Ethnomethodology Study

An Ethnomethodology Study: Information Sharing Patterns of Participant-Leaders in a ‘Fomenting and Managing Organizational Change’ Workshop

Introduction

The purpose of this ethnomethodology study is to investigate the communicative action of information sharing of selected participant-leaders from a consortium of private higher education institutions attending a leadership workshop on fomenting and managing organizational change. I am one of the participants and am particularly interested in what is said and how it is said in this workshop activity. As a participant-observer, I would like to understand this communication action from the intersubjective point of view of the participants and focus on the crucial opening event of the activity

Unlike many social-scientific studies of social interaction that use research methodologies that elucidate what people say they do (e.g., interviews, focus groups, surveys), CA is a methodology that investigates what people actually do, with analysts examining the details of recordings of talk and other conduct of participants in naturally occurring interaction. Conversation analytic studies use naturalistic data, i.e., non-experimental data that wasn’t set up for the purposes of the research and would have occurred without the researchers’ instigation (ten Have, 2007). Hence, I particularly employed participant observation techniques using audio recording to collect the data to be able to answer my research question. As such, the opening event of the workshop activity comprising six episodes - greetings, prayer, welcome, introductions, workshop program overview and first workshop instructions – was recorded and later on transcribed using the notational convention developed by Jefferson (2004). In this mini-study, the data set that was qualitatively analyzed is the textual transcription of the audio recording of the opening event in the workshop activity (see Appendix “A”). In coming up with the data set, I used the Jefferson’s transcription notation in accordance with the conventions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research. Ethnomethodology studies the activities of group members to discover how they make sense of their surroundings and how individuals give sense to and accomplish their daily activities. It is not so much concerned with what they are doing, but rather how they make sense of it (Pollner & Emerson, 2001). Thus, as to the observation in education settings, for instance, a lecture, involving actors of the categories lecturer and students (or facilitator and participants in the case of a workshop), I