In the middle of managers Occupational communities,global ethnography and the multinationals

Abstract

International management is a discipline that has yet to develop ethnographic sensitivity to the links between macro-level changes in the political economy and organizational structures and micro-level meanings and everyday life. Hassard et al. (this issue) argue that by using ethnography to study formation of middle managers' communal experiences, international management could attune to the new organizational ideology and its actualization in the everyday life of local actors in multinational corporations. In this response to Hassard et al., I note that middle managers represent a distinct occupational group that has been affected profoundly by the restructuring and delayering initiatives in corporate organizations and that their anxieties and uncertainties, shared as they may be across countries, are arguably different from the experiences of other occupational groups. Additionally, ethnographic method has traditionally studied local cultures and sites, and even the recent calls for `global ethnography' remark that ethnographic research cannot present a total vision of the world systems or transnational institutions. Instead, what ethnography can offer is description of the lives of managers and other corporate actors as they, together with the ethnographer, participate in the transnational flows, mobilities and ideologies from the viewpoint of the legacies of their local occupational and communal traditions.