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In at least 250 words, reply to the original poster below. You must use at least two scholarly journals to support your response. You must also use at least one reference from the New International Version Bible. All citations must be in APA 7th Edition format with both in-text citations and a References page. Journals must be from within the past 5 years. You must also use the attached text as a reference.
Original Poster (Algernon Wallace)
Importance of Fieldwork in Organizational Ethnography
Ethnography remains one of the most preferred research methods among social scientists while undertaking qualitative inquiries that seek to study human subjects and their lived experiences within a cultural environment and natural settings. As a qualitative methodology, ethnography distinguishes itself from other research methods because it focuses on understanding reality, way of life, and human experiences based on a native perspective. Typically, this entails observing participants and offering detailed descriptions of their behaviors, challenges, and experiences based on their representation in the natural social world (Lune & Berg, 2016). Method handbooks and anthropological scholarship reproduce the long-standing notions that fieldwork is an initiation or practice that ethnographic researchers must traverse at some point in their professional careers. In their quest to understand human affective relations and how organizational cultures work, social scientists rely on fieldwork processes and other ethnographic methods to facilitate access to pertinent information on various phenomena experienced and perceived by subjects in their native social world.
Considered a methodological requirement in organizational ethnography, fieldwork approaches allow social scientists to immerse themselves in a natural environment, for example, a government institution, and affectively relate to and experience others’ life worlds in order to learn or capture the feelings, experiences, and accounts by individuals who inhabit these settings. Drawing on radical empiricism positions, Thajib(2019) argue that fieldwork allows ethnographic scholars to transfigure their emotions and interpret them as scientific disturbances. Thus, this approach makes fieldworkers become deeply immersed in the participants’ social world and metamorphose into new forms, which enables them to function as analytical scientists as they indulge in ethnographic knowledge production. In other words, the fieldwork approach provides an effective method to achieve self-reflexive engagement and scientific subjectivism in organizational ethnography. While applying fieldwork techniques in organizational ethnographic studies, the researcher must maintain an affective disposition and orientation to assist in interpreting their subjective and affective experiences in a way that helps other individuals who have no prior encounter with such life-words understand them in a profound manner.
Essentially, fieldwork describes data collection activities, including making observations, obtaining informants’ narratives, and other undertakings that occur during ethnographic studies in natural social worlds, such as organizational environments. Due to the emphasis on the ethnographic researcher’s relational depth, affective engagement, open-ended commitment, immersion, and sensitivity to the natural environment, fieldwork can be applied in diverse organizational settings, especially where anthropological practices appear to offer a modish substitute to achieve a comprehensive and rigorous inquiry (Stodulka, 2019). The holistic attentiveness and affective immersion in the informants’ social world and detachment from human actors in such contexts – including participants and interlocutors – increase ethnographic researcher’s epistemological potential, increasing their ability to translate their conversations, interactions, narrative accounts, and observations into a format that outsiders can understand (Stodulka, 2019). While drawing on primary cases where ethnographic study designs have been successfully used as an empirical underpinning for public programming by federal agencies, these inquiries rely on field data collection through distinctive methods, such as human observation in community environments, interactions with informants in their local settings, which allows the ethnographer to blend with people, immerse themselves in others’ natural worlds, build affective, emotional relations, and translate their experiences while maintaining a native standpoint.
Based on methods literature, the approach to fieldwork has continued to change contemporaneous with recent developments and emerging methodological issues observed in ethnographic research designs. In particular, the emergency of multi-sited ethnography, where social scientists focus their field data collection on multiple locations, can have a significant bearing on how researchers relate with and interpret organizational cultures. These developments exemplify the interconnected nature of cultural contexts, mainly driven by globalization practices. Van Duijn (2020) described multi-sited ethnography as a new and fitting approach that requires organizational researchers to restructure fieldwork processes and maintain a “following” strategy while studying people, cultures, events, objects, and problems in situations that require them to look beyond restrictive organizational boundaries. Unlike in conventional ethnography research, where fieldwork involves human observation and data collection in a single location, multi-sited ethnography imposes additional burdens on modern organizational researchers, especially in public institutions, by requiring them to constantly reflect on their positionality relative to the field and continuously negotiate access as they traverse across sites.
Furthermore, the growing attention toward posthumanism models and sociological literature that draws on actor-network theory has increased the pressure on organizational ethnographers to move away from the conventional human-centric view while studying organizational cultures. The posthumanist framework, as applied in contemporary ethnographic work, requires organizational researchers to build affective relations and immerse themselves in material-discursive settings without restricting their analysis to conventional duality and long-standing binaries – emotion/logic, nature/purpose, human/nature, male/female gender dynamics, body/mind, human/nature, abstract ideas/practice, and other parallel forms (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). While looking at the posthumanist paradigm and its relevance in contemporary public administration through the organizational ethnography lens, this theoretical framework may increase the pressure on organizational researchers to adopt fieldwork strategies and methodological approaches that focus on happenstance events, effective materialization, non-restrictive, and ephemeral politics to enhance understanding on compelling issues in complex institutional ecologies.
The discussion on organizational ethnography contributed to a new and convoluted understanding of this qualitative research design as an intellectual enterprise that anchors on “fieldwork” as the empirical basis for studying and interpreting cultural dimensions and epistemologies in other people’s natural and social world. Fieldwork mainly includes being physically present in the study setting, immersing oneself in the participant’s natural context, and maintaining self-reflexive engagement to facilitate knowledge production. However, unlike traditional anthropologists, modern sociologists are more concerned with the changing architecture of social science research, some highlighting that recent globalization trends and the shift toward the posthumanist paradigms have challenged traditional epistemological foundations and traditions upon which organizational ethnography was grounded.
References
Lune, H., & Berg, B. L. (2016). Qualitative research methods for the social sciences (9th ed.). Pearson Education (US). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780134416229Links to an external site.
Thajib, F., Dinkelaker, S., & Stodulka, T. (2019). Introduction: affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography (pp. 7-20). Springer International Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_2Links to an external site.
Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., & Thajib, F. (2019). Fieldwork, ethnography, and the empirical affect montage. In Analyzing affective societies (pp. 279-295). Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429424366-16Links to an external site.
Taylor, C. A., & Fairchild, N. (2020). Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: Viscous matterings and gendered bodies. Ethnography and Education, 15(4), 509-527. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1735469Links to an external site.
Van Duijn, S. (2020). Everywhere and nowhere at once: the challenges of following in multi-sited ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 9(3), 281-294. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-12-2019-0045Links to an external site.
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