Abstract
While performativity, as a theoretical concept, has gained much purchase in the field of management and organization studies (MOS), there remains a dearth of empirical work operationalizing the idea. In this article, we argue that empirical studies on performativity in organizational settings have been scarce mainly due to two methodological challenges: (1) the problem of breadth, and (2) the problem of depth. In terms of breadth, to study how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, researchers need to follow threads of meanings and practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford. In terms of depth, studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies possess the analytical resources to unravel. We offer multi-sited ethnography as a promising methodological approach that has the potential to concomitantly overcome both challenges. Through a vignette of a study that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we illustrate how multi-sited ethnography enables empirical research on performativity in MOS.
Keywords
[N]ot only are empirical claims not ruled out, they are understood to be particular intelligible speakings of the world (with all due regard to all the various qualifications required to make good sense of this claim). In particular, empirical claims do not refer to individually existing determinate entities, but to phenomena-in-their-becoming, where becoming is not tied to a temporality of futurity, but rather it a radically open relatingness of the world worlding itself.
Introduction
The management and organization studies (MOS) literature reveals that while the concept of performativity has proved to be generative on the theoretical front, it has not been easy to operationalize in empirical work (Gond, Cabantous, Harding, & Learmonth, 2016; Harding, Gilmore, & Ford, 2022; Marti & Gond, 2018; Pollock & Williams, 2016; Shadnam, 2019). The question remains: Why is this the case? Indeed, if empirical claims are “speakings of the world” as Barad (2011, p. 148) reminds us in the introductory quote, why have we not listened?
We attribute this oversight to the limitations found in commonly used research methods. Empirical research on performativity faces several methodological challenges, of which two are especially conspicuous. The first problem relates to breadth. To study how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, we need to follow threads of meanings and practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford (Muniesa, 2014). The second is the problem of depth. Studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies offer (Pollock & Williams, 2016). It is from the pressure to concomitantly achieve breadth and depth that the prospects of empirical research on performativity have been stymied.
Before proceeding, a caveat merits note. The categories of breadth and depth are meta-descriptions for the challenges of research on performativity. As such, they are not meant to be adopted as new requirements or ideals akin to data saturation. In other words, our goal in this article is not normative: we do not intend to argue that performativity researchers must achieve this level of breadth or that level of depth. Rather, our goal is descriptive. We assert that the process of collecting and analyzing data to study performativity often requires going broader and deeper than what commonly used research methods accommodate.
This article offers multi-sited ethnography as a method that would be adept in overcoming the challenges of breadth and depth. Multi-sited ethnography is the practice of conducting ethnographic research through following the phenomenon of interest in multiple sites, in different times and locations (Marcus, 1995). While MOS researchers have employed multi-sited ethnography for a variety of research purposes (e.g., Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020; Keim & Shadnam, 2020; Prasad, Prasad, & Mir, 2011; Rauf, Prasad, & Razzaque, 2018; Van Maanen, 2010), it has rarely been employed in empirical work on performativity. This is due to a deep-seated tension between ethnography and performativity. Ethnographic research is often conducted by those who are skeptical of abstract theorizing and, thus, focus on immersing themselves in the empirical field, whereas performativity seems to have emerged from musings of armchair theorists who share more affinity with the humanities than with the empirical social sciences. As such, performativity and multi-sited ethnography have been, for the most part, debated in starkly different scholarly communities on two sides of disciplinary walls, which is why the synergies between the two have remained underexplored and underutilized. Given the analytical tools that multi-sited ethnography proffers researchers, we contend that it is an especially conducive methodological approach to study performativity. As such, we call on MOS researchers to adopt the approach when seeking to unravel performative circuits.
The remainder of this article is structured in five sections. First, we introduce the concept of performativity and selectively review the wave of research that it has catalyzed in MOS. We also discuss the problem of breadth and depth drawing on the concepts of citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity. Second, we offer a review of multi-sited ethnography and situate it within the historical conditions in which it emerged. Third, we build upon the previous two sections to argue that multi-sited ethnography is a method that can enable MOS researchers in overcoming the dilemmas of breadth and depth, which currently obfuscate empirical work on performativity. Here, we discuss how the challenges of breadth and depth can be effectively placated by drawing on four affordances made by multi-sited ethnography: mobile focus, translocal construction, focused understanding, and field formation. Fourth, we illustrate our arguments through a vignette of a multi-sited ethnography that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Finally, in the fifth section, we close this article with some concluding remarks.
Performativity Research
MOS researchers have expressed growing interest in the concept of performativity (Gond et al., 2016; Marti & Gond, 2018; Shadnam, 2019). The theoretical inspiration underlying the corpus of this work has come from a host of influential thinkers such as John Austin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad. Notwithstanding the differences between the theoretical (and the political) projects of these thinkers, there is a foundational claim prevalent in most conceptions of performativity—namely, the non-representational view of symbols and, most prominently, language. The core idea is that language (words, descriptions, theories, etc.), or cultural/symbolic constructions more broadly (including, for instance, bodily expressions), do not innocuously represent pre-existing realities; rather, realities and representations are mutually constitutive. For example, in contrast to the representationalist assertion that underpins most fields of empirical knowledge, which purports scientific theories to be only observations and descriptions of the reality out there, Callon (1998, p. 2) shows how “economics, broadly defined, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions.” Similarly, in contrast to the representationalist belief that presupposes a natural substance that is represented in our gender expressions, Butler (1990) explains that there is no gender prior to or beyond its expressions; instead, gender emerges only through parodic practices expressed corporeally. As these examples illustrate, performativity research: (1) is focused on deconstructing the cultural/symbolic constructions that are assumed as taken-for-granted realities of social life, such as gender and economics; and (2) captures the tautological nature of how they are performed often through the very symbolic processes that purport to be describing them as realities.
Working from this purview, the very idea of performativity shares certain affinities with widely used concepts in MOS such as institution and discourse. The cultural/symbolic constructions that appear as facts of life can be categorized as institutions inasmuch as they are “enduring rules, practices, and structures that set conditions on action” (Lawrence & Shadnam, 2008, p. 2289; for a nuanced discussion of various definitions of institution see Abdelnour, Hasselbladh, & Kallinikos, 2017). As cultural/symbolic constructions, they can also be classified as discourses that organize how we socially relate to one another. In sum, it is not surprising that researchers invested in the study of performativity have engaged with the concepts of institution and discourse, and have, in turn, significantly advanced the extant literature on these ideas. Notwithstanding these points, performativity maintains distinct conceptual parameters due to its characteristically radical ontological claims. Studies of institutions and discourses may focus on how certain gender discourses get diffused, legitimated, and institutionalized, but they do not typically make ontological assertions such as the performative claim that gender only exists in its continued expressions (Butler, 1990).
