Workplace studies are a commonplace feature of organizational life – organizations everywhere conduct them or hire consultants to do so, usually with the aim of change in mind. Accompanying these studies are a huge variety of approaches or methods: scientific management, task analysis, and business process reengineering name but a few well-known ones. This paper articulates an approach to workplace study that emerged in the social sciences during the 1980s (Garfinkel 1986), which has achieved some considerable prominence in the field of interactive systems design (Luff et al. 2000). The approach’s purchase in design – which is as much about reorganizing the workplace as it is about constructing computer systems to support workplace activities (Hughes et al. 1994; Blythin et al. 1997; Crabtree et al. in print) – lies in the attention it pays to the real world, real time working practices of parties to an organization’s daily work. Despite its successes, however, the approach is often encountered as an exotic practice available only to an adept few. Nothing could be further from the truth and, accordingly, this paper sets out to provide some practical instruction into what is, after all, a very ordinary craft that anyone may master. Workplace study requires no special methods, no scientific expertise. What it does demand is that the analyst develop competence in the work under study (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992; Crabtree 2000a; Crabtree to appear).

The purpose of this "unique adequacy" requirement is to identify observable and reportable structures of work, or real world structures, in contrast to the abstract characterisations of normative workplace studies. Normative organizational reasoning construes of the workplace as an "objective social fact", as something that we as members of society know exists "out there" in our world - a physical "container" of sorts, which we can point to, talk about, remark upon, etc., and which compels persons located within it to do certain activities in certain ways (Boden 1994). In more complicated locution it might be said that normative organizational reasoning treats the workplace under a "logic of exteriority", as a concrete object that shapes the action which goes on inside it (Coulter 1982). This common sense assumption is imported wholesale into professional orders of organizational reasoning (into Business Management, Sociology, Psychology, and the rest), where it is embodied in particular theoretical formats (see, for example, the classical works of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber).

Despite a vast array of competing theoretical formats or models accounting for the structuring of the workplace, one commonality exists across normative accounts in the unequivocal recognition that the workplace is an organized phenomenon or, alternately, an orderly phenomenon. Simply put, the notion of orderliness refers to the regularity of conduct within organizations, to recurring patterns of conduct. Construed as some sort of container, the organization is said, in an endless variety of ways, to order workplace activities. The challenge to the analyst is one of identifying just how organizations order or structure the workplace so as to provide for the recurrence of its activities and, with that, provide for the "same business as usual", job after job and day after day. Thus, the analyst’s task in undertaking workplace study is one of identifying ordering structures of work. Examples are provided by Durkheim’s functional structures, Marx’s forces of production, Weber’s hierarchies of rational production and control, and a great many other models are available to the contemporary analyst.

At the heart of Weber’s highly influential model of organizational life (Weber 1964) stand the common sense notions of rules and procedures which are said to govern workplace activities, laying out and coordinating sequences of actions to be performed by the incumbents of particular jobs and providing for the "same business as usual". Rules and procedures are invoked in a plethora of normative accounts as common sense solutions to the problem of order and, as such, they constitute ordering structures of work. Two seminal studies respecify the normative common sense view, which has been imported into professional orders of organizational reasoning. 1) Peter Blau’s classical study of work in a US employment agency, which draws our attention to the grossly observable fact that rules and procedures are complied with through ad hoc work practices (Blau 1964). And 2) Don Zimmerman’s study of a Public Assistance Bureau (again in the US), which draws our attention to the grossly observable fact that ad hoc working practices whereby rules and procedures are complied with are identical with the orderliness of working situations (Zimmerman 1973).

In other words, ad hoc working practices – practices devised by an organization’s staff to meet the requirements of rules and procedures – observably and reportably constitute ordering structures of work. In contrast to the abstract structures of normative organizational reasoning, these structures are real world structures – one may go out and look and see them (Sacks 1984). This section of the paper explicates, by practical example, what talk of ad hoc working practices means by presenting 1) a set of organizational rules and procedures said to order the work of rating freight quotes (formulating costs for shipping goods in containers), and 2) by providing an alternate praxiological account of rating work. That is, an account that describes rating from the point of view of the work’s real world, real time performance by parties to its accomplishment.

