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.

Bob Anderson is the former Pro Vice Chancellor for Research at Sheffield Hallam University. As CEO of University Campus Suffolk, UK, he led the founding of what is now the University of Suffolk. He is currently an Associate in the Horizon Research Institute at Nottingham University.

Wes Sharrock is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Manchester University, UK.

List of Figures

List of Appendices

Preface

Part I: Foundations

1. The World of the Senior Manager

2. Management as a Common Sense Construct

Part II: Studies in the Practicalities of Executive Management

3. Representations and Realities

4. Representations without Metaphysics

5. Intersubjectivity and the Arts of Financial Management

6. The Contingencies of Due Process

Appendix

7. Sensitivity Analysis as Practical Modal Realism

Appendix

8. Benchmarking as Reality Conjuncture

Appendix

9. Does It Wash Its Face?

Appendix

10. Plans and their Situated Actions

Part III: Conclusion

11. Ethnomethodology: A First Sociology?

Index