Practitioners as Theorists

Autoethnography—Narrating the Narrator

Autoethnography (Karra & Phillips, 2008; Reed-Danahay, 1997) refers to ethnography in which the researcher’s own culture becomes the object of research. Autoethnography, as the structured study of one’s own group, tends to be heavily autobiographical (e.g., Learmonth & Humphreys, 2011; Van Maanen, 1995), using the researcher’s own experiences to provide insights into organizational members’ attitudes, values, and behavior.

Increasing emphasis on acknowledging one’s own background and historical situation as a researcher (Vaughan, 2007) has led researchers to openly acknowledge and explore their own particularistic perspectives (Ellis, 2005). Autoethnography claims academic legitimacy not through the erasure of the self in conducting objective research, but in the self-examination of the researcher as a source of insight and information. Thus, autoethnography turns the ethnographic gaze inward, a gesture with both epistemological and political implications (Karra & Phillips, 2008), touching on questions of objectivity, power, and authority. The emergence of autoethnography, particularly when carried out by local or marginalized groups, is in this sense tied to issues of autonomy and self-mastery, as organizational members take up positions to theorize the social bases of their own practices.

Highlighting the embeddedness of researchers in complex relationships with their informants, self-knowledge, and reflexivity, contemporary ethnography looks increasingly autoethnographic (Karra & Phillips, 2008). Para-ethnography shares with autoethnography the problematization of traditional self-other relations in ethnographic writing, as well as the application of the ethnographic gaze onto researchers themselves. These shared aspects involve reframing subjectivity and situatedness from biases into resources for ethnographic understanding by making them objects of study.

Distinctly, however, para-ethnography does not simply invert the insider–outsider relationship, but acknowledges varying positions with regards to participants’ “native” or “researcher” status, problematizing the researcher–researched relationship without necessarily inverting this relationship. If conventional ethnography involves translating “others” into terms comprehensible to one’s own community, and autoethnography involves translating the self into another’s terms (Reed-Danahay, 1997), then para-ethnography emphasizes the acts of translations inherent within terminological systems, meaning that we are all to some extent both researchers and actors of our own cultures.

Multisited Ethnography—Following Traces of a Diffuse System

Multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) moves from studying situated, local cultures to studying how cultural knowledge, products, and populations move across boundaries. It arises from the recognition that the local, isolated, and clearly bounded culture, although always a less-than-perfect idealization (cf. Falzon, 2005), is today a rarity and an anachronism, and the most interesting cultural spaces are precisely those that cut across borders and represent the global flows of people and goods that sustain contemporary life. Van Maanen (2010, p. 255), for instance, describes a shift in views of culture toward the “distributed and deterritorialized.” As Davis, Morrill, and Soule (2008, p. 393) note, contemporary organizations involve a “constant organizing and reorganizing of information and people across time and space,” making it necessary to adapt our methods to match such organizational agility. Examples of this kind of study can be seen in the study of diversity practices across industries, consultancies, and training settings (Prasad, Prasad, & Mir, 2011), the tracking of differences across organizational and domestic settings (Nippert-Eng, 1995), and the study of fashion trends across borders (Miller & Woodward, 2007). In each of these examples, we are led to understand cultural objects and actors by their transitions though different localities.

Under conditions of competing logics and discourses without recourse to a unified culture, meanings are constituted in the processes of mediation between different actors who have stakes in promoting certain stories over others. Multisited ethnography captures this multilevel aspect of organizations by exploring how meanings emerge through multiple translations within and between organizations. Although still nascent in the organizational literature, multisited ethnography has been recognized as an important innovation in organizational research methodology (Van Maanen, 2010).

Multisited ethnography, originally envisioned as a way of ethnographically studying the global capitalist world system (Marcus, 1995), becomes more generally a method for studying cultural work across boundaries. As Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) claim, the embedding of local cultures in global commodity chains and other world system features produce culture at an “awkward scale,” abstracting the driving features of cultures from the immediate material conditions of the inhabitants of the culture. Such systems are difficult to pick up from simply living on the ground, but require reinterpretation in the light of knowledge of how immediate experience relates to these global systems. Thus, much of previous ethnography as the immediate lived experience of culture must be reworked to position it against its macro structure (cf. Burawoy, 2000; Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992).

