John Van Maanen

The Fact of Fiction in Organizational Ethnography.

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. This paper conveniently glosses over many of the fine points of methodological nuance and regards any social study at least partially ethnographic if it allows a researcher to become immersed in the everyday life of the observed. In essence, the use of such techniques in organizational studies literally forces the researcher to come to grips with the essential ethnographic question of what it is to be rather than to see a member of the organization.

Police Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination of Job Attitudes in an Urban Police Department

This research was supported in part by the Organizational Behavior Research Center at the University of California, Irvine and the Office of Naval Research (Contract No. N00014-69-A-0200-9001 NR 151-315). I would like to gratefully acknowledge my academic colleagues, in particular Lyman W. Porterand Mason Haire fortheir insightful suggestions and assistance during various phases of this research.

Ethnography then and now

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review some of the compositional and orientational shifts that have occurred in ethnography during the last 20 years.Design/methodology/approach – Within the paper the author produces a series of reflections based upon his own experiences of writing ethnography, plus of reading the ethnographic accounts of others.Findings – Ethnography remains relatively free from technical jargon and high‐wire abstraction. Because of its relative freedom from a thoroughly specialized vocabulary and a privileged conceptual apparatus, ethnography continues to carry a slight literary air compared to other forms of social science writing. Ethnography maintains an almost obsessive focus on the “empirical.” Despite attempts to develop a standard methodology over the last 20 years, there is still not much of a technique attached to ethnography.Originality/value – The paper presents the original views of a renowned ethnographer about developments within the practice of ethnography during...

Organizations and Risk in Late Modernity

Risk is an important but under-investigated feature of organizations in Late Modernity. This paper introduces the Special Issue on Organizations and Risk in Late Modernity. The rationale for the special issue is discussed. An overview of important approaches to risk research and organizations is provided to frame the special issue. These approaches include the cognitive science approach, which takes a positivist perspective and assumes that risks are objective and knowable. This view is contrasted with socio-cultural theories based in work by Mary Douglas, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault. Charles Perrows organizational theory of the production of risk and accidents due to interactive complexity, and Karl Weicks theory of risk sensemaking, are then discussed. The paper then reviews the contributions of papers in the special issue and outlines issues for future research on risk and organizations.

The Loci of Work Satisfaction: Job, Interaction, and Policy

Three thousand five hundred subjects from four governmental organizations (two municipalities, one county, and one state) were interviewed to investigate the nature ofjob satisfaction in the public sector. The intent of the study is to examine the relationships between components of satisfaction and various conceptually objective design variables of the work environment including characteristics of the assigned tasks, work assistance, pay, promotions, and communications, among others. Using the techniques of multidimensional scaling and clustering, a tripart locus of work satisfaction is derived involving job properties, interactional features, and organizational policy variables. Each of the loci is shown to be analytically distinct and related to a specific set of design features. The implications of these findings for change programs such as job enrichment are subsequently discussed.

Displacing Disney: Some notes on the flow of culture

This article presents a comparative reading of the theme parks Disneyland, DisneyWorld, Tokyo Disneyland, and (in brief) EuroDisney. The aim is to explore how an explicitly American product flows across distinct cultural boundaries. The park itself is treated as a source of “cultural experience” for those who pay to wander about its grounds and partake of its attractions. The meaning of this cultural experience depends however on the social context in which it occurs and — despite corporate claims to the contrary — is anything but universal.

A Song for My Supper: More Tales of the Field

This essay tries to be true to a podium talk I presented at a conference in March, 2008. But, of necessity, certain consolidation liberties are taken. Beginning with a brief and broad treatment of ethnography as a paired written representation of and lengthy personal experience in a particular social world, I move to consider why the former, the text, has been so infrequently examined in lieu of the latter, the so-called method. I then move to ethnographic texts themselves and look at what I take to be some broad changes the seem apparent — particularly within the organizational ethnography domain — over the past 20 or so years. Alongside these changes comes the emergence of several distinct genres treated only lightly (or not at all) in Tales of the Field. I end by considering what seems to have stayed the course in ethnography and why.This essay tries to be true to a podium talk I presented at a conference in March, 2008. But, of necessity, certain consolidation liberties are taken. Beginning with a brief and broad treatment of ...

