COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FIELD: UNDERSTANDING AND DOING ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY*

Journal of Munaxement Studies 28: 1 January 1991 0022-2380 $3.50

COMING TO TERMS W I T H T H E FIELD: UNDERSTANDING AND DOING

ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY *

MICHAEL ROSEN

Sundered Ground, Inc.

ABSTRACT

This article argues that ethnography is inadequately understood and recognized within administration science as a method for studying organizational culture. Ethnographic analyses of organizational cultures are largely absent from the administration science literature, primarily because such work derives from a social constructionist understanding of science. The knowledge of organizations thus provided is interpretive, denying the subject-object dichotomy inherent in mainstream empiricist applications of social analysis. In addition, whereas ethnographic analysis and writing is an appropriate method for studying culture, organizational ethnography is substantially different from ethnographic studies of whole (and largely foreign) societies. Formal organizations are both partial and specialized in comparison to general societal organization. The conceptual and practical toolkit the organizational ethnographer brings to the field and the writing table is thus tailored to this particular research arena, and is outlined here.

INTRODUCTION

This article explores some conceptual and practical dimensions of conducting and writing organizational ethnography. This work is pursued in the hope of encouraging an increased appreciation and application of ethnographic research and writing in the field of administrative research.[']

Ethnography is a method for both data collection and analysis, each irrevocably mated to the other. It is based upon achieving a conscious and systematic interpretation of the culture system operating for those the ethnographer observes to those who may eventually take in the ethnographer's end product, perhaps a film or video, a journal article, a conference presentation, or most commonly, a book.

Interpretation is the consummate goal of ethnography because meaning is understood in the social constructionist realm to derive from interpretation, where knowledge is significant only insofar as it is meaningful (Spooner, 1983, p. 3). We accept an ethnographic explanation as meaningful if it appears plausible against our own set of explicit and implicit assumptions about social process

Addres.r for reprints: Michael Rosen, Sundered Ground Inc. , 512 Broadway, Room 5M, New York, NY 10012, USA.

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(Douglas, 1975) and if we can associate the framework and data the ethnographer proposes against the interpretation framework we have systematized throughout our lives.

In ethnographic explanation a framework for producing meaning may be understood to derive ultimately from one or a combination of three fundamental forms. These are based in establishing: (1) the appropriateness of the reported data to human needs (functionalism); (2) the tendency of the reported data to reinforce social and cultural equilibrium (structural-functionalism), or ( 3 ) the consonance of the data with presumed meta-patterns of thought (structuralism)['] (Spooner, 1983, p. 3). Our current forms of ethnographic explanation may be understood to derive from one or a combination of these basic approaches.

While an ethnographic report may - and depending upon the writer frequently does - claim interpretive authority, each report is limited insofar as it derives from what is a partial perspective. Any interpretation is also only a second or third order construction. The ethnographer interprets that which he or she observes, experiences, or was told by others, recording this cultural data in field notes and consciously and unconsciously letting it settle against a tableau of meaning structures within his or her own imaginings. The resulting ethnographic interpretations are reworked as time and data accumulate and permit (Van Maanen, 1987, p. 75), mediated by experiences in and out of the field. What appears as written ethnography, therefore, is as much a product of the time and context in which it was written as of any purported truth of interpretation.

However, while the authority of an interpretation is never absolute, its value does not rest on whether an alternative explanation can account for the same data. Instead, its value rests on whether the explanation accounts for the data in a plausible manner, or whether we are able to provide our own account- ings for the reported data. An ethnographic work is valid even in this latter case, for the goal of generating meaning for the cultural data of another is accomplished.

Ethnographers study others to find out more about both themselves and others (Spooner, 1983, p. 3). In so doing, they change not only their own lives, but also the lives of those studied. In the process they bring the place of epistemology, the place of the meaning of data and enquiry, to the forefront of activity. As Spooner (1983, p. 3) notes, epistemological issues inform

how to select the data you [the ethnographer] work with, how you can logically delimit their context or universe, and see the relationship between the data and the purpose for which they were gathered, and - most important of all - their significance or what they will mean and how to test that meaning scientifically.

While the place of epistemology is largely overlooked in the mainstream empiricist applications of social science, it cannot be ignored in ethnographic work. A discussion of the epistemological underpinnings of a social constructionist approach is thus included in this work. First, however, the particular place of orgunizationul ethnography is considered in relationship to the general field of ethnographic research.

ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY 3

ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Most ethnography, Spooner (1983, p. 4) notes, is written about general forms of organization and general ways of thinking in particular contexts. By ‘general’ he intends ‘the ways in which particular people behave and think in their everyday lives without being consciously “organized for a specific objective’ (1983, p. 4). Organizational ethnography, on the other hand, is predominantly concerned with those social relations coalesced around a subset of goal-oriented activities. The rules, strategies, and meanings operating within such ‘structural poses’ (Gearing, 1958, p. 1149) are different from those in everyday life, but likely congruent with them (Spooner, 1983, p. 6). People interact with each other according to this action and meaning subset for the duration of the specialized activity.

A group of hunter-gatherers will subconsciously adopt a special set of social rules and behaviours as they set out on a raid (Spooner, 1983, p. 6). These will be in operation, however, for a short period of time relative to the year-by-year, nine-to-five routine of an IBM employee. This is to say that within our complex society structural poses have become formalized and elevated to a central social position; we perceive ourselves to be an ‘organizational society’ (Galbraith, 1983; Pfeffer, 1981).

While a specific definition of ‘rules’ will not be proffered here, the centrality of this concept may be approached in a general non-determinist fashion. Rather than being independent of context, following Wittgenstein (1953, pp. 80-l), we may understand the meaning of a rule to be obtained only in context, where rules are consulted to interpret what is perceived as intentional action. Weider (1974) notes this interpretational approach in his study of social process in a halfway house, writing that

instead of predicting behavior, the rule is actually employed as an interpretive device. It is employed by the observer to render any behavior he encounters intelligible i . e . , as coherent in terms of motivation (1974, p. 179).

There is a fundamental reflexivity here. Members of a social system generate rules through the very interpretive mechanisms used to decide the meaning and applicability of rules. ‘Just as the situation is consulted to construct the meaning of a rule, the rules are used to define the meaning of a situation’ (Leiter, 1980, p. 234).

The understanding of rules here is also embedded in the analogy of social behaviour to one or another form of game. While this analogy has derived from a greater variety of sources in the social (and mathematical) sciences - Wittgen- stein’s conception of forms of life as language games, von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s work on game theory, Goffman’s application of game imagery to an amazingly wide slice of American life - underlying them all, as Geertz (1983, p. 25) writes,

is the view that human beings are less driven by forces than submissive to rules, that the rules are such as to suggest strategies, the strategies are such as to inspire actions, and the actions are such as to be self-rewarding - pour le sport.