Within MOS scholarship, the concept of performativity has been evoked in a variety of contexts, including but not limited to economic language, gender, resistance, decision-making, routine and change, strategy, philanthropy, and information technology (e.g., Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005; Harding, Ford, & Lee, 2017; Keevers, Treleaven, Sykes, & Darcy, 2012; Shadnam, in press; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). It has also been employed to consider whether critical management studies should be considered anti-performative (Fournier & Grey, 2000) or critically performative (Spicer, Alvesson, & Kärreman, 2009); or, more recently, whether it should embrace failed performatives (Fleming & Banerjee, 2016). The bulk of these studies, however, are theoretical discussions of the idea of performativity in different organizational domains. The few empirical studies that have referred to performativity focus on carefully bounded cases where traces of meaning and practice are naturally confined to a limited scope of the social phenomenon under study. Unfortunately, such carefully set boundaries do not represent the realities of organizational life.
Before delving into a discussion of methodological challenges, we must address a more fundamental question: What exactly does it mean to conduct an empirical study on performativity? After all, a non-representationalist view of symbols seems to discredit any claim to represent empirical reality. Here, one must note that while the non-representationalist view is in contrast to the positivist belief that considers scientific methods as mirrors of empirical reality, it equally rejects the idealist forgoing of empirical reality. Performativity is built upon a postpositivist recognition of there being no theory-free observation or description of facts, acknowledging that all empirical data are theoretically informed. Even in the natural sciences, empirical observations take the appearance of hard evidence only because their underlying theories are agreed upon and largely presupposed among its scientific practitioners (Kuhn, 1970). As Kuhn (1970, p. 91) illustrated, in the periods when this taken-for-granted agreement is disrupted there is “recourse to philosophy and debate over fundamentals.” The significance of theory, however, is more evident in the social sciences as there exists a range of inconsistent views, which equivocate on the definitions and the assumptions as well as the empirical referents of the objects of study. This character, as Alexander (1987, p. 23) elucidated, makes for “the overdetermination of social science by theory and its underdetermination by fact.” For example, when we conduct an empirical study of organizational performativity, we acknowledge that different sets of actors (including ourselves) are describing and interpreting the organization through our a priori theoretical views and, by doing so, we are partly reshaping and partly reproducing the organization. As Butler (2004, p. 274) notes, “any effort at empirical description takes place within a theoretically delimited sphere.” She further adds: “Theory operates on the very level at which the object of inquiry is defined and delimited, and that there is no givenness of the object which is not given within the interpretive field—given to theory” (p. 274).
As this discussion illuminates, performativity has for the most part remained in the domain of theoretical articulations and as such little attention has been paid to methodological challenges of empirical research. Empirical research on performativity, as an agenda for deconstructing what appears as “facts of life” and elucidating their autopoietic symbolic processes, needs to attend to meanings and practices that often lurk beneath or beyond what we access using our habitual research methods. This effectively means that this agenda faces two key empirical challenges, which we call the problem of breadth and the problem of depth.
The problem of breadth
The first methodological challenge for MOS research on performativity is the problem of breadth. The cultural/symbolic constructions through which we live—such as gender, state, economy, market, organization, or even the price of a cup of coffee—appear as pre-existing realities because the performative relations that contribute to their construction are often hidden out of sight/site. Performativity research seeks to deconstruct this taken-for-granted appearance and “describe a set of processes that produce ontological effects, that is, that work to bring into being certain kinds of realities” (Butler, 2010, p. 147). To do so, researchers need to follow the chain of representations associated with their object of study into multiple, sometimes unusual and ephemeral arenas, because that is where performative circuits are best revealed (Muniesa, 2014). At times, researchers may also find the chain of representations extending to domains that are not amenable to visual and verbal data collection, which necessitates the capturing of embodied experiences (such as visceral or emotional sensations). This endeavor is not consistent with the guidelines of most established methodologies, which call on the researcher to delimit the context and the scope of study from the outset (Bickman & Rog, 2009). Reflecting on this issue, Steyaert, Marti, and Michels (2012, p. 47) suggest that MOS research on performativity should pay closer attention to how their object of study “unfolds from multiple sociospatial arrangements, while research (presentations) are always restricted to specific socio-spatial sites (e.g. actors, identities, perspectives, or localities).”
Within the theoretical lexicon of performativity, two core concepts illustrate the problem of breadth most vividly: citationality and agencement. Citationality refers to the Derridean idea that signs are essentially citational, which means they conform to a norm or law—an iterative model—that makes them intelligible. Any understanding of a social phenomenon (or reference to things) takes place through a series of signs whose meaning is contingent upon the norms and the laws that they cite. Taking a performativity perspective entails a focus on ontological norms—norms that establish what is really out there—and analyzing how a cultural/symbolic construction takes on the appearance of a fact or substance through reiterations of acts that cite ontological norms. Applying this line of argument to gender performativity, Butler (1993) argues (p. xii) that “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”
An empirical investigation of performativity using the concept of citationality requires an analysis of the norms and the conventions that are cited and recited in contexts that often stretch in time and space beyond predefined boundaries. It entails interrogation of citational acts in multiple settings because, as Derrida (1979) contends, signs are vulnerable to being reiterated in various, sometimes unforeseen, contexts and appropriated in unexpected ways. Accordingly, citationality is a kind of interdiscursivity, an act that links multiple sites, events, identities, and discourses. This point is demonstrated empirically by Nakassis (2012), whose analysis of brand performativity traces citational chains into territories such as brand counterfeits, remixes, and simulations.
The other concept that plays a key role in performativity research is agencement. Agencement refers to particular arrangements of heterogeneous sociomaterial elements that possess the capacity to act (Callon, 2007). The core idea is that it is usually not a cultural/symbolic construction alone that can cause its own realization. Rather, for a cultural/symbolic construction to become performative, it must be carefully arranged along with an entire symbolic and material assemblage—an agencement—where agency originates. The Black and Scholes formula in economics, for instance, becomes performative “through the intense work of articulating, experimenting and observing that has been required to produce the gradual, mutual adjustment of sociotechnical agencements and formulae” (Callon, 2007, p. 320). Thus, an empirical investigation of performativity using the concept of agencement entails examining a wide range of sociomaterial elements that can be considered “the world” in relation to the cultural/symbolic construction under study. It includes the understandings and brain structures, practices and effects, actors and bodies (including movements, gestures, gazes, and postures), institutions and spaces, networks and connections, and all of the other aspects of both the symbolic and the material. The holistic conception of agencement requires the researcher to broaden the empirical context to include a wide range of elements that are often beyond one site. As an example, Mcfall (2009, p. 49) studies the performativity of the market for “a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at working class thrift” by studying the relevant agencement that includes multiple sites and even domains such as the political, commercial, and cultural, as well as “hybrid combinations of human bodies, material equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes.”
