Abstract
In this introduction to the Special Issue, we review the rich tradition of ethnographic studies in organisation studies and critically examine the place of ethnography in organisation studies as practised in schools of business and management. Drawing on the findings of the articles published here, we reflect on the need for a significant extension of the content and syllabus of our discipline to include what we call objects of concern and objects of ignorance. The articles we publish show that decision makers in organizations are not always humans, and nor can we assume the human and its groups monopolise the capacity for agency in organisation. Where we still labour in organisation theory with dualisms such as structure or agent, or subject and object, these articles trace objects and their relations which point to new forms of non-human co-ordination and agency. The organisational realities to which these objects give rise demand careful methodological enquiry, and we show that recent experiments in a genre we call ‘post-reflexive ethnography’ are likely to prove helpful for developing ethnographic enquiry in contemporary organisation.
Ethnography is enjoying much attention in management and organisation studies today. The proliferation of specialist conferences and standing working groups at management and organisation symposia – including EGOS and the Academy of Management – and the publication of significant new research monographs and edited collections are certainly more than suggestive of a burgeoning trend in organisational ethnography (see, for example, Czarniawska, 2012; Garsten and Nyqvist, 2013; Kostera, 2007; Neyland, 2007; Ybema et al., 2009; O’Doherty, 2017). At its best, it provides the basis for paradigmatic innovation in academic research communities; questions and unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions shared across paradigms; and pushes back against the secrets and lies in which modern corporations are so often mired.
For these and many other reasons, researchers are increasingly turning to ethnography in management and organisation studies. It helps enrich and complexify our understanding of how struggles around power and inequality form group and sub-groups who continually pull and push at the boundaries and operations of formal organisation. In one important review, ethnography offers a way into an inter- and cross-disciplinarity which remains an essential pre-requisite to the mapping of contemporary systems of globalising power and inequality (Westbrook, 2008) – and one to which management and organisation studies must surely want to contribute. If the social sciences are wedded to the building up of modern nation states (Bauman, 1987; Foucault, 2003), ethnography offers the possibility of developing new understandings about emerging post-national patterns of international order and disorder in which ‘the west’ appears to be in a process of being slowly dissolved and transformed (often in violent and horrific ways) through its confrontations with the global south and the east.
While these ambitions remain some way off being fulfilled in studies of organisation, the emergence of new journals dedicated to ethnography in business and management studies provides indication of an increasing recognition of ethnography’s capacity to open up new routes out of the old. From vast geo-political realignments in the global balance of power, to post-growth or de-growth economics and the challenge of ecological sustainability, the sense that things cannot go on as before is strong. Management and organisation remain central to these broader social and political challenges, and ethnography provides one important method for integrating and combining things which are typically understood to lie within local or mid-range domains at the mesolevel with things normally cast into the broader and more encompassing ‘macro’ realm. Where the proper domain of sociology is traditionally considered ‘the social’ (Bauman, 1987; Giddens, 1986), management and organisation studies are normally considered subordinate to this broad canvas. As we shall see, management and organisation studied ethnographically can help circumvent this initial separation (or dualism) that divides what is understood to be ‘local’ from that which is considered ‘global’.
Exploring the possibility of overcoming such analytical divisions remains central to the ambitions sought for this Special Issue. To do so, we draw together some of the most innovative contemporary ethnographies in management and organisation studies that treat a range of new transnational objects, materials, and technologies. Algorithms, digital money, blood ontologies, data infrastructures, information co-ordination centres, collateral debt obligation contracts and price display boards are far from being typical in management and organisation studies but provide the focus for the articles published here and which mark out a terrain we call ‘objects of concern’ and ‘objects of ignorance’. Traditionally associated with culture or people – the soft or subjective side of another typical dualism - ethnography is now being developed to study things previously left to science, engineering or technology studies. There is culture or rather cultures in a test tube as much as there is a ‘culture’ created by laboratory scientists working with test tubes. Similarly, nature is not the other of culture but is itself a cultural phenomenon, just as culture can be thought of as natural. Dividing the world of objects and materials that can be known best by science (nature) while reserving for arts, humanities, and the social sciences that which remains subjective (culture) is deeply debilitating for our research (Latour, 2005) and fails to deal adequately with a world of organisation in which its objects and other phenomena increasingly escape such categorical confinement.
For some time now, the discipline of organisation studies has been confined by a syllabus and an agenda largely set by the perceived needs of business and management as they are constituted and represented from within a business school. If the client for sociology was society defined as a public good whose custodian was the state, then for those disciplines in a business school looking for distinction vis-à-vis existing departments of social science, it is the private sector, corporate firm and its executives and managers who acts as the client. This can lead to an extremely narrow and impoverished set of objects and practices deemed of relevance to the client: practical accounting and finance, the principles of marketing, best-practice human resource management, and optimised logistics and supply chain configuration. It is a world of organisational charts, box diagrams, and neat lines of cause and effect, with human decision makers sitting atop a pyramid of converging reporting lines. By contrast, the articles we publish in this Special Issue all point to the need for a significant extension of the content and syllabus created for organisation studies in a business school. The decision makers are not always humans, and nor can we assume the human and its groups monopolise the capacity for agency in organisation. Where we still labour in organisation theory with dualisms such as structure or agency, or subject and object, these articles trace objects and their relations which point to new forms of non-human co-ordination and agency. Humans and their society (the separation, and the positioning of one in the other) are contingent organisational outcomes rather than apriori and sovereign cause or condition for the emergence of these new objects. In this way, the articles in this Special Issue push at the limits of current paradigms in management and organisation studies.
