writing ethnography

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY
SUBRATA SANKAR BAGCHI

ETHNOGRAPHY IS WRITING?
 Ethnography - in the field and
‘write it up’.
 Ethnography is writing.
 ‘a written account of the cultural
life of a social group,
organisation or community
which may focus on a particular
aspect of life in that setting’
(Watson, 2008a).
 Written ethnography - ‘wrapping
up’ any specific concerns within
broader attention to ‘a cultural
whole’ (Baszanger and Dodier
2004)

JOHN VAN MAANEN
 John Van Maanen –
Tales of the Field: On
Writing Ethnography
(2011)
 Tale - inherent story-like
character of fieldwork
accounts
 There may not be any
direct correspondence
between the world as
experienced and the
world as conveyed in a
text
 the observer and the
observed.

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY
 ‘thousands of works
written in many
languages and genres
have been encoded as
“ethnographic”’
(Tedlock 2000: 459)
 doctoral theses,
extended monographs
to short stories, plays
and poems.
 Writing up

JOHN VAN MAANEN
 Realist Tales
 Direct, matter-of-fact portrait of a studied culture
 Confessional Tales
 Focus far more on the fieldworker than on the culture studied.
 Impressionist Tales
 Personalized accounts of fleeting moments of fieldwork cast in
dramatic form - elements of both realist and confessional
writing
 Other kinds of ethnographic tales
 Critical, Formal, Literary, and Jointly-told Tales.
 Residual categories of ethnographic writing (quasi
ethnographies)

REALIST TALES
 Experiential Author(ity)
 Almost complete absence of the author from
most segments of the finished text
 More-or-less objective data in a measured
intellectual style uncontaminated by personal
bias, political goals, or moral judgments.
 A studied neutrality characterizes the realist tale.
 Boas, Malinowski, Firth, Evans-Pritchard,
Margaret Mead, Park, Whyte, Hughes, and
Becker….

REALIST TALES
 Typical forms
 style focused on minute, sometimes precious, but
thoroughly mundane details of everyday life among
the people studied
 rites, habits, practices, beliefs, and, generally, ways
of life
 family life, work life, social networks, authority
relations, kinship patterns, status systems,
interaction orders, etc.
 Manning, Marcus, Cushman…. the daily
concerns of “common denominator people."

REALIST TALES
The Native's Point of View
 accounts and explanations by members of the culture
of the events in their live
 Extensive, closely edited quotations authentic and
representative remarks transcribed straight from the
horse's mouth.
 Ethnoscience (Tyler, 1969; Spradley, 1979).
 Ethnomethodological enactments of sense-making
practices of members of a culture (Garfinkel, 1965;
Leiter, 1980; Lynch, 1985).
 Boasian tradition - translating the stories and myths
of the members of the culture.

REALIST TALES
Interpretive Omnipotence
 Ethnographer has the final word on how the culture is to be interpreted
and presented.
 Didactic deadpan" (Clarke 1975) interpretations of the author are made
compelling by the use of a string of abstract definitions, axioms, and
theorems that work logically to provide explanation.
 Each element of the theory is carefully illustrated by empirical field data.
 Marxian, Durkheimian, Freudian, Weberian, or Saussurean
 A) The dividing up of a society or an organization into its functional,
systemic, symbolic, dramatic, or other analytically required elements, as
dictated by an acclaimed theory
 B) Resting the case on the members themselves, generalised rendition
of native’s point of view and collapsing into explanatory constructs.
 C) Geertz (1973) jettisoning of "experience-distant" concepts in favour of
those that are "experience-near."

CONFESSIONAL TALES
Personalized Author(ity)
 Author-fieldworkers are always close at hand in confessional
tales.
 How particular works came into being - demands personalized
authority.
 No ubiquitous, disembodied voice of the culture
 How the fieldworker's life was lived upriver among the natives.
 Clear break between the representation of the research work
itself and the resulting ethnography
 Learning from living in the culture - cognitive, rule-based and
behaviorally focused ethnographic display
 To cast oneself as a translator or interpreter of indigenous texts that
are available to the ethnographer in the field (Geertz, 1973)
 reflexive, language-based, interpretive one

CONFESSIONAL TALES
 The Fieldworker's Point of View
 Autobiographical details - point of view being
represented is that of the fieldworker.
 The attitude conveyed is one of tacking back and
forth between an insider's passionate
perspective and an outsider's dispassionate one.

