As a student of the workplace I have long been an avid reader of organizational ethnographies. The research project that inspired this book began when I read a number of especially interesting organizational ethnographies during a sabbatical year. I was impressed by the insights the ethnographies offered about work life. It was also apparent that the authors had taken great care to describe a standard and reasonably comprehensive set of workplace characteristics and concerns in addition to their focal issues. Tom Juravich's Chaos on the Shop Floor (1985) stands out as an exemplar in the genre. Based on these readings, I decided to pursue a project of systematically coding workplace ethnographies. The goal of this project was to take advantage of the in-depth observations offered by workplace ethnographies while simultaneously providing a framework for identifying repeated patterns and relationships.

Selecting the Cases

The first step was to select the cases to be analyzed. With the help of a research assistant, I examined thousands of case studies in a two-phase procedure to locate appropriate book-length ethnographies. First, likely titles were generated by computer-assisted searches of archives, perusal of the bibliographies of ethnographies already located, and searching the library shelves in the immediate area of previously identified ethnographies. We screened titles using on-line computer archives, book reviews, or direct examination of the books selected from the shelves. Repeated application of these procedures constitutes what we believe was an exhaustive search – eventually our pursuit of new leads produced only titles already considered.