The present of things past: Ethnography and career studies 1

Prologue

This article is shaped by a ceremonial talk given at the Academy of Management Annual Meetings in 2014 whose aspirational theme concerned ‘the power of words.’ In my talk, I invited my audience to pay more attention to the spirit of my remarks than to my words because a pulpit performance allows and encourages one to take certain liberties they might not take in cold print and allows the audience to judge the stance of the speaker as sincere or cynical, enthusiastic or flat, heartfelt or opportunistic. Here, however, I reverse the prescription since text is all I can offer. Whatever spirit remains – or what a reader might take away from a text beyond the words it lays down – is an entirely open question. My hope is that some of the spirit remains, for words alone cannot carry the message I wish to pass on. The spirit, however, just might.

Fortunately, I prepared my talk in the intellectual shadow of Everett Cherrington Hughes, thus allowing me plenty of room to hold forth, so eclectic and interdisciplinary were Hughes’s interests. There is no Hughesian School of sociology and he was anything but a grand social system builder. He was a fox not a hedgehog, jumping from topic to topic, problem to problem, following what Kenneth Burke (1984) would call a ‘logic of incongruity.’ He wrote essays for the most part, not research tracts, and did so in an altogether accessible style that seems to have gone out of fashion in our field. It is his legacy to which I pay tribute in this article.

In paying tribute, I am thankful that the Careers Division provided me with the podium since it allowed me to hold forth a bit on my own career as have past recipients of the Hughes Award. And this is just where I will embark by reflecting on my career from graduate student to senior status as a way of setting up my remarks to follow on the ethnographic contributions to career studies, then and now.

An unexpected journey

To begin on a personal note, a quick look at my past told in the present. My career in organization studies began almost 50 years ago when I came to the new and then isolated campus of the University of California at Irvine in 1965 and became a part of a small and rather novel social science program, the brainchild of Jim March. I, of course, had no idea that this was a rather daring and one-off experimental program – one without a history or disciplinary borders – nor did I have any idea at that time of what a scholarly career might entail. I figured I would get some kind of master’s degree, avoid the draft, enjoy the beach and move on. Little did I know how this rather accidental but most fortunate career move would play out.

My research career proper began with a year in the field in 1969 with the Seattle police department . . . that was 45 years ago. Since then, aside from numerous revisits to Seattle, I have worked in the UK with coppers and detectives from Scotland Yard, with fishermen in the northeast Atlantic fisheries – notably Gloucester, in Disneylands here and there. I have crossed geographic, occupational and organizational borders one after another. And, like other career researchers, crossed many theoretical borders as well from positivism to post-modernism, shamelessly borrowing analytic ideas wherever I could find them and using them whenever they seemed to fit.

For all these years I have defined myself as a fieldworker, an ethnographer, interested in various worlds of work. This is, of course, a self-serving label − increasingly popular of late, a topic I will return to later in this talk. But the label is a good part of my engulfed or authentic self – recognizing that authenticity is, according to Erving Goffman (1959), merely being taken in by one’s own act. There is, of course, a career attached to the sort of work I do, a career that is both organizational and occupational. This is a career that supports my self-referencing, however blindly this specific ethnographic career was initially entertained and entered. Let me quickly sketch out this career in both general and personal terms that I will tie rather arbitrarily, but I hope suggestively, to the sort of rites, rituals and impressions that summer gatherings of the tribes like the Academy of Management meetings generate.

I first came to annual meetings as a grad student in 1970. I went to both the American Sociological Association (ASA) in San Francisco and Division 14 of the American Psychological Association meetings in Los Angeles. This was long before the Academy of Management had achieved the size, prominence and status it holds today, but I imagine the impressions I gained as a neophyte on glimpsing the parades, totems and scenes academic meetings provide are not too dissimilar from what graduate students today at these summer meetings experience as well (even if the venues are considerably larger). As a grad student, I wandered about the convention halls in something of a confused, rather bewildered stupor – sticking close to my grad student friends and all of us more or less following around the faculty from UCI we knew and admired and attending selectively to the advice they offered as to how we might occupy our time. We would mosey in and out of sessions, peruse the book displays, listen attentively in a few distinguished speaker sessions, crash a party or two, and try to absorb whatever wisdom – if any – was being dispensed. Our conversations as I recall were mostly with each other and largely about ‘sightings,’ a bit like birdwatchers on the prowl – ‘Hey, I just heard Alvin Gouldner talk about the coming crisis in western sociology’ or, ‘Guess what? Yesterday, I saw Howie Becker in the lobby and spotted Charles Perrow by the pool’ (who knew then he was ‘Chick’ Perrow?). The grad student today might look around the Academy meetings and say, ‘Wow, there’s Jeffrey Pfeffer’ . . . ‘Look, there’s Woody Powell’ . . . or tell those they are with that last night they actually ‘sat at the bar with Steve Barley,’ never mind that they exchanged hardly a word.