In the rest of this introductory essay, we extend and elaborate why one should or would undertake ethnographic research in a business school and consider what it can give access to and the questions it can answer for which other methods struggle. We trace some of the historical conditions out of which ethnography emerged creating a variety of distinctive descriptive practices and styles. This is important to be able to discriminate and see what is novel about the ethnographic practices developed by our contributors here. We also trace some of the complexities and paradoxes associated with the method of ethnography before drawing out some of the shared features of those ethnographies capable of studying forms of organisation emerging around non-human actors where the relations and forces to which they give rise escape the categorical divides and modes of orientation given by subject/object, structure/agent, and global/local. Drawing on recent experiments in a genre we call ‘post-reflexive’ ethnography, which includes the work of people like Marilyn Strathern, (1988, 1991, 1999), Bill Maurer (2005) and Annelise Riles, (2001, 2006), we show that the objects of concern to which we turn in this Special Issue demand careful navigation of the organisational realities which these objects help emphasise. To what extent can contemporary organisation analysis and organisation theory recognise and acknowledge the work of these objects when they resist the representational conventions reproduced by most contemporary ethnography in management and organisation studies. Finally, we wonder whether some of this ethnographic work developed here might sketch out the lineaments of a post-paradigm organisation studies, long called for (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Hardy and Clegg, 1997; Pym, 1990) but rarely practised (cf. Hassard and Cox, 2013; O’Doherty and de Cock, 2017).
Organisational ethnography in the business school
Despite flourishing in management and organisation studies, ethnography is rarely studied systematically in schools of business and management. Where ethnography is claimed as a method, it is normally justified on very superficial and pragmatic grounds – it allows research to get close to the action in organisations, for example, or it provides a method to study forms of social interaction that would elude more formal and structured quantitative or qualitative methodologies (Gill and Johnson, 2010). As a result, the writing of ethnography is often produced in a very unself-conscious way, and in the main, the writing of it in management and organisation studies inadvertently tends to naïve realist or naturalistic descriptions 1 – and this despite the popular if ritualistic citation of Van Maanen’s (1988) classic Tales of the Field.
Doctoral students are rarely offered courses in which they get the chance to carefully study ethnographic texts to work out the various different styles of writing and the rationale for cultivating style in one form rather than another. The descriptive practice of Geertz (1973) and the style of his texts as realised in his classic ‘Cock fight’ paper are very different to those of Evans Pritchard (1940) in The Nuer, or the style of the more contemporary Michel Taussig, for whom we might take a fairly recent paper on blue jeans as a typical example (Taussig, 2008). This means that ethnography is unfortunately underdeveloped as a method in schools of business and management, and its most celebrated exponents (including Tony Watson or Gideon Kunda) tend to be either ex-sociologists or escapees from anthropology (see Rosen, 2000), who are typically autodidacts or self-taught writing outside the collective regulation maintained by disciplinary experts.
Historical reviews of the development of ethnography offer complex and chequered narratives that position ethnography in a number of different ways, many of which would not speak to the rather grandiose ambitions and emancipatory hopes with which we opened this introduction (Stocking, 1993). Rooted in early 20th century anthropology and sociology, ethnography is often associated either with a Western colonial project that studies far-flung island tribes for the purposes of empire and control, or marginal and exotic communities indigenous to the burgeoning modern Western metropolis – working class trades and occupations, racial segregation, gangs, drugs and inner-city violence – wherever social order was perceived to be threatened from within (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Smith, 2017). This remains a somewhat jaundiced caricature of ethnographic history of course, and more nuance and care is required to develop an adequate genealogy.
Ethnography has always been practised in a number of radically different ways and from a variety of political commitments, serving different ends and from often-incommensurable positions on underlying assumptions about ontology and epistemology. The methods and practices of Malinowski (1922) in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which for many is the founding text of modern ethnography (Kuper, 1973), are so vastly different from those of his contemporaries that there is often little agreed upon models and procedures as to how or what one is doing when doing ethnography. Indeed, it is often hard to grasp what it is that holds practitioners of ethnography together in ways that would offer the possibility of mutual acknowledgement or collective self-recognition. However, it is perhaps what appears to be this openness and freedom that is so attractive to those new to the rigour and demands of academic research, which can be misleading because it risks losing the discipline and specificity of ethnography as a method or what can be better argued to be a ‘way of seeing’ (Wolcott, 1999), an ‘attunement’ or existential commitment, even ‘a way of life’ (Rose, 1989).
Those adopting and adapting ethnographic research methods in management and organisation studies usually justify their choice, as we have said, on the rationale that ethnography offers ways of ‘getting close to the action’. Spending extended periods of time conducting fieldwork, the ethnographer builds trust with indigenous members of the community or organisation(s) under study and acquires privileged insider knowledge. In this model, the intrepid ethnographer sets off to confront a bewildering and confusing organisational community to return some time later with the data that will eventually order and explain what was initially so disorienting (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). The much debated and ethically controversial study of various gay and ostensibly public sexual practices conceived and contracted through ‘cottaging’ or the ‘tearoom trade’ community (Humphreys, 1970) offers one example of this approach. Casting light on a lifestyle and community of which mainstream society would have little or no awareness of its existence, Humphreys carefully teases out and elucidates the complexities and subtleties involved in organising a semi-clandestine sub-culture. Similarly, in management and organisation studies, ethnographic studies have helped understand the complex role of organisational sub-cultures (Turner, 1971), and the ubiquity of things like theft and stealing in work organisations – or what might at least be called ‘stealing’ by non-indigenous members of the community (Mars, 1982).
That one should seek to embark upon ethnography from within a business school is however one of the more intriguing challenges we need to address as there are very specific conditions of possibility that must be carefully navigated for those wishing to practice ethnography outside of its traditional homes in sociology and anthropology. The customary norm that ethnography requires one-year full-time fieldwork, for example, is doubtless one of the biggest obstacles for those wishing to conduct ethnographic research, and prima facie would seem to restrict its possibility in a business school to doctoral students. This reluctance to embark on ethnographic study in a business school might be explained by unique pressures to publish in which publication can be easily secured by the recycling of ‘gap-spotting’ (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011) and formulaic papers that conform to the commercially driven agendas of private publishers (Harvie et al., 2012). Commentators from both within and outside the business school persistently rail against the quality and scholarly integrity of its research, and periodically this gets aired as anxiety about the perennial rigour/relevance dilemma (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Knights, 2008; Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002; Starkey and Tiratsoo, 2007). Some have even called for the closure of business schools, in part because of the lack of independent scholarship and the damage to the economy and society promoted by a narrow and technocratic research and teaching syllabus (Parker, 2018). Indeed, widespread cynicism and accusations of moral and ethical failure in the business school has attracted insider ethnographers (Anteby, 2013) who against considerable internal collegial opprobrium and resistance have teased out the subtle processes through which the business school reproduces oppressive and conservative cultures that mitigate against serious scholarship.