The problem of depth
The second methodological problem that MOS researchers on performativity encounter is the problem of depth. The objects of performative research are the cultural/symbolic phenomena that appear as seamless, stable, and ontologically given; the objective of performative research is to upend this appearance. This work necessarily involves criticizing established ways of understanding and researching with the intent to question taken-for-granted assumptions, counter the reification of objects, and raise uncomfortable questions about apparently banal things (Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2016). The list of methodologies that can stand up to the performative disturbance is not long, since such methodologies must be acutely sensitive to sets of meanings that render social phenomena intelligible as well as the processes of how social phenomena are culturally/symbolically constituted and deconstituted (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Prasad, 2012). As Simpson, Buchan, and Sillince (2018, p. 657) note with respect to performative research in leadership, “[t]he methodological challenge then, is to apprehend a fleeting world that is continuously enacting leadership as it engages, and is engaged by actors in the emergent in-flow-ence.”
To illustrate the problem of depth, we can spotlight two core concepts within the theoretical lexicon of performativity: subject formation and intra-activity of matter. Subject formation is related to citationality, though it is specifically concerned with subjectivities and identities. Contrary to essentialist views that take the subject as fixed and coherent, as it is assumed to be just out there, the idea here is to interrogate how—that is, the processes by which—the subject is formed. As such, the question being interrogated is: How do we come to take our position as a subject? Or, more specifically, how do I become a consumer, employee, manager, student, mother, philanthropist, doctor, or citizen (Shadnam, 2015, 2020)? Studies on performativity that take their inspiration from Butler reject the idea that there is a subject who pre-exists actions and structures; instead, the subject is an effect of these very actions and structures. Thus, “sex and gender are the effects rather than the causes of institutions, discourses and practices” (Salih, 2002, p. 10). Taking this point seriously requires empirical investigations of performativity to pierce the commonly held intuition that actions are caused by actors, doing is caused by being, to be able to uncover the reversal of cause and effect, to show being is an effect of doing. As an example, Hodgson (2005, p. 56) analyzes the “professional” identity in project management and shows how “the repetition of identifiable performances enacts the ‘professional’ into being and simultaneously constrains the ‘professional’s’ conduct.”
The intra-activity of matter refers to how all things—social, material, and equally the boundaries between the social and the material—are produced and are productive. The concept is rooted in the insights of Barad (2003) who questions the taken-for-granted, atomistic view that assumes the world is comprised of separate and distinct entities that are inter-related. Her use of “intra-action” instead of “inter-action” is to emphasize the idea that separate entities do not exist but come into existence through entanglement of agencies. Even categories such as human and nonhuman emerge out of “the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized” (Barad, 2003, p. 808) rather than being based on properties inherent in these categories. From this perspective, performativity is understood as “iterative intra-activity,” an entanglement of agencies that reconstitutes that entanglement. Empirical studies that are based on Barad’s conceptualization of performativity, thus, need to be able to go beyond what appears as distinct, separate entities and explore the practices that stabilize the boundaries of those entities. As an example, Harding et al. (2017, p. 1226) study the process of strategy implementation in organizations and explore “how resistance/resistants are performatively constituted and coemergent in saying ‘no’ to a power that would deny identity and self-hood.”
Multi-sited Ethnography
Multi-sited ethnography represents a recent trend within ethnographic research that acquired wide currency since the publication of the seminal article on the method by Marcus (1995). In his article, Marcus notes that this emerging trend rests upon two coinciding movements. The first movement is intellectual and pivots on the crisis of representation, which has given rise to a plethora of ideas broadly associated with postmodern theory. This broad set of ideas has challenged the ontological and the epistemological underpinnings of classical ethnography and has led to new forms of ethnography with labels such as critical, feminist, poststructuralist, and deconstructive. The core insight that unifies these contemporary variants of ethnography is the questioning of classical ethnography’s “goal of description” and moving toward “the goal of producing ideologically open texts” (Koro-Ljungberg & Greckhamer, 2005, p. 285). The postmodern movement has also raised serious doubts about the adequacy of the established categories that were commonly used to define the object of ethnographic examination and, thereby, delimit the site for fieldwork. So, rather than conducting intensive investigations of lifeworlds in a single site—which is the conventional way of conducting ethnography—ethnographers have increasingly shifted toward questioning the boundaries of the site and following the flow of lifeworlds into multiple sites across time and space.
The second movement that has precipitated the emergence of multi-sited ethnography is what Marcus (1995) called the “empirical changes in the world” (p. 97), referring to all of the transformations that can loosely be grouped under the umbrella of globalization (on macro shifts of organizational reality, see Shadnam, 2021). It is no longer possible to find a single site where meanings, identities, and relationships are contained and, thus, untainted by cultural processes outside of that site. As Van Maanen (2010) observes (p. 244), “with the rise and expansion of vast human migrations, vanishing natives, market globalization, enhanced information, communication and transportation technologies, the anthropologizing of the West, ethnography has become rather deterritorialized.” One example of this phenomenon is the rise of a global political economy—enabled by the advent of sophisticated technologies, the expeditious transfer of global finances, and rapid human mobility across historically impervious geopolitical boundaries—which has led to the creation of a new system of market dynamics. Even national borders have increasingly lost their boundary function as multinational corporations have begun to usurp and exercise power that had traditionally fallen within the remit of state governments (Trouillot, 2003). As such, economic practices of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption can no longer be conveniently examined at single sites as if those sites are autopoietic. For this reason, conventional ethnography, which may not be overly concerned with critiques cast by postmodern theory, finds that its object of study often slips away on threads of a cultural web that quickly expands beyond a single site (Falzon, 2016). In abridging the sentiments of his field that had begun to ferment as early as the 1990s, Metcalf (2001, p. 65) finds that there was “a growing concern among anthropologists that [their] material was rapidly outrunning [their] methods.”
Inspired by the cultural shifts engendered by postmodernism and globalization, multi-sited ethnography offers fieldwork practices that build upon the rich, nuanced tradition of conducting ethnography and yet expands its lens “to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus, 1995, p. 96). Contrary to conventional ethnography in which staying in a single site for extended periods of time was considered essential, the essence of multi-sited ethnography is following. Marcus (1995) provides several examples for this mode of conducting ethnographic research: following the people, the thing, the metaphor, the story, the biography, the conflict, or (as will be captured in the vignette we offer below) the discourse. As such, the multi-sited ethnographer is on the move, often paying multiple visits to several geographically dispersed sites and continuously juxtaposing the collected data from one site against another. The research design of multi-sited projects pivots “around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connections among sites” (Marcus, 1995, p. 105). It is precisely these connections that serve as the unit of analysis for studies adopting this method (Green, 1999).
The emphasis on following, however, should not be interpreted as wholly losing the immersion aspect that is at the crux of the ethnographic method. Multi-sited ethnography is still ethnography; accordingly, it needs the patience, commitment, and a certain embeddedness in the field to be able to recount and reconstruct the lifeworlds under study. In other words, the practice of Geertz’s classic concept of thick description that has been the core of ethnography is not to be lost; rather, it turns into “ethnography through thick and thin” (Marcus, 2011, p. 21). The multi-sited ethnographer must act strategically to select which sites should be treated “thickly” and which ones “thinly” depending on the phenomenon under study. This foregrounds the role of theory as well as fieldwork pragmatics in balancing between the thick and the thin.