Para-ethnography builds on the cross-frontier aspect of multisited ethnography as informants, in their experience across sites (e.g., expatriates, migrant workers), critically assess and compare practices across frontiers. Para-ethnography relies on the ability of internal actors to position themselves as theorists of their own cultures, noting that this ability derives from the frequent transitions of actors across fragmented systems and cultural boundaries. Thus, the multisitedness of fields is complementary to para-ethnography. However, while multisited ethnography focuses on the macro forces affecting such circulations, para-ethnography focuses on the reflexive spaces for cultural analysis used by informants themselves. In fact, multisited ethnography, in highlighting the circulation of objects (cf. Marcus, 1995), may thereby foreclose on the critical potentials of participants themselves. The reflexive capacities of informants, alternatively, takes center stage in para-ethnography.

Para-ethnography—Locating Reflexivity From Within Organizations

Like multisited ethnography, para-ethnography emerged as part of a self-conscious rethinking of ethnographic methods in light of emerging practical and epistemological questions. These involved the relations between researchers and participants, from early thinkers such as Geertz (1973) and culminating in the radical questioning of ethnographic conventions (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Para-ethnography joins auto- and multisited ethnography in proposing an “ethnography of the contemporary” (Rabinow et al., 2008), where temporal, spatial, and researcher/participant boundaries are more fluid. At its base, para-ethnography rests on the idea that ethnographic subjects in contemporary settings have been deeply exposed to depictions of cultures, including their own, and are often in a position to play the role of culture analysts themselves (cf. Mills & Ratcliffe, 2012). While social changes do not dictate methodological approaches, the latter arise from interactions between researchers and their informants, and thus methods cannot remain aloof from transformations among organization members and their shifting practices (Mills & Ratcliffe, 2012). Thus, while autoethnography shifts the object of study from the other to the self, and multisited ethnography shifts the spatial imagination of culture from local settings to cross-spatial flows of goods and people, para-ethnography decenters the ethnographic authority from researcher to the interface of researchers and informants.

Making such a shift wagers that reflexivity is not only produced from academic distance, but also from embedded subjects’ shifting social contexts, such that “spontaneously generated para-ethnographies are built into the structure of the contemporary” (Marcus, 2005, p. 27). In this way, organizational spaces contain pockets of reflexivity deriving from the attempt to make sense of everyday reality in ways sometimes similar to theorists, but sometimes distinct (e.g., Beech et al., 2010). The world described here, marked by fluidity and rapid reconfiguration of social codes, leads cultural actors (including academics) to improvise with new meanings as their assumptions come to be seen as unreliable. In such a world, “there is very little one can think or imagine in the confines of academic study that is not already thought in some version, expression, or venue in sites and scenes of fieldwork” (Rabinow et al., 2008, p. 112).

In this context, para-ethnography is both an attempt to revalue ethnographic informants as collaborators, but also to reimagine itself within contemporary, globalized terrains where cultural meanings are not bound to place, passed along by tradition, and taken for granted by new generations. Of importance, then, the para-ethnographic is not limited to “knowledge workers” but arises to the extent that actors must revise taken-for-granted assumptions, whether academic or not, and the researchers recognize in these revisions the same seriousness and angst (Van Maanen, 2011) that they themselves struggle with to do justice to their site of study. As informants engage in “future-oriented cognitive practices that can generate novel configurations of meaning and action” (Marcus, 2005, p. 27), researchers note their occasional insightful leaps of imagination, but also their self-serving biases and their moments of ingenuousness and learn about their own project in the process. Thus, para-ethnography involves a mirroring of ethnographer and informant roles, as these roles interpenetrate each other.

