Editorial
Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Volume 1, Issue 2.
The inaugural edition of the Journal of Organizational Ethnographysought to outline the kinds of research that we hoped to attract and publish within the pages of forthcoming issues. We were also keen to sketch why we thought a new journal was needed in these new times and in the current academic climate. Issue 1.2 provides a first opportunity to explore whether our conviction for creating a space for new ethnographic work is a widely held ambition and also provides a reflection upon the collective manifesto penned by contributors to Issue 1.1. Submission rates to the journal, together with the quality of work that we have received, have been pleasing and, in part, affirm that our conviction is indeed more widely held. The veracity of our claim, that a new journal is needed for new times, is for others to decide. That said, we think the content of this issue responds directly to many of the concerns articulated in the collective manifesto; provides exemplars of the types of work we envisaged attracting; demonstrates the salient role ethnography can play in making sense of organizations; and explores the wider social implications of ethnographic work.
Darius Mehri's paper offers what, in many respects, represents a return to traditional forms of industrial, plant and factory ethnography. His contribution is to explore the restructuring of Nizumi, a Toyota group company, in the face of economic distress precipitated by the Asian economic crisis of the of the mid-1990s. Evocative of traditional shop-floor ethnography, Mehri's work is based on fieldwork drawn from three years as a participant observer where he worked as a production engineer together with interviews with those he worked alongside. His detailed and careful account provides the reader with a sense of the experience of restructuring from the perspective of those subject to the vagaries both of management and of global labour markets. The sense of anxiety,fear and hopelessness as work intensifies, pay is cut and colleagues are manipulated and marginalized becomes palpable. The account details how control of the Nizumi becomes progressively surrendered as Toyota management aggressively pursues strategy for cost reduction through direct and indirect forms of control. This account, with its mix of traditional techniques and a very contemporary context, will have clear resonance to those exposed to management in a time of crisis and showcases the important role ethnography has in illuminating the operation and impact of such practices.
David Lewis in this issue explores the intersection between public, private and third sector organizations. The idea of an organization occupying space between state and market has a long history, but the continued retreat of state provision in areas of welfare and educational provision and the ascent of the third sector to a domain of public policy means that this analysis is particularly relevant. His in-depth exploration of the spaces between these sectors reveals the porosity of boundaries when seen from the perspective of workers who negotiate and transcend them in their everyday working lives. His work speaks to the current interest in the role of boundaries as work and employment becomes more flexible and precarious for most, whilst the lines between organizational entities are relentlessly drawn and redrawn by irresolute cadres of management and consultants. Both international and comparative in scope, the discussion that Lewis articulates builds to suggest a typology of four archetypes of boundary crossers. Lewis sites his work as contributing to the increasing ethnographic attention devoted to policy, extends the “life history” approach to ethnographic research and provides an analytical tool for future researcher.
In a piece that exhibits thematic similarities to the work of David Lewis,Julia Vorhölter situates her contribution also within the context of the increasing use of ethnographic techniques within the policy and development sector. Theoretically, the similarity is extended as Vorhölter focuses upon the concept of participation, a critical concern within the development field, to discuss in-depth the link between participation as a meta-theoretical concept and specific organizational cultures of development agencies. Specially, the author is able to outline three concrete elements that relate to an organization's culture and affect the approach it adopts towards participation:the degree of professionalization; processes of brokerage; and value and mission statements. The importance of this approach is that it stresses how significant it is to understand how development organizations work in situ rather than to attempt to design processes anew from a distance to make development most effective.
Bob Jeffrey and Geoff Troman explore the consequences of increasing marketization of educational provision in many developed economies. In particular, the paper explores how, within a case study of an English Primary School, teachers manage the tensions between the competing logics and imperatives of performativity and creativity, respectively. The study confirms the increasing trend for educators to adopt “managerial roles” and to tend towards the mobilization of “peer surveillance” in their everyday working lives. Through the institutional “embrace”, educators seek to secure their short-term futures by aligning themselves with particular institutional configurations by displaying appropriate performances which in this case revolved around discourses of aspiration, team work and distributed leadership and openness. Although clearly site specific, the relevance of the findings will be easily recognizable to those within the broader education field and beyond.
Pauline Ramshaw's account of urban “beat” policing in the UK provides an insight to the subcultures of community policing set against a context of funding cuts and shifting organizational priorities. Her close observation of the police at work sketches the way in which autonomy and flexibility is mobilized by police officers during periods of “untasked” patrol. We see the variation that results and the author usefully relates this to differences of opinion within the team of officers relating to the aims and priorities of community policing. The insights provided here allow us to appreciate a more detailed picture of policing in practice and how strategic proprieties at an organization level are mediated through individual expertise, experience and expectations to produce practices which at times, at least on the surface,appears divergent and incompatible.
All the articles in this edition combine elements of established technique with a thoroughly contemporary context and the findings from each paper have much broader implications that the specific contexts considered. This then confirms, in our view, the journals remit and we look forward to broadening and deepen the discussion of these concerns in future editions.
Matthew Brannan, Manuela Nocker and Mike Rowe
