Organizational Ethnography

Conceptual Overview

OE can be traced to the very beginnings of anthropological and sociological explorations of social organization. Anthropologists produced case studies of processes of social organization as early as the 1930s, and the Chicago school of sociological research generated ethnographical data in the 1950s. In organizational studies, OE as a method appeared only in 1979 with the publication of a special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly edited by John Van Maanen. However, OE as a strategy of organizational culture research remained limited to the production of ethnodata, that is, those data that researchers claim represent the emic point of view. OE as both a methodology and a style of writing did not take root in organizational studies until the mid-1990s, when anthropology entered the field of organizational studies.

Managerial interest heralded the “cultural turn” in both management practice and organizational sciences, thus setting the stage for the concept of culture to enter both managerial and scholarly agendas. As a potential control variable, organizational culture was defined as an amalgam of beliefs, ideologies, language, ritual, and myth. In this perspective, organizational culture came to be viewed as a management instrument that can both manipulate and be manipulated in order to improve performance. Interventions in organizational culture were regarded as potentially effective in promoting loyalty, enthusiasm, diligence, and devotion of organization members to a common aim as defined by the management. In this context, academic research on organizational culture was strategically employed to generate calculable results in order to contribute to the overall aim of output enhancement.

Organizational anthropology made its appearance only as the close relationship between managerial needs and analytical approaches became disrupted. The cultural hype in management circles subsided once it became clear that organizational culture cannot easily be orchestrated, engineered, and manipulated to achieve preset managerial targets. The interest in an anthropological perspective in organizational life was fueled by the understanding that organizations, instead of being well-integrated and clearly bounded entities, embody partly converging, partly conflicting, and continuously changing configurations of interests, aims, motives, and perceptions of meaning.

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