Ethnography Atelier Podcast Ruthanne Huising, Pedro Monteiro, Samantha Ortiz, Pauli Pakarinen and Audrey Holm

In this episode, we talk with Michel Anteby about access. In particular, the resistance that field workers may face and how such a process may, in reality, offer invaluable insights into the social world being studied. In our conversation, Michel elaborates on the challenges and promises of research settings that may be hard to access, reflects on the ethical limits of fieldwork, and shares tips about selecting and immersing oneself in the culture of occupational groups and organizations. 

Michel Anteby is a Professor of Management & Organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences. He also co-leads Boston University’s Precarity Lab. Michel’s research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. Studied populations have included airport security officers, anesthesiologists, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, puppeteers, and subway drivers.

Further information:
Anteby, M. (2024). The interloper: Lessons from resistance in the field. Princeton University Press.Anteby, M. (2015). Denials, Obstructions, and Silences: Lessons from Repertoires of Field Resistance (and Embrace). In Handbook of Qualitative Organizational Research (pp. 197-205). Routledge. Bourmault, N., & Anteby, M. (2023). Rebooting one’s professional work: The case of French anesthesiologists using hypnosis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 68(4), 913-955.Anteby, M., & Occhiuto, N. (2020). Stand-in labor and the rising economy of self. Social Forces, 98(3), 1287-1310.Anteby, M. (2010). Markets, morals, and practices of trade: Jurisdictional disputes in the US commerce in cadavers. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(4), 606-638.

In this episode, we talk with Madeleine Rauch about diary methods, especially unsolicited diaries for research in organization and management. Madeleine tells us about her experience with such an approach, how diaries can be combined with other sources of data, and the questions that they help us answer. Our conversation also features practical insights about how to keep one’s data secure, as well as reflections on the tendency in social sciences to rely on verbal data sources and how focusing on diaries can elicit new ways of approaching existing topics and open up new ones.


Madeleine Rauch is an Associate Professor of Strategy and International Business at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School. Her research focuses on the strategies and challenges faced by people working and living in challenging contexts, such as undocumented individuals in the U.S., medical professionals during the recent COVID pandemic, and soldiers in war zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and South Sudan.


Further information:
Rauch, M, & Ansari, S. (2022). “Waging war from remote cubicles: How workers cope with technologies that disrupt the meaning and morality of their work.” Organization Science 33 (1), 83-104.
Rauch, M, & Ansari, S. (2022). “Diaries as a methodological innovation for studying grand challenges.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Organizing for societal grand challenges. Emerald Publishing Limited, 205-220.

In this episode, we talk with Angèle Christin about the challenges and opportunities of studying influencers and social media platforms. The context for this conversation is her latest research, a digital ethnography for a new book on the algorithmic labor of influencers and influencer marketing on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The conversation is packed with insights on gaining access to a phenomenon that happens online in private spaces (including a story on how Angèle became an influencer herself); the promises of designing research on niches or fields in the social media space; and practical reflections on how to make ethnography “the art of the possible.”

Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices.


Further information:Christin, A., and Y. Lu. Forthcoming. “The Influencer Pay Gap: Platform Labor Meets Racial Capitalism.” New Media & Society. Christin, A. 2020. “The Ethnographer and the Algorithm: Beyond the Black Box.” Theory & Society. 49(5-6): 897-918. Kellogg, K.C, M.A. Valentine, and A. Christin. 2020. “Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control.” Academy of Management Annals 14(1): 366-410. Christin, A. 2020. Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. Princeton University Press.

This time we welcome Anissa Pomiès to the Atelier and talk with her about methodological opportunities and challenges of studying materiality, the things that are pervasive in life but have been for long-time eluding researchers. In this conversation, Anissa reflects on her research on taste and coffee making, where she found it was central to take objects seriously—since they were taken as such by informants in that context. She also shares some tips on organizing the analysis of images, videos, and artifacts and using a broader range of senses to collect data.

