Book review: Continuities and changes in ethnographies of work

Citation

Dahles, H. and Wels, H. (2024), "Book review: Continuities and changes in ethnographies of work", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 311-313. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-07-2024-102

Ethnographies of Work is a volume in the Emerald series “Research In The Sociology of Work,” edited by Rick Delbridge and associate editors Andreas Pekarek, Gretchen Purser and Markus Helfen. The series editors, echoing Gideon Kunda’s call of 20 years ago, aim at transforming the agenda of the sociology of work – “bringing work back in” – in times when work, workplaces and labor markets face existential challenges, such as increasingly precarious and insecure work arrangements, accelerated by the rapid development of new technologies and ongoing upheaval wrought by climate change and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges, having profound impacts on the contemporary workplace and every-day lives of workers worldwide, propel work matters right back into the focus of the sociology of work. Ethnography – as a research methodology, genre of writing and paradigm – makes a distinct contribution to the study of work. By investigating “social realities in context, ethnographic work helps identify where and how exactly wider structures impinge on the agency of the persons involved, and, by moving close to a given social situation, it assists in identifying those aspects that can or must be changed,” the editors explain (p. 4–5). In other words, workplace ethnography is emancipatory in nature.

The edited volume revolves around (new) challenges emerging both in workplaces and the ethnographic work conducted in this space. These challenges are addressed, in varying degrees, in ten chapters authored by a mix of early career researchers and senior academics – with an emphasis on the former. The editors imply that this study offers new empirical insights, new theoretical perspectives, new ways of presenting ethnographic data and new understandings of the position of ethnographers vis-à-vis the “field.” In short, and in their own words, it offers “cutting edge ethnographic research” (p. 5).

Covering established and new work settings (service provision in the hospitality sector and gig work in the food delivery industry), Chapters 2 and 3 are based on solid fieldwork, providing detailed empirical descriptions interpreted against the background of the wider institutional contexts. The next three chapters (4, 5 and 6) offer empirical insights into relatively novel and less well-understood social settings: an income-sharing intergenerational community; an emerging workforce of digital nomads and freelance workers in the knowledge-based gig economy. Chapter 7 challenges conventional ways of presenting “storytelling” in ethnographic writing, offering vignettes without an interpretative framework. The final three chapters address the researchers’ positionality and the subjective experience of the research process: Chapter 8 on the experience of precarious work, Chapter 9 on the personal vulnerabilities of the researcher and Chapter 10 on how to break through the “company line” to realize the emancipatory potential of ethnography.

So, in what ways do this edited volume and its chapters meet the claims of novelty and “cutting edge” ethnographic research?

“New”, in a sense, are the workplaces figured in the various chapters, reflecting major transformations occurring in work settings where more and more work is performed in shifting, mobile and provisional arrangements or in digital and remote spaces. Related new themes emerge in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and revolve around pre-mid-post-COVID work experiences and the longer-term impacts of the pandemic. Equally, the concept of sustainability is among the themes giving rise to new alternative work arrangements, such as community settings that practice income sharing and co-production of food and support services.

Turning to the methodological dimension, to what extent do the contributors, in parallel to these novel workspace arrangements, develop innovative ways of doing ethnography?

No doubt, ethnographic crafts(wo)manship stands out in the empirical cases presented. Immersion is still the first and foremost methodological tool for sound and solid fieldwork. Capturing the insiders’ point of view – “from within” and “from below” – remains the ultimate trial and triumph of the ethnographer, whether it is in a traditional workplace or in a mobile, remote or digital setting. Chapters in this volume demonstrate that this quest for immersion brings about challenges and issues ranging among the “classics” in ethnographic fieldwork: First, there is the issue of how to gain access to the field and, in particular, the “backstage”, so that the perspective “from within and from below” can be achieved. Second, there is the challenge of how to find a balance between distance to and involvement with participants during and after fieldwork to be able to keep an open mind without jeopardizing the intimate knowledge of the “field.”

Relatively new is the attention given to the researcher’s positionality. Over the past few years, it has become commonplace to observe critical self-reflection and transparency when discussing the role of the researcher in ethnographic writing. However, one has to be aware that positionality is a novel term for an “old” problem: what and how much to reveal about one’s research and oneself vis-à-vis research participants and audiences? What perspective to pick, who to be close to in the field and who to keep at a distance? This is also related to the above issue of “distance and involvement” and resonates with the fine line between ethnography as an “objective” description of the field on the one hand and advocacy, emancipatory work and activism on the other. These questions form part and parcel of every ethnographic research, as is demonstrated so aptly in this volume. Over many generations, early-career ethnographers, entering the field for the first time, feel overwhelmed initially. It seems impossible to properly prepare ethnographers to face, with confidence, the mental and physical “exposure” to fieldwork and its complications, both face-to-face and online.

And finally, another “classical” challenge presents itself in “writing ethnography,” i.e. the issue of presentation: How to write up the fieldwork notes? How to convey the “native’s point-of-view” and whose voice qualifies for being heard? Does it make sense for the ethnographer to limit their writings to description and refrain from contextualizing and interpreting fieldwork findings? The current volume offers a glimpse of the latter but leaves these issues for future exploration.

So, on balance, it is gratifying to see that the “art of doing and writing” workplace ethnography is continued and carried forward into new work settings by next-generation ethnographers. A critical approach is called for to anticipate workplace futures. Recent additions to scholarly explorations of workplaces offer a glimpse of such futures, as there are, for instance, organizational ethnographies of cryptocurrencies (see Caliskan, 2023), artificial intelligence (AI) and intuitive interspecies communication (IIC). On the latter two topics, the Journal of Organizational Ethnography (JOE) has already lined up two Special Issues. After all, not only do we need to “bring work back in” but also need to raise the question who actually performs the work in the (new) spaces under scrutiny. In the volume reviewed here, the “who” is typically assumed to be a human. Yet, new research opportunities present themselves in the budding field of animal organizational ethnography (see, for instance, Hamilton and Taylor, 2012, in the very first issue of JOE), where humans become decentered and human exceptionalism is challenged. Far more often than ethnographers acknowledge, workspaces are co-inhabited by human and nonhuman actors. Hence, we envision a fascinating potential for new ethnographies of work(spaces): for instance, an ethnography of service dogs, foregrounding the perspective of the dog, or a study on nonhuman “vermin” and their perspectives on their human “exterminators”? A piece on nonhuman animals used in various types of academic research through the eyes and senses of these nonhuman research assistants. As the current edited volume is one in a series on “Research in the Sociology of Work,” a next “cutting edge” volume may rise to the challenge of debunking human exceptionalism in workplace studies.