Suchergebnisse

In recent decades, organizational scholars have set out to explore the processual character of organizations. They have investigated both the overtly ephemeral and sometimes dramatically unstable aspects of contemporary organizing and the social flux and flow of everyday organizing hiding beneath organizations' stable surface appearances. These studies manifest a range of different approaches and methods. In this chapter, we evaluate the use and usefulness of one of these – ethnography – for studying organizational processes. As ethnographers draw close enough to observe the precariousness of such processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life, ethnography is well suited for such study. Ethnographers are commonly aware that '… incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule, not the exception, in organizational life' (Morrill and Fine, 1997: 434). 'By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature', then, as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014: 282) put it, ethnography 'is revelatory of processual dynamics'. Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013), typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation towards sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of researchrelevant documents). Second, ethnography embraces a sensibility towards meaning and meaning-making processes, and this shapes the ways its observations and interpretations are carried out. Third, ethnographic analyses are commonly presented through a written text presenting data that give voice to the minutiae of everyday life, in their social, political, and historical contexts, thereby conveying to readers a sense of 'being there'. This fieldwork, sensework, textwork trio may remind one of other treatments of field research methods (e.g., fieldwork, headwork, and textwork in Van Maanen, 1988; 2011; fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork in Yanow, 2000), which Wilkinson (2014) supplements with preparatory legwork. We replace the middle term with 'sensework' to encompass a broader range of analytic activity that is sensitive towards organizational actors' meaning making, the complexities of the everyday, and the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of organizational life. More is involved, in our view, than just the 'headwork' of theory-informed interpretation and distanced analysis. Although previous work has typically not made a process focus explicit, the history of organizational studies shows ethnographic research being sensitive to a key feature of organizing processes unfolding over time: the intersubjective processes of 'social reality' construction. Ethnography has commonly required a prolonged period of researcher immersion in the research setting in which fieldwork is being carried out. This has inspired many influential organizational studies, both in the discipline's early days and in more recent years (Fine, Morrill and Surianarain, 2009; Ybema, Yanow, et al., 2009; Yanow, 2013). Earlier studies delved into the dynamics of, for instance, bureaucratic control and resistance (e.g., Selznick, 1949; Blau, 1955; Kaufman, 1960; Roy, 1960; Crozier, 1964; Kunda, 1992), organizational performances and dramatics (Goffman, 1959), and the unofficial workarounds brought into play through processes of power struggles and local meaning making of labour relations (Dalton, 1959). Some of these studies also covered longer-term developments, such as Gouldner's follow-up account of worker–management relationships in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Although these studies show that an ethnographic approach is well equipped for doing process analyses, processes themselves were not often their explicit concern. More recent ethnographic studies, however, have taken a more explicit 'process turn', focusing on the instability and dynamics of organizational life on the ground (e.g., Feldman, 2000; Jay, 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013). We begin this chapter with a sketch of studying organizational processes which provides the conceptual footing to argue for the relevance of ethnographying for this kind of study. To bring the processual qualities of ethnographic work into sharp focus, ethnography can be seen as 'following' actors, interactions, and artefacts over time and space. Ethnographers go along with actors, interactions, and artefacts on the move or stay in one place observing things that move around them. Next, we explain in more detail what ethnographic fieldwork, sensework, and textwork entail, and how these relate to process. We discuss two different foci in process analysis – long-term developments and microdynamics – and present two recent examples of ethnographic work which illustrate what ethnography can do for the study of process. We conclude with a few suggestions as to how ethnographers could become more processsensitive in their field-, sense-, and textwork. That is, although ethnography has something to contribute to process studies, ethnographers could themselves learn from taking the issues engaged in this handbook into consideration.

Joan Littlewood (1914‐2002) was a pioneer of theatre directing in the United Kingdom, most famous for her production of Oh What a Lovely War!. This article performs an ethnographic study of Miss Littlewood , a 2018 musical by Sam Kenyon, which documents Littlewood's life and work using the style of the earlier show. Miss Littlewood 's plot reveals details of Littlewood's life and work, while its form mirrors the montage techniques that she pioneered in Britain. The article uses interviews and rehearsal observations to document aspects of the process by which Miss Littlewood was developed. It reflects on the tensions that are revealed between that relatively luxurious process and Littlewood's political and financial realities. Ethnography was an ideal method for documenting this process because it facilitated observation of relationships between the various works and demonstrated the fluidity and creativity of academic writing.

