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 socia...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Van Maanen, John (Contributor)
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Sage Publications, 2011-11-01T19:36:11Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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Summary: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.