The promise of ethnography: complexity, ah-ha moments, storytelling
Ethnography is uniquely placed to provide insights into complexity, paradox and ambiguity in organisation which often poses problems to those seeking quick and pragmatic diagnosis and solutions to managerial problems accustomed to box diagram mappings, simple cause–effect relations and linear processes (O’Doherty, 2017). Not withstanding the creative and performative feats and unintended consequences of these standard management 101 techniques, whose ubiquity can be traced to the influence of an engineering discourse and a broadly positivist conception in the practice and study of management science (Alvesson and Willmott, 2012; Shenhav, 1999), ethnography also shows how multiple realities can co-exist in organisation such that management can synthesise or maintain worlds that are simultaneously predictable and ordered and overwhelmed by chaos and uncertainty (Knox et al., 2015; Watson, 1994). The two, order and disorder, can become indistinguishable in ways that recall the visual flicker caused by the widely known young girl–old woman illusion, but this is a finding that goes back to one of the first ethnographies of management (Dalton, 1959). To see not only the old woman or young girl but both together simultaneously is a huge challenge and still poses difficulties for management sense-making (Weick, 2005) who pressed for time, and results tend to want to see things in more basic black and white terms. How these ambiguities and paradoxes are created by indigenous members of organisations and how they are lived with is only limited by the particular conditions and circumstances to which ethnography can delve, but in principle the study of work organisation provides infinite variation on this theme.
In Willis and Trondman’s (2000) ‘manifesto for ethnography’, ethnography is commended for its capacity to generate what they call an ‘Ah-ha!’ moment, in which our very basic sense of the world gets overturned or refreshed in and through which we have occasion to see things again, as if for the first time. There is a moment of clarity and understanding, which can vary in existential depth and profundity, whilst remaining fundamentally evanescent as the ethnographic method leads us to extend ever further into relations that develop our research question taking us further away from that which is obvious towards uncharted territories and questions that have not been asked before. At the same time, this onwards and upwards drive confronts its own methodological paradox, namely that ethnography simultaneously leads us back to that which is so obvious that we have forgotten it, in a version of that well-known Heideggerian puzzle worked out in Being and Time in which we learn of that which is ontically the closest but ontologically the farthest away (Heidegger, 1962).
It is perhaps little wonder that the practitioner of ethnography invariably experiences a sense of going around in circles (but each time perhaps deepening the lines drawn in the sand), or of experiences more disconcerting than this, more akin perhaps to an aimless wandering. Indeed, this is yet another trope in ethnographic method. ‘Getting lost’ (Solnit, 2006) or how to get lost is becoming more widely recognised as an important strategy in ethnographic research, the paradox being that it is only when you are lost that you have any sense of knowing what it means to be ‘here’ – which is a version of the ‘fish in water’ sales pitch sold to organisations by ethnographers seeking access, namely that the ethnographer can help tease out features of organisation (the water) that cannot be seen or sensed by indigenous members (ask the fish how the water is today, they are likely to respond ‘what water’?).
This brings us to another paradox of method and finding that ethnography can offer, namely what is added by ethnography to the stories that are told by members of organisation about the way their organisation works or does not work and how one manages in it. The ability to tell these stories requires the ethnographer to get as close as possible to becoming an indigenous or skilled, competent member of the organisation they are trying to study. What is sought is, in part, insider’s knowledge, but they are also trying to tell a story that members of the organisation cannot tell themselves; they are in other words seeking to add to the stories currently known and told about the organisation. To do this the ethnographer must navigate their role as both insider and outsider, but they can never lose that tension of being insider/outsider. The quality of the tale told of organisation depends on coming as close as possible to becoming an insider (and there is a genre of field stories about ethnographers who ‘go native’ and never return (i.e. Rosen, 2000)), without losing awareness that one is and must remain an outsider to be able to produce an ethnographic account. From this, we can state that there is a point reached at a paroxysmal point of tension in this relationship in which the ethnographer almost loses that tension in an infinitely minute moment of vacillation or transgression where the ethnographer forgets they occupy the role of ethnographer.
The complexities and paradoxes of method in ethnography, only some of which we have detailed here, are perhaps the pre-requisite or mirror image of the kind of insights into organisation available to the ethnographer, a world of subtlety, counter-intuition, surprise and paradox. The time it takes to navigate and access these dimensions of organisation does perhaps militate against the feasibility of such research in time pressed, results-oriented business schools, but at the same time, such openings as it does provide into organisation cannot be adequately contained and explained within hidebound academic disciplines. In this sense, the business school provides an extraordinary confluence of modern disciplinary subjects, everything from evolutionary psychology and the pursuit of Popperian ideals in laboratory science to anarcho-syndicalists steeped in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin including the emergence of a recent avant-garde of so-called accelerationists and object-oriented ontologists. The modern business school is certainly lively and heterogeneous (Parker, 2018). Given this, one might argue that the business school is the site of a major transformation and even ‘de-territorialisation’ of the modern social sciences. What are the possible new objects and subject positions being created out of this confluence and possible de-territorialisation of the modern social science? How might we best study them?
Unsettling subject–object divisions
This Special Issue on ethnography in management and organisation studies was commissioned to explore the possibility that new forms of practice were emerging around new objects of concern specific and unique to students of organisation studies located in schools of business and departments of management. With this end in mind, we will be exploring a range of phenomenon in the papers that follow, most of which will be surprising or even shocking to students of organisation in business schools and indeed perhaps to ethnography: ‘blood ontologies’ (Wittock, Michiel, De Krom and Hustinx), price display boards (Cochoy, Hagberg and Kjellberg), bitcoin (Kavanagh, Miscioni and Ennis), data infrastructures (Ratner and Gad), collateral debt obligation contracts (Tischer, Maurer and Leaver), transport co-ordination centres (Heath and Luff) and algorithms and high frequency trading (Lange, Lenglet and Seyfert). None of these immediately strike one as obvious candidates for ethnographic enquiry – and indeed in some of the papers, there is a pushing against the boundaries of what might qualify as ethnography and the concomitant search for an alternative descriptor (i.e. praxiography).