While local actors have always been able to critically reflect on their own social practices, the relative presumed stability of practices enabled the establishment of a “native’s point of view” (Geertz, 1983), that could then constitute an object of study. When these forms of life, however, became increasingly heterogeneous, fluid, and contested, actors may themselves have been forced into “outsider” positions, having to critically reflect on the alternative social realities to which they could align themselves. In this way, the “epistemological angst” associated with adopting the native’s point of view (Van Maanen, 2011, p. 177) is not only a researcher’s angst, but also that of the native. The perpetually unfinished and transitory aspects of contemporary social life (Shotter, 2008) require rethinking how questioning and reflection themselves become socially distributed. Calling into question the distinction between academic insiders and practical outsiders follows, as being practical becomes less a question of inhabiting preestablished social roles than of adapting to changing organizational configurations requiring both formalized knowledge and reflexive adaptability.

As such, para-ethnographers do not claim either that earlier ethnographers were wrong in their methods or that earlier studied individuals were unconscious of their cultures, but that the forms of consciousness required of contemporary cultural actors are different than those required in more stable cultural situations. Para-ethnography, then, is a “project in which we are systematically reimagining the norms and design of ethnography…under the changed contemporary circumstances in which it is practiced” (Holmes & Marcus, 2005a, p. 246). Ethnography in contemporary societies is, in effect, studying a distinct form of relation between cultural reflexivity and practice, and must therefore adapt its approach to this new form of relation. Otherwise, critical reflexivity from within societies may be overlooked by treating culture as based on “taken-for-granted assumptions” (Fine & Shulman, 2009).

We thus can summarize the para-ethnographic reformulation in schematic form: Overly stable views of culture deprive informants of the critical distance needed to reflect on the underlying bases of culture, with the ethnographer’s outsider position allowing such a critical distance. However, in a globalized world of shifting boundaries and border crossings, it is likely that members of social groups will themselves have experienced distancing from stable cultural structures, and thus will be positioned so as to critically view their cultures and provide alternative visions. This new role of workers exemplifies a change in the ethnographic situation in several ways.

First, the nature of ethnographic data is more conceptually self-conscious, with organizational artifacts, biographies, and narratives taking specific roles within the organizational culture. Such roles can include both system justification and contestation or resistance. However, para-ethnographic data, whether they come from employees, consultants, or academic researchers, are created by actors who understand the practical agendas of knowledge production, and therefore form part of the practice of organizational members. Para-ethnography would depart from ethnographer-driven approaches whereby the researcher constructs data sets from self-generated sets of theoretical priorities, but also refrain from using “official” texts, discourses, and archives as taken-for-granted snapshots of organizational reality. A parallel can be drawn with historical ethnographic approaches (e.g., Vaughan, 2004) that treat organizational archives as official assemblages marking actors’ ongoing sense-making attempts. In short, para-ethnography stresses turning toward actor-produced perspectives, while treating these are pseudo-theories in the process of construction. That is, such theories are epistemic fragments, and are components of discourses from which eventual answers can be constructed.

Second, the role of participants in analysis changes from that of traditional ethnography. To the extent that members are less than completely embedded in a given system (a likely outcome of the rapidly changing and hybrid systems of contemporary organizations), members are able to step outside of their own practices, allowing pseudo-theories to be produced in the many spaces left by shifting organizational structures. These partial visions are expressed organizationally in alternative narratives, multivocality, weapons of the weak, jokes, rumors, and other marginal discourses, as well as in more formalized attempts to deliberately affect culture through planned ceremony, ritual, and formal discourse. Para-ethnography depends on the researcher’s ability to take advantages of these partial visions to map how they are translated across levels of the organization, just as multisited ethnography attempts to do with cultural artifacts.

Third, as a corollary to the previous point, if organizational members are able to produce their own theories about organizational culture, then they should be able to collaborate in the analysis of their own organizational systems with the ethnographic researcher. Although organizational researchers acknowledge competing discourses within organizations (e.g., Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004), these discourses rarely are seen as constitutive of the researcher’s own theoretical findings. Para-ethnography positions theoretical analysis as itself a strategic move in the struggle between discourses, albeit as a kind of meta-strategy that claims outsider or objective status. Para-ethnography, then, is a way to extend the logic of multivocality, distance, and the “outsideness” of members into the theoretical edifice itself.