According to the normative accounts of the organization, the rating of freight quotes is ordered in something very much like the following manner. -

Whether a rate request is occasioned by phone, fax or telex these formal organizational procedures are said by management to order, layout and otherwise govern a sequence of actions (1 – 22) the rating agent is expected to perform in order to get the job done time and again. In other words, from a normative point of view within the organization these procedures constitute an ordering structure of work providing for the recurrent accomplishment of the job of rating.

The following praxiological account describes a phone-based quote. In marked contrast to the normative account of rating work, staff usually avoid formulating rates over the phone due to the amount of time consumed in using the organization’s computer system. The system is cumbersome and compels staff to perform a great deal of unnecessary work (unnecessary to the provision of a rate) as a consequence of hardwiring rules and procedures of conduct. By "hardwiring" I mean to say that all the procedures for action are laid out in advance by the system in a step-by-step fashion (e.g. 1 - 22, as above), which cannot be circumvented. The system not only dictates what-to-do-now and what-to-do-next but that the operator must do this action now and that action next in order to perform some situationally relevant task. Much of what the system demands the operator to do is essential for the integrity of the system as a formal organizational system of work, but it is entirely irrelevant to the operator’s daily task of "drumming up" business for the organization: the raison d’être of rating work and no mere matter of following a computer script at that. There is simply no way out of this constraining and time-consuming situation if the operator is to use the system however, and so operators avoid systems use when working with customers over the phone wherever possible.

Whenever possible in dealing with customers over the phone, the system is used after the work involved in "drumming up" business to formally account for particular aspects of the work. In the course of dealing with the customer, hand written notes are usually taken instead and the rate is formulated after the call then forwarded to the customer, often by fax. The degree of details noted down varies in accordance with how well the quote agent and customer "know each other". The details and needs of long-standing clients are well known by rating agents and notes are quite often minimal, consisting in just a name, a container type and size, a load point or receipt, and destination of the cargo, for example. The temporal and contingent nature of work means that hand written notes are routinely placed in a pending tray awaiting time to process them. Despite the time-consuming nature of system use, quote agents who are very familiar with the system may on occasion - either in urgent cases or in cases when an infrequent but "good" client calls - provide a rate over the phone.

The instance of rating work provided above, which provides the concrete focus for workplace study and constitutes the unit of analysis in ethnomethodological studies of work (Crabtree 2001), reveals something of the skill and expertise involved in the real world, real time accomplishment of rating work. Having received a call from a customer warranting the phone-based formulation of a rate, the rating agent elicits the necessary cargo and shipping details (from where to where, commodity description, quantity, size and type of container). These details are inserted into the system as they are elicited and provide for a computer-generated formulation of the basic shipping cost. Notably, cargo is occasionally difficult to classify and rating agents have to collaborate with one another in formulating commodity descriptions that the system will accept, thus furnishing a basic shipping cost. That is not all there is to the formulation of the rate however. Discretionary addons and surcharges must be identified and added to the basic rate. The specification of extra charges is not accomplished through the use of the computer (due to the time-consuming and inefficient nature of use) but through paper shipping schedules or "cheat sheets" that rating staff produce for themselves at the beginning of each week (when charges are updated). Staff work on specific service lines so they only need to know about and have to hand a relatively small number of extra charges.