At the same time, none of the papers fit within traditional social or applied social science disciplines and methodologies, both in terms of their object and allied subject position required for their research. There will be much to gain for those who do define themselves as sociologists, anthropologists or philosophers, but there will also be a certain frustration or perhaps excitement and intrigue. While medical sociology might be interested in the social life of blood, for example, even its social construction, the fact that there is a business of blood or blood economies, is one that would only pique the interest of someone thinking from within a business school. Moreover, when blood is discovered to be neither a concept (a social construction), or a reality independent of its knowers, we can learn much from what Wittock and colleagues describe as the multiple ways in which blood is enacted (see also Mol, 2002; Law, 2004). The making of business out of blood remains a potentially vast social experiment and demands an entrepreneurial preparedness to sacrifice any belief in a constraining social context held together by prevailing customs and norms. Business makes a difference, and therefore we should expect that it requires unique methods of enquiry but which has not yet attracted much in the way of debate.
What social science could cope with such a mixed up (bloody?) ontology–epistemology, and moreover something which cannot be explained by a sociology or an anthropology? With its commitment to access all areas (see O’Doherty, 2017), the openness of ethnography would seem a valuable first step into studying this phenomenon, but then how precisely does one ethnographically study blood? Can it be asked questions? Is it possible to interview blood? If it is possible for some ethnographers to ‘interview a plant’ (see Hartigan, 2017), it may indeed be possible, but on a more prosaic level, if organisation is making business in ways that multiply the becoming of blood, then business is complicit with on-going ontological deconstruction that plays havoc with traditional categories of subject–object or structure and agent. With its traditions of ‘becoming the phenomena’, ethnography is well placed to cope with this derailment of subject–object or the dilemma faced when one expects the world to conform to either representation or reality.
The development of ethnography in organisation studies
We are beginning here to draw out some of the peculiar properties of organisation to which this Special Issue sought to draw attention and to invite specialists in organisation studies to consider and develop through their ethnographic research. This invitation was stimulated by the sense that ethnography was theoretically and practically underdeveloped in management and organisation studies or rather had stalled around the literary turn developed by Geertz (1973), whose ‘thick description’ is popularly cited as justification for doing ethnography by colleagues. One gets the impression that students attracted to ethnography are those who are intimidated by the apparently more formal rigour of quantitative methodologies or the (quasi)science of positivist hypothesis testing and data collection. Ethnography might seem a rather ‘soft’ option which encourages the development of researcher creativity and interpretation such that anyone might feel they are capable of producing ‘thick description’. Developing trust with informants it is claimed can help ethnographers generate insight into the intimate feelings, thoughts and actions of managers or the authentic voices of the often-overlooked shop floor worker (Nichols and Beynon, 1977) who might not confess what it is they do or think through the impersonal techniques of attitude surveys or formal interviews. This formed an important element in ethnographies conducted to test and develop labour process theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Collinson’s (1992) ethnographic study of Slavs was particularly significant helping to show the contradictions and paradoxes under which modern industry labours while advancing insight into counter-intuitive puzzles such as ‘why do workers work so hard’ or ‘how do certain forms of resistance enhance managerial authority and worker insecurity?’ Important insights into the specific conditions of organisation that pertain to women at work was also improved by ethnographies that brought to life gendered aspects of experience on the shop floor and in trade union struggle (e.g. Cavendish, 1982; Cockburn, 1991; Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984).
These studies helped show how ethnography could study management and workers in action, so as to reveal things not considered important by indigenous members of organisation. This very ‘taken-for-grantedness’ might also give important insights into specific properties of organisation, how it works or is made to work and its overt and sometimes latent or implicit discontents. To learn the difference between a ‘nod and a wink’ in social interaction is widely considered to be the high watermark of ethnographic ambition and insight, a subtlety whose organisational properties cannot be made evident through any other research method. 2 However, often accused of being rich in local description but light on generalisable lessons or theoretical development, the results of ethnography are seen by some to be decorative, merely adding local colour to that which lies underneath or behind the scenes on a more structural level, accessed by a more powerful set of universal theoretical explanations for organisation.
On the contrary, when an important contemporary ethnographer of management and organisation like Steve Linstead is puzzled by his experiences as an apprentice in a cake factory, during which he was regularly submerged head first in a vat of coagulating cake mixture to remove small crystals blocking the outlet pipe (Linstead, 1996), one enters a world of ritual and humiliation of which the sanitised textbooks and teaching of business and management overlooks or remains ignorant. Work in this vein (see also Rosen, 2000) began to appear through the support of the burgeoning international Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism network (SCOS) that introduced neglected and often marginalised figures such as Barry Turner (1971) and Van Gennep (1909) to the understanding of management and organisation.
The boon to ethnography generated by the ‘cultural turn’ in business and management studies in the 1980s (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982; etc.) helped show that organisation is held together through paradox and ambiguity, transgression and liminality and often through arcane and intricate subterranean ways, which also reveal dimensions of organisation through which power and inequality is pursued and sustained (Casey, 1995; Collinson, 1992; Kunda, 1992; Watson, 1994). The chutzpah of what Steven Dunn (1991) called ‘prairie philosophising’ and the ‘smell of woodsmoke’ that enveloped the genre of predominantly North American writing on organisational culture as a viable approach to restoring the fortunes of Western economies confronted with Japanese and (at the time) the newly industrialising economies of the Far East, was systematically dismantled and the complexities and contradictions of culture in organisation restored by these ethnographies.
