A Nice Place: The Everyday Production of Pleasure and Political Correctness at Work

This dissertation investigates heterosexed reality as an ongoing accomplishment by the members at a workplace. Observations were carried out sporadically for two years at a museum. During this period twelve formal interviews, fifteen informal interviews, three formal group interviews and three informal group interviews were also conducted. The study rests on an ethnomethodological understanding of how reality and order is achieved by actors in interaction through the use of ethnomethods, such as common sense. Order is produced in a number of situations and it is situations, as locations of shared practices, which are primarily focused. It is concluded that the members try to, in different ways, realise the museum as a nice place. The concept of straight-framing is introduced to describe one of the pleasure procedures performed by the members in order to generate good mood, solidarity and familiarity in everyday working life. To successfully straight-frame situations, the members must utilise the heterosexual matrix and produce themselves and others as intelligibly sexed beings, belonging to either the category women or men, and as relatable to people of the other sex in couple-like and/or sexualised (explicitly or implicitly) ways. Three different forms of straight-framing are distinguished; direct, mock direct and indirect. The members also routinely realise the museum as a nice place by creating a discourse of political correctness. The easiest way to produce and use this discourse appears to be to talk about gender equality. In conversations about gender equality women and men are commonsensically turned into a standardised relational pair and this is referred to as the body count routine. While the body count routine makes the issue of gender equality intelligible for the members and enables them to come across as politically competent, it also provides them with an opportunity to organise the working units at the museum. Sex-mixed units can be placed above non-mixed in a moral hierarchy.