Abstract
The study of organisations is arguably at the heart of social anthropology. The discipline has a long and relatively well-established record of exploring organisations as sites where systems of meaning are produced and circulated. This book highlights the contributions that anthropology can make to studying complex organisations and presents the inherent challenges for the discipline. Rather than outlining one approach to organisational research, the editors invite various contributors to describe their own fieldwork experiences as well as the methodological and theoretical lessons drawn from it. As a result, the reader has the opportunity to appreciate, learn from and be inspired by thirteen accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that vary from the lifestyle company Bang & Olufsen to policy meetings in the EU to the Freemasons in Italy.
The work provides three main contributions. First, the thick descriptions make this book a rich and engaging read for those interested in ethnography. Second, the anthropological gaze sheds light on informal and everyday processes, and reveals important aspects of power and knowledge construction that are sometimes still neglected in organisational research. Finally, the presented experiences of fieldwork are helpful for adapting ethnographic instruments to the new challenges of complex organisational settings. Several chapters highlight, for instance, that the traditional ‘field’, as a single-site location, is no longer a realistic expectation and that, as a consequence, ethnographers have to be flexible enough to repeatedly negotiate ‘punctuated’ entries. Likewise, the ‘tribe’ of organisational employees is often very similar to the researcher herself, offering the opportunity for quicker and deeper engagement. However, contributors also point out that similar background and language can make it difficult to understand the way in which meaning is made and thus require heightened reflexivity to recognise the shared understandings and agreements as sources of potential bias.
Although the book's breadth of different fieldwork experiences provides an overview of organisational anthropology, the chapters are largely unrelated, describing the individual experience of each researcher in a specific context. While it is a good introduction to the issues in conducting this type of research, aspiring researchers are likely to want a deeper and more focused engagement. Also, while the descriptive character of many chapters is appropriate for reflecting anthropological fieldwork and making them interesting to read, the authors sometimes remain primarily descriptive. Perhaps the relatively short length of the chapters (thirteen pages, on average) did not give the authors enough space to substantiate their theoretical and methodological arguments.