Next in this perplexing and formidable world of getting started on an academic career comes the stage when you have finished or almost finished with your thesis and are in the thick of a job search – seemingly more and more lengthy and certainly more grueling these days than ever before. An anxious period for sure since you figure your entire academic career rises or falls on how well you perform at the time – whether at summer meetings or giving nervous job talks. You have also begun to move away from your close circle of fellow students and are trying to establish some sort of recognizable promise and a scholarly identity amongst what remains a mind-boggling welter of scholarly identities and personas in your imagined field. At this stage, if attending an annual meeting you might even forgo cost cutting and room sharing and splurge for your very own hotel room so anxious are you to establish something of an autonomous and independent presence in the research world.

Then – if you are lucky – you are an assistant professor wanting to do serious work in your area of specialization. You come to the meetings and deliver papers, maybe organize sessions, take in lunches and dinners with colleagues spread out across the country (increasingly the world), join subsections, attend parties with an invitation in hand, network seriously. For here, in part, is the proving ground of your research and academic career.

By the time you are a full professor, charmed no doubt since you survived the psychological atrocities of the tenure system, you are finally more or less comfortable at these gatherings and well positioned in your tribe. You may still be giving papers but at invited sessions now or those you chair and you – perhaps for the first time – feel like you are now really a part of the research community, an insider of good standing, no longer an outsider looking in. You are a senior person proudly attending sessions where perhaps your very own graduate students are giving papers.

In your twenties and early thirties, you are typically the neophyte, the rookie, the greenpea and definitely on the margins. In your thirties and forties you are ‘making it’ (or not). In your fifties and sixties, if all has gone well, you are roughly in your prime – maybe a touch slower but surely wiser since you have proven your worth.

Even in your late sixties, my view is that you are still in academic middle age. But, eventually, sometime in your seventies most likely, you come to recognize that at least in the eyes or others you are in fact ‘getting old’ – or, in the somewhat softer, Neil Young like phrase used by Edward Bruner (2014) – ‘becoming old.’ This is a status that I assure you takes some adjustment. And this is where I am today. Sigh. Indeed, at the last couple of meetings I have attended, I have finally begun to realize that when looking around at all the faces in the crowd, it seems I hardly know anyone. And when I do spot a familiar face, I am relieved and likely to rush to hug and embrace them as a long lost friend even though our relationship may have been distant, even frosty, in the past.

Less visually but far more starkly, some in my cohort have now passed away and many more simply choose not to come to the meetings at all. A few of my well-respected and accomplished grad students have themselves – horror of horrors – retired and several more are talking about it. When I go to the sessions in my own fields of interest I look for familiar faces and seldom see many. What I find is a bright young generation of scholars moving in all kinds of new directions that are well beyond my ken. But, to speak curmudgeonly for a moment, I also find they are dimly aware of and indeed rather indifferent to whatever contributions my generation (or the one preceding my own) may have provided to their work.

In this respect, attending annual meetings today then is not unlike attending them when I was a grad student. A bit confusing trying to figure out what the hell is going on in what is now an enlarged and increasingly segmented domain. But there is a twist as well . . . where I once was trying to be accepted into a research circle – or, if you will, an occupational community – when ‘becoming old’ you realize that the community that you still consider your own is passing you by. The career path is then circular, moving from the margins to the center to the margins.

There are of course rewards of a peculiar sort. At the ASA meetings last year, I was walking through the lobby of the hotel where they were held and a young man I did not know looked curiously at me and down at my nametag and burst out: ‘You’re John Van Maanen!’ I nodded yes and he exclaimed, ‘I read your book for my class last fall. You’re a legend.’ Then he passed by hurriedly and I never saw him again and, alas, was unable to find out whatever legendary feats I might have performed.

As the career unfolds, this one in particular, shifts in your fields of interest occur as well – some paradigmatic, some topical, some theoretical or methodological. What recognition I receive these days is tied – unsurprisingly – to my relatively recent work. My older work – with Ed Schein, Lotte Bailyn, Steve Barley, Gideon Kunda – on, say, socialization and careers – work that was reasonably well cited at the time – has somehow fallen off the field’s radar (although I am about to soon provide a reminder). The invitations I receive these days are mostly related to ethnographic representation and practice – asking me, for example, to review a manuscript, blurb a new book, be a discussant on a panel, write a foreword or afterword to an edited volume or, on a few occasions, give a keynote or deliver a paper at a small conference. These are all activities – and not by any means unpleasant ones – that I have done a good deal of in recent years but differ rather substantially in this ‘the late show’ of my career from what I was doing in the early and middle ‘getting it on’ periods.

If there is an arc here in terms of how I now relate to my work in different periods of my career, it is of the following sort. In the early stages, I felt I was getting close to having a grasp on the matters of my research concern – be they gathering up all the ethnographic specifics of the occupational and organization world I was living in or the more general features or analytic notions – linked, say, to work socialization, careers or culture – that I was using to pack up my representational materials. This was a delusion. There was and is always far more to learn and while my studies had beginnings, they now seem to have no endings. And I now take this to be a rather common feature – and not a bug – associated with many, perhaps even most, academic careers.

