Abstract
This special issue celebrates qualitative research’s potential for understanding how and why change unfolds in organizations. Indeed, qualitative research has been a source of rich insights in studies of work, management, and organization since the early 20th century; although it exists as a minority subfield, it has been disproportionately important and relevant to the discipline as measured by institutional accolades when compared with research in the dominant hypothetico-deductive tradition (Fine, Morrill, & Surianarain, 2008; Locke, 2011). Furthermore, with their emphasis on process and dynamism—that is, with organizing (see Weick, 1979) rather than organization—ethnographic approaches have a long history of contributing to our developing understanding of the dynamics of organizational change (Fine et al., 2008; Spradley, 1979; Van Maanen, 2001).
While I do not want to draw unnecessary boundaries around forms of qualitative research (they are fuzzy to say the least), I do want to underscore and advocate for ethnography’s understood premium on researchers being present to and immersed in everyday-lived situations to observe and consider how and why agents, act, feel, and think in the way they do (Atkinson, Delamont, & Housley, 2008; Wacquant, 2002). Researchers may draw on a wide range of methodological practices as suits the emergent purposes of a given study, but sustained immersive fieldwork attending to particularities of everyday action and interaction and imaginative exploration and conceptualization of their potential relevance generally define ethnographically oriented approaches (Locke, 2011). The priority for attending to mundane, micro-level interactions over time carries into a form of writing that emphasizes detailed description married with analytic commentary. This provides readers insights about organizational life expressed in the represented characters, feelings, thoughts, and actions observed within the particular social settings studied (Golden-Biddle & Locke, 2007; Van Maanen, 2001; Watson, 2011).
Thus, ethnographically oriented studies do a specific kind of work for documenting, thinking about, understanding, and conceptualizing change; specifically sustained immersive fieldwork focuses the researcher’s and reader’s attention and analytic imagination on particular groups of people working out the actions and implications of shaping, initiating, implementing, being subject to, and responding to change in particular situations over a particular time period. This work not only attends to unfolding action within the institutional and cultural contexts in which it takes place—the way in which things, people, and actions already matter in specific though evolving ways—but it also brings them together with the everyday talk and interaction that both draws on and produces these contexts. This leads to theorizing change as an emergent, fluid, messy, and human phenomenon, and it consistently results in theoretical insights that offer an alternative to abstract variable-based analytic renderings of change dynamics and that invariably challenge and complicate strategic rational action perspectives.
Pettigrew’s (1985) research on the change patterns of a major British multinational firm became a landmark study in this regard. Informed by methods and analytic sensibilities developed from his disciplinary training in social anthropology and sociology—including ethnographic study of the Sebeii in Uganda (Pettigrew, Starkey, & Hambrick, 2001)—Pettigrew analyzed the firm’s efforts to change its strategy, structures, technology, and culture in four divisions over a more than two-decade period by attending to the interaction of history and tradition, context and culture, and emergent politics within a processual epistemology. His work underscored the complex, haphazard, multiple, and contradictory dimensions of how change emerges and unfolds over time (Pettigrew, 1990). From an ethnographic perspective, theorizing how change happens on the ground in interaction clearly requires painting a more complicated and humanly messy picture than that conjured up by exhortations for change such as “develop a clear vision” or “seek out low hanging fruit!” Although seeking out “low hanging fruit” might be a useful enjoinder in general, it may be helpful, irrelevant, misleading, or even counterproductive to a particular organization at a particular time as it is worked out in practice (e.g., Tillquist, 2001, see also Buchanan, 1999; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011) because those complicated, interrelated and emergent dynamics are precisely what needs to be understood.
Consider Vallas’s (2003) fieldwork on the introduction of participative and continuous improvement work practices as part of a broad workplace transformation effort at a pulp and paper company. An emergent event at one plant, specifically, managers naming some nonunion workers to improvement teams, was interpreted as an act of disrespect by union representatives who responded by insisting on the right to appoint all hourly participants to the teams—a predictable culturally conservative response. Managers gambled and gave in. Over time, though, outcomes developed that were pleasant surprises to both managers and union leaders. Union officials found that participation in the plant’s program was having positive bleed-over effects as improvement participants became more active in local union affairs, whereas managers discovered that the plant’s knowledge resourcing capacity was increasing. The dynamics that continued to unfold eventually completely transformed the initiative itself, reshaped plant governance, and highlighted the flexibility inherent in culture and context. These consequences were neither anticipated nor intended. Vallas’s ethnographic sensibility heeded events that happened (and called for interpretation and action), followed their unfolding and formative influence in shaping how and with what results a planned change unfolded, and reconsidered culture’s putative role in shaping organizational transformation.
Finally, review the following field note excerpt from Kellogg’s (2009) study of institutional change focused on implementing new regulations for medical residents’ work hours. In it, senior medical staff offer to write orders and a discharge so that an intern can end his shift on time:
[Intern] finishes running through patient updates. [Day senior] says that he can put the orders in. [Intern] hesitates and says OK (doubtfully). [Chief] tells intern to go and that he will write the discharge on [patient]. [Intern] says OK and leaves. [Chief] goes to the computer to enter the discharge order. (p. 693)
Institutional change is happening in this brief interaction and a host of entwined issues and relations (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011) are implicated in it. As Kellogg’s (2009) analytic narrative makes clear, this exchange expresses historical as well as planned work practices, occupational identity and status consequences in role relations, traditional beliefs about how to care for patients and how to educate residents, and, as well, the ecology of interactions among groups supporting and resisting adoption of the new regulations. All these are entangled in the unfolding change effort. They are teased out and marshaled in an ethnographic narrative that explains and demonstrates both why and how the two hospitals she studied initially resisted new work practices introduced to reduce the number of hours residents worked and also how, over time, new practices came to be adopted in one hospital but not the other.
As I noted at the outset, my intention has been to advocate for ethnography’s observational and analytic sensitivity to understanding and theorizing the lived experience of change as situated, emergent, messy, and human. Although its value as a research approach for change is, I trust, patent, I also want to be a proponent of ethnographic writing to researchers outside the ethnographic and qualitative community whose own analytic thinking might be enriched and inspired by scrutinizing grounded narratives of unfolding change. After all, theorizing is not time, space, or even activity bound. Ethnographic narratives are now being produced across the social sciences by a broad range of disciplines and by professional schools whose concerns touch on the world of work—how could they not! Consequently, there is now an accumulating body of ethnographic work that is available as a resource to researchers of all persuasions (see, e.g., Hodson, 2008). Even anthropologists, who with few exceptions, moved far away from early interest in Western workplaces, are increasingly re-turning their attention to and contributing to the growing corpus of work on managerial and organizational processes—in which change is a recurring feature (see Cefkin, 2009; Gellner & Hirsch, 2001; Holmes & Marcus, 2006). These grounded accounts are a useful resource to take readers into change’s unfolding dynamics.