Sierk Ybema

Just as newspapers do not, typically, engage with the ordinary experiences of people's daily lives, so organizational studies has also tended largely to ignore the humdrum, everyday experiences of people working in organizations. However, ethnographic approaches provide in-depth and up-close understandings of how the 'everyday-ness' of work is organized and how, in turn, work itself organizes people and the societies they inhabit.

Studying Everyday Organizational Life: Introduction Sierk Ybema, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels and Frans Kamsteeg

PART ONE: ETHNOGRAPHIC DOING AND WRITING
Getting Going: Organizing Ethnographic Fieldwork Kees van der Waal
Ethnographic Practices: From 'Writing-up Ethnographic Research' to 'Writing Ethnography' Michael Humphreys and Tony Watson
Reading and Writing as Method: In Search of Trustworthy Texts Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow
When the 'Subject' and the 'Researcher' Speak Together: Co-producing Organizational Ethnography Simon Down and Michael Hughes

PART TWO: FAMILIARITY AND 'STRANGER-NESS'
Making the Familiar Strange: A Case for Disengaged Organizational Ethnography Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg
Zooming In & Zooming Out: A Package of Method and Theory to Study Work Practices Davide Nicolini
From Participant Observation to Observant Participation Brian Moeran
At-home Ethnography: Struggling with Closeness and Closure Mats Alvesson

PART THREE: RESEARCHER-RESEARCHED RELATIONSHIPS
Lies from the Field: Ethical Issues in Organizational Ethnography Gary Alan Fine and David Shulman
'But I Thought We Were Friends?' Life Cycles and Research Relationships Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert, Robert MacIntosh and Peter McInnes
Critical Action Research and Organizational Ethnography Chris Sykes and Lesley Treleaven
Beyond Complicity: A Plea for Engaged Ethnography Halleh Ghorashi and Harry Wels

Annotated Bibliography
Defining 'Organizational Ethnography': Selection Criteria Dvora Yanow and Karin Geuijen
Bibliography Karin Geuijen

'This collection of articles is exceptionally well selected. It will be an essential reference for any student or researcher interested in organizational culture.’
– Joanne Martin, Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emerita, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, California, US

48 articles, dating from 1951 to 2002.
Contributors include: M. Alvesson, S. Barley, P. Bate, D. Collinson, B. Czarniawska, T. Deal, J. Martin, E. Schien, L. Smircich, B. Turner, J. Van Maanen.

Identity work is widely regarded as a process through which people strive to establish, maintain or restore a coherent and consistent sense of self. In the face of potential disruptions of, or threats to, their identities, people seek to salvage their sense of self by resolving tensions and restoring consistency. In contrast to the current identity work literature, this research indicates that identity work is not always about seeking resolution and moving on, but sometimes about continuing struggles which do not achieve a secure sense of self. This article seeks to elaborate the understanding of unresolved identity work by exploring three contexts of the everyday practice of indie musicians. An analysis of how they struggle to construct acceptable versions of their selves as songwriter, bandleader and front(wo)man allows us to develop the conceptualization of self-questioning (as opposed to self-affirmative, resolution-oriented) identity work.

For many scholars and practitioners in the field of cross-cultural management, Hofstede’s work has provided a foundation for theory and practice. In this chapter, we briefly describe its main characteristics, explore its impact, and critically discuss its limitations. We then sketch the outlines of a critical, interpretive approach to studying national culture and cultural differences in organizational settings which is more sensitive to culture change and conflict; individual agency and social context; as well as power issues and organizational politics. After offering an illustration, we close our chapter with a few reflective thoughts and ideas for future directions.

Highlighting public-service actors’ deliberately tokenistic or self-serving efforts, existing literature has shown that public participation often involves the co-optation of sympathetic citizens. In contrast, our study demonstrates that participatory advocates may discredit and marginalize critical voices despite their own inclusive, democratic ideals. We analyze the entangled legitimacy claims of participating citizens and “inviting” public-service actors, capturing (a) the often-unintended dynamics through which the inclusion of particular participants legitimizes the exclusion of others, while illuminating (b) the tenacious propensity of participatory initiatives to establish “constructive cooperation” as the norm for participation and, subsequently, to normalize exclusionary practices.