As we read more, learn more, experience more, our confident hold on what we study lessens. Our interests broaden, our assumptions and conceits are challenged, our positions in the world change and we discover that things are always far more complicated and less stable than our early portraits or models would suggest. I now despair of ever tying things down – anything really – neatly and definitively. This may be the lament of an odd ethnographer but I think not. And here I am reminded of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ (1993) observation that there are only two certainties associated with a research career. The first is that in the end we will all be wrong and the second is that in the end we will all be dead. A successful academic career depends on having the second truth precede the first.

This, in a sketchy, rough, abbreviated form, is an academic career unfolding. Recognizable phases and stages if you will, but I would hastily add, none well planned or even foreseen. It is made sense of largely in retrospect by way of the semi-coherent narrative I have cobbled together. The perspective is primarily occupational although I could have easily provided an organizational lens as well. Such a lens would bring into focus the plain fact that throughout my career I have been blessed with a privileged institutional position: light teaching loads, enormous intellectual help and advice from patient colleagues who were (and are) supportive of my work, small classes, superb graduate students full of energy, wonder and eager for fieldwork, generous leave policies, relatively easy access to grants and fellowships that allowed me to pursue research interests wherever it led me – even if straight into a writer’s block. These are indulgences. Had I been at another institution or even at my home institution some 10 or 20 years later there might have been more pressure, sooner, to ‘cut to the chase’ and submit to the sorts of normal science ‘publish or perish’ dictates that today seem to govern so much of organization behavior and theory research, I might well have done very different work. These intergenerational differences are real and I recognize that my career, like all careers, developed in a rather specific time and place – for me, the fabled ‘right time and right place’ – with advantages that were and are, sadly so, hardly widespread.

But I trust also the academic career I have sketched is a recognizable one – at least in part: that there is a pattern here that is idiosyncratic to some extent but collective as well. A good deal of institutional structure, forbearance and backing is required – annual meetings, for example – and, as obliquely hinted at previously, such a work career is possible only with far more than a little support from my family and friends. Unmentioned too are the complicated and ever-present entanglements of a career unfolding alongside and intertwined with other personal careers as well. My career as a husband, father and now grandfather, as a short-lived ride operator at Disneyland, a triple-A dispatcher and tow-truck driver, a mistake-prone lathe operator, a prickly contract researcher, a long-time faculty member at MIT, a little league coach, a soccer Dad, a school board member, a runner (currently nursing a sore Achilles), and a dedicated and forever anxious Red Sox and Celtics fan. All provide elements of my identity, both projected and felt. All are social and cultural to the core. ² All are important to me as they have been dialed up and down over my life stages, and all, in various complicated ways, play off the extended work career that, in its most general form, is the ostensible topic of this article – a topic to which I now turn.

My intent in what follows is to illuminate my take on what an ethnographic perspective on work careers involves – be these careers occupational, organizational or, most likely, a heady mix of the two. The distinction between occupational and organizational work careers is ostensibly a tidy one, presumably quite apparent to outside observers, but I would argue hopelessly murky when viewed from the perspectives of insiders who are enacting the career over time in their rather uncertain, ambiguous and often volatile worlds of work. My remarks on careers are, given limited space, brief and (intendedly) crisp. They are lifted in part from some of my current work on representation and culture but rest on the palimpsest of my old work. I want also to highlight the rather remarkable growth of ethnographic work in organization studies at large and note its particular relevance to career studies – then and now – and point to some of the changes I think that this work exhibits over time, changes by the way that are not unrelated to the shifting organizational and occupational worlds we study. I will conclude with a few words on what I think has stood the test of time in ethnography.

Ethnography as a social practice

My view is that ethnography is a logic, a stance if you will, rather than a given method or any particular type of study. It calls out an epistemology – a way of knowing and the kind of knowledge that results. It is anything but a recipe. It involves fieldwork, headwork and textwork, and results typically in a written representation of cultural understandings held by others – meanings about work, about careers, about life – that are closely tied to a specific context and always provisional and partial. It is both dynamic and recursive but the encounter with the ‘foreign’ or ‘unknown’ or ‘strange’ is the very essence of ethnography.

Operationally, as ethnographers, we spend, for instance, a few days in the field, meander about the scene, hang out, talk to a few people quite different from ourselves who hold ideas that in various ways differ – often spectacularly – from our own. We learn what we can and then alter the questions we ask or the way in which we ask them and spend a few more days in the field and meet with more people. And on and on (and on) it goes – and where it stops, nobody knows. Those who revere standardization as a research strategy break out in hives when ethnographers hold forth about their craft.