To summarize, para-ethnography is appropriate where informants achieve reflective distance, taking advantage of internal spaces of criticism. The possibility of distance permits analysis within the insider role. Distance can come about when, for example, rapid system change leaves members caught between the old and the new. It can occur when different professional groups are brought together and must deal with workplace contradictions. Or, following critical theory, it can arise when work systems involve intrinsic contradictions or elisions, leaving some members alienated and motivated to engage in system-critical thought.

Table 2 illustrates the central theoretical and cultural assumptions of the revisionist perspectives described below. Next, I illustrate the details of para-ethnographic practice through a consideration of several contrasting examples drawn from the extant organizational literature.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Main Theoretical Assumptions of Revisionist Perspectives on Ethnography.

Type of Ethnography	Prevailing Assumptions About Culture	Relationship Between Ethnographer and Informant	Presumed Theoretical Authority of Informant
Traditional “Malinowskian” ethnography	Relatively stable traditional culture	Ethnographer as “outsider,” native as “insider.” Ethnographer acts as translator of indigenous knowledge	Informant as acute observer of empirical content of everyday practice. Limited critical view as insider.
Autoethnography	Either stable or dynamic cultures	Line blurred between researcher and informant, researcher engages in objective distancing from self.	Informant–researcher mix gives researcher empirical, informant, analytical, authority.
Multisited ethnography	Dynamic, changing cultural forms	“Informant” distributed among global circuits, human and nonhuman. Ethnographer as tracker of distributed fragments.	Informant may be absent altogether, as objects are studied in circulation. Informants who circulate across sites have comparative authority of experience across frontiers
Para-ethnography	Dynamic, changing cultural forms	Line blurred between ethnographer and informant. Informant as a source of “para-ethnographic” analysis.	Informant authoritative as source for revealing cultural contradictions, “fugitive” facts.

Site Selection and Site Construction

Early ethnographic studies cataloged and thickly described the variety of traditional human cultures. Considered relatively stable, sites were selected based on either “discovering” less studied cultures or correcting inaccurate prior ethnographic descriptions of sites (e.g., Freeman, 1983). Organizational research has taken more seriously the explicit defense of a site, requiring researchers to justify why a certain site is theoretically interesting (Siggelkow, 2007). Such justifications invoke the significance of a particular sector or space (e.g., Islam, 2010), or potential contributions to a theoretical perspective or debate (e.g., Leonard-Barton, 1990). Problematizing sites as a methodological choice means that the organizational spaces we study are impossible to divorce from the topics we study within these spaces.

Less acknowledged is that contemporary organizational sites are chosen not only by researchers, but also by participants. Organizational research tends to justify sites in the methods section of an empirical report, but once justified, these justifications fade into the background of the study, the site forming a tacit boundary within which observation and theory occur. Para-ethnography suggests that organizational members are themselves, to an extent, aware of the differences between contexts, and choose to act within certain contexts and not others. Furthermore, organizational sites are constructed and modified by actors with particular strategic intents. Thus, sites are not simply contexts within which cultural dynamics occur; their composition is itself an outcome of these dynamics, framing spaces of further action, and reflecting the underlying worldviews and motivations of actors, as well as inconsistencies in their worldviews.

We can illustrate the move from contestation within sites to contestation in the construction of sites by comparing Martin’s (2002) study of paradoxical aesthetics in an elderly home with Zilber’s (2002) study of a rape crisis center in Israel. The two organizational ethnographies treat somewhat similar sites, in this case, caregiving-therapeutic contexts. In Martin’s study, she astutely locates the distinct logics of institutionalized and homelike care systems in the aesthetic, bodily experience of organizational members, describing from an inside perspective the lived experience of organizational members. Methodologically, this is brought out through the researchers’ immersion in her own bodily experiences during fieldwork. Reinserting subjective experience, Martin explained, departed from positivism by acknowledging the body of the researcher. At the same time, the existence of the home itself, as an expression of wider logics of care or therapy, remains in the background. Members sense contradictions, and attempt to deal with them on a daily basis, but the organization itself is not politicized as a result. Much like traditional ethnography’s focus on the native’s point of view, Martin’s tale gives us a rich feeling of what it would be like to inhabit the setting, but not what it would be like to construct it.