In recent years, ethnographic approaches in the wider academy have undergone significant transformation that take them far beyond the traditional anthropological approaches made popular by such authors as Kunda (1992) or Rosen (2000). While Rosen is more experimental in his ethnographic craft (see Rosen and Mullen, 1996), he shares with Kunda and others in management and organisation studies a largely ‘realist’ or in some cases a ‘critical realist’ commitment to ontology and epistemology (see also Casey, 1995; Watson, 1994). The ‘late life of a cocaine dealer’ (Rosen and Mullen, 1996) might abound in literary beatnik jazz and free association that conjures an intense and paranoid experience for the reader, but this style seeks an integration of form with subject matter that aspires to a greater representational veracity than could otherwise be achieved. There is an authorial or subjective will-to-power in relating compelling ‘tales from the field’ that leaves much to admire in these studies, but the reflexive and artefactual status of the writing is rarely explored in ways that would muddy the telling of a good story. Good stories are still expected to conform to Aristotelian principles, most notably the requirement that they observe the structure of a beginning, middle and end and to reproduce the conventions of character, plot and narrative that characterise the modern bourgeois novel. The stories are essentially preoccupied with human experiences, and this is a feature shared by some of more recent developments including the visual turn in ethnography preoccupied with access to more emotional, affective and aesthetic qualities of organisation (Hassard et al., 2018; Wood et al., 2018).
While Linstead (2018) sees this visual turn and ethnographic film-making for management and organisation studies as a practice with ‘performative’ qualities – that is, the ethnographic practice and final product circulates within and thereby helps constitute or realise those realities and practices that are the ostensible object of study – his films are still about human (collective and individual) experience and particularly about the possibilities for ‘aesthetic moments’ that elevate experience into a rarefied almost transcendent realm of poetic vision and insight. Whilst often moving, and in ways that extend our understanding of life as tragedy or Vanity Fair, it is still a comforting or placatory project: art as therapeutic ‘pharmacology’ (Derrida, 1981).
New objects of concern: towards the post-reflexive
In our call to attend to new objects of concern, we wanted to know if it was possible to make an organisational ethnography of objects or things, even things as apparently mundane and inert as a T-shirt! Such flippancy might serve to provoke or mystify, but there was a serious intent. We wondered to what extent human experience was being eclipsed by a new set of emerging objects - things like global financial trading algorithms, ‘big data’, new symbiotic human–machine intelligences, affects, drones, bio-engineering, or other virtual and augmented realities. How do we study these things? Moreover, where do they take place? Where is their organisation? Whereas a ritual Christmas party would appear to take place in simple place and time whilst offering a microcosm or synecdoche of great insight into underlying contradictions and strains in organization as a whole, (Rosen, 1988), ‘multi-sited’ ethnography (Marcus, 1995)3 has been long considered a methodological requirement in the study of contemporary organization which can be more complex and distributed, and moreover one that never achieves a whole that would allow us to label some phenomenon as ‘parts’. Similarly a cock-fight might suggest itself as a part or a microcosm of wider society as society works itself out through staged dramas that are nested into wider context in a circulating or dialectical functionality (Geertz, 1973). However, if objects are neither simple social constructions under the control and experiential grasp of their human inventors nor things that exist in an autonomous realm of technical essence (Heidegger, 1977), where do they reside and what significance should we grant their organisational capacities? What happens, moreover, to our understanding of organisation if we abandon the presumption of society and the assumption that society is a kind of bigger whole or a container in which humans reside (see Strathern, 1988, 1991)?
By following a T-shirt instead of say its human wearers or its workers, could we trace networks, relations and effects that might force us to re-configure our understanding of organisation (including the time and place of organisation) and in ways that displaced or alienated our human sensibilities beyond the comforts of traditional existential dread? 4 Students of science and technology studies, socio-materiality, and actor–network theory, among others, have all in various ways abandoned the dualism of subject and object and the assumption that the concepts of ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’ exist as delimited and differentiable domains to which explanation for organisation can be sought. With their use, we are inevitably searching for what we might call a ‘phantom empirics’. Instead, we need concepts that work with their mutual and inextricable entanglement between subject and object, or structure and agent, and in which neither has explanatory priority for the other.
In making these analytical moves, we are encouraged to re-centre and privilege a range of contemporary objects that might be identified because of their increasing proliferation in contemporary organisation. Organisation looks a lot different when we privileged a humble T-shirt or follow something like ‘hair’ (O’Doherty, 2017: 185–213). Such objects cut across established divisions, and as the network opens up around these objects, we begin to find room for the possibility of agency and experiences that exist beyond the human–actor. Can an object have agency? Can ostensibly human hair have agency of its own? Advancing these thoughts, we might ask whether an object world of Internet mediated algorithms and artificial intelligence is beginning to realise a cybernetic intelligence that begins not only to second-guess what we presume is left of human thinking but is perhaps re-programming our cognitive faculties, and in ways that give rise to a collective-hybrid agency with powerful organisational potential? Consider the consequences of granting legal status to such apparently fantastic creatures as ‘ambient intelligence’ (Hildebrandt, 2008), for example, which at the very least would appear to extend our understanding of criminality and criminal liability into realms previously consigned to science fiction. Do we now need to extend this dictum to consider the possibility that some of these objects might themselves be ethnographic researchers come to study us to feed data back to a new empire conspired by alien intelligence with the prospect of a coming war of the worlds? 5
If the human and its capacity for collective agency is no longer in control, or at the centre of these organisational worlds, to where or to whom should we send our ethnographers? Such speculations are perhaps at the very edge of what might be considered ‘reasonable’, but we find excuse for some of this by inviting readers to consider what might happen on the ‘rim of reason’ (Munro, 2003) when our current epistemologies and ontologies provide little purchase on recent events and objects in contemporary organisation. Baudrillard’s (1990) delirium might have been merely a symptom of this exhaustion of modern reason, but can we begin to develop strategies from within organisation analysis based on the kind of careful descriptive practice associated with the traditions of ethnography? John Law (1994) once sagely commented that the ethnographer is ‘never where the action is’, by which he meant that an appreciation of the extended relations through which organisation is achieved means that there is no simple time or place in which organisation happens. It is widely known that apparent decision points at so-called crucial meetings to which the ethnographer might have access have been prepared for months and years in advance; but has this problem got worse with the consolidation of new tele-technology medias and the proliferation of non-human actors and ‘hybrid’ actors (see Latour, 1993), for which we have few conceptual hand-holds? Consider Amazon’s Alexa. Is ‘it’ (she or he?) a personal assistant that will help make our lives easier – a mere tool through which the human extends its control, or does Alexa give rise to new human–non-human relations for which our agency becomes orchestrated in ways that make it somewhat capricious and its longer term consequences unpredictable? Consider also climate. Is climate a human or natural force? Without clean separations or distribution of agency and causality, to where should we want to focus our efforts to modify or change causal forces? Following the work of Lovelock (1979), many are turning to ‘Gaia’ to explain the strange nature of these emerging agential qualities (see Latour, 2017), which might raise the possibility that these emerging hybrid assemblages of human and non-human even have something akin to what we call a consciousness.
