Content area
Full text
Managerial work is simply too complex and we know too little about it [to rely in such situations on] the indirect methods of research, such as [...] interviews. [...] Any [...] form of research that presupposes much knowledge of the subject and that does not enable the researcher to create new structure as [s /]he goes along [...] is certain to perpetuate the inadequate views that we now have of managerial work ([22] Mintzberg, 1970, p. 104, emphasis added).
With the launching of this journal, organizational ethnography comes still more fully into its own, its earlier presence in organizational studies having been driven underground by the behavioralist "revolution" of the 1970s. An institutional marker of a field of inquiry's scientific standing, a dedicated topical journal announces that field's arrival as a full-fledged member of the family of "disciplines" (including those interdisciplinary), joining such other markers as conferences, workshops and books equally dedicated to the topic. But what is organizational ethnography and why is it re-emerging now? This essay touches on these and related questions on its way to engaging some of the key methodological issues in organizational ethnography that today merit attention.
One of several forms of "marked ethnography" - ethnographic research conducted outside of what most consider its home base, in a disciplinary context in which it has to share space with other methods and perhaps even to defend its scientific bona fides against them - organizational ethnography joins political ethnography, educational ethnography and other such whose marking designates the kind of setting in which the ethnography is to be carried out, as well as, at times, the disciplinary domain that gives it a home. Why this development is deemed necessary today in organizational studies is an interesting question, given that the discipline numbers among its literature several ethnographic sorts of works, including foundational ones. Weber seems to have developed his ideas about bureaucratic organizational forms from observations of the Prussian military. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management rested on detailed, observation-based descriptions of what today might be called work practices. The Hawthorne studies' wiring room experiment findings reflected the observational presence of researchers. The Tavistock coal-face socio-technical systems (STS) analyses also developed out of researchers' presence among the miners, discovering the...