Zilber’s (2002) ethnography of a rape crisis center in Israel similarly contrasts different logics of care, examining therapeutic versus feminist institutional logics competing within the center. However, Zilber goes beyond describing the contested worldviews within the center, and characterizes the construction of the center itself as an outcome of a feminist logic, while the hierarchical organization of the center reflected wider therapeutic logics from mainstream Israeli society. Thus, the contradictory logics are built into the center itself, and are expressed through the various expressions of conflict that follow. Methodologically, this plays out both the selection of cases, to illustrate a political contrast, and in the treatment of data, where contradiction and tensions are sought out among members as they construct the center. We sense at each step not only that members have to make sense of contradictory principles and logics, but that the center itself forms the locus for wider social tensions that are accessible by placing them in a local context. Furthermore, the organizational members seem aware of this conflict, and are conscious yet unsure of what kind of activities would be necessary to reconfigure the center to reconcile or negotiate this tension.

Thus, while both studies are important contributions to understanding the experience of contradiction in organizations, Zilber’s study takes a more para-ethnographic track. While Zilber frames the site against the background of a wider macro system, however, we are still unable to see the ethnographer’s own relation to the site. We view the contested logics, in both studies, from a relatively safe distance. That the feminist founders of the center and the therapeutic practitioners are each steeped in academic traditions that the researcher himself or herself has access to and frame themselves as acting in the name of schools of thought imply that the ethnography itself may be playing a role in the center’s ongoing history, and the center may have been conceived in the light of similar academic work in the past. Pushing Zilber’s study in an even more para-ethnographic direction, therefore, would involve exploring how sites of research and education dialogue with the therapeutic structures populated by trained practitioners, conceivably those reading Zilber’s own study in their ethnographic methods courses, and even the current article’s interpretation of Zilber’s work.

Seeking the Theory in Data

Beyond site selection, para-ethnography also critically examines notions of ethnographic “data.” Inductive or case study approaches (cf. Siggelkow, 2007), where observed data ground coding and discovery of higher order concepts (cf. Gioia & Pitre, 1991), retain a concept of “data” as separate from “codes,” itself distinct from “theory.” However, when sites are infused with academic knowledge, organizations planned around business models and informants steeped in concepts from organization studies, the “data” themselves may be largely a product of prior theory (Feyerabend, 1975). In such cases, ethnographic data are, in a sense, already filled with theory (cf. Amis & Silk, 2008). Although most cultural data inherently reflect older ideologies, traditions, and implicit theories (cf. Feyerabend, 1975), the issue is particularly marked when the planning and theorizing behind organizational artifacts and structures are proximal, immediate, and ongoing. While all cultures carry implicit theories in their reproduction of social structures, contemporary organizations explicitly cite approaches, measurement systems, and theoretical paradigms to construct and justify choices, making the theory-ladenness of data more stark and unavoidable, and calling into question the solidity of the ground of grounded theory.

For example, in his study of legal institutions, Kozin (2007) examines the creation of a legal case file as a cultural artifact. Such an artifact is the outcome of a complex process of construction by various actors, but plays the role of establishing “facts” that can then be used to ground legal decisions. As a fact-marking device, the file acts both as fact itself (as data in the ethnographic study) and as a pseudo-theory (as a kind of structured organization of other facts in a coherent story). Participants struggled over how to compose the file, reflecting underlying theories about what counts as a “fact” in a given case, a decision theoretically interesting to the researcher, but also necessary for the legal actors to do their jobs. The case file thus demonstrates a para-ethnographic element in that its construction involves theories (and theoretical debates) about what facts consist in, which ones are relevant, and how they should be organized. The ethnographer can read in the case file an allegory of his or her own task in cataloging, and is given an uncanny view into the institutional stakes involved in establishing what is or is not to be counted as a fact (cf. Rabinow, 1986). In short, the methodological gambit of using already existing contests over categorization as reflecting deeper theoretical divergences can then provide insights to be developed by the researcher.

