What I'm reading today

Laurier, E. (2001). Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls. Environment and Planning, 19, 485 – 504.


“In what follows although I will be taking a ‘theoretical’ attitude, I will not proceed as you might have observed others to do as I will not be ‘doing theorising’ as it tends to be ‘done’ in cultural geography, sociology, and cultural and media studies (Sharrock and Coleman, 1999). So I will not be drawing together, sketching out, or building a new and discrete theory from parts of the rich corpus offered by the social sciences; nor will I be using ethnographic materials to complicate, fine-tune, or build afresh a theory (such as a theory of ‘the nomad’, or ‘the postmodern’, or ‘the public sphere’). Relatedly, in handling my ‘empirical material’ that follows, I will not be ‘coding’ or ‘decoding’ transcripts of in-depth interviews or focus groups carried out with members of some particular social or cultural group(s) identified by terms such as ‘working class’ or ‘gatekeepers’ (Crabtree, 1999). Not because terms such as working class are inappropriate or ill founded, but because of more epistemic problems with the activity of ‘coding’ (Suchman and Jordon, 1990). As a result I will not be interpreting and analysing these codes and their related segments of text towards a previously worked out theoretical framework. And I will not be proposing an alternative or more complex theory to substitute any other social theory. My “disagreement is not based on an alternative theoretical basis but on methodological grounds” (Crabtree et al, 1998, page 6). In the shortest possible terms: I am interested in describing methods, in particular formulations of place (Schegloff, 1972a) used by people who competently make and receive calls on their mobile phones day in, day out, as an ordinary, everyday (and sometimes annoying to bystanders) achievement. In what follows I will not be seeking to displace their methods and competencies in favour of the methods and competencies, briefly described above, of doing what could be called theory-driven ethnography. There may be times during this paper where it may seem that I am paying an excessive attention to detail, yet you will have been offered an answer as to why people say where they are when called on their mobile phone that is versed through actual instances. Along the way we may also be able to observe some problems and topics which are often dealt with abstractly as problems for a theory to solve- critique or remedy being handled as routine practical difficulties by a group of actors whose everyday business is dealing with such affairs (Sacks, 1972b)."