The purpose and value of a situation-centric approach to the study of organization and management of work stems from a “concern for what one individual can be alive to at a particular moment” (Goffman 1974, p. 8) when at work, aiming to capture the complexity of sources of influence that is at play when people act and interact in particular circumstances. These sources of influence might stem from the general social occasion where the work takes place, such as the home of the clients in the vignette, institutional contexts, as when the police move from the street into the courtroom, the roles and statuses engaged as well as other people’s specific expectations, material objects inviting particular modes of interaction, such as the i-pad the nurse brings, natural phenomena such as temperature, all together mediated by the participant's personal experiences, cultural and professional practices, etc. (See Klemsdal and Clegg, 2022). The point is to be able to capture the nuances and dynamics of variations between people's work situations, as they might shift during the day, depending on the details of the circumstances. In such a picture of the context of work, the organization becomes one of many variables that is invoked and enacted by the people involved, as they do what they do.
Such a perspective, then, also helps to avoid overstating or underspecifying the organization’s contribution to the ordering of working life, by capturing the immersive relational totality of everyday work situations without privileging or neglecting the organization by default. In other words, rather than assuming that the organization or formal organization, represent the main contextual condition at stake when people perform their work, a situation-centric approach sensitizes towards the messy complex of sources of influence that is invoked when people provide their services to particular clients under particular circumstances, or negotiate their business deals whether on “Teams” from the kitchen table or over a dinner in a restaurant. Intermeshed with other frames and appropriated in the situation as part of an experienced gestalt, the organization is no longer a discrete entity but competes with other sources when people negotiate their understandings and definitions of what to do and how to do it at work.
At the same time, the situation-centric approach enables us to appreciate the organization’s role as a general co-constitutive contingency of work and as a relatively fixed and stable part of the context within which actors enact their work situation. In some situations, organizational frames may predominate – as, for instance, in tightly defined settings like assembly lines. In other situations, the formal organization may be less central than other sources of frames, as in service work performed in people’s homes or on the street. Either way, the situation-centric approach guards against the tendency of situated perspectives on the organization to misjudge the constitutive role of a formal organization (cf. du Gay and Vikkelsø 2016; King et al., 2010) and enables empirical assessment of the organization’s specific role in concrete work situations.