Workplace Studies and Critical Interactionism by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 Workplace Studies and Critical Interactionism: Recovering the Moral Economy of Labor Under Neoliberal Capitalism

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Introduction: The Hidden Infrastructure of Cooperative Work

For over three decades, ethnomethodologically-informed workplace studies have generated an extraordinary empirical archive revealing a profound contradiction at the heart of contemporary capitalist work organization: the systematic mismatch between how work is actually accomplished and how managerial ideologies represent it. Emerging from Garfinkel's radical insight that social order is a practical, ongoing accomplishment rather than a structural determination, and refined through Sacks' discoveries about the indigenous organization of talk-in-interaction, workplace studies have dismantled romanticized conceptions of "knowledge work," exposed the fantasy of procedure-driven labor, and revealed the invisible interactional and moral economies that make organizational functioning possible. This tradition—crystallizing at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and extending through contemporary CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) research—provides the essential empirical foundation for Critical Interactionism's reinterpretation of the labor process under neoliberal capitalism.

Critical Interactionism enters this intellectual terrain not as a mere synthesis of ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EM/CA), Symbolic Interactionism, and labor process theory, but as a fundamental reorientation of workplace studies around the lived consequences of capitalist exploitation. Where classic workplace studies brilliantly captured the endogenous organization of cooperative work, they rarely confronted the politics of that organization. Workers appeared as skilled practitioners but not as dominated subjects; analyses revealed how work is organized but not how exploitation is accomplished through that very organization. My contribution transforms this limitation: I demonstrate that the interactional machinery documented by EM/CA—turn-taking systems, repair sequences, categorical reasoning, sequential positioning, embodied coordination—can be mobilized to expose racial microaggressions, gendered silencing, epistemic asymmetries, deontic subordination, algorithmic deskilling, and embodied resistance. The moral economy of labor—workers' struggles for dignity, recognition, autonomy, and fairness—becomes the analytical center, not an afterthought.

Ethnomethodology's Radical Program: From Durkheim's Problem to Members' Methods

Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) inaugurated a research program that took seriously three features of social action systematically ignored by structural functionalism and conventional sociology: indexicality, practical reasoning, and reflexivity. Indexicality refers to the irreducibly context-dependent nature of meaning—every utterance, gesture, category, or action derives its sense from its "occasioned use" in concrete situations. "Here," "that," "urgent," "competent," "teamwork"—these terms have no stable meaning outside the local contexts of their deployment. Yet this radical contingency does not paralyze social life. Through practical reasoning, actors deploy commonsense methods—"et cetera," "let it pass," "good enough for now"—to achieve workable understandings sufficient for the task at hand. Action is thus reflexive: it simultaneously presupposes and constitutes its own context, creating templates for subsequent interpretation while being shaped by immediately prior actions.

Garfinkel's insight was that social order is not imposed by external structures, internalized norms, or cognitive schemas, but rather is an ongoing practical accomplishment achieved through participants' skilled, methodical work. The "immortal ordinary society" that ethnomethodology studies is not fragile—quite the opposite. It is robust precisely because actors continuously monitor, repair, and hold each other accountable to recognizable methods of producing intelligible action. When someone deviates too radically from shared methods, members demand accounts or issue corrections. Social order, in Garfinkel's famous formulation, is thus a "witnessed orderliness"—produced in and through its very witnessing by competent members.

Harvey Sacks extended this program through conversation analysis, revealing that ordinary talk exhibits systematic, orderly properties discoverable through fine-grained sequential analysis of recorded interactions (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Turn-taking, adjacency pairs, preference organization, repair mechanisms—these structures are not imposed by syntax or social norms but emerge from participants' locally organized, moment-by-moment coordination. Crucially, Sacks demonstrated that these methods are members' methods—practical reasoning procedures that participants themselves deploy, orient to, and hold each other accountable for using. The analyst's task is not to impose external categories but to discover the indigenous logic through which participants produce and recognize orderly interaction.

