What Are We Missing

In this chapter, we draw on four ethnographic monographs published in other social sciences – Gelya Frank’s Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America, Lori Kendall’s Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, and Ruben Andersson’s (2014) Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe – to illustrate alternative, inspiring ways to craft ethnography today largely absent from management and organization studies (MOS). We show that these ethnographies distinctively relate their empirical studies to ‘Big Questions’ in social theory, advance novel understandings of what constitutes a research field, enact forms of reflexivity and make truth claims grounded in post-positivistic understandings of social science, foreground effective ways to engage with the body and materiality, and deal with power by creatively and skillfully reconnecting the micro- and the macro-politics. Our analysis unveils the hidden cost of the domestication ethnography has undergone in MOS. We make a plea for loosening current conventions concerning the crafting of ethnography and encourage MOS PhD students to engage with ethnography in other disciplines to move the collective debate forward within our own

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

• Is there a new ‘right to Milan’? Neo-normative control and spacing practices in post-pandemic corporate spaces

  Open Access•Daniela Aliberti, Francesca Mochi•Culture and Organization•2026

  Add to list

• The politics of identity in organizational ethnographic research

  Open Access•Rafael Alcadipani, Robert I Westwood et al.•Human Relations•2015

  Add to list