Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations Free

What images of ethnographic research are conveyed in the pages of this journal or evoked by readers when they think about ethnography? To the imaginary of “organizational ethnography” by contrast with “anthropological ethnography”, Melissa Cefkin's edited Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations adds another point of contrast: perspectives from the world of “business anthropology.” The book includes chapters by some of its leading practitioners in corporate settings, most of them IT-related, concluding with reflective comments from one practitioner – veteran Jeanette Blomberg – and one academic – equally renowned anthropologist Michael M.J. Fischer.

The chapters and their reference lists and acknowledgements are a who's who of key figures at the intersections of anthropological practice, high tech, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies/sociology of scientific knowledge (STS/SSK), human-computer interface (HCI), participatory design conference (PDC), and so on. They provide insights into major aspects of contemporary life, from IT to commercialization, from product design to branding. Case settings include Microsoft, a US Veterans Agency medical center (as a public organization, not commonly thought of as a “corporation” per se, but certainly sharing some of the size and complexity dimensions of these other organizations), Intel chip manufacturing plants in Costa Rica and Malaysia, and a handful of pseudonymized companies. The chapter by Darrouzet, Wild, and Wilkinson presents their own consulting approach (operating as “Water Cooler Logic” – great name for a firm!), using intriguing analytic processes (I’d love to work there), as much as it does the VA Hospital, their case.

Disciplinary histories are an intriguing way of gaining an understanding of an author's approach to a field, and Cefkin's genealogical narratives in the book's introduction sketch out an interesting story. They are also suggestive of the intellectual and analytic promise of marrying “corporate ethnographic studies” with “organizational studies ethnographies.” In my reading of them, the chapters in this volume show that these two practices are more alike than they are different, especially by contrast with more psychologically-oriented consulting practices that emerge from organizational development (OD). There is much to be learned from what is written here, in at least four areas of research thought, even if their point of departure is the research work life in the corporate world rather than the academic one – and perhaps because of that.

One of these areas of contribution is to our understanding of methodological issues in ethnographic work. Employed in the organizations they study or on behalf of whom they conduct research, these authors are “[d]enied the critical distance of an outsider” (p. 8), an attribute they share with other “native” or “at home” ethnographers studying their own organizations or local cultures (see, e.g. Narayan, 1993; Alvesson, 2009). Cefkin argues for the “unique stance” of perspectives “from deep within” and “as active participants in” organizational life – a distinctive variation on (participatory) action research which is similarly participatory, although in which researchers are not usually members of the setting under study. One of the chapters, by Nafus and anderson [sic], suggests that anthropologists and their business counterparts co-produce certain kinds of knowledge. This perspective is fairly widely accepted in interpretive methodological circles, but it is nice to have empirical evidence in support of the point. In addition, we are introduced to “participatory ethnography” (Darrouzet, Wild, and Wilkinson), methods for analyzing the identity dialectics of product managers, technical customers, and ethnographers (Flynn), and methods for approaching inscriptions on organizational walls as lieux de memoire (Nafus and anderson). I particularly appreciated the use of visual methods in several of these chapters (the ones by Flynn, Jordan with Lambert, Nafus and anderson, Brun-Cottan).

A second area of contribution is to practice studies. Those chapters that engage it directly largely take up the more reflective practitioner work (of, e.g. Donald Schön), contributing much to both theoretical argumentation and empirical analyses. Once again, I see generative potential in bringing these organization-based theorizings together with both process organizational studies and the more phenomenological literature (e.g. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005; Nicolini et al., 2003; Schatzki, 2006).

Another potential contribution derives from what is distinctive about the positions from which these authors write: they are explicitly called upon to provide advice – whether in the area of OD and management consulting or with respect to product design and development. This leads to one more set of challenges emerging from confronting academic ethnographers with corporate ethnographers: the extent to which the former are themselves called upon to adopt the role of consultants or otherwise to advise. I have in mind, in particular, a problem that at times confronts PhD researchers asked after six weeks or so in the field to report on their findings. As Ed Schein (2013) has noted, most doctoral students are not trained as interventionists, leading to ethical challenges if they take on this role, which they often do not anticipate and for which their advisors have not thought, or perhaps known, to prepare them. I imagine that we could learn a great deal from the authors of some of these chapters with respect to what it means to give consulting advice, how to handle the potential tensions between that and in-depth studies, and related issues.

