Organizational Ethnography

Studying the Complexity of Everyday Life

Sierk Ybema, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels, Frans H Kamsteeg, Sierk Ybema, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels, Frans H Kamsteeg, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847870469, 9781847870452
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Just as newspapers do not, typically, engage with the ordinary experiences of people?s daily lives, so organizational studies has also tended largely to ignore the humdrum, everyday experiences of people working in organizations. However, ethnographic approaches provide in-depth and up-close understandings of how the ?everyday-ness? of work is organized and how, in turn, work itself organizes people and the societies they inhabit.

 

Organizational Ethnography brings contributions from leading scholars in organizational studies that serve to unpack an ethnographic perspective on organizations and organizational research. The authors explore the particular problems faced by organizational ethnographers, including:

 

- questions of gaining access to research sites within organizations;

- the many styles of writing organizational ethnography;

- the role of friendship relations in the field;

- problems of distance and closeness;

- the doing of at-home ethnography;

- ethical issues;

- standards for evaluating ethnographic work.

 

This book is a vital resource for organizational scholars and students doing or writing ethnography in the fields of business and management, public administration, education, health care, social work, or any related field in which organizations play a role.

Part I

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Ethnographic Doing and Writing

1

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Getting going: Organizing ethnographic fieldwork

Kees van der Waal

introduction

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The work of ethnography is to make the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic, to problematize what is taken for granted, to ‘suggest in writing what it is like to be someone else’ (Van Maanen, 2001: 235). A characteristic of ethnography is its criticality, its radical challenge to received ideas about people and society (Bate, 1997: 1153). In this book, the core question is: what is the contribution of the ethnographic approach to the study of organizations in both familiar and exotic settings? Organizational processes dominate our lives more markedly than ever before over large parts of the globe, given the articulation of complex production and consumption processes that connect us to more people in larger networks, demanding more streamlining, efficient coordination and precise planning in shorter time periods. While this book focuses on the complexities of organizations fundamental to everyday work and economic life, this thematic focus should not prevent us from keeping an eye on the many interconnections between various sites and between symbols of home and workplace.

Ethnographic fieldwork can be defined as the ‘firsthand experience and exploration of a particular social or cultural setting on the basis of (though not exclusively by) participant observation’ (Atkinson et al., 2007:4). It makes use of field research tools in the interpretative tradition of social science in which participant observation, conversational interviewing and the close reading and analysis of documents are key. In this chapter, I look at the way in which doing ethnography in organizational settings has been represented in the literature and how this relates to my own research experience. How is ethnography in organizations actually done? What are the characteristics of different approaches to organizational ethnography? I will refer to my ethnographic experiences in the following inter-and intra-organizational settings in South Africa: local development planning processes in two rural areas (a tribal hierarchy and a development committee in Limpopo Province, a housing planning project in the Western Cape), as well as two university settings (university labour relations in Johannesburg and higher education language planning in Stellenbosch). I write from the perspective and preoccupations of an anthropologist although I attempt to present the ethnographic process here in more general social science terms. I refer to ‘ethnography’ as a generic research approach and ‘anthropology’ as a specific social research field.

The core idea within this chapter is that the ethnography of organizations has characteristics and challenges that reflect crucial current methodological and theoretical concerns in ethnography in general. These have to do with the nature of the object of study and the relationship between the ethnographer and this object. Specific issues that surface in organizational ethnography are the problematics of access and intervention. The focus in the most insightful work in this field is on organizations as symbolic and social processes as discourses and practices in specific contexts, rather than as institutions. The implications of this choice are apparent in the delimitation of ‘unit of observation’ and ‘unit of analysis’ as well as in the emphasis on power relations. This chapter is organized around issues that often emerge in an organizational study: choosing a research question, choosing a research site, how to gain access, what ethnographic fieldwork entails, the significance of various types of data and the importance of issues of power and ethics. I argue against a narrow, purely inductive and empiricist approach to ethnography in view of the important role of the ethnographer’s life experience and prior cognition for the research process. As the personal and subjective dimension is so central to the ethnographer’s being, this needs to be recognized and reflected upon. Ethnographic research, I maintain, benefits from the awareness of it being an open and contingent process.

