In 2002, I read “The Ethnographic Interview” by JP Spradley (1979). It’s written very formally, but it gave me an excellent approach for how to do interviews.

I was in Professor Roger Dunbar‘s “Management and Organizational Behavior” class at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Professor Dunbar made looking at how people work together in companies like looking at art (in a good way!), or looking at some fascinating puzzle with moving pieces that all connect.

After reading “The Ethnographic Interview,” I went with some of my classmates to interview the manager and staff of Sbarro’s pizza (corner of 8th and Broadway in Manhattan). We prepared five questions before we interviewed each person. As they spoke, we asked about what interested us… how the business worked, what they thought about working there, how they came to work there, challenges, joys…

The manager told us that his parents had owned a food cart that used to be on the street outside (I remember because it seemed that he was joyful about what he saw as the progress from food cart to store).

We observed our own first impressions as observers… how the lighting caught our eye, what we liked and disliked about walking into the store, how the counters were positioned to hold food, separate the staff from the customers, how the cashier was positioned near the bathroom door…

I remember that the “language of work” (as Mac Wellman would call it in a Pataphysics workshop I took with him a couple of years later) that struck me had to do with how long the pizza was out. The staff was very insistent that it couldn’t be out for more than an hour. I don’t remember for sure, since it’s eight years later, but I think they called this the “hold time”? I remember this word, and I asked about it, because there was emotion associated with it. It was stressful for them, and they seemed proud that they cared about it. It affected the health of their customers. It was a basic standard for them that seemed to be an unquestioned priority.

In the workshop with Mac Wellman, Mac made it clear to me how the words we use, the phrases and assumptions we take for granted, shape our lives and our interactions with each other. They bond us with other people who use the same words and have the same assumptions. This is similar to what Roger Dunbar calls “framing.” The words we use, and our assumptions, show us what we can see, and also frame what we don’t see, just like framing a picture. [See #46 What we draw a box around becomes what we see, and #45 Put yourself in their shoes. A framing tip that I'm not a fan of, unless someone else is doing it to you first: #47 To control others without their awareness, frame irrelevant choices.]

At this first formal interview of mine, we didn’t have a clear result in mind other than to describe what we saw and write down what we learned. Clear results would come in my next interview.