Journal of Organizational Ethnography

Making organisational ethnography

Tony J. Watson
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Making
Making organisational organisational
ethnography ethnography
Tony J. Watson
Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham,
Nottingham, UK
15

Abstract
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the “manifesto” for organisational
ethnography being put forward in the first issue of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.
Design/methodology/approach – The author draws upon several decades of personal experience
of field research and ethnographic writing, in and around organisations, to suggest ways in which this
type of research and publication can be advanced.
Findings – It is wise to see ethnography as much more than a research method; it is a way of
presenting research – research which can be carried out using a variety of investigative methods in
addition to the essential activity of intensive field research. To work fully within the spirit of
ethnography, it is vital to set organisational activities within the broad societal order of which they are
part. Ethnographic researchers should consider undertaking “everyday ethnography” (seeking
ethnographic insights in the course of their daily lives) as an element of their studies.
Originality/value – The paper provides a clear and bold guide to the nature and practice of
organisational ethnography based on extensive research and writing experience in the field.
Keywords Ethnography, Organizations, Society, Organizational ethnography,
Organizations and society, Everyday life, Field research, Grounded research, Social sciences, Fiction
Paper type Viewpoint

Introduction
It is a great pleasure to contribute to the launch of the Journal of Organizational
Ethnography. Although the making of ethnographies is not something to which all
organisational researchers can be expected to turn, it is slowly becoming recognised
that ethnographic research, or research that adopts elements of field research, has a
great deal more to offer to organisational and managerial studies than has previously
been recognised. Therefore, central to a manifesto for the new journal must be the aim
of promoting ethnographic and ethnographically oriented research generally. The
journal should aspire to having a general positive catalytic effect on researchers and on
the publishers and journal editors who present their work to the world. It must not
become a ghetto into which the bulk of ethnographic organisational research is drawn.
We do not want to exacerbate the disturbing tendency whereby “quantitative” research
work is only read by quantitative researchers, “qualitative researchers” only read work
by other qualitative researchers, and so on. In the pragmatist epistemological tradition,
into which ethnographic work so readily falls, the whole point of research is to inform
the practices of members of society by presenting them with grounded accounts of
“how the social world works” (Watson, 2011). Every time social scientists increase
the exclusivity of their occupational division of labour and every time they set up
another specialist “talking shop”, they risk pushing further and further away any Journal of Organizational
move in this direction. It is not easy to say how this danger can be avoided. But doing Ethnography
Vol. 1 No. 1, 2012
so will be much easier if JOE succeeds in publishing work of such a high quality pp. 15-22
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
and perceived relevance (academic and social) that both researchers and research 2046-6749
disseminators will, if I can borrow a phrase from one of my entrepreneurial research DOI 10.1108/20466741211220615
 JOE contacts, “want a slice of that action”. Thus, let part of the journal’s manifesto be to
1,1 act as a trendsetter, a trailblazer, a pathfinder for ethnographic work and its relevance
to everyone interested in organisations.
To achieve this rather ambitious purpose, I shall now make several suggestions
about how we conceive of, present and carry out ethnographic work. These manifesto
items are based on some decades of involvement in the field and derive from a
16 continuous, and indeed continuing, process of “learning the ropes” of the ethnographic
craft. First, I shall propose that it is helpful to see ethnography as much more than
a research method. Second, I suggest that it will enhance the quality, scope and
distinctiveness of our ethnographic work if we work to soften the boundaries between
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organisations and the social orders in which they exist. Third, to put into practice
the above principle, I propose that researchers consider doing more work in what I have
come to think of as “everyday ethnography”.