Ethnography is improvisational, not procedural. It is path-dependent because we learn more about the subjectivity and intentionality of those we encounter in the field after our work is begun and, the longer we are at it, the more we learn about what we need to learn next. Our knowledge accumulates and changes over time as we come closer to understanding the perspectives – the venerable, if mythical, ‘native’s point of view’ – of the people from whom we are learning. Knowledge emerges in part because surprise – the Holy Grail of ethnography – is inevitable and taken seriously. When people do or say what we least expect, explanations are called for, however limited and tentative they may be at the moment. It is, as Michael Agar (2013) contends, the imaginative reaction to surprise that fuels ethnography such that the early days in the field are often the most exciting and most creative periods since the learning curve for the ethnographer is rapidly accelerating. Yet, as I have discovered in all my work, cultural learning curves rarely, if ever, flatline – in part because culture itself is hardly static and the problems people must deal with are continually shifting. There is always more to learn and surprise is always just around the bend. Exit from the field is then largely arbitrary, having little to do with either theoretical or empirical saturation. ³

Ethnography, properly speaking, is a social practice concerned with the study (fieldwork) and representation (textwork) of culture – these days with a distinctively small c. ⁴ It is a practice many claim to be the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. It exists somewhere in academic Limbo-land, an interdisciplinary pursuit and storytelling institution possessing a good deal of scholarly legitimacy with works commissioned, approved and published by the leading scholarly institutions of the day and carries the National Science Foundation (NSF) stamp of approval (and, these days, usually an institutional review board (IRB) license to commit ethnography as well). It claims a sort of documentary status by the fact that somebody actually ventures beyond the ivory towers of learning (and comfort) to, with qualifications, ‘live with and live like’ those from whom one is learning. And these matters are not up for grabs.

One becomes an ethnographer by going out and doing it and coming back to write it all up. This is both the rite of passage into the trade and a strongly held occupational norm. Nothing much can prepare you for intensive fieldwork. If you cannot figure out how to get close to the organization, occupation or, relevant to the theme here, the career or careers you want to study (and stay there), if you cannot figure out what to ask the proverbial natives, if you cannot figure out how to build a certain type of rapport with often recalcitrant and always suspicious others, then it is time to think about a nice career in economic sociology or experimental social psychology where the so-called ‘data’ are unlikely to be quite so cagey, to talk back, to question the questioner.

Some historical context

Ethnography itself has a long and venerated career in organization studies. One origin myth – of several – places anthropologist William Lloyd Warner in a founding role. Warner was a ‘hired hand’ brought in during the late stages of the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s by the Harvard Business School research team – headed by Elton Mayo – to design and oversee the observations and interviews in the famous (or infamous) Bank Wiring Room of the Hawthorne plant (Gillespie, 1981; Luthans et al., 2013). While Warner’s cultural interpretation of the results of that phase of the study, emphasizing the collective meaning the workers attributed to their efforts and their life situation, were discounted by Mayo and others directing the project – who blissfully played down the workers’ apparent sense of community and treated their cultural interpretation of the conditions of their work as ‘irrational’ – the quasi-ethnographic perspective Warner brought to Hawthorne left a mark on organization studies that persists to this day.

Warner went on to produce the acclaimed, albeit controversial, Yankee City series of ethnographic monographs in the 1940s in which the shifting and altogether precarious occupational and organizational landscapes within and across class divides in the community (Newburyport, Massachusetts) were wonderfully and evocatively represented. As fate (or sound reason) would have it, Warner wound up for much of his academic career joining Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer (of symbolic interaction fame) at the University of Chicago, helping to sustain the fieldwork-based traditions of the so-called Chicago School of Sociology – then (like now) challenged as ‘old fashioned’ and unable to compete empirically with hypothesis testing, statistically driven and theory obsessed approaches to social studies. Hughes himself not only upheld the ethnographic approach at Chicago but trained a galaxy of young men and women who kept the tradition vibrantly alive: Howard Becker, Blanche Geer, Joe Gusfield, Anslem Strauss, Eliot Friedson and, most brilliant of them all, Erving Goffman.

These figures and their work left an indelible mark on how I and my close MIT colleagues and students – Ed Schein, Lotte Bailyn and Deborah Kolb in the 1970s, Steve Barley, Gideon Kunda, Deborah Dougherty and Brian Pentland in the 1980s, Bob Thomas, Leslie Perlow, John Weeks and Wanda Orlikowski in the 1990s, Kate Kellogg, Melissa Mazmanian, Ofer Sharone and Catherine Turco in the ’aughts – have come to imagine and study (each in our own distinctive ways) work, careers, occupations and organizations in society. Looking back, in highly abbreviated form, five features of this approach stand out.

First, a career follows a person wherever that person works – in one organization, several or none. And the work career itself is an evolving sequence of work experiences over time. For Hughes (1958), an occupation identifies the kind of work people do – the bundle of tasks and jobs they perform – and the patterns (and deviations) associated with who does what, when and where in the trade as careers unfold. If workers or practitioners (to use both a lower and upper status term) in the occupation have much sense of collective identity and solidarity – an empirical question subject to disruption and change – they will also claim a mandate to define – not just for themselves but for others as well – the proper conduct with respect to matters of their work and career.