Organisations are certainly aware that we are looking at them as ethnographers, an organisational self-awareness which has been widely accepted theoretically through the popular ‘reflexive modernization’ theses developed in tandem by Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, John Urry and Ulrich Beck who point to things like real-time information monitoring systems. 6 While theoretically known among many in organisation theory, it has not led to much in the way of practical and methodological innovation to try and circumvent some of the possible tautological problems associated with studying something that changes in relation to the knowledge seeker. Confronted by these problems, scholars dutifully cite Clifford and Marcus (1986), but the implications that follow when we read of an anthropologist who is referred to a copy of his supervisors book by a tribal chief when asked about the symbolic and ritual qualities of headwear has not been worked through carefully in terms of ethnographic practice in organization studies.
There is also the assumption that the ethnographer is an expert who will explain to indigenous members their community, and this remains the dominant mode of ethnographic practice in organisation studies. In Nader’s (1972) terms, we still presume we are ‘studying down’ – to those with less formal education, less expertise and less status perhaps. Most ethnography in management and organisation studies is also theoretically driven, as researchers seek to collect interesting stories and evidence to fill out theoretical schemas and commitments. Whether this is Foucault’s theory of subjugation combined with broad Marxist political economy (Casey, 1995; Collinson, 1992), practice theory, socio-materiality or actor-network theory (Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010; Bruni, 2005), ethnography is made subordinate and in-service to academic theory. 8
Whether we can or should seek to abandon apriori theoretical knowledge and concepts has been much debated amongst ethnographers in organisation studies, notably in a point–counterpoint debate in 1993 in which John Van Maanen explains his preference for a naturalistic and descriptive ethnographic practice, while Deetz and Mumby argue for an allegiance to theoretical guidance. For Deetz and Mumby, this allows and encourages ethnography to uncover the unofficial and marginalised narratives of organisation life otherwise denied or repressed by those in power 7 (see Putnam et al., 1993). However, even in these quite sophisticated debates, when the problem of reflexivity is acknowledged, it tends to be reserved exclusively for the ethnographer and there is notably little attempt to tackle the possibility that our theories (and ethnographies) are already circulating in a knowledge economy (Thrift, 1999) of which managers and members of organisation remain readers and ‘users’. One of us recalls an ethnographic moment when an interlocutor replied ‘Ah, well this is Erich Fromm territory, right? Are people still reading Fromm at university?’ Immediately this posed some real problems. Fromm was intended to be used to help explain what was going on. How could we use Fromm as an explanation when indigenous members were using the same ideas as a resource to make sense of organisation? The anxiety of tautology and infinite regress is never far from these concerns. More than this, we are perhaps more insightful as ethnographers if we can acknowledge that managers and other members of organisations are themselves practical theorists, developing explanations of the world in which organisation operates in which the explanation is also engaged in enacting a particular form of world-making. There is no divide between theory and practice, or representation and reality, which remain the dominant tropes for ethnographers keen to find a method that permits latitude for their own interpretative efforts and reflexivity.
Ethnographic developments in recent anthropology
Strathern (1991) has been at the forefront of anthropological theory and practice in developing forms of ethnography that attend to these dilemmas in knowledge, and the work of Maurer (2005) with his proposal to advance ‘lateral reason’, and Annelise Riles (2001) development of ‘inside out’ ethnographic practice have done much to extend Strathern (see allied projects of Holmes and Marcus, 2006; Marcus, 2013; Rabinow, 2007). Sometimes called ‘post-reflexive’ ethnography, Maurer and Riles produce an ethnographic practice that acknowledges the world-making complicities of the ethnographer. In Riles’ study of networks and non-governmental organisations operating in and around the institutions of the United Nations (UN), she realises that their knowledge practices – reading, writing papers, analysing and debating evidence – mirror in form and content precisely those practices in which she is placed as an academic. Often the very same theory, academic theories of globalisation, for example, are being used by members of these organisations to construct and shape policy and practice, which makes more complex the status of these theories as disinterested explanatory resources for academics. Riles seeks ways of surfacing the unseen and mundane that is shared by both the putative object of analysis and the subject doing the analysis. In this way, she turns ‘network’ from a descriptive or conceptual register into a resource that helps enact what it is talking about. This is a turning ‘inside-out’ of network in an effort to ethnographically map this elusive realm of practices and relations that are responsible for enacting organisation but which normally remain obscured sometimes by virtue of their apparent superficiality, their marginality or triviality. 8
In his research, Maurer, in a similar manner to Riles, wants to acknowledge the intellectual and theoretical reflexivity of that which he studies (humans and non-human actors), in order to seek ways of side-stepping (the ‘lateral’ in his proposal to develop a ‘lateral reason’) the problem of tautology that strikes when knowledge seeks to know knowledge practices which are formally very similar to those in which the researcher is (often unknowingly) placed. To acknowledge one’s implication is a first move, but during his research, Maurer will also become a skilled practitioner or expert in his chosen field of study - Islamic finance or bitcoin for example. This often means that he will become a keynote speaker at insider industry conferences or events, and even someone to whom other practitioners might seek advice, which of course implicates Maurer in the facilitation and extension of networks of influence through which the world of bitcoin or whatever mutates. Is Maurer the subject or object of research, the actor or the observer? These questions help open a complex and shadowy world, highly sensitive and uncertain, and in the case of new technologies and realities emerging around things like bitcoin, unpredictable and febrile, one of entanglements and mutations in which things like causation and effect enrol and implicate the ethnographer (see the mysterious K.D., 2015). In reading Maurer or Miles, or the ‘para-ethnographies’ of Marcus and Holmes, one gets the sense of dispersed and complex agencies where subject and object or structure and agency no longer hold. Our customary intellectual resources for explaining where the action is, or what is agency are misleading and of little explanatory purchase in these worlds shaped by quasi-subject/objects in Serres’ (1982) or actants in Latour’s (1996) terms.