CONFESSIONAL TALES
Naturalness
 Materials pure and uncontaminated
 Fieldworker and a culture finding each other and, despite
some initial spats and misunderstandings, in the end,
making a match.
 Stoddart’s (1985) happy list
 A) The way authors normalize their presence coming on
the scene, in the scene, and leaving the scene.
 B) Displays of empathy and involvement.
 C) How natives, as informants of the field worker, are
handled in confessional writings – fieldworkers are only
as good as their informants - "well-informed informant”
(Back 1956)

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
 Impressionist painting sets
out to capture a worldly
scene in a special instant
or moment of time.
 The work is figurative,
although it conveys a
highly personalized
perspective.
 Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat,
and Monet
 impressionists' self-
conscious their time,
innovative use of their
materials-color, form, light,
stroke, hatching, overlay,
frame - fieldwork writing.

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
 The impressionists of ethnography are also
out to startle their audience
 Striking stories, not luminous paintings
 Their materials are words, metaphors,
phrasings, imagery, and most critically, the
expansive recall of fieldwork experience - put
together and told in the first person
 Impressionist tales are not about what
usually happens but about what rarely
happens

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
Textual Identity
 Dramatic recall
 Events are recounted roughly in the order in
which they are said to have occurred and carry
with them all the odds and ends that are
associated with the remembered events.
 The idea is to draw an audience into an
unfamiliar story world and allow it, as far as
possible, to see, hear, and feel as the
fieldworker saw, heard, and felt.
 "here is this world, make of it what you will."

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
Fragmented Knowledge
 A look here, a voice there, a glance at some
half-hidden object, all characterize the well-told,
suspenseful tale.
 Cultural knowledge is slipped to an audience in
fragmented, disjointed ways.
 Certain unremarkable features of the beginnings
of a tale become crucial by its end.
 Or similarly, certain features seemingly vital in
the beginnings of the tale prove unimportant to
the eventual turn of events.

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
Characterization
 Fieldworkers’ own images in their tales of the
field – to be judged charitably.
 Individuality is expressed by such poses as
befuddlement, mixed emotions, moral anguish,
heightened sensitivity, compassion,
enchantment, skepticism, or an apparent eager-
beaver spirit of inquiry.
 Shape the lead character's action simply as a
way of making the tale easier to tell and, at least
to the fieldworker, attractive.
 Not simple scribes, absorbent sponges, or
academic ciphers in their research worlds.

IMPRESSIONIST TALES
Dramatic Control
 Irony that members (or at least most of them) know
their culture less well than the fieldworker.
 In the Storyworld, it is the fieldworker's reading of
those events at the time they occurred that matters.
 Recall is sometimes put in the present tense to give
the tale a "you-are-there" feel.
 The audience cannot be concerned with the story's
correctness, since they were not there and cannot
know if it is correct.
 Interest (does it attract?)
 coherence (does it hang together?), and
 fidelity (does it seem true?).

OTHER TALES
CRITICAL TALES
 Ethnography oblivious about the political
economy (e.g., Hall and Jefferson, 1976;
Harris, 1979; Hammersley and Atkinson,
1983)
 Might reveal about larger issues, particularly
those concerning the political and economic
workings of capitalist societies (Marcus,
1986)

OTHER TALES
Literary Tales
 Author's explicit borrowing of fiction-writing
techniques to tell the story.
 Literary tales combine a reporter's sense of
what is noteworthy (newsworthy) with a
novelist's sense of narration.
 Dense characterization, dramatic plots,
flashbacks (and flashforwards), and
alternative points of view are illustrative
techniques.