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Games are little universes of meaning in which some things can be done and others cannot, Geertz notes. Just as one cannot score a goal in baseball, one cannot lead a community in prayer on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. From this perspective society exists as a plurality of conventionalized arenas of which formal organizations present - to a greater or less extent - their own hermetically sealed worlds.

Accordingly, an ethnographic interpretation of forms of behaviour and thought within general society will be different from a description of those relations enacted within the nine-to-five space owned by a British Petroleum or Bankers Trust. Here a subset of people are organized around an ascriptively recognized set of goals. As Spooner (1983, p. 4) notes, while such organizations may be complex, they are not complex in the same sense as complex society is complex, ‘because these formal organizations are both partial (that is, not a whole society) and specialized (organized for a specific objective or set of objectives): all relationships within any one of them are rationalized in terms of the end product or products which are the raison d’itre of the firm’ (emphasis added). Everyone within such organizations has a formal, explicit status and role (frequently defined in official documents). People are to interact with each other according to these statuses, which are likely to be different from how the same people would interact if they met in circumstances completely separate from the organization; ‘everyday social awareness’ is suspended as people interact within the organizational space (Spooner, 1983, p. 4). However, the longer people interact with each other within this formalized space, ‘the more that general social awareness from the outside everyday world seeps back‘ into organizational relations (Spooner, 1983, p. 5).

This inside/outside dichotomy is particularly dynamic - full of age, sexual, religious, political, ethnic, social, and aesthetic tensions - and perhaps may best be conceived as a continuous labour by those controlling an organization to punctuate its experiences and meanings from its wider culture (Weick, 1977, p. 287). More so than the culture of a general social group - and particularly those well insulated groups traditionally favoured by anthropologists - organizational culture is likely to be rough-edged and contested (Van Maanen, 1987, p. 109). It is by definition partial and frequently ambiguous. Given that organizations are centred around the interests of at least a segment of their memberships, organizational culture is also palpably political.

Finally, another peculiarity of organizational ethnography concerns the relationship of the ethnographer to the group he or she studies. Ethnographers traditionally invaded foreign cultures to collect their data. Organizational ethnographers, on the other hand, largely study organizations peopled by individuals like themselves. Hayano (1 982) terms this ‘auto-ethnography’, the cultural study of one’s own people. Such work provides a special set of concerns that must be addressed by one engaged in i t .

The remainder of this article will unfold with a discussion of the social constructionist approach to data generation and analysis, and will relate this to the concept of culture. General information about the process of conducting ethnographic research and analysing ethnographic data will then be introduced. Within this, ethnography is argued to be more than an arrangement of field techniques. It is a method of enquiry combining social theoretical ideas with techniques for data collection. The social theory of the method and its data form


an inseparable whole. Finally, the state of organizational ethnography - its possibilities for advancement and reasons for a halting start - will be explored within the context of administration science.

ENACTING REALITY AND CONDUCTING RESEARCH

The ethnographer’s method of collecting data is to live among those who are the data. He or she tries to learn the subjects’ rules for organizational life, to interact with them for a frequency and duration of time ‘sufficient’ to understand how and why they construct their social world as it is and to explain it to others.

The ethnographer, however, works on the margin of administration science. His or her data is not only primarily qualitative, but is derived from a social constructionist perspective towards the nature of social process. Hence, according to the dominant norms in the administration field, such data are inferior to quantitative data - and in particular, positivist data - for the purpose of scientijic enquiry (Morgan, 1983). ‘What is the validity of your results’, an ethnographer is asked. ‘Is your work generalizable?’ ‘Is it replicable?’ ‘How much variance do you account for?’ And so on.

Social constructionism mounts a challenge to mainstream social science in challenging some of its central assumptions as implied above. Most notably, as Kaplan (1964, p. 131) comments, there has been an empiricist tradition in scholarly research, ‘from Hume through Mill to Russell, in which a distinction is made between “hard” and ‘‘soft’’ data, according to whether they are purely observational or contain an inferential element’. Within this tradition scientific knowledge is understood to be based on the former, that is, on ‘readings’ which do not interpret but instead record a ‘perceptual content’, and are thus ‘free from conceptual contamination’ (Kaplan, 1964, p. 131).

The interpretive, social constructionist approach, on the other hand, pre- supposes that members of any social system - including formal organizations - enact their particular worlds through social interaction. Reality is a social product, which cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective meanings of the social actors involved in its enactment (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Geertz, 1983; Schutz and Luckmann, 1974).

‘Since we can perceive nothing except through the knowledge structure in which perception is embedded’, Astley (1985, p. 498) writes, we cannot speak of a non- social reality, because the knowledge structure through which reality is inter- preted and thus created is socially constructed. This knowledge structure is what anthropologists and other social constructionists commonly refer to as ‘culture’, a constructed document or public rhetoric (Geertz, 1980, p. 102) developed over time through the shared, accumulated experience of system members, giving rise to such system-specific ideational elements as assumptions, ideas, values, and norms. These are ‘envehicled meanings’ (Geertz, 1980, p. 135), with symbols being the vehicles through which communication occurs. Symbols are thus the ‘objects, acts, relationships, or linguistic formations that stand ambiguously for a multiplicity of meanings, evoke emotions, and impel men to action’ (Cohen, 1974, p. 23). They are thus anything that signifies an intersubjective process, and thus public (Geertz, 1980, p. 135).

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While culture emerges from action, it continuously acts back upon it as well, recreating and transforming action through the provision of meaning. T o function in a setting, and to gain meaning from behaviour, culture systems are more or less internalized. At the heart of organizational ethnography, therefore, lies the assumption that, because corporate culture is a concept about meaning and its construction, about ideas, values, beliefs and assumptions, it might reasonably be studied from a social constructionist, interpretivist perspective, from a perspective exploring how the shared meaning system of the members of any particular organization is created and recreated in relationship to the social processes of organization.

From this perspective we may understand the ‘truth‘ of organizational research also as a social construct, as an outgrowth of and simultaneously embedded in the culture of its producers. Researchers in organization analysis actively construe the objectivity they find in observation and conclusion, precisely as tribesmen find ‘truth‘ in their ‘objective’ observation that epidemic has been unleashed among them by incest, or that game animals have disappeared from the forests because of their quarrelling (Douglas, 1975, p. 5). Each observational group projects its moral order upon the universe, only to assume subsequently a dualism between its knowledge structure and the universe it finds around itself. While we recognize this process of social construction at work in unfamiliar societies, the regularity of our own universe is built on our relative inability to do so when considering our world, when considering both our own ‘commonsense’ and our formal knowledge (Geertz, 1983). We do not readily discover the constraints we have construed and subsequently find in observing our own universe (Douglas, 1975, p. 5).

