ABSTRACT

This book presents a new way of understanding organizational ethnography due to its strong emphasis on what the word organizational means in organizational ethnography. In the past five years, a new organizational studies research field has developed involving organizational ethnographies, which is when organizations are studied using ethnographical methods. This development has shed light on the methods and difficulties of organizational ethnography, and yet we argue that confusion still remains as to what organizational ethnographical approaches are.

This edited volume offers students and scholars a profound understanding of organizational ethnography by presenting concrete examples, reflections and discussions of how to understand and adequately conceptualize the word organizational in organizational ethnography. All the chapters illustrate the work of analytically combining different organizational phenomena (e.g. strategy making, policymaking), analytical perspectives (e.g. sensemaking, narratives) and ethnographical methods (e.g. texts, observations, shadowing, interviews) and demonstrate different ways of doing organizational ethnography. At the end of each chapter, an experienced researcher in the field offers comments and discussion on the contributions of the chapter, providing reflections on the implications for research in the field to which they ascribe.

In Doing Organizational Ethnography, organizational is defined as polyphonic ways of organizing based on the interactions of the many voices, discourses, practices and narratives in and around organizations and the book provides readers with in-depth reflections on what organizing and organizations become when doing organizational ethnography.