The Fact of Fiction in Organizational Ethnography

Abstract

The Sherlockian prescription as applied to organizational research is simple, sequential, and reflexive: less theory, better facts; more facts, better theory. Organizational researchers schooled in an ethnographic tradition take the Sherlockian prescription rather seriously. In essence, ethnographers believe that separating the facts from the fictions, the extraordinary from the common, and the general from the specific is best accomplished by lengthy, continuous, firsthand involvement in the organizational setting under study. The ethnographic approach is that of anthropology, and, to a more limited extent, sociology, under the stiff but precise tag, participant observation. Field data represent primarily the ethnographer’s recording of first-order concepts as they arise from the observed talk and action of participants in the studied scene. Ethnographic research is of course more than a single method and can be distinguished from participant observation on several grounds one of which is that of its broader aim, the analytic description of a culture.

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