This fieldwork report presents the findings of a brief - ‘quick & dirty’ - ethnographic study of some aspects of the admissions process in the University; in particular the work of the various staff in the Admissions Office in University House and the associated admissions work in a number of departments in the University. There are a number of important caveats to bear in mind throughout this report most obviously, given the annual cycle of the admissions process, the very limited time span - primarily January and February - during which observations were made; and the limitations in terms of the number of academic departments, with varying technological configurations, that were studied. Despite these limitations the report attempts to provide some ‘sensitivities’ to the everyday work of admissions, presented in terms of ‘routine’ work, ‘coordination’ work and so on, particularly in so far as these might provide instantiations of the impact of ‘legacy’ issues on everyday, routine work.

The research method adopted in this study was that of ethnomethodologically-informed (or inspired) ethnography. The general advantage claimed for such an approach lies in the ‘sensitising’ it promotes to the ‘practical’, real world character and context of activity. The main characteristic of ethnographic approaches is the detailed and unprejudiced observation of practices, conversations, and activities and an emphasis on furnishing a 'thick description' and ‘illustrative vignettes’ of the practical accomplishment of work; the 'routine' problems and contingencies that 'typically' arise and are overcome and accommodated; and the various forms of team working that combine to enable the work to 'get done'. The aim was to observe and describe the phenomena of ‘everyday life’ in the various settings of the Admissions Office and the departments, taking an ‘unmotivated’ approach to the varied activities, looking just to see what people are doing, rather than seeking to identify things which might be ‘interesting’ from the viewpoint of sociology or systems design.

As befits it's origins in ethnomethodology, this particular 'take' on understanding work emphasises how work is socially organised - how individuals are enabled to work because of their awareness of what constitutes their 'task' and how it links with the tasks of others. This focus on the ‘situated’ character of work and the related judgements and discretion routinely displayed in response to everyday contingencies, provides a method for identifying the subtle, unremarked, cooperative aspects of work, such as the small-scale constellations of assistance and deployment of local knowledge that enable work to be accomplished. Consequently, we are not just concerned with placing the 'actor's point of view' at the centre of analysis but with issues of 'consociation', with the 'gearing into' the social world of work. As Anderson et al (1989) write:

Ethnographic methods involve, therefore, far more than ‘mere’ detailed description but bring a particular focus to the analysis of systems in use and thereby outline what possibilities’ Anderson (1994) calls the ‘play of for work and design; "to enable designers to question the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the conventional problem-solution design framework" (Anderson 1994:170). It is in these senses that ethnography can perhaps prove useful as a 'bottom up', or more accurately ‘endogenous’, method for re-specifying and developing a more sophisticated view of work activities.

The Admissions Office has a relatively clear routine of working based around the annual application and decision-making cycle. The routine centres on the two central aspects of the admissions process - the annual receipt of applications and the transmission of decisions. The UCAS process begins for the University at the beginning of September every year when students apply for places; the UCAS forms begin to come through to the University in early October and the numbers of applications steadily builds up until the process is effecively in ‘full flow’ by early November. This period of applications runs through to end of January (with an UCAS ‘deadline for applications usually about mid-January) and while the University still get applications throughout the rest of the academic year (until the end of June) around 95% of application forms have been received by the end of January.

Three main operations are involved in the admissions process, all are primarily characterised by extensive checking procedures. The first process is centred on the receipt of applications which arrive from UCAS in both electronic format (usually overnight on a dedicated PC) and a paper form (usually delivered in batches by courier). On arrival the paper forms are checked against the electronic listing to ensure that all forms have been received. The forms themselves then undergo a further checking process with ëstandardí applications being sent direct to the departments and ëproblematicí applications - such as overseas or mature or special needs aplicants or those with ënon-standardí qualifications - being retained for further consideration and advice.

