Work Setting at Midwest Survey

Summary

To understand the various facets of work in all their complexity and to facilitate the emergence of hypotheses from the data, the ethnographic method of collecting data has been used in the present study. This chapter delineated the ethnographic method, followed by the classification and coding of the interviews. Inferred data included demographic variables; sociophysical attributes of the workspaces; psychological perceptions and attitudes, and satisfaction with workspace, interaction opportunities afforded, and work in general. The coded data elucidated respondents’ individual reactions to the physical, social, and psychological setting of work. However, the ways in which these reactions come to be experienced in the organization are also a function of the (1) structure of the encompassing social context (elucidated in Chapter 3); (2) the ways in which symbolic meaning is constructed in, and decoded through the physical dimension; and (3) the ways in which meaning becomes intertwined with social-organizational aspects such as in status/role (elaborated in Chapter 5), in social interaction (Chapter 6), and in implications for the social-organizational structure of the work setting (Chapter 7).

Social actions are comments on more than themselves: that where an interpretation comes from does not determine where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large issues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.... If makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about them (the mega-concepts with contemporary social science is afflicted), but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with them. (Geertz 1973; emphasis in original)