Ethnography Atelier Podcast

This episode features a conversation with Professor Renate Meyer in which she reflects on the value of visual data for gaining unique research insights and the theoretical basis of such an approach. We talked about the tools and methods she and her colleagues have used to investigate a range of topics in the diffusion and institutionalization of organizational concepts and the challenges of interpretation and dealing with large amounts of data during analysis.

Renate Meyer is Professor of Organization Studies and Head of the Institute for Organization Studies at WU Vienna. She works in the areas of institutional theory, with a particular interest in meaning structures and multimodal accomplishments, and organizational forms. She also has an empirical interest in public sector management and urban governance.

Renate’s profile:
https://www.wu.ac.at/en/urban/team/heads-of-research-institute/rmeyer

Further Information:

Boxenbaum, E., Jones, C., Meyer, R. E., & Svejenova, S. (2018). Towards an Articulation of the Material and Visual Turn in Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 39(5–6), 597–616.

Höllerer, M. A., Leeuwen, T. van, Jancsary, D., Meyer, R. E., Andersen, T. H., & Vaara, E. (2019). Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies. Routledge.

Meyer, R. E., Höllerer, M. A., Jancsary, D., & van Leeuwen, T. (2013). The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues. Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 489–555.

Jancsary, D., Meyer, R. E., Höllerer, M. A., & Boxenbaum, E. (2017). Institutions As Multimodal Accomplishments: Towards the Analysis of Visual Registers. In M. A. Höllerer, T. Daudigeos, & D. Jancsary (Eds.), Multimodality, Meaning, and Institutions (Vol. 54A, pp. 87–117). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Meyer, R. E., Jancsary, D., Höllerer, M. A., & Boxenbaum, E. (2018). The Role of Verbal and Visual Text in the Process of Institutionalization. Academy of Management Review, 43(3), 392–418.

This episode features a conversation of members and friends of the atelier together with Professor Diane Bailey. We discuss her ethnographic research on work and interdependence in technical settings. In our conversation, Diane reflects on the challenges of observing and documenting technical work and suggests strategies for studying new forms of technology.

Diane Bailey is Geri Gay Professor of Communication at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences of Cornell University. She earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Diane’s research focuses on how people use information technology in their everyday work and what happens when they do.


Diane’s Profile
https://www.dianebailey.me/

Further Information

Bailey, Diane E. and Barley, Stephen R. (2020). Beyond design and use: How scholars should study intelligent technologies. Information and Organization.

Bailey, Diane E., Leonardi, Paul M. and Barley, Stephen R. 2012. The lure of the virtual. Organization Science, 23(5): 1485-1504.

Bailey, Diane E., Leonardi, Paul M., and Chong, Jan. 2010. Minding the gaps: Understanding technology interdependence and coordination in knowledge work. Organization Science, 21(3): 713-730.

This episode features a conversation of members and friends of the atelier with Professor Steve Barley about doing ethnographies of work and occupations. In particular, we discussed his research about technicians and long-term interest in grounding organization research in the study of work and technology. In the chat, Steve shares his experience in managing collective ethnographic projects and his forecast of future themes in the study of work, technology, and organizations.

Steve Barley is the Christian A. Felipe Professor in the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Steve earned his Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he collected data for his work on funeral directors and the introduction of CT scanners. He began his career at the ILR school at Cornell, where he engaged in several collective projects that went beyond producing new knowledge for our field and offered new models for doing that. He left Cornell for Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, where he is Professor Emeritus.

Steve's Profile:
https://tmp.ucsb.edu/people/stephen-barley

Further Information:

Barley, S. R. (1996). Technicians in the workplace: Ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organizational studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 404-441.

Barley, S. R., & Kunda, G. (2001). Bringing work back in. Organization Science, 12(1), 76-95.

Barley, S. R., Bechky, B. A., & Nelsen, B. J. (2016). What do technicians mean when they talk about professionalism? An ethnography of speaking. In The structuring of work in organizations. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Bailey, D. E., & Barley, S. R. (2020). Beyond design and use: How scholars should study intelligent technologies. Information and Organization, 30(2), 100286.