The second process concerns the transmission of the admissions decision which occurs from the end of November until mid April. Once the forms have been checked they are sent to academic departments in batches every week (on Wednesdays). Some departments (most departments) are also able to download the accompanying and identical electronic information from UCAS either using GQL or a custom-made package. Once departments have made their decisions on the various applications the form comes back with their decision inscribed within a formated decision-box (stamped by the Admissions Department in the bottom left corner of the form). These decisions are then checked over - that candidates results are accurate, that candidates satisfy general entrance requirements, that any ambiguities are removed and that offers are not liable to any misinterpretation. Decisions take three forms; unconditional offers and rejections are sent straight to UCAS; with conditional offers - most common for 18 year olds taking A levels - the candidate is informed that an offer is being made and the availability of Open Days but the decision itself - in terms of the grades expected - comes from UCAS. Candidate offers are formatted and sent by computer to UCAS while overnight a letter is sent to the candidate.

Replies to admissions offers (firm choice; insurance; decline) begin to arrive in numbers in April-May. Those who accept their offers are sent information on accommodation, registration and the Universityís introductory week. By the end of June the University has received most of the candidate replies and sent out various materials to all those who have firmly accepted a place. At the same time a paper based record is also created using the photocopied application forms which are assigned to folders on the basis of the departmentsí and candidates decisions, sifting forms into ‘live’ and ‘dead’ based on acceptance of offer. (Filing - blue = live; orange/pink = dead; white = insurance choice went elsewhere - forms are kept for two years - in case they apply again)

The third and final process is a ëconfirmation periodí which occurs in July and August as candidates begin to get the results of their examinations; in July from Access courses, Btech and GNVQ (and some overseas students) and in August from A levels. A level results arrive in mid-August and are always published to candidates on a Thursday, although the University gets the results in advance, on the Sunday before, by going to Cheltenham to get results as they appear on various sheets of paper, and electronically on the Monday. These results are then ìfranticallyî entered onto the application forms and if the candidate makes the required grades their place is confirmed. By Wednesday departmental Admissions tutors come in to say how many confirmed places there have been and consequently how many vacancies are left to fill. On the Thursday, when candidates get their results, ìthe phone starts ringing for two weeksî. There are generally two types of query; those candidates not making the required grades and checking whether they have been accepted for a place; and those candidates who had not applied to Lancaster on their original UCAS application and are looking for course vacancies. Candidates are given information on what courses have vacancies and the miniumum entrance requirements. If they are interested in Lancaster the admissions Office will obtain a copy of the candidates application form from UCAS while the candidate gets a ‘clearing entry form’ ( a ëguaranteeí that they are going to accept the offer) from UCAS which has to be sent before a formal offer is made. At the same time the Admissions Office has to make an estimate as to how many will actually accept the offer - in the past the figure for those who phoned ‘materialising’ on the course was around 50% - in the last year it was 60%. After clearing comes ‘tidying up’ with the issue of formal offer letters to candidates and by August/September Admissions has a reasonably clear picture idea of the size and composition of the new student intake. At the end of August a marketing operations is embarked on; the first year materials are sent out; preparations are made for registration and the whole process begins again. .

Within the Admissions Office a relatively straightforward division of labour operates. When UCAS applications are received they undergo a simple check for ‘standard’ and non-standard’ applications, with ‘standard’ applications - referring to British, 18 year old, ‘A’ level entry - being sent straight to the various departments. ‘Non-standard’ applications - overseas students, mature, special needs and non-standard qualifications - are then referred to senior personnel for further checking, comment and advice.

Although it is clearly not the only or even the most important work within the ofice, the overwhelming impression and characterisation of work in the Admissions Office is that of ‘checking’ - the admissions process appears to be an almost constant stream of checking procedures - checking the accuracy of the information on the application forms, checking the character of the information on the application forms, checking the paper forms against their electronic equivalent and so on. The general procedure followed is that when a batch of application forms comes from UCAS with a checklist (which has usually been preceeded by the equivalent electronic data) the batch is checked to ensure that there are forms for everyone on the list - entered onto a ‘checking forms in’ form. Those students applying for more than one course are then highlighted (orange) and a ‘decision grid’ is placed on the application. Applications are then checked for particular courses where special conditions apply; checked for residential category, ‘mature’ student status and special needs; checked for the qualifications being taken for entry and more. In each case ‘non-standard’ applications are referred to more senior colleagues. This routine process is illustrated in the fieldwork notes below:

