Organizational Ethnography
Studying the Complexity of Everyday Life
- Sierk Ybema - VU Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Dvora Yanow - Wageningen University, Netherlands
- Harry Wels - VU University, Amsterdam
- Frans H Kamsteeg - VU University, Amsterdam
Ethnography | Research Methods for Business & Management (General) | Social Research Methods
Organizational Ethnography brings contributions from leading scholars in organizational studies that serve to unpack an ethnographic perspective on organizations and organizational research. The authors explore the particular problems faced by organizational ethnographers, including:
- questions of gaining access to research sites within organizations;
- the many styles of writing organizational ethnography;
- the role of friendship relations in the field;
- problems of distance and closeness;
- the doing of at-home ethnography;
- ethical issues;
- standards for evaluating ethnographic work.
This book is a vital resource for organizational scholars and students doing or writing ethnography in the fields of business and management, public administration, education, health care, social work, or any related field in which organizations play a role.
Adopted for a course at the Copenhagen Business School.
Highly useful for Masters of Research and DBA students undertaking organisational ethnographies
Like ethnography, this book is a rich resource that includes many war stories and impressions from the field about doing qualitative research in organizations. It is a collection of short essays from many leading scholars and highly acclaimed researchers.
Some good case studies in this book. Useful for students to see how organisations work and how to find out what actually happens inside them.
I will recommend the book to those of my students who are preparing for fieldwork in formal organizations.
As for general comment, I would say it is a very welcome book (in the Netherlands so many "organizational sociologists" have never set a foot in an actual organization - except their research institute -), and I will make references to it in my class, even probably have students read one chapter from it.
However I think it has two main features that (without being defaults as such) keep me from assigning the entire book as a required reading:
- essays are quite epistemological and retrospective: I would have liked more case studies, in other hand more "organizational ethnographies" in this book. Or, to say it differently, actual ethnographies could be more demonstrative for students who don't know about it.
- on the whole, arguments in the book have a level of generality and ambition that make it a potential replacement for a "general" ethnography book. Since I am satisfied with the one I use (Ethnography: Principles in Practice), i feel it would be redundant to ALSO assign Organizational Ethnography.
So: Recommended.
I will think about it further for next year though (2010-2011).
I really like the book and find it highly useful, both for my own purposes as well as for my students.
Vary clear book helping the novice researcher step by step