To date, multi-sited ethnography has been employed in a wide variety of contexts, some of which lend themselves to this empirical approach in more obvious ways than do others. On the more obvious end of the continuum, migration studies have extensively used multi-sited ethnography as researchers sought to follow migrants in different sites to make sense of the migration experience (Fitzgerald, 2006). But the more interesting advantages of multi-sited ethnography lie in the non-obvious applications of this method, where the object of study is not multi-sited to begin with and connections to other sites are not clear at the onset. As an example, consider Bestor’s (2001) ethnographic study of Atlantic bluefin tuna trade in Tokyo’s Tsukiji wholesale market. To understand the interactions of meanings, practices, processes, and social forms in the political economy of this trade, Bestor followed the fish. The study took him [T]o the auction floors of the Tsukiji market, on docks in New England, into hearing rooms in Washington, D.C., to trade shows in Boston, into markets in Seoul, aboard supply boats in the Straits of Gibraltar, and inside refrigerated warehouses at Narita’s airfreight terminals, among many other places. (Bestor, 2001, p. 78)
This multi-sited ethnography enabled Bestor to shed light on the intricate processes underpinning cognate phenomena, such as the North American sushi boom.
Within MOS specifically, Prasad et al. (2011) offer an exemplar of multi-sited ethnography in their study of the design and the implementation of workplace diversity management programs. While their initial focus was on diversity management practices in the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, they followed the diversity management discourse in the industries, which expanded their study into new sites. This approach led them to study a number of diversity consultants and trainers who were engaged in offering programs and workshops, which in turn led them to a diversity conference in Philadelphia and a host of educational and promotional material such as fliers, brochures, case studies, and videos used by diversity trainers. This multi-sited ethnographic study elucidated “a number of themes coalescing around elements of the discourse of fashion,” which included “the perceived value of following managerial trends, the role of external consulting firms in designing cutting-edge diversity programs, local organizational disenchantment with ‘brand-name’ diversity programs, and so forth” (p. 709).
It should be acknowledged that while following is a central theme to multi-sited ethnography, it is not unproblematic. Van Duijn (2020) observes that following is neither a clean nor a linear process. It is usually not clear as to the path a researcher is to follow and, as importantly, the paths to unfollow. Choices must be made by the researcher during the data collection process, which will, ultimately, inform which narratives are captured and which narratives are ignored. As such, Van Duijn advises multi-sited ethnographers to: (1) carefully delimit the fields to follow, (2) unfollow the fields with an attitude of reflexivity, and (3) sensibly follow guiding questions and concepts (p. 292).
Multi-sited Ethnography for Performativity Research
As described above, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced in MOS research. Some have referred to it by name (Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020; McConn-Palfreyman, Mangan, & McInnes, 2022; Prasad et al., 2011; Van Duijn, 2020; Van Maanen, 2010), while others have used its tenets without explicitly naming it (Lok & de Rond, 2013). With that said, the method’s utility has not yet been specifically leveraged in MOS research on performativity. In this section, we make a case for methodologically applying multi-sited ethnography to empirical research on performativity. Our argument is that the core strengths of multi-sited ethnography correspond to the major methodological challenges that MOS research on performativity encounters pertaining to breadth and depth. The cross-synergies between the analytical mechanism of performativity with affordances of multi-sited ethnography as a method are summarized in Tables 1 and 2.
How multi-sited ethnography helps address the problem of breadth.
How multi-sited ethnography helps address the problem of depth.
Addressing breadth through multi-sited ethnography
Multi-sited ethnography provides a way out of the problem of breadth in performativity research by centering the idea of following and underscoring the need to stay open to expanding the fieldwork into multiple sites as the study progresses (Marcus, 1995). Contrary to most other methodologies that delimit the scope of study from the outset and foreclose opportunities of chasing the object of study into unanticipated territories, multi-sited ethnography encourages researchers to take adventurous paths and enter multiple rabbit holes. This is particularly significant for research on performativity because, as mentioned earlier, performative circuits often expand beyond what is presumed to be the relevant context for study. In Table 1, we highlight some methodological affordances of multi-sited ethnography that are particularly useful for tackling the breadth problem.
Mobile rather than stationary focus
Unpacking performativity circuits implies following threads of meaning and practice as they travel beyond the taken-for-granted understanding of research participants (i.e., beyond the understanding of the “locals” or the “natives” situated at one site). Multi-sited ethnography focuses on mobility. This focus on mobility entails two elements. First, modes of data collection do not tie the researcher to one site for too long. Multi-sited ethnographies typically take the form of “informant work” (i.e., conducting interviews with research participants) and heavily rely on interviews rather than field participation or observation (Hannerz, 2003). Interviews, which are likely to be in the form of informal and loosely ordered conversations, provide the most efficient way of gathering information for a researcher who is on the go and seeking to identify a social phenomenon manifest of multiple different spaces and/or actors. The performativity of cultural/symbolic constructions occur through fast travels of symbols in different contexts, which can only be studied when methodological tools are adept to mobility. The focus on interviews is a departure from the heavy reliance on participant observation of traditional ethnography and, to be sure, there is a trade-off here. The mobile researcher who relies primarily on interviews does not gain the same level of world-encompassing understanding and “feel for the field” as their traditional counterparts who stay and observe a field for extended periods. However, we contend that the type of knowledge ascertained through tracking-information from quick interviews is especially conducive for empirical studies on performativity.
The second aspect of the focus on mobility in multi-sited ethnography alludes to mediated forms of data collection. Multi-sited ethnographies are often “polymorphous engagements,” which means studying informants “across a number of dispersed sites, but also doing field work by telephone and email, collecting data eclectically in many different ways from a disparate array of sources, attending carefully to popular culture, and reading newspapers and official documents” (Hannerz, 2003, p. 212). This has become more critical in studying current-day organizational life because people are increasingly relying on digitally mediated encounters in conducting their work and life. As such, ethnographers must leverage new modes of being co-present with informants by leveraging digital artefacts (Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020). As Akemu and Abdelnour illuminate, being able to trace mediated relations will be a key feature of MOS research on performativity due to the ethnographer’s limited capacity to be physically present in multiple sites simultaneously so as to observe how cultural/symbolic constructions are formed, reformed, and performed at diffused sites. This necessitates the use of mediated forms of data collection to juxtapose what happens at one site against what happens at multiple other sites.
To study citationality, this focus on mobility enables researchers to follow threads of citation across site boundaries. For example, in their multi-sited ethnographic study of marriage migration to Europe, Scheel and Gutekunst (2019) followed the citations of bodily practices that perform national borders and marriage migration. Threads of citation were stretched from “street-level bureaucrats, bureaucratic routines like interrogating binational couples, verifying the authenticity of supporting documents, archiving files and so on” to how “binational couples, in turn, prepare for their interview, provide the requested paperwork, complete application forms and so forth” (p. 854). The authors had difficulty gaining access to participants in such stretched-out sites, so they relied on a limited number of research participants. They were also advised by their participants to look up the term “bezness” on the internet, specifically on the webpage 1001 stories. The digital data on the internet, in conjunction with how those stories were consulted by European consular staff, were instrumental in unpacking the practices that constitute “doing border.”