Anissa Pomiès is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Lifestyle Research Center at emlyon business school. She completed her PhD at ESCP Europe and Sorbonne University and is trained as a sociologist and an ethnographer. Her research focuses on taste, market creation, and transformation, consumption practices. She typically uses ethnographic methods to study these topics in combination with actor-network theory, practice theory, and similar approaches.

Further information:Pomiès, A., & Arsel, Z. (2022). Market Work and the Formation of the Omnivorous Consumer Subject. Journal of Consumer Research.Pomiès, A., & Hennion, A. (2021). Researching taste: an interview of Antoine Hennion. Consumption Markets & Culture, 24(1), 118-123.

In this episode with Prof. Christine Beckman and Prof. Melissa Mazmanian, we talk about
the promises and challenges involved in conducting research in intimate spaces, such as in
people’s homes, instead of the workplace, where most organization and management research usually takes place. Christine and Melissa reflect on the research for their recent book “Dreams of the Overworked” where they explored nine families in California and what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of growing expectations about one’s productivity amplified by smart devices. Christine and Melissa share tips on the relational work in fieldwork, the value of working in teams to gain reflexive distance, and how observing work and organization topics from intimate spaces can bring new insights.

Christine Beckman is the Price Family Chair in Social Innovation and Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy. She is the current Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly and Past Division Chair of the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management. Her work has focused on a range of topics including social innovation and inequality, organizational learning, entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship; technology and work, and organizational control.

Melissa Mazmanian is a Chancellors Fellow, Professor and Chair of the Department of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences, and Professor of Organization and Management in the Paul Merage School of Management (joint) at University of California, Irvine. Her work revolves around the experience of communication
technologies as used in-practice within organizational and personal contexts, specifically in relation to identity projection and the nature of time in the digital age.

Further information:
Beckman, C. M., & Mazmanian, M. (2020). Dreams of the Overworked. In Dreams of the Overworked. Stanford University Press.
Mazmanian, M., & Beckman, C. M. (2018). “Making” your numbers: Engendering organizational control through a ritual of quantification. Organization Science, 29(3), 357-
379.
Mazmanian, M., & Lanette, S. (2017, February). “Okay, One More Episode” An Ethnography of Parenting in the Digital Age. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 2273-2286).
Mazmanian, M., Beckman, C. M., & Harmon, E. (2015). Ethnography across the work
boundary: Benefits and considerations for organizational studies. In Handbook of Qualitative Organizational Research (pp. 294-303). Routledge
Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2013). The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals. Organization science, 24(5), 1337-1357.

In this episode with Professor Stine Grodal, we explored the promises and challenges of archival research. We discussed Stine’s use of archival methods in contexts such as nanotechnologies or the tobacco or hearing aid industry. Stine reflects on the kinds of research questions best addressed with archival data and provides specific sampling and analytical strategies researchers can take to approach archival datasets. She also shares advice on where to look for archival data, how to start, when to combine archival research with other research methods, and the benefits of being creative in our methodological approach.

Stine Grodal is Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University D'Amore-McKim School of Business in the department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She received her PhD from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering. Stine examines the emergence of categories in nascent markets and the strategic actions market participants take to create and exploit these emerging social structures.

Stine’s Profile: https://damore-mckim.northeastern.edu/people/stine-grodal/

Further information:
Hsu, G. and Grodal, S. 2021 The double-edged sword of oppositional category positioning: A study of the U.S. e-cigarette category, 2007-2017, Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(1): 86–132
Grodal, S. 2018. Field expansion and contraction: How communities shape social and symbolic boundaries. Administrative Science Quarterly, 13(4): 783–818.
Kahl, S. and Grodal, S. 2016. Discursive strategies and radical technological change: Multilevel discourse analysis of the early computer (1947-1958), Strategic Management Journal, 37(1): 149-166.
Langley, A. 1999. Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data. The Academy of Management Review, 24(4): 691.