Making Sense of What People Do: A Sociological Perspective

This final keynote address focuses on how to make work visible. Drawing on the methodology of institutional ethnography, the author advocates a mode of inquiry that starts in people's everyday lives, examining the relations, organizations and forms of power that intersect with and organize the everyday world and relate us to others in ways we do not easily see or appreciate. This approach makes visible a whole range of activities that do not usually appear as work: waiting in lines, gathering the materials needed to begin work, the thinking and planning that makes work appear to happen effortlessly. It makes visible the complex organization of social relations that results, for example, in the downloading of work from paid to unpaid (e.g. bagging our own groceries, doing our own bank deposits, assigning postal codes to letters). People's relations to others change imperceptibly. Our social world is reorganized, yet much of the complex organization of work remains invisible. The very process of using a professional or institutional language to make things accountable itself makes almost everything that is involved in doing the work in actual real life situations disappear. Professionals talk about their work using professional discourses which take for granted and do not describe what they actually do. Occupational scientists need to be aware of the ways our descriptions, our use of language, may make invisible the work that people do.