ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that ethnography has made major inroads in corporations, other large organizations in government, and the not-for-profit sector, organizations that used to rely almost exclusively on quantitative data for strategic decision making. Ethnography has thus gained a new, strategic legitimacy, which has also led to the reemergence of employees hired for other reasons now claiming their ethnographic skills. As an insider, it gained access to the community and helped to describe the key elements of their practice through ethnographic fieldwork. This input was valuable for the company and relevant for organizational development processes that could improve the safety practices of the company. What follows are some of the issues that arose in the course of this project. For the employer, an insider by degree means that the internal ethnographer can easily switch location and objects of study within the organization.
