Abstract
This article illustrates the value of reflexive dialogue regarding foundational assumptions about ontologies of culture and cultural change, as well as regarding key methodological and epistemological tensions at critical junctures in the research process, in a collaborative ethnographic study undertaken by Ecuador’s largest banking institution in partnership with a team of university anthropologists. While acknowledging the importance of ethnographic positionality and the complexity of organizational interests in business anthropology, the case highlights the role and power of consciously positioned reflexivity and dialogue to overcome tensions, build trust, and ultimately reach cultural insights that are products of an inclusive and pluri-ethnographic approach as opposed to a more hierarchical, or “othering,” para-ethnographic perspective. The case demonstrates how this approach requires attention not only to divergences and convergences between academic anthropologists and corporate culture workers but also to multiple positionalities within organizations themselves that inflect understandings of cultural ontologies and ethnographic epistemologies.
Keywords
Introduction
In early 2018, Ecuador’s largest banking institution, Banco Pichincha, contacted our anthropology department to invite us to partner with them in undertaking a study of their organizational culture from an ethnographic perspective. While perhaps now common in the Global North (Cefkin, 2010; Denny and Sunderland, 2016; Jordan, 2010; Roca i Girona, 2001; Westney and Von Maanen, 2011), this type of study was perceived by Banco Pichincha and our team as novel and unusual in Ecuador, where anthropology has made fewer inroads into the corporate sector. Having experienced significant changes in directorship and management in the previous 2 years, along with various waves of restructuring that included the creation of a “Cultural Climate and Change” department, the bank was self-consciously labeling itself as being in the midst of a “transformation” that now necessitated a closer examination of its changing corporate culture. In part, this desire was driven by a realization that more traditional, quantitative methodologies utilized to gauge cultural climate, such as large-scale surveys, had proven limited or unsuccessful in offering meaningful data and understandings. For instance, managers in human resources felt that associates often answered such surveys in overly optimistic terms, either out of fear of the potential consequences of overly critical responses that might be tracked (i.e., a distrust in the confidentiality of the methodologies themselves) or fear that “negative” answers might be met by the assignment of greater workloads or initiatives to “fix” the problems diagnosed. Even when such methodologies had produced potentially realistic or valid results, the bank struggled to understand the cultural logics (the how or why) driving certain quantitative trends.
One of the more significant publications in recent years in business anthropology has been a collection of papers in a 2017 special issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology, titled “Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business,” edited by Daniela Peluso. One of the key objectives of this special issue was to critically interrogate the relationships between business anthropologists and their interlocutors in the field and how those relationships help shape the production of ethnographic interpretations and anthropological knowledge (Fisher, 2017: 3). The authors in this volume grapple with important questions of whether anthropologists may be performing analyses “of,” “for,” or even “with” businesses, noting that these distinctions carry with them not only methodological consequences but also political decisions regarding whose interests are served (Cefkin, 2017: 123; Peluso, 2017: 11–12). Several of the authors also make use of the conceptual category of “para-ethnography,” first theorized by Holmes and Marcus as “the conception that traditional objects of study have developed something like an ethnography of both their predicaments and those who have encroached upon them, and their knowledge practices in this regard are in some ways parallel to the anthropologist’s and deserving of more consideration than mere representation in the archives of the world’s people that anthropologists have created” (Holmes and Marcus 2006: 35). Elsewhere, Islam (2015) has championed the benefits of the para-ethnographic approach, as it acknowledges that contemporary workplaces are sites of “proto-theories” that are often expressed organizationally “in alternative narratives, multivocality, weapons of the weak, jokes, rumors,” but also in more official “planned ceremony, ritual, and formal discourse” (239), thereby empowering collaborative spaces for organizational members to participate along with ethnographers in forms of organizational reflexivity (245).
Despite its conceptual benefits, we are concerned, however, that the term “para-ethnography” may become a boundary-enforcing concept to defend professional hierarchies of knowledge and practice and to “other” ethnographic practice by those who are not professional or academic anthropologists. Such anxieties seem palpably evident in some of the articles of the aforementioned special issue on anthropologies “of” versus “for” business, as when Peluso mentions that para-ethnography “should not warrant the concession of our own claims on expertise as anthropologists” (2017: 16) or when author Krause-Jensen worries that although no “watertight separation” exists between ethnographer and employee, this “does not imply that we should abandon the attempt to make the distinction” (2017: 102). In the case we present in this article, we would like to advance an opposing perspective that might be called “pluri-ethnography,” an approach that seeks to break down rather than enforce the boundaries between diverse communities of ethnographic practice and to acknowledge that in even a single project or initiative, ethnographers may move contextually or simultaneously among and between the practice of anthropology of, for, and with businesses. In our view, this more inclusive notion of pluri-ethnographic practice also redeems the power of collaborative, reflexive methodologies by differently positioned researchers, in concert, who also co-labor to understand partially connected though diverse ontologies of culture and cultural change, albeit not without particularly positioned tensions and occasional frictions that must also be managed.