Let us treat ethnography as much more than a research method

There are enormous advantages in treating ethnography as a distinctive type of
research and not as simply a method of doing research. I propose that a particularly
helpful way of defining ethnography is as a genre of social science writing which
draws upon the writer’s close observation of and involvement with people in a
particular social setting and relates the words spoken and the practices observed or
experienced to the overall cultural framework within which they occurred. If we treat
ethnography as a culturally holistic social science genre rather than thinking of it
as a method, we are more likely to appreciate the distinctive features of this basically
anthropological practice and, hence, go beyond research findings whose only
distinctiveness lies in the author’s possible claim that “I was there”. Although
ethnographic writing is only possible if one adopts intensive field-research
observational practices, the adoption of such procedures will not in themselves lead
to ethnography. You could spend half your life “embedded” in an organisational setting
and get nowhere near to appreciating the relationship between what you observed
and experienced to the broader cultural framework in which they happened. And
another major advantage of not treating ethnography as a method is that it encourages
researchers to be open to the whole range of other investigative methods – from
interviews and documentary analysis to the perusal of statistics and even the carrying
out of small surveys. Almost any method ever used in the social sciences can
potentially be deployed alongside the necessary intensive observational work which is
the sine qua non of ethnography. None of these other methods can replace close
involvement with people in their “natural” setting. But they can considerably enhance
the richness of the insights which can be generated.

Let us always remember the distinctive concern of ethnography with

cultural “wholes” and never forget that organisations are parts of society
Central to the above characterisation of ethnographic work, with its reference to an
“overall cultural framework”, is a notion of cultural “holism”. Baszanger and Dodier
explain this notion very effectively when they write of ethnographers relating
sequences of observations to “a cultural whole” where there is “global reference which
encompasses these observations” and enables them to “throw light on each other”
(2004, p. 13). And Gellner and Hirsch are helpful in suggesting that ethnographers
make “a commitment to methodological holism” whereby “anything in the research
context can be relevant and could potentially be taken into account” (2001, p. 1).
 So what does this mean for organisational ethnography? At first sight, it would Making
suggest that when we look at the detailed day-to-day activities that occur in our chosen organisational
organisation and listen to and take part in the small conversations that fill the day, we
make sense of them by analysing how they relate to the overall culture of “the ethnography
organisation”. This would make our “cultural whole” the factory, farm, prison, school
or hospital in which we have done our fieldwork. This, I suggest, is not sufficient.
It implies the existence of a boundary between organisation and “society” which might 17
be convenient for the organisational specialist to believe in but which, I venture to
suggest, any ethnographer will find difficult to locate in the “real world”.
Of course, one must look at any distinctive features of the researched organisation
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which can be related to observed behaviours and experienced conversations. But

we have to be extremely careful to avoid the trap which Martin (2002) warned
organisation researchers about. She argued that we tend to see any organisation that
we focus upon as unique. We thereby fail to see how many cultural characteristics that
we come across in any organisation are likely to be seen in the cultures of other
organisations. And I would add to this the fact that many of what we take to be
organisational cultural characteristics (whether existing across different organisations
or not) may be characteristics of broader societal institutions or particular institutional
fields. To illustrate this point, I remember listening to a student who had done her first
industrial placement in a large hotel telling her tutor about “the amazing – and really
freaky – culture” that she had observed and experienced during her placement. Her
tutor repeatedly interrupted the account which followed with words along the lines:
“No Jane, that’s not The Moonshine Hotel, it’s the hotel and catering industry”; “Sorry,
Jane, I’ve seen what you’ve just described in every hotel I’ve ever worked in”. It is easy
to see that, if this undergraduate student were a research student going into the field
for the first time, she would soon be in difficulty learning about “how things were
as they were” in that hotel if she did not move her analysis up to the institutional
field level of the industry of which her selected hotel were a part. But, if she realised
this as her research proceeded, she might well have come to realise (say, after a holiday
abroad and staying in some American hotels) that she also needed to consider the ways
in which life in her research organisation related to the nation or the society in which
the hotel was located.
The word “organisation” in the social sciences often refers to bureaucratically
structured formal organisations. This is the meaning that is adopted by books entitled
Organizational Ethnography (Neyland, 2008; Ybema et al., 2009) and the present new
journal. But “organisation” is used in another way in the social sciences: to refer to the
society-level, and increasingly cross-societal, “social organisation” of which formal
organisations are a part. This distinction was made in a classic organisation theory
text (Blau and Scott, 1963) but its import has not been recognised as strongly as it
might. What I am arguing, then, is that we can only create successful organisational
ethnographies if, in every study, we give full consideration to the broader “social
organisation” as well as to the more local “formal organisation”. I think I began to
realise this in my very earliest attempt to work ethnographically where I was perhaps
distracted by learning some particularly hard lessons about “cultural
misunderstandings” (see Jemielniak and Kostera, 2010, for the salacious details). But
I was still learning when, years later, I undertook a one-year full-time period of
participant observation in order to write what might be termed an organisational
ethnography (Watson, 1994/2001). I found myself, after about six months
intensive fieldwork, completely incapable of sketching out in the “reflective” part of
 JOE my field notes a characterisation of the organisational culture of GEC-Plessey
1,1 Telecommunications (GPT). However, I was prompted by the way a group of managers
were reflecting on “what language” was spoken by a new managing director to drop
the notion of “culture” as an analytical tool and, instead, to work with a concept of
multiple managerial discourses or “rhetorics”. So much of what was going on in the
organisation was made more understandable by examining the interplay between a
18 “control, jobs and costs” discourse and an “empowerment, skills and growth”
discourse. This was a crucial theoretical advance which gave enormous purchase on
the events which unfolded in the second six months of the study. But the point I wish to
stress at this stage is that I was only able to progress the analysis of a particular
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organisation by examining two discourses about the very nature of management,