OTHER TALES
FORMAL TALES
 Formalists of ethnography build, test,
generalize, and otherwise exhibit theory.
 Less concerned with the political economy
 Push a much narrower view of ethnography
under labels such as ethnomethodology,
semiotics, symbolic interactionism,
conversational analysis, ethnosemantics,
sociolinguistics, ethnoscience, various forms
of structuralism, and so forth.

OTHER TALES
Jointly Told Tales
 Dialogic and polyphonic authority in fieldwork
representations (Clifford 1983).
 Production of jointly authored texts
(fieldworker and native) in a way that opens
up for readers the discursive and shared
character of all cultural descriptions.
 The author provides space for the natives to
tell their own tales without the undue
interference and wanton translation of the
fieldworker (e.g., Shaw, 1930, 1931;
Klockers, 1975).

STRUCTURAL TALES
 A merging and growth of critical and formal
tales.
 Analytically sophisticated, ambitious, and
determinedly conceptual.
 Like critical tales, they are also something of
a back-to-the-future form of ethnography

STRUCTURAL TALES
 Structural tales are typically less an
ethnography of a specific social group than an
ethnography of specific, highly contextualized
cultural processes meaning- making-taking
place among those studied.
 Theoretical and empirical inquires run parallel
and are carefully adjusted to one another.
 This question of "fit" is always tricky and
arguable but it allows the choice of the research
sites (and sites within sites), the problematic
situations selected for study, and the various
theoretical concepts put forward to presumably
inform and play off one another.

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY
 Michael Humphreys and Tony Watson (2009)
 Four-fold typography of ethnographic forms:
the plain, the enhanced, the semi-
fictionalized and the fictionalized.
 ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICES

ENTERING THE FACULTY
The taxi turns right out of the honking traffic through the main gate set within a forbidding, three-metre-high, spiked
wrought iron fence. The taxi driver jokingly asks us, in English, whether the fence is there to keep students in,
or others out. Students mill about in the yard, between the fence and the dull grey concrete buildings. They are
nearly all female, and there seem to be two styles of dress. Some wear very short skirts or tight jeans,
sweaters, shirts, boots and long hair. In contrast to this there are some in Islamic dress, their hair and head fully
covered by the hijab or scarf and only the skin of the face and hands visible. We enter the main door, and are
greeted by the caretakers, all brown-suited middle-aged men with moustaches, leaning against grey unadorned
walls. We pass the student common room and tobacco smoke billows from the door. We walk along a tile-
floored corridor past a large black bust of Atatürk, a Turkish National flag, tall glass cabinets with examples of
costume and embroidery, and continue onto a grimy stone floor, passing hundreds of students along the way.
Glancing right we see a ‘kitchen’ lined with large steaming urns of boiling water. In here there are five or six
middle-aged men in blue overall jackets making glasses of tea and coffee and carrying them away, one handed,
on silvery metal trays. We walk up a wide uncarpeted staircase, into the main administration and management
area where the floor is carpeted and each office door has a brass plate with the occupant’s name and title.
Each of the offices has an outer office with a secretary. As we enter the Vice-Dean’s rooms her secretary, a
woman in her forties wearing a dark skirt and white blouse, welcomes us with a formal and deferential
‘Guneydin’, shakes our hands and shows us into the main office. The room is about four metres square, with a
blue/grey plain carpet, high windows across one wall and a piece of flat modern sculpture on the wall opposite.
There is a large, very tidy, dark wooden desk. Everything on it is neatly arranged including pens, pencil,
scissors, a jar of sweets, a television remote control, and two telephones. At the front of the desk is a black
ceramic nameplate with ‘Prof. Dr -------’ in gold lettering. The desk has a padded black leather chair behind it.
On the right of the chair is a Turkish flag furled on a pole topped by a golden crescent. Next to the flag there is a
blue and white circular enamel charm against the evil eye. On the wall directly above the chair is a severe black
and white portrait of Atatürk looking down into the room. An IBM computer sits on a small table to the left of the
desk, and behind this a television. There are three houseplants in the corner, two armchairs facing each other
across a low coffee table, on which there is a notepad from Manchester Museum of Science and Industry and a
prospectus from Purdue University. The inside of the office door is covered in quilted leather padding. The
secretary, through our interpreter, apologizes for the absence of the Vice-Dean, giving us a choice of tea, apple
tea, coffee, or a herbal sage drink. We order apple tea and sit waiting. After about five minutes the Vice-Dean
arrives, breathlessly explaining that she had been to a meeting to substitute for the Dean who was ill. She is
wearing a blue and black striped suit, a white sweater and we notice a small gold Atatürk’s-Head lapel badge.

