The present of things past: Ethnography and career studies

This article first provides something of an informal narrative of my own academic career and suggests just what is idiosyncratic to that narrative and what seems to me to be rather general. This is followed by a swift look at ethnography as a social practice and some of its defining features highlighting the relatively recent burgeoning of ethnographic studies in organizational research. The following sections examine what I think are exemplary ethnographic career studies and just how these ethnographic studies have changed over time. The next section notes what seems to have not changed much over the years. I conclude by revisiting some of my introductory remarks on academic careers and the always provisional character of ethnographic studies. My normative argument is that while ethnographic work has contributed a great deal to our understanding of both occupational and organizational careers – then and now – such studies are too often overlooked by current variable and measurement-driven career researchers.

[1]  T. Deal,et al.  Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. , 1982 .

[2]  Ofer Sharone.  Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences , 2013 .

[3]  Andreas Glaeser.  Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police , 2000 .

[4]  Michel Anteby.  Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education , 2013 .

[5]  R. I. Sutton.  The no asshole rule : building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn't , 2010 .

[6]  Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy , 2002 .

[7]  Allen C. Bluedorn,et al.  Men and Women of the Corporation , 1978 .

[8]  Michael B. Arthur,et al.  The boundaryless career , 2006 .

[9]  Herbert Kaufman,et al.  The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior , 1960 .

[10]  Barney G. Glaser,et al.  Organizational Scientists: Their Professional Careers , 1964 .

[11]  M. Sahlins.  Waiting for Foucault, Still , 2002 .

[12]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[13]  A. Kuper,et al.  Culture: The Anthropologists' Account , 2001 .

[14]  D. Lortie.  Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study , 1976 .

[15]  D. Snow,et al.  Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People , 1993 .

[16]  E. Bruner.  The Aging Anthropologist , 2014 .

[17]  Karen Zouwen Ho,et al.  Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street , 2009 .

[18]  H. Shepard,et al.  Men Who Manage , 1959 .

[19]  E. C. Hughes,et al.  Men And Their Work , 1959 .

[20]  A. James.  Assholes: A Theory , 2012 .

[21]  M. Arthur.  The boundaryless career: A new perspective for organizational inquiry , 1994 .

[22]  L. Saunders,et al.  Permanence and change. , 1958, The American journal of nursing.

[23]  Julius A. Roth,et al.  Timetables: Structuring the Passage of Time in Hospital Treatment and Other Careers , 1963 .

[24]  Christina Garsten,et al.  Apple World: Core and Periphery in a Transnational Organizational Culture: A Study of Apple Computer Inc. , 1994 .

[25]  V. L. Allen,et al.  Automobile Workers and the American Dream , 1955 .

[26]  Shehzad Nadeem,et al.  Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves , 2012 .

[27]  Peter Moskos,et al.  Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District , 2008 .

[28]  S. Barley,et al.  Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy , 2004 .

[29]  Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh,et al.  Gang Leader for A Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh, New York: Penguin, 2008 , 2009 .

[30]  Michael M. Sokal,et al.  Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments , 1991 .

[31]  Beth A. Bechky,et al.  Reclaiming “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history” – commentaries , 2013 .

[32]  D. Holland.  Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds , 1998 .

[33]  A. Goffman,et al.  On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City , 2014 .

[34]  C. Lane,et al.  A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment , 2011 .

[35]  R. H. Waterman,et al.  In Search of Excellence , 1983 .

[36]  Ofer Sharone.  Job-Search Games: Chemistry, Self-Blame, and Unemployment Experiences , 2013 .

[37]  Howard S. Becker,et al.  Boys In White , 1961 .

[38]  Christena Nippert-Eng.  Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life , 1996 .

[39]  C. Morrill,et al.  Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology , 1997 .

[40]  Sherry B. Ortner.  Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject , 2006 .

[41]  G. Hofstede,et al.  Culture′s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values , 1980 .

[42]  K. Weick,et al.  Matthew Desmond: On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters , 2008 .

[43]  K. Knorr-Cetina,et al.  Epistemic cultures : how the sciences make knowledge , 1999 .

[44]  Robin Nagle,et al.  Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City , 2013 .

[45]  John R. Weeks,et al.  Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank , 2003 .