Having established the basic cost and calculated discretionary addons, the rating agent checks that rate falls within accepted profit margins. The rate agent usually writes the customer’s name, the rate and the potential profit down on a paper notepad and then "quotes" the rate to the customer, providing an item or reference number and bringing the call to a close. Typically, as is the case in a competitive marketplace, the customer will "consider" the rate where consider means that he or she will call back some time later saying that a competitor has offered a lower rate. The seasoned customer does not usually disclose this rate but asks the quote agent for a more competitive rate. The quote agent knows this is "par for the course". That the customer may or may not have a competitive rate but in light of a failure to disclose "probably doesn’t" is not the point. The point, from the customer’s perspective, is to get the price down as low as possible. From the rating agent’s perspective, to make as much profit as possible. This scenario is known in common, taken for granted, and reciprocally orientated to in the manner of not paying attention to it but to the potential business the situation presents. In response, the rating agent will reassess the componential details of the rate, relaying selected fiscal details to the customer and, if possible, offer a lower rate. The quote agent does not of necessity need to check the rate details again, the rate and profit margins are already known. This reassessment work is work done for practical effect under the mutually recognized auspices of "negotiation" and to make plainly visible that providing a lower rate consists in work that is done-for-you, that it is the-best-that-can-be-done, and that both it and the work that occurred before it has been done authentically in good faith. Such is the skill and the expertise of the rating agent and the customer. It is a skill and expertise that respects the spirit of organizational rules and procedures, which are ultimately intended to maximise the efficiency of the rating operation. If those rules and procedures were followed to the letter by using the system to get the work done, the rating operation would become highly inefficient. Staff have to modify or occasionally suspend the rules and procedures then, in order to bring about the outcomes the rules and procedures dictate.

The praxiological account shows that abstract characterisations of ordering structures of work, such as normative accounts of rules and procedures, are inadequate. They are not necessarily wrong but fail to appreciate, take for granted, and in other ways ignore the real world, real time ways in which an organization’s staff come to comply with rules and procedures. Those "ways" consist of ad hoc working practices – practices devised by an organization’s staff in concert with others, such as customers, to get the work done in manner whereby the rules and procedures that govern work might be said, for all reasonable practical purposes, to have been met. In the case of providing a freight quote over the phone, those working practices consist of only undertaking a phone-based quote if absolutely necessary, of assembling and using a host of work-specific paper documents providing for the calculation of discretionary charges, of recording the financial details of quotes issued on a notepad, and of engaging in a distinct course of negotiation together with customers. These real world, real time working practices in and through which rating work observably and reportably "gets done" time and again, day after day, constitute the actual ordering structure of work.

Those structures do not, as Blau (1964) reminds us, consist of "informal" practices, contrasting with the formal specifications of organizational reasoning, for in practice, in contrast to analysis, there is but one structure of work and that is to be found in the reoccurring "ways" in which staff and other parties to the work observably and reportably conduct their interactions together. As Suchman (1983) puts it,

By placing an emphasis on the "orderly work of the office" (or any other worksite) Suchman seeks to draw our attention to seen but unnoticed or taken for granted features of work, particularly the grossly observable and often ignored fact that organizational structures of activity – ordering structures of work - are the concerted product of a community of co-workers (including customers, etc.). It might otherwise be said that organizational structures are "self-organizing" structures, produced in the actions and interactions of parties to an organization’s daily work. The structures upon which the orderliness of work and (thus) the same business as usual depends are not to be found in abstract characterisations of work then, but the in the self-organizing structures of concerted practical action produced by an organization’s staff in the course of carrying out their daily routines.

Daily routines are perhaps the most prominent orderly feature of organizational life and they are often said to be the product of rules and procedures. This common sense notion glosses or obscures the skill and judgement on which work relies however (Blomberg et al. 1994). The skill and judgement involved in accomplishing routine work is usually "invisible" to people located higher up the organizational food chain and to other analysts (lay and professional) abstracted from the actual work. Nonetheless, routine activities and the exercise of judgement co-exist at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. On the shopfloor, skill and judgement consists of effecting a practically adequate relationship between formal procedures and the contingent circumstances of the actual cases to which those procedures must be applied. Any such relationship is necessarily effected in the ad hoc working practices of shopfloor workers. The routine is a product of working practice then, something constructed or made by parties to the work in the reoccurring "ways" in which they conduct their interactions.

The late Herbert Blumer (1969) described the fundamental character of organizational routines in the following illuminating way. -

Each activity of work, no matter how routine, must be "formed anew" on each and every occasion of its performance. As a reoccurring consequence of workaday contingencies, just what actions have to be taken if the routine is to transpire yet again is not, and cannot be, specified by formal organizational devices (such as rules and procedures). This is not cause for concern however, as a simple fact of working life is that a great many workaday contingencies – such as doing a phone-based freight quote - are themselves reoccurring. Insofar as the same activity is undertaken again and again, day after day, then the same practical troubles occur again and again, day after day (such as the time-consuming nature of sytems usage in doing a freight quote). Managing such troubles is a part and parcel of "getting the job done" and in that respect staff improvise and devise particular courses of practical action or work practices to handle particular contingencies (using cheat-sheets instead of the system, for example), thereby making their activities routine yet again (Zimmerman 1973). Thus, although

As noted in the introduction to this paper, the point of workplace study is, more often than not, to intervene, to bring about change (whether through the design of new routines and processes or through the introduction of computer systems, or both as is often the case today). It may be argued that a failure to appreciate actual ordering structures of work – real world working practices whereby routines and processes are actually assembled by parties to the work – can but be detrimental to the effort to reorganize the workplace. Alternately, and less dramatically, it might be said that efforts to reorganize the workplace may be enhanced by developing an appreciation of actual ordering structures of work, for it is here that work is actually organized and executed (Button and Harper 1996; Crabtree et al. 2000; Crabtree et al. in print). However the issue is articulated, the real world working practices whereby routines and processes are actually structured are not available to normative organizational reasoning, which draws foundational distinctions between formal and informal structures, privileging one over the other, for example, and otherwise seeks to locate the orderliness of work in abstract characterisations of ordering structures. Observably and reportably, ordering structures of work are not located in abstract phenomenon (such as rules and procedures) but in the ad hoc working practices devised, performed, and altered by an organization’s staff to meet the requirements of organizational programmes of work. Much is to be learnt in undertaking organizational change in consulting the concerted activities of the real experts in work’s accomplishment then, namely the practitioners of work.

The need to consult practitioners is hardly a revelation, organizations have after all been doing that for a long time. The question, of course, is one of how practitioners might be consulted in order that appropriate targets for change might be identified? Practitioners may be consulted through a host of methods – business process maps, task analysis, time and motion studies, questionnaires, focus groups, and a great many other methods of "observation" are available to consultation. The approach to observation advocated here is ethnographic in character (Prus 1996). In the first instance, this simply means that the work analyst must immerse him or herself in the milieu of activities that constitute the daily business of the workplace. The purpose of this immersion is to develop first-hand knowledge of the work of the setting and to gather materials providing for the assembly of instances of work (Blumer 1969; Crabtree 2001).

Immersion need not be a prolonged activity – much may be learnt in a short period of time and through a thorough examination of the materials gathered. Materials of particular value include job descriptions and rules and procedures, which provide an organizationally relevant frame of reference for investigating the work, and audio and-or video tape-recordings of the work actually being done. Recordings may be complimented by photographs or photocopies of the materials used by staff in the course of getting the work done. The work occurring on the tapes may be inspected and described in terms of an unfolding sequence of interaction (whether with people or artefacts, such as computers). Instances may be assembled by transcribing the talk on the recordings and weaving video stills, photographs, photocopies, or even small sequences of video into the transcript at the point where the working materials they display are used in the sequence of interaction.

The instance may then be "analysed" with an eye towards explicating the ad hoc working practices the sequence is made up of or constructed through. The work of analysis is not done through codification and classification (and is not, as such, a "constructive" species of analysis, which characterises normative reasoning) but through thick description of the component courses of action comprising the sequence and thus explicates the working practices the sequence is made up of (Ryle 1971; Garfinkel unpub. manu. 1). In the rating instance above, for example, the sequence consists of the following courses of action: answering the phone and initiating a phone-based quote; eliciting route, commodity, and container details and inputting those details into the computer to identify the basic rate; identifying addons and surcharges through the use of cheat-sheets; noting down on paper financial details; issuing and item or reference number; bringing the call to a close. Thus, in describing the component courses of action the sequence is comprised of (and obviously one would need to that in detail, not as I have just glossed over it), the analyst is instructed by the work of the site and the reoccurring "ways" in which that work is ordered by practitioners. That course of instruction constitutes the consultation exercise and provides the basis for delivering praxiological accounts. It is a course of instruction concerned with what practitioners actually do and how they do it, concertedly so, in and as of the day’s work, not with what they say or are otherwise said to do. And it is carried out through direct observation of the work being done, through conversations with practitioners as to the sense and meaning of what is being done, and through thick description of recordings of work as it occurs in real time on the shopfloor, in its natural environment out in the wild, in the life-world, the lebenswelt.