choosing a research question: the importance of theory and prior assumptions

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Although ethnographic research is celebrated for its closeness to experiential knowledge, the importance of theory and other prior knowledge for ethnographic research should not be obscured. My own trajectory from a more conservative and closed perspective on ethnography, to a more critical and open perspective proves this point for me. My training in anthropology occurred within the conservative framework of the Afrikaans-speaking academic environment of Pretoria University in the late 1960s and 1970s in which volkekunde (the study of ‘peoples’) was the accepted theoretical approach. The task set by this paradigm was to understand human life in terms of separate traditional cultures that were supposed to be stable and homogeneous ethnic forms, such as ‘tribes’. This academic knowledge confirmed popular fantasies in white South Africa about the incommensurability of ‘races’. Volkekunde studies, like most older ethnographies, were characterized by several exclusions: of the ethnographer’s position, of ‘modern’ or ‘powerful’ social subjects and of the wider social context (Macdonald, 2007: 71). My own work for a master’s degree (Van der Waal, 1977) fitted into this paradigm by focusing on the use of space in Venda (an area on the border with Zimbabwe) as mainly a cultural phenomenon that needed description in terms of widely shared cultural patterns. In line with our training, my methodological approach did not include participant observation, as this would have overstepped the apartheid taboo on social interaction between ‘races’, but it also rested upon the wrong assumption that one could gain sufficient insight into cultural life primarily by asking questions during ethnographic interviews.

Some years later, I was fortunate to experience a paradigm shift towards a more critical and Marxian informed position when I moved to the anthropology department of Rand Afrikaans University (now Johannesburg University). This was sociologically an exciting period during the run-up to the South African political transformation. The members of the department started to ask new research questions (Kotzé, 1982) and to initiate fieldwork among the black population based on participant observation, something that we had not done before because of the apartheid ban on cross-racial social intimacy. Apart from discarding bounded notions of cultural and social entities, we also began to foreground social process and context as important theoretical and analytical concepts with important implications for the way we were doing ethnographic fieldwork.

This account of my personal trajectory illustrates how theory informs the choice of research questions as well as the methods used in the field. In my volkekunde period the research questions I pursued were mainly descriptive, restricted to issues within bounded cultural entities and with no attention to organizational issues. In my later work (Van der Waal, 2001; 2003a), informed by the anthropologies of development and of organization, I started to give more attention to issues of interpretation (what caused these particular forms of organization, in this specific setting, in this exact context?), looked at relationships across cultural and social boundaries and included managers and political figures in my analyses – studying up. Since the publication of Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), ethnographic writing has become more of a focus among researchers, leading to increased self-awareness, an emphasis on the biographical dimension of fieldwork and a questioning of the legitimating claims of ethnographers (Atkinson et al., 2007: 3, 4). This orientation to theory and method also affected my work in its later phase, for instance, in the ways in which I framed research questions. The above illustrates the dialectical relationship between the theory that one employs and the way one does research.

There is, however, a theoretical approach, known as ‘grounded theory’, which advocates an a-theoretical position when entering the field (Charmaz and Mitchell, 2007). It is true that much that occurs during ethnographic work is unpredictable (Van Maanen, 2001: 253), meaning that there are always experiences in the field unforeseen in one’s theoretical preparation. A strong grounded theory position would argue that one cannot know the questions to be addressed in a research setting in advance; therefore one needs to reflect on such questions while in the field and to test one’s insights continuously. It is indeed important to prioritize the issues that are central to the people among whom one is doing ethnographic research – above one’s own theoretical preoccupations – in order to discover local knowledge (Hirsch and Gellner, 2001: 8). While acknowledging the importance of theory, it is sobering to relativize all knowledge, including social theory, by regarding all voices as equal and problematic, following the insights of Foucault and Latour (Abram, 2001: 200).

Although I prefer to go into the field with an open mind and would also agree that theoretical interpretation needs to be built on empirical research, I do not think one can escape the reality that theoretical conceptions inform ethnographic fieldwork. Social theory is the ethnocentric burden of the ethnographer, although it is, after all, the best set of interpretations that one can take along into the field. There is value in an open-ended approach, but there is also a need for an initial theoretical disposition or at least for having a set of carefully formulated possible interpretations as a starting point for ethnographic work, while constantly testing these insights and retaining a flexible research approach (Burawoy, 1998). In the end, ethnographic work aims not only at describing and interpreting, but also at contributing to theoretical understanding, based on new fieldwork-based insight (Bate, 1997; Hirsch and Gellner, 2001: 9). The implication is that both social scientific theory and local frameworks of thinking need to take their place in the ethnographic work of making sense of organizational process.