Finally, the work of Strathern, Maurer, and Riles has been seminal for the development of new forms and styles of ethnographic description more adequate to the dilemmas and paradoxes opened up in post-reflexive studies. Instead of abandoning the challenge of ‘description’, they push against the application of existing repertoires or templates of classificatory and descriptive practice that serve only to reproduce cliché and a sense of having always-already anticipated what it is we might find out empirically by virtue of powerful academic theories. In a sense, they are seeking ‘weak’ explanation by not offering the reassuring tropes that are popular in academic work where we might find bitcoin being described or explained as ‘capitalist’ or a social construction, or the work of ‘neo-liberalism’, the economy, ‘culture’, the contradictions of capital, or actor-networks. As Latour (2005) counsels, we need to avoid ready-made concepts and explanations which act to short-cut explanation. Instead of seeking these shortcuts we should follow relations and practices all the way and not presume a backstop or context to which we can appeal for explanation. Description necessarily becomes more detailed and more exhaustive once we abandon the use of ready-mades and other theoretical or conceptual black boxes.
Objects of ignorance and objects of concern
In this Special Issue, we were keen to attract academics in management and organisation studies who were grappling with similar issues in their ethnographic practices. We wanted to try and focus our efforts by selecting a range of possible objects of concern for contemporary research in management and organisation. We asked scholars to consider a range of new transnational objects, materials and technologies including new forms of agency and non-human actors that also push at the limits of our current paradigms in management and organisation studies, whether in the form of global financial trading algorithms, ‘big data’, new symbiotic human–machine intelligences, affects, drones, bio-engineering, or other virtual and augmented realities. How are we to study these things ethnographically, we asked? Can one make an algorithm, for example, the subject of ethnography?
Here, of course, we press against the graphe (writing, signs, communication) of the ethnos (people, community), to invite interest in forms of ‘Writing organization’ (i.e. code, software, algorithms) that are neither human or non-human, but perhaps instead assemblages that mutually re-define what is human and non-human. Some have spoken of ‘symmetrical ethnology’ (Czarniawska, 2017), or ‘gaiagraphy’ (O’Doherty, 2018), to reflect methodological efforts that seek to permit equal status to human and non-human actors and which stakes out a similar realm of organisation captured by people like Eduardo Kohn (2013) in his efforts to work out ‘how forests think’, Marisol de la Cadena’s ethnography of ‘earth beings’, or Hannah Knox’s (2015) study of organisations and practices that bring about something akin to a ‘thinking like a climate’. 9 A strong relation to this work is obvious in the works of Annemarie Mol (2002) and John Law (2004), who are both widely read by management and organisation scholars. Indeed, ‘praxiography’, a neologism coined by Mol, describes very well what most of us are trying to write.
The various contributors to this Special Issue took up the challenge of attending to new directions in ethnography and the various questions we posed. Donncha Kavanagh, Gianluca Miscioni and Paul Ennis suggest that the simultaneity of the financial crisis and the emergence of Bitcoin provides an opportunity to renew and refresh both our questions of what is money and what becomes of ethnography in a technologically saturated everyday world. In their paper, Bitcoin is treated as an emerging object of concern that is never settled, never geographically or temporally bounded, and thus never open to treatment as a conventional ethnographic field site. To retain the sensibilities of ethnography, whilst retuning our forms of engagement and analyses through these ever emerging digital matters, requires a form of ‘ethno-resonance’ they suggest. Through such resonance, Bitcoin can be studied while a critical distance is maintained through which the cyberlibertarian orthodoxies of emerging crypto-currencies can be analysed. What emerges is something akin to a scaled-up ethnomethodological breaching experiment, first in relation to money and the financial crisis, and the emergence of Bitcoin as a way of encouraging speculation on financial futures in the wake of that crisis. But also, second, of ethnography: just what can it mean to now study something without a field?
A more conventional treatment of ethnomethodological precepts, although never less than technologically saturated, is pursued in Paul Luff and Christian Heath’s study of centres of co-ordination. Here, visible problems and how they might be practised forms the object of concern. In place of a focus on breach, comes a study of the on-going practices through which the co-ordination of technology, organisational arrangements and participants are enabled through sequential and interactional work. Technological saturation in the control room, however, only provides circumscribed access to the material environment where problems are taking place. In a similar manner to Bitcoin, this raises questions for the ethnographer. Ethnographic study must now become both multi-sited and multi-modal, engaging various techniques for recording the visual and auditory traces of the control room. Although both papers relate to ethnomethodology, to technological saturation and emerging objects of concern, Kavanagh and colleagues respond methodologically through resonance, whereas Luff and Heath respond through up-close study of sequences of naturally occurring action.
An alternative methodological response to the ever emerging, technologically saturated workplace is provided by Nathan Wittock, Michiel De Krom and Lesley Hustinx. Their study of blood takes a praxiographic approach to the organisational co-ordination of blood’s multiplicity. For these authors, praxiography involves paying close attention to activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures and objects, enabling blood itself to be an active participant in the study. Their particular concern is for co-ordination once again, but this time the ways in which distinct and even incoherent enactments of blood can be sequentially and temporally co-ordinated for the organisation to continue to sensibly treat its central matter of concern. Praxiography, drawing on Mol (2002), thus requires a move away from a pluralistic approach to objects, with various actors focusing on different aspects of the same object, to multiplicity that signals the enactment of different versions of the object. What then emerges within the organisation of Belgian blood donation is blood as a gift, and as suspicion, and as management, and as research, and as economy.