PLAIN ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING
 Mike in a Turkish Technical College (Humphreys and
Watson, 2009, p.43)
 Mike - plain ethnography, was anxious in this piece
of work to give an account that corresponded, as
closely as possible, with what he saw and
experienced ‘in the field’.
 When I was doing my first ethnographic study I
needed to somehow represent for my readers how it
felt living, working and collecting data in Turkey.
 Immersed in another culture, that I had been a
‘stranger in a strange land’.
 ‘personalised accounts of fleeting moments of
fieldwork in dramatic form’ Van Maanen
 ‘naive realism’

PLAIN ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING
 Experience of physically entering this
Turkish University women’s faculty building.
 The focus on small details that catch my
attention suggests that these stand out for
me as unusual.
 Why are these things unusual?
 ‘stranger’ here in several different ways: an
English male in an all female Turkish
Faculty; a European in Asia; a Westerner in
the East, and (nominally) a Christian in a
secular state with an Islamic population.

CROSSING THE BRIDGE
 As we approached the steps down from the footbridge which had taken us over the railway line we looked down at people eating and
drinking in the garden of the public house which was part of the business that Diane and I were currently studying. Tynemill, a business
running a couple of dozen pubs and bars, had moved its base to the upper floor of The Victoria, a late nineteenth century former railway
hotel.
 We entered The Vic and, after pushing our way through the group of customers who were crowding the main bar, found ourselves being
greeted by Neil, a director of Tynemill who was currently spending most of his time in The Victoria and, it would seem, taking charge of
activities in the pub.
 ‘Perhaps you ought to get round this side of the bar and help us out’, he suggested to Diane, who had learned how to serve pints, take
food orders and all the rest at this bar as part of the ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ component of the Tynemill study.
 Neil looked a little more askance at Tony, ‘Fancy seeing you here, stranger’. ‘
 Yes, it’s no good asking me to help out, Neil. I’d be no better that side of the bar than I am at this’.
 Neil rolled his eyes upward, jokingly acknowledging his awareness of Tony’s well-known discomfort at struggling to get served at
crowded bars. But he was also aware, from earlier conversations, that Tony tended to associate going into The Victoria with some
unhappy experiences when he was working as a participant observer in the large company across the railway line. These were
experiences of ‘going for a goodbye drink’ with managerial colleagues who had found themselves made redundant by the company to
which they had given years of highly committed service. Yet, as Neil had pointed out on an earlier occasion, The Victoria in pre-Tynemill
times was a ‘very different place’.
 ‘The Vic, as it was then’, Neil had argued, was ‘precisely what Tynemill had come into existence to provide an alternative to. It had been
a scruffy, unwelcoming dump offering one brand of keg beer (imposed on it by the brewery) and two flavours of crisps if you were lucky’.
 ‘But look what you’ve got now’, he went on. ‘There’s a proper choice of real ales, bottled beers and excellent wines. You’ve got full food
menus in the bar and the restaurant. And you’ve got the chance of good conversation, without jukeboxes or games machines. And all of
this is in a comfortable physical environment, inside or out in the garden, without any kind of pretentiousness …’
 ‘Except perhaps on the part of some of the regulars who tend to block the bar,’interrupted Tony, ‘and some of the old brewery posters are
a bit …’. ‘Well, if you came in here a bit more often …’, Neil started to respond before being called away to deal with a problem that had
arisen in the kitchen, an area of his territory that he was especially proud to rule over.
 ‘I’d better go and see what’s happening in the kitchen’, Neil explained, ‘and I’m expecting to see Chris at any time now.We’ve some
rather big things to discuss’.
 With Neil away in his beloved kitchen, Tasha came over and served us with our pint of Hemlock (brewed in Tynemill’s own Castle Rock
brewery) and a glass of red wine. Diane and Tasha had a quick conversation about recent developments among the Victoria’s bar staff
but nothing was said about what the issues might be that Neil was going to be discussing with Chris, the managing director of Tynemill.
This was something we would need to find out about later. Meanwhile, however, we took our drinks over to the only empty table, one
which was next to the door of the bar. This was a slightly uncomfortable place to sit but, as Diane pointed out, it provided to the still
uneasy Tony, quite a good vantage point for people who took their ethnographic research seriously. Suitably chastized, Tony sipped his
Hemlock and turned to see how the customers who had newly arrived in the pub were managing to navigate through the now even more

