Analyzing Organizational Ethnographies (Resubmission)

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

This project develops, codes, and analyzes data from a comprehensive archive of organizational ethnographies. The archive helps advance the field of the sociology of work by combining the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The in-depth observations contained in ethnographic accounts of organization life provide rich qualitative information, and the systematic coding of those observations into scores appropriate for quantitative analysis provides the basis for more precise comparisons of otherwise separate case studies. The topics studied by the project with the organizational ethnographies of work include: 1) co-worker relations involving race and gender relations and discrimination, 2) the role of information technology, 3) causes of job stress, 4) worker solidarity, unionization, and resistance, 5) workplace marginality, and 6) sources of high performance. The project addresses these topics by adding data from 34 recent ethnographies to an existing archive of 108 ethnographies. Like data from the previously-archived ethnographies, which served as the basis for numerous and influential publications, additional data for the archive come from codings based on content analysis of descriptive passages in the new ethnographies. With the coded data, the analysis extensively evaluates the reliability and validity of the coding methods, and addresses relatively new workplace issues studied only by the most recent ethnographies. In making the archive public, the project allows others to quantitatively analyze a variety of topics relating to work and organizations.