Marlot Kuiper

108 Connective Routines These conversations, which can be considered a form of real-time interviewing (Barley & Kunda, 2001) provided rich information about how professionals perceived concrete events or interactions (that had just taken place), but also gave insights into general views of professionals about their work. Since it is difficult to talk about the specifics of what you do outside the context of actually doing it (ibid), these informal conversations were a valuable addition to the observations I conducted (see also Oldenhof, 2015). Although I only shadowed the key respondents (as presented in the attached Research log ), during my days at the surgery department, I also informally interviewed many additional respondents, like full professors, division leaders, medical doctors in training, scrub nurses, and nurse anaesthetists. 4.5.4 Collecting artefacts One of the advantages of doing ethnographic fieldwork, is that being there might open doors to all kinds of data that are usually hard to get (Van Hulst, 2008). During the process of data collection, I indeed have been able to collect various artefacts that are mostly not somewhere ‘out in the open’. First of all, I collected various artefacts that are ‘representations of the rule’ (D’Adderio 2011;2008), such as the checklists that are in use, but also amended versions of the checklist that were in a developmental stage (figure 4). Further, there were all sorts of other documents like internal memo’s or e-mails. One day, the gynaecologist I was shadowing drew my attention to a document that was circulating among employees (figure 5, see chapter 5 for a full version). I subsequently received this document by e-mail. In the ‘story’ that was told in the document ‘making soup’ was used as a metaphor for standardization in surgical care. The document was therefore named ‘soup protocol’. Such artefacts made an valuable addition to understand ostensive aspects, as they often were physical representations of ‘what was going on’, and reflected values and opinions. The approach of ‘artefacts’ in this study is however broader than just ‘documents’ (see paragraph 2.4.4 for some theoretical considerations). In the most broad sense, artefacts also include the physical environment, such as the construction of the building and the (possible) uses of space.