554745

research-article2014
SOQ0010.1177/1476127014554745Strategic OrganizationVesa and Vaara

So!apbox Essay

Strategic Organization

Strategic ethnography 2.0: Four

2014, Vol. 12(4) 288­–298
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1476127014554745
process and practice research soq.sagepub.com

Mikko Vesa
Aalto University School of Business, Finland

Eero Vaara
Hanken School of Economics, Finland

Abstract
Although slow to enter mainstream strategy research, ethnographic methods play an important role in
studies of strategy processes and practices. In this article, however, we argue that the potential of “strategic
ethnography” has not yet been fully realized. In particular, we maintain that there is a need to complement
conventional non-participant, observation-based ethnography with other ethnographic methods. This leads
us to suggest four methods that will help advance contemporary research in strategy processes and practices:
auto-ethnography which can provide a better understanding of the lived experiences of different types of
strategists in different settings; video-ethnography, which allows detailed analysis of strategic practices in
their sociomaterial context; comparative ethnography, which enables comparison of processes and practices
in different settings, and virtual ethnography, which will further our understanding of the virtual aspects of
organizational strategy work.

Keywords
Fieldwork, qualitative methods, research design, strategic ethnography, strategy as practice

Introduction
While ethnography is generally regarded as an important part of management and organization
studies (Van Maanen, 2011; Ybema et al., 2009), it is generally not seen as part of the mainstream
of strategic management research. However, it has gained increasing ground in strategy process and
practice research, where it has emerged as a fruitful approach to elucidate the micro-level aspects of
strategy work. For example, in her study of strategists-at-work, Samra-Fredericks (2003) explored

Corresponding author:
Mikko Vesa, Department of Management Studies, Aalto University School of Business, P.O. Box 21230, FI-00076 Aalto,
Finland.
Email: mikko.vesa@aalto.fi
Vesa and Vaara 289

through close-up observation how strategists’ linguistic skills influence strategy processes, Rouleau
(2005) has elucidated micro-level practices in middle managers’ sensemaking and sensegiving in
interpreting and selling strategic change, and Kaplan (2011) has explored the affordances of
PowerPoint as a technology to influence the discursive practices of strategic knowledge creation.
Thus, strategic ethnography has so far produced interesting and important insights, and we believe
that it can offer further benefits to contemporary strategic management research.
Nevertheless, the full potential of ethnography remains to be realized. In this article, we argue
that this is at least partly because strategy scholars have mainly conducted conventional non-
participant and, to a lesser extent, participant observation and not pursued other forms of ethnog-
raphy that take advantage of new technologies and/or more creative and more complex forms of
engagement with research sites. Although we have learned a great deal about strategy work by
following managers (Rouleau and Balogun, 2011; Samra-Fredericks, 2003) and observing meet-
ings (Jarzabkowski, 2008; Vesa and Franck, 2013), we maintain that strategy research in general
and strategy process and practice research in particular would benefit greatly from other more
specific forms of ethnography. Thus, we argue for a shift from strategic ethnography 1.0 to stra-
tegic ethnography 2.0.
While we see value in promoting strategic ethnography per se, we wish to underscore that spe-
cific forms of ethnography can advance specific issues in strategy process and practice research.
These include a need to broaden the scope of strategy process and practice research in terms of
types of organizations and actors studied, a need to go deeper into strategic practices involving
sociomateriality, a need to compare strategic processes and practices in different organizational,
institutional and cultural contexts, and the need to take the virtualization of organizations and stra-
tegic processes and practices seriously. This leads us to suggest four specific ethnographic methods
that can advance strategy process and practice research: auto-ethnography, an underutilized method
for understanding the lived experiences of different types of strategists in different settings; video-
ethnography, a means to advance detailed analysis of strategic practices, in particular sociomateri-
ality; comparative ethnography, which enables comparative analysis of strategic processes and
practices; and virtual ethnography, which will further our understanding of the virtual aspects of
organizational strategy work.

