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The purpose of this paper is to argue that social interaction fundamentally underpins how people examine, experience and make sense of museum exhibits. It seeks to reveal how people collaboratively view and make sense of artwork and other kinds of exhibit, and in particular how the ways of looking at and responding to exhibits arise in social interaction.

The analysis inspects in detail video‐recordings of visitors' conduct and interaction at exhibits. It draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to reveal the social and sequential organisation of people's verbal, visual and bodily action and interaction.

The study finds that people explore museums and examine exhibits with companions while other visitors act and interact in the same locale. Which exhibits visitors look at and how they see and experience them is influenced by and arises in social interaction with others, be they companions or strangers. People display and share their experience of exhibits with others through verbal and bodily action and interaction.

The findings bear on current debates in marketing research. They suggest that there is a lack of understanding of people's experience of exhibits in museums. They show how video‐based studies can address this gap in marketing research. Further studies are currently being conducted to shed light on the quality of people's experience at the exhibit‐face and how it may be enhanced by the deployment of interpretation resources, such as labels, touch‐screen and handheld systems.

The findings may have some implications for the work of curators, designers and exhibition evaluators. They suggest that social interaction needs to be taken into consideration when designing and deploying exhibits and interpretation resources, such as labels, touch‐screen information kiosks, hand‐held computers, etc.

The paper uses visual/video‐recordings as principal data and illustrates its findings by virtue of visual material. It introduces video‐based field studies as a method to examine cultural and visual consumption in museums. It employs an analytic and methodological framework from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that previously have found little application in marketing and consumer research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of letting ideas from ethnomethodology inform a radicalisation (i.e. going to the roots) of interviewing in management and organization studies.

The argument draws upon insights from discourse and conversation analysis, in particular the acknowledgement of the productive function of language use in social life.

A radicalised approach to interviews is one that tries to abstain from letting the interview talk represent an organizational reality “out there.” The aim of radicalised interviewing is rather that of trying to identify situations and practices within the organization that resemble the interview situation.

Interview research within management and organization studies needs to take into consideration that the relation between interview accounts and organizational reality is one of the re‐creation rather than re‐presentation. This insight has implications for both the interview practice and the analysis of interview material. The challenge for the interviewer is to contribute to an interview situation that enables the re‐creation of organizational reality.

The practice of interviewing in business practice offers the same kind of problems as the research interview, and thus needs to take into consideration the re‐creational nature of the interview situation.

The paper attempts to complete the linguistic turn and explore the radical consequences for the practice of interviewing. Doing so, the paper contributes to the self‐reflexive methodological debate in a way that tries to avoid pragmatic and inconsistent argumentation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which management control is enacted in a product development setting, to provide new insights into the different roles that control can play in this context.

A nine‐month, in‐depth field study was carried out at a subsidiary of an Australasian multinational firm which operates in the consumer foods industry. A participant observation approach was used to collect field notes and documents from the organisation, which were analysed through the lens of ethnomethodology.

The results indicate that the role of management control during product development is mainly focused on reducing uncertainty at each stage and promoting goal congruence at the decision gates. The authors argue that this helps explain why management control has a positive effect in a product development setting.

The implication of this finding is that the role of management control changes during product development due to the involvement of different organisational members (communities of practice) and the activities that they carry out. This helps build a more holistic understanding of control in product development. As this is a field study of a specific company, the findings are not generalizable to other companies or settings. Future research needs to investigate other possible roles which management control may play in this context.

The paper extends the research in this area by showing how and why management control can take on multiple roles in practice.