This article reports on a first phase of the work we undertook with the bank, a diagnostic or organizational “cultural portrait” planned in close collaboration with the cultural team and other key actors in the human resources department of the bank. In the rest of the article, we focus on two dimensions of collaborative or pluri-ethnographic potentials and frictions in organizational ethnography. First, we discuss the importance of differing foundational starting points, or ontological orientations, toward the very definition of culture and cultural change itself, whether among diverse members or areas of the organization or between corporate and academic understandings. Second, we examine key, critical junctures in the course of the project that revealed distinct and even conflicting methodological and ethical orientations or practices (i.e., epistemological understandings of how the study should best be carried out or represented). Regarding both the ontological and epistemological questions, we argue that rather than silencing such tensions in the interest of supposedly objective, value-free knowledge, or enforcing hierarchical boundaries between diverse forms of ethnographic practice, the most productive pathway toward ethically sound and practically useful cultural analysis is precisely through reflexive dialogue among diverse partners in ethnographic collaboration.
Our ethnographic team, made up of three researcher professors along with a few student research assistants, proposed an ethnographic methodology aiming to assess the bank’s organizational culture, including distinguishing diverse visions of the “ideal” versus the “real” cultures of the bank (e.g., gaps between cultural discourses and practices) and identifying diverse “local” cultures within the generalized culture of the bank, be these geographic or functional localities. Our ethnographic methodology involved participant observation in spaces such as meetings and presentations, along with 42 focus groups and 130 individual interviews comprising a total of 413 participants from all levels and areas of the organization and in bank branches throughout the majority of Ecuador’s regional provinces, including the Pacific coast, the Andean mountain region, and the Amazonian lowlands. The gender balance of participants closely mirrored the gender distribution of the bank, where about 65% of associates are female and around 35% male, though women are more heavily represented in lower ranks and administrative levels than in managerial levels. In terms of ethno-racial identities, nearly all participants were mestizo-identified, reflecting the organization’s lack of ethnic diversity and particularly inclusion of indigenous and black Ecuadorians. The bank perceived many of the benefits of ethnographic methodologies from the beginning of the project, including their participatory, interactive, and horizontal nature, and was interested in a collaborative partnership that would also achieve a transfer of ethnographic knowledge and skills to key members of the human resources team (see Campbell and Lassiter, 2015; Gunn et al., 2013; Ikeya et al., 2007; Sedgwick, 2017). In the end, our study focused on several key diagnostic themes in the bank’s organizational culture, including values, community and belonging; the challenge of balancing a “results” orientation and a culture of recognition; localisms, regionalisms and (de)centralization; organizational change; professional mobility; and finally, diversity and inclusion.
In developing a collaborative and pluri-ethnographic methodology, we worked closely with the three-person cultural team as well as the team of “business partners” (or “generalists,” as the bank called them) in the human resources department. Indeed, these internal collaborators in the bank were involved early on in the project through a series of training workshops and working sessions we organized. During 2 days of sessions in September 2018, we taught these human resource specialists about anthropological concepts of culture and ethnographic methodologies and their applications in organizational culture research, subsequently enlisting their help in developing our sample population and designing our ethnographic routes throughout the country as well as our interview and focus group guides (executed in the first half of 2019). This collaborative planning sought to leverage the institutional knowledge of these specialists along with our academic and ethnographic expertise within a context of critical dialogue among the partnering institutions in order to generate a customized, participatory, and multifaceted methodology. While we were conscious that this collaborative dependence on the bank’s internal actors could occasionally translate into certain biases in terms of which persons, bank branches, or even regions were included, we also perceived that our own capacities to navigate within such a large organization were limited and that it made little sense to jettison their institutional knowledge and ability to guide our entrée into locations across the country. Through carefully co-crafted research relationships and dialogues, we sought to be consciously reflexive about potential moments of bias and encourage our collaborators to help us achieve a study that would reflect both the bank’s representative elements but also its diversity.