Second, while occupations and careers can surely be ranked as to their broad status and prestige in society, they are not to be defined on such an evaluative basis. In the social world, prostitutes, plumbers, poets, physicians, programmers, painters, prisoners, paramedics, pastry cooks, pilots and periodontists all have occupations and careers within them – be they carried on for mercifully brief periods or rewardingly long ones. What most distinguishes the occupation or career is not its length, its trajectory, its professional standing, or its inclusion in a governmental census table: it is what people who claim membership within the occupation do and what it means to them. In language that Lotte, Ed and I favor, this is an ‘internal definition’ of work and career and not an ‘external’ one.

Third, such internal definitions are rarely invented by a person out of whole cloth. People move in to and out of work worlds where situational definitions are already present and used by others and thus newcomers gradually come to both learn and position themselves according to the meanings already on hand, however subtle and invisible they once may have been. The internal career is what the person makes of his or her experience in the occupational and organizational worlds they inhabit. As positions shift, work changes, organizations expand and retract, and occupations rise and fall, so too will the meanings people ascribe to their work and careers.

Fourth, social and personal identities are inextricably tied to work and careers that provide, in Hughes’s view and mine, as good a clue as any as to our sense of self, our course of being, our way of life. ‘What do you do?’ is of course a standard and all too familiar probe to which we must have a ready answer or risk censor. There are a number of ways work bestows meaning on the self. Some are set by historical and institutional processes rather distant – external – and rather removed from the specific individuals doing the work. Others bubble up precisely from the particular kinds of things people do in the ordinary, everyday process of going about their work and the problems they encounter. The former draws on relatively stable, categorical orderings of the occupational order and provides something of shell or vessel within which people labor. The latter bestows meaning through, for example, the intricacies and skills involved in the work process itself, the results of the work, the intensity and demands of the work, or even in the byproducts generated by such work. By and large the meaning of work in these more or less internal domains relies on cultural conventions or codes specific to those who do such work and arise (and change) in the day-to-day conduct of the trade. Outsiders rarely have much appreciation for the insider’s perspective on the work processes or products and therefore are in no position to judge individual performances – whether in the short or long run – with the same appetite, knowledge, evaluative criteria, moral sentiment and consequence that workers or practitioners bring to the task.

Fifth and finally, what is important, problematic and central in any given career is quite likely to show up in others as well. For example, tenure and the uneasy stability it grants role incumbents can be official or unofficial, acknowledged or unacknowledged, honored or not, but it in many guises shows up in innumerable studies as a matter of considerable interest and speculation to those pursuing the career under examination. Normative calendars of when status passages should occur across a career are almost universal when in-depth studies of occupational or organizational careers are conducted. Or, to take another generalizable feature, my own work with police suggests, for instance, that the police share a highly specific, relatively refined yet situational-constricted label for that character they routinely and all-too-often encounter in their work world, ‘the asshole.’ And the asshole turns out to be a rather stock character in accounts of other careers from the humble to the proud. ⁵ Doctors have their crocks, managers have their shirkers, teachers have their rowdy pupils just as students have their draconian instructors. Locating similarities amongst differences (and vice versa) is then central to the approach to career studies I have outlined here – and rest assured they will be found.

I doubt any of these claims are controversial, so taken-for-granted they seem to be in the past and current work and career studies that are framed implicitly or explicitly along such lines. Classical ethnographic studies are many ranging from Ely Chinoy’s (1955) close look at the careers (and dreams) of factory workers in the US automobile industry; to Becker et al.’s (1961) careful study of the student careers of would-be physicians in medical school; to Dan Lortie’s (1975) examination of schoolteacher careers; to Charles Bosk’s (2003 [1978]) sensitive treatment of the work and lives of young surgeons; to Melville Dalton’s (1959), Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1977) and Robert Jackell’s (1988) remarkably similar portraits of managerial careers – mostly male – that span some 30 or so years in widely dispersed settings. Consider, too, Julius Roth’s (1963) examination of patient careers in treatment settings; Herbert Kaufman’s (1960) account of the careers of forest rangers; Barney Glaser’s (1964) look at the professional careers of organizational scientists; and Helen Lopata’s (1971) careful look at the career or, in her terms, the occupation of British housewives. Classic studies also include those of uncommon or ‘deviant’ careers such as Erving Goffman’s (1961) account of the moral career of mental patients; Frederick Thrasher’s (1927) depiction of gang member careers; Edwin Sutherlands (1949) probe into the careers of white collar criminals; or John Irwin’s (1970) tracking of the career paths of thieves, hustlers and junkies. All remain in print, if too infrequently consulted by contemporary career researchers.

