Two cooks at work: independent and coordinated lines of action

In this paper, we analyse data from a multi-view video recording of two cooks preparing meals in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. The aim of this research is to show the different interactional configurations emerging from the micro analysis of the activity of the cooks, focusing on transitions from individual to cooperative actions. We are particularly interested in analysing the verbal and non verbal modalities that the two cooks use for switching from autonomous lines of action to the co-accomplishment of local tasks. In our analysis, the activity of cooking in the kitchen is conceived as a situated activity system(Goffman 1961), that is a system comprehending all the phenomena occurring during the accomplishment of a specific activity in a specific relevant setting. The situated activity system corresponds to "the range of phenomena implicated in the systematic accomplishment of a specific activity within a relevant setting" (Goodwin 1997: 115). Some of the previous studies of such situated activity systems are Suchman’s studies of airport control rooms (Suchman 1987, 1993), Hutchins’s studies of a pilothouse (Hutchins 1995, Hutchins and Palen 1997), and the study of the London underground control rooms by Heath and Luff (1994). All these works can be referred to as workplace studies. They analyse work and collaboration in technologically advanced environments. The study of the activity of cooking in a professional kitchen can be defined as a workplace study, although the work setting differs from that of those previous studies in the sense that it is a technologically simple context.The artefacts in a professional kitchen are mostly manipulable objects which function as resources and constraints (Norman 1998) for the accomplishment of the activity.1 As for the general study of situated activity systems, the relation between human actors and artefacts is an important aspect of the activity of cooking. The analysis will show that the cooks prepare the meals through a substantial use of physical tools the positioning and accessibility of which in the surrounding have an important influence on the structure and ongoing organization of the activity itself. In our data, the prototypical interactional situation — that is the face-to-face interaction as it is associated with conversational activity sustained through a mutual body orientation and a mutual gaze — is very rare. Most of the time, the two cooks and the other members of the personnel that enter the kitchen interact without being mutually oriented: they don’t look at each other and their bodies are oriented to the different activities they are accomplishing. Even in these conditions, the two cooks interact and collaborate for guaranteeing a minimum level of coordination. In this situation, the stable positioning and function of objects in the surrounding play as resources for monitoring and interpreting the other’s behaviour and in so far contribute to the participants’ coordination, be it at the minimum level of sharing the different working emplacements, or at the maximum level of co-accomplishing a stage in sequence of actions. Besides these cases, there are occasions in which one of the participants begins an action which is then interrupted or suspended by the intervention of the other participant or by her becoming available for accomplishing a particular task at that moment. The intervention of the other participant changes the configuration of the whole current action. The analyses will focus on those particular cases, which permit us to investigate the transition between individual actions to coordinated activity.