To offer some context on Ecuador’s organizational culture, it is important to historicize the founding of Ecuador’s oldest bank within larger sociocultural and organizational dynamics that in many ways persist until the present today. After independence from Spain, the early republican Ecuador of the nineteenth century was ruled primarily by conservative governments influenced greatly by the power of the Catholic Church and highland elites. With the Liberal Revolution of 1895, however, coastal elites who specialized in international trade began to rise to power, promoting trade liberalization and the linkage of the country’s regions through railway routes. In order for highland landholders to take advantage of these new opportunities, they needed to develop their own banking and credit systems, and it was in this context that Banco Pichincha was founded in Quito in 1906 (see Clark, 2004). The bank was founded in a crucible of economic liberalism and social, Catholic conservatism, as well as in the context of the racialized stratification of the organizational model of the hacienda, even as elites ascribed to the whitening and modernizing ideologies of mestizaje. The mestizo category, far from its literal meanings of “mixing,” became instead a homogenizing and whitening ideology of engagement “in the urban, market-led and modernizing national society and an avenue for social advancement” (Radcliffe, 1999: 215), a model which excluded the country’s significant indigenous and black population (Stutzman, 1981). These racialized and classed notions of hierarchy and status became pillars of the bank’s identity and of organizational culture and managerial style in the nation, pillars which persist but are now frequently viewed as obsolete and in need of transformation within the contemporary moment of a nation which now, at least in discourse if not in practice, prides itself on its plurinational Constitution and its cultural diversity. It is also important to observe that Banco Pichincha’s desire to transform may also stem from its wish to continually distance itself from the traumatic history of the feriado bancario, or “banking holiday,” a euphemism which refers to a 5-day period in March 1999 when banks all over the nation closed and froze accounts to attempt to stave off panicked withdrawals by their customers in the midst of massive monetary devaluation and economic instability. These events led eventually to the dollarization of the country’s economy, as well as massive emigration in the wake of the economic shocks, primarily to Spain and the United States.
What is culture and cultural change, anyway?
In an essay on theories of globalization, Henrietta Moore (2014) issues a call for anthropologists to become more conscious of the pre-theoretical commitments as well as the concept-metaphors guiding analysis. Concept-metaphors like the self, the body, gender, or as we argue here, the very culture concept itself, lack adequate referents and exceed representation, and while they are necessary for theorizing and “open up spaces for future thinking,” their use “requires rigorous critical practice,” since rather than resolving ambiguity, “their purpose is to maintain a tension between pretentious universal claims and particular contexts and specifics” (364–365). While concept-metaphors are “domain terms that orient us towards areas of shared exchange” (364), they also mark the existence of what Marisol De la Cadena (2015), borrowing from Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivist theory, calls “equivocations,” shared terms that nonetheless refer to things that are not the same because understandings of them emerge from “partially connected” and heterogeneous worlds. De la Cadena argues that the work of the anthropologist is to control equivocations precisely through making the terms, excesses, and losses in cultural translation as explicit as possible (2015, see especially Story 6). In our work with Banco Pichincha, we quickly realized that many of the models and understandings of culture and cultural change were not necessarily in accordance with academic anthropological understandings (see Amirebrahimi, 2015), nor were internal understandings among diverse areas or associates in the bank necessarily the same. In the following sections, we describe some of the patterns that emerged particularly in terms of diverse conceptualizations of organizational change, in an attempt to make more explicit the terms of cultural translation.
“If the bank were a person…”: perceptions of cultural transformation
The goal of achieving cultural change is notoriously complex and difficult. Banco Pichincha has continuously evolved during its 115-year-old history, responding to constant economic and technological changes, a strength observed by many participants in our study, illustrated in the comment that the bank “dances to the song that’s playing.” In the current historical moment of the institution, in fact, change and transformation is front and center, as the bank announced explicitly to both its employees and clients a new phase of change, officially titled “We Are Transforming” (“Nos Estamos Transformando,” or #NET) and rolled out with a radical change in the institution’s logo, followed by a change in the style or fashion of employee uniforms. Some interviewees in our study felt that these more “cosmetic” changes were, in fact, sufficient evidence or the very substance of what cultural change meant, even as our ethnographic team attempted to advance a more holistic and integrated conceptual understanding of culture and cultural change. Our own team used a definitional model of culture that emphasized the identification of unique cultural logics or patterns cross-cutting various elements or domains that help construct cultural fabrics, including the following: history (including official histories as well as traditions and personal experiences); linkages (with other local, regional, and international processes and systems); infrastructure (physical environments, technology, material resources); social structure and organization (social relations, alliances and fractures, social roles); ideology and cultural expression (beliefs, values, symbols, rituals); diversity, stratification, and power relations (axes of identity, difference and community such as gender, class, race and ethnicity, generation and place of origin, among others); and human agency (skills, strategies, innovation, resistance, negotiation, reproduction, and consent, whether individual or collective).
