Matthew Brannan, Manuela Nocker and Mike Rowe and Dvora Yanow
The purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Journal of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.
Design/methodology/approach
This essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of “marked” ethnography.
Findings
This essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re‐emerging now?; and on related questions, on its way to engaging some of the key methodological issues in organizational ethnography that today merit attention.
Originality/value
The paper may be of value to readers who are interested in the method and in one researcher's conceptual‐methodological take on it.
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Keywords
Abstract
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The purpose of this paper is to assess the myths and challenges in the field of organizational ethnography and methodological angst.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the myths and challenges in the field of organizational ethnography and methodological angst.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is initially written as an invited keynote address for the 3rd Annual Joint Symposium on “Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences” (University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management, Liverpool, September 3‐5, 2008). It explores what might be distinctive about organizational ethnography and how that might be different from “anthropological” ethnography. In particular, it engages a kind of collective methodological performance anxiety among organizational studies scholars without formal training in anthropology who do ethnographic research.
Findings
The paper argues that it is time to be explicit about a variety of forms of professional angst that many ethnographic researchers within organizational studies carry which have not been discussed.
Originality/value
The paper is of value to those willing to consider the myths and challenges that need engaging and perhaps uprooting and casting off.
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I explore Bevir’s approach to interpretive social science and its implications for his study of governance. I make two arguments: one methodological and one substantive. First, I…
Abstract
I explore Bevir’s approach to interpretive social science and its implications for his study of governance. I make two arguments: one methodological and one substantive. First, I argue that we should think of the philosophy of interpretive social science as necessarily tied to some chosen method of recovering knowledge, be it local or expert knowledge. Without such a recovery of knowledge, interpretive analysis of local reasoning is impossible. Second, I argue that the recovery of not only expert knowledge - Bevir's primary focus - but also the local knowledge of citizens who are affected by these reforms, ought to play a central role in our understanding of governance.
Joanna Mason, E. Lianne Visser, Lindsey Garner-Knapp and Tamara Mulherin
This opening chapter introduces key debates in relation to informality in policymaking, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for the individual empirical chapters…
Abstract
This opening chapter introduces key debates in relation to informality in policymaking, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for the individual empirical chapters, beginning with a provocation for how informality can alternatively be understood. Through illustrating where gaps in understanding within current literature exist for how informality acquires meaning, and the physical and material relevance for how it manifests across contexts, this chapter introduces the three thematic clusters that thread through the book’s chapters: boundaries, knowledge mastery and networks. In doing so, it briefly positions each chapter in relation to these flexible and overlapping categories, drawing attention to how each chapter presents a different understanding of informality. Key to this chapter is our contention that while informality escapes definition, without binary or fixed conceptualisations of this concept we are better able to take in its fluidity and envisage how it is interwoven in everyday policy work and its human and non-human enactment. Underpinning this contention is a key contribution of this work, a proposition for a re-conceptualising of informality and formality as in|formality. Methodologically, this chapter argues that informality is better ‘shown’ than ‘told’ – and that this can be achieved through interpretive and socio-material approaches woven through disciplines that foreground narrative, ethnographic and creative approaches to research.