ABSTRACT
As new organizational forms are emerging in our knowledge-based economy, organizational ethnographers are devising new methods, including multi-site research. While ethnography has always been defined by immersion in a localized organization, multi-site research involves neither immersion nor a localized organizational setting. These developments thus challenge basic assumptions about ethnography, turning them into the following research tasks that this chapter examines: (1) What, if any, shared theoretical commitments should guide organizational ethnographers? While existing multi-site work uses ethnographic methods, it is not “doing ethnography,” which also involves adherence to theoretical commitments, most notably the ethnographer’s self-transformation designed to obtain an insider’s perspective. (2) Are these theoretical commitments different for organizational ethnographers? Organizational ethnographers have borrowed methods, including for multi-site research, from anthropology. Following the “crisis of representation,” anthropologists have backgrounded the objective of obtaining an insider’s perspective because they are rarely born into the focal culture and thus do not share informants’ socialization process. Because anthropologists are separated from informants by an unbridgeable distance, non-immersive methods are not a trade-off. In contrast, organizational scholars are knowledge workers, like their informants. They share the same primary socialization and can acquire organizational culture in the same way. Given this historically new alignment between scholar and informants, backgrounding immersion is too costly. (3) Through what types of innovations can organizational ethnographers respond to the changing ethnographic object, while observing shared theoretical commitments? I use a case study to illustrate the use of self-transformation through immersion as preparation for multi-site research, balancing its “thinness.”