As my argument suggests, a merely descriptive study will not suffice when choosing a research question for an organizational ethnography. It may add to our knowledge to know the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘who’ of an organizational setting, but in order to progress beyond taxonomy and description, the ‘why’ (or ‘criticality’) question also needs to be engaged with. In order to answer the question of why a set of relationships or symbolic understandings is the way it is, it needs to be set against the background of other factors and processes. In other words, it needs to be contextualized. A lasting contribution of a Marxian theoretical approach in social science is its emphasis on forces (especially historical and political economic factors) that impact on small-scale relationships and cultural forms. One should therefore not study an organization per se as an isolated entity. Additionally, the main point of interest would not so much be the form and function of an organization, but rather the organizational process as it unfolds between sets of actors, including other organizations. Core to the organizing process is the tendency to set up a governing ethos (organizational culture), rules for interaction and resource allocation, and the necessity to monitor these (Hirsch and Gellner, 2001: 3, 4). In choosing a research question the boundaries of organizations and other social settings should not be taken as given and homogeneity in the research setting should not be assumed.

As such, some possible research questions in the ethnographic study of organizations might include the following:

• What are the relationships between different actors in a specific organizational process?
• What form does the organizing process that is studied take and how does it change?
• Why does this particular form of organizational interaction occur in this specific context?
• How do relations of power and contestation emerge in organizational processes, and how are these related to meaning (symbols and cultural forms)?
• What are the effects of a specific organizational process on particular socioeconomic relationships?

situating oneself and gaining access

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Organizational ethnography potentially ranges from the very local to the global, from a village development committee setting in its interaction with the local offices of the national state to a United Nations agency in Geneva or a multinational headquarters in a metropolis. It may encompass several organizational levels and follow the relationships between and among them. Mostly, however, due to the constraints of time and location, researchers will choose a local setting as the primary research site and follow the connections between that site and other sites as far as is feasible and to the extent that these connections are relevant to a research project. Organizational ethnography often tends to be done in a specific site, within the boundaries of the organization selected as the unit of observation. However, the possibility of multi-sited organizational research work is very promising. In this way important connections between organizations and their interactions can be followed from local to global levels (Hirsch and Gellner, 2001: 4). In choosing a research site, one will be led by the theoretical understanding one has of the issues to be studied. It makes sense to develop several possible lines of approach to the main research questions and then decide on a specific approach in light of its viability.

Ethnographic research sites have often been characterized by large differences in class between researcher and researched. This used to be the case in colonial contexts and is still the norm in development situations. Class differences often meant relatively easy access for a researcher to settings where her or his social position was socially powerful. But many organizational settings are now very challenging in terms of access. Organizations’ gatekeepers in industrial, urbanized settings tend to be more assertive and less accessible than those in community settings in rural areas. One reason for this difference is that organizations that are publicly active in economic and political realms tend to be very vulnerable regarding their reputation (Chapman, 2001: 31). Despite legislation promoting transparency and a commitment to free flows of information, many gatekeepers are well aware of the damage that can be done by the publication of ‘misinterpretations’ by social scientists. Therefore, it is quite common to experience problems in gaining access to organizations, or even to be denied access. In many cases trust has to be established before intensive research work on the ground can begin. The initial contact, the way in with the help of a contact person, and the nature of first meetings are all very important, but difficult to control. Much of the success of the ‘way in’ depends on the impression you make and the time that you take to establish social contact with decision-makers or brokers who can facilitate or block access to a research setting. Even where access is denied, it may, nevertheless, be possible to study an organization through the available literature, through informal contacts with people involved in the organization and through the study of the effects of the organization.

Ethnographic research is time-intensive, and the first stage – that of reconnaissance – should not be rushed. Time should be taken to find out which organizational setting would be most useful to study in terms of its role in the organizational process and to develop a sense of possible alternatives. Spending time in alternative research settings, getting to know local role-players informally and establishing contact with gatekeepers is absolutely essential, preceding the formal process of requesting permission to spend time in an organization or to peruse its records. It is quite important to point out the need for and the benefits of the research project without making unrealistic claims or promises. One of the main issues in this regard is that the emphasis in ethnogr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Studying everyday organizational life
• Part I Ethnographic Doing And Writing
• Part II Familiarity And ‘ Stranger-Ness’
• Part III Researcher–Researched Relationships
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index