Marlot Kuiper

202 Connective Routines Intermezzo: Developing research routines It’s 7.30am when I’m in the dressing room of Plainsboro. I walk towards the shelve to grab out an OR shirt and pants from the ‘S’ compartment. In the beginning, I always took a regular size ‘M’ as usual, but by looking like a bag of potatoes I found out sizes of OR-clothing not very well represent regular clothing sizes. Then I take some items out of my bag, and put my coat, clothes, car keys and bag in my locker. When I put my OR suit on, it’s time to ‘install’ my outfit with my standard equipment: A ‘Snelle Jelle’ and Dextro Energy (I developed this habit after fainting the first time, also see the previous intermezzo), my note book that fits a back pocket, a pen, a spare pen, and a box for my contacts in case they might get dry because of the air circulation system. When I carefully put my hair underneath the cap, I’m ready for yet another day in the surgery department. At some point, with hindsight I think after a day or ten in the surgery department, I quite knew what to expect, and what was expected from me. In the beginning, I was just extremely exhausted after a day of shadowing someone, because you have to follow someone, watch carefully what is happening, and you have no clue what’s gonna come next. Sometimes I even had a hard time in carefully writing up my field notes behind my computer screen the same evening, just because my eye lids were too heavy. Getting to know the routines made things a lot easier. After a while, I understood the architecture of the operating theatre, and was able to find my way. I knew how a surgery was organised, and also how I could be of help. When I started to get to know the routines in the surgery department, I also started to develop my own routines for conducting ethnographic research. Put differently, I developed routines for studying routines. Besides my routine of ‘getting dressed and packed’, I developed routines for making field notes. In my tiny notebook, I always wrote down the type of activity, thus the (aspect of a) routine (briefing, time-out, sign-out, or others like hand over or teammeeting), the actors that were involved, and then in keywords or short sentences what happened. The analytical constructs ‘ostensive’ ‘performative’ and ‘artefact’ made it more easy to organise the notes, I added these in case I already could identify them at that point in time. I used quotations marks to indicate a quote by one of the actants. I also included notes about my state of mind, or things I was amazed by. Not so much for the purpose of data analysis, but rather to be able to reflect on my own position and role later on – and write intermezzos like these. In the beginning it was more difficult to decide what to write down, and what not – as