Similarly, to study agencement, the focus on mobility makes it possible for researchers to follow heterogeneous sociomaterial elements as their particular agentic arrangements emerge in diffused sites. For example, Soutjis, Cochoy, and Hagberg (2017) conducted a multi-sited ethnography to understand why electronic shelf labels (ESLs) have not become ubiquitous despite their long history and many benefits. They studied several retail stores in Sweden and the United States, relying on interviews with research participants as their primary mode of data collection. They also used a host of mediated forms of data collection including photos of those pages in journals and magazines where the evolution of ESLs was documented as well as videotapes of some retail stores. This combination enabled the authors to follow the agencies, both human (manufacturers, retailers, advertisers) and non-human (price display systems, pricing algorithms) that collectively culminated in price agencement.
Translocal rather than local construction
The problem of breadth in performativity research occurs because the processes of symbolic/cultural construction are not bounded to one local site. Instead, these processes are interwoven in the space between multiple sites. Multi-sited ethnography is suited for empirical research on performativity because it specifically caters to studying such translocally constructed phenomena. As Hannerz (2003) notes (p. 206), multi-sited ethnographers “draw on some problem, some formulation of a topic, which is significantly translocal, not to be confined within some single place.” Accordingly, “[t]he sites are connected with one another in such ways that the relationships between them are as important for this formulation as the relationships within them; the fields are not some mere collection of local units” (p. 206).
Researchers must collect data not only from within sites but also from the network of relationships between sites. In methodological terms, this entails collecting data on how the meanings associated with the phenomenon of interest travel across multiple sites, which requires particular attention to processes of translation, interpretation, and appropriation (Ekström, 2006). In the context of energy infrastructure, Silvast and Virtanen (2019) uncover performativity of energy markets through studying distribution of assemblages of what they call “framings” and “tamings” across multiple sites. Given the nuanced and contextualized understanding needed for ethnographic investigations of translation, interpretation, and appropriation, this work often takes a collective form. For Silvast and Virtanen’s study, a team of researchers with different backgrounds and competencies collaborated in making sense of the performative nature of energy markets. This collective mode of conducting an ethnographic investigation is contrary to the single-authored articles based on traditional ethnographic fieldwork (for further information on team-based ethnography, see Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, & Cabantous, 2015).
Another methodological aspect of translocal construction in multi-sited ethnography materializes in data analysis, where data from multiple sites are juxtaposed and analyzed to reveal how the phenomenon of interest is performed translocally. This makes it critical for the data analysis and the data collection processes to commence contemporaneously; ensuring that the emerging analytical questions can be followed and attended to empirically. The analysis also pays particular attention to the translocal effects on the identities and the practices that may appear pure and discrete at first sight. This is wholly in line with how performativity research interrogates seemingly fixed and seamless categories to excavate underlying performative circuits. Accordingly, the research agenda on performativity can be equipped with what multi-sited ethnography offer in terms of revealing translocal constitutive relations.
To study citationality, translocal construction provides a way to follow threads of citation as signs get translated, interpreted, and appropriated across boundaries of different localities. It enables researchers to deconstruct translocally originated identities and practices, which helps in uncovering their performative origin. Berg (2007) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of communicative practices among Peruvian migrants in the US to conceptualize how categories such as self and community are performed. A collectivity of Urcumarquinos in Washington DC and suburban Maryland comes into existence not through any material connection to Urcumarca (a pseudonym of a Peruvian village), but rather through chains of citation across diffused localities. She shows “how new and old practices have blended and as a whole contributed to the constitution of new kinds of translocal and transnational collectivities” (p. 9).
To study agencement, translocal construction enables researchers to follow heterogeneous sociomaterial elements across boundaries as their particular agentic arrangements emerge and lead to particular identities and practices. In her multi-sited ethnography of global value chains in Ghana and Peru, Niebuhr (2016, p. 37) investigates performativity by focusing on “the power of market models to gradually construct the realities they attempt to describe.” In doing so, she shows that the marketization agencement is a translocal field of power built upon the basic module of translation, which is ultimately predicated on the qualification and singularization of a product. As she writes: “This occurs when a product is alienated from its original context, is made calculable and. . .its properties are defined and associated with an economic, ecologic, or other value” (p. 34).
In this section, we illuminated how multi-sited ethnography provides an effective approach for addressing the problem of breadth in empirical studies of performativity. Focusing on the notions of citationality and agencement as markers for breadth in performativity research, we highlighted two core elements of multi-sited ethnography: mobile focus and translocal construction. These elements enable researchers to achieve needed breadth.
Addressing depth through multi-sited ethnography
Multi-sited ethnography provides a rich, nuanced, and meaning-centered method that helps in overcoming the problem of depth in performativity research. Employing ethnographic research practices at every site enables researchers to immerse themselves in the cultural/symbolic world that is being studied and unearth its underlying webs of identities, relations, and practices. This is of much importance for performativity phenomena since, as we discussed earlier, explication of performative effects demands particular attention to how people conduct themselves and make sense of the world through symbolic and cultural means. Table 2 offers a summary.
Focused rather than deep understanding
The cultural/symbolic constructions that constitute the phenomenon of interest in performativity research are embedded in structures beyond their transient instantiations. To illuminate their performative character requires a deep understanding of how they figure in these structured sets of meanings, but does not necessarily require a deep understanding of their lifeworld in its entirety. Researchers engaged in empirical studies on performativity must, proverbially speaking, dive down into the sea of meanings and, at the same time, avoid drowning. This is the combination afforded by multi-sited ethnography—it is, on one hand, ethnographic and thus concerned with deep understanding and, on the other hand, characterized by selectiveness and incompleteness. The selectiveness feature highlights that the empirical researcher must select the focus of inquiry. This is a conscious selection that entails including certain sites while excluding other sites. As multi-sited ethnographers have observed, “a recurrent characteristic of multi-site ethnography [is] that site selections are to an extent made gradually and cumulatively, as new insights develop, as opportunities come into sight, and to some extent by chance” (Hannerz, 2003, p. 207). The incompleteness feature highlights that the goal is not to study an entire culture and way of life as traditional ethnographers do, but to understand the linkages between multiple local ecologies of activities as they bring about a cultural/symbolic construction. In other words, it is incompleteness by design.
Rather than seeking deep understanding, multi-sited ethnography attempts to ascertain focused understanding. To do so, they engage in purposeful sampling with respect to participants, documents, and observation domains. The logic is to focus on those sources of data that are particularly information-rich with respect to the aim of the study. As an empirical study progresses, researchers continuously adjust their focus and use their judgment to decide where to dig further.
To study subject formation, a focused understanding guides the data collection toward the ecologies of activities that bring about subjects—to capture how being is an effect of doing. Coffin (2017) conducted a multi-sited ethnography to understand how LGBT+ groups in Manchester emerge as place consumers and shift between different formations of their place consumer subjectivities. The author selected four formalized leisure groups and followed them in their regular meetings in different places. The research does not go into much detail about the various aspects of the lifeworlds of these groups other than their choice and experience of place. So, while it is an ethnographic study that captures the layered meanings associated with place, it does not offer a comprehensive understanding of the studied LGBT+ groups.