The Flow of Culture: Some Notes on Globalization and the Multinational Corporation*

As this collection of essays suggests, organizational theorists are just getting around to the serious study of the MNC. As of yet they have not had much time for culture, but when culture does enter into the emerging representation of the MNC, it does so often as an all-purpose variable used to account for many of the problems faced by MNCs. Such firms by definition do business in different countries under vastly different conditions throughout the world; they must therefore enter into relations with people — as customers, employees, suppliers — from distinct national (and other) cultures who may have quite different ideas as to what the organization and their roles in relation to it are all about. This multinational character creates varying degrees of cultural complexity, confusion and conflict when individuals and groups who do not share the same underlying codes of meaning and conduct come into contact with one another. These troubles may persist over time and even become amplified, thus leading to a good deal of distrust, disorder, hostility and the unravelling of corporate or local agendas. Organization theory applied to the MNC becomes then a search for those organizational forms that might obviate, mediate or otherwise soothe local interests in favour of corporate ones.

Making Rank: Becoming an American Police Sergeant

Drawing upon field research carried out in the police force of an American city, this study examines the deep, recurrent organizational tension between the street culture of policing, epitomized by the so-called “patrolmans mentality,” and the administrative culture of the police hierarchy, as this tension is reflected in the processes of becoming a sergeant. Sergeants are selected from among the patrol ranks by procedures that favor administratively inclined candidates. Once promoted and assigned, new sergeants are left more or less on their own in learning and adapting to the demands of their positions, as socialization at the sergeant level tends to be informal and individualistic in character. “Street sergeants” and “station house sergeants” quickly develop different supervisory styles and strategies, each with distinctive attractions and drawbacks for those supervised, yet each reflecting the “street” or “desk” pattern of the incumbents established organizational career.Drawing upon field research carried out in the police force of an American city, this study examines the deep, recurrent organizational tension between the street culture of policing, epitomized by the so-called “patrolmans mentality,” and the administrative culture of the police hierarchy, as this tension is reflected in the processes of becoming a sergeant. Sergeants are selected from among the patrol ranks by procedures that favor administratively inclined candidates. Once promoted and assigned, new sergeants are left more or less on their own in learning and adapting to the demands of their positions, as socialization at the sergeant level tends to be informal and individualistic in character. “Street sergeants” and “station house sergeants” quickly develop different supervisory styles and strategies, each with distinctive attractions and drawbacks for those supervised, yet each reflecting the “street” or “desk” pattern of the incumbents established organizational career.

The present of things past: Ethnography and career studies

This article first provides something of an informal narrative of my own academic career and suggests just what is idiosyncratic to that narrative and what seems to me to be rather general. This is followed by a swift look at ethnography as a social practice and some of its defining features highlighting the relatively recent burgeoning of ethnographic studies in organizational research. The following sections examine what I think are exemplary ethnographic career studies and just how these ethnographic studies have changed over time. The next section notes what seems to have not changed much over the years. I conclude by revisiting some of my introductory remarks on academic careers and the always provisional character of ethnographic studies. My normative argument is that while ethnographic work has contributed a great deal to our understanding of both occupational and organizational careers – then and now – such studies are too often overlooked by current variable and measurement-driven career researchers.This article first provides something of an informal narrative of my own academic career and suggests just what is idiosyncratic to that narrative and what seems to me to be rather general. This is followed by a swift look at ethnography as a social practice and some of its defining features highlighting the relatively recent burgeoning of ethnographic studies in organizational research. The following sections examine what I think are exemplary ethnographic career studies and just how these ethnographic studies have changed over time. The next section notes what seems to have not changed much over the years. I conclude by revisiting some of my introductory remarks on academic careers and the always provisional character of ethnographic studies. My normative argument is that while ethnographic work has contributed a great deal to our understanding of both occupational and organizational careers – then and now – such studies are too often overlooked by current variable and measurement-driven career researchers.