Kameo2015
| Kameo2015 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Kameo2015 |
| Author(s) | Nahoko Kameo, Jack Whalen |
| Title | Organizing documents: standard forms, person production and organizational action |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Emergency Calls, Materiality, Documents, Institutional, Membership Categorization Analysis, Technology, Racism |
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| Year | 2015 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Qualitative Sociology |
| Volume | 38 |
| Number | 2 |
| Pages | 205–229 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11133-015-9302-7 |
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Abstract
Using the case of calls-for-help to police and fire communications centers and their incident record forms, we present a detailed investigation of how documents play a constitutive role in formal organizations. We take an ethnomethodologically informed approach to the problem, delineating how standard forms in bureaucracies enable organizational participants to coordinate actions across time and space and, at the same time, produce people who perpetually produce such documents or work from them. We focus in this regard on person description. The call-taker needs to translate the call into preset categories, and thus enlist the citizen in the work of inscribing the incident in the way the form requires, (re)producing certain categorizations of personhood, especially race and sex. In this way, organizational documents and their inscriptions function as a kind of technology of reification for these categories.
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