The paper proposes an ethnomethodological approach to the study of naturalistic decision making. We present an analysis of design practices in an Internet company, showing that, besides ‘professional design’ of technological systems, designers are continually involved in an activity of maintenance and replanning of these same systems (‘design-in-use’). Through an interaction-based analysis, we describe a serious emergency design-in-use situation. Results show that (1) decision-making activities are not clearly identifiable in ongoing problem-solving action but are embedded in complex work practices; (2) work practices and organizational features shape when, how and which decisions are made, underlying the situated character of the decision-making process; (3) considering the group of designers as unit of analysis allows the complex and distributed nature of decision making in organizations to be described.

This study describes the rhetorical manipulation of social identities arising in the discourses of a professional soccer team. The author audio recorded and completely transcribed according to G. Jefferson’s (1989) method 3 discursive interactions be- tween team members (after a victory, after a defeat, and in a pregame situation). Methodology comprises both a conversational analysis and a quantitative one. Results show that (a) team members use rhetorically a complex repertoire of their own and others’ social identities; (b) intragroup differentiation is more marked than intergroup differentiation; and (c) two main variables influence the use of markings of social identities: the role of the speakers (in particular the power role of the coach) and the result of the match around which the interactive discourse revolves

This article deals with the negotiation of time boundaries in a project group. The study grew up from a theoretical approach grounded in cultural psychology, where time is considered as a cultural artifact and as a dimension of the interactive environment that could be co-constructed by all participants through discourse. The relevance of the negotiation of the temporal dimension in work settings is still unexplored. Both qualitative and quantitative data of the first meeting of a project group of an Italian national bank working on the reorganization of front-office services show how the negotiation of temporal aspects is a core topic from the very beginning of the work. This study shows that when a project starts, all participants spend a lot of effort in defining different kinds of temporal boundaries as these represent very important dimensions of work planning; time is not treated as a single topic but participants differentiate organizational time, project time, meetings time and actual meeting time. Results strengthen the hypothesis of the interactional nature of time in work settings and show specific relationships with the contents of participants' discourses.