The list here is long and impressive and anything but obsolete or irrelevant in terms of understanding contemporary careers. ⁶ Such studies have given us long lasting concepts and theories addressing such matters as how alienation and anomie arise in work settings, how social labeling serves as a control mechanism suggesting ironically that labels say more about the labeler than the labeled, how differential association patterns explain career choices and trajectories, how gender imbalances in the workplace are tightly linked to the way power and decision rights are distributed in organizations, how social learning occurs (or not) at different stages of one’s career, and so on. They also provide a treasure trove of ethnographic evidence such that historical comparisons are possible and changes in what were once ‘traditional’ career patterns can be discerned. And, as I hasten to show, studies of comparable worth are continuing and continuing at a pace that to me appears to be accelerating.

Ethnography on the rise

We live now in what might be called a Cambrian period for ethnographic studies. An expanding number of lively (as well as dull) research monographs appear each year. Numerous old and new journals carry an increasing number of ethnographic representations and commentary. Method primers are cranked out with regularity, full of help and advice for fieldworkers, new and old. Door-stopping theory and practice Handbooks appear frequently – years in the making – to convey the rough and ready state of the ethnographic arts. And of course the blogosphere has its share of ethnographic voices, critical and otherwise, putting forth peculiar pros and cons of doing things this way or that and what it all might mean. ⁷

As might be expected, ethnography is now remarkably splintered and diverse. What was once a relatively small band of ethnographers interested in work worlds is now a sprawling, sundry and increasingly heterogeneous lot. Ethnography is commonly talked of today in an adjectival fashion (i.e. educational, urban, medical, communication, occupational, organizational, community, legal, market, digital, network, consumer, even as applied or contract ethnography). In the last two years, I have been asked to give talks on ethnography to faculty and students in the Arts and Humanities School at the University of Colorado, at the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and oddly, but instructively, in the Musicology Department at Harvard. A good deal of this dispersion of interest in ethnography is a result of the surge and spread of the distinctly open and contemporary idea of culture as something constructed (and construed) – thick or thin – by all self-identifying groups.

Everyone these days has a culture it seems – more likely multiple cultures – from which to draw meaning. Thus, we have accounts of culture as built, sustained and interrogated by Second Life enthusiasts, by doormen on the upper-east side in New York City, by beat patrolmen on the High Street in English villages, by those Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, by elite academics serving on peer-review panels, by slick and youthful Silicon valley entrepreneurs, even by those abducted by Martians (curiously only Americans are abducted) but mercifully returned to us, and on and on. For ethnographers, to whom the study of culture is their raison d’etre, this is a rather welcome development, expanding traditional fields of inquiry and opening up new ones.

For students of careers this is good news as well. Culture presumes membership and membership presumes careers – within and perhaps beyond cultural boundaries. But contemporary ethnographic perspectives on culture – organizational and occupational – have shifted a good deal from the time the classic studies were conducted to the present. Culture is represented today as open-ended, flexible, internally contested, less (and less) precisely situated in space or time, ambiguous and constantly reordering itself in a continually changing environment. The ‘social reality’ and view of culture that I try to put forth in my cultural representation work today emphasizes variability, paradox, ambiguity, complexity, conflict and more than a little individual agency – far more so than my early work would allow. The notion of a coherent, homogeneous, valued, stable and highly integrated culture either occupational or organizational – a sort of ‘cultural island’ or ‘essentialist’ view – is distinctly out of fashion (and for good reason).

In short, the burden of ethnography to represent culture has become heavier, messier and less easily pinned down. The faith in ethnographic holism – always something of an ethnographic fiction like Newton’s frictionless space – has retreated and so have claims to have captured the ‘spirit’ of the people, the ‘culture’ of a nation or organization, the ‘ethos’ of an institution. Although the trope of holism remains strong in the public imagination – and remains a kind of literary suction pump or rhetorical imperative for the ethnographic writer as a way to provide closure to a study – there is considerably more openness to ethnographic accounts these days. And this has led to several analytic turns in the way careers are studied through the ethnographic lens. A few of these the changes follow.

Career studies today

Given ethnography is no longer confined to single-site studies of supposedly isolated or conveniently bounded peoples (the ‘cultural island’ approach), multi-site career studies are on the rise. With market globalization, enhanced communications, new information technologies allowing high interconnectivity among people formerly remote to one another, the rise and spread of vast human migrations, the decay of large public and private institutions and so forth comes an inevitable and yet rather unprecedented shuffling and interpenetration of modes of thought and action the world over. This has required a relocation of fieldwork, complicated it certainly but widened its view. The timely boundary-less career idea so well espoused by Michael Arthur (1994) some 20 years ago has become a rather taken-for-granted reality for many of us. And a number of career relevant ethnographic studies come to mind that point to the problematic nature such careers present as well as the innovative ways ethnographers have stumbled on to study them.

A few examples will have to suffice although there are many. Barley and Kunda (2006) provide, for instance, a terrific multi-site study examining the peripatetic careers of both blue- and gold-collar contract workers in the Silicon Valley. Christina Garsten (1994) examines organizational careers but across borders at Apple in both the core of the company (Cupertino, California) and at the periphery (Europe, particularly Sweden). And Shehzad Nadeem (2013) takes a close multi-organizational look at the way the outsourcing industry for call centers works and just how globalization has opened up new careers and opportunities (and lives) for young people in India that are full of both hope and disappointment.

