Please join us on Friday, August 7 from 8:00am to 10:00am at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC for a Professional Development Workshop: Being There/Being Them: The Intersection of Organizational and Occupational Ethnography. Our panelists include: Steve Barley (Stanford University); Lisa Cohen (McGill University); Emily Heaphy (Boston University); and Gerardo Okhuysen (UC Irvine).

The workshop seeks to explore new directions in ethnography by discussing how ethnographers address (or not) the intersection of occupational and organizational dynamics in their work. Most ethnographies focus either at the occupational or organizational level, without addressing the relationship between them. Thus, the particularities of how occupational and organizational dynamics shape one another are often absent in ethnographic accounts. We will use the workshop to explore this theme in current ethnographic projects by discussing various perspectives on addressing this interplay. Using an interactive format, the workshop will address two primary questions. First, conceptually and tactically, what are the challenges and opportunities associated with addressing both occupational and organizational dynamics in ethnography? Second, what might be the implications of those challenges and opportunities for the way ethnographers select settings, design research, as well as collect, analyze, and theorize their data? The panelists will each share their ideas and experiences related to the theme, and then we will break into groups for deeper discussions about ongoing projects between the panelists and workshop attendees.

This workshop is being organized by Michel Anteby (Harvard Business School); Curtis Chan (Harvard Business School); Julia DiBenigno (MIT) and Elizabeth Hansen (Harvard Business School). If you have questions about the workshop, please contact Elizabeth Hansen, ehansen@hbs.edu.