This analytical reorientation had profound implications. If social order is practically accomplished rather than structurally determined, then analyzing how participants accomplish that order—through what specific practices, what sequential moves, what embodied coordinations—becomes the key to understanding social life. Moreover, Goffman's dramaturgical insights about the "interaction order" as a domain sui generis (Goffman 1983) suggested that face-to-face interaction constitutes a distinct level of social organization with its own structures, vulnerabilities, and moral economy—a domain where identity, dignity, and social standing are continuously negotiated and potentially damaged.

The Xerox PARC Revolution: Situated Action and the Critique of Plan-Based Models

The translation of ethnomethodological insights into the study of technology-mediated work began in earnest at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1980s. Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions (1987) stands as the foundational text. Against cognitive science's plan-based models of human action—in which actors form mental representations, devise hierarchical plans, execute those plans, and monitor results—Suchman demonstrated that action is fundamentally situated: emerging responsively within evolving circumstances rather than following predetermined scripts. Her comparison of Western navigational planning with Micronesian seamen's improvisational wayfinding brilliantly illustrated how competent action depends on continuous adjustment to local contingencies rather than rigid plan execution.

This insight dismantled the dominant paradigm in artificial intelligence and office automation. If work cannot be adequately captured in procedural flowcharts or formalized rule sets, then systems designed to automate "routine" work or support "knowledge work" by encoding procedures will systematically fail. Suchman and Wynn's earlier studies of office work (Wynn 1979; Suchman 1982, 1983) had already shown that formal office procedures do not causally determine action—they function as resources that workers deploy flexibly to accomplish locally contingent tasks. The "office automation" movement's vision of replacing human discretion with programmed routines was thus fundamentally misconceived.

The PARC workplace studies expanded this critique across multiple domains. Studies of photocopier repair technicians (Orr 1996) revealed that expert troubleshooting depends not on consulting technical manuals but on narrative sensemaking—"war stories" shared among technicians that encode experiential knowledge about machine behavior under specific conditions. Studies of airport operations (Suchman 1996; Goodwin and Goodwin 1996), control rooms (Heath and Luff 1992), and scientific laboratories (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981) demonstrated that complex technical work involves continuous artful practices—skillful improvisations, embodied know-how, peripheral awareness, and collaborative sensemaking—that formal descriptions systematically miss.

Critically, these studies revealed what Schmidt calls the "escamotation" of articulation work. Like skilled illusionists, competent workers make their labor appear effortless by suppressing visible signs of the complex coordination, repair work, and contingency management through which they actually accomplish tasks. They project orderliness to colleagues while continuously handling breakdowns, ambiguities, and unanticipated problems behind the scenes. This performative suppression is not deception—it's essential competence. Broadcasting every uncertainty would overload colleagues with irrelevant detail. But it means that formal descriptions of work, organizational charts, and procedure manuals capture only the surface of work's accomplishment, missing the invisible infrastructure of skilled practice.

Workplace Studies as Critical Practice: Unpacking "Black Boxes"

The emerging tradition of "workplace studies" (Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath 2000; Heath and Luff 2000) extends PARC's insights through video-based analysis of work across diverse settings: air traffic control, financial trading floors, hospital operating theaters, news production, architectural design, and call centers. These studies share methodological commitments inherited from EM/CA: (1) analyzing video recordings of naturally occurring work activities to capture embodied action, tool use, and multimodal coordination; (2) building collections of phenomena to identify recurrent practices and their variations; (3) maintaining participant orientation by demonstrating how co-participants themselves treat actions as meaningful; (4) avoiding premature theoretical impositions by discovering endogenous organization.

Several exemplary studies illustrate the tradition's power. The Lancaster air traffic control studies (Harper, Hughes, and Shapiro 1989, 1991) revealed that the "low-tech" practice of manipulating paper flight strips—which automation advocates dismissed as outdated—actually enabled controllers' peripheral awareness of aircraft positions and facilitated rapid, collaborative responses to emergencies. The "flight strip" was not mere information storage but an interactional resource enabling distributed cognition. The London Underground control room research (Heath and Luff 1992) showed how operators' embodied conduct—gaze direction, posture shifts, gesture—made their ongoing activities visible and accountable to colleagues, enabling seamless coordination despite high-pressure, rapidly changing conditions. Christian Heath's auction studies (Heath 2013) demonstrated that auctioneers deploy microscopically timed bodily movements and vocal modulations to manage competitive bidding, projecting fairness while maximizing sale prices—skills utterly invisible to observers but decisive for auction outcomes.