The aim of social constructionist research is then to understand how members of a social group, through their participation in social process, enact their particular realities and endow them with meaning. The realm of meaning - the world of the symbol, and thus of culture - must be integrated with the realm of behaviour in this form of investigation. Thus, while the meaning of behaviour is not problematic in positivist research (Taylor et al., 1973, p. 20) - the important thing is that the object can be measured - meaning is the focus of investigation in the social constructionist case. The task of the researcher is to describe and analyse the world from the perspective of those involved with its performance. As Denzin (1983, p. 132) notes, because ‘man is caught in webs of significance, feeling, influence and power that he has woven, then the interpretive task is one of unraveling and revealing the meanings persons give to their webs’.

A social constructionist perspective is based on the assumption that the researcher must get ‘close’ to those generating (or enacting) data, closer than is the case with positivist aproaches, where the researcher stands apart from the subject. In the latter instance the researcher formulates theories and the questions or experiments to test these, which are predominantly phrased in the underlying assumptions and actual language of the researcher. A border - the questionnaire or experiment as research instrument - is erected between the researcher and the subject.

The social constructionist researcher, on the other hand, actively seeks to deconstruct borders between herself or himself and the subject. This effort involves not only the absence of the use of preconstructed, rigid research instruments,

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but the willingness and capacity on the part of the researcher to drift and reformulate in the research site. This occurs as the researcher’s conceptions are applied and tested against the data being collected. Through ongoing iterations of data with the researcher’s understanding of the actions and ideas of those being observed, the ‘theoretical model’ of the researcher will likely come to fit the ‘facts’ of the situation. This process is not unlike that of the blacksmith exercising his or her craft. Through repeated poundings of a softened metal the smith forges an instrument fitting its intended uses. Social constructionist research is thus an exploration in a basic sense. The researcher has some notion of where she or he is destined, but is willing and expecting to explore uncharted ground encountered in the process.

The vast difference between the precepts of the positivist and social constructionist forms of analysis reveals not merely a difference in approach between the two - where one perspective may substitute for the other depending upon the whim of the researcher - but a fundamentally different goal underlying the work of those within both camps. One working from a positivist position accepts that those processes relevant for study can be reduced to independent and dependent variables, which may then be captured through questionnaires or experiments, and predominantly analysed using quantitative techniques. Such research presumes causality, and seeks its explanation. It seeks to answer the question of ‘why’ certain social phenomena take place (Denzin, 1983, p. 132).

The basis of social constructionist research, on the other hand, lies in interpretation. Geertz (1973)’ borrowing from Gilbert Ryle, identifies this form of interpretation as ‘thick description’, a statement of that observed among a social group based upon action and the meanings that lay before and follow from such action. Thick description, therefore, is an interpretation blending behaviour and meaning. For example, Ryle asks us to consider the case of two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. One boy has an involuntary muscle twitch. The other is engaging in a conspiratorial signal to a friend. To an observer acting in an ‘1-am-the-camera’ mode of recording and analysis, both acts are precisely the same. If the observer reports them as such, primarily focusing on the act devoid of meaning, the audience is given a ‘thin description’ of the occurrence.

Thick description, on the other hand, is concerned with telling the difference between a twitch and a wink. It consists in creating a ‘stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures’ in accordance with Heidegger’s reminder that ‘nothing is anything without a context’ (cited in Van Maanen, 1985, p. 119).

Ethnographic analysis, therefore, provides a context of meaning upon which to hang pieces of action. Geertz (1973, p. 18) notes that ‘interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens’, where ‘a good interpretation takes us into the heart of that of which it is an interpretation’. Put differently, ‘a piece of interpretation consists in tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into an inspectable form’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 7).

This brings the curious place of ethnography into focus. A balance must be reached - relative to the ethnographer’s particular theoretical orientation - between ‘thick description’ and ‘diagnosis’, between capturing the meaning ‘particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge just attained demonstrates about the

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society in which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 27).

As the outcome of empirical research, thick description is well illuminated by Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory. Giddens views structure as a recursively organized set of rules and resources, understandable only in duality with human agency. Herein, humans are reflexive, knowledgeable agents, conditioned by and at the same time constructing structure. Social process is richly analysed by ignoring neither structure nor agency. We must analyse social structure so that we can see how it requires and reacts to agency, and we must analyse human agency so that we can grasp how all social action involves social structure (Bernstein, 1986, p. 240).

Empirically from this perspective, social process is not captured in hypothetical deductions, covariances, and degrees of freedom. Instead, understanding social process involves getting inside the world of those generating it, and constructing an interpretation of ‘other people’s constructions of what they and their com- patriots are up to’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 9). Nuance and uniqueness are as important in this endeavour as is normally frequent behaviour.

These differences in aim between the positivst and social constructionist approaches are sometimes overlooked in favour of the pretence that both forms of research are, in fact, striving to reveal the same thing. Thus, in an appraisa1 of the research on symbolism in organizations, Staw (1985, pp. 117-18) criticizes culture research for not achieving the criteria defining the ‘goodness’ of positivist research. For example, he notes that ‘to my knowledge, no one has yet put together a symbolically-based theory of organizational behavior that is both persuasive and falsifiable’ (Staw, 1985, p. 117). Similarly, research into the symbols - or the meaning systems - of organizations should, according to Staw, enable prediction, the sine qua non of positivist research.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no comparative tests of symbolic versus conventional [positivist] coding in predicting important organizational outcomes or relationships, yet such research will likely be prerequisite to gaining a foothold in organizational science. . . . Beyond the hand-waving and travelog that characterize most articles devoted to symbolism, we are still waiting for the real contributions to organizational science -- the kind that will either help bridge qualitative and quantitative data or bring new predictive powers to our understanding of organizational life (1985, pp. 117-18).

Organizational research which does not aim at prediction, which is not concerned with testing the validity of hypo-deductive statements is, according to this perspective, not science. And that which is not science has no place within the scholarly literature. Presumably, social constructionist research would be acceptable if it were transformed from interpretive to predictive, from soft to rigorous, from subjective to objective. But then, of course, the approach would be something other than it is.


AN EXAMPLE: ETHNOGRAPHY AND CONTROL

In this section I explore one concept in organizational analysis, the notion of organizational control, from a perspective which might reasonably be adopted in an ethnography focusing on control. I do this to contrast standard organizational focuses on control with the contextually grounded approaches which might arise from ethnographic studies of formal organizations, the intent to expand an understanding of ethnography itself.

