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Persuasive Encounters: Ethnography in the Corporation

Brinda Dalal

Palo Alto Research Center

In corporate settings, ethnographic methods are challenged routinely by managers who confront ethnographers with a set of typical objections that question the validity and effectiveness of ethnographic methods, findings, and recommendations. This article offers a series of steps toward overcoming this impasse by laying out a set of arguments for legitimizing ethnographic work. We discuss ways of responding to a variety of problematic encounters, involving some relatively quick answers to challenges of that sort but also acknowledging that the different worldviews of managers and ethnographers can be reconciled only in a long-term educational effort. In the last analysis, embedding ethnography in corporations is an exercise in culture change that almost always relies on rephrasing questions and reformulating metaphors to resituate our practice.

Key Words: workscapes • ethnographic methods • work-practice analysis • corporate anthropology

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