Exploring Organizational Culture: An Ethnographic Approach

Catalog description

This course introduces concepts, methods, and applications for understanding and conducting ethnographic research in organizational settings. Organizational ethnography is an approach to qualitative research that helps practitioners understand the complex social, cultural, and behavioral dynamics of this approach when applied across a variety of settings and for both practical and scholarly aims. Organizational ethnography is grounded in immersion in specific settings (cultural, organizational, community) and draws on observation, interviews, and other modes of interaction with members of the organization being studied to get close to the lived experience of people in organizations. Ethnographers collect their data through field notes, recordings, photographs, surveys, and other means and also produce reports in written and now, increasingly, other media forms (image and sound-based). While traditional ethnography emerged out of anthropology and the social sciences, there has been considerable innovation in revising these methods to make them relevant, practical, and inclusive for the contemporary environment and for use in other disciplines. There have also been criticisms of the power relations inherent in traditional ethnographic methods, and the field has developed collaborative and participatory ways of engaging with these organizations and communities. This course will allow students to learn about and experiment with ethnographic work in organizations through reading, doing, writing, and discussing ethnographic approaches.