Meeting Ethnography

This volume asks and addresses elusive ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions about meetings. What are meetings? What sort of knowledge, identities, and power relationships are produced, performed, communicated, and legitimized through meetings? How do—and how might—ethnographers study meetings as objects, and how might they best conduct research in meetings as particular elements of their field sites? Through contributions from an international group of ethnographers who have conducted “meeting ethnography” in diverse field sites, this volume offers both theoretical insight and methodological guidance into the study of this most ubiquitous ritual.

This book presents a new way of understanding organizational ethnography due to its strong emphasis on what the word organizational means in organizational ethnography. In the past five years, a new organizational studies research field has developed involving organizational ethnographies, which is when organizations are studied using ethnographical methods. This development has shed light on the methods and difficulties of organizational ethnography, and yet we argue that confusion still remains as to what organizational ethnographical approaches are. This edited volume offers students and scholars a profound understanding of organizational ethnography by presenting concrete examples, reflections and discussions of how to understand and adequately conceptualize the word organizational in organizational ethnography. All the chapters illustrate the work of analytically combining different organizational phenomena (e.g. strategy making, policymaking), analytical perspectives (e.g. sensemaking, narratives) and ethnographical methods (e.g. texts, observations, shadowing, interviews) and demonstrate different ways of doing organizational ethnography. At the end of each chapter, an experienced researcher in the field offers comments and discussion on the contributions of the chapter, providing reflections on the implications for research in the field to which they ascribe. In Doing Organizational Ethnography, organizational is defined as polyphonic ways of organizing based on the interactions of the many voices, discourses, practices and narratives in and around organizations and the book provides readers with in-depth reflections on what organizing and organizations become when doing organizational ethnography.

Advancing a rapidly growing field of social science inquiry—the anthropology of policy—this volume extends and solidifies this body of work, focusing on education policy. Its goal is to examine timely issues in education policy from a critical anthropological, ethnographic, and comparative perspective, and through this to theorize new ways of understanding how policy "does its work." At the center is a commitment to an engaged anthropology of education policy that uses anthropological knowledge to imagine and foster more equitable and just forms of schooling. The authors examine the ways in which education policy processes create, reflect, and contest regimes of knowledge and power, sorting and stratifying people, ideas, and resources in particular ways. In contrast to conventional analyses of policy as text-based, dictated, linear, and rational, an anthropological perspective positions policy at the interface of top-down, bottom-up, and meso-level processes, and as de facto and de jure. Demonstrating how education policy operates as a social, cultural, and deeply ideological process "on the ground," each chapter clearly delineates the implications of these understandings for educational access, opportunity, and equity. Providing a single "go to" source on the disciplinary history, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical applications of the anthropology of education policy across a range of education topics, policy debates, and settings, the book updates and expands on seminal works in the field, carving out an important niche in anthropological studies of public policy.

The financial crisis and its economic and political aftermath have changed the ways that many anthropologists approach economic activities, institutions and systems. This insightful volume presents important elements of this change. With topics ranging from the relationship of states and markets to the ways that anthropologists’ political preferences and assumptions harm their work, the book presents cogent statements by younger and established scholars of how existing research areas can be extended and the new avenues that ought to be pursued.

In Meeting Anthropology, the major phases through which our species has passed provide the structure for a truly coherent encounter with general anthropology -- biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic, Part I, "Growing Up", covers the evolution of upright, large-brained primates. Part II, "Spreading Out", details how culture allowed these handy, intelligent beings to expand from their tropical homes to fill the world. Part III, "Crowding In", focuses on the dramatic cultural reconfigurations wrought by the growth of large societies, as humans populated the earth ever more densely. Part IV, "Switching On", explores how contemporary culture emerged from, and continues to be transformed by, the emergence of a world system and the ongoing process of industrialization. Throughout the book, the imperative we share with all animals to find and use energy sources is a key integrative theme. Also highly integrative is the book's consistency in defining and analyzing cultural systems -- including our own -- in terms of (1) the means by which societies interface with their physical and social environments; (2) the customary ways in which members of society interact with one another; and (3) the ideas through which reality is interpreted symbolically.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the World Bank and a Ugandan ministry, this book critically examines how the new aid architecture recasts aid relations as a partnership. While intended to alter an asymmetrical relationship by fostering greater recipient participation and ownership, this book demonstrates how donors still seek to retain control through other indirect and informal means. The concept of developmentality shows how the World Bank’s ability to steer a client’s behavior is disguised by the underlying ideas of partnership, ownership, and participation, which come with other instruments through which the Bank manipulates the aid recipient into aligning with its own policies and practices.

This book is an exploration of how this remarkably efficient and familiar form of gathering operates, in different times and places, and how it comes to be recognised by those who experience or deploy it. Throws the spotlight on the epistemological and ontological basis of coming together through formal meetings of different kinds Demonstrates how meetings - socially and institutionally prescribed spaces for coming together - are important and ubiquitous organisational forms in various political, religious and economic settings Shows how meetings feature prominently in classic anthropological accounts, and in more contemporary ethnography, particularly in relation to studies of documents, organizations, policy, development, politics, and science and technology

A radical anthropologist studies the global justice movement.