Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations, focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of an organisation’s members.
The thirteen contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more ‘classical’ anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer, with barriers including the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations.
A number of organisational contexts – including corporations, EU policy arenas, think tanks and the public sector – are explored in case studies from the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Series Preface
1. Entries: Engaging Organisational Worlds – Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist
Part I: Corporate Corridors
2. Counter Intelligence: The Contingencies of Clerkship at the Epicentre of Convenience Culture – Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw
3. Counter-Espionage: Fieldwork among Culture Experts in Bang & Olufsen – Jakob Krause-Jensen
4. When Life Goes to Work: Authenticity and Managerial Control in the Contemporary Firm – Peter Fleming
5. Oblique Ethnography: Engaging Collaborative Complicity among Globalised Corporate Managers – Emil A. Røyrvik
Part II: Policy Arenas
6. Access to all Stages?: Studying through Policy in a Culture of Accessibility – Anette Nyqvist
7. Punctuated Entries: Doing Fieldwork in Policy Meetings in the European Union – Renita Thedvall
8. The Instrumental Gaze: The Case of Public Sector Reorganisation – Halvard Vike
Part III: Working the Network
9. All about Ties: Think Tanks and the Economy of Connections – Christina Garsten
10. Working Connections, Helping Friends: Fieldwork, Organisations and Cultural Styles – Brian Moeran
11. Messy Logic: Organisational Interactions and Joint Commitment in Railway Planning – Åsa Boholm
Part IV: Opaque Worlds
12. The Profane Ethnographer: Fieldwork with a Secretive Organisation – Lilith Mahmud
13. Communicative Nature of Money: Aligning Organisational Anthropology with Technocratic Experiments – Douglas R. Holmes
14. Not Being There: The Power of Strategic Absence in Organisational Anthropology – Tara A. Schwegler
15. Momentum: Pushing Ethnography Ahead – Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Anette Nyqvist is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and holds a research position at Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research. She is the co-editor of Organisational Anthropology (Pluto, 2014) and the author of Opening the Orange Envelope: Risk and Responsibility in the Remaking of Sweden’s National Pension System (2008).
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