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
Ethnographic Research
Organizational Ethnography brings contributions from leading scholars in organizational studies that help to develop an ethnographic perspective on organizations and organizational research. The authors explore the special problems faced by organizational ethnographers, from questions of gaining access to research sites to various styles of writing ethnography, the role of friendship relations in the field, ethical issues, and standards for evaluating ethnographic work.
This book will be a useful resource for organizational scholars 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.
This timely collection constitutes essential reading for all organizational ethnographers interested in the ways in which their discipline is developing. Although it will primarily be used for reference on the basis of individual chapters, this is a well crafted text which maintains a strong narrative throughout
Organization Journal
Whether one's background is in ethnography or organizations research, this volume is an excellent place to begin. With modest aims, it offers advice, guides, stories, and cautionary tales to which both students and experienced professionals can relate. Experienced researchers may find this book to be a useful teaching tool and occasional reference work. Highly recommended at all levels and to libraries
CHOICE Magazine
The volume offers a fine introduction to interdisciplinary research...the book is of tremendous value precisely because of its reformulation of classic and perennial issues and problems of ethnography in a new setting...This is more than enough reason to assign the book for both undergraduate and graduate courses
Open Anthropology Cooperative
The relationship between ethnography and the study of organizational settings is not an intuitive one, in that organizational ethnography is ‘a relatively new term’...The collection of essays contained in the book is successful in explaining what links the two, and why an ethnographic perspective on organizations, by engaging with the everyday experiences of people, may be a fruitful starting point for understanding work...Competent, informed and detailed
Work, Employment and Society
The editors have compiled a thought-provoking look at this method of research...The writing is vivid, engagingand humorous in places, using organizational ethnography itself as a means to illuminate the subject...Organizational Ethnography is an enjoyable read and an effective resource. It is helpful for researchers, students and practitioners in analyzing the culture of organizations
Journal of Occupational Science
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