Control is taken in this context to be control over the labour process, the organization and direction of the process of labour in formal organization. Control as understood herein includes control over the material and conceptual organization of production tasks, the knowledge to carry out such tasks, any resulting products, and the social organization of workers within the process. It is in this sense that control is an existentially two-sided relationship, involving an exchange of labour power for wage and the direction of such labour. And placed in sociohistoric context it is a rich topic for exploration, involving significantly more than an instrumental exchange of work for money. For on the moral plane it involves an exchange of such commodities of the human fabric as loyalty, self- definition, love, sacrifice, and so on. And it is in this admission to context that organizational ethnography stakes its claim. O n one hand, the direction and structure of control in formal organizations may be taken as so self-evident and natural as to be completely unproblematic, merely a commonsense aspect of things. This is the approach yet dominating organization analysis, derived from Barnard (1938), as Perrow (1979, pp. 78-9) indicates, from whom much of the philosophical orientation in organization analysis continues to spring. Barnard viewed bureaucratic organization as equitable, moral, and functional for members from all its levels. He understood authority to emanate from the lower levels of organization and flow upwards, with the rule of management consequently in the interests of all. The labour process may not be understood herein as anything other than a natural and equal exchange between equal partners. Managers co-ordinate work under the auspices of willing workers. As Perrow (1979, p. 88) writes, for Barnard ‘organizations were the measure of man’s co- operative instincts and were [thus] essentially democratic in nature and benign in their influence’. Critically reflexive aspects of the analysis of authority - and hence of control - and the problematic areas of organization studies that it entails, such as power, conflict, and individual goals and interests, are fundamentally ignored as ‘outside of his [Barnard’s] model’ (1979, p. 88), and eventually little studied in normal organization analysis, especially from a stance premising sociohistoric context. Instead, questions of legitimacy, power, authority, and so on are normally considered from a position buttressing the status quo power and authority structures underlying our organizations and society. Such questions are thus essentially decontextualized and sociohistorically deproblematized, so much so that the discipline of organizational analysis essentially adopts the political perspective of management - how to best control workers to increase their performance - presuming this objectification of the managerial interest to be natural, to be apolitical and ahistorical, hence objectifying the reification of managerial dominance.

On the other hand, an organizational ethnography addressing the concept

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of control might reasonably do so from a perspective recognizing its dialectical composition, what might be referred to as a dialectic of control. Control and the structures which channel it are understood herein as outcomes of human, social action. To a greater or lesser extent control is a conscious outcome of human planning, and is thus neither natural, neutral nor immutable. But once developed and deployed in organizations it assumes an objective reality of its own, a reified presence, which subsequently determines behaviour and social relations. An ethnographically based understanding of control would thus likely account for the interplay of human agency and structural channelling described herein, akin to Giddens’ (1979) understanding of structuration. Giddens emphasizes that social phenomena are simultaneously comprised of both subjective and objective dimensions, and as such organization control has an essentially dual nature. This accounts for the influence of control structures on subjective action, involving both the constraint of some behaviour and the facilita- tion of others, including the resistance to control.

Consider, for example, the organizational ethnographies of Kunda (1986a) and Rosen (1985; 1988). Both researchers focus on culture and control, Kunda in an internationally known US computer manufacturer and Rosen in a US regional advertising agency. Both ethnographers present a substantially similar system of control to be in operation in the organizations they each studied, a system based in the ideational realm of culture. As Kunda notes, in Tech ‘culture,’ replaces ‘structure’ as an organizing principle to explain reality and guide action. A management focusing on consent through an emphasis on culture, Kunda (1986, p. 58) explains, enables a deconstruction of the

sharp and clear distinctions between categories of people that are the hallmark of organization. Instead, the image is of a collection of individuals fulfilling the membership role. Marginal people and groups are only peripherally described, and the focus is on organic unity and similarity.

As people buy into this culture of organization - through but not limited to the symbolic action of organizational rituals and dramas, group and individual selection, and so on - a definition of self and organization is forged in which Tech membership is understood to involve a binding emotional commitment. As this is the case, boundaries between self and organization become blurred, work becoming a largely religious, transcendental experience. Tech membership is projected as similar to family membership, involving an inextricable connectedness to a social group one cannot morally shirk or desert. And as work is transformed into a transcendental experience, as ideational control is played out on the terrain of the control of attitudes, orientations and emotions of committed members, an organic unity is hopefully achieved wherein worker productivity is high and ultimately profitable.

Working from a similar understanding of culture and control, Rosen (1985; 1988) focuses on the symbolic dynamics of organizational life - and particularly organizational control - through the exploration of two organizational ceremonies he encountered during a year of participant observation study in an advertising agency, one an annual agency breakfast, the other an annual Christmas party. In the breakfast analysis, for example, Rosen proposes that a cammunitas - a


temporary levelling of structured relations, an escape from the organized self, an achievement of ‘antistructure’ (Turner, 1969) - is dramatically enacted in surroundings of finery, formality, and food. Agency executives give department pep talks, they tell jokes to their troops, seniority is venerated, and in one instance agency employees are urged to support the United Way only minutes before they are told of a salary freeze. Rosen sees such organizational ceremonies as social dramas, an instrument through which the social order is reinforced and political control sustained. Each part of the dramatic performance of the breakfast, for example, rationalizes the control of management and neutralizes the stratifica- tion of roles, prestige, and remuneration. Control becomes the terrain of consciousness resting on a foundation of contest and struggle. Management’s efforts to exert control and to transmit feelings of harmony, unity, continuity and order require extraordinary effort. Thus, Rosen (1985, p. 48) proposes, control and the manipulation of culture through which it is attained and main- tained are ‘built on the edge of chaos’, management’s work in large part being the continuing legitimation of the culture of contemporary formal organization.

And the ethnographer’s work in this instance lies largely in deconstructing these richly textured social realities, laying bare power relations and intending interpretation for other audiences in time and place.

RECAPPING THE FIEI,D

While the theoretical space of organizational ethnography has been established here, some general concerns surrounding the ethnographic endeavour will also be considered. These include getting a background for research, positioning one’s self in the field, writing up one’s results, and seeing advances in the approach. In addition, the state of organizational ethnography and some practical difficulties in conducting, writing, publishing, and surviving the ethnographic route are also discussed.

However, a cookbook approach towards collecting data and writing up one’s results is rejected here. The divergence of theoretical orientations existing within organizational ethnography (primarily deriving from wider disputes within anthropology and sociology) make it unreasonable to suggest a list of conceptual categories the ethnographer should employ much beyond those basic to a social constructionist perspective. In addition, this divergence in approach makes it unreasonable to assume that a common checklist of empirical properties to be covered by the ethnographer while in the field might be employed, while something of a minimally acceptable table of contents for the finished piece of ethnographic writing is similarly impossible to fix. Such common approaches were employed in the early days of anthropology (Kuper, 1973; Langness, 1974), but were abandoned as diversity flourished.

