This article discusses a few issues on formality-informality based on linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine's approach. It uses participant observation to analyze an organizational consultants' community of practice (CoP). The main objective is to deal with the difficulties found during the observation, which, based on Irvine, are called the (in)formalities methodological implications for the research. It concludes that the different aspects of such (in)formalities have a deep effect on the discourse under analysis and must be noticed not so much as to sterilize these elements' discourse (as if this was possible and as though those elements were undesirable and/or extrinsic), but so that these analytical dimensions extend the focus of the code to the situation - and vice-versa - enriching the social approach of the linguistic phenomenon and the researcher's observational capabilities.
communities of practice; methodology; formality; linguistic anthropology; Judith Irvine
