Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- List of contributors
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Introduction: what is strategy as practice?
- Part I Ontological and Epistemological Questions
- Part II Theoretical Resources: Social Theory
- Part III Theoretical Resources: Organization and Management Theories
- Part IV Methodological Resources
- 24 Using ethnography in strategy-as-practice research
- 25 Researching strategists and their identity in practice: building ‘close-with’ relationships
- 26 Studying strategizing through biographical methods: narratives of practices and life trajectories of practitioners
- 27 Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution
- 28 Critical discourse analysis as methodology in strategy-as-practice research
- 29 Studying strategy as practice through historical methods
- 30 Quantitative methods in strategy-as-practice research
- Part V Substantive Topic Areas
- Index
- References
27 - Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution
from Part IV - Methodological Resources
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of boxes
- List of contributors
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Introduction: what is strategy as practice?
- Part I Ontological and Epistemological Questions
- Part II Theoretical Resources: Social Theory
- Part III Theoretical Resources: Organization and Management Theories
- Part IV Methodological Resources
- 24 Using ethnography in strategy-as-practice research
- 25 Researching strategists and their identity in practice: building ‘close-with’ relationships
- 26 Studying strategizing through biographical methods: narratives of practices and life trajectories of practitioners
- 27 Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution
- 28 Critical discourse analysis as methodology in strategy-as-practice research
- 29 Studying strategy as practice through historical methods
- 30 Quantitative methods in strategy-as-practice research
- Part V Substantive Topic Areas
- Index
- References
Summary
The studies of work [Garfinkel] inspires […] [examine] the detailed and specifiable process of producing orders based on shared methods, trust, competence and attention.
Rawls (2008: 702)Introduction
Harold Garfinkel originally coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ in the 1950s to capture his central interest in (for us, organizational) members’ ‘folk’ or everyday taken-for-granted methods (also called practices) or practical reasoning procedures for accomplishing a social order that constitutes sense. Garfinkel (1974: 16) later commented that ‘ethno’ referred, ‘somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the whatever’. While Garfinkel's ‘daunting prose’ (Silverman 2000: 138) may deter us from reading him first-hand, others, such as Heritage (1984), have offered accessible summaries of his work. Garfinkel's ethnomethodological stance was also subsequently taken up in a unique way by Harvey Sacks (see Jefferson 1992; see also Silverman 1998) and colleagues in the late 1960s, establishing conversation analysis. Under the auspices of the ‘missing what’, both Garfinkel and Sacks argued that social scientists were missing out the observable and reportable ‘work’ – in other words, the everyday ordinary activities of members whereby they make accountable and visible those entities we call, for example, ‘welfare agencies’, hospitals, factories, courtrooms, families and various other kinds of organizations/bureaucracies.
In quite diffuse ways, ethnomethodological thinking and ideas have seeped into the management and organization studies field through the work of Weick (1995: 11) and Giddens (1984; see Boden 1991). More recently the social theorist and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2005: 479) – when detailing the parameters of a practice turn in social theory – has also contended that his ‘site ontology’ is ‘clearly allied with a variety of micro-oriented approaches to social life, for example, ethnomethodology’. When turning to the more general substantive ‘topic’ in this chapter – strategy work – ethnomethodology has also been briefly referred to by Knights and Morgan (1991) in their Foucauldian-based appraisal/critique of corporate strategy and the inherent constitution of subjectivity and other ‘power effects’.
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- Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice , pp. 477 - 490Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
References
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