Learning to administer an IM injection: Candidate descriptions of knowledge

Can non-indigenous concepts be introduced into the description of settings while observing the strong form of the unique adequacy requirements of methods? We suggest that this can be achieved by adopting and developing Garfinkel’s practice of deliberately misreading texts. In doing so, we seek to lay some foundations for an EM hybrid discipline of nursing. This project orients to two emerging initiatives in EM: the various previous attempts to develop a hybrid discipline; and the recent suggestion that the corpus of EM studies should be reviewed in order to revitalise the discipline. Two candidate descriptions of the process of learning to administer an intramuscular (IM) injection are presented. The first represents a conventional detailed ethnography of work, conducted according to the unique adequacy requirements of methods. For the second, we borrow concepts from Norman, Ryle, Polanyi and Garfinkel himself. We argue that the resulting analysis conforms to the unique adequacy requirements of method, and has a generic context-free, context sensitive, character, but does not yet meet the full requirements for a hybrid study.