The notion of a praxiological account is informed by a "radical" species of organizational reasoning (Zimmerman and Wieder 1973; Garfinkel and Wieder 1992). The radical character of ethnomethodological studies of work derives from the intentional "misreading" of several seminal intellectual texts, particularly those of Edmund Husserl, his protégé Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Garfinkel unpub. manu. 2 and 3). Briefly put, Husserl (1974) laid out an influential critique of the modern sciences that suggested they had lost sight of the genetic origins of independent Galilean objects, which are their objects of study. By "independent Galilean objects" is meant things that exist independently of individual perception - things that comprise the world "out there" such as "objective social facts" (organizations, institutions, etc.) which are the objects of the social sciences and more mundane reasoning. By "genetic origins" is meant that independent Galilean objects are produced and recognized or constructed in human praxis.

It may seem strange to think of the objects of science (natural or social) as having a genetic origin in human praxis, as things constructed by human beings in their interactions together and with their objects of work (or "study"). A momentary pause for reflection reminds us however, that is only in and through their working practices that scientists (and mathematicians) make their discoveries of independent Galilean objects (Garfinkel et al. 1981). It is in this respect, then, that it makes sense to speak of independent Galilean objects being produced in, and recognized through, human praxis. Only in and through socially distributed work practices does a particular object come assume its publicly available and verifiable Galilean (subject independent) status. Independent Galilean objects do not simply exist "out there" then, but are potters objects made available to human beings in and through particular work practices. Practices that are (reflexively) constitutive of particular organizations of human conduct: of physics, maths, sociology, software engineering, container shipping, and the rest. This is not to say that independent Galilean objects only exist as a result of human praxis – that human praxis casts and recasts the real world of things concrete - but that the real world of things concrete only exists for human beings as a result of human praxis, and as praxis changes so does our collective understanding of the real world of things concrete. Thus, independent Galilean objects are social objects through and through; objects which are accountably constituted in and through human praxis. Independent Galilean objects and human practices are "intertwined creatures" then and it is a recognition of this irremediable relationship that underpins the notion of a praxiological account.

Husserl’s injunction to take account of the genetic origins of independent Galilean objects is an injunction to return to the "prescientific" or pre-constructive analytic (pre-analytic for short) world of real observable work and working practice within which such objects are produced and recognized. In calling for a return to the pre-analytic, Husserl argues that the scientist or analyst (natural or social) dresses up the objects of the everyday world (be it objective social facts or the phenomenon of natural science) in "a garb of ideas" or "symbols and symbolic forms" (such as rules and procedures, routines and processes, etc.) which are used to represent that world, to dress it up as "objectively actual and true". Husserl’s is a call to suspend normative idealizations of the world however, and to return to the vital practices (or ad hoc practices as they have been described here) in and through which independent Galilean objects are produced and recognized in the concerted practical actions of members (including those of the scientist, natural or social). These vital practices are often "forgotten" by the members (lay and professional) – seen but unnoticed, taken for granted, so much noise to be ignored and the vacuum filled with abstract principles of scientific method and the constructive analytic accounts of normative reasoning, which treats the world "out there" as given and characteristically asks why it is as it appears to be, rather than how it comes to appear as it recognizably does for members (as an organization, an institution, a football match, a queue, a rating operation, etc.)?

Within the context of the social sciences, Merleau-Ponty (1999) elaborates Husserl’s position in pointing out that objective social facts are made up of existential ordering structures of work. They are existential in the sense that we live our lives out "in" them and those structures are, therefore, deeply rooted in the conduct of people who inhabit them. If we wish to provide an adequate account of objective social facts we need, then, to attend closely to the incarnate, observable and reportable "ways" in which any particular objective social fact (this organization, department, place of work, etc.) comes into being in the concerted practical actions of its members. In other words, we need to attend to the groundwork in and through which objective social facts are built up step by step in practice. This groundwork constitutes a primary layer, a primary organization, an original order of work observable in interaction and displays in its description the genetic origins of objective social facts and other independent Galilean objects.

How do we make the groundwork and the vital practices it consists of visible and available to radical account? It is in this respect that Wittgenstein (1992) comes into the equation. Wittgenstein was concerned with a different order of philosophical problem than Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Nevertheless, he shared their concern with the adequacy of scientific methods, particularly with what he called "this stupid superstition of our time" (Wittgenstein 1979), namely the belief that any phenomena may be adequately accounted through the analytic construction of a theory or model explaining why it is the phenomena appears to be as it is. Wittgenstein was deeply concerned with the perennial problems of philosophy – problems such as the nature of meaning, thinking, knowing, and the rest – which he demonstrated arise from our being bewitched by our language (Wittgenstein 1992). Philosophical problems emerge from the misuse of ordinary language concepts and may be dissolved by explicating our ordinary grammar, thereby making it perspicuous what it makes sense to say. In other words, the solution to philosophical problems, particularly epistemic problems, is to consult the use of words in their deployment in our ordinary everyday language. Here, in their proper context, Wittgenstein observes that "Words are also deeds" (ibid. PI 546) and it is in misreading this particular aphorism that we may begin to get a purchase on the groundwork and vital practices whereby objective social facts are constructed.

Leaving philosophy behind, it is reasonable to say that talk is a central feature of organizational life (Durkheim 1909; Sacks 1963). One might investigate work through consulting the talk of the organizational staff or members who perform it then (Garfinkel and Sacks 1969; Boden 1994). Thus, we might record workplace talk and transcribe it. Unlike Sacks’ later work (Sacks et al. 1974), the point of consulting workplace talk is not to examine talk through a specialised apparatus of transcription and analysis, but rather, to treat talk as a tool that makes work practice available to radical account in its use. Talk is not an object in itself in ethnomethodological studies of work then, but a resource examined with an eye towards identifying and explicating "what members are doing when they do taking turns at talk" (Lynch 1993). Analytically, we are concerned with Wittgenstein’s "deeds" when attending to and inspecting talk, with the practical actions being performed in talking, with what is done through talking as part and parcel of some daily job of work (Moerman 1992). Talk makes the groundwork available to inspection and analysis, then, and transcriptions may be interleaved with the material resources used in the work (either through stills or video sequences) to display, through analysis of the sequence of interaction embodied in the instance, the vital practices through which practitioners order that groundwork.

Talk provides access to real world, real time ordering structures of work and provides a primary resource for assembling praxiological accounts, which make real world ordering structures of work publicly available in being readable as instructions which locate descriptions of work in an observable world of ordinary (but nonetheless skilful) human jobs. -

With praxiologizing’s work we reach the nub of what an adequate account of ordering structures of work turns upon. In contrast to the constructive analytic accounts of normative reasoning, ethnomethodology makes independent Galilean objects publicly available through the description of the groundwork and vital practices through which an object (rating, say) is produced and recognized or constructed by practitioners. Treated in the reading as instructed actions, praxiological descriptions of the groundwork and vital practices through which an object is produced and recognized by practitioners locate the described object in the real world – in the phenomenal fields of ordinary human jobs - in contrast to abstract ordering structures, and in doing so, render the account amenable to verification. Unlike abstract constructive analytic accounts of normative reasoning, praxiological accounts are corrigible accounts which may be validated by practitioners and other members who have developed a competence in practice and who can, therefore, confirm the correctness of the account – that the job is indeed ordered in practice as it has been described. Alternately, practitioners may dispute the account, or instruct us in missing details, which may be explicated through the gathering of further instances. In either case, the validity-status of the account stands on the fact that the account is the first segment of a Lebenswelt Pair (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992).