As we gauged the dominant perceptions that bank associates had of the current moment of cultural change, we found that the process was viewed as positive even if slow, signaling the end of a more vertical, patriarchal, and traditional culture. There was a shared sentiment that the bank “is listening to us now,” that there were more spaces of horizontality and openness. However, there were also shared perceptions of a certain loss of integrative and meaningful symbolic and practical elements that once held the organization together, without an adequate production of new symbols and practices to fill those voids. When we inquired about the content of the “We Are Transforming” initiatives and what the current moment of change signified, four dominant perceptions emerged throughout the length and breadth of the country. The first dominant understanding was that it referred to a new emphasis on “making the client fall in love” with the institution, a message that had been diffused from top management in key, organization-wide communications. The second dominant perception was that the new moment of change was primarily about digitalization and technological automation. As one associate explained, the challenge here was to “adapt to the customers as a traditional bank that stays the same yet seeks to be more digital.” A third and closely related dominant understanding of change was one of need, specifically the need to transform given the demographic growth driving the market for newer generations, particularly the famous millennial and “Z” generations. Finally, the fourth common perception we found concerning organizational change, and potentially the most worrisome, was related to new processes of corporate restructuring and layoffs and increasing uncertainties regarding professional permanence or mobility in the organization.
Rather than ignore concept-metaphors or seek to locate or impose unified meanings of culture, one of the most revealing questions we asked actually sought to introduce a projective concept-metaphor precisely in order to generate dialogue and to help us characterize existing perceptions of the bank’s transformations: “If the bank were a person, how would you describe this individual?” This particular question (the bank as a person or the bank as an animal) had been explicitly suggested and encouraged by the bank’s cultural team, and while our first reaction was that it embodied an obsolete and potentially essentializing “cultural configuration” or “culture and personality” approach, employing this question for the bank’s cultural team led us to an interesting series of interpretations with interviewees and human resources specialists. While answers were wide-ranging and diverse, the most recurring image we found was a description of a middle-aged man in the midst of a sort of midlife identity crisis. Perhaps, the most vivid answer we received was the following: “It’s an older guy in a suit, maybe even with a cane and a hat…the difference from 2 years ago is that maybe now he has put on sunglasses, but he is the same, maybe even more disorganized than before…he’s more modern, more youthful, more jovial, more fun, more cool…he put on Converse shoes, he changed his suit to a slim fit with a narrower tie, but his attitude is still the same.” This image or cultural symbol of the current state of the bank is one of tension, ambiguity, and even internal conflict or crisis. It evokes uncomfortable feelings of worry, cynicism, or even embarrassment for this person awkwardly navigating his transformation, but it also shows the institution’s own willingness and capacity to look at itself honestly in the mirror, with empathy and even a sense of humor and with openness to the potentials and possibilities of this person. In these images, this individual is still defining himself in the midst of an inevitable process of maturation and growth, inviting us to ask: Will he emerge successfully from this process of change or become stuck in crisis or clumsy attempts at change? Will he find the balance between who he is and who he wants to become? What will he look like when this phase is over? In other words, the image of the bank as a person reminded us that the current moment of transformation was uncertain, open, opportune, and critical. Most of all, following the bank’s request to include this question reminded us that in the collaborative and pluri-ethnographic enterprise in which we were involved, despite diverse positionings or even structural inequalities between ourselves and our interlocutors, as well as among our interlocutors, it was important and, indeed, productive, for us to maintain “communicative equality” with our ethnographic peers inside the bank and follow and experiment with their methodological intuitions, as well (see Sedgwick 2017: 63).
From reflections to agents of change
Part of our work involved theorizing with the cultural team about the directions of organizational change from outside and from within, with the first axis referring to the necessity to respond to external realities such as new generations, technologies, or market pressures including political-economic and sociocultural factors and the second axis representing the vision, involvement, and empowerment emanating from associates within the organization (see Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008: 14–15). In the initial phase of our work with the cultural team, we saw that a dominant discourse of cultural “alignment” primarily connoted the imposition of the external axis over the internal axis of change, combined with the notion that the transformed culture of the bank would be dreamed or generated by top management and subsequently disseminated in processes that would ensure that all associates were aligned and “in line” with these new cultural models. One of our key challenges was to encourage the cultural team to re-conceptualize cultural alignment in ways that did not imply imposing the external axis of change over the internal, or vice versa, but rather developing consciously dialogic, dialectic, and hopefully harmonious relationships between both.