discourses which had strong historical roots and which were related to debates about
management which were going on across a growing number of different societies.
The local activities of managers in any particular organisation can only be understood
if it is recognised that “management” is a central characteristic of the social organisation
of the modern world.
Am I simply saying here that the organisational ethnographer must “contextualise”
their in-organisation investigations? No. I am saying much more than this. There are
real dangers of dualism in any thinking, which uses notions like “organisations
and their context” as there was in that archaic usage, “individuals and society”.
There is also the serious danger that the organisation’s “context” can be regarded
as less important than “the organisation” – a matter of “background” only. A true
ethnographic awareness recognises that “social organisation”, societal culture and
so on are inside organisations as well as around them. They are intrinsic parts of
organisations. Formal organisations are made by social organisation and social
organisation is, in significant part, made by formal organisations.
The episode “from the field” which I have used to emphasise the importance of the
relationship between formal and social organisation also illustrates the way in which
the ethnographer may theorise “on the hoof”, so to speak, as they struggle to make
sense conceptually of what is happening around them. Let us look at this possibility
more closely.

Let us make ethnography grounded without resorting to “grounded theory”

To put it very simply, theorising is a matter of creating generalisations about “how the
world works” which can then be drawn upon to inform human practices in the world.
Puddephat et al. (2009) make a related point, which should encourage all ethnographic
researchers to be as “theoretically relevant” as possible. They point out that the more
theoretically relevant an ethnographic work is, the more it will travel from local
concerns and particular substantive areas to “capture wider academic interest and
make a more lasting contribution to scholarship” (Puddephat et al., 2009, p. 2). In spite
of this, these authors point out, ethnographers have in the past tended to be ambivalent
about theory, this being related to certain powerful reactions in American sociology,
especially in Chicago, to “high minded European sociology” (Puddephat et al., 2009,
p. 4). The emphasis of much ethnographic research, then, has been on “the language
and meaning of everyday life according to the actors involved” (my emphasis); “What
good is theory if it makes no sense to the people on the ground?” these pioneering
ethnographers tended to ask.
It is in this atmosphere, with its intense hostility to hypothetic-deductive
procedures, that Glaser and Strauss brought onto the scene a fiercely inductive
 research manifesto and a set of procedures which would help researchers discover Making
“grounded theory” (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1997). As a great organisational
admirer of the organisational research of Strauss (which I read as the work of a
man soaked in theory from the start), I have always been worried about how the ethnography
“grounded theory” notion might be taken up. And, like many colleagues, I have
indeed found that the notion strongly appeals to those research students who
blissfully welcome any suggestion that they “do not have to do too much reading” 19
before entering the field. This is not surprising, perhaps, when we note that
Glaser tells us that the grounded theory researcher has to wait patiently for
“conceptual sense-making to emerge from the data” (Glaser, 1999, p. 838, my emphasis).
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The “theory” in “grounded theory”, then, is the outcome of “data”. A vastly

