From Cameras to Conversations: Exploring Office Work Through Ethnography

Author: Annamari Korhonen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tampere University

I’m on the morning train, following a visually impaired person on their trip to another city. It's a typical working day - for a post-doc researcher in an ethnographic research project, that is.

In NewWorkTech (NWT), we want to help build a better world of work for everyone – and we want to do it through research at workplaces and on-the-job training environments. Finding points of success and witnessing obstacles are both equally important to us. That’s also what this trip is about.

During this first year of the project, fieldwork has been a main focus. It starts with recruitment of participants and applying for research permits with various organisations. Next, I pack up two cameras, tripods, a voice recorder and the notebook where I jot down everything that could potentially be important about the workplace and what happens there. I go to a workplace, shake hands, get consent signatures and sit down to observe how the place operates. After a few days of observation and filming interesting work tasks and interaction with colleagues, I interview the participant to learn more about what helps or hinders them in the work, how they use technology and what could be improved.

We work with video cameras and recorders, and while it sometimes seems that at least 50% of my work is carrying the equipment, those are not our only tools; we also work with theories from the fields of social and cognitive sciences, as well as applied linguistics and interaction research. Theories help us understand what we see and how it relates to other systems and concepts.

What’s best about fieldwork? The learning. I get to meet people in a wide variety of environments and see how work communities are organised on a social level, how people help each other without making it a big deal, and how well-being at work can be built as an ongoing project that hums below the surface of everyday work. And what’s best, I, as a member of the NWT team, have the opportunity to tell others what I have learned.