Why do fieldwork?
There is plenty of information around â information from, of, and about such phenomena as organizations, organizing, workplaces, management, production, consumption, and finance. It is no longer necessary to go to the library or buy a newspaper in order to collect that information. I receive the annual reports of several companies to which I am but vaguely connected: Scandinavian Airlines, an insurance company, and a housing cooperative. The mail and e-mail delivery of myriad advertisements combined with TV commercials could provide me with enough material to analyze the society in which I live throughout eternity. Global economies are at my fingertips on the Internet. Why go to the field, then? And where is that field?
In this text, the word âfieldâ is being used in the sense of a field of practice, where even theorizing is one type of practice. Because there is a âturn to practiceâ in contemporary social theory (Schatzki et al., 2001), fieldwork in modern societies usually denotes the study of a field of practice, resulting in what Annemarie Mol (2002) has called a praxiography â a description of that practice. Its historical antecedents must be sought, on the one hand, in natural sciences and empiricism and, on the other hand, in studies of premodern societies.
Yet researchers whose goal is to describe practices can be seen as the opposite of traditional empiricists, with their motto, Nullius in verba! (On no manâs word). In this type of fieldwork, the words of men and women in the field are as valid as the researchersâ own words. If fieldwork must be seen as empirical, I would call this type of empiricism âethicalâ. Richard Rorty put it well in a passage that, to use Helen Swordâs formulation, âis dated in its gendered pronoun use but timeless in its sentimentâ (2012: 10):
[It is] a mistake to think of somebodyâs own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he is doing or he might not, but it is not a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. (Rorty, 1982: 202)
The field is where other people live and work, which means that my life and work can also become elements of a field of practice to be studied. Fieldwork is an expression of curiosity about the Other â about people who construct their worlds differently than we researchers construct ours. I could study my own field â the practice of research â but in order to do so, I would have to become, at least temporarily, an observer of that practice. As Niklas Luhmann (1998) pointed out, the world as seen by actors is necessarily unlike the world seen by observers. Observers are able to see options â and to distinguish among them. But actors can see options only in the moment of reflection, of observing, of not acting. (The awareness of an alternative would be paralyzing â the condition from which Buridanâs ass allegedly starved to death while trying to decide between a pail of water and a pile of hay.)1 One must step back in order to observe â even to observe oneself at a different time â and, paradoxically, for researchers this backward step means stepping forward â into the field. The advantages are many.
Although all fields of practice currently produce many accounts of their activities, it is in the field that the actual production of accounts can be studied. Before a glossy brochure reaches my mailbox, there has been a long discussion about which accounting data to include and what tone the CEOâs letter should strike â not to mention the three-month argument between the two schools of cover design. Sociologists of science and technology went to laboratories to see how facts were manufactured (Latour and Woolgar, 1979/1986; Knorr Cetina, 1981); medical anthropologists have gone to the field to see how health care is produced â together with both sick and healthy bodies (Mol, 2002).
There is another reason for âstepping intoâ the field: Because both the actions and the accounts of action abound there. Of the many accounts produced in the field, its representatives send me one â the one they have decided is good for me as their client. As a student of their modes and mores, however, I may want to use a different selection principle. I may prefer to select the very accounts that they wish to hide from me, or those that they consider to be âfor internal use onlyâ.
What is more, people in the field of practice both produce and consume a multitude of accounts and all types of narratives produced elsewhere. Their selection procedures are of obvious interest to an organization scholar, and it is equally obvious that it is easier to figure them out by observation than by speculation. What do they see? What do they read and hear? And why do they see, read, and hear these specific things?
As my colleagues and I have learned in preparing a collection of cases on organizing around threat and risk (Czarniawska, 2009), the Web is a practically infinite source of material. Because each day brings new contributions, going to the field can also be a way of limiting research material to manageable proportions â by allowing the practitioners to select material that they find relevant for their practice.
So researchers go into the field for at least three reasons: Because other people live and work there and can be observed, because that is where the accounts of their life and work is produced, and because that is where some of these accounts are âconsumedâ.
An important source of inspiration for fieldwork is to be found in anthropological studies. Although there are a great many ethnographies of and from modern countries (Kunda, 1992/2006; Nigel Barley, 1995), they are adapted versions of techniques developed in studies of premodern societies.
Fieldwork in premodern societies
With the growth of what can be called âcontemporary ethnographiesâ, there is much debate over the correct way to conduct studies of modern practices in an anthropological mode. Some researchers, like organization sociologist S. Paul Bate (1997), consider most such studies to be âquick and dirty jobsâ done on an âin and outâ basis, and they urge a return to traditional work ethnography:
On closer examination âthick descriptionâ invariably turns out to be âquick descriptionâ, yet another business case study or company history, a pale reflection of the experientially rich social science envisaged by early writers like [US anthropologist Michael] Agar. âProlonged contact with the fieldâ means a series of flying visits rather than a long-term stay (jet plane ethnography). Organizational anthropologists rarely take a toothbrush with them these days. A journey into the organizational bush is often little more than a safe and closely chaperoned form of anthropological tourism. (Bate, 1997: 1150)
As Prasad and Prasad (2002) observed, Bateâs critique is infused with a strong nostalgia for such âheroicâ ethnographies as those of BronisĹaw Malinowski. Although I agree with them, I am also sympathetic with Bateâs critique of âflying visitsâ, on the grounds of their frequent cursoriness. Quite a few researchers reach profound conclusions about humanity on the basis of the answers given to abstract interview questions, which are assumed to be windows into the depths of realit...