Toward strategic ethnography 2.0

More or less all organizational ethnography is a search for socially shared and acquired local
knowledge (Van Maanen, 1979). As Geertz (1983) observes, ethnography is characterized by an
in-depth and detailed analysis of social phenomena in their historical and cultural context: “to-
know-a-city-is-to-know-its-streets” (p. 167). Thus, ethnography is of value in management and
organization research because it allows immersion into the researched organization and access to
the lived experiences of managers and other organizational members (for excellent examples, see
Michel, 2012; Pratt, 2000). This is also true of the kind of strategy research that aims at a better
understanding of the actual processes and practices of strategy work (Mantere, 2008; Stensaker and
Langley, 2010; Jarzabkowski et al., 2012). Strategy process research is by definition interested in
longitudinal social and organizational processes and the role of managers in them (Langley et al.,
2013; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985). A closely related area, research on strategic practices—often
under the umbrella of strategy as practice—focuses on the social and organizational processes,
activities, and practices of strategy work (Balogun et al., 2014; Johnson et al., 2003; Vaara and
Whittington, 2012).
Accordingly, we have seen a growing stream of ethnographic strategy process and practice
research in recent years. A part of this work has used the term “ethnography” in a relatively loose
290 Strategic Organization 12(4)

manner to refer to qualitative data gathered with close access to the target organization. However,
there are also a number of excellent studies that have made effective use of ethnography to advance
strategy process and practice studies methodologically and theoretically. Most of these studies
have been based on classical forms of ethnography that employ non-participant or participant
observation. Some scholars have employed non-participant observation as the main source of data
(Denis et al., 2011; Jarzabkowski, 2008; Kaplan, 2008), while others have used it in a triangulating
role (Balogun and Johnson, 2004; Salvato, 2003). In the latter case, observations have been used
as a complementary data source with the purpose of strengthening or testing the validity and qual-
ity of theoretical constructs (Yin, 2014). This is done in order to mitigate the effects on the analysis
of any bias in information processing due to interview data (Eisenhardt, 1989).
In contrast to the more widespread use of direct non-participant observation, participant obser-
vation has played a less central role in strategy studies. However, participation still offers a rich and
meaningful method for gaining insight into the everyday life of organizations from the inside. The
researcher contributes to the host organization through local interaction, often by adopting bound-
ary-spanning roles such as those of consultant (Laine and Vaara, 2007; Sminia, 2005), trainee
(Howard-Grenville, 2007), or managerial assistant (Rouleau, 2005). In these studies, participation
forms the primary data source.
These studies have greatly advanced our understanding of strategic processes and practices.
However, we argue that these classic forms of ethnography can be complemented with others to
realize the potential of ethnographic analysis. In particular, we maintain that there are four areas of
research that could benefit from specific forms of ethnography. First, although strategy as practice
research has helped us to better understand the “lived experiences” of strategic decision-makers
(Samra-Fredericks, 2003), more could be done to dig deeper into the experiences of strategists in
different positions and different settings. Auto-ethnography is a form of ethnography that focuses
on this issue, and it can specifically help to add to the relevance of strategy research. Second, stud-
ies of strategic processes and practices have often focused on specific cases. It would, however, be
of great value to compare processes and practices in different settings. While classical ethnography
is typically conducted by individual researchers, comparative ethnography allows teamwork.
Third, in-depth analysis of strategic practices requires increasingly detailed data. In this regard,
video-ethnography can be of considerable assistance; in particular, it can help us to better under-
stand the sociomaterial aspects of strategy work. Fourth, contemporary organizations are increas-
ingly virtual, and strategic processes and practices are changing. Virtual ethnography allows us to
dig deeper into these processes to better understand new forms of online and virtual strategy work.

Four methods to advance strategic ethnography 2.0

Making use of one’s own experiences: Auto-ethnography
Auto-ethnography, which uses one’s own experiences as data, is a classic form of ethnography that has
seldom been used in strategy research (Karra and Philips, 2008; Rasche and Chia, 2009). The meth-
odological preferences of mainstream strategy research—with which auto-ethnography and its inher-
ent “subjective bias” readily clash—are perhaps the reason for this neglect (Hambrick and Chen,
2008), which is indeed ironic in view of the calls made for relevance and closer collaboration with
practitioners in management studies in general and strategy research in particular (Jarzabkowski et al.,
2010; Rynes, 2007; Walsh et al., 2007). In fact, auto-ethnographic immersion within an organization
ensures access to privileged knowledge not usually available to outsiders and an intimate understand-
ing of what it is and feels like to do strategy—with all its limited information, unpredictability, emo-
tional upheaval, lack of resources, and constraining sociomaterial conditions. In auto-ethnography,
Vesa and Vaara 291

participation in strategy-making is a form of natural behavior that contributes to the local organization
on its own terms.
Auto-ethnography is a particularly useful approach for studying problems requiring close col-
laboration with the host organization when co-production of findings of high relevance to practi-
tioners is the aim (Johnson et al., 2010). Hence auto-ethnography usually builds on first-hand
knowledge of how everyday strategy work is conducted in the research setting (Tallberg et al.,
2014; Yanow, 2012) and expands the concept of “going native” in strategy studies (Brannick and
Coghlan, 2007). Ideally, an auto-ethnographer is both a fully versed inside participant in strategy-
making and a full-fledged member of the academic community. Hence, auto-ethnography is a tall
order in today’s academic world and requires a clear awareness of its pragmatic and ethical rami-
fications on the part of the researcher. It is indeed difficult to be both a successful academic and an
active strategist in an organization.
We maintain that strategic auto-ethnography 2.0 can be conducted in ways that help to go
beyond top management decision-making in business organizations—and thus advance strategy
process and practice research. First, we too often think of business firms as the only organizations
to study. This may constrain our ability to see what is happening for example in the academic
organizations in which we work or in other organizations of which we are part, be they more formal
associations or social movements (see, for example, Alvesson, 2003; Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991;
Jarzabkowski and Wilson, 2002). Experiences from our own working life both prior to and along-
side our academic duties can also be leveraged for substantial insights (see, for example, Michel,
2012; Tripsas, 2009).
Second, auto-ethnography allows one to immersively understand how strategy work is experi-
enced by different organizational members, not only top managers, and offers means for such
analysis. To advance strategy process and practice research, it is important to examine how strate-
gies are made sense of, enacted, and resisted at various levels and parts of organizations (Balogun
and Johnson, 2004). This is especially important in endeavors to understand phenomena such as
the emergence of new strategies (Burgelman, 1994) or resistance in strategy work (Ezzamel and
Willmott, 2008; Laine and Vaara, 2007; McCabe, 2010).
Third, auto-ethnography can build on deep collaboration with the organization being studied.
This allows for substantial latitude in both how we interact with practitioners and how we report
on our findings. For example, Vaara et al. (2005) analyzed bank restructuring in a research team
that included the top managers responsible for the changes, while leaving the reporting to an aca-
demic team of authors. Herepath’s (2014) study of strategizing in the Welsh government builds on
the naturalized immersion of the author, but reports on the findings from an almost objectifying
birds-eye perspective. Contrasting to these, the primary informant in a study of organizational
identity formation by Gioia et al. (2010) was an inside researcher who enacted the dual role of actor
and observer, with the primary informant’s comments interspersed throughout the article. Jay’s
(2013) study pursues an engaged account of both the role of the researcher and voice of the author,
exposing how working ethnographically as an organizational historian accounts as an intervention
in its own right. The bottom line is that auto-ethnography can facilitate our access to and under-
standing of the experiences lived by practitioners—and that this can be done by a variety of ways
depending on the context at hand.

Beyond notes and transcripts: Video-ethnography

Recently, scholars have started to focus more attention on sociomateriality (Orlikowski and Scott,
2008; Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011), by examining, for example, the spatio-temporal settings,
tools, and technologies used in strategy work as well as bodily movements and expressions.
292 Strategic Organization 12(4)

Increasing interest in emotions in strategy is a closely related development (Huy, 2011; Liu and
Maitlis, 2014). Although these aspects of strategic practices are crucial, their analysis is not easy
with conventional methods, including participant observation ethnography. Often crucial details
are missed in the writing of field notes, which would be discernable if we had more reliable means
of re-accessing the events observed.
One of the methods that offers novel opportunities here is video-ethnography (LeBaron, 2005).
This provides a new angle on qualitative analysis in general and enriches conventional ethno-
graphic analysis in particular. The possibility for continuous replay provided by video-ethnography
facilitates the detailed analysis needed to gain a better understanding of the use of tools and tech-
nologies or the display of emotions. It also enables multimodal analysis, in which verbal commu-
nication can be linked with visual and aural elements, for instance in strategy meetings.
Video-ethnography is particularly useful if the research problem requires exceptional detail on
“nano” episodes of strategy work, for example, in ethnomethodological (Samra-Fredericks, 2010)
or conversation analysis (Whittle et al., 2014). It can highlight complex and/or nuanced aspects of
strategy work related to gestures or emotions (Liu and Maitlis, 2014). The method may also be
appropriate for situations that forbid direct participation on the part of the researcher because the
practices and processes under study are highly sensitive and/or vulnerable to interference. In such
cases, video recording may still allow researchers to capture rich observational data about these
situations. Recent examples include the study of Sorsa et al. (2014) where they video recorded
strategy and performance appraisal discussions, and Smets et al. (2014a) who studied reinsurance
underwriters. Nevertheless, video recording may also bring its challenges, including information
overload in the sense that the researcher may focus too much attention on details instead of analyz-
ing more important patterns, practices or processes.

