How Online Collaboration Makes Telework Possible: An Ethnomethodological Study

Abstract

This ethnomethodological research employed conversation analysis (CA) to examine how the communicative practice of online collaboration makes the phenomenon of telework possible. This study was framed within the perspective of the sociocultural tradition that theorizes communication as “a symbolic process that produces and reproduces shared cultural patterns (Craig, 1999, p.144).” Through conversation analysis, this study revealed teleworkers’ tacit, unacknowledged, and taken-for-granted collaborative practices, as well as their common sense, which enables them to create order and achieve work. This study utilized a pre-recorded Zoom recording of a remote session conducted by teleworkers. The pre-recorded remote session recording aligned with CA’s preference for recorded conversations, which are more natural and non-experimental, rather than provoked by the researcher (ten Have, 2011e, p. 4). The online written interaction found in the remote session recording was also added to the dataset used in this research. This study was guided by the research questions: “What practices do teleworkers employ to accomplish the organization? What organizational arrangement is created in telework?” Its findings include discovering six key practices that enable telework, which are: connecting, synchronizing/coordinating, sharing information, using digital technologies, initiating repair, and complying with data privacy and information security policies. It also proposed an organizational arrangement of telework, which provided a representation of how social order is formed during telework and a symbolic representation of how online collaboration is constituted for the purpose of accomplishing telework.