To study intra-activity, a focused understanding makes way for investigating how different entities come into existence through agencies that create and sustain distinctions and boundaries in matter. Dudhwala (2016) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of a group called Quantified Self (QS) to understand self-making through those kinds of self-quantifying technologies that have become popular in recent years (e.g., wearables). Her research uncovers how self-quantifying technologies are agential intra-actions through which the self is discursively performed. Methodologically speaking, her research was not aimed at describing the entire lifeworld of QS members; it was rather focused only on the intra-action of selected aspects of self-quantification—numbers and visualizations—with how the self is (re)done.
Fieldwork to understand field formation
Performativity research entails unpacking the processes that maintain seemingly fixed and settled cultural/symbolic constructions, including the very categories of field or site. Instead of taking the field as a bounded space with clear boundaries and durable characteristics, performativity researchers make sense of the field through an engagement with how it is (per)formed. This problematizes depth as it confounds the relations between the researcher and the researched. It prevents the researcher from settling in any given field and getting comfortable within that field. Multi-sited ethnography attends to this uncomfortable subject position as it challenges the ontological primacy of site boundaries and provides the researcher with the necessary vantage point for understanding how fields are in continuous formation in conjunction with one another. On this point, Hine (2007, p. 669) argues that multi-sited ethnography helps us “to pursue the ways in which science is practiced across sites and the ways in which it practices sites.”
Highlighting field formation implies including the relevant fields or sites as objects of study. This methodologically translates into paying particular attention to “binaries” (such as public versus private, personal versus professional, sacred versus profane) that sustain articulations of borders and boundaries (Fortun, 2016). Binary oppositions play a key structuring role in the narratives that form, reform, and perform fields. As such, data collection must extract which binary oppositions are underlying the established demarcations between what is in and what is out of the corresponding field, and what brings about and gives force to those binaries. Bhattacharjee (2018) conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study of visitors to the Scottish island of Iona and found the role of binaries such as religious/secular and tourist/pilgrim in the formation of specialness by visitors to the location.
To study subject formation, methodological attention to field formation enables extraction of the binary oppositions that create and sustain fields and sites such as consciousness, identity, and body. In a recent study, Hailwood (2020) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of a secondary school mindfulness program called ‘.b’ in the UK. The author demonstrates how mindfulness sites of practice and interpretation are constituted “by binaries of what is more/less true, authentic, real: being/doing, sensing/thinking, present/absent” (p. 57). This paves the way to analyze subject formation among the children for whom the .b curriculum is designed and delivered. The author reveals that while mindfulness is often presented as a healing for the divided self of modernity, the binaries such as nature/culture, mind/body, and self/other are still reverberated throughout contemporary interpretations of mindfulness practices.
To study intra-activity, methodological attention to field formation provides an entrance into extracting the binary oppositions that create and sustain distinctions and boundaries in matter. This, in turn, enlightens how different entities come into existence. Jokinen and Nordstrom (2020) animate this idea in their study of new literacies in a technology-assisted learning environment. They reconceptualize their ethnographic study “as ‘field’ and ‘nonfield’ cannot be separated anymore as they are constantly implicated with each other” (p. 642). This enables them to see new fields formed in the course of their ethnography and to make sense of human–machine performative entanglements.
In this section, we argued that multi-sited ethnography allows researchers to overcome the problem of depth in empirical studies on performativity. We focused on notions of subject formation and intra-activity of matter as vivid manifestations of the need for depth in performativity research and we highlighted two core elements of multi-sited ethnography: field formation and focused understanding. These elements offer a way for researchers to achieve needed depth. To animate our argument, we now turn to an illustrative vignette from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. The vignette captures how concerns related to breadth and depth are remedied through multi-sited ethnography.
Illustrative Vignette: Performativity and Multi-sited Ethnography in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
One of the authors conducted extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. At the onset, he intended to study the very broad question: How do organizations survive under precarious political conditions? (Prasad, 2019). The following vignette is drawn from the study. To acknowledge and preserve the ethnographer’s vantage-point, and consistent with anthropological tradition of writing ethnography, first-person voice is used in presenting the vignette.
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I found the West Bank to offer a picturesque landscape, replete with hills and valleys that seamlessly flow between metropolitan centers, fertile farmlands that appear to extend to infinity, and fields of trees yielding the most potently delicious olives. However, as I traveled from the twin cities of Al-Bireh and Ramallah (usually my departure point) to other major cities and villages within the West Bank, I quickly became witness to the deleterious conditions under which Palestinians conduct daily life.
The hills of the West Bank are punctuated by red-roofed structures that signify Israeli settlements. Abrogating any notion of Palestinian self-determination, these are areas within the geographical boundaries of the West Bank that are preserved solely for Israeli-Jewish settlers. The roads used to access these settlements are likewise reserved for settlers, only further codifying feelings of closure and segregation in the region.
Visits to the small villages told an even more devastated story. Grounds were littered with remnants of Israeli artillery used to violently repress Palestinian subjects—and to maintain Israeli hegemony in all aspects of social life. Friday afternoons, following Islamic prayers, seemed to be especially popular times for the incitement of violence against Palestinians and their property. It was not uncommon to see homes with windows shot out, young men and boys walking with an uneasy—though poignantly familiar—gait after becoming prey to the might of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and bright fencing used to demarcate the Israeli confiscation of parcels of land that had once belonged to Palestinian families for generations.
What remained most ubiquitous in the context were the myriad mobility restrictions. The approximately 2,200 square miles that constitute the West Bank is awash with hundreds of checkpoints, which require Israeli security screening and clearance before travel is permitted. There are also what are referred to as flying checkpoints—checkpoints which suddenly appear anywhere, anytime, and without any prior notice (Alvi, Prasad, & Segarra, 2019; Khoury & Prasad, 2016). The time and the energy involved with crossing the maze of checkpoints render travel between West Bank cities, which are relatively close in geographical proximity, to appear more comparable to crossing borders between countries elsewhere (Prasad, 2014a, 2014b). For example, on one occasion when I had to travel from Ramallah to Nablus—cities separated merely by some 22 miles—it had taken me in excess of three hours. I was required to pass through multiple orchestrated checkpoints between the two cities as well as flying checkpoints within those cities. Depending on where one lives in relation to where one works or attends school, these checkpoints may have to be crossed on a daily basis for local residents. These are just some of the wretched conditions of a twenty-first-century military occupation.
As I commenced fieldwork and witnessed firsthand the abject circumstances that constitute life under military occupation, I asked Palestinians what they believed to be the underlying reason for Israel to erect a system of occupation that render everyday life so challenging. I posed the open-ended question: “Why do you think Israel makes life generally, and doing business specifically, so difficult for Palestinians?” Much to my surprise, I received a consistent response from Palestinians. I was told repeatedly that the military occupation can be attributed to one, and only one, reason: “They [Israelis] want the land without the people.”