more productive way to proceed, however, is for the ethnographer to work neither
in a primarily deductive way (“testing” established theory for instance) nor in an
inductive way in which “data” gives birth to theory. Instead, the investigator
works iteratively, switching back and forth (sometimes even minute to minute)
between the inductive and the deductive (cf. Orton, 1997). In large part,
researchers make their ethnography by working as “theorists in the field”. Theory
is thus both a resource for guiding fieldwork and an outcome of the thinking
process which is stimulated by the interplay in the researcher’s mind of theory and
field experience.
A very specific and practical manifesto prescription can be drawn from this close
relating of the conceptual and empirical elements of the ethnographic process. This is
to say that anyone setting out to do organisational ethnography should equip
themselves at an early stage with as full as possible a knowledge of organisation
theory and research and make sure that they have a good grasp of the sociological,
anthropological, psychological and methodological thinking which has informed the
study of organisations so far. Ethnography is not surgery. But to embark on
organisational ethnography without being equipped in this way would be like trying to
operate on a hospital patient without knowledge of anatomy or an awareness of what
to do with anaesthetics, scissors, scalpels, sutures and stitches. At whatever stage of
their career they have reached, the organisational ethnographer should approach the
field equipped with a bank of conceptual resources. This bank will have been built
up through the researcher’s social science education and subsequent research work.
And the researcher will add to, refine and select from this “bank” to shape and reshape
a conceptual apparatus which makes theoretical sense of the research puzzles arising
in the fieldwork – as well as leading to generalisations in the finished ethnography
about “how things work” in the organisation and associated social organisation which
they have studied. This theory, because it has “grown in the field”, so to speak, is
thoroughly grounded.
In this version of grounded research, theoretical concepts are ingredients that go
into the ethnographic mix, alongside and in interaction with observed fieldwork
episodes and recorded/remembered utterances and conversations. To observe a work
supervision event in an organisation without an awareness of such concepts as, say,
bureaucratic authority (Weber, 1947) or “indulgency pattern” (Gouldner, 1954), would
be as unfortunate as observing an organisational meeting without being aware
of the concept of micropolitics (Burns, 1961) or the “garbage can theory” of decision
making (Cohen et al., 1972). Organisation studies, like all science, must work
cumulatively. Innovation and creativity in making organisational ethnographies can
only be achieved by building with and building upon what has come before.
 JOE Let us always consider the possibility of “everyday ethnography” to help us
1,1 to relate organisations to social organisation
There has been a growing interest in the social sciences over the past few decades in
the sociology of everyday life – the study of the “quotidian” or mundane day-to-day
aspects of social life (Bennett and Watson, 2002; Certeau, 1984; Felski, 1999). The way
that ethnographers immerse themselves in the daily life of their research setting
20 means that they cannot avoid these aspects of social life. As Ybema et al. put it, they
are well placed to appreciate the “extraordinary-in-the-ordinary” (2009, p. 2). This
helps them “understand the ambiguities and obscurities of social life” and, in the
organisational ethnography, it enables them to produce “a fuller, more grounded,
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practice-based understanding of organisational life” (Ybema et al., 2009, p. 2). Attention

