What is a perspicuous setting?

Over the last couple of days I've been doing some thinking and reading because I want to get up a solid proposal for the EM/CA conference in Fribourg in July 2012. My starting point was acknowledging that my recorded data of young children's use of computers is fairly unique with the field. In other words, it presents an opportunity to make a contribution to EM/CA only I have to strengthen my take on it.

First off I looked through a list of EM/CA papers on technology that I have been putting together. I then downloaded a few of those to read. One paper bu Suchman, Trigg and Blomberg made use of the expression ""praxiologically valid courses of instructed action". This concept was coined by Garfinkel, so my "paperchase" then spread to his book "ethnomethodology's program: working out Durkheim's aphorism". and finally that led me to a neat section of writing by Garfinkel where he talks about perspicuous settings.

Garfinkel writes:
"To find a perspicuous setting the EM policy provides that the analyst looks to find, as of the haecceities of some local gang's work affairs, the organizational thing that they are up against and that they can be brought to teach the analyst what he needs to learn and to know from them, with which, by learning from them, to teach them what their affairs consist of as locally produced, locally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally described, locally questionable, counted, recorded, observed, etc., phenomena of order, in and as of their in vivo accountably doable coherent and cogent detail for each another next first time." (p. 182)

Garfinkel says that that one way to find a perspicuous setting is to use Sack's gloss. He then describes it.In brief, Sack's made a distinction between a possessable and possessitive: The former (again, in brief) is a thing that you see, that you want and you know you can have. A possessitive, on the other hand, is see and desired but you know you can't have it because it belongs to somebody else. Sacks sought to find a work group, where members' methods entailed -as an aspect of their daily work -making this distinction. Sack's eventual found that perspicious setting in the work of police in the LA Police Department who made decisions about whether cars were abandoned or just delapidated cars that were nevertheless owned.

So ... how might the gloss be applied to settings that I am interested in? Or should I say, do I have a gloss for which a setting might provide a way to know the thing through examining the work of the people who must decide whether it is one thing or the other? Whew!