NCJ Number
150148
Journal
Social Problems Volume: 41 Issue: 2 Dated: (May 1994) Pages: 316-345
Date Published
1994
Length
30 pages
Annotation
This case study focuses on the production of a British television program involving domestic assault to examine the relationships among the knowledge, beliefs, decisions, and actions of work.
Abstract
The research involved 130 hours of audiotapes of workplace interactions and discussions with workers in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as review of scripts, videotapes, and production notebooks. In London and Liverpool, fieldwork involved the observation of the actions of 32 employees producing 10 half-hour episodes of a program called Brookside. The analysis focused on how verbal interactions reveal the intricacies of communicating in the context of differing occupational, organizational, and personal knowledge and how the workplace interaction results in a particular product. As they dealt with their differences while working on the scene portraying domestic assault, the participants tacitly developed an agenda of topics and ways of discussing those topics. As a result, they presented physical violence as an expedient response to frustrating situations. This notion of normal violence shaped the ideological context of the subsequent work and the ideological direction of the resulting television episode. Footnotes, excerpts of transcripts, and 77 references (Author abstract modified)