Organisational Anthropology: Doing Ethnography in and Among Complex Organisations

Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations, focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of an organisation’s members.

The thirteen contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more ‘classical’ anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer, with barriers including the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations.

A number of organisational contexts - including corporations, EU policy arenas, think tanks and the public sector - are explored in case studies from the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.