ENHANCED ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING:
 Humphreys and Watson, 2009, p.46
 Tony’s - of enhanced ethnography is almost like a film
sequence. He is trying give the reader a feeling of
actually ‘being there’ watching the two researchers
and their activities in the pub.
 Using techniques we usually associate with the novel.
 A matter of technique and presentation as opposed to
a shift towards fiction, in the sense trying to be a
‘creative writer’.
 It certainly uses the fiction-writer’s techniques, but it
is as close as memory and field notes would allow to
‘what actually happened’ that day.
 More than just reporting an event, for the sake of
reporting an event.

ENHANCED ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING:
 Tony’s ‘crossing the bridge’
 It is actually the opening of an ethnographic
study and, in addition to setting the scene, it
introduces the researchers and actually
starts the narrative rolling by introducing
characters and some plot issues.

SEMI FICTIONALIZED ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING:
 Michael’s ‘charity begins at home’
 USA Bank Credit Line’s headquarters in the UK,
where I was investigating the identity of the
organization via the narratives of the employees
(Humphreys and Brown, 2008).
 Primary research interests is in the multiple, often
changing, occasionally consonant, sometimes
overlapping, but often competing narratives that
participants tell about their organization (Humphreys
and Brown, 2002a; 2002b).
 One pervasive corporate narrative was Credit Line’s
stance on corporate social responsibility represented
in accounts of its environmental and social activities
both internally, with its own employees, and
externally, in the local community.

 This position is encapsulated in an extract
from the bank’s website:
 At Credit Line we believe that a great
company must hold itself to the highest
standard, so we take our role as a
corporate citizen seriously. We believe
true corporate success is measured not
simply in the ledger but rather in a
company’s positive impact, both in the
community and in the workplace.
 (Credit Line website)

 As I spent more time within the bank I gradually
came to realize that although members of the
organization publicly extolled the bank’s
community and green credentials, in private
their views were very different.
 This presented me with an ethical problem.
 In order to represent these contrasting public
and private stories I needed to express the
opinions of individuals but also maintain their
anonymity.
 I did this by writing an ‘ethnographic’ account of
a composite person, who could not be identified
as any single employee.
 Charity begins at home

CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME
 Soon after I started research work at the bank Credit Line I met Charity,
who was in charge of community relations. She was a great research
subject, bubbling with infectious energy, enthusiasm and drive – all of
which were reflected in her office hours, work rate and speed of
conversation. She was happy to tell me all about her background in a
poor Catholic working class family in Yorkshire, where her parents still
lived. Leaving school she had done a business studies degree course at
a polytechnic and, after failing in her ambition to get into television, went
to work at the sweet factory that she had worked in as a child, this time
in the offices. She laughed as she related the experience of getting her
first ‘proper’ job saying: ‘I ended up going for an interview at an electrical
engineering firm as systems analyst trainee, and getting the job. I cried
when I got it, because I really didn’t want to do that, but we had no
money and I needed a job. I stayed there for 11 years’. Later in our
acquaintance she became much more reflective talking about how
promotion to her first management role had coincided with the
breakdown of her long-term relationship, and she was tearful when
describing how a new relationship had ended in tragic circumstances
when her partner died suddenly, ‘I was really quite ill as a result of all
that. I struggled on in that job for two years, tried to get redundancy;
couldn’t get it so ended up going on secondment to theYouth Business
Trust.When I came to go back, they’d forgotten they’d got me, and
they’d made me redundant!’ At this point Charity had no career plans,
applying for whatever jobs were advertized locally and eventually finding
a position as a fund-raiser for the community activities of the County