New pressures, dynamics, and ethical consequences in the global financial industry show us the risks that exist when there are imbalances in the management of external and internal axes of change. Corporate anthropologist Karen Ho, in her masterful research on Wall Street investment banks, argues that a fundamental historical shift in orientation has occurred during the last few decades of corporate restructuring: while in the older model, there existed a certain equilibrium between productivity and workforce well-being while taking into account other stakeholders such as local communities or nations, the orientation of the new Wall Street model focuses obsessively and almost exclusively on stock price, stockholders, and boards of directors. The old struggles between management and labor have given way to the new shape of struggles between the owners of capital and managerial forces (Ho, 2009: 183). However, as Ho astutely observes, one of the consequences of this shift has been a “nervous and unsustainable overdrive” in which associates are formed and motivated to pursue personal and short-term advantages rather than the long-term sustainability of companies or the financial industry itself, effectively generating the failures and crises that were emblematic of the 2008 global recession (186). Part of what our study diagnosed was the opportunity to generate and communicate more clearly a vision of change from within, based in greater involvement and empowerment of the bank’s associates and with a more positive motivational structure. As one associate mentioned, “Reaching goals out of fear is different than reaching goals because one really wants to.”
In our study, we wanted to diagnose the latent mental and motivational structures, whether implicit or explicit, about the sources of change, as well as the dominant discourses, theories, or narratives of cultural change within the bank. In general, we found that there were many implicitly disempowered theories of cultural change, incubated in the hierarchical management styles that were legacies of the stratified hacienda-inflected organizational cultures that have characterized Ecuador’s national history and that were mentioned earlier in this article. For instance, the dominant conceptual models of change (what we sometimes referred to as organizational intelligence) were frequently oversimplified or insufficiently critical. In our interviews and focus groups, we often heard comments such as, “change is always good,” without much further critical elaboration. Additionally, cultural change was frequently identified as emanating from two primary sources: from leadership and supervisors, or alternately, from new generations of workers or hires, or in other words, change from above or change from without. A few participants in our sessions even mentioned this pattern, criticizing a climate of stereotypes or devaluation toward older associates and the experience and knowledge they represented, in contrast with an irrational obsession with millennial generations.
With an anthropological eye for the dynamics of structure and agency, we realized that even in the official campaign for “We Are Transforming” (which included messages of empowerment in common spaces like elevators and restrooms), deeper semiotic analysis left open an implicit potential narrative that the source of change lays outside the associate. One of the more common slogans in the campaign, for instance, stated, “You are the reflection of transformation” (“Eres el reflejo de la transformación”), an affirmation that could nonetheless position the associate as ideally aligned with or passively mirroring a top-down vision of change rather than as an active agent or generator of change. Potentially more problematic were slogans such as, “Get on board the transformation” (“Súbete a la transformación”), which, in a larger context where this phase of change was also associated with restructuring and layoffs, could have perverse and unintended effects of activating a motivational structure based in fear: get on board, or implicitly, this train will leave you behind. Here again, we can observe how a “modernizing” ideology led by the bank’s more elite managerial units was felt as an imposition upon rank-and-file workers who felt left out of meaningful participation in the organization-building project, similar to what has occurred in Ecuador’s nation-building projects.
Overcorrections and other gaps in cultural transformation
In their book Changing Organizational Culture: Cultural change work in progress, Alvesson and Sveningsson (2008) argue that the majority of change initiatives do not achieve deeper levels of meaning and in fact suffer from what they call “symbolic anorexia,” or alternately, fall into familiar traps of presenting hypocritical ideals, spectacle, or empty rituals (2008: 174). These authors distinguish three levels of understanding of organizational culture, with the first being the experiential culture or lived experience of the cultural climate (in itself complex given the diversity of associates and areas in the organization). Second, the “hypercultural” level is an understanding of culture based in idealized or marketed imaginaries, frequently top-down and oversimplified, including grandiose but unrealistic dreams of the future or what we sometimes called the “shiny new toy” of the moment, be it a new consultancy or conceptual model, but without real engagement with or resolution of well-known or older tensions or problems. Finally, Alvesson and Sveningsson speak of the anthropological understanding of culture, a level that is consciously reflective and reflexive, able to adequately incorporate cultural complexity in order to foment a shared sense of identity, community, and well-being through practices of exchange, critical dialogue, empathy, and reflection concerning both real and ideal cultural behaviors and patterns (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008, chapter 9).
A common mistake in current corporate contexts is to deny such complexity and the processes necessary for cultural change, instead substituting isolated and superficial interventions, even if fashionable. For example, a recently published column in The Atlantic observed that in offices with “open-space” designs that have become so popular and in vogue in recent years, employees often simply reconstructed new “walls” through the use of headphones, among other strategies (Mull, 2019). Indeed, in an academic study, Bernstein and Turban (2018) show an ironic reduction (measured as approximately 70%), rather than an increase, in face-to-face collaboration in such architectural spaces. In another corporate case study examining the introduction of ludic or “fun” elements, the initiatives generated substantial cynicism among the employees, who interpreted the efforts as condescending, inauthentic, and forced, and the author recommends an approach emphasizing “dignity” in order to reach a healthier organizational culture (Fleming, 2005).
While bank managers, human resources specialists, and the cultural team with whom we worked took for granted the ontological reality of organizational transformation, rank-and-file workers were much more skeptical. An associate in the Quito corporate office, for instance, expressed his concerns about the dangers of superficial or inadequate communication with the process: “I sometimes see the transformation as a fad, I mean, it’s as if from Communications they tell you that everything is transformation, so if I change the red pen for a blue one, then that’s change…If transformation means a shift from the traditional to the digital, then fine, as much as you want, but it’s as if it’s all still very distant…I am myself trying to figure out what the transformation is really about, listening to people who are involved most in the efforts, but if I went to a teller in a little city and asked them what it was, no idea.” Tellingly, this comment also speaks to the regional stratification that characterizes Ecuador both historically and in the contemporary moment, where larger cities are prioritized both symbolically and materially over rural or campesino regions (particularly those with higher indigenous or black populations) that frequently feel abandoned by public and private sectors as well as the national civil society.
Change initiatives require careful measuring of the rhythms and degrees of transformation in order to balance under- and overcorrections, to use a concept-metaphor familiar in financial markets. In this sense, and in the vein of a pluri-ethnographic approach that recognizes multiple forms of diversity, we found it remarkable that even among rank-and-file associates, there was a wide panorama of perspectives regarding the pace of change. As we have seen regarding the image of the bank as a person in the midst of an identity crisis, some associates believed that despite current official rhetoric, the bank was “stuck” in its older ways and still unable to change sufficiently. On the other hand, and given that much of the bank’s identity and pride have been based in its lengthy history and its historic stability as an institution, other associates questioned if the bank was “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” eliminating all traditions, including even the “good” ones, in its current pursuit of all things new. Still other associates, even when they recognized that the older organizational culture needed to change, felt that there had been an overcorrection, that “we’ve gone from one extreme to the other,” primarily implying lesser emphasis on a sense of community and a certain abandonment of its human capital. As one manager explained to us concerning the linkage between associates and customers, “The powerful message is that we are transforming…but we can’t forget that there exists a relationship between people. If we just have pretty new toys with which to serve customers, but associates do not understand that they are serving other people, this will fail…We have to remind them that they are human beings serving the needs and fulfilling the dreams of other human beings.”
Narratives and practices of meaning and belonging should reflect a balance between the bank’s structures and the possibilities for agency and empowerment on the part of its associates, but here again, we confronted a stark difference between the interpretations of managers, who tended to perceive ample possibilities for agency, and workers, who felt hemmed in by hierarchical and top-down structures. For instance, another of the current change slogans in the bank is, “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” However, this slogan is an empty signifier if not accompanied by everyday structures and processes that permit and indeed inspire creativity and innovation. The risk of an organizational cognitive dissonance between discourse and practice is ever present, and indeed, we often heard a shared refrain, most common among managers but also internalized by lower-level associates, to justify these gaps: “It’s up to each person” (see also Blair-Loy and Wharton, 2004; DiFruscia, 2012). Indeed, it is up to each person, but within a context where it is also up to the organization. In our cultural work with Banco Pichincha, leveraging differing ontologies and epistemologies for culture and cultural change meant encouraging managers in human resources to both welcome and pay more attention to dialogues regarding equivocal concept-metaphors in order to generate greater synergies of belonging, commitment, and innovation between the institution and its associates.
Opening the floodgates: Overcoming collaborative frictions through positioned reflexivity
Over three decades ago, James Clifford asserted that ethnographic truths were inherently partial and incomplete and that ethnography was “actively situated between powerful systems of meaning” in a process that “decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion…It describes processes of innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes” (2010[1986]: 470). These processes are especially apparent in collaborative ethnography, where the commentaries of and negotiations with our interlocutors should become part of the fieldwork process and the ethnographic text itself (Lassiter, 2008: 74). Collaboration necessitates the arduous work of adequate reflection, dialogue, and representation of points of disagreement in order to respect the needs of different interests and actors (rather than cover up such moments) and to reach a vision where all actors involved form an “enlarged community of colearners, coresearchers, and, ultimately, cocitizens” (Campbell and Lassiter, 2010: 370). In this section, we would like to describe a couple of vignettes that illustrate how reflexively positioned, pluri-ethnographic dialogues about methodological and representative tensions at critical junctures in the project constituted a pathway to building greater partnership, trust, and ethnographic understanding among collaborators.