Once this initial checking and sorting procedure is completed the ‘standard’ applications are sent onto the Departments for their Admissions Tutors to make their decisions while ‘non-standard’ forms are retained within the Admissions Office and given to more senior staff in order to ensure that departments are given appropriate and timely information in order to enable them to make their decision and to ensure fairness and consistency across the University. Senior Admissions Office staff are responsible for dealing with ‘non-standard’ applications; with dispensing advice on qualifications, offers, overseas students, and fraud to university departments, students and various other organisations; and with the development of management information systems for example for marketing and targetting. Again, much of this work can be characterised as a (relatively sophisticated) form of checking. This is illustrated in the fieldwork extract below where the ‘non-standard’ forms have just been received:

In this next fieldwork extract the application forms have been received back from the departments with the Admissions Tutor’s decision in the ‘decision box’ grid. The forms are then checked before the decision is communicated electronically to UCAS (who will then inform the candidate). The checking at this stage is usually to ensure that any decisions are consistent with known departmental and university policy; that the format of the abbreviated decision in the decision box accurately conveys the departments intentions and that there is no possibility of ambiguity or misinterpretation. As the extract illustrates the work at this ‘checking’ stage is far from routine:

Finally there is another/related checking procedure before admission decisions are sent electronically to UCAS as illustrated in the following example;

5. Decision-making screen - ìwhatís the number for delete decision?î ì8î - enters 8 into decision box...

Despite this emphasis on checking as a routine activity what also clearly emerges from the fieldwork is, as Suchman (1986) notes, that routines are not followed slavishly and generally and typically involve the use of several kinds of ‘judgement’ specifically the circumstances under which the routine is to be strictly followed and the circumstances under which modifications or ‘short-cuts’ may be employed through the utilisation of informal teamwork or ‘local knowledge’ is a matter for ‘occasioned determination’ in the course of the work. The fieldwork observations manifestly identified the extent to which the accomplishment of work tasks (especially their speedy and efficient completion) was a product of what was termed ‘the open office’ that is, dependent on various kinds of informal teamwork, ‘constellations of assistance’ and the provision and employment of the ‘local knowledge’ of colleagues.

This section is concerned with the work of the senior Admissions staff as they go about their everyday work of dealing with non-standard applications. Of interest here is the manner in which such work, although ‘non-standard’, is demonstrably and accountably made to conform to notions of consistency and routine through an extended process of checking and annotation. This ‘routinisation’ of the admissions process for ‘non-standard’ applicants is regarded as particularly important for coordinating the work of the admissions tutors in the departments and ensuring that their work is effectively ‘routine’; "...one of the things we do with the non-standard forms ... admissions tutors .. have come to expect that they will get some guidance actually on the form .. I would write on here things like "yes, the English is OK" and a note saying ‘please see attached’....". In the following fieldwork extract a senior admissions officer is working through some ‘non-standard’ applications from a range of overseas students. As she explains as she begins her work;

This work of dealing with ‘non-standard’ forms’ highlights a central feature of Suchman’s (1986) critique of the planning model - that ‘the plan’ is an abstract construction which will, at the very least, require articulation with, and application to, the specifics of the circumstances in which it is to be followed. A feature of plans and procedures is that they develop and are modified, they unfold, in real time. What the plan agreed, what interdependencies there are, only become clear as the courses of action specified in the plan unfold, creating additional workloads in terms of coordination and the awareness of work. This is dramatically illustrated in the next fieldwork extract when the issue of ‘fraud’ arises.

The admissions process varied considerably within the academic departments, the difference being explicable primarily in terms of the system being used or the division of administrative responsibilities within the department. To some extent the variations in the process - that is, in ‘workflow’ and in decision-making - can be accounted for in terms of whether the department could be characterised as a - ‘selector’ or a ‘recruitor’ department. Although not a hard and fast distinction, ‘selector’ departments were regarded as those whose popularity ensured a high level of student demand and consequently were able to ‘select’ from amongst the large number of applicants. In these circumstances, it was suggested, predicted ‘A’ level grades were of paramount, if not sole, importance. ‘Recruitor’ departments, in contrast, were those regarded as actively seeking to increase their student intake or to ensure that they met their intake targets and consequently were likely to have lower ‘A’ level grade expectations and were more likely to pay attention to the student’s reference or comments on the UCAS application. The principal focus in this section is on the use of the ‘system’ - whatever it might be - which ranged from a more or less completely manual approach, to various and different usages of the GQL system, and finally the employment (within the more obviously ‘computer literate’ departments) of ‘custom-made’ systems.