ORGANIZATIONAL EI’HNOGRAPHY REDUX

According to Van Maanen (1979, p. 540), a principal aim of ethnography - and here he is specifically speaking of organizational ethnography - is to ‘uncover and

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explicate the ways in which people in particular work settings come to understand, account for, take action, and otherwise manage their day-to-day situation’. The goal of ethnography in general is to decode, translate, and interpret the behaviours and attached meaning systems of those occupying and creating the social system being studied. Ethnography, therefore, is largely an act of sense-making, the translation from one context to another of action in relationship to meaning, and meaning in relationship to action. Ethnographic description, however, is not to be confused with the recountings that would be provided by the actors themselves in a social setting. It is, instead, a construction cast in the theory and language of the describer and his or her audience. It is a second-order recounting (Geertz, 1973, p. 15).

By definition, ethnography is a longitudinal method, geared towards a process- based understanding of organizational life. As such, when properly reported, ethnographic data does not provide a snapshot-like view of behaviour and action, but instead focuses on their flow and interrelationships. Unlike the survey instrument researcher, who concentrates on isolated data points - those individuals responding to a questionnaire - the ethnographer focuses on a great number of actors in the social system being studied - in fact, the greatest number possible, restricted only by time, location and social norms. At best, the ethnographer would like to observe and record everything. As Ltvi-Strauss (1963, p. 280) states,

on the observational level, the main - one could almost say the only - rule is that all the facts should be carefully observed and described, without allowing any theoretical preconcpetion to decide whether some are more important than others.

While it is not possible to capture ‘all the facts’, it is true that the ethnographer does well to cast her or his data-gathering net quite broadly within his or her frame of reference for defining and locating facts. This wide casting is recom- mended to capture an extensive slice of organizational life to be formulated and reformulated while in the field, but also systematically examined once the ethnographer leaves the field and begins to write.

Because the ethnographer lives in the site, she or he is witness to a range of events - behaviours and meanings - to which one would not otherwise be exposed. Processes largely unreachable by the positivist researcher thus constitute part of the day-to-day data towards which the ethnographer is geared. In this sense, the ethnographic method expands the range of data units that are considered significant to capture. For example, the whole range of the symbolic - the realm of meaning - is fundamental to the ethnographer, and occupies a great amount of his or her concept formulation and data gathering time. As noted, however, the symbolic realm is largely problematic for the positivist researcher, both theoretically and empirically, and is thus essentially ignored.

WATCHING AND TALKING VERSUS ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography is known as the method of ‘participant observation’, indicating that a researcher is directly involved in the life of a social group, collecting data

ORGANIZATIONAL E T H N O G R A P H Y 13

through various forms of observation, interviewing, memo and file reading (in formal organizations), and SO on.

Ethnography is more than a collection of mechanisms for gathering and writing about data. At its best, ethnography is a method of ‘seeing’ the components of social structure and the processes through which they interact. Interviewing, observation, archival reviews, participation, and so on must be accompanied by an overlay of social theoretical ideas concerning meaning and action. These give texture to the social process recorded in the research site. Social theory provides the foundation from which an interpretive, social constructionist analysis may be conducted. In the case of organizational ethnographers, theory is a tool used to strip down the cultural blinkers we wear when studying organizations existing in the same overall cultural space we inhabit. To practise ethnography, therefore, it is not sufficient to be a participant and observer in the rawest sense. The ethnographer must also work from a conscious concept of culture, and organize her or his material accordingly.

Sanday (1979, p. 529) takes this position when she proposes a dichtomy between doing ‘ethnography’, on the one hand, and ‘paradigmatic ethnography’ on the other. She defines ‘paradigmatic ethnography’ as the forms of interpretive work done by ‘an observer trained in or familiar with the anthropological approach’. In distinction, ‘ethnography’ is the cultural mirroring or interpretation conducted by poets, novelists, journalists, film makers, advertisers, park bench sitters, and any others who observe and analyse culture but do so without employing a model from the anthropological and/or sociological literature.

Within this ‘professional’ literature, of course, there are competing and contra- dicting models of culture and sociocultural process. This article is not intended, however, to introduce or review these. Such work has been done by others (see Langness, 1974; Ortner, 1984; Sanday, 1979; Singer, 1968; Smircich, 1983). But it is only from reading the extant literature that one develops a template of the social theoretical ideas that give depth to the data collection and analysis mechanisms of ethnography. The field techniques of this approach are meaningful only in relationship to the theoretical problems of ethnographers (Epstein, 1967 , p. xi). It is for this reason that the major manuals on techniques for conducting fieldwork have primarily consisted of collected essays discussing theoretical problems rather than the data gathering techniques themselves (Epstein, 1967; Naroll and Cohen, 1970). The implicit understanding has been that ‘thick description’ flows primarily from the conceptual toolkit the ethnographer has developed along the way to the field, rather than from the specific recording mechanisms used once he or she has arrived.

G E T T I N G A B A C K G R O U N D FOR ORGANIZATIONAL E T H N O G R A P H Y

As Geertz (1983, p. 74) notes, anthropologists have traditionally studied societies of one particular form, this commonly understood in juxtaposition to that which the anthropologist inhabits, the latter relatively readily and without much contro- versy identified as ‘modern’. Whether identified as savage, primitive, simple, or merely traditional, those societies the anthropologist has traditionally gone off to study have been understood as different from the home of the anthropologist.

14 MICHAEL ROSEN

To Geertz - and Geertz’s view is in this case rather similar to the norm in contemporary anthropology - the difference between the modern and the traditional may

be put in terms of the degree to which there has grown up around the ancient tangle of received practices, accepted beliefs, habitual judgements, and untaught emotions those squared off and straightened out systems of thought and action - physics, counterpoint, existentialism, Christianity, engineering, jurisprudence, Marxism - that are so prominent a feature of our own land- scape that we cannot imagine a world in which they, or something resembling them, do not exist . . . we know, of course, that there is little chemistry and less calculus in Tikopea or Timbuctu, and that bolshevism, vanishing-point perspective, doctrines of hypostatic union, and disquisitions on the mind-body problem are not exactly universally distributed phenomena (Geertz 1983, p. 74).

