Abstract
We live, it seems, in what might be called a Cambrian period for ethnographic studies. A growing stream of lively (and dull) research monographs appear each year, a wave of old and new journals carry an increasing number of ethnographically informed papers and commentary, methods primers are cranked out with regularity full of help-and-advice for wannabe fieldworkers, door-stopping theory and practice handbooks appear frequently – years in the making – to convey the rough and ready state of the ethnographic arts, and the blogosphere has its share of ethnographic voices, critical and otherwise, putting forth their peculiar pros and cons of doing things this way or that and what it all might mean. Ethnography is now spectacularly splintered and diverse. It is commonly talked of in an adjectival fashion – educational, medical, legal, market, science, occupational, virtual, urban – and originates in (and is filtered by) virtually all social science disciplines as well as an increasing number of programs in the humanities, notably cultural studies. As a form of creative non-fiction, ethnography has certainly carved out a recognizable if diffuse and contested space for itself.
Of course, how one keeps up with it all is another matter. A sort of tunnel vision is required since even with the cloud we can’t keep up with it all. What captures our attention and attains a degree of common readership across or even within scholarly fields remains something of a mystery despite the efforts of many – myself included – to put forth a plausible theory of what constitutes the informative, persuasive and indeed admirable ethnography. Surely some of it is in the writing, some in the reader response, some in the topical and theoretical choices made by an author, some in field tactics employed, some in the particulars of the time, place and context in which a work appears, and on and on. None of this is reducible to formula.
That said, however, it is worthwhile still to try to provide some guidance to the neophyte ethnographer as well as (and perhaps more importantly) to publicly reflect on what seemingly works for us in the field and at the writing desk and what does not. These may not be general lessons to be taken to heart by all, but the stories told by those more or less seasoned veterans who have been in the field, managed to craft an ethnographic account based presumably on such experience, and are able to go meta with what is an account of an account represent in my view a modestly useful way to guide the practice of ethnography, organizational or otherwise.
And this is precisely what the four editors of the volume under review here have done. Organizational Ethnography is a collection of original essays all marked by personalized, first-hand accounts of doing and conceptualizing field research from the first days in the field to the last and beyond. There are 14 tidy chapters, each about 15 to 20 pages long. Points are brought home in a reader-friendly way by condensed anecdote rather than point-counterpoint analysis and the writing is sometimes quite witty and sharp. The chapters are shoehorned into three broad (and highly overlapping) categories: Part 1 takes up “Ethnographic Doing and Writing.” Part 2 examines “Familiarity and ‘Stranger-ness”’ and Part 3 examines various kinds of “Research-Researched Relationships.” The authors are mostly male, primarily from management schools in UK and Dutch universities – along with a few Americans, three from the Land of Oz, and a lone Dane. All are experienced field workers and many have impressive ethnographic credentials.
Much of what is talked about in the volume covers ground familiar to ethnographers of whatever specialty – ethnographers of the professions, communities, schools, private companies, religious groups, laboratories, government agencies, et al. Organizational ethnography is today an accepted if rather mundane label and social research category but exactly how its practices – in the field or in print – differ from those of other labels and social research categories is never made quite clear in this volume (or elsewhere, for that matter). But given the post-Weickian shift among many theorists in organizational studies from viewing an organization as an object or a taken-for-granted state with set properties and purposes, this is probably quite appropriate. As a number of ethnographies both ancient and new make clear, street gangs, after all, make use of familiar organizational processes, the homeless are more organized than conventional wisdom suggests, and the unemployed work feverishly and often collectively to find and keep a job. At the most, organizational ethnography denotes a narrow or wide setting or site(s) where people do things more or less together. But beyond that – as the book’s subtitle, Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life, makes clear – ethnography is simply ethnography.
Looking at the specific contributions to the collection, all combine reflections on both fieldwork and writing, often making the point that what one has uncovered in the field is not realized or even known until attempts to textualize such “discoveries” are made. The four chapters in Part 1 are most explicit on this point. Kees van der Waal in the first chapter of this reader provides an overview of ethnographic fieldwork emphasizing the virtues of a multisited approach and reminding readers that theory is taken both in and out of the field – what he tellingly calls the “ethnographic burden.” Michael Humphreys and Tony Watson in Chapter 2 offer a broad taxonomy of ethnographic writing styles – moving from “plain ethnography” to “fictionalized ethnography” – and provide snippets of text to illustrate their categories. In Chapter 3, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow also examine writing strategies (their own as well as celebrated others), asking a question over which there is now much agonizing: “What makes an ethnographic account trustworthy?” The answer, they say (if there is one), is to be found in reading communities that are increasingly porous but obsessed with trying to locate evaluative standards. Simon Down and Michael Hughes in Chapter 4 close out Part 1 by placing the “subject” and the “researcher” on the same page, allowing the researched (Hughes) to speak outside the representational and theoretical space put in place by the researcher (Down). Each, it seems, serves as the “key informant” to the other, creating a rather novel account – if not unprecedented – of an apparently successful organizational change effort.
