Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work: Introduction

Doctors, mechanics, technicians, helpline operators do it, as do the police, prison officers, therapists, designers and many other professionals. Diagnostic activity — aimed at identifying and categorising problems (or opportunities) and defining scope for action — is crucial in many different contexts; aviation (Dekker, 2005), the chemical industry (Reason, 1997), healthcare (Kohn et al., 2000), business (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001), as well as engineering and design, are just some of domains within socity that rely on it. The product — ‘the diagnosis’ — can be mundane (sometimes a cough is just a cough), or hugely consequential, such as the confirmation ‘you are well clear of friendlies’ in a 2003 friendly-fire incident in Iraq that killed one soldier and injured four others (Nevile, 2009). Diagnoses are important for a number of reasons: through diagnoses, understanding of underlying facts and causes can be measured or expressed quantitatively; diagnoses can be transformative, reflexively shaping the material and experiential reality of people’s lives; they can provide access to resources or treatment, and they can be a meeting-ground for different perspectives (those of patients and healthcare professionals, users and designers, or pilots and ground controllers, for example). Visions of alternative futures and the ‘mapping out’ of paths towards them are built on diagnoses of the status quo.