“Being there”: detailed ethnography, detective work and a little imagination

“Being there”: detailed ethnography, detective work and a little imagination
Anna Uhlin, Chris Ivory
Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp.-

This methodological paper aims to push the boundaries of workplace ethnographies, where technologies in general and the implementation of new technologies in particular are being studied. Intrigued by the experience that “being there” is not enough, and sometimes not even possible, we discuss complementing aspects of the “how” of the work on the ground that set the foundation for high-quality ethnographic studies.

To this end, we mobilize Latour’s (1992, 1993, 2005) thinking around a sociology of translation and how non-humans bring essential force to social relations, and Leonardi’s (2017) three-step methodology for dealing with material, materiality and how matter comes to matter. We illustrate our argument with ethnographic material telling a story of the “life and death” (c.f. Law and Callon, 1992) of visualization boards at a local site of a global manufacturing company.

Our findings suggest that detailed ethnography is the foundation for allowing the progressive detective and imagination work we argue is required in technology-focused workplace ethnographies. “Being there” is the foundation, and it grants us the privilege of doing the important work of joining the dots where senses-enabled trajectories disappear.

The paper puts forward an approach to ethnographic on-the-ground work that encourages detective work and imagination to “join the empirical dots” when “being there” is not enough.