Action at a Distance : Studies in the Practicalities of Executive Management

This book examines the nature of work and management, centring on documents as a class of management objects that play a central role as ordering devices, in the social organisation of patterns of coordinated action in situations in which the usual resources of face to face communication are absent. With a focus on managers, the authors offer a description of the interior configuration of the world of senior management, drawing on first person experience rather than ethnographic fieldwork to shed new light on the importance of third person reflection upon practical understandings.

This book examines the nature of work and management, centring on documents as a class of management objects which have been relatively understudied in ethnomethodological research. Treating documents and similar artefacts as ordering devices, the authors describe consociation – the social organisation of patterns of coordinated action in situations where the usual resources of face to face communication are absent. With a focus on senior managers, this volume provides a description of the interior configuration of the world of senior management as the encountered, everyday experience of managing, drawing on first person experience rather than ethnographic fieldwork to shed new light on the importance of third person reflection upon practical understandings. An innovative study of the social character of such management objects as spreadsheets, strategic plans, computational models and charts, Action at a Distance will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in ethnomethodology, the sociology of work and method in the social sciences.