Long-term, deep probe, single-site career studies – the sort that in the past represented the ethnographic ideal – are giving way these days to more focused but wider-ranging work. Karen Ho’s (2009) timely examination of the careers of young Wall Street bankers and traders (and the culture of greed within which they operate) is a good example in this regard. Another example at the opposite end of the economic ladder is the vivid depiction of the wretched careers of the homeless on the streets in Austin, Texas provided by David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993). Both works suggest that the very idea of ‘the field’ is itself shifting insofar as groups, organizations and occupations are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically self-conscious or culturally homogeneous. Even when studying careers in a single, but huge and multinational organization, the ‘ethno’ of ethnography takes on a quite unreliable, non-localized character (e.g. Sarfaty, 2012; Weeks, 2006). This is a new and I think rather fertile domain just beginning to be explored.

Relatedly, comparative ethnographic work seems also to be on the rise. Some illustrations: Avid Raz (2002) looks to Japan and the USA, a la Ruth Benedict, for lessons as to how emotions at work are expressed and more or less managed and draws out a number of implications for how the careers he examines – largely managerial – that play out in the two countries. Ofer Sharone (2013) gives us a moving portrait of the troubled careers experienced by long-term unemployed white-collar workers in the USA and Israel during what he calls the recent Great Recession. In this comparative domain, I am particularly fond of a complex ethnography by Andreas Glaeser (2000) that looks closely at the West and East Berlin police departments (and their respective critiques of one another) that were merged after the fall of the Wall. The consequences of this merger are stunning and largely go in unexpected directions as the moral orders are upended and the work is redefined and redistributed thus advancing some police careers and stalling, cutting short or eliminating others.

Fracture, disruption, chaos also mark contemporary career ethnographies. Vickie Smith (2002) tells a potent story, akin to Glaeser’s, of corporate restructuring and its aftermath in several large American firms. Carrie Lane (2011) has an elegant illustration of a multi-sited ethnography exploring what she calls ‘self-managed careers’ as told through the voices of job-seeking, high tech workers in Dallas, Texas. And, in this vein, but deeply associated with the surveillance state that attends to America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, Alice Goffman (2014) weaves a poignant account of just how careers emerge (or not) for those trapped on the wrong side of the law – with no way out – in the ‘killing fields’ of our urban ghettos; a narrative not unlike Sudir Venkatesh’s (2008) account of the violent careers of those in a drug-dealing gang in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects.

A final set of examples in contemporary ethnographic work on careers come from studies that on the surface appear ‘old fashioned’ but textually break new ground. Prominent is the rise of the highly personalized ethnography. Robin Nagle’s (2013) work on a reviled occupation, garbage collecting, is a good illustration. Here the confessional merges with the realist tale in a scholarly and often amusing way as, Nagle, deeply embedded within the New York Sanitation Department, shows how those in this vast and essential city bureaucracy manage to maintain their pride and dignity over the course of a long career while keeping the city clean, navigable and safe. In a different mode, but equally confessional, are Michel Anteby’s (2013) exploration of the early careers of faculty members in his home institution, the Harvard Business School, written while he was simultaneously undergoing the lengthy tenure process in place at the school; Peter Moskos’s (2009) gripping and personal account of learning the ropes in the patrol division of the Baltimore Police Department; and Graham Jones’s (2011) cunning investigation of the making of magicians in France via his own attempts to master this trade of tricks.

I could easily push on with this list of shifts in ethnography and exemplary illustrations but I trust I have made my point. Ethnography is certainly still with us, perhaps healthier than ever, yet many of its subjects and practices – textual among them – have changed. This may seem paradoxical but I think the paradox disappears because ethnography – like any other social practice – does not remain the same because its topics, problems, facts, methods, theories, genres remain the same, but because in the midst of such changes, an audience still looks to it for the performance of a given task, namely, the close study of culture and, I might add, the close study of careers as constructed and construed by particular people, in particular places, at particular times, doing particular things. Or, if you will, what it is like to be someone else.

I am struck, however, that ethnographic work of the sort I have just mentioned is so often overlooked, egregiously so, in what I take to be the mainstream career literature in organizational and management studies – at least in the research that shows up in journal article form where a variable and measurement approach to careers is dominant. Yet a career, like culture, is not a variable, it is a pattern and an increasingly complex one. It is best and most faithfully evoked and made visible through lengthy, hard-slogging fieldwork alongside those who enact the career. And here the ethnographer must be intent on chasing down variance because surprise hangs out in the gap between what is expected and what is found. The logic is one of discovery, not verification. Thus, a plea to career researchers of all sorts to be attentive to what we organizational and occupational ethnographers have to say. We have left our cultural islands far behind and many of us are deeply enmeshed in messy and changing work worlds trying to bring back the news of what is happening in them.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Let me complete this look at shifts in ethnographic career studies with a few remarks about what has not changed much. I have four in mind.