What struck me most about the discourse that had emerged during my fieldwork was its cohesiveness and repetition. Indeed, it appeared that regardless of who I was speaking with in the West Bank—whether local entrepreneurs, heads of NGOs, analysts at international donor agencies, diplomats of foreign embassies, ministers in the reigning Palestinian government, or leaders at social movement collectives—the discourse remained intact. Given the emergence of the reified discourse, I decided to follow it to see how it manifested in the identities, the practices, and the imaginations of the individuals with whom I interacted during my days in the field. The decision to follow this discourse in multiple sites made my work characteristically a multi-sited ethnography.
I followed the discourse by asking questions such as “who exactly?”, “why?”, “to what extent?”, “since when?”, “until when?”, “how do you know?”, and by following the trail of clues. Ultimately, this led me to travel throughout the West Bank to interview relevant research participants, gather copious amounts of multi-sited ethnographic data, and collect germane artefacts. I investigated the past (through spoken memories, written memoirs, and archival data), the present (through observations, interviews, and limited participation), and the future (through subsequent visits and follow-up interviews) with those who had connections to the discourse regardless of the site(s) at which they were located. One specific tale from my multi-sited ethnography is particularly revelatory for empirically unravelling performativity and, concomitantly, redressing issues of breadth and depth related to citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity.
During my first round of fieldwork in the region in 2009, I interviewed a Palestinian woman named Noor (a pseudonym)—the co-owner of a small enterprise, which she operated alongside her husband. Noor was born in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and experienced firsthand life under military occupation. She moved to the US where she attended university and, while there, she met her Palestinian husband. She and her husband eventually became American citizens and settled into living as what she called “an all-American family.” During a visit “home,” Noor and her husband decided to return to the West Bank permanently and to raise their young family there. As she explained to me: We both went to university in California. We came to visit (Palestine) and the atmosphere and the culture and the way people handled the occupation then was so overwhelming. We felt, what are we doing in a country that’s not ours? We should be here. We should be part of this [resistance] and we decided to come back. And, I still believe that those times were good times in terms of the Palestinian identity, so to speak. There was a lot of unity within the people.
Noor further elaborated that “this is our home and that’s how it felt. It felt more home here than any other time in all our life.”
At the time I first met Noor, her daughter had just graduated from a West Bank high school and was to commence college at a highly prestigious private university in the US later that fall. During my interview with Noor, she described to me the difficulties that her daughter routinely encountered when doing what, in other geographical contexts, would be the most mundane of tasks. She offered the example of the logistical challenges that met her daughter while she traveled back and forth between home and school. As Noor explained, her daughter often encountered various road closures and flying checkpoints erected by the IDF. These physical elements of the military occupation would often significantly delay Noor’s daughter’s commute to her classes. It was certainly not outside the norm for her to miss entire days of school after being prevented from crossing certain checkpoints. This resonated with my own experiences as I encountered similar blockades and delays on countless occasions though, admittedly, as a non-Palestinian and the holder of a Canadian passport, I was meaningfully less encumbered from traveling between geographical sites within the West Bank than are local Palestinians. Thus, in approaching my fieldwork as a multi-sited engagement, I was in a position to corporeally relate what I was hearing from Noor with what I was experiencing myself as I traveled between West Bank cities.
Noor recalled an especially traumatizing incident that her family experienced during the Second Intifada, a so-called uprising that occurred between 2000 and 2005. At the height of the Intifada, the family home was commandeered by a heavily militarized unit of the IDF and the family was relegated to a small space within their compound. Noor and her family were essentially imprisoned within their own home. As armed members of the IDF moved around their home with impunity, Noor described how her daughters lived in ubiquitous fear during that period, not knowing whether they would escape the event unharmed.
Given the challenges emanating from the military occupation that Noor’s daughter experienced growing up, Noor contemplated whether her daughter would return to the Occupied Palestinian Territories once she finished her undergraduate studies in the US. As she explained to me during our first interview: If my daughter were to say I’m coming back, sure we’re still here. We have the house—we’re not going anywhere. She’s always welcome to come back. But I don’t really think that once she graduates from MIT that that’s going to be the first thing on her mind—to come back here.
Coincidentally, I returned to conduct a second round of fieldwork in the West Bank in late 2013—shortly after Noor’s daughter had graduated from university. I had the opportunity to re-interview Noor in the very office where I had interviewed her some four years earlier. Noor’s statement from 2009 proved prophetic.
When I spoke with Noor in 2013, she told me that just a few months before her daughter was to graduate from university, she told Noor that she wanted to stay in the US to attend graduate school. Noor empathized with her daughter’s decision to stay in the US, given all that she encountered growing up under the architecture of military occupation in the West Bank. In proffering astute maternal advice, Noor told her daughter that if she wants to pursue graduate school, then she should do just that; however, she should not use graduate school as an excuse to remain in the US. Noor further advised her daughter that she would support her decision to live where she felt most happy and, therefore, her daughter does not need any reason beyond that to remain in the US and not return to the West Bank.
This illustrative case captures the performative nature of the discourse that I was following. By performative, my intention is not to negate the material conditions of military occupation. Indeed, in following the tenets of multi-sited ethnography, which required me to regularly travel between Israel and the West Bank, and between militarily segregated localities within the West Bank itself, I personally encountered many of the impediments to mobility—and the symbolic as well as the physical violence emanating thereof—from the military occupation conveyed by Palestinians. Rather, the point that merits underscoring is how the discourse on the military occupation was performative insofar as it engendered the very outcome it was purporting to explicate.
In terms of the Palestinian discourse, “they want the land without the people,” Noor’s story about her daughter captures the emergence of citationality—namely, the discursive actualization of the very belief among Palestinians that the harsh conditions of their life are intentionally designed to make them leave their ancestral lands. As a result of this belief, many Palestinians willingly vacate their land and move to other countries in pursuit of a better life for themselves and for their children. As more Palestinians flee the occupied territories and experience the contrast between their living conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories versus more hospitable locations elsewhere, the discourse gets cited and becomes reified as a matter of fact. As the anecdote shows, even when a Palestinian such as Noor’s daughter mentions other reasons for not returning “home,” other Palestinians tend to interpret that decision through the lens of, “they want the land without the people.” Noor’s suggestion that her daughter was using graduate school as a pretense to remain in the US alludes to this notion. As citationality would suggest, these dynamics have the double effect of perpetuating the discourse and strengthening its self-fulfilling character. What helped me in studying citationality in this case was the mobile focus of multi-sited ethnography, whereby I did not immerse myself in one bounded locality and instead followed the Palestinian discourse, which led me to informants living in various cities and villages who only substantiated the sentiment.
