Juliette Koning and Can‐Seng Ooi
Researchers rarely present accounts of their awkward encounters in ethnographies. Awkwardness, however, does matter and affects the ethnographic accounts we write and our…
Abstract
Purpose
Researchers rarely present accounts of their awkward encounters in ethnographies. Awkwardness, however, does matter and affects the ethnographic accounts we write and our understanding of social situations. The purpose is to bring these hidden sides of organizational ethnography to the fore, to discuss the consequences of ignoring awkward encounters, and to improve our understanding of organizational realities.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents awkward ethnographic encounters in the field: encounters with evangelizing ethnic Chinese business people in Indonesia (Koning), and visiting an artist village in China (Ooi). Based on analysing their awkwardness, and in the context of a critical assessment of the reflexive turn in ethnography, the authors propose a more inclusive reflexivity. The paper ends with formulating several points supportive of reaching inclusive reflexivity.
Findings
By investigating awkward encounters, the authors show that these experiences have been left out for political (publishing culture in academia, unwritten rules of ethnography), as well as personal (feelings of failure, unwelcome self‐revelations) reasons, while there is much to discover from these encounters. Un‐paralyzing reflexivity means to include the awkward, the emotional, and admit the non‐rational aspects of our ethnographic experiences; such inclusive reflexivity is incredibly insightful.
Research limitations/implications
Inclusive reflexivity not only allows room for the imperfectness of the researcher, but also enables a fuller and deeper representation of the groups and communities we aim to understand and, thus, will enhance the trustworthiness and quality of our ethnographic work.
Originality/value
Awkwardness is rarely acknowledged, not to mention discussed, in organizational ethnography.
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Keywords
Paul F. Donnelly, Yiannis Gabriel and Banu Özkazanç‐Pan
The Guest Editors’ intent with this special issue is to tell tales of the field and beyond, but all with the serious end of rendering visible the largely invisible. This paper…
Abstract
Purpose
The Guest Editors’ intent with this special issue is to tell tales of the field and beyond, but all with the serious end of rendering visible the largely invisible. This paper aims to introduce the articles forming the special issue, as well as reviewing extant work that foregrounds the hidden stories and uncertainties of doing qualitative research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors advance their arguments through a literature review approach, reflecting on the “state of the field” with regard to doing research and offering new directions on reflexivity as an ethical consideration for conducting qualitative research.
Findings
Far from consigning the mess entailed in doing qualitative research to the margins, there is much to be learned from, and considerable value in, a more thoughtful engagement with the dilemmas we face in the field and beyond, one that shows the worth of what we are highlighting to both enrich research practice itself and contribute to improving the quality of what we produce.
Originality/value
This paper turns the spotlight onto the messiness and storywork aspects of conducting research, which are all too often hidden from view, to promote the kinds of dialogues necessary for scholars to share their fieldwork stories as research, rather than means to a publication end.
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– The aim is to identify the potential for establishing successful businesses operations or institutions emanating from returnees' mixed embeddedness in post-conflict Cambodia.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim is to identify the potential for establishing successful businesses operations or institutions emanating from returnees' mixed embeddedness in post-conflict Cambodia.
Design/methodology/approach
This explorative study of the two largest groups of returnees, the Cambodian French and the Cambodian Americans, compares these two categories through a review of literature on Cambodians in the USA and France and primary fieldwork data obtained through open interviews with Cambodian returnees in Cambodia.
Findings
Cambodian French and Cambodian American returnees show different entrepreneurial dispositions and hence play different roles in the Cambodian economy. While the all-embracing welfare system in France incapacitated both the self-sufficiency and community building among Cambodian diaspora, the market-driven model of social services in the USA induced the Cambodian diaspora with a commercial orientation. While both categories initiate institutional and business ventures, their contribution to social change in Cambodia is modest. Among the returnee entrepreneurs, the Chinese Cambodians seem to be most successful in their business ventures irrespective of their diasporic background.
Originality/value
The emerging scholarly interest in “immigrant transnationalism” tends to focus in particular on identity issues. Contrastingly, this article focuses on economic aspects of “immigrant transnationalism” in terms of its “mixed embeddedness” in both home and host country economies.
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Rita Järventie-Thesleff, Minna Logemann, Rebecca Piekkari and Janne Tienari
The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on carrying out “at-home” ethnography by building and extending the notion of roles as boundary objects, and to elucidate how…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on carrying out “at-home” ethnography by building and extending the notion of roles as boundary objects, and to elucidate how evolving roles mediate professional identity work of the ethnographer.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to theorize about how professional identities and identity work play out in “at-home” ethnography, the study builds on the notion of roles as boundary objects constructed in interaction between knowledge domains. The study is based on two ethnographic research projects carried out by high-level career switchers – corporate executives who conducted research in their own organizations and eventually left to work in academia.
Findings
The paper contends that the interaction between the corporate world and academia gives rise to specific yet intertwined roles; and that the meanings attached to these roles and role transitions shape the way ethnographers work on their professional identities.
Research limitations/implications
These findings have implications for organizational ethnography where the researcher’s identity work should receive more attention in relation to fieldwork, headwork, and textwork.
Originality/value
The study builds on and extends the notion of roles as boundary objects and as triggers of identity work in the context of “at-home” ethnographic research work, and sheds light on the way researchers continuously contest and renegotiate meanings for both domains, and move from one role to another while doing so.