Below are some fieldwork extracts from observations of the process of admissions and systems use within a number of departments. The first extract is from a department that currently uses the GQL system:

As the extract makes clear, GQL use is far from problem free and in fact this data was from a second period of observation, in the first the system could not be made to function at all. The relatively infrequent use of the system means that staff are generally unfamiliar with the various routines and adopt a whole series of contingent and often time consuming approaches to the completion of work. Logging onto the system appears cumbersome; locating current work within the historical record involves the completion and maintenance of a manual log; transferring data firstly into Excel files and then into the mail is time consuming and error prone given the normal exigencies and interruptions of office life. In the above example, what appears to be the simple lack of an adequate Excel template - with the current template having columns that are not only ordered incorrectly but inadequately sized - creates problems in transferring data from GQL into Excel files and from Excel files into the mail system. Whilst this might not be a case of legacy software it might be suggested that this is an example of legacy working whose problems become especially obvious when staff leave or duties are reassigned.

The next fieldwork extract is taken from observations of a department which, at the time, had no networked technological assistance (in the form of GQL or a custom-made system) and consequently was reliant on manual methods - what they termed their own accounting/auditing system - both to accomplish the work and to keep track of it.

The general impression from the fieldwork of the admissions process in the departments is not dissimilar to Mervyn Peake’s gothic depiction of ëGormenghastí; a bureaucratic quagmire in which different sections develop their own highly idiosyncratic but ‘satisficing’ methods of working in blithe disregard for either the capabilities of the system deployed or what happens elsewhere. This is not to criticise anybody using these systems or even the systems themselves but is intended to point to some of the training issues involved.

One of the major transformations of modern society is the advent of the bureaucratic organisation in which administration by records assumed the essential role that it now has. Classically this has involved a routinisation of record keeping through, for example, the standardised formatting of documents to reflect the ‘rationalisation’ of the application of policy and procedures. A major implication of this is the embedding of organisational actions in the processing of paper records so that, in significant respects, paperwork is the work. It is in this sense that paperwork, the format of documents and their use within a division of labour might be regarded as a ‘legacy’ issue in a related fashion to the classic software legacy problems.

One of the most noticeable features of work in the Admissions Office was this sheer volume and predominance of paperwork. The sheer amount of paperwork raises important questions about its role in work activities rather than seeing it as a now largely unnecessary adjunct to work which could, given the appropriate technologies, be dispensed with. What is clearer is that paperwork is an integral feature of the work itself and is, of course, not simply the production of paper but of ‘records’, ‘correspondence’, ‘forms’, ‘memos’, and so on, to use labels which denote the social context of their use (Hughes and King, 1993; King and Hughes, 1994).

In the case of the Admissions Office and in the admissions process in the departments, there is a ëtypicalí work pattern which involves a process of working, sometimes using the same information - on candidates, courses and so on - between the computer and the paper record. There seems to be an historical ëlegacyí of duplication of effort which, some might suggest, with suitably designed systems, much of the work could be more efficiently transacted electronically. While this certainly seems a plausible conclusion, particularly in the case of some of the departments, the issues are not quite so straightforward.

First, the emphasis on paper, as it is in so many other organisations, is closely linked to the need for an audit trail and to questions of accountability should these arise. Records, that is, are normatively regulated.

Second, paper is deeply ingrained within working practices of all kinds. The ‘at-handedness’ of paper as an instrument of work, its robustness, its ready visibility accentuated through ëhighlightingí or the attachment of ëpost-ití notes and so on , are all so familiar as to be, paradoxically, ‘invisible’ in its functionality and usability. Such ëat-handednessí is not easily replicated electronically and, as has already been indicated, the use of facilities such as ëflaggingí on the existing system lacks the obvious transparency of paper-based approaches.