I consider the significance of just one silence in strategy research – it revolves around the ‘I’ which brings in matters of biography, epistemology and reflexivity. While different epistemic communities have their investigative conventions or protocols and allied evaluative criteria which either silence or give voice to an ‘I’, developments in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge suggest the need to account for two particular and intertwined aspects of reflexivity. The first rests on C. Wright Mills' assertion that ‘craftsmanship is the centre of yourself’, and in this paper I share four snippets of autobiographical reflection outlining the crystallization of my interests and the sociological ‘eye’ which I bring to the study of strategic management. Second, the ways the established or taken-for-granted socio-politico-ethical orders routinely reproduce as legitimate (or not) particular ways of seeing-researching and thus, particular I's, is also woven into this account. My own intellectual ‘home’ of ethnomethodology is one where constitutive reflexivity is central and shows that the field of research interest – strategy work/strategizing – and our own practice of trying to understand this field are both a reflexive accomplishment.

In this chapter the author discusses some insights lost in a lost ethnomethodological study of parkour. The author introduces parkour, before critically engaging with some of the existing theoretical treatments of the practice. The author then considers some of the materials drawn on by those existing studies in reconsidering what is getting done in ‘parkour talk’. In further outlining what was lost, the author considers some of the aspects of the study that would have positioned parkour in terms of its engaging ordinariness. The chapter concludes with a summary of these avenues of inquiry and closes with a plea for the continued recognition of basic social inquiry and ethnography.

Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, and before that at Linköping University (1988–2008). Her work focuses on how talk is used to build social organization, with a particular focus on children's peer groups, institutional encounters, and identity-in-interaction. Other research interests include children's play, informal learning, and bilingual conversations. She publishes internationally, and her most recent papers appeared in Language in Society and Discourse & Society. A recent book is: Hedegaard, M., Aronsson, K., Højholt, C., & Skjær Ulvik, O. (Eds.). Children, childhood and everyday life: Children's perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

This paper aims to use a video‐taped fragment of conduct and interaction in a museum to illustrate the analysis of visitors' interactionally produced response to works of art.

The method draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to investigate the social and sequential organisation of people's action and interaction. The fragment discussed as part of this paper sheds light on the social and interactional production of people's response to and experience of exhibits.

The detailed analysis of one video‐fragment illustrates how the analysis progresses from an inspection of the sequential organisation of talk to an examination of the sequential organisation of verbal, visual and bodily conduct. The analysis also makes a small substantive contribution to current debates on people's experience of artwork in museums. In particular, the findings suggest that the experience of works of art is not a subjective and cognitive response to the objects, but arises in and through socially organised, embodied practices at the exhibit‐face.

The paper discusses an innovative way to analyze video‐data, and makes a contribution to the growing body of research in arts marketing and museum marketing on the exhibition floor.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce narrative construction, a method by which participants produce a narrative to make sense of their organizational context, as well as strategically guide action and decision making. While narrative theory has long‐held that people construct narratives to make sense of, and guide, their experience, narrative construction here entails a deliberate and strategic approach to narrative theory.

This is part of an ethnonarrative approach that includes both a constructionist and interpretive narrative and ethnographic methodology.

Narrative construction has research implications for an ethnomethodology of social construction and empirical observation of narrative enactment. There are practical implications for enabling change and building highly‐coordinated organizations.

Narrative construction offers a new qualitative methodology and extends ethnonarrative research. The research setting, a death penalty defense team, is also unique. It also moves narrative theory beyond an interpretive device to a constructionist strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the governance of inter-firm co-development in an open innovation setting and show how a stage-gate product development process can be used to support this relationship.

The authors adopt a qualitative case-study approach informed by ethnomethodology. Data were obtained via semi-structured interviews and document analysis.

They found that in an open innovation setting – where the producing partner relies on a research partner for all product development activities – a stage-gate product development process can act as a governance mechanism, as it enables the development of trust and cooperation which supports the co-development relationship.

The implication of this finding is that a stage-gate process can be a flexible governance mechanism, which can adapt over time in relation to the needs of the co-development partners in an open innovation setting. This also lays the groundwork for future research to explore the applicability of this tool in other settings, e.g. outsourcing arrangements as well as help guide the design and implementation of future governance mechanisms.

In the context of accounting research, this paper helps practitioners and academics understand how a stage-gate process can be used as a governance mechanism to manage and control co-development projects in an open innovation setting.