33rd EGOS Colloquium, The Good Organization, Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen, Denmark, 6-8 July 2017: 33rd EGOS Colloquium, The Good Organization

Sub-theme 04: (SWG) Long-shots and Close-ups: Organizational Ethnography, Process and History

Convenors: Juliette Koning, Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom; Sierk Ybema, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Merlijn van Hulst, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

In the EGOS Standing Work Group (SWG) 04 on “Organizational Ethnography” we want to discuss the use and usefulness of an ethnographic approach to studying organizational processes. Ethnography is claimed to be sensitive to both historical context and the micro-dynamics of organizational life (Bate,1997; Ybema et al., 2009). Van Hulst, Ybema and Yanow (forthcoming) argue, for instance, that an ethnographic approach is well suited for process studies, as ethnographers ‘draw close enough to observe the precariousness of organizational processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life’. ‘By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature,’ as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014, p. 282) put it, ethnography ‘is revelatory of processual dynamics’.

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