Comparison of strategic processes and practices in different settings: Comparative

ethnography
One key challenge facing much strategy practice and process research is its apparent inability to
move beyond what are essentially single-case studies; this is particularly true of research that
employs ethnographic fieldwork. This may pose considerable challenges for the generalization of
findings. Furthermore, there is a general lack of comparison in strategy process and practices
research that calls for new kinds of research designs and methods. Comparative ethnography is
unusual because it often builds on the work of a team of several fieldworkers rather than on that of
a single researcher (Clerke and Hopwood, 2014). By collectively observing similar activity at dif-
ferent organizations or at different sites inside an organization, it allows a research team to com-
pare their observations and cover much more of the phenomenon in question. Thus, comparative
observation requires an unusually high degree of co-ordination for ethnographic fieldwork. While
individual researchers may even pursue immersive fieldwork, on the team level, comparative
observation is about focusing the research on specific pre-identified points-of-interest that may
evolve through iteration as long as the research focus of the team remains synchronized. Overall,
the ability to compare observations is useful for dealing with the “subjective bias” that is some-
times associated with ethnography. Contrasting with classical participant observation, comparative
ethnography is often an unobtrusive form of fieldwork, as researchers typically gather observa-
tional data that are supplemented with interviews.
Though uncommon, there are useful examples of such studies. Using comparative ethnography,
Barley (1996) employed a team of eight fieldworkers over 5 years to study occupational structures
in post-industrial society. Using a team enabled the combination of the unique fieldwork experi-
ences of each researcher for the purpose of gathering comparative data on contemporary work
Vesa and Vaara 293

roles. At the team level, the researchers were able to move away from understandings of work roles
structured around local notions. This allowed the team to theorize about new ideal types of work.
At the same time, each individual researcher was able to retain a personal localized point-of-view.
Sometimes, comparative ethnography can emerge through serendipity. In their study, Bechky and
Okhuysen (2011) combine ethnographic data from two previous studies, on police SWAT teams
and film crews, respectively, to conduct a comparative ethnographic analysis regarding how organ-
izations react and handle surprises.
More recently, in their study of Lloyds, Smets et al. (2014b) used sustained comparative obser-
vation by three fieldworkers to examine the actual working practices of insurance underwriters.
Their observations allowed them to capture the full pattern of the working practices and interac-
tions of the research subjects; the comparative element allowed the researchers to establish that
what they observed was in fact typical of underwriters at large, rather than the idiosyncratic work-
ing pattern of individuals. This is important for establishing the presence of dense networks that
transmit and stabilize collective practices (Smets et al., 2012).
Finally, in addition to studying parts of the same organization or related ones, comparative eth-
nography provides huge opportunities for comparison of strategic processes and practices across
different institutional and cultural contexts. Such comparisons have been very few in strategy
process and practice research. Comparative ethnography offers one way of dealing with this gap,
but such research designs and related issues of access and workload are challenging. Thus, we want
to underscore that such comparisons may combine empirical material already conducted.

Taking online strategizing seriously: Virtual ethnography

Today’s strategy work is mediatized and often takes place at least in part online. Although online
communities have received increasing attention (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005; Jeppesen and
Frederiksen, 2006; O’Mahony and Bechky, 2008), we need a better understanding of the virtual
aspects of strategy work. Virtual ethnography provides the means to do this (Boellstorff et al.,
2012; Hine, 2005). It means studying how people participate in virtual organizations located in
virtual space as well as how these organizational forms interact with conventional organizations.
We argue that virtual ethnography is particularly appropriate for understanding strategizing in
emerging digitalized sociomaterial conditions, such as internal corporate-sponsored virtual worlds
(Dodgson et al., 2013). In practice, this opens the way for the study of strategy work as it occurs
through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, in online collaborative co-creation such as
Wikimedia or open source software development, or in entirely virtual worlds. Virtual ethnography
can also facilitate the study of open strategy, which is often an attribute of online organizations
(Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007; Doz and Kosonen, 2008). Furthermore, virtual ethnography is
a fruitful method for studying new organizational phenomena such as gamification, that is, the
introduction of game-like elements into organizing, impacts on the practices and discourses of
strategizing (Werbach and Hunter, 2012) and the multi-disciplinary intersectionalities between
management and game studies, such as playful organizations (Warmelink, 2014).
There are many ways to study virtual environments ethnographically, from the unobtrusive
gathering of online text material known as netnography (Kozinets, 2002; Langer and Beckman,
2005) to highly immersive research designs in which organizational participation takes place
through virtual embodiment such as avatars (Williams, 2007). We argue that this is important
because at the moment, virtual worlds remain understudied and hence terra incognita for strategy
studies. Here, it can be difficult to assess in advance what fieldwork should focus on, thus leading
to what Nardi (2010) calls a “go with the flow” fieldwork strategy of following the interesting and
the unexpected (p. 27).
294 Strategic Organization 12(4)