to the ambiguities and obscurities of everyday life in organisations is an exciting
dimension of organisational ethnography. But it must not entice us to lower our
eyes downward to the level of organisational human interaction and away from the
broader social organisation of which these mundane goings-on are a part.
Perhaps ironically, it was precisely this latter concern that brought my co-researcher
and me to our particular concept of “everyday ethnography”. Together we had
embarked on the study of a relatively small organisation, one in which we thought
we might more easily create a “whole organisation” ethnography than we could in a
larger corporation (the ethnography carried out in GPT, discussed earlier, was an
ethnography of managerial life in that organisation, and not an ethnography of the
whole organisation). The organisation we chose for intense study was a pub-owning
and brewery business. Through intensive fieldwork (the bulk of which was carried
out by my partner), we got to “know” the organisation and the people involved and
associated with it very well indeed. But we soon realised that an ethnographic
understanding of what we were seeing, hearing and experiencing would be
impossible without considering the part played by pubs and beer across the society in
which this organisation was operating. How, for instance, could we appreciate the
culture of a pubs and brewing organisation without considering, say, “male drinking
culture”, the culture of the pubs industry, the culture of the real ale movement, the
culture of England and so on. We therefore saw the need to act not just as
organisational ethnographers but also as “everyday ethnographers” who would act as
“everyday” participant observers in their own society, recognising that public houses
are part of the mundane, day-to-day functioning of British society.
Ethnographies are the written outcomes of the work of the ethnographer, just as
novels are the result of the work of the novelist. But both the ethnography and the
novel are brought into being or “made” by processes in which the actual writing is only
a final stage. Thus, “in the same way that a novelist intending to write a novel about
love and courtship might take note of every occasion in their daily life when such
matters come to their attention, so we have taken note of how friends, neighbours,
strangers on trains, newspaper writers, people in public house, characters in television
programmes, and so on, speak about pubs” (Watson and Watson, 2012). We have also
observed activities in pubs beyond the ones belonging to our focal organisation and
(reinforcing my earlier point about mixed methods within ethnography) we have
formally interviewed a selection of general “pub customers”.
Another use of the parallel between “researching” a novel and doing the (much
more systematic and theory-oriented) scientific research for an ethnography has
inspired personal research on one particular type of organisational activity, that of
“entrepreneurial action”. In the same way that a novelist intending to write a novel
 about crime and punishment might take note of every occasion when such matters Making
come to their attention in their daily life, so I have noted every hint of entrepreneurial organisational
activity encountered as I have “gone about my shopping in the high street, spent days
observing and talking to people in a selection of small businesses, read newspapers ethnography
and watched television, discussed entrepreneurship teaching and writing with
academic colleagues, engaged in development work with small business owners and
managers, attended entrepreneurship talks and events, discussed career possibilities 21
with my students – and so on and so on” (Watson, forthcoming). As a result of this
work, I have been able to enter the entrepreneurship literature with an argument,
firmly grounded in my research, that progress in the social scientific investigation of
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entrepreneurship can only proceed if it completely drops the concept of the

“entrepreneur” and if it recognises that entrepreneurial action is a key feature, with its
own institutional logic, of contemporary social organisation. I have, of course, claimed
that entrepreneurship studies would benefit enormously from more ethnography!

Conclusion
The final manifesto item presented here to help push forward the organisational
ethnography “cause” is a fairly straightforward invitation to ethnographers to consider
the possibility of treating their own life situation as a research site which can generate
insights and information relevant to their focal research organisation. Among other
advantages, it offers a great deal of easily obtained research access and it is especially
relevant to the consumption or service aspect of the work done in organisations.
It is an idea which “emerged” as part of an ongoing process of “learning the ropes”
of both work organisations themselves and the craft of studying organisational
life ethnographically – a process which began in undergraduate days. Earlier,
I characterised ethnography as a social science genre, as opposed to a social science
method. Such a term is appropriate given the emphasis on writing in the etymological
roots of the word “ethnography”. It is quite normal to talk of different genres of writing.
But producing work in this genre is nothing too grandiose. It is a craft. It is by no
means an easy craft but it is one whose skills have continually to be polished and
developed. The new journal can thus be seen as both a craft workshop and a showroom
in which the fine products of ethnographic craft workers can be displayed.
The Journal of Organisational Ethnography is going to be an important place for
ethnographers to present their wares. It is also going to be an important forum for
debates about the most effective ways of doing organisational research. But debates in
the academic world can readily become debates for their own sake. I therefore close by
saying that I offer the thoughts and learning experiences presented here with the
primary intention of improving the effectiveness of the work we do, in the field and in
our writing. I honestly and sincerely believe that we will produce better work and gain
greater recognition for our ethnographic endeavours if we recognise that ethnography
is something much more sophisticated and distinctive than just another research
method and if we fully appreciate that we are studying social organisation as well as
formal organisations.

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About the author

Tony J. Watson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Work and Organisation in Nottingham
University Business School. His earliest research on change in the engineering industry was
carried out by participant observation and several of his subsequent studies have used this method
and been written as ethnographic studies, including the influential book In Search of Management
(1994 and 2001). Tony J. Watson can be contacted at: tony.watson@nottingham.ac.uk

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