ABSTRACT
This final chapter of this book suggests in broad terms what readers might take away from the preceding writings and what might be made of them all in terms of the promise and prospect of organizational ethnography. The chapters mix story and explanation with theory, critique, and advice but most tell, in some detail and with bite, about what it is like to be someone else. The natives of these tales are not, however, the alien and exotic others of faraway lands put forth in the classic monographs of cultural or social anthropology but, rather, oddly familiar domestic others who might be our cohorts at work, our next door neighbors or even, gasp, ourselves. With the sacralization of culture and the cult of authenticity associated with heightened cultural sensitivity and awareness, a broad misunderstanding of ethnography results and anything other than the native's point of view is read as less than the real thing.
