Etnografia al lavoro: uno studio empirico sulle pratiche lavorative in un contesto tecnologico

Activity theory, recently enriched by situated action paradigm, considers work practices as social activities which make use of technological and material artefacts. Both these views enables us to “go beyond” abstract, formal and static descriptions of organizational contexts giving us the chance to find out how work activities are built through social and discursive interactions among individuals. The study analyze - mainly through ethnographic and conversational analysis - work practices which characterize a technologically advanced organizational context. Conversational results describe the everyday accomplishment of work practices, in particular: social processes of problem solving, processes of development and distribution of professional knowledge between members, social processes of negotation of meanings and the conversational role of technology.Basically, the study shows that formal descriptions of work practices are untenable, since they are mainly concerned with single individuals cognitively dealing with their tasks whereas it emerges from our observations that actual organizations need more social criteria and standards of evaluation and description.