A review of Frank Gurrmanamana, Les Hiatt and Kim McKenzie with Betty Ngurraban-Gurraba, Betty Meehan and Rhys Jones's People of the Rivermouth: The Joborr Texts of Frank Gurrmanamana (National Museum of Australia and Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2002).The concept of postcolonialism, and an Australian postcolonial literature specifically, is fraught with problems. The least of these is the reality of this country not yet being fully free from its British colonial inheritance, let alone from ongoing internal colonialism. Even so, postcolonialism is still a useful term to define a body of (particularly Indigenous) literature produced over the last thirty years. Keeping the irony in mind, Australia's virtual postcolonial literature has been gaining increasing prominence, providing fertile ground for the political promise that one day may be realised as a state of actual Australian postcoloniality of sorts. In the meantime, the postcolonial movement desired and reinforced by the literature continues to gather momentum. People of the Rivermouth, a recent addition to the Australian anthropological corpus, initiates what looks like a promising future for postcolonial ethnographies; yet it too has some problems. While the book claims that it is 'arguably the most comprehensive work ever produced on a single Australian Aboriginal group', in effect presenting itself as an ethnography of the highest order, the main component of the work—the Joborr texts—are, I believe, somewhat more aligned to what Eric Michaels once described as 'para-ethnography': a story that transcends itself into a kind of incidental ethnography.

Climate change is commonly understood to be an intractable political problem. It is also widely assumed that the solution to the problem is a rather straightforward reconfiguration of humanity's interactions with "carbon." If global warming is so clearly fixable, and so much work has long been underway to accomplish this fix (carbon offsets, international negotiations, localized climate initiatives, etc.), then why does the quagmire continue? This dissertation explores the stagnant "progress" of climate politics by using "carbon" as the locus of its mixed-methodological approach. The dissertation creates a new nomenclature, presented as a glossary at the beginning of the text, to represent the diverging meanings and underlying assumptions conveyed by different "carbon" invocations. This terminology facilitates the dissertation's material-semiotic analysis of climate politics, which combines discourse analysis, multi-sited ethnography, and object tracking of "carbon." The analysis finds that the dominant, carbon-based discourse of climate politics reinforces modernist assumptions that inspire a perpetual faith in the ability of humans to solve the climate problem through carbon management, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This discourse, ironically, enables a widespread estrangement of carbon the signifier from carbon the signified in global climate governance. This lack of fidelity between material "carbon" and representations thereof is also encouraged by the ubiquity and invisibility of elemental carbon; when apprehended largely with a reductive emphasis on quantifiability, and put in combination with market incentives, "carbon" is a fungible and easily co-opted entity. Therefore, despite "carbon's" appeal as a policy mechanism (thanks again to its perceived quantifiability), it is a misguided foundation for climate policy. The likelihood of failure according to the carbonized terms by which the problem has been defined is the "elephant in the room" of climate activism. The liberal capitalist global order that has summoned anthropogenic climate change may find itself challenged by the monster it has created. The dominant, carbon-centric discourse through which the problem is (not) addressed, amounts to an attempt of that order to control its monster without significantly changing itself.

Reflecting on the World Health Organization's (WHO) account of obesity and recent developments in ethnography, I advocate for a collaborative, multiauthor approach to studying obesity and, more broadly, chronic disease. To illustrate this, I show how recent ethnographies of obesity and metabolism have convincingly challenged and reframed the WHO's account of obesity. I further suggest that future ethnographic studies of obesity (and chronic disease) could expand their analytical scope – without sacrificing a critical and people-centred approach – through coordination and collaboration. A multiauthor approach to obesity research would increase the capacity of ethnography to demonstrate the many conditions that must be fulfilled for a person to become 'obese', productively foregrounding how 'obesity' emerges out of a web of social, economic, political, chemical, and historical connections. This would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the uneven emergence of obesity (and other chronic diseases) worldwide.