Nor are the formal organizations which are the academic domain of organization scholars. While anthropologists have traditionally studied kinship and community organizations (Wallace, 197 1, p. 1) - those organizational forms characterizing the terrain of traditional society - organization scholars have placed their focus on the formal, administrative organization, which is the ground-tone of our society precisely as are those ‘squared off and straightened out systems of thought and action’ of which Geertz spoke. And because, in the case of the organizational researcher, the studied and the studier most often inhabit the same society - as opposed to the anthropologist going off to study ‘more or less isolated and “exotic” communities’ (Epstein, 1967, p. xii) and likely confronted by a startling combination of palpable differences in geography, the built environment, temperature, humidity, dress, speech, spiritual beliefs, economic and produc- tive behaviours, skin colour, common-sense patterns, and so on from the anthropologist’s baggage - the organizational researcher is presented with a special set of epistemologically-based problems to overcome. These are based in a logical inversion of what Geertz (1983, p. 44) terms the truth of the doctrine of cultural relativism, wherein ‘we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own’. Given the nature of their work, anthropologists have been historically concerned with how one comes to understand - if such understanding can be attained - the understandings of others. The ethnographically inclined organizational researcher, on the other hand, must be concerned not with understanding the clearly strange or the exotic, worrying that the truly foreign might never be made familiar, but with staying at home and claiming sufficient bravado to transform that which is culturally familiar into a subject upon which to interpret understandings. She or he must seek to attain an essentially self-reflexive understanding wherein the ethnographer encounters the forces of his or her own culture, seeking to stand sufficiently distant to conceive its gestalt and sufficiently near to grasp the local minutiae of its detail, this process - at its best - achieving what Geertz (1983, p. 69) terms a ‘continuous dialectical tacking’ between the parts and the whole ‘in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’. And the ethnographer labours within a hermeneutic of interpretation in which the multiple meanings already inherent


in the dialogue between subjects, author, and readers are further mediated through the interconnectedness of all within the same culture frame. The ethnographer accordingly then struggles with tools of interpretation to gather, formulate, and present understandings and their artefacts, taking the familiar minutiae of everyday organizational lives - corporate charts, business suits, luncheon meetings, department meetings, hallway conversations, annual reviews and raises, profit goals, widgets sold, bathroom banter, birthday parties - and weaves them into a presentation in which, when it works, we are met full force with the equally enlightening and disequilibriating implications of viewing a world which is our own largely demystified within its own cultural frame.

As noted, then, anthropologists went to study foreign societies on the assumption that an outsider would be able to understand and analyse the culture of a group more keenly than those who carry it. ‘It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water’, Kluckhohn has remarked (in Wolcott, 1975, p. 115). O r as Agar (1980) phrases it, the ethnographer purposefully assumes the position of a ‘professional stranger’, for an outsider is presumably free of the same blinkers the carriers of a culture wear - albeit dressed in another set - and is therefore more able holistically to interpret it. The intent of this position is that the ethnographer has a heightened sense of awareness when in a context not her or his own, and is therefore more sensitive to the nuance of things.

However, to conduct their work all ethnographers, whether of the foreign or the familiar, might reasonably acquire a basic background in the thought and craft of the approach. Firstly, the ethnographer might gain contextual anchoring through schooling in the area of sociocultural studies. He or she might also choose similarly to be familiar with at least a cross section of the classic ethnographic studies. Without this background - even if the acquired conceptual frameworks are then consciously and systematically rejected on grounds of epistemological inadequacy, as thunderously represented in recent works by Clifford, Marcus, and their associates (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), and so on - the ethnographer is to some extent akin to one wishing to be a mechanic but without conceptual and physical toolkits.

Beyond education, however, and before starting an extensive study, it is likely advantageous for the prospective ethnographer to have had some field practice, perhaps as a student in a methods course. Even a short stay in an unfamiliar setting may provide training the ethnographer will find useful when she or he engages in an extensive study (Sanday, 1979, p. 528).

In addition, like ethnographers in anthropology, it is a goal of the task that the organizational ethnographer comes to learn the ‘language’ of those people she or he has chosen to study, one relevant starting point being the group’s spoken vernacular. Depending upon the type of organization, this likely means possessing a working knowledge in some of the functional areas of business. A strong familiarity with the basic definitions, techniques, and measurements in these areas helps not only in gaining organization access, credibility, and a common ground for discussion with managers and owners, but is also fundamental in understanding their concerns, motivations, and actions. Acquiring an MRA degree is one method of gaining this ethnographic background, but is by no means the only route.

Beyond possessing this general business background, however, the ethnographer’s

16 MICHAEL ROSEN

work will gain further grounding to the extent that the researcher has knowledge of the specific industry he or she is entering. This may be gained by reading, training, andlor experience, and in part depends upon the type of industry and organization being studied. In turn, the type and degree of working knowledge gained influences what the ethnographer ‘sees’ and subsequently writes about, because, as noted earlier, the data processed in the research site are filtered by the social theoretical ideas and practical abilities of the researcher.

SOME CONCERNS IN CONDUCTING ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The following section introduces four practical concerns proffered here as possibly relevant to the prospective organizational ethnographer in designing her or his study. These concerns are based merely on this author’s experiences in conducting and writing ethnographies of various organizational types and research designs.13] This section is not, therefore, presented as other than an empirically advised sketch undoubtedly incomplete.

Nelson (1969) claims that only by ‘direct participation’ in the affairs of a social group can the ethnographer come to understand the actions and meanings of those who constitute the group. Most ethnographers, on the other hand, approach their research as observers of participants. The organizational ethnographer must similarly make a choice between conducting research as an employee of a company or as an outside observer.

The direct participant hopes that by being what the members of the organization are, he or she will be able to give a more incisive account of organizational social processes and structure than by being merely an observer. While there is reasonable logic to this approach, the trade-offs between doing research as an observer and as a participant are complex, and should be considered before entering the research site. At least four factors are relevant in making this decision. These are working knowledge, organizational secrecy, trust, and role definition.

Working knowledge consists of the technical expertise and emotional feelings which derive from doing a particular type of work. Such knowledge does not emerge in a one-sided manner solely from performing the actions of a task, but also from engaging in the social relations in which the task is embedded.

An observer has less access to immediate working knowledge than does a participant. In turn, the participant’s knowledge is not necessarily limited to her or his immediate area of task performance, because this knowledge also derives from participating in the overarching social relations of one’s organization.

When those in anthropology recommend ‘direct participation’ as a mode of field study they do so for the working knowledge that is gained from first-hand participation in the activities of those being studied. Expertise in performing the tasks of the subjects presumably leads to a deeper understanding of their sociocultural existence.

Organizational secrecy: By definition, bureaucratic organizations are based on secrecy (Simmel, 1950). Organizational policies, directions, and decisions are commonly safeguarded for strategic advantage. Organizational records are private, and entire departments and buildings might be off-limits for employees (and especially outside observers) without the correct level of clearance.


Depending upon the ethnographer’s research interests, access to guarded information and people might be crucial to a ‘successful’ work. The ethnographer must thus carefully select his or her organizational role in full recognition of such secrecy,

Trust: When an ethnographer occupies an official place in an organization - an ‘office’ located in physical and temporal space - he or she is part of the first-order politics of the organization, and therefore not someone to be fully trusted by others located in the same political arena. This is opposed to how one might trust an ‘outsider’; the fellow passenger on a plane ride, the psychologist, the priest as confessor, and to an extent, the ethnographer as observer. He or she is an outsider knowledgeable of the organization, yet at the same time probably marginal to its political processes.

