Abstract
Organizations increasingly carry out their work by relying on complex, distributed activities supported by a wide range of technologies for synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration. How do we capture complex, distributed activities? What tools do we use in settings where even a team of trained ethnographers could not comprehend, much less record, all the interplays between team members, the subtleties of a look or tone, the shifts in orientation to people or objects in the workspace? In this paper, we explore the use of video-based Interaction Analysis to extend the ability of traditional ethnographic methods for data collection and analysis. We draw on a study of a distributed organization’s use of remote meeting technologies to illustrate how this approach contributes to the depth of insights to be garnered from workplace ethnography.
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Ruhleder, K., Jordan, B. (1997). Capturing Complex, Distributed Activities: Video-Based Interaction Analysis as a Component of Workplace Ethnography. In: Lee, A.S., Liebenau, J., DeGross, J.I. (eds) Information Systems and Qualitative Research. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35309-8_14
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