 She spent three years in this post and, as part of her job, came into contact with
Credit Line ‘to ask for some money for the community project’. The Head of
Corporate Communications in the bank seemed impressed by Charity’s energy
and expertise and suggested that she might like to apply for a job in community
relations. She was laughing again when she said, ‘I got it and, as they say, the
rest is history’.
 She felt different to many of her fellow employees who she saw as ‘middle class
and cosseted’. Proud of her own working class background she saw her family
as the source of inner strength, telling me that ‘I was brought up working class,
without money … Mum found a fiver in the street once, and phoned the police
and handed it in, you know … I come from a very different place, I think, than a
lot of our marketing department, who are graduates from top universities, who’ve
probably been to public school’.
 Although it was clear that she was passionate about the responsibilities that
organizations have for their staff, the environment and the local community,
Charity seemed quite cynical about her own job saying, ‘My problem is that, in
this organization, corporate social responsibility is a sham – it’s just rhetoric – I
mean how can we call ourselves responsible when we give credit cards to poor
people and charge them 30 per cent APR just because they are a high risk’. She
was quite emotional when she described her own ambivalence, saying, ‘I find it
really difficult to square my conscience when I am representing the bank at
some community event such as the launch of the clean needle exchange for
heroin addicts and I know that we are also putting huge pressure on anyone who
makes a late payment on their card’. However, she also acknowledged that she
had been changed by her experience of working for a very high profile financial
organization, telling me with a little glee that:

 My expectations have gone up. I mean, we went
to America, Sadie and I, last month, and we got
upgraded on the way out. And we then got to
the hotel, and we didn’t like it, so we upgraded
ourselves. We checked out of that hotel and into
the Ritz Carlton … It was fantastic! We had, you
know, the chauffeured car to take us
everywhere, and we had the bellboys to take
the stuff up to our room. I think, probably, I feel
now that I deserve more. You know, being
brought up with Catholic guilt and stuff ... I
started here with a Ford Fiesta. I’ve now got a
BMW 325i coupe with leather seats and CD
player.

 In this account I have merged the personalities of several
of my research subjects and used interview transcripts,
field notes, and my own impressionistic ideas about the
organization and its employees to construct versions of
what the fictional ‘Charity’ might have said.
 Although Charity is a construct she represents those
individuals who felt marginalized and somewhat at odds
with most of the mainstream financial, marketing and IT
specialists who were the core staff of the organization.
 Charity’s life history and voice are thus amalgamations of
the stories and utterances of several resistant individuals
located in pockets throughout the organization, in, for
example, the call centre, public relations, projects, and
debt recovery.
 The ethical precondition here was my duty to protect
individuals in particularly vulnerable positions in the
organization.

FICTIONALIZED ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING:
 Tony’s ‘scrimshaw scrimshanks’
 ‘semi-fictionalized’ type of account-necessarily plays a role in
most ethnographies where there is a need to protect individual or
corporate confidentialities.
 Research on the role of strategy-makers themselves on the
strategies of their businesses (Watson, 2003) - not just with the
responsibility - of protecting certain business confidentialities, but
of protecting both a marriage and a relationship between a pair of
siblings.
 A considerable amount of ‘disguising’ therefore had to be done.
 A study of HRM strategy in a food-processing business (Watson,
2004b).
 In that case there was what might be termed ‘absolute dynamite’
in terms of ‘insider information’.
 Fictionalizing was vital to avoid the risk of that dynamite blowing
up in the faces of the people who were good enough to trust me
with highly sensitive information both about the businesses and
the personal lives of senior managers.