Third, paper records are one of the ways in which the interdependencies within a division of labour - in this case between the Admissions Office and the departments - is achieved. Records are not detached commentaries on activities but integral features of them. A paper record such as the UCAS form and its various attachments often has a procedural implicativeness for the actions of organisationally relevant others - admissions tutors, administrative suppport staff etc - because it represents organisational events and, in this way, is tied to the production and the performance of organisational activities. Such records are typically part of transformation processes by which one set of actions initiates another set.

Fourth, because paper has such a ‘natural’ place within work it can easily establish an inertia of routine and it becomes difficult to see how and in what ways particular activities can be done more efficiently and more effectively. As many studies have pointed out, it is relatively easy for ‘standard procedure’ to become little better than ‘red tape’ in which the routines of paperwork become not only the visible and tangible representations of the work but an end in themselves. And, it may well be that such a description applies to the UCAS form.

Although much of the everyday work centres around the perusal and use of paper the computer system is also heavily utilised - as a parallel system - for checking and receiving and communicating information and decisions. This is illustrated in the fieldwork extract below, firstly where correspondence is being linked to an application form;

As the Admissions Officer explains;

The applicantís basic application details - received from UCAS - is displayed on screen in a small box showing name, applicant number, course codes, and so on. A list of ‘flags’ appears at the bottom of the screen that are used for providing additional information or for indicating something ënon-standardí about the application (A= non-standard application; B= non-standard qualifications; C= later action; D= extra information not included in course mode; E= finance).

The computer is also used for communicating decisions to UCAS. A decision-making menu appears and decision processing takes the form of typing in a code, an abbreviation ("we’re happy if they dont use the format as long as they tell us what they want..") that is then expanded in the UCAS letter ìI do a couple of hundred .. call it a file and then send that.. (to UCAS)î) This decision entering process is illustrated in the following extract;

Over the years at Lancaster we have developed a means of presenting or thematising ethnographic analyses of work that deploys a ‘framework’ as an essentially practical device for both organising and understanding the vast array of fieldwork observations of how the work in any complex setting ‘gets done’. The framework we have developed organises studies around three main dimensions: ‘Distributed Coordination’; ‘Plans and Procedures’ and ‘Awareness of work’. These different dimensions provide a skeleton for constructing a presentation of fieldwork and may provide a better purchase for the analysis of work and the identification, description and resolution of legacy issues. (see Hughes et al 1997)

Distributed coordination refers to the fact that work tasks performed in complex settings are performed as part of patterns of activity, as operations within the context of a division of labour, as ‘steps’ in protracted operations, as contributions of continuing ‘processes’ of activity. It is perhaps in this context that the complex interrelationship between UCAS, the Admissions Office and the departments is best understood, as well as the more immediate or obvious concerns relating to ‘templating’ and the articulation of paperwork and computerwork. Distributed coordination refers to the various ways in which the coordination of people and tasks is accomplished as a routine feature of ‘real world, real time’ work. An important, if commonplace feature of all work settings is that tasks, activities and, persons are embedded within an organised ensemble of some kind. The activities and the people who perform them are interconnected and coordination does not consist in any one feature of the work but is deeply, and inseparably, implicated in the procedural details of all work activities. Much of this coordination work consists of distributing relevant information to relevant parties - to the various University departments, to UCAS and the applicants - and keeping this flow of information going as a routine state of affairs. Thus many aspects of work in the Admissions Office are explicitly concerned with coordinating interdependencies of various kinds in order to ‘get the work done’.

Coordination can also be a feature of specifically designed or evolved artefacts. As Yates (1989) describes, memos, files, standard forms, etc., evolved to solve problems of ‘distributed coordination’, as organisations became larger and the problems of management and control correspondingly increased. These ‘standard forms’ are readily apparent in the Admissions Office. Such artefacts facilitate the coordination of tasks by embedding descriptions of the task, along with other relevant information, within the format of a document as ‘instructions’, as ‘items required’, and so on, which makes available to those who know how to use the artefact, what the implications are for the actions of others. These artefacts serve as sets of instructions for a set of institutionally identified persons - the ‘Admissions Tutor’for example - to perform particular tasks and, in addition, serve as a check on whether or not these tasks have been performed. Given the central role of coordination within cooperative work the identification of the features of work which promote coordination is clearly important. Notable coordination features include the ability to monitor the activities of others and access to shared and readily available information much of which is accomplished through paperwork - it is in this sense that the ‘Open office’ approach that characterises the Admissions Office becomes a resource for the completion of work.

