Another topic that is usually brought up in ethnographic studies revolves around the generalisability of the findings, especially in cases where the ethnographic findings come from only a small number of participants who do not cover diverse demographic categories (e.g. adequate number of participants from different genders, race or national background). This thesis’ findings are based on 25 members, who belonged to different organisations and teams. As a result of that, someone might ask on what grounds this thesis makes large-scale claims about the entire community these 25 individuals are members of. Are the provided descriptions capable of reliably explicating members’ methods in creating Minecraft content?
Ethnomethodologists have provided a series of counter-arguments to these claims, which point to the generalizable character of members’ methods in the particular context that is being studied. Crabtree et al. (2013) argue that even cases of one member accounting for the collaborative work in a setting could potentially be enough in order to develop a rigorous understanding of how members attend to their business and carry out their everyday actions. This is the case due to the inherent social nature of collaborative work in an organisation. The activities that are entailed in collaborative work and how they are tied together, ordered, coordinated and carried out by members is what accounts for the generalisability of the outcome of an ethnographic study, not the amount and diversity of participants.
This was firstly introduced by Sacks, who coined the term “machinery of interaction” (Sacks 1984) in order to refer to the sequential order of interactions humans follow in order to do turn-taking during talk. Sacks suggests that the machinery of interaction involved in talking is “context and cohort independent” (Sacks et al. 1974), which means that it is carried out in the same manner wherever and whenever talk occurs, regardless of who is involved in it. This resonates with Sacks’ Membership Categorisation Devices (MCDs), which are, as Crabtree et al. (2013) put it:
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“[…] collections of natural language categories such as ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘baby’, ‘uncle’, ‘grandmother’, etc., which members employ to characterise relationships between people – and tying rules, which provide for our hearing that the categories ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ are first and second parts of a pair […]”
These arguments stem from an example Sacks used to demonstrate what people understand when they hear phrases such as “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up” (Sacks 1992a). This phrase has no direct information regarding the relation of the mommy and the baby. Even so when people hear it, they immediately make the connection that the mommy who picked the baby up is the mother of the baby. According to Sacks, this is because members of any setting are capable of pairing distinct categories (e.g. mommy and baby) together through the use of rules that dictate how these categories are related to each other (Sacks 1992b).
Whilst Sacks’ discussion concerned talk, it is not constrained to it; on the contrary, talk was just a means to an end in his studies, as that was the tool he had available at that point in time (Sacks 1984). The use of MCDs and tying rules are constantly at play in everyday life and it is through them that members manage to bring order to their social affairs (Crabtree et al. 2013)4.
This discussion is relevant to the dispute between academic reflexivity and endogenous or members’ reflexivity. As discussed above, many scholars assert that academic rigour comes from the ethnographers’ expertise and how they interpret the naturally occurring phenomena in the setting they study (Williams & Irani 2010; Marcus & Fischer 1999; Dourish 2014). Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, respecifies reflexivity as being inherently tied to “the practical organisation of everyday life; a constitutive feature of account-able [sic] action” (Button et al. 2015). Members’ actions and interactions naturally account for what the actors want to achieve and do in a setting. Competent members of the setting are capable of understanding what the observed actions refer to and what
4 The application of MCDs in sociological analysis is mostly applied in Conversation Analysis
(Sacks et al. 1974). Schegloff provides a tutorial in the use of MCDs (Schegloff 2007), which summarises key aspects of Sacks’ initial conceptualisation of the term.
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is achieved through them. As such, generalisability of findings does not come from the amount of ethnographic data, but rather from accurate descriptions of members’ accounts that manage to convey the reflexive character of members’ actions and interactions.
It needs to be mentioned that this thesis’ findings were presented to and verified by those that participated in it (for more information, see section 3.4).
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Chapter 3
3 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD SITE
This chapter emphasises a number of key topics that revolve around the study conducted to address this project’s research problem. Firstly, a description of
Minecraft is fleshed out, which covers not only its gameplay affordances but
also the details that are intertwined with the market under investigation. Following that, an elaboration of the various practical matters that are pertinent to the study is provided, covering: how participants were recruited; the ethical implications of the study; and how the data gathering took place. Lastly, the key
findings this thesis points to are summarised, as well as the validation of these findings by those that participated in the work.