Doing the organization's work - transcription for all practical governmental purposes

  • By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.

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Author:Alex Holder, Christopher ElseyORCiD, Martina KolanoskiGND, Phillip D. BrookerGND, Michael MairORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-620502
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.797485
ISSN:2297-900X
Parent Title (English):Frontiers in communication
Publisher:Frontiers Media
Place of publication:Lausanne
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2022/02/02
Date of first Publication:2022/02/02
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2024/03/11
Tag:NASA (national aeronautics and space administration); ethnomethodology and conversation analysis; inquiries; military; transcription
Volume:6
Issue:art. 797485
Article Number:797485
Page Number:20
First Page:1
Last Page:20
Note:
Alexander Holder’s work on this paper was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council via the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership, Grant number: ES/P000665/1. Open Access publication fees provided by Goethe University Frankfurt.
HeBIS-PPN:519209729
Institutes:Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International