In a related but more maligned example, Boje, Gardner, and Smith (2006) examined the manipulation of formal accounting metrics by Enron. Seeing imperfections in formal knowledge systems that could lead to market imperfections, Enron actors did not seek to solve these imperfections, but to exploit them for profit. Methodologically, Boje et al. analyze members’ construction of these persuasive numbers in a first step, followed by their organization into tables and presentations, and finally their rhetorical and instrumental use. In this case, the critical limits of formalized knowledges were identified by actors, but for exploitative ends. Had the executives been “objective” analysts or regulators, their demonstration of the consequences of current accounting principles may have led to new recommended reporting norms, but instead their awareness of critical limits underwrote a set of ethically dubious decisions. Yet, as Boje et al. demonstrate, their discovery did eventually become integrated into theorizing about the social constitution of quantitative “data” and a critical view of what can be obscured by measurement.

Finding Representational Moments and Their Gaps

Para-ethnography depends on the ability of organizational members to articulate their cultures in ways that are both conventional and reflexive, reflecting both knowledge of the “common sense” of organizations and the limits of that common sense. The role of the ethnographer in relation to such informants is to identify the everyday organizational settings when professionals of different backgrounds represent their work to one another as “outsiders,” in ways meant to create certain meanings and subvert others.

For example, in Vaughan’s (2004) ethnographic study of the Challenger space accident, she notes that thousands of pages of technical material had to be translated into schematic, summary, and pictorial representations to be made intelligible to different constituencies. Thus, far from a taken-for-granted indigenous cultural reality, organizational members actively constructed representations of their own work to others whom they knew would have little background with their knowledge. The ethnographer in such a setting has as data not only the cultural knowledge of the actors, but also the attempts at self-representation as a form of cultural activity. As organizations involve more complex interchanges between professionals of different backgrounds, we may expect that such practices of representation begin to take precedence over the beliefs themselves as the main focus of ethnographic interest.

Moments of representing institutional situations are interesting because they reveal omissions, “fugitive facts,” and contradictions that derive from actors’ attempts to consciously manage their stakeholders and understand their own work. These “gaps” constitute omissions from the organizations’ official generalizations and representations. Professionals demonstrate a “de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain as a way of dealing with contradiction, exception” (Holmes & Marcus, 2005a, p. 237). Not only do they produce gaps, but they notice gaps and attempt to articulate them critically, often lacking the precise discourses to do so since these gaps have been omitted from official vocabularies. For example, individuals may have a feeling that more is going on than “official” narratives suggest, but are not sure how to articulate this feeling, and thus do so in the form of office jokes, hallway discussions, and other informal discourse that the ethnographer can compare with official texts and discourses.

Moving the locus of critical reflexivity to organizational members themselves provides an alternative way to promote reflexivity in ethnography. Ethnographers have been able to launch critiques of workplace exploitation, for instance, by maintaining a distance from managers and providing a forum within which workers’ voices could emerge (cf. Zickar & Carter, 2010). Besides the conceit that it is able to truly represent workers from often very different socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnography also posits itself as a “third wheel” in the game, and is thereby left unable to theorize its own position. Para-ethnography, however, assumes that actors within the organizational system already embody contradictory messages of both system reproduction and critique, meaning that taking “the native’s point of view” (Geertz, 1983) can be consistent with cultural critique. Employees produce their own critiques, to varying degrees, not only as a form of contestation but in recognition of the limits of formalized knowledge in practicing their professions well. Job performance often requires bracketing formal knowledge and revising received wisdom, just as good scholarship requires revising received theory on the basis of new experience. Ethnographers can thus locate organizational spaces where knowledge is remade and theory, often derived from academia, is refuted. The ethnographer’s job is thus not to act as an external analyst, nor as a mere sounding board for internally produced critique, but rather to discover the conditions of possibility for producing critical knowledge from within organizational settings themselves, referred to as “found imaginaries” (Rabinow et al., 2008). The ethnographer serves not as an author of critiques launched despite the bewilderment of unsuspecting informants, but as an interpreter of found critiques discovered from actually existing or nascent voices in the field.