Finally, there are the ethical concerns. Anthropology as a discipline, in the US at least, roundly objected to the anthropologist's “embedding” in military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cefkin herself draws the parallel (pp. 20-21) in discussing corporate anthropologists embedded in their marketing, branding, and other circumstances: not only studying or working in organizations, corporate anthropologists work for them. The advantages, in methodologists’ views, that attach to ethnography and make it more useful for accessing or generating certain kinds of knowledge can also be turned against ethnographers, in the form of the commercial expectation that they can offer “access to an unfettered truth” (p. 21). Here, too, I can imagine generative conversations across academic and corporate practitioner communities.

For book editor Melissa Cefkin and the authors of the main chapters, the imaginary against which they position their practices of “corporate ethnography” seems to be what is taught and practiced in traditional academic anthropology departments. For those of us trying to understand what we do when we do organizational ethnography, this adds another dimension: to what extent is an “anthropological” perspective (read: academic anthropology) different from a corporate anthropology one, and that from an organizational studies one? In my reading of this book, the differences between the latter two are not that great, especially by contrast with Inside Organizations: Anthropologists at Work (Gellner and Hirsch, 2001), the other recent major work to take up an anthropology-focussed approach to the study of organizations,^[1] whose chapter authors were, on the whole, innocent of organizational theories that would explain business operations. Perhaps this should not be surprising: both corporate ethnographic and organizational ethnographic practices are at odds with how mainstream (read: academic) anthropologists perceive their calling. Still, Cefkin and her colleagues’ book is shadowed by the sense that the sort of work they do needs defending from anticipated disparagement at the hands of academic anthropologists. This has certainly been the experience of US “applied anthropology” groups (e.g. the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Work) at the hands of others in the American Anthropological Association. Reading from my vantage point in Europe, I find this continued put-down of such work discouraging, to say the least, and am thankful that here, the boundary lines seem less starkly drawn (see also Wright, 1994).

With respect to the book's organizational ethnography imaginary, however, I have some concerns. Cefkin, referencing one chapter (Gottlieb's), accepts the idea that organizational studies treats organizational “culture” as so many traits that can be identified and listed, a position both of them critique. I and many others doing organizational ethnography (and organizational culture studies) in academic organizational studies departments share this critique; but we also know that the discipline's engagement with culture has, since the 1990s if not earlier, been rather more sophisticated than that. I think it erroneous to say that conceiving of culture as “grounded and fixed” is “common to organizational studies” (p. 26; see also Ortlieb's chapter). Tying the organizational studies engagement with culture and ethnography to its disciplinary history – see, e.g. Morey and Luthans (1987/2013), Yanow et al. (2013) – would go a fair way to eliminating this narrow and disparaging treatment of the discipline. Still, we might well consider whether ethnographic studies of corporate organizations have two distinct traditions – business anthropology, on the one hand, a more corporate orientation as practiced, for example, at the International Conference on Business Anthropology; and organizational anthropology, on the other, a more academic orientation on display at the Liverpool annual conference hosted in Amsterdam this year (“Symposium on Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences”).

Bottom line? The book is not only a must-read for “business anthropology” students and practitioners, but also, and perhaps even more so, for academic organizational ethnographers, both for use in teaching and for their own theorizing, whether with respect to (collective) organizational learning, practice studies, process organizational studies, or interpretive research methods, and especially for those interested in seeing constitutive causality in practice. The theorizing presented on these pages provides the sort of oblique angle that lends clarity to the direct focus on one's interests, along the “singing in the shower” or Archimedes’ bathtub principle: looking at something else (in this case business anthropology) to understand one's own practice of academic organizational, political, policy, educational, etc. ethnography. Curiously enough, this implements the classic anthropological principle of going away to study another place in order to return to understand one's own more fully. If I might be allowed a personal wish, it would be that Berghahn or another publisher bring out a resource volume collecting many of the cited works that are papers in conference proceedings. That would go a long way to furthering generative conversations among ethnographers employed in corporations and consulting firms and those in academic settings.