Enhancing In Situ Observation with the SCI Design (Shadowing–Conversations–Interview to the Double) to Capture the Cognitive Underpinnings of Action

In situ observation methods have essentially been mobilized to study actors’ doings, but they have also been mobilized (through studies in the stream of situated action) to study cognition in these same organizational actors. The existing methodological designs have helped to enhance our knowledge of certain cognitive underpinnings, but they carry two limits: (1) they are deployed following a stacking logic, that is, by triangulation, which is more about compensating for the weaknesses of the component methods than uniting their strengths, and which has the pitfall of capturing cognition and action separately; and (2) they cannot capture all the situated and structuring facets of the cognitive underpinnings of action. Here we propose to overcome these barriers with the SCI design: S for shadowing, C for conversions, and I for an interview borrowing on the ‘interview to the double’ technique. This design is built in a synergy-guided effort that hinges on tightly meshing these three techniques together at fieldwork deployment. This articulation makes it possible to capture action and cognition together and to surface both the situated and structuring facets of cognition underpinning action. The SCI design is easy enough to deploy in fieldwork across a whole range of research settings.