Sensitivity to situated positionings: Generating insight into organizational change

Within ethnographic forms of organisational research, sensitivity to context is generally acknowledged as a critical ingredient for analysing processes and practices. When conducting such research, however, researchers typically privilege one particular research context for generating knowledge: although some ethnographic scholars underscore the importance of adopting a diversity of both insider and outsider roles, ethnographic research is usually equated with gaining a deep familiarity with the field of study through immersion. First, we argue that, although immersion elicits valuable knowledge ‘from within’, its prioritisation inevitably blinds the researcher’s eye to equally interesting insights stemming from alternative – and often unintended – positionings. Testifying to the significance of researchers’ relational reflexivity for data interpretation, we show how a variety of researcher’ positionings vis-à-vis the researched generated a variety of insights. Critical sensitivity to fieldworker identities in an ethnographic study of planned organisational change within a police organisation allowed us, second, to criticise the change management literature for routinely building on a fixed dichotomy between ‘change agents’ and ‘change recipients’ and to empirically demonstrate a wider variety of police officers’ positionings in relation to change initiatives (i.e. countering, complying with and co-opting) and its initiators (i.e. engaging in other-depreciating, self-questioning or self-affirming identity work)

The affordance of compassion for animals: a filmic exploration of industrial linear rhythms

Compassion is an emotion that could be useful for improving the lives of animals within the intensive and factory farming system (IFFS). Rhythms that exist within this system play a role in making compassion difficult to realize, which formulates the research question: How do the rhythms of the IFFS shape the affordance of compassion for animals? Drawing on a cultural mode of analysis informed by Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, this paper explored the rhythms of three films that focus on the treatment of animals in this system: Meat; Our Daily Bread and Never Let Me Go. Industrial linear rhythms seem to compromise the compassion offered to animals in the IFFS by manipulating the cyclical rhythms of animals and animalized bodies from birth, through life and at death. Compassion for animals and animalized bodies in the IFFS, this paper concludes, is often provided in a piecemeal and localized manner

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). We argue that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. In doing so, we tackle long-standing stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for. We highlight how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. We demonstrate the potential pay-off with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies, we argue, suggest a reorientation of how we understand the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. We conclude by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection,and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment