Matereal Methods

Monika Büscher and Preben Holst Mogensen

Chapter 10 in Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work, 2010, pp 171-192 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract As Bill Chalmers, the hero of Alan Lightman’s novel The Diagnosis, finds when his world unravels due to a mysterious illness: definitive diagnoses are important but difficult to come by. Moreover, as illustrated in great variety by the chapters in this book, they are the tip of an iceberg helped into view by a colossal body of often hidden diagnostic work. In this chapter we — a social scientist and a computer scientists — would like to explore further inside this subsurface body, combining our different perspectives and observations. We will do so by examining police and fire service officers’ work in managing safety at a large (but relaxed) public entertainment event. Risk assessment and situation awareness in the context of such work are widely recognised as forms of diagnostic work (Abbott, 1988), but apart from looking at explicitly diagnostic professional practices, we also treat diagnostic work as an analyst’s category, seeking to explore phenomenological forms of ‘micro-diagnosis’. By this we mean social and material practices that enable people to take a ‘natural attitude’, that is, an attitude that ‘gears’ them into the world as for all practical purposes factual, amenable to being acted upon as well as within (Schutz, 1970), attending specifically to processes of ‘intra-action’ or the entanglement of world and action (Barad, 2007).

Keywords: Police Officer; Situation Awareness; Matereal Method; Command Centre; Automatic Identification System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-29693-0_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230296930

DOI: 10.1057/9780230296930_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().