Part 2 consists of four chapters dealing roughly with the oxymoron that the contrasting terms participant and observer create. Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg lead off in Chapter 5 with an argument for using – conceptually and practically – one’s oddness or differences from others in the field rather than anxiously trying to quickly fit in and familiarize all that is seen and heard. What the fieldworker finds unexpected, surprising or paradoxical on first encounter is, in the authors’ view, too often and too rapidly normalized. In Chapter 6, Davide Nicolini turns toward ethnomethodology, pushing for an intensified concern for work practices (“zooming in”) without ignoring the local practices as partly held in place by other and (arguably) broader practices (“zooming out”). Brian Moeran in Chapter 7 cleverly turns participant observation into observant participation, by which he means that, to get beyond what Goffman would call the frontstage to the backstage of a studied scene, the fieldworker must bring something and often do something of practical use to those in the setting. As Moeran points out, there are numerous examples of just how moving from a relatively passive to an active role in the field brings with it a dramatic leap in understanding. Part 2 closes with Mats Alvesson in Chapter 8 who makes a solid case for “at-home ethnography” – the study of and in an organization of which one is a part, hardly an unproblematic or easy matter and distinct from so-called auto-ethnography – highly personalized texts in which writers narrate their own “lived experiences.” At-home ethnography, in Alvesson’s view, begins by turning the quintessential ethnographic question “what the hell are they up to?” into “what the hell are we up to?” Such mysteries abound wherever we are and perhaps, as novelists suggest, no less or more than where we live and work.
Part 3 deals with research relationships and begins in Chapter 9 with a list of “lies from the field” by Gary Alan Fine and David Shulman. The list is derivative from some of Fine’s earlier work but stands here as a wonderfully exemplified tale of the varnished stories we tell ourselves and others (IRBs for example) of what it is we do. It is unimaginable to me that any veteran fieldworker won’t flinch some – and add a few lies of their own – when reading this piece. Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert, Robert MacIntosh and Peter McInnes in Chapter 10 scrutinize from a pragmatic ethical perspective the temporal character of those typically impermanent and always contingent friendships that develop in the field. Chris Sykes and Lesley Treleavan in Chapter 11 appraise the differences between critical action research and ethnography and, not unexpectedly, find that little consensus apparently exists as to what both critical action research and ethnography intend and accomplish. Normative theories and aims may be explicit or implicit in either, but the authors suggest these are sure to be transformed as a study deepens. Chapter 12 by Halleh Ghorashi and Harry Wels closes Part 3 with something of a historically informed plea for an “engaged ethnography” that would openly work toward the emancipatory aims of those studied. That such engagement need not be of a j’accuse sort is a point well made by the authors, who conclude by noting that overcoming complicity in ethnography (as in life) may be a matter of more humility than arrogance, more patience than activism, more ears than opinions.
An annotated bibliography of some 65 book-length organizational ethnographies – classic and contemporary – serves as an appendix. By and large, the studies listed are all exemplary. A brief but acute and amicable essay by Dvora Yanow and Karin Geuijen introduces the bibliography by commenting on the difficulties and trade-offs involved when deciding what is to count as an organizational ethnography, much less an exemplary one. While all readers will no doubt find some of their favorite ethnographies missing from those named, such absences usefully document several of the points made by Yanow and Geuijen – a fitting way to end a volume that contributes to a flourishing if always difficult and awkward endeavor that may lack a suitable label but not, as the listed works attest, a canon.
In closing, this is a book that advanced undergraduates or graduate students undertaking their initial step into the ethnographic camp will enjoy. It’s readable, does not ask much of a reader in terms of background understandings, and covers a wide variety of approaches and purposes that mark ethnographic work. Its flaws, like any collection of essays, are several. Redundancies are annoying – as the authors of each chapter, for example, conjure up a rather similar definition of and purpose for ethnography while declaiming that ethnographies are invariably idiosyncratic, hence non-replicable. Few interconnections across chapters are made, as if each of the chapter authors was blissfully in the dark about what one another wrote. But, there is a gem or two to be found in each piece such that those of us who have been in this game for some time will nod in recognition and appreciate seeing in print a fine or novel point well made. The contribution this work makes to the ongoing ethnographic discourse is then a worthy one, bringing home the somewhat subtle point that there will never be a widely accepted prototype or model organizational ethnography, thus the search for one is a bit like hunting down a snark.