Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnography

Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnograph

Guiding Change as President of the Board of Trustees: Learning from the Liminal Drama of It All

Organizational-culture change has been of interest to scholars and practitioners for decades, though little empirical data has contributed to our understanding of ritual transitions. By contrast, transitions for individuals, but not organizations, have been examined through the theoretical lenses of ritual process. This article builds on both literatures to explore planned change in an assisted living and nursing care community. I led an effort, as President of the Board of Trustees, to establish philanthropy as a core element of the organizational culture at a time when the long-term-care sector had become increasingly competitive. Participant observation, documentary data and discussions, along with the roles I played, resulted in this account. My term of office was marked by ambiguity, inaction, polarization, and conflict. I distinguish among three types of “liminal” or transitional periods, using van Gennep and Turner’s works as a foundation. I illustrate the relationship between liminality and the resistance and interventions that emerged within the Board and Leadership Team, drawing implications for ritual theory―particularly, liminality and social drama. The practical lessons from this experience, depicted in the Countering Resistance Model, should be helpful to other organizations and leadership groups in mitigating their own transition difficulties

The Woes of Implementation Practice: Getting Caught by the “Program of the Month”

Senior leaders from a large American hospital told me that they wanted their hospital to become more “patient-centric” and asked me to help them.  I was hired to conduct an ethnographic study of the hospital with a team of six employees and the goal of improving patient experiences.  Sixteen months later, the research was completed, effective models of hospital work practices documented, recommendations made, and 16 tools developed to improve hospital culture.  Yet none of our work was implemented.  I returned to my field notes to discover clues that might explain why.  This article explains the process I followed, the stories that revealed unwanted messages, the transcripts that enabled sensemaking, and the program-of-the-month cycle that prevented implementation from occurring. 

The Coming of Age of Anthropological Practice and Ethics

Anthropology as a discipline is well over 100 years old; as a profession it is just gearing up. It is the diversity of anthropological work, not simply by subfield and geographic location, but by job function that has contributed to the field’s expansion. This growth has led to ethical questions and issues surrounding anthropological identity, adaptation, and collegiality, as increasing numbers of anthropologists are finding alternatives to the work of the professor. While the “split” or “divide” between academic and nonacademic work now seems narrower, much more needs to be done to acknowledge that practitioners are a growing and contributing segment of the field. As the career paths of anthropologists continue to differentiate, efforts will be necessary to unify anthropology so that the work of practitioners is considered on par with academics. This article takes on that challenge and proposes solutions to help practice and academia work together to advance the field

Opinions: Ethnographic Methods in the Study of Business

For this issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology, I approached a number of people who have conducted research in, with, on, or for business organizations of one sort or another and asked them to reflect upon their ethnographic experiences. What follows is a series of essays by scholars and practitioners ‒ many of them extremely experienced, but one at the beginning of her career ‒ who between them have provided us with a collation of exemplary practices and insights. It isn’t just restaurant kitchens and home cooking that provide ‘food for thought’, but cruise ships, art museums, General Motors, and an Austrian electrical company. Bon appetit

Reconciling Perceptions of Career Advancement with Organizational Change: A Case from General Motors

Little attention has been given in the literature to the effects of corporate restructuring on the career mobility and career perceptions of organizational "survivors." Employees remaining with the firm typically exhibit career mohility concerns since they anticipate that fewer job opportunities will exist, particularly within the managerial tier. Past research has neither compared actual career moves with employee perceptions of those moves, nor adequately emphasized perceptions of career mohility. This report examines the effects of a mid 1980s downsizing on sales and service employees in one General Motors division. Our results suggest that employee perceptions were rooted in past career path patterns. Because of this reliance on past behavior and the accuracy of their perceptions of past career movement, the majority continued to believe that they would advance in their careers. We discovered the longer an employee was associated with any given position, the less likely helshe was to anticipate future career movement (p< 0.01). Perceptions of career mobility change only when employees are personally affected by the restructuring; ideological change for the majority of organizational members not only follows change in organizational structure, but actually lags behind it