Following Husserl, the strong notion of a lebenswelt pair situates workplace studies in the milieu of the pre-analytic life-world (in everyday life), in contrast to the abstract characterisations of normative reasoning which are necessarily derivative. In other words, normative accounts are second order accounts – they derive from our reflections on everyday life. In reflection, the orderliness of everyday life is topicalized (in terms of rules and procedures, for example) and the objects of that topicalization are made into primordial phenomena whereby everyday life is said to be ordered. Demonstrably, this puts the cart before the horse as rules and procedures, for example, are the outcome of the orderly work of the office (etc.). The rule-governed and procedural character of the workplace is an achievement of work, then, not a precursor to it. Specifically, the rule-governed and procedural character of the workplace is the achievement of members’ accomplishment of their ad hoc working practices. Work practice is the primordial phenomenon of everyday life, reflected upon and forgotten in the topicalizing. The strong notion of a lebenswelt pair puts us back in this primordial horizon of ordinary human jobs and working practices. It situates description and analysis in the primordial orderliness of everyday life and draws our attention to real world structures of practical action from which normative accounts derive yet forget to mention.

Specifically, for any independent Galilean object, the first segment of a Lebenswelt Pair of segments – the praxiological account composed of the instance (or a collection of) and its (their) analysis - is a corrigible description of the groundwork and vital working practices involved in the object’s observable and reportable production and recognition (or social construction). Read as a course of instruction, the first segment of the lebenswelt pair locates the account in, and makes available (in principle) for actual inspection by the reader, the real world structures of practical action known in common and taken for granted by practitioners that comprise the orderly horizon of ordinary human jobs in and as of their day’s work and ad hoc working practices (the second segment of the Lebenswelt Pair). Thus, the strong notion of Lebenswelt Pairs situates workplace study in, and sketches out, a real world setting which is observably and reportably ordered in terms of materially embodied work practices, in contrast to the abstract characterisations, methods, formulae, structures, generic representational formats, and other reflective, theoretical, and metatheoretical formulations of normative reasoning. As Garfinkel and Wieder describe it,

As first segments of lebenswelt pairs – as corrigible accounts of real world structures of practical action – praxiological accounts may therefore be validated by practitioners in that, and precisely because, they can recognize their work and working practices in such accounts (Sacks 1984; Sacks 1992). Being informed by the real world, real time orderliness of work, appropriate targets for change may thus be identified in consulting actual practice as it is conducted by practitioners on the shopfloor, in contrast to how it is said to be conducted in the reflective analyses of normative reasoning which forget the actual work of the site and offer abstract characterisations instead (through time and motion breakdowns, the construction of process maps, or the statistical aggregations of questionnaire responses, etc.)

Ethnomethodological studies of work offer an alternate but complimentary approach to workplace study in the effort to intervene in organizational life by locating change in the actual working practices of an organization’s staff. The approach may be used, as it has in interactive systems design, to compliment functional requirements analysis, for example. It may also be used to compliment business process reengineering, supporting the "mapping" process through the explication of the working practices whereby processes of work are produced and coordinated. The ethnomethodologist’s craft consists of 1) immersion in the daily activities that comprise an organization’s "business"; 2) of gathering materials which display the haecceities of particular jobs of work (particularly through audio and-or video recordings, photographs of working materials, and discussions with staff as to the sense and meaning of their work); 3) of assembling the materials gathered into instances of work which display in coherent detail the unfolding sequence of interaction constitutive of particular jobs of work; 4) of explicating the component courses of action the sequence of interaction is composed of and thereby identifying the working practices whereby work routines are constructed in the concerted practical actions of parties to the work. Thus, the analyst’s challenge to identify ordering structures of work is located in and directed towards explicating the groundwork and vital working practices whereby objective social facts (organization’s, departments, workplaces) are constructed by persons who actually conduct the organization’s daily business. Garfinkel puts it well in saying,

That fundamental phenomenon may be addressed through assembling praxiological accounts of workplace activities as first segments of lebenswelt pairs.