 The more I get into strategy-level issues in ethnographic-
style investigations – and especially when I pursue my
key concern with the way strategists’ personal lives
connect to their ‘business lives’ – the more I find I have to
engage in serious ‘fictionalizing’.
 I have been very wary about bringing into formal
‘academic’ research writing the sort of intimate, emotional
and indeed sexual aspects of business life that my
ethnographic experiences, across organizations and over
the years, have convinced me to be of great importance.
 I have pondered long and hard on how I could explore
them.
 And I came to the conclusion that a fictionalized form of
writing is the only way I could really get to grips with some
of the more ‘personal’ and emotional aspects of emotion
and behaviour that is, for very good reasons, kept
beneath the surface in academic work.

 Important as this factor of touching on the more ‘personal’
aspects of human lives is in the ‘fiction-science’ writing (Watson,
2000) I have done (all of it drawing on experiences and insights
from field-work experiences), there is something even more
important.
 This is something that distinguishes the work from mainstream
‘creative writing’: the informing of the writing by my knowledge of
and fascination with social science theory.
 The Gaberlunzie Girl (Watson, 2004a) piece, which was rooted in
some of the things I had seen and heard about in looking at family
relationships within business, wears its theory component relatively
lightly but my story In search of McManus: mystery, myth and
modernity (Watson, 2008b) has a very explicit theoretical dimension
with my fictional figures mixing debate about how to theorize ‘myth’
with tales of sexual intrigue in 1930s Milan.
 The example of fictionalized ethnography provided here (Watson
2008c: 304) has been chosen to highlight the theoretical
dimension. The words are spoken by a fictional warehouse
worker.
 Scrimshaw scrimshanks - one of the variants of a particular kind
of organizational mischief

 strategies of authorial voice and narrative form’ (Jeffcutt 1994:
232) .
 no research account can ever be totally ‘true’ but that some
accounts are truer than others (Watson 1997; 2006).
 The truer ones are those that would better prepare someone
entering the area of life being studied to cope (or ‘fulfil
projects’) in that sphere than would another account.
 These ideas and debates impinge on us as business school
academics both when writing about organizations and when
teaching students.
 Of course, there is a direct relationship between research and
teaching, exemplified in the huge number of available case
studies which range from the ostensibly ‘true’ to the completely
‘fictional’.
 It seems to us that the more authentic the experiences
depicted in our work the more effective they are pedagogically.

SCRIMSHAW SCRIMSHANKS
 I had not heard the word ‘scrimshank’ until I went to work in the
grocery warehouse. And I naively thought that the blokes had
made up the word to name the sort of thing that Dave Scrimshaw
got up to. It turned out that it was all a coincidence. But there’s one
thing I can tell you, Dave Scrimshaw was a real scrimshanker. Let
me tell you the sort of thing I mean. When the warehouse boss
used to come down to tell us that, say, a new delivery of breakfast
cereals would soon be arriving, Dave would look really pleased
and ask questions like, ‘And which cereal is it arriving today, Mr
Cooper?’ He would follow this with ‘Oh yes, Mr Cooper, I think that
one has to be handled with special care, so we’ll go very gently’.
But when the boss had gone and the lorry arrived, Dave would
conspicuously throw or kick the boxes all over the warehouse.
 When he’d had enough of this, he would engage in some other
wheeze to impress the lads. One thing he liked to do was to
construct for himself a little sleeping ‘den’ between the piled-up
boxes. He’d then make a display of climbing into this space ‘for a
nice rest’. We’d then hear this snoring coming from his hiding place
– whether he was sleeping or pretending to sleep, we never knew.
But you can be damn sure of one thing – the boss never caught
him being anything but the hardest working and most
conscientious worker of us all.

writing ethnography

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to writing ethnography (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

writing ethnography