[ Call for Papers | Applications ]

We invite papers that explore the concerns particular to ethnographic, participant-observer, and other forms of interpretive organizational research (e.g., semiotics, ethnomethodology, activity theory, discourse/narrative/story analyses, etc.) that engage issues in two categories: methods and methodology. These would include organizational studies considered broadly, including workplaces and work, and public (governmental), nonprofit, family, and corporate organizations, as well as papers dealing with more philosophical questions, such as the knowledge claims made by ethnographers and other interpretive researchers for their analyses and "findings", or evaluative criteria for judging the truth claims or trustworthiness of interpretive research. Topics might include:

1. The promise and pretense of ethnographic and other interpretive
   methods for organizational studies; e.g.:
   • The potential contribution of situational knowledge concerning everyday organizational life for the multidisciplinary field of organizational studies and/or for managing and other organizational
     work practices
   • Interpretive methods’ potential for producing self-understanding for managers regarding their everyday activities and for making visible institutional logics and tacitly known governance structures
   • Interpretive methods, tacit knowledge, and truth claims
   • Post-modern critiques of ethnographic and interpretive knowledge claims
2. The challenges particular to doing organizational fieldwork; e.g.:
   • Questions of access
   • Organizational power relations: studying “up” the organization vs. studying “down”
   • The role of experts/specialists and expertise/specialist knowledge
   • The ethnographer/interpretive researcher as consultant or employee
3. The contributions of such methods to specific topics in organizational studies and their differences from other approaches. Possible topics:
   • organizational identity
   • organizational learning
   • new forms of decision making (such as those called for by shifting national economic strategies that have radically destabilized seemingly stable governance systems, especially in public organizations, e.g., shifting from the logic of rational bureaucratic organization and
     control to more complex and hybridized forms with extended inter-organizational networks and ‘new localism’).
4. Issues in ethnographic/interpretive writing. E.g.:
   • Writing reflexive ethnographies of organizations
   • Publication and censorship (by management; self-censorship)
   • Translating ethnographic research into management strategy
5. Interpretive methods and the positivist hegemony in academic organizational studies. E.g.:
   • Gaining legitimacy for interpretive methods (will they be the eternal underdog?)
   • Overcoming career-related issues perceived as obstacles to doing this sort of research (lengthy field research time, article page-space
     limitations)

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 6 January 2006

Convenors are:

• Dvora Yanow, Department of Culture, Organization, and Management,
  Vrije Universiteit-Amsterdam, Netherlands [Mail]
• Heidi Dahles, Department of Culture, Organization, and Management,
  Vrije Universiteit-Amsterdam, Netherlands [Mail]
• Ritva Engeström, Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki, Finland [Mail]