Who Allowed You To Observe? A Reflexive Overt Organizational Ethnography

Marie Buscatto

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.4.3.03

Authors

Marie Buscatto Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.4.3.03

Keywords:

Ethnography, Reflexivity, Organization, Work, Epistemology

Abstract

Observing people working within organizational contexts through time creates epistemological issues, more so when doing it overtly, with top management’s official agreement. Power relations as well as hierarchical structures strongly influence the way people view the observer and interact with her in organizations. Those interactions also partly depend on his personal background – sex, age, professional position and so on. Following a reflexive approach, my objective is here to better grasp how top management’s agreement to the ethnographer’s entry on the field may influence both the way workers from differing hierarchical levels behave with her (and thus affect her observing conditions) and how he may analyse his ethnographic notes to develop scientific sociological results.

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Author Biography

Marie Buscatto, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

Marie Buscatto is a Professor of sociology at l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and a researcher at Georges Friedmann Research Center (Paris 1 – CNRS). She has led several intensive ethnographic surveys in modern organizations – call centers, automobile industry, insurance companies and distribution sector – and in the French Jazz world. Her current main research topics are women’s difficulties to get access and full recognition in artistic worlds and main gender segregations at work. She also develops epistemological reflections related to the uses and advantages of ethnography to study organized work. Her publications include Femmes du jazz. Musicalités, féminités, marginalisations (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2007); “Chanteuse de jazz n’est point métier d’homme. L’accord imparfait entre voix et instrument en France.” (Revue française de sociologie, 44 (1):33-60, 2003); “De la vocation artistique au travail musical: tensions, compromis et ambivalences chez les musiciens de jazz” (Sociologie de l’art, Opus 5:35-56, 2004); « Des managers à la marge : la stigmatisation d’une hiérarchie intermédiaire » (Revue française de sociologie, 43 (1):73-98, 2002).

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