At the same time, Noor’s story reveals the discourse to be performative insofar as it reveals the agencement of state violence. Indeed, perceived security threats to the Israeli state (and to its citizens) are enacted—which functioned as precursors to the Second Intifada—when the state engages in activities that terrorize Palestinians. In this anecdote, this form of state violence is represented by Noor’s family home being commandeered by military force and the family being sequestered to only a small part of the home. The Israeli position that portrays the Palestinian subject as a ubiquitous threat to their existence results in the Israeli state taking material actions to ensure their people’s security from Palestinian threat. As such, for the material conditions of military occupation to be rationalized, political rhetoric that conflates the Palestinian subject as an ontological threat to the Israeli state must be preserved. In short, Israeli actions in the name of maintaining security function to create the conditions for more insecurity, which in turn only justifies the need for further security measures. What conceptualized agencement of state violence in this case was the translocal construction of the discourse, which multi-sited ethnography revealed. I studied how heterogeneous sociomaterial elements of state violence are translated, interpreted, and appropriated across the apartheid walls that segregate Palestinians from Israelis.
Relatedly, I saw that the intra-activity of matter is also unfolding. Namely, there are social and material boundaries in place that make certain things and categories come into existence. The belief that positions the Palestinian as an ontological threat leads not only to the orchestration of the physical elements of the military occupation (i.e., commandeering private property, checkpoints), but also to an elaborate set of social fabrications, which are found in the ideological invocation of terms such as “terrorists”, “active threats”, “potential threats”, “human shields”, and so on. It is the iterative enactments of military occupation that create separate bodies and assign different resources, pathways, and destinies to them, leaving little hope for peaceful coexistence and, concomitantly, catalyzing acts of resistance from Palestinians. What helped me in studying intra-activity in this case was the field formation aspect of multi-sited ethnography, whereby I did not take the distinction between Palestinians and Israelis for granted; rather, I investigated how binary oppositions such as us/them and secure/unsecure creates and sustains the distinction.
Before concluding this vignette, two points should be underscored about the utility of multi-sited ethnography. First, the explication of the performative nature of the discourse would be untenable had it not been for the methodological tools provided by multi-sited ethnography. For brevity, here, I draw attention to one particular point: How it was only in following the discourse that allowed me to learn about how Israelis rationalize what would otherwise be widely considered an inhumane military occupation. Namely, the discourse that “they want the land without the people” made familiar reference to how they perceived Israeli Jews to problematically justify the physical occupation by exploiting the notion of “security.” As Seema, one of my early Palestinian research participants, explained to me when I asked her about why she believes the notion of “security” is exploited by Israelis: If you oppress me, what can I do? If you blocked my food and income resource and my land and you killed my son and put my father in prison, what should I do? Thank you? Say, “please let me live?” Or I will rebel, and say stop, you can’t do this. Is this the way to keep security? To oppress people? To put them in a cage? The same with what happened in Gaza. [Israel] left them for months, without food. . .they can’t leave Gaza. They can’t get proper food, proper water, and many, many problems and now, [they] have to bomb Gaza because [they’re] saying no. [Gaza is] launching some rockets on Israel and so [they] bomb [them]. What should they do?
When pressed further to explain what she believed to be Israel’s endgame for maintaining the seemingly unnecessary, though extremely precarious, conditions of military occupation, Seema said that Israel seeks to make life so unlivable for Palestinians that they willingly vacate their land—that is, again, Israel desires, “the land without the people.”
Seema’s words offer evidence of subject formation. Indeed, she identifies how Palestinian subjectivities are pivotally informed by their experiences as an oppressed class of people—this also helps to explain why Noor and her husband chose to return to the West Bank permanently for, as Noor described, “the way people handled the occupation then was so overwhelming.” Seema alludes to how the Palestinian subject’s rebellious identity is the corollary of the conditions of military occupation enacted by the Israeli state that seeks to establish a Palestinian territory devoid of Palestinians (“you killed my son and put my father in prison”). What enabled me to understand subject formation was the focused understanding offered by multi-sited ethnography. I did not investigate the entire lifeworld of Palestinians, but focused only on those sources that revealed how their passive (oppressed) and active (resisters) subjectivities are formed in relation to the occupation.
Second, the data yielded from following the discourse using multi-sited ethnography was rich in terms of responding to issues of breadth and depth. Specifically, the data addressed questions of citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity. To summarize, in terms of depth, the study enabled me to gain a nuanced understanding of the symbolic and the physical conditions of military occupation in the region. In terms of breadth, the study allowed me to explicate the ways in which the symbolic and the physical conditions of military occupation are reproduced through a discourse that unfolded at multiple locations over extended periods of time. In sum, both depth and breadth of ethnographic data were precursors to unravelling performative relations.
Concluding Remarks
As MOS researchers continue their empirical journeys into uncharted territories of performativity, they require methods adept to explicating such a complex phenomenon. In this article, we argue that multi-sited ethnography fulfills the mandate as it provides both the breadth and the depth necessary to study performativity. While most of the recent empirical studies on performativity have already moved toward ethnographic methods, their contribution is often limited due to inadequate attention to the problem of breadth. They either use speculative arguments to compensate for lack of data beyond one site, or avoid the issue from the outset by choosing specific cultural/symbolic constructions whose thread of meanings and practices is relatively locked in one delimited setting (e.g., see the 2021 special issue of Organization Studies on “Power and performativity as interweaving dynamics of organizing”). For example, Hultin, Introna, Göransson, and Mähring’s (2022) ethnographic study of subject formation takes place in tented settlements of Syrian refugees in Lebanon where relations of recognition are naturally restricted to the group who are present in or in touch with the same camp. Our arguments show that moving toward multi-sited ethnography would pave the way for inclusion of all cultural/symbolic constructions—especially the important and consequential ones—in empirical studies of performativity. In developing a vignette from a multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we demonstrate how this method enabled the researcher to follow the performative circuits that were outside the scope of other methods. Among other things, it allowed the researcher to experience the consequences of the discourse he had originally heard about from his research participants, and which he ultimately followed, to make sense of the discourse’s material actualization in daily life. Moreover, in carefully balancing considerations of breadth and depth, he found himself in a position to trace instances of citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity. Thus, we conclude by calling upon MOS researchers invested in the study of performativity to leverage this promising, though still underutilized, methodological approach.
Despite the discussed strengths and synergies with performativity research, multi-sited ethnography has its own potential challenges. It requires more resources in comparison to most other methods because it often requires a team of trained research collaborators, securing access to multiple sites, more on-the-go time, and higher travel costs. Researchers also need what Marcus (1995) calls a character of “circumstantial activism” to take on the appropriate identity/persona in each site and, then, quickly move to wearing another identity/persona at another site. Researchers must walk a fine line between site hopping and site staying. Moreover, even with the complexities involved, the knowledge constructed through this process may not await a welcoming academic outlet for dissemination as reviewers tend to expect the standards of traditional ethnography from a study that claims to be ethnographic. These challenges, however, are the kind of battles that any novel and creative idea had to overcome in the history of science, and should not sway us from pursuing the unique insights that can be born using multi-sited ethnography.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Senior Editor Ignasi Martí and the three anonymous reviewers, whose very detailed and constructive comments throughout the review process encouraged us to think more deeply about the implications of our ideas. Ajnesh Prasad gratefully acknowledges research support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs program.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