During our very first field visits, certain frictions began to emerge with the human resource specialists who were our primary guides and collaborators in the project (mentioned earlier in the descriptions of our methodology), tensions that might have completely eroded trust and derailed the viability of the project had we not adequately addressed them in collective, reflexive dialogue. Understandably, the human resources specialists, who had been integrated as methodological partners and who were enthused to be learning about the potentials of ethnographic methods in the spirit of knowledge transfer, assumed that they would be present or even co-facilitators at most if not all of our interview and focus group sessions. When we initially tried to accommodate this vision, against our own methodological intuitions, we quickly ran into problems. In the first place, some specialists felt that we were deliberately stoking negativity about the most sensitive issues in the organization, such as layoffs or overtime hours, while we felt we were simply employing follow-up questions on specific issues that were brought up first by participants themselves. The line was very fine, even for us. For instance, if an interviewee began to express pain or anger and we nodded or expressed empathy through our facial expressions, was that an inappropriate manifestation of our bias or taking sides? In those first sessions where human resources specialists were sometimes present, we also began to notice the icy silence of some of the participants who we feared did not feel comfortable expressing themselves while they were in the room. We tested our intuition by asking participants in a couple of sessions to anonymously weigh in on comment cards regarding the presence or not of human resources specialists, and the responses were resoundingly negative regarding their presence.
As we began to appreciate later in the project, the specialists occupied an exceedingly difficult position in the organization, framed as empathetic confidantes on the one hand and yet being the messengers of doom when layoffs were decided. When we asked the specialists to abstain from attending the sessions, they understandably felt excluded, even betrayed, by members of their own teams as well as by our promises of collaboration and knowledge and skills transfer. However, we overcame these frictions through group dialogue about these very quandaries, one of which occurred in an urgent conference call involving the specialists’ supervisor, our team’s director, the director of the cultural team, and one of the most aggrieved specialists. In this and other conversations, we were able to promote a position of empathy toward all of the differently positioned actors involved, but most of all toward the project participants and their desires to be able to express themselves in the freest way possible. We also collectively began to converse about the shared goal of an accurate diagnostic of the organizational culture, a goal that would not be reached if we could not guarantee the most confidential and secure space the bank could allow, particularly given that previous survey efforts had proven to be limited precisely due to fears among participants about the consequences of “negative” comments. As Krause-Jensen (2017) argues, the liminal nature of the human resource consultant’s role, which also relies on reflexive meaning-making to motivate employees through concepts, symbols, images, and narratives, is not unlike “the ambivalent position of the ethnographer” (106). In the end, we arrived at a shared decision that it was best to continue without the presence of the specialists in our sessions. This decision proved to be the correct one. Furthermore, we redoubled our standard efforts to explain guarantees of anonymity and confidentiality to participants in order to create safe spaces for open dialogue, and the floodgates opened. After one memorable focus group where members of a bank branch had aired many issues and problems, for example, a bank greeter or “host” excitedly told us that she felt the branch team had dialogued more honestly and openly about shared concerns than ever before. In fact, she reported that she had gone immediately to her manager to tell him about the session and to recommend that the branch replicate a similar sort of exercise, ideally guided by an external entity, every few weeks.