What happens when people try to ‘transcend’ organizational boundaries and engage with so-called outsiders? Current boundary-work literature does not fully account for the processual, dispersed, and political dynamics triggered by such efforts. To address this shortcoming, this article builds on an ethnographic study of a professional care provider’s attempts to engage local citizens within one of its care homes. We analyze how actors negotiate the parameters of outsider engagement – that is, how they interactively (re-)erect and (re-)efface boundaries between actors (Who is engaged?), issues (What is their engagement about?), and positions of authority (Does local engagement affect central decision-making?). We contribute to extant theorizing by, first, explicitly scrutinizing boundary work’s temporal and spatial dynamics. Testifying to the importance of analyzing temporal sequences, we show how attempts at transcending boundaries intensified boundary work on multiple organizational...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an inside-out perspective on the practices and effects of talent management (TM) in a multinational organization. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an autoethnographic approach focusing on the experiences of the first author during her employment in a multinational organization. This approach contributes to the literature by providing an insider talent perspective that thus far has not been presented in TM research. Findings Applying autoethnography as a means to address the inside-out perspective in TM reveals a tension. The authors label this phenomenon the “talent paradox,” defined as the mix of simultaneously occurring opportunities and risks for individuals identified and celebrated as a talent. Originality/value The paper may be of value to TM scholars and practitioners, as well as to employees who have been identified as high potentials or talents in their organizations. In contrast with the TM literature’s optimism, ...

Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education.

When studying individual attempts to foster citizen engagement, scholars have pointed to the coexistence of competing rationales. Thus far, however, current literature barely elaborates on the socio-political processes through which employees of professional organizations deal with such disparate considerations. To address this gap, this article builds on an ethnographic study, conducted in the Netherlands between 2013 and 2016, of a professional care organization's attempts to engage local citizens in one of its elderly care homes. To investigate how citizen engagement is 'done' in the context of daily organizing, we followed employees as they gradually created and demarcated the scope for such engagement by approaching citizens as either strategic partners (pursuing 'democratic' rationales) or as operational volunteers (pursuing 'instrumental' rationales). In order to deal with such potentially incongruent orientations, we found that employees used discursive strategies to influence the balance that was struck between competing rationales; either through depoliticization-i.e., the downplaying of incongruities and the framing of disparate considerations as being complementary within the pursuit of a shared, overarching goal-or through politicization, i.e., the active challenging of how their colleagues prioritized one consideration over another. By showing how the successful conveyance of such (de)politicized accounts helped employees either defend or redraw the boundaries of what citizen engagement was (not) about, we contribute to extant theorization by (1) developing a processual approach to studying citizen engagement that (2) is sensitive to organizational politics.

Within ethnographic forms of organisational research, sensitivity to context is generally acknowledged as a critical ingredient for analysing processes and practices. When conducting such research, however, researchers typically privilege one particular research context for generating knowledge: although some ethnographic scholars underscore the importance of adopting a diversity of both insider and outsider roles, ethnographic research is usually equated with gaining a deep familiarity with the field of study through immersion. First, we argue that, although immersion elicits valuable knowledge ‘from within’, its prioritisation inevitably blinds the researcher’s eye to equally interesting insights stemming from alternative – and often unintended – positionings. Testifying to the significance of researchers’ relational reflexivity for data interpretation, we show how a variety of researcher’ positionings vis-à-vis the researched generated a variety of insights. Critical sensitivity ...

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power...

Recent studies of temporary organizing and project-based work explain how organizational actors establish and maintain clear role structures and harmonious relations in the face of precariousness by engaging in stabilizing work practices. This focus upon ‘order’ undervalues conflict-ridden negotiations and power struggles in temporary organizing. This paper demonstrates that in temporary organizing conflict and order may exist in tandem. Drawing close to the collaborative dynamics in a large-scale global project, we analyse the political struggles over role patterns and hierarchic positioning of client and agent in the temporary organization of the Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP). In such projects, the agent typically takes the position of project leader. In this case however, the client was formally in charge, while the agent was assigned the role of coach and mentor. The diffuse hierarchy triggered project partners to engage in both harmony-seeking social and discursive prac...

2.1 INLEIDING 93 2.2 VERANDERING 97 Een metamorfose 100 De lezer, de concurrent en de Perscombinatie 104 Democratisering en dogmatisme 108 Professionalisering en verzakelijking 113 De commerciële context 116 Vervaging van ideologische tegenstellingen 120 Verwijdering van het verleden 123 2.3 VERWARRING 131 Tussen heden en verleden 133 'Ontwarring' 136 'Koester de crisis' 140 De politieke tinten van de crisis 143

Studies interested in the discursive use of ‘the past’ often view history as an organizational resource designed to create a shared origin and a common purpose, promoting a sense of continuity and commitment among organizational stakeholders. In this article, I view ‘history’ instead as a symbolic site for discursive struggles between proponents and opponents of organizational change. It shows how organizational actors use ‘traces’ of a collective past in their version of ‘the’ history to win consent for change and to counter competing views. They do so by creating a sense of discontinuity from the past. The case study presented in this article combines a historian’s account of a newspaper’s history with an ethnographic account of the use of history prevalent among newspaper editors. While the historian’s narrative suggests the continuance of some vigorous traditions alongside identity change, the editors narratively construct or ‘invent’ transitions between periods or episodes whil...