observing a particular person do a particular job is to consider what the function or role this piece of work has within the overall organization. Naturally, it is important to understand members’ perspective in this regard: what they think their role function is, and where the section they belong to is located within the organization, e.g. a section which earns most, or a section which does not directly make business, etc.
2. The division of labor. Similarly to the organizational context just how the work is divided into different jobs was at some point a rational decision. The division of labor is the very thing that gives rise to ‘an organization’. So one should always consider how this has been done, what the organizational structure is, and what a group’s responsibility is. Then, one can consider whether this division and the rational for it still makes sense when one considers the way people actually collaborate.
3. Working relationships. Usually there are organization charts which represent different relationships among different groups and people in each section and in other sections. Yet, observation of how members relate to each other in the workplace can yield a more complex picture of the organization and how it actually works. How do colleagues relate to each other, how do they relate to their boss? Are there informal groups? Especially, how do people talk about themselves and others in the organization?
4. Official vs. real work. It behooves fieldworkers to pay special attention when workers have found ways around official procedures to get their work done and the rationale for not following the official procedures (if there are, and we encourage people to collect as much as they can official documents that describe procedures).
5. Organization of work. When observing someone at work, a fieldworker should always consider: How do people decide what to do next? Often there is a certain rhythm to people’s work. In some cases, members’ work is reactive to the environment, i.e., in a restaurant waiters’ and chefs’ work is driven by the customers that walk into the door. In other work, the work can be self-organized and people are free to organize their own day to get their work done.
6. Space. How have people organized their workplace, arranged their tools into physical space, for doing their work. Oftentimes, the organization of their workspace is quite deliberate. We give an example of a worker in a call center, who has pasted a number of documents next to his computer within easy reach, has learned to use the mouse with his left hand in order to keep his right hand free to jot down notes while on the phone with the customer. We also give an example of how the design of a workplace can either impede or enable collaboration between workers and give an example from the research of Heath and Luff (2000) as well as our own work.
7. Technology. What technologies and tools are taken up in the course of work? Fieldworkers should consider how those tools support (or hinder) the subjects’ work. Such consideration can lead to suggestions about how tools could be modified in order to better fit with the actual work practices. Documents are, in this sense, a special and ubiquitous technology in most workplaces but should also be considered technologies. We give some examples, including the affordances of paper (Sellen and Harper 2002).
8. Troubles. Troubles are especially helpful for fieldworkers because they often reveal the hidden, normal organization of work. Therefore fieldworkers should pay special attention when troubles occur (although when they do it is also especially important not to interfere with the subjects’ work).
9. Local language. One aspect of the language in a workplace is the jargon, specialist words with particular technical meaning. However, the local language is more than jargon; quite ordinary words may be used in a different way in a worksite as well. Understanding the local language is so important because it teaches a fieldworker how members organize their experience.
10. Local knowledge. Consider what the members need to have learned in order to do their work. Often, even simple jobs require an enormous amount of local knowledge, knowledge about people, their relationships, about the members’ work and its relative importance, about the organization’s history, etc.
11. Organizational culture; values and norms. An organization can promote certain values and norms and these are reflected in the actual actions of the organization’s members.