First, ethnography remains relatively free of technical jargon and high-wire abstraction. Concepts are borrowed largely from existing social theory and, even more pronounced, from general public discourse. For better or worse, something of an anti-theory bias is still apparent. Ethnographers are primarily problem-focused, phenomena-driven pragmatists. We favor theoretical pluralism when trying to work up an account for how, say, particular careers operate in this case or that. Some theories work better than others depending on the particular problems addressed and the equally particular situations and times in which they are used. Le Grand Paradigm is not coming to ethnography anytime soon. Surprise, irony, frame breaking and pluck-and-luck still shape the analytic domain.

Second, because of this relative freedom from a thoroughly specialized vocabulary and privileged theoretical apparatus, ethnography continues to carry a slight literary air – at least compared with other forms of social science writing. It remains, I think, a less congealed, passive, impersonal and congested form of discourse, thus suggesting that a textual self-consciousness has been with us for some time. This keeps the non-specialist interested in what we do and occasionally pushes certain forms of ethnography into the trade or general-reader domain. Indeed, a number of the monographs I mentioned earlier have been widely read and reviewed well beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Third, ethnography maintains an almost obsessive focus on the empirical. And, related to my previous point, this ‘I-witnessing’ ideal continues to provoke some hostility to abstractions not connected to immersion in situated detail. ⁸ Other forms of data are acceptable, of course, and responsible scholarship requires the sort of interdisciplinary contextualization across the settings in which we work. But these other forms of evidence and argument are acceptable only (woe) as a concession to practicality. Who would want to discover how many workers Walmart employs ethnographically? Relatedly, whatever far-reaching generalizations or explicit policy implications a given work might suggest are often left to the reader to draw out and justify for themselves on the basis of the rich, contextualized and often graphic ethnographic specifics provided in the text.

Last, there still is not much of a technique attached to ethnography – despite some 50 or 60 years of trying to develop a standard methodology. Ethnography, it seems, cannot – and, I would argue, will not – be made safe for science, leaving it in the academic Limbo-land I identified earlier. This I do not find terribly worrisome, for a standard methodology would effectively neuter or perhaps destroy the still present expeditionary spirit that marks the trade as broadly curious and adventurous. In this respect, ethnography is still a relatively artistic, improvised and situated form of social research where the lasting tenants of research design, theoretical ambition, canned concepts and technical writing have yet to leave a heavy mark. And this, you will be unsurprised to learn, is the way I think it should be.

End notes

As a way of circling back to some of my introductory remarks and drawing a close to this look at career studies, I have a few parting reflections on academic careers and my words about them. But first an anecdote I want to share.

In 1983, Everett Hughes, then 86 years old, came to MIT at Steve Barley’s and my request to give an informal talk to our Organization Studies group. He was bright, witty and fully in charge of the conversation, a memorable afternoon that ended with Steve and me accompanying Everett back to his Cambridge home on the T where we were invited in for a sherry and more wonderful chatter, joined by his wife Helen. This was shortly – two months actually – before his death and he was well past the ‘becoming old’ stage I mentioned earlier.

Similar long-time engagement and involvement is perhaps not so uncommon in our field, or many other fields for that matter. Some of us drop out of course, just as some of us seem to keep going forever in a straight line taking up new topics and continuing to learn, to read, to do research and to write. My impression is that many of us, when blissfully free from the burdens of teaching, grading papers and attending dyspeptic faculty meetings, continue, if able, to be occupationally active but at a less hurried pace (although I have no data to back this up). We are fortunate indeed for our work – among other identity markers – allows us to interpret in a most favorable light the meaning of the one life we have to live. A telling illustration of this is provided by my long-time neighbor and still active local plumber, Charles Jesome, who is now well into his 80s. I recently asked Charlie what kept him going at his trade; why, after all these years he continued to work? He replied, without hesitation and with his hand held tightly to a wrench fastened to a rusty old valve in my basement: ‘It’s what I do.’

Finally, let me remind you that this writing is based entirely, if implicitly, on the questionable precept that there is a structure to this world, an organizational and occupational order, a discernible sequence of experiences that are visible and meaningful enough to allow us to claim that such things as cultures and careers are real and we have an approach to examining them that promises at least to bring forth understandings that will help us act knowledgeably and wisely in the world. But remember too what the playful ghosts of Everett Hughes and Erving Goffman might say: that when all is said and done and we are all properly admonished as to the infinite complexity of our social worlds and their ever changing workings, the precepts and promises of our intellectual fields appear rather fragile and weak – and thus we must always return to the flickering, messy, cross-purposed, unknown and unknowable surroundings and circumstances that our empirical and analytic work seeks to tame. Words – and the concepts they inevitably betray – will hardly hold back the wind. But we will no doubt continue to try.