Social Studies of Social Science: A Working Bibliography

The social sciences are currently going through a reflexive phase, one marked by the appearance of a wave of studies which approach their disciplines’ own methods and research practices as their empirical subject matter. Driven partly by a growing interest in knowledge production and partly by a desire to make the social sciences ‘fit-for-purpose’ in the digital era, these studies seek to reinvigorate debates around methods by treating them as embedded social and cultural phenomena with their own distinctive biographical trajectories – or “social lives”. Empirical studies of social scientific work and the role of methods within it, however, remain relatively scarce. There are several reasons for this but, for one thing, it can be difficult to find examples of how such studies might be undertaken. This contribution draws together a literature scattered across various social science disciplines and their sub-fields in which social science methods have been studied empirically. We hope this working bibliography will provide a useful resource for those who wish to undertake such studies in the future. We also hope to show that the more recent literature can be connected to, and stands to be informed by, a much broader literature. We do not pretend that our bibliography is complete and comprehensive but we do think it represents a starting point for those who wish to pursue these issues for themselves

Back to the Control Room: Managing Artistic Work

Control rooms have long been a key domain of investigation in HCI and CSCW as sites for understanding distributed work and fragmented settings, as well as the role and design of digital technologies in that work. Although research has tended to focus mainly on ‘command and control’ configurations, such as rail transport, ambulance dispatch, air traffic and CCTV rooms, centres of coordination shaped by artistic and performative concerns have much to contribute. Our study examines how a professional team of artists and volunteers stage manage and direct the performance of a mixed reality game from a central control room, with remote runners performing live video streaming from the streets nearby to online players. We focus on the work undertaken by team members to bring this about, exploring three key elements that enable it. First, we detail how team members oriented to the work as an artistic performance produced for an audience, how they produced compelling, varied content for online players, and how the quality of the work was ongoingly assessed. Second, we unpack the organisational hierarchy in the control room’s division of labour, and how this was designed to manage the challenges of restricted informational visibility there. Third, we explore the interactional accomplishment of the performance by looking at the role of radio announcements from the event’s director to orchestrate how the performance developed over time. Announcements were used to resolve trouble and provide instructions for avoiding future performative problems; but more centrally, to give artistic direction to runners in order to shape the performance itself. To close we discuss how this study of a performance impacts CSCW’s understandings of control room work, how the problem of ‘diffuse’ tasks like artistic work is co-ordinated, and how orientations towards quality as an artistic concern is manifest in / as control room practices. We also reflect on hierarchical and horizontal control room arrangements, and the role of video as both collaborative resource and product.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant numbers EP/G065802/1, EP/K025848/1, EP/M02315X/1, EP/T022493/1]

Wild interdisciplinarity: ethnography and computer science

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar forms of research, in which social scientists are involved in the deployment of experimental technologies within real world settings, are becoming increasingly prevalent. The fieldwork for the project was highly problematic, with the result that few users of the system were successfully enrolled. We analyse why this was the case, identifying three sets of issues which emerge in the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary collaboration and wild setting. We conclude with a set of recommendations for projects involving technologists and social scientists.This research was supported by a research grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K012703/1) and by Horizon Digital Economy Research, RCUK grant (EP/G065802/1)

Closing seminars and lectures: The work that lecturers and students do

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Discourse Studies and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617701992Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on: firstly, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which do not just include speech, but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); secondly, the active role that students play, who may engage in closing activities in ways that attempt to preserve the classroom order (e.g., by packing up silently while continuing to demonstrably listen) or in ways that are disruptive of it (e.g., by packing up noisily); thirdly, the occasional subversive role that students may adopt, who may attempt to initiate closings in order to cut the lecture or seminar short (e.g., by suggesting to the lecturer that he or she is going over time or by engaging in ‘premature’ closing activities)

The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research on Language and Social Interaction on 18th November 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08351813.2015.1090114.This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despite the original declaration, non-speech turn-taking systems have evaded close scrutiny for the past four decades. By turning our attention to such a system here, this study makes two contributions: firstly, to the sociology of turn-organized activities (through a comparison of the central features of turn-taking for conversation with pool skating) and, secondly, to the study of how bodily actions can accomplish pre-beginnings (since in pool skate sessions, this is the place to settle the matter of turn allocation in order to avoid overlaps in riding)

News Interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s The News Interview

News interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s ‘The News Interview

Checking correctness in mathematical peer review

202405 bcchVersion of RecordRGCPublishedC

A Comparison of Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in the ESRC's National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM): Research Methods in Practice

Within the social sciences, ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ approaches are commonly differentiated in terms of official statements of their respective methods. The goal of this project was to investigate how these differences play out in practice. Although the two chosen Nodes, BIAS and Realities, could not be said to be entirely typical of either quantitative or qualitative approaches, they take avowedly different methodological stances and therefore served as case studies to consider both similarities and differences in their methodological practices. The project was thus a largely unprecedented attempt to examine social science’s own research practices sociologically