This chapter addresses the use of ethnographic methods in critical social theory, and the assumption that such methods prove to be useful because they allow the researcher to be closer to 'matter itself'. Instead, I argue for ethnography from within a framework of historical materialism and social critique, marking the difference between such 'materialism without matter', based on Marx's 'fetishism of the commodity', and some strategies of New Materialism. My goal is to situate the uses of ethnography for a transformed consideration of the relation between theory and practice. ; Marianna Poyares, 'Theory's Method?: Ethnography and Critical Theory', in Materialism and Politics , ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 345–63

"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it." Mafiosi have often reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it "really is," thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquiry that focuses not on answering "What is the Mafia?" but on the ontological, moral, and political effects of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social fact but a problem of thought produced by the absence of words. Puccio-Den approaches covert activities using a model of "Mafiacraft," which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft depends on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named? Puccio-Den approaches this task with a fascinating anthropology of silence, breaking new ground for the study of the world's most famous criminal organization.

This paper draws upon several transnational theories from Glick Schiller, Wimmer, Faist, and Sassen and analyses the major theoretical and methodological shifts in migration studies. In response to such changes, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced as a main research method; it differs from the traditional way of doing migration research, where spatially-defined ethnic minority communities serve as the primary fieldwork sites; instead, moving between different sites allows researchers to follow individual migrants, whose social networks have become the main focus. Moreover, such a research method also redefines the traditional notion of "field", which is now believed to be with blurred and softening boundaries. Through my research project, I have analysed how translocal communities constitute global diasporic networks; I have also come to the conclusion that transnational migrants themselves are involved in very fluid patterns and complex processes of identification and affiliation; their social networks, which consist of multiple relationships such as familial, economic, social, organisational, and political, are not geographically bounded, but these networks cross over and connect different types of social spaces in a wide variety of cultural, institutional, professional, and other kinds of context.

Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies.Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance

Purpose This article explores the analytical gains of what we refer to as "awkward ethnography." How might our understanding of organizational phenomena benefit from those unexpected moments when our observations are laughed at, when our questions cause discomfort, or when we feel like a failure? While such instances seem to be an inherent aspect of organizational ethnography, they are often silenced or camouflaged by claims of intentionality. This article takes the opposite approach, arguing for the analytical value of awkwardness. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on their respective ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish and Swedish armed forces. Based on observations, participation and interviews in two military units, the analysis focuses on situations that rarely find their way into final research publications. These will be explored as analytically productive material that can provide crucial insights into the organizational context studied. Findings The authors' analysis demonstrates that awkward situations that arise during ethnographic work not only bring about unforeseen insights; they also enable vital analytical opportunities for discovering silent knowledge in the organization which researchers might otherwise not have considered to inquire about or understood the gravity of. Research limitations/implications Implied in the suggested methodological approach for ethnographers is an acceptance of awkward situations as productive encounters. This means doing away with ideals for (ethnographic) knowledge production steered by notions of objectivity, instead embracing the affective dimensions of fieldwork. Originality/value This research addresses a key, and often silenced, aspect of ethnographic fieldwork, and stresses the unique value of the unintended and unexpected when doing ethnography. ; Funding agencies: The ethnographic work described in this article has been carried out during our respective PhD studies at the University of Copenhagen (SlOk-Andersen) and Linkoping University (Persson); both positions funded by the host university. While writing and publishing this article, the authors' work has been funded by NordForsk (grant no. 88041).

What follows is an ethnographic study of Canada's first varsity esports program. Esports – formalized competitive videogaming – is a cultural and industrial phenomenon taking root in North America. This research yields rich qualitative data, collected through participant observation and interviews with esports student-athletes, providing insider perspectives on the institutionalization of the organizational field. My interdisciplinary approach offers insight on institutional pressures and their relationship to stakeholders, player agency, and institutional work – broadly speaking the creation, maintenance, and disruption of organizational social institutions. In 2011, institutionalists Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca called for the refocused exploration of the relationship between individuals, their agency, and institutions. Additionally, they emphasized the importance of bridging the gap between critical and institutional views of organizational behaviour. Critical scholars, such as T.L. Taylor, declared the importance of researching esports, for its consequences on our understanding of socio-technical systems and evolving traditional institutions (Taylor, 2018). This thesis' discussion of Foucauldian power dynamics, in relation to its findings, rears significant questions pertaining to the perpetuation of biased institutions via normative isomorphic pressures, as well as meaning making and identity work. Thus, bridging critical and institutional views to explore the trends of progressing professionalization and gamer-identity in the field.

The Wide World Web (WWW) is by now an everyday fact of life. The social scientist, like the layman, cannot work without being connected to this new world, where we can access articles, references, news reports, etc., which we would previously have known nothing about unless we were in direct contact with the authors. In some respects the Internet has also brought greater democracy in the sciences: we are better informed and therefore have more opportunities to participate in conferences, calls, initiatives and events, meeting other students and researchers, and forming new relationships. E-mail enables us to contact people and exchange opinions, to do research, and to write articles with colleagues whom we have never met physically. All this takes place in real time, while we are physically located in different and sometimes very distant places: things that were impossible twenty years ago. The main aim of this research note is to collect, order and classify the principal ethnographic resources to be found on the web, and to offer it to those are interested on ethnographic method. It is obviously a partial list, because new resources are constantly becoming available on-line.

This article is about the silences that often are registered but not so often highlighted and analysed with the anthropological tools of the ethnographer, referring as these do to the empirical world that can be captured. While there is abundant literature that helps the ethnographer refine the technical aspects of the writing of the narrative, it has been only recently that die political implications behind the epistemology and ontology of ethnography as a research strategy have been addressed in any depth. Rather than, therefore, looking at ways of improving the collection of data, this paper will consider an aspect that hitherto has been largely ignored in ethnography. The focus will be on what the ethnographic text leaves unsaid. A number of silences will be identified with reference to the process, content, and political effectiveness of ethnographic narratives, although it will be argued that these silences or gaps are not all of the same kind, and that some rather than others are more promising in the construction of radical educational theory and practice. ; peer-reviewed

In this article, we address issues of attribution, utility, and accountability in ethnographic research. We examine the two main analytical approaches that have structured the debate on data collection and theorization in ethnography over the last five decades: an inductivist approach, with grounded theory as its main analytic strategy; and a deductivist stance, which uses field sites to explore empirical anomalies that enable an ethnographer to test and build upon pre-existing theories. We engage recent reformulations of this classical debate, with a specific focus on abductive and reflexive approaches in ethnography, and then weigh into these debates, ourselves. drawing on our own experiences producing and using research in non-academic settings. In so doing, we highlight the importance of strategy and accountability in one's ethnographic practices and accounts, advocating for an approach to ethnographic research that is reflexive and overtly responsive to the knowledge needs and change goals articulated by non-academic collaborators. Ultimately, we argue for a research stance that we describe as tactical responsivity, whereby researchers work with key collaborators and stakeholders to identify the strategic aims and audiences for their research, and develop ethnographic, analytic, and communicative practices that enable them to generate and mobilize the knowledge required to actualize their shared aims.

In line with the conference Ethnografeast III. Ethnography and the Public Sphere, from which it stems, this issue aims at equating uses and products of ethnography as they relate with each other within the context of the public sphere. Keeping the conference's commitment to interdisciplinarity, pluralism in genres and theoretical suasions, it focuses on the way political and civic uses of ethnography enter into the conceptual elaboration of its products, and, conversely, on how the design and implementation of ethnographic research may contribute to enhance public debate. ; Em linha com a conferência "Ethnografeast III: Etnografia e Esfera Pública", na qual teve origem, este dossier visa equacionar os usos e os produtos da etnografia e o modo como se articulam entre si na esfera pública. Mantendo os princípios de interdisciplinaridade, de pluralismo nos géneros e nas filiações teóricas que marcaram a conferência, pretende focar a maneira como os usos cívicos e políticos da etnografia podem tomar parte na elaboração conceptual das suas produções e, conversamente, no modo como o desenho e a realização da investigação etnográfica pode contribuir para a qualidade do debate público. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) ; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Center for Research in Anthroplogy ...