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Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized and coordinated by text-mediated and text-regulated social organization. Actor-network Theory (ANT) is a theory/method that is concerned with how realities get enacted. ANT focuses on a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors (e.g., computers, documents, and laboratory equipment) and how the relations between them are constituted and how they are made to hang together to create certain realities. In this chapter, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT. We begin with an overview of IE and ANT and focus on their ontological and epistemological “shifts.” We then discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT, particularly from an IE stance. In doing so, we put these approaches into dialog and allude to some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of combining these approaches.

Imperial College in 1969 looked like a man's world; it was certainly difficult to locate a ladies’ room which was not apparently hastily constructed in a tight space as an afterthought to a great design. Yet I joined a powerhouse of women. Joan Woodward had already tempted Dorothy Wedderburn from Cambridge and together they had secured large sums of research monies from the Research Councils, Fords, Pilkingtons, ICI, the Post Office, the Coal Board, government departments, and other supporters who were each captivated by the promise of the work and rare combination of intellectual strength and practical concerns of its leader. With research funds flowing in abundance, driving passions to explore further the relationship between structure, technology, and performance, and very few specific commitments, Joan and Dorothy set about recruiting what was to be one of the largest groups of young researchers in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s.

When Joan Woodward died in 1971 at the age of 54, she left behind an enormous professional and personal legacy. This volume is a tribute to her work and life, to the profound effect she had on those she worked with, and to the important impact her work has had on how we think about organizations. It is also a tribute to a woman who succeeded in what was, at the time, overwhelmingly a man's world. That she was only the second woman appointed as a full professor at Imperial College London provides ample evidence of her success in the unlikely and very masculine setting of post-war Britain.

Joan interviewed me for my first job in 1969. Little did I realize what an opportunity I was about to be given. I was about to be offered a post with one of – if not the – United Kingdom's most eminent industrial sociologist (as we were called then) and to join the most exciting and dynamic group of young researchers in the subject at the time; a group that have all gone on to make their mark in various ways. I was recruited because I was interested in the organization and management of industrial research and development, and Joan wanted to test her ideas outside traditional manufacturing environments.

Far from being emotional deserts, organizations are full of emotion and passion. Increasingly, management has sought to harness emotion to increase work motivation, enhance customer service and work performance and the “emotional intelligence” advocates have sought to develop a toolkit for the smarter deployment of emotions in organizations. Using social constructionist and psychoanalytic ideas, the author argues that the management of emotions is problematic and precarious. Some emotions may be contained or re‐directed, but many arise from deeper unconscious sources and are impervious to learning. Two specific emotions, anxiety and love, are discussed.

I may get my account of Joan Woodward wrong because I am relying on my memory of decades-old events, and others may be more accurate. Joan was, I believe, teaching at a technical university when she was asked to do a survey of a number of Midland firms in terms of industrial policy. It was an odd choice for a female professor with an Oxford degree in medieval history, with no background in industrial policy let alone organizational theory. This may have been her advantage. She came to the task without the medieval theories of organizations that reigned. She looked at these firms in a way that no one in organizational theory had before. She wrote a preliminary report that said that because they use different technologies, they had different structures; the most successful matched their structures to their technologies – routine processes allowed centralized control, nonroutine ones required decentralization, to put it crudely.

The problem of how to weight technical expertise is familiar to anyone concerned with the design and implementation of company job evaluation schemes, and nowhere is this problem more acute than in Research and Development (R & D) departments. Here, typically, there are large numbers of highly qualified technical specialists who both deserve and demand promotion on the basis of their technical contribution. Yet, because technical staff have relatively few of the kind of responsibilities which carry high weighting on most job evaluation schemes, they rarely warrant higher grading on conventional criteria. And where they are promoted, their excellence as scientists wins them promotion into research management. In a recent study conducted by the author, concerning the reasons why R&D staff in a large UK company sought posts elsewhere in the organisation, the belief that promotion was easier to get outside R&D was one of the most important factors. A dual ladder system may offer a partial solution to this problem. By a dual ladder is meant the establishment of two parallel hierarchies within R & D: a management ladder and a ladder for technical specialists. The two ladders carry different responsibilities but equivalent rewards and status. In theory, at least, a distinction is made between responsibility for resources, located on the management ladder, and responsibility for technical merit, located on the technical ladder.