This episode explores the comparative case method—as developed by Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt—with Professor Pinar Ozcan. This research strategy involves using one or more cases to create theoretical constructs, propositions and/or midrange theory from case-based, empirical evidence. In the conversation, we touched on the strengths and perils of such an approach for management research, some tricks to collect and analyze data across multiple cases, and some general challenges of becoming an inductive researcher.

Our guest, Pinar Ozcan is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and specializes in entrepreneurship and strategy in technology markets. Her current research includes the open banking project—where she is examining the industry disruption in banking through regulation and market entry of fintech companies—and the development of the sharing economy. She has also studied similar dynamics related to market formation and entry in the context of the gaming industry, mobile payments, and paid TV.

In this episode, we talk with Professor Siobhan O’Mahony about digital ethnography. Siobhan’s work explores how technical and creative communities organize for innovation. She has examined high technology contractors, open source programmers, artists, music producers, internet startups, and product development teams. In this conversation, she shared some great insights from her experience studying the Linux and Anonymous communities, such as how to navigate large volumes of online information, the role of research questions to arrive at robust findings, and the hidden benefits of doing fieldwork online.

In this conversation with Dr Sarah Sachs, we explored the challenges involved in studying algorithms at work. Sarah’s research examines how data analytic technologies are reconfiguring work and organizations. Her dissertation “The Algorithm at Work: The Reconfiguration of Work and Expertise in the Making of Similarity in Art Data” is an ethnography of team practice in the DNArt project. In the episode, we talked about the work involved in making algorithms work, the strengths and limits of studying how organizations and people work with and around new technologies, and the challenges of sampling and gaining access to such phenomena in light of the growing interest around machine learning and AI.

In this episode, we sat with Dr Gretta Corporaal from the Oxford Internet Institute to talk about the challenges of studying work ethnographically. Gretta has researched cross-boundary collaboration and, more recently, how some of the world’s largest corporations adopt online platforms to hire and manage specialists and the work involved in designing these platforms. During our chat, Gretta reflected on some tactics to study work which today is increasingly happening online and geographically distributed, and the importance of in-depth qualitative research on digital technologies and AI in and around organizations to offer more nuanced views on the changing nature of work in the digital gig economy.

This fourth episode of the podcast examines the challenges of researching vulnerable populations. We are joined in this conversation by our colleague Dr Nevena Radoynovska (emlyon business school) who has conducted research on social entrepreneurship based on fieldwork in the French quartiers prioritaires — government-designated disadvantaged neighborhoods with disproportionally high rates of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. In the episode, Nevena reflected on this recent study, its practicalities, and her effort to tell the stories of informants without re-enforcing stereotypes while also respecting their particularities.

In the third episode of the podcast, we talk with Professor Aruna Ranganathan (Stanford Graduate School of Business) about her experience using a full-cycle approach to mixed methods. This approach starts with the observation of naturally-occurring phenomena supported by inductive techniques and then moves to theory-testing with the use of quantitative datasets and experiments. Although mixing different methods is a promising strategy enabling the researcher to interrogate the phenomena of interest from multiple angles, it is also somewhat challenging and still relatively rare. In our conversation, Aruna reflected about her use of the full-cycle approach, its main strengths and weakness, and shared tips on how to cross the qualitative/quantitative divide in empirical research.

We are joined by Professor Susan Silbey from M.I.T in our second episode which explores a team approach to ethnography. Ethnography is a qualitative approach originated in anthropology that is widely used today in many academic areas and also applied research. It is heavily grounded in the study of naturally occurring phenomena, usually via observation. The goal is to understand and describe social processes from the perspective of the people studied by being immersed in their reality. While traditionally associated with a single researcher, many benefits may come from a team approach. In our conversation, Susan elaborates on the benefits of a team approach to ethnography, the reasons which lead her to adopt it in a multi-year study of the implementation of safety regulations in scientific labs, and the lessons she learned from this experience.