Working through a highly immersive research design, the first author conducted a 39-month
ethnographic study of the massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (Bainbridge, 2012;
Vesa, 2013). The research explored the strategizing practices of virtual player guilds (Williams
et al., 2006). It was conducted in-game by participating in the daily activities of five different
player guilds through an in-game character. In order to explore the novel organizational context
holistically, the research made use of various participatory fieldwork roles ranging from that of
initiate guild member to that of leading guild officer. This allowed the research to explore and chart
the virtual strategizing practices used in guilds, to identify their users, and to ascertain how infor-
mation flows within the guilds were structured in relation to seniority and rank. The study also
demonstrates how findings from virtual worlds can be extrapolated into general management the-
ory by using rapidly evolving gamer groups such as guilds as online laboratory sites, in this case
by theorizing around organizational evolution and the relationship between collective commitment
and organizational boundaries (Vesa, 2013; Warmelink, 2014).

Conclusion
Ethnography has played an important part in strategy process and practice research. However,
its full potential could be extended by reaching beyond conventional non-participant or partici-
pant observation fieldwork. In this article, we point to a need to connect the current challenges
in the strategy process and practice research agenda with concurrent developments in ethno-
graphic methods. We do this not only to promote strategic ethnography 2.0 per se, but to under-
score the ways in which novel forms of ethnography help to advance strategy process and
practice research.
More specifically, we propose four specific ethnographic methods that can achieve pro-
gress on key issues in strategy process and practice research that are difficult to tackle with
other methods, including those of conventional ethnography. Auto-ethnography, which is
more of an underutilized method than a novel one, offers an opportunity for strategy research
to better capture the lived experiences of various kinds of strategists’ in situ work in different
settings. It also offers opportunities for practitioner collaboration by enabling fieldworkers to
develop an intimate understanding of the organization under study. This should facilitate
crossing the bridge between academic and practitioner knowledge. Video-ethnography offers
researchers new opportunities for detailed micro-level analysis that can in particular provide
a better understanding of the sociomaterial aspects of strategic practices and process. Video-
ethnography works especially well when analysis requires minute detail or when the research
topic cannot be studied through participant observation. Comparative ethnography enables
comparison of strategic processes and practices in different contexts and allows us to move
beyond the experiences of a single field worker through constant comparison of empirical
findings among members of a research team. This can also be extended to compare strategy
processes and practices in different institutional and cultural contexts. Finally, virtual ethnog-
raphy can capture the way technology impacts organizing by identifying both new research
technologies and organizational realities. Virtual ethnography offers strategy researcher an
opportunity to study strategizing in online settings from discussion boards to pure virtual
worlds that in and of themselves can be parts of either conventional organizations or emerging
online communities.
While these four forms of ethnography are not the only ones available for enterprising strategy
researchers, they help us to move toward strategic ethnography 2.0, a state in which the evolving
research agenda of strategy process and practice research is paired with concurrent innovation in
research methods.
Vesa and Vaara 295

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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Author biographies
Mikko Vesa is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University School of Business. His research focuses on
strategic practices, management temporality, intersections between games and organizations as well as quali-
tative research methods. In his dissertation, he examined the strategic practices and processes of World of
Warcraft gamer groups, and his research has been decorated at conferences such as the Academy of
Management and EURAM.
Eero Vaara is a Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki,
Finland, a Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, France, and a Distinguished Visiting
Scholar at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests focus on organizational and institutional change,
strategic practices and processes, multinational corporations and globalization, management education, and
methodological issues in organization and management research. He has worked specially on discursive and
narrative approaches. His work has been published in leading journals and several books, and he has received
several awards for his contributions.