The opening of the floodgates, however, eventually provoked another important moment of reflexive dialogue, this time not just about the positionality of project collaborators but also about the “non-neutral” positionality of the study itself within the contextual and historical trajectory of the institution. This second important moment occurred post-fieldwork and upon presenting our initial analyses to key members of the human resources team. One of the professionals who attended became quite critical during our presentation, interrupting us to assert that she felt we were only representing the most negative or critical qualitative data and silencing more positive or optimistic responses, further adding that since bank specialists had not been allowed in the sessions, she could not even prove her assertions. Though some in the room countered that we were, in fact, including some of the more positive commentaries, she remained unconvinced and expressed that she would be far more trusting of quantitative survey data which she felt might more accurately reflect the real proportionalities of positive versus critical responses. At this point, we temporarily abandoned our presentation in the interest of fostering a dialogue that proved to be highly productive and included a far-ranging discussion of the nature of ethnographic methodologies, the advantages and disadvantages of both quantitative and qualitative methods, emic versus etic perspectives, and “neutral” versus reflexive understandings of objectivity, among other topics. The most valuable insight for all of us, in the end, was the realization that our project was, indeed, positioned within a specific historical and situational context for the institution and that it therefore had to be framed as such. We reminded ourselves in this conversation that the supposedly more objective quantitative measures that were previously used had also been positioned and had reflected particular, partial truths, in which the floodgates had been kept shut in contexts of fears about expressing certain points of view. Given the nature of this institutional repression of criticism, it was logical that once provided with safe spaces of open and confidential dialogue, participants would choose to open those floodgates. This dynamic did not imply that our study was necessarily the correct representation while prior studies were erroneous, or vice versa, but it did provide the valuable lesson that all attempts to interpret organizational cultures are positioned in particular ways and must be analyzed as such. As the air cleared and the tension dissipated, we returned to the presentation of our findings, but now with a greater collective understanding of the importance of reflexive dialogue about distinct positionalities among collaborators and also about the positioning of research approaches and projects themselves within the bank’s history. We encouraged the bank professionals present not to perceive the need to choose between different methodologies but rather to appreciate the potentials of a diverse array of approaches taken in conjunction and accompanied by adequate reflexivity about each kind.
Conclusion
It would be erroneous in our opinion to assert that the sort of reflexive ethnography we are advocating here is no longer concerned with criteria of veracity or replicability. Reflexive ethnography remains deeply committed to such notions, but it does not seek objectivity through “neutrality” but rather through profound reflection on the multiple and complex positionings of all interlocutors, both ethnographers and ethnographic subjects, as well as the effects this may have on ethnographic representation and analysis. Additionally, however, and not inconsequentially, we found this approach, as a methodology of care and of recognition, to be the most humanizing and empathetic in terms of anthropological ethics. Though we were working for the benefit of the institution, it was ethically important to us to orient our primary concerns toward the well-being and humanization of the over four hundred bank associates who willingly offered to participate and place their trust in us in order to tell their stories and share their perspectives. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes has so cogently argued, anthropologists can commit to being a species of “negative workers” within institutions, siding with the humanization and the interests of individuals on the ground over purely elite or institutional interests; this work of empathy, witnessing, listening, and companionship “positions the anthropologist inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being, one who will ‘take sides’” (2014[1995]: 417). As one of our focus group participants put it, “I really enjoyed this space. We’ve been able to interact and express ourselves in ways that demonstrate how much we care about this institution. We want the bank to take into account our experience, transparency and our interest in giving all of our support for this transformation we are experiencing.” Or, as another participant said more succinctly, “We need to be listened to, like you are doing now.”
This said, it is also true that the highly hierarchical structure of the bank did have an impact on our study. Even if we were doing an ethnography “of” the bank and even “with” the bank so that it could change things “for” the bank (which for us primarily meant the associates), we still did not have control over the longer-term, tangible outcomes or effects of our project. Our attempts at pluri-ethnographic and collaborative inclusion still did not solve our relative lack of empowerment to help effect change relative to the higher management of the institution. However, the richness of the ethnographic details narrated in this article should not be pushed into a narrow framework of working toward an anthropology of, for, or even always with business as an overarching category. As the ethnographic moments presented here show, we constantly and contextually moved in and among these prepositional categories and sometimes even felt we were working uncomfortably “against” certain bank teams, ideologies, or practices. The “business” itself is not homogenous, either, and neither are ethnographers (whether internal or external to the business), and rather, we found that this sort of organizational ethnography required utmost attention to the diversity of bank associates as well as to the diversity of ethnographic approaches and practices at work in the bank already. As we have also argued in this article, we find it rather unproductive, at the very least, and perhaps even patronizing and condescending, in the extreme, to grapple with such diversity through the lens of “para-ethnographic” practice, which implies a hierarchy of knowledge production in which some ethnographic practices and actors are squarely inside the category while others are “around” it. Rather, we propose a pluri-ethnographic approach that recognizes diverse communities of ethnographic practice that can collaborate through mutual recognition, positional reflexivity, and the often tough but equally fruitful work of dialogue.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors acknowledge receipt of project funding from Banco Pichincha in order to carry out the research methodology described in this article. The research funding was received and managed through the university’s Projects Office. Banco Pichincha has not sought to influence findings or critical analysis and has signed an institutional consent form for this article, in the interest of transparently sharing the lessons of such projects with wider academic and/or business audiences.
Funding
The authors disclose receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the costs of carrying out the ethnographic research methodology was financed through a budget provided by Banco Pichincha and managed through the authors’ university research projects office.