The issue of secrecy discussed above is related to this issue of trust. The former is tied to the instrumental relations of organization, the means-ends processes of social intercourse, while the latter is tied to the moral relations among individuals, ‘friendship’-like relations developed and pursued as ends in and of themselves.

The instrumental and moral dimensions of a relationship are clearly embedded within the same discourse between actors. From a means-ends perspective, the ethnographer as researcher and/or participant - an occupier of a role in instrumental relations - will be informed according to the perceived utility or disutility of doing so. O n the other hand, the ethnographer as part of a friendship relationship will be informed of the discourse of the organization insofar as this is germane to the discourse of the friendship. These two aspects of communicating are not infrequently in conflict.

Role definition: As an insider, that is, as a direct participant, the ethnographer presumably shares the group’s general framework of values and beliefs and is there to work, to perform an organizational duty.

Collecting ethnographic data, on the other hand, is a pursuit requiring conceptual and physical action in contradiction to purely acting as an organization member. This includes such activities as asking extensive questions concerning social and cultural relations, recording information while in the workplace, and so on. In short, researching while one ‘should be’ working. Switching back and forth between the organization participant (inside) and scholarly data gatherer (outside) roles can cause confusion and conflict among the ethnographer and his or her co-workers, who are also his or her subjects. Crossing this role boundary can also cause anxiety within the ethnographer to the extent he or she has ‘gone organizational’, reluctant to disengage from the work process to record data for fear of wasting informants’ and one’s own work time.

In summary, while Nelson (1969) extols the insight gained through ‘direct participation’ in ethnographic fieldwork, a difference likely exists between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ participation. Participation in one’s own formal organizations is accompanied by a set of research constraints apparently not encountered if one participates in the activities of a ‘foreign’ social group. The difference lies in the subjects’ perceptions of the ethnographer. While an ethnographer in a foreign culture might perceive of himself or herself as a participant, those in the group likely perceive the ethnographer more as a ‘guest participant’ than a full member,

18 MICHAEL ROSEN

and treat him or her accordingly. The ethnographer is therefore more free to ask ‘silly’ questions, behave in a ‘strange’ manner, and so on. In addition, if the ethnographer errs in the appointed task - hunting seal among the Arctic Eskimo, in Nelson’s case - the host society will not likely suffer. Those with responsibility are not actually relying on the ethnographer, and as a corollary, are not treating him or her as a member.

The ethnographer of goal-oriented, formal organizations within one’s culture is much more constrained. He or she might thus consider each of the four factors discussed here when choosing the location and form of his or her research within a formal organization.

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

The process of ‘writing up’ one’s collected experiences from the field - notes, company documents, memories, and so on - is as much a literary task as it is a scientific one. It is, in the view of some particularly fertile minds, fundamentally a function of fiction in the sense of ‘something made or fashioned’ of something literarily made up, ‘of inventing things not actually real’, where good ethnographies are ‘true fictions’ (Clifford, 1986, p. 6). This is the existentialist dilemma of interpretation, the ethnographer fashioning an interpretation within a continuously varying and ambiguous dialogue among informants, the ethnographer, and various audiences. Consequently, the format one follows in ‘writing up’ derives in large part from the manner of interpretation (functionalism, structural-functionalism, structuralism, or some combination thereof) the ethnographer selects to follow. In addition, however, the ethnographer must decide how to situate himself or herself within the analysis, an issue recently receiving considerable attention (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Van Maanen, 1987). Adopting a literary criticism perspective, Van Maanen (1987) discusses three possible positionings in detail. These are the realist, confessional, and impressionist approaches, reviewed here briefly to introduce the reader to at least one rendering of the complexity of presentation.

In a realist work the ethnographer is absent from an analysis striving to present ‘realistically’ what is observed in the field. Within a confessional writing, on the other hand, the ethnographer infiltrates the text personally, often appearing as a ‘human bundle of exposed nerve-endings’ standing alone in a culture (Van Maanen, 1987, p. 54). The ethnographer can present emotional reactions, hard- ships, unrxpected occurrences, and so on personally experienced in the field. These enable a reader to see how he or she came to understand a particular culture scene.

Within the impressionist approach the ethnographer transforms himself or herself into a teller of tales, usually those in which he or she was a participant. These tales ‘reconstruct in dramatic form those periods the author seems to regard as especially notable and, hence, reportable’ (Van Maanen, 1987, p. 81). In addition,

the story itself, the impressionist’s tale, is a representational means of cracking open the culture [being studied] and the fieldworker’s way of knowing it such


that both can be jointly examined. The impressionist writing tries to keep both subject and object in constant view. The epistemological aim is then to braid the knower with the known (Van Maanen, 1987, p. 81).

Each of these approaches ultilizes a different set of rhetorical and literary devices to represent the results of fieldwork. The form of explanation the ethnographer finally adopts and the extent to which he or she makes himself or herself visible within the writing depends in large part upon the criteria of the audience written for. Regardless of the tact, however, the goal of ‘writing up’ one’s data and fieldwork experience remains the same. This is to construct a systematic explanation of one group’s culture for another group to read and understand, given the inextricable limitations of understandings of understandings.

O N T H E STATE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography advances as a body of working ethnographers actively engages in a process of cross-study discourse. However, a difficulty exists precisely because few people are writing ethnographies. Among those who are, even fewer write holistic analyses of organizations. Most limit themselves to journal articles and conference presentations; to short snapshots of organizational life.

While this journal and conference output gives the impression that organizational ethnographers are establishing a foundation of lasting work, it belies the fact that a body of holistic and rigorous ethnographies has not been created.

This core of organizational ethnographies is necessary not only for establishing this area of enquiry, but for advancing it as well. Our theories, the point of departure for ethnographic study, are in large part derived from previous studies, and are refined as others adapt and test them against their data. The lack of a body of organizational ethnographies slows the refinement of theoretical formulations.

Ethnographies advance and build on one another in a slow and staggered manner. As Geertz (1973, p . 25) writes,

studies do build on other studies, not in the sense that they take up where the others leave off, but in the sense that, better informed and better concep- tualized, they plunge more deeply into the same things. . . . Previously discovered facts are mobilized, previously developed concepts used, previously formulated hypotheses tried out; but the movement is not from already proved theorems to newly proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary understandings to a supported claim that one has achievcd that and surpassed it. A study is an advance if it is more incisive - whatever that may mean - than those that preceded it ; but it less stands on their shoulders than, challenged and challenging, it runs by their side.

If an ethnographic interpretation formulated in one study is subsequently employed in another, it is at best refined or found to be awkward. If found awkward it is likely not as often to be picked up as the point of departure in future analyses, this octopoidal form of progress functioning, in Geertz’s (1973, p. 27) terms, as ‘intellectual weed control’.