Klaus Schmidt's influential essay "The Critical Role of Workplace Studies in CSCW" (this volume) articulates what workplace studies fundamentally reveal: cooperative work's orderliness rests on members' indigenous methods—practical reasoning procedures that participants themselves use to produce recognizable, accountable action. These methods constitute work's endogenous organization—order produced from within the setting through participants' skilled practices, not imposed by external structures or formal rules. Technology systems fail when they ignore this endogenous organization, attempting to replace human coordination with algorithmic control rather than supporting the actual methods workers use.

Yet Schmidt also identifies a crucial limitation. Workplace studies expose what's there—the intricate practices through which work gets done—but they rarely ask cui bono? Who benefits when certain work becomes visible or invisible? Whose interests are served by representing work as procedural rather than discretionary, individual rather than collective, cognitive rather than embodied and emotional? The tradition brilliantly reveals capitalism's dependency on workers' invisible artistry while insufficiently theorizing that revelation's political implications.

From Description to Critique: Critical Interactionism's Intervention

This is where Critical Interactionism makes its decisive move. The same EM/CA methods that reveal work's cooperative infrastructure can expose exploitation's micro-mechanisms. Consider Garcia et al.'s analysis of enterprise IT failures. They report that roughly 70% of workplace technology implementations fail—not because workers resist innovation but because formal systems misrepresent work. Their examples include a foam manufacturing firm's invoicing system that crashed because it couldn't accommodate workers' practice of manufacturing products before invoices were written (to enable same-day shipping), and police crime reporting software that made reports appear late and over-revised because it didn't fit officers' actual work rhythms. These "failures" appear as technical problems. But from a labor process perspective, they represent capital's systematic attempt to deskill workers, intensify labor, and extract surplus value by replacing human discretion with algorithmic control—attempts that fail because they ignore workers' actual practices, yet impose enormous costs on workers who must continually "repair" dysfunctional systems.

My video ethnographies of adjunct faculty, homeless outreach workers, and temporary employees reveal the "microphysics of domination"—how power operates through the fine-grained organization of interaction. Interruptions that silence junior colleagues aren't random; they systematically target women and people of color, enforcing epistemic hierarchies. Directives that appear neutral ("Could you handle that?") encode deontic authority relationships, positioning precarious workers as subordinate. Categorical formulations ("those people," "that demographic") accomplish racialization in real-time, not as "bias" but as practical categorization work with material consequences. Surveillance technologies don't merely observe—they restructure embodied conduct, making workers perform compliance while destroying the peripheral awareness and embodied coordination that actually enable quality work.

Crucially, my analyses also capture resistance. Workers deploy conversational repair to reject demeaning categorizations. They produce pointed non-cooperation—"misunderstanding" unreasonable directives or delaying compliance—to resist exploitation without overt confrontation. They build solidarity through whispered asides, shared glances, and collaborative "workarounds" that preserve dignity while accomplishing tasks. These practices of resistance are simultaneously moral and strategic, individual and collective—they defend personhood against commodification while maintaining the appearance of compliance necessary for precarious employment.

The Neoliberal Context: Service Work as Moral Labor

Contemporary workplace studies must confront the transformation of work under neoliberal capitalism. The shift from manufacturing to service economies means that labor is increasingly interactional—its value lies in social encounters, emotional performances, and relational coordination, not tangible product fabrication. As Hochschild (1983) demonstrated, service workers perform "emotional labor"—managing their own feelings and inducing emotions in customers as core job requirements. But this formulation still treats emotion as individual psychology. Critical Interactionism insists that service work is moral work: workers continuously navigate ethical dilemmas, preserve client dignity amid bureaucratic constraints, and defend their own professional identities against devaluation.

Recent workplace studies of service work (Schneider et al. 2021; vom Lehn and Heath 2021) align with this perspective. Their studies of hospitality workers, call center employees, medical triage, and gig labor reveal that service encounters are sites of meaning-making where value, dignity, and power are negotiated turn-by-turn. These are not "scripted exchanges" but complex moral negotiations. A restaurant server must balance management's demand for speed against customers' desire for unhurried dining; she must perform deference while maintaining self-respect; she must manage sexual harassment from customers while preserving tips essential to survival. These dilemmas are not psychological but structural—they arise from capitalist service work's fundamental contradiction: workers must perform authentic care within commodified, time-disciplined, precarious employment.

This illuminates why neoliberal metrics systematically fail to measure what matters. "Contacts," "referrals," "clicks," "completions," "customer satisfaction scores"—these quantifications erase the relational labor that constitutes service work's actual value. A homeless outreach worker's "productivity" isn't measured by "clients housed" but by the trust she builds through repeated, unhurried encounters over months. A temp worker's competence isn't captured by "tasks completed" but by her ability to learn unwritten rules, navigate informal power structures, and maintain dignity amid exploitation. EM/CA's fine-grained analysis reveals this invisible labor—but Critical Interactionism insists we theorize its political economy.

Technology, Algorithmic Management, and the Intensification of Exploitation

Contemporary CSCW research reveals that algorithmic management and AI-augmented workflow systems intensify these contradictions. Studies of remote coordination (2020-2024) demonstrate that algorithmic surveillance doesn't merely observe work—it fundamentally restructures it, often increasing cognitive load, redistributing skill invisibly to frontline workers, and expanding organizational surveillance while making that surveillance appear neutral and technical (vom Lehn and Heath 2021). The "impact" of technology is produced interactionally: systems succeed or fail based on how they reconfigure perception, value, and organization of work that employees already perform.

Crucially, the labor required to repair, circumvent, or supplement algorithmic breakdown is simultaneously technical and moral. Workers don't just "fix" system errors—they preserve client dignity when algorithms treat people as data points. They protect professional identities when metrics reduce nursing to "patient throughput" or teaching to "learning outcomes." They maintain organizational functioning while shielding the organization from its own self-imposed chaos. This repair work is gendered and racialized: women and workers of color disproportionately perform the emotional and relational labor that makes dysfunctional systems minimally functional, yet this labor remains invisible, uncredited, and uncompensated.

Garcia et al.'s observation that technology failures reflect designers' misunderstanding of work becomes, in Critical Interactionist perspective, a diagnosis of capitalist rationality's fundamental irrationality. Capital's drive to automate, discipline, and control labor systematically destroys the very discretion, collaboration, and moral commitment that make labor productive. The contradiction produces endless "system failures"—but workers pay the price through intensified labor, precarious employment, and algorithmic surveillance.

Recovering the Situated, Moral, and Embodied Character of Labor

What, then, is Critical Interactionism's distinctive contribution to workplace studies? First, methodologically, it refuses to separate analysis of work's organization from analysis of work's domination. Every instance of skillful coordination, every example of embodied expertise, every demonstration of workers' indigenous knowledge is simultaneously a revelation of what capital systematically devalues, erases, and exploits. The same video data that shows how emergency dispatchers accomplish life-saving coordination reveals how their emotional labor—calming panicked callers, projecting confidence during uncertainty, managing their own stress—remains unrecognized and uncompen sated.

Second, theoretically, Critical Interactionism situates micro-analysis within macro-political economy. Symbolic Interactionism provides frameworks for understanding how workers construct and negotiate identities amid institutional devaluation—how adjuncts maintain scholarly identities despite degrading working conditions, how service workers preserve dignity despite customer abuse. Labor process theory locates these struggles within capitalism's structural logic: the imperative to extract surplus value through deskilling, surveillance, and precarity. EM/CA provides the rigorous methods to analyze these processes' micro-instantiation—revealing not just that exploitation happens but how it's accomplished turn-by-turn, gesture-by-gesture, categorization-by-categorization.

Third, politically, Critical Interactionism centers what workplace studies typically background: the moral economy of labor. Workers don't merely want "fair wages" or "good working conditions"—they demand recognition as full human beings, respect for their expertise, autonomy over their practice, and solidarity with colleagues. These demands aren't "subjective" or "cultural"—they're material. Respect means being heard in meetings; recognition means having one's knowledge valued; autonomy means having discretion over work's pace and methods; solidarity means having co-workers' support against arbitrary management. EM/CA reveals how these demands play out in interaction—how interruptions deny respect, how deskilling denies recognition, how surveillance denies autonomy, how competitive metrics destroy solidarity.

Conclusion: Toward an Emancipatory Workplace Studies

The workplace studies tradition has generated invaluable insights into work's cooperative foundations. It has exposed as fantasy the managerial vision of work as individual task completion according to prescribed procedures. It has revealed the extraordinary competence required for "routine" labor. It has documented the indigenous methods through which workers accomplish organizational functioning despite, not because of, formal structures. These are genuine achievements.

But the tradition has insufficiently confronted a fundamental question: Why does capital persist in implementing systems that workplace studies repeatedly show will fail? Why do organizations continue to measure what's easily quantified rather than what actually matters? Why does technology relentlessly deskill, surveil, and discipline workers when research demonstrates this destroys productivity?

The answer lies in capitalism's logic: profit depends on control, control depends on making labor transparent and measurable, and transparency requires erasing precisely the discretion, collaboration, and moral commitment that workplace studies reveal as essential. The contradiction between capital's need for workers' invisible artistry and its drive to eliminate that artistry's invisibility by making it visible, measured, and controlled is capitalism's constitutive irrationality.

Critical Interactionism thus transforms workplace studies into an emancipatory project. By revealing how exploitation operates through interaction's micro-organization—by showing that indignity, subordination, and dehumanization are practical accomplishments requiring continuous interactional work by both dominators and dominated—it opens space for resistance. If domination is practically accomplished, it can be practically refused. If categorical work produces racialization, conversational repair can contest it. If surveillance restructures embodied conduct, alternative embodiments can resist. If competitive metrics destroy solidarity, workers can rebuild collective bonds through interaction's moral economy.

This is Critical Interactionism's wager: that the same methods which expose capitalism's dependency on workers' invisible labor can become weapons in struggles for dignity, recognition, autonomy, and solidarity. Workplace studies recover work's situated, moral, and embodied character. Critical Interactionism mobilizes that recovery toward a world where workers' full humanity—their artistry, their moral commitments, their collective power—is finally recognized, respected, and rewarded.

Bibliographic Note

The article also draws on contemporary EM/CA workplace studies. These include Christian Heath and Paul Luff’s studies of collaborative work (Heath and Luff 2000), Derek vom Lehn’s account of the interactional production of organizational impact (vom Lehn 2021), Eric Laurier and Barry Brown’s ethnomethodological workplace analyses (Laurier and Brown 2020), Ilkka Koskinen’s overview of CSCW workplace studies (Koskinen 2022), and the Nordic workplace-studies volume edited by Kari Kuutti and colleagues (Kuutti et al. 2019). Additional grounding comes from Schneider and Brodbeck’s pragmatist review of service work (Schneider and Brodbeck 2021) and other contemporary studies of coordination, multimodality, and embodied action.

Critical labor studies provide the structural frame, including Harry Braverman’s analysis of capitalist deskilling (Braverman 1974), Michael Burawoy’s ethnography of manufacturing consent (Burawoy 1979), and David Graeber’s account of bureaucratic domination and “bullshit jobs” (Graeber 2018). Feminist contributions include Dorothy Smith’s standpoint theory (Smith 1987), Arlie Hochschild’s study of emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), and Gretchen Purser’s analyses of precarious service work (Purser 2019). The article also engages recent writing on digital ethnography, algorithmic management, neoliberal governance, gig-economy labor, remote work, and workplace surveillance.

Finally, the framework is shaped by the author’s own multi-site ethnographic and video-based research on homeless outreach, contingent academic labor, temporary employment, service encounters, and other forms of contemporary precarious work. These data provide empirical grounding for the development of Critical Interactionism as a worker-centered approach to understanding the moral, political, embodied, and sequential structuring of work under neoliberal capitalism.

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