‘Plans and procedures’ refers to the means by which distributed coordination is organisationally supported and the orderly production and accomplishment of work is facilitated. The complex and skilful responses to overseas applications, the consideration of a range of factors relating to qualifications, college of origin, date of application and so on might usefully be considered within this framework since a consideration of plans within cooperative work should be sensitive to different notions of ‘following a plan’. What we are interested in is how ‘plans’ are used as coordinating mechanisms within socially organised ‘real world, real time’ work activities. Their explicit point is to co-ordinate the work of numbers of people - at UCAS, the Admissions Office in the academic departments and so on - in order that separate work activities and tasks come to have a coherence and, typically, through this meet other goals such as efficiency, meeting time constraints, and so on. However, ‘the plan’ is an abstract construction which will, at the very least, require articulation with, and application to, the specifics of the circumstances in which it is to be followed as one of the Admissions Office staff commented;

The successful accomplishment of a ‘plan’ is dependent on the practical understandings about what the plan specifies in these circumstances, using these resources, these people, and so on. Although plans may be presented as abstractions, as statements of procedures, and so forth, the ‘just what’ it takes to realise them is a practical matter of ‘making the plan work’ through all the various and inevitable contingencies that can arise. It is such activities which maintain the plan by dealing with ‘those things which arise’, ‘the things not planned for’, such as unusual qualifications or particular circumstances, so that even ‘deviations’ from the plan can be accommodated to sustain its ‘spirit’ which in the case of the Admissions Office and the departments involves some notion of ‘consistency’ in treatment between applicants. Real time, real world work also and often involves the utilisation of ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local logics’, to support the overall objectives of the rules or the procedures and again this is evident in admissions work in their reliance on ‘local knowledge’ concerning particular qualifications, educational establishments or national education systems.

Having presented a critique of the planning model for failing to acknowledge the myriad ways in which people 'work to make the plan work'; it is perhaps hardly surprising that we are equally sceptical about similarly stilted, rationalistic models of decisionmaking. As Feldman & March (1981) note models of strictly rational decisionmaking create expectations which are rarely met in practice;

In fact studies of organisations, and the Admissions Office is no exception to this, consistently suggest that information often appears to be gathered for its own sake without having any obvious decisional relevance and; "'Much of the information that is used to justify a decision is collected and interpreted after the decision has been made, or substantially made...Much of the information that is gathered in response to requests for information is not considered in the making of decisions for which it was requested" (1981: 174) To some extent, observation suggests that this attenuation between the gathering of information and its utilisation in decisionmaking is minimally affected by the incorporation of plans and procedures into a computer system.

‘Awareness of work’ refers to the way in which the organisation of work activities involves making the nature of those activities ‘visible’ or ‘intelligible’ to others doing the work; illustrated in in the case of the Admissions Office through the extensive use of ‘post-it’ notes and the attachment of correspondence to the various UCAS forms as well as the use of ‘flagging’ on the computer system itself. Clearly this is a theme which involves various interactional subtleties and constitutes a major aspect of the means through which coordination of work tasks is achieved as a practical matter. The various ways in which ‘awareness’ is developed, in which work is made public and available to others, are essential ingredients in ‘doing the work’ as part of a socially distributed division of labour.

So, for example, the layout of the Admissions Office, the organisation of the workspaces permit the development of an ‘ecology of awareness’ which is consequential for the performance of the work activities. Many of these affordances arise simply because of the co-location of a collection of people doing ‘much the same things’ or who are performing interdependent activities. Being able to ask for advice just when it is needed, updating colleagues as one is passing, dealing with an emergency when ‘all hands are needed’, and more, are all informal, often intermittent, certainly unplanned occasional events which are facilitated by appropriate spatial layouts of work areas. Similarly, the state of desks, where someone is within the spatial setting, looking in a particular filing cabinet, working through a pile of paperwork, and more, furnishes information about what the person is doing, where that person is in the stream of work, how busy they are, and so on; information which, in subtle ways, is available so that others can update themselves on the state of the work, how it is going, whether ‘we are behind’, ‘on top of it’, etc. The point we want to make about such affordances is that they are not necessarily designed or planned, though they can be, but represent arrangements which can be used in the day-to-day ‘doing’ of work.

