Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods

Abstract

Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this paper. We first outline the methodological implications of a shift from single researcher to team ethnography, and from single case site to the multiple sites that constitute global ethnography. Then we present a detailed explanation of a global, team-based ethnographic research project that we conducted over three years. Our study of the global reinsurance industry involved a team of five ethnographers conducting fieldwork in 25 organizations across 15 countries. We outline three central challenges we encountered; team division of labour, team sharing, and constructing a global ethnographic object. The paper concludes by suggesting that global, team-based, ethnography provides important insights into global phenomena, such as regulation, finance, and climate change among others, that are of interest to management scholars.

The Influence of Routine Interdependence and Skillful Accomplishment on the Coordination of Standardizing and Customizing

“…Informed and sensitized by our wider immersion in the field (Guba & Lincoln 1985), we have isolated a data set that only includes data pertaining to those 24 underwriters involved in U.S. property catastrophe deals for this paper (see Jarzabkowski, Bednarek & Cabantous, 2015). These underwriters perform a particular reinsurance trading routine that is highly consistent and comparable.…”

Ethnography: challenges and opportunities

“…The emergence of team-based ethnography, as a departure from the traditional lone researcher working ‘ in the field’ , is in part in response to the globalisation of societies, economies and ororganisations 15. Multisite or global ethnography is a new way of conceptualising ethnography that offers opportunities to study the interconnectedness of modern society,15 and could be appropriate to study healthcare systems globally.…”

Ethnography of Religious Instants: Multi-Sited Ethnography and the Idea of “Third Spaces”

“…However, multi-sited ethnography has become increasingly common over the course of the last two decades (e.g., [14,19]). George Marcus [20] was at the forefront of calls for multi-sited fieldwork.…”

“…As Jarzabkowski et al [14] make clear, collaborative ethnography involves its own challenges. Much of ethnographic research is rooted in subjective research and employs the ethnographer as a "research instrument".…”

“…Jarzabkowksi and her colleagues make a strong case for the use of team-based ethnography to study global processes and networks. In the course of their collaborative research focused on the reinsurance industry they came to understand their project as less about comparison of different sites and more about "an interconnected global practice" ( [14], p. 15). Pursuing similarly collaborative ethnographic research ought to allow us to examine religion within global networks of practice and dialogue.…”