From resonance, to studies of co-ordinated practice, to research on the praxiographic co-ordination of different versions of the object, we can discern different matters of concern each emerging through distinct technologically saturated everydays. For our purposes in underscoring new directions in ethnography, we can also start to trace out the methodological contours of these investigations into challenging objects: the need to find distinct ways of making something as elusive as Bitcoin open to analysis through ethnographic sensibilities, the challenges for ethnographers in accessing the material environments of problems that require a response through control rooms, and the complexities produced via the organisational co-ordination of ontological multiplicities. What these challenges start to reveal is that ethnography and ethnographers are taken in new directions through these studies.
Two of the papers offer a response to the difficulties of grasping elusive objects through text. For Cochoy and Hagberg and Kjellberg, the history of the digital is a story that cannot be separated from its etymological roots in the digit. In their study of pricing practices, ethnography becomes literally translated into the writings of the people – in this case, shopkeepers. The latter are central, it is suggested, to changing practices of price writing and to the emergence of digital forms of price communication. Through close-reading of Progressive Grocer, the authors suggest that a move from coded to open prices, from hand-written to printed displays of pricing can be explored. In place of up-close study of the moment to moment activities of key figures – which in this article would be mid-20th-century shopkeepers – comes up-close study of the promotional texts through which new pricing technologies and techniques were enabled. From an ethnography in the hands of the researcher, comes an ethnography through the hands of the shopkeeper (at least mediated via Progressive Grocer).
In the same way that 20th-century shopkeeping is now unavailable as a contemporary practice to be observed by the ethnographer, Daniel Tischer, Bill Maurer and Adam Leaver suggest contemporary financial practices are full of opacity. For these researchers, documents provide a route into these otherwise obscure worlds. Here, collateral debt obligations and their contracts provide the ethnographer with a textual entry point into finance, but not simply as a written record cast free from the richness and difficulty of ethnographic study. These documents enact. They put the ethnographer in the same position as an investor whose decisions on investment may well be shaped by the available documentation. The documents themselves provide something akin to a tourist guidebook, establishing and maintaining relations between various market entities. The documents are thus brought to life through allusion to (or one might say resonance with) the history of ethnographic interest in markets, in particular Geertz’s study of the bazaar. Whereas for Cochoy and colleagues, the texts of Progressive Grocer enable access to the writing practices of shopkeepers, for Tischer, Maurer and Leaver, collateral debt obligations provide a guide to the travails of the bazaar.
What these papers share in common is that contemporary ethnography appears to be characterised by a shared and active pursuit of unconventional fieldsites. From Bitcoin to blood, from recent history to financial opacity, ethnographers are increasingly seeking to enter organisational settings that require a deep and challenging rethinking of what does, and what ought to, constitute ethnography. This is made most apparent in the paper by Ann-Christina Lange, Marc Lenglet and Robert Seyfert on algorithms used for high frequency trading in financial markets. Their emphasis is on objects of ignorance as matters of concern. As algorithms increasingly participate in trades that are beyond the speed of human traders, with automated decision making taking place outside the knowledge of human participants, ignorance abounds for both participants and researchers. This version of the technologically saturated everyday requires a further imaginative leap if it is to be engaged by ethnographers. Lange and colleagues draw on Serres (1982) to develop the quasi-object and quasi-subject as a means to capture something of the relations between traders and algorithms. What this suggests is that we need to rethink ethnography once again, but this time by also thinking algorithmically.
If algorithms provide a logic for organising the world of financial trading, Helene Ratner and Christopher Gad suggest that databases, data warehousing and data infrastructure provide new and emerging means for experimentally managing contemporary education. The move to make Danish schools’ performance public and comparable through these data infrastructures has opened up the opportunity for experimentation, establishing and cutting relations across and between various entities. But the organisational world being made is also always unfinished. Borrowing from Strathern, the connections are partial, relating to different concerns and always necessarily still in the making.
Conclusion
With this Special Issue, we sought to stimulate management and organisation studies scholars to (re)think the possibilities for organisational ethnography in the wake of various developments in theory and practice associated with post-reflexive ethnography. We were particularly interested in studies that were tackling what we see as ‘new objects of concern’ in management and organisation studies. Within mainstream approaches to management and organisation studies these objects of concern might appear exotic or even insignificant. To us, they seem to be possible portents of a new era giving rise to phenomena that falls outside the customary analytical distinctions and dualisms of modern social science. In these conditions, the macro and the micro are no longer the stabilising heuristics they might have once appeared, and this is why it is important to explore the ways in which the arbitrary might become the rule, or the ways in which the traditional dualisms of the social sciences – macro/micro, global/local, structure/agent etc. – become unsettled and redrawn, or even inverted and displaced under the influence of such objects of concern. In tracing the genealogy and effects of these new objects of concern, we may discover new organisational phenomena – or perhaps they are here already, but still unseen within the dominant disciplining of the subject and its managerial practices.
What these articles reveal is that a formal organisation is not a tribe, nor an ethnos of any kind. At present, organising takes place among, between, and outside formal organisations. But exactly because of that, new tribes, or ‘communities of practice’ arise and join the old ones, such as professions. Most importantly, the ‘tribes’ have widened, as the researchers noticed the presence of what we might call, following Michel Serres (1982), quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, that play a big part in tribal life. And to study such wide tribes, no ‘anthropology lite’, justly criticised by Paul Bate (1997), is enough to do a proper ‘participant observation’. One has to do it – to buy bitcoins, to treat algorithms as actants, to follow the flow of blood, or to trace the origins of taken for granted innovations.
True, an increased attention to objects of concern has been made possible by new technologies, digital as well as visual. After many years of neglect, objects and technologies become again foci of organisation studies. Together with our colleagues who study science and technology, we hope to be up to date with the newest trends in global organising. And as to the methods used, perhaps one needs to be reminded by Stephen Toulmin (2001: 84) that the term methodos referred to pursuit of any goal, with no particular reference to obligatory procedures. Anything that permits us to reach the goal by ethically approvable ways will do.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.