Other ways in which the awareness of others’ work is made available and visible, often ‘at a glance’ is through the various ‘mechanisms of interaction. In the Admissions Office the various forms, - the highlighting, their location with particular individuals, on particular desks or in particular trays etc - and different sections of the computer database are both the focus for work and a visible, a publicly available, record of work that has been done or remains to be done. In other words, what these representations do, among other things, is make the work ‘visible’ so that it can be ‘taken note of’, ‘reviewed’, ‘queried’, and so on, by others involved. They put the work on display so that others may be aware of it.

The overriding practical issue for these representations is what to represent about the work, for whom, and how to represent it. What is it that people who are to use the representation need to know about the work and in what format is this to be conveyed? In presenting advice to the departmental Admissions Tutors the Admissions Office know that a number of issues need to be addressed;

What seems to be at work here is a practically oriented principle of economy with respect to the information that is represented through the artefact. Not all the possible information that might be gathered or represented is so. The question of what is represented is not solved ‘once and for all’; what information the Admissions staff, perusing the various typs of information - correspondence from applicants, headteachers’ agents, perusing advice of qualification equivalents etc - ‘needs’ to include for the departmental Admissions Tuor - is a constant preoccupation in and through the course of the work. Finally, understanding what the representation represents, so to speak, relies upon knowledge of the work itself and how the representation is embedded within the work as an instrument of the work.

The various forms in use in the admissions process are all designed to collect standard information, to make the information comparable and to control the information that is provided. In this respect they are solutions to the problem of the assembly of information in organisations identified by Garfinkel (1967); that is, what information is needed and its ‘value’; the worth of collecting the information with reference to the effort involved in its collection. Nevertheless despite the obvious benefits of standardised processes and formats - the format does not always, in itself, convey an adequate ‘sense of the work’ and it is in these circumstances that local knowledge and a range of interactional skills are deployed to help ‘make sense of’ the work. It is in this sense that ‘awareness of work’ becomes a ‘skill’. ‘Skill’ is a concept whose tacit and often highly situated notions need considerable ‘unpacking’; however the sense of 'skill' that we are interested here is that of 'knowing how', or competency. In particular the competencies involve making sense of, and thereby being able to make available to others, what is ‘going on’. These could be described as competencies required for ‘mutual intelligibility’ or ‘mutual awareness’ on the part of the members of a work team.

What should come across strongly in the field study is the ways in which workers in the Admissions Office orient to the ‘ordinariness’ and ‘routine’ character of the work and its setting. In a wider and more general sense workers within the Admissions Office and the various departments are aware of their work as part of some larger institution and that their work activities are the work of and represent ‘the University’. The very characterisation of them as ‘Admissions Officer’ or ‘Admissions Tutor’ or ‘Departmental Secretary’ and so on, calls them into play as people who are organisationally positioned and people who have organisationally prescribed responsibilities and tasks. The sense in whichAdmissions staff, to develop this example a little more, are aware of the fact that they are working within a system that transcends their here-and-now, is also reflected in the physical organisation of the office; in their physical and hierarchical/organisational relationships to each other; in the paperwork and computerwork and so on. They are aware of the fact that the Admissions Office is but a location within a system of university education and administration which extends beyond Lancaster university; aware of the fact that they work within a bureaucratic structure of work organisation, subject to a managerial supervision and situated within a complex division of labour. They are aware of the fact that their working is dependent upon various types of computer and administrative support and the activities of workers at other locations - such as deopartmental admissions tutors, UCAS staff and so on - within the wider higher education network. Those working in the Admissions Office clearly saw themselves as integral, interlocking components in an extended division of labour within which they could locate their particular work or task

Distributed Coordination: within the framework refers to the fact that work tasks performed in complex settings are performed as part of patterns of activity, as operations within the context of a division of labour, as ‘steps’ in protracted operations, as contributions of continuing ‘processes’ of activity.

The emphasis on distributed coordination foregrounds issues of importance to the level of support for action and tasks within the system. Highlighted here are the manner and means by which work is coordinated and the implications this may have for support ranging from simple coordination mechanisms to more procedural workflow systems.

Plans and Procedures: provides the framework with a prominent means by which distributed coordination is organisationally supported. Project plans and schedules, manuals of instruction and procedures, job descriptions, formal organisational charts, workflow diagrams are all ways of enabling people to produce the orderliness of work. Particularly important to the treatment of ‘plans and procedures’ has been the need to clarify the understanding of how these function in the organisation of activities, consequently we suggest that a consideration of plans within cooperative work should: identify the different actors and their potential relationships to plans and procedures; understand and accept the existence of diverse viewpoints on plans and procedures; record and be sensitive to different notions of ‘following a plan’.

The emphasis on plans and procedures highlight the relationship between users and the formal representation of their work. This relationship is a rich and complex one emphasising the difference between the description of work and ‘getting the job done’. Knowledge of this distinction and what it is to ‘do the job’ is central to design decisions which potential reify the policy and procedures of work with the system. For example, the setting of access and status information, the sequencing of actions in form based systems and the setting of role profiles in workflow systems. Often users ‘ad-hoc’ the process, and knowing these ‘shortcuts’ is central to informing computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) design.

Awareness of work: is an expression referring to the way in which the organisation of work activities involves making the nature of those activities ‘visible’ or ‘intelligible’ to others doing the work. Just as distributed coordination and the application of plans and procedures are pervasive features of work sites, so too are practices for enabling others to have an awareness of the nature of the work that is being done.

The final emphasis on awareness of work reflects the growing body of work on the importance of the public nature of work and the availability of action to others. This need for awareness is in contrast to traditional individualistic approaches to the development of multi-user systems. Highlighting the need for sharing that promotes an awareness of the activities of others emphasises to designers the fundamentally social and cooperative nature of work.

In this final section we briefly review some of the implications of this phase of the fieldwork.

One of most salient findings to emerge from the fieldwork is that despite the apparently ‘routine’ nature of much of the work - the stepwise completion of particular forms and so on - dealing with the inevitable contingencies that arise often requires departure from the routine in order to ‘get the work done’. Furthermore, the closer one gets to the ‘customer’ - the applicant, in responding to particular circumstances and requests, the more frequent these contingencies occur to the extent that they often appear to overwhelm the necessarily routine character of the activity. In the Admissions Office then, responding to the particularities of applicants circumstances has to work hand-in-hand with UCAS and admissions procedure. One effect of this is to place greater reliance on the knowledge and competencies of others, and rather less on the computer technology.

‘Local knowledge’, that is, knowing within a worker’s horizon of relevance additional matters not formally available is still important. In the case of the Admissions Office this generally takes the form of knowing, in detail, the particular circumstances surrounding applicants, their qualifications and educational institution. Work in the Admissions Office also involves a ‘local knowledge’ of the applicability of particular procedures and the expectations of those to whom they are accountable - the University, the departments, UCAS and so on. Thus members of the Admissions Office use their ‘local knowledge’ and experience to effect a ‘smoother’ application of the formal procedures. Despite the apparent paradox of an emphasis on consistency and standardisation while judgements were observed to be based on ‘the person involved’, ‘their situation’, and what else was known about the person this was precisely because this ensured some degree of consistency. Consistency and standradisation has to be worked at, it is an accomplishment not the simple product of an organisational regime.

One theme that has emerged from the fieldwork has been the importance of communications between and within the various organisational divisions of the admissions process. Central to this has been the creation and articulation - the meshing and ‘modal transformation’ - of various forms of ‘paperwork’ and ‘computerwork’. At the Admissions Office and, apparently, throughout the UCAS system at present it remains the case that ‘paperwork’ dominates, for a variety of reasons. However, as the admissions process moves toward increased electronic techniques - for example direct applicant entry over the Internet? (or the introduction of an Intranet) this relationship becomes increasingly important to understand.