20 MICHAEL ROSEN

When a significant body of working ethnographers does not exist, this form of cross-ethnography idea fertilization is difficult at best. Good ideas are refined slowly. Poor ideas live longer than they might otherwise. Weak ethnography is not readily identified as such, while non-ethnographies survive under the ethnographic banner.

Related to the above, more articles appear to be in print which explain various aspects and mention the need for ethnography (Van Maanen, 1979; Deetz, 1985) than articles which are ethnographies, which actually report ethnographic data. Perhaps this condition exists because ethnographic fieldwork necessitates input in juxtaposition to that which the institutions within the discipline reward.

For example, ethnography is conducted within the framework of an extended period of participant observation, generally involving roughly one year to be spent within the research site (Sanday, 1979). More specifically defined, doing ethnographic fieldwork involves ‘a long period of intimate study and residence in a well-defined community employing a wide range of observational techniques including prolonged face-to-face contact with members of local groups, direct observation in some of the group’s activities, and a greater emphasis on inten- sive work with informants than on the use of documentary or survey data’ (Conklin, 1968, p. 172). This period includes not only spending as close to full- time as possible in the work site during official hours, but socializing with organization members outside work as well: eating, drinking, fishing, shopping, dancing, driving, partying, running, playing ball, and otherwise getting to know people’s work and outside-work selves.

Further, ethnographic writings are arguably best conveyed in book form (Agar, 1980, p. l ) , though current experimental work in other media - such as video (Rusted and Tomas, 1988) - is both intriguing and promising. Although individual articles may be spun off an extensive ethnographic study, a holistic exploration into a social system normally requires more space than that provided within ajournal article. Marcus and Cushman (1982) and Van Maanen (1987) in fact suggest that the journal article and short monograph formats do not provide sufficient space for introducing the under-analysed and the problematic aspects of a culture, making the written presentation of one’s work overly rhetorical.

But these doing ethnographic research within departments of organizational science are subject to the same set of institutional forces common to all within the discipline. These pressures include an editorial bias against publishing ethnographic data. They also include being a member of a field which institu- tionally supports articles above books in establishing one’s reputation, gaining tenure and promotion, and achieving other measures of professional survival. The organizational ethnographer housed within a business school community is also subject to those pressures rewarding the larger number of articles possibly written and published through the use of survey and experimental research methods rather than the smaller number of articles likely resulting from the pursuit of ethnographic research and writing. Thus, while someone may be doing insightful ethnography, he or she may at the same moment (from an institutional perspective) be killing himself or herself out in the field. It is therefore safer for those interested in ethnographic analysis to talk and write about doing ethnography rather than to risk conducting it.


CONCLUSION

Both the epistemological and technical aspects of the ethnography of formal organizations have been considered here. Understanding the raison d’e‘trp and conduct of ethnography requires a dialectical tacking between the ethnographic whole in relation to its parts. The game rules of ethnography, its data-gathering techniques and forms of communicative output, make sense only in relation to the encompassing theoretical context of ethnographers and vice uersa. Similarly, organizational ethnographers are part of a larger community of organizational scientists. A comparison of the normal epistemological and ontological concerns of this group with those of its members on the ethnographic margin must therefore occur to understand the working context of the latter group. This article is also an attempt to lay the groundwork for such understanding by presenting various aspects of the ethnographic project and some of the relationships between these.

This article is thus somewhat like the process of ethnographic analysis itself. Such analysis, Geertz (1973, p. 29) notes, is not only ‘essentially contestable’, but also ‘intrinsically incomplete’. No matter how we might look at a particular set of data, another analyst, differently situated - in time, education, gender, ethnicity, age, and so on - will likely highlight different patterns of meaning against the same background of raw information. And there is always more that we might do with our own writings. There are more avenues to explore, and the possibility is there to travel more fully those already started.

Finally, the characteristics of ethnography described here - what the approach does and does not enable the researcher to accomplish in comparison to other methods - will not constitute a full reason for its use. Ultimately, the reason for selecting one methodological approach over another is an issue of aesthetic choice, involved more with what a researcher desires to study than with how she or he will do it. These choices involve a perception not only of what is ‘beauty’, but of the ‘truth‘ underlying it. The selection of a research topic and a corres- ponding method are in many ways also a life choice. They are indicative of that which the researcher believes is important to ‘see’ in the world, to investigate and know. An individual’s choice of topic and method corresponds to his or her ontological vision, his or her model of being. For example, when Kunda notes that

Ethnography is the only human activity in the social sciences. As a method, it is not divorced from the modes of experience that I consider human, that is, it is not divorced from my ‘reality’. It is therefore one of the few ways of doing research that speaks the ‘truth‘ as I understand it (Kunda, 1986b).

he is stating a personal aesthetic, embedded within which is an individual definition andlor direction towards ‘truth’. A person does not conduct ethnographic research only because he or she en.joys the process of participant observation and writing up the collected data. An individual conducts ethnography because the problems that interest him or her are believed to be best mined by the machinery of ethnography and conveyed in its product.

22 MICHAEL ROSEN

NOTES

* I am indebted to John Van Maanen (MIT), to Gideon Kunda (Tel Aviv), to Linda Srnircich (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), to Brian Spooner (University of Pennsylvania), to Wolf Heydebrand and Steven Stumpf (New York University), to Arthur Brief (Tulane) and to the particularly tenacious editors and reviewers of JMS for their relentless comments on previous drafts of this work.

[ 11 Although a body of work focusing on organizational culture has been emerging within administration science (Frost et al . , 1985; Pondy et al., 1983; Schein, 1985; Smircich, 1983), research based on ethnographic fieldwork is almost totally absent from the administration science literature. For example, while at least three administration science journals have published special issues on organizational culture (Administrative Science Quarter&, 1983; Journal ofManagement, 1985; Journal of Management Studies, 1986), only one article appeared within these which utilized the ethnographic approach to data collection, analysis, and writing (Rosen, 1985). This neglect of ethnography has not been based on a reasoned dismissal of the applicability of the approach for culture analysis. The argument has not been made that ethnography is an in- appropriate and/or inadequate method for exploring organizational culture. In fact, the opposite case has been stated (Sanday, 1979; Smircich, 1983; Van Maanen, 1979).

[ 21 Whether assumed to derive from the neuro-physiological structure of the mind, as exemplified in the works of Levi-Strauss (1975), the nature of language (Derrida, 1974), and so on.

[3] These organizations include a medium sized advertising agency (Rosen, 1984; 1988), a boutique investment banking firm (Rosen, 1989), and a grass-roots cocaine dealer (Rosen and Mullen, 1987). The principal research approach was as an observer of participants, and in the Wall Street situation as a participant, an organization member.

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COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FIELD: UNDERSTANDING AND DOING ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY*