Experimental Ethnography and the Future of Critique

Conveners:

Sideeq Mohammed, The University of Manchester, sideeq.mohammed@manchester.ac.uk

Oz Gore, The University of Manchester, oz.gore@manchester.ac.uk

Organisational ethnography is beginning to occupy an ever more significant place among

the intellectual concerns and research methods of scholars located in the modern business school.

With its own journals, conferences and research centres being set up to further its development,

ethnography looks set to extend its contribution to our understanding of organising. On the

backdrop of management and organisation studies developing an interest in expanding its

methodological repertoire (see Barry & Hansen, 2008), this panel seeks to ask what of

organisational ethnography’s contribution to critical approaches?

This question becomes even more pertinent, when considering how, as ethnography

becomes a ‘legitimate qualitative method’ in the business school, with contributions like Van

Maanen’s Tales From the Field now widely accepted in the mainstream (see Cunliffe, 2009), its

practices and assumptions are being called into question by many within the social sciences.

Significant work is taking place across the academy which challenges the modes of ethnography

that have become popular in the business school, namely those which seek ‘immersion’ within

the culture of an organisation in order to understand simply ‘how things work’ there (see

Watson, 2011; 2012). This auto-critique of ethnography reaches at least as far back as the

Writing Culture project (see Clifford and Marcus, 1986), and has received only modest treatment

within the business school from scholars associated with a critical agenda (see Linstead, 1997;

Rosen, 2000; Czarniawska, 2012; Ybema et al., 2009). However, if business and management

studies has been slow to respond to Writing Culture, then there is even less awareness of more

recent developments associated with what has been called “the ontological turn” (see Holbraad et

al., 2014; Mol, 1999, 2002; de la Cadena, 2015; Kohn, 2013). With relatively few recent

exceptions (see O’Doherty, 2015, 2016; Papazu, 2016; Sage et al., 2014) our ethnographic

practice not only threatens to lag behind that of our contemporaries in other disciplines but may

well miss out on the potential of these modes of ethnographic engagement to open up new means

of critique. The same can be said for our response to related modes of engagement such as (inter

alia) cosmological perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, 2012; Stengers, 2010, 2011), object

oriented philosophy (Harman, 2011) and actor-network approaches (Latour, 2005).

It thus seems pertinent for us to ask what the potential contribution of these movements

within ethnographic thought and practice might be to CMS scholarship and, furthermore, what

CMS might give back to the broader community of ethnographers who are challenged by these

problems. We are inviting submissions which chronicle ethnographic experiments within the

aforementioned traditions, particularly those which actively seek the development of unique

methods and approaches to ethnographic work; practices which we might come to call “critical

management ethnography”.

The panel is interested in bringing together papers dealing with the following topics:

- The possibility for organisational ethnography to make a unique contribution to

scholarship, either through its methods or the object of its investigation.

- More-than-representational accounts of organising and organisation.

- Narratives of organisational events, encounters, or ethnographic objects that seek

an engagement with the works of so called ‘process philosophers’ (Whitehead,

Deleuze, Tarde, etc.). This might include non-traditional ethnographies exploring

affectivity, virtuality, or materiality in organisation and management.

- New forms of ethnographic critique, particularly those which call into question

what it means to be critical.

- Reflexive engagement with the role of the organisational ethnographer as

scientist/manager/storyteller/artist/philosopher/consultant/etc.

- Challenges to or critique of the use of ethnography in management and

organisation studies.

- The potential contribution of multi-sited ethnographies to the study of what has

been understood as ‘macro phenomena’ such as the crisis of capitalism,

globalisation, or the intensification of work.

References

Barry, D. & Hansen, H., 2008. The SAGE Handbook of New Approaches in Management and

Organization. London: Sage Publications.

Clifford, J. & Marcus, G. eds., 1986. In: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of

Ethnography. London: University of California Press.

Cunliffe, A., 2010. Retelling Tales of the Field: In Search of Organizational Ethnography 20

Years On. Organizational Research Methods, 13(2), pp. 1-16.

Czarniawska, B., 2012. Organization Theory Meets Anthropology: A Story of an Encounter.

Journal of Business Anthroplogy , 1(1), pp. 118-140.

de la Cadena, M., 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. London:

Duke University Press.

Harman, G., 2011. The Road to Objects. Continent, 3(1), pp. 171-179.

Holbraad, M., Pedersen, M. & Viveiros de Castro, E., 2014. The Politics of Ontology:

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Available at: http://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions

[Accessed 15 January 2016].

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University of California Press.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:

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Mol, A., 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University

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O'Doherty, D., 2015. Missing Connexions: The politics of airport expansion in the United

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O'Doherty, D., 2016. Feline politics in organization: The nine lives of Olly the cat. Organization,

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Papazu, I., 2016. Management through hope: an ethnography of Denmark’s Renewable Energy

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