Purpose This article proposes a methodological framework for submerged ethnographic research, addressing the central question: How can a submerged methodology contribute to hydrofeminist justice? It responds to intensifying anthropogenic pressures on oceanic ecosystems by foregrounding the need for relational, multisensory methods that honor watery agency. Moreover, this article attempts to reorganize knowledge insofar as it serves a commons of care rather than a commons of extractivism. Design/methodology/approach Grounded in autoethnographic diving, underwater fieldwork, and interviews with scholars, writers and activists, the article draws on hydrofeminist theory to develop a methodology based on listening, embodiment and immersion. These practices enable research with, in, and on water, fostering attunement to the ocean as a dynamic, more-than-human presence. Findings Submerged methodologies cultivate attentiveness to sound, movement and vulnerability in underwater environments. They offer alternative epistemologies that challenge and reorganize extractive, colonial ways of knowing. At the same time, the article reflects on the ethical, practical and conceptual limitations of conducting research in submerged and watery spaces. Originality/value This article articulates and presents a submerged methodology for, among others, hydrofeminist justice research. It contributes to environmental humanities, social sciences and feminist scholarship by centering the ocean as an agential participant in ethnographic inquiry.
Purpose The study explores the socio-economic and environmental implications of the development of the Vizhinjam Seaport International Limited in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, particularly focussing on the marginalised Mukkuva (fishermen) community, who are largely dependent on the coastal ecosystem for their livelihood. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that the conflict is fundamentally a struggle over ownership, care and rights to the sea. While the blue economy frames coastal waters as spaces of investment and infrastructural development, the Mukkuva community understands the sea as a commons sustained through intergenerational labour, care and belonging. The study explores how port-led development produces dispossession and ecological uncertainty, while the Church, as a civil society institution, enabled collective resistance and recognition. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Vizhinjam, Kerala. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, participant observation and field visits among fishers, clergy, activists and community leaders. Particular attention was paid to local understandings of the sea, experiences of displacement, ecological change and resistance to the port project. Ethnographic findings were complemented by analysis of policy documents, Environmental Impact Assessment reports, media reports and legal records. The study offers a qualitative account of how coastal communities negotiate competing claims over marine resources and development. Findings Drawing on ethnographic research among the Mukkuva community, this study shows how port-led development transforms the sea from a lived commons into strategic infrastructure serving national and corporate interests, further raising the question of whether investments in finance or nurture grant rights to control the sea. At its heart lies a contest over ownership, legitimacy and the authority to define the future of coastal environments. The restrictions on fishing, the erosion of customary access and the increasing regulation of marine spaces reveal how dispossession operates not only through the loss of land but also through the gradual loss of collective ownership within the community. It was in this context that the Church emerged as a significant civil society institution, translating ecological loss, collective ownership and exclusion into politically visible claims. Yet its role was neither straightforward nor uniformly oppositional. Rather, the Church occupied a complex position between resistance, negotiation and its existence, illustrating how civil society organisations mediate struggles over large-scale development projects embedded within the very political structures they seek to influence. Originality/value The study contributes to debates on the blue economy by shifting attention from economic growth to questions of ownership, care and marine commons. Bringing together scholarship on accumulation by dispossession, commons governance, civil society and recognition, it demonstrates how conflicts over coastal development are simultaneously struggles over who has the authority to define, govern and care for the sea. Empirically, the study provides original ethnographic insights into the Vizhinjam conflict and highlights the role of the Church as a civil society institution that validates grassroots claims. The findings advance discussions on fisher rights, environmental justice and democratic coastal governance.
Purpose The purpose is to problematize authenticity in organizational settings and show how it operates as a modern expression of normative control rather than resistance to it.Design/methodology/approach This study adopts an ethnographic approach, drawing on eight months of participant observation and semi-structured interviews within a public service organization (Service NSW). Data were analysed through the lens of normative control theory to examine how authenticity is constructed, performed and institutionalized as a mechanism of organizational control.Findings The findings reveal that authenticity operates as a central mechanism of normative control within the organization. Three interconnected control mechanisms were identified. First, authenticity functions as a normative principle requiring members to display thoughtfulness, empathy and social deference in their self-presentations. Second, visibility operates as career currency, with members strategically making their work, alignment and achievements observable across organizational forums to enhance advancement opportunities. Third, recognition systems reward performances that appear authentic, reinforcing organizational ideology and deepening members' emotional investment. Together, these mechanisms demonstrate how contemporary organizations appropriate the discourse of authenticity - traditionally framed as resistance to conformity - and transform it into a sophisticated mode of control requiring continuous emotional regulation, identity work and strategic self-management. While members experience themselves as authentic, their performances simultaneously align with and reproduce organizational interests.Research limitations/implications This study is based on an in-depth ethnography within a single public service organization, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other organizational contexts or sectors. While the prolonged immersion enhances contextual richness and depth, the focus on one site means the dynamics observed may reflect features specific to public sector governance, career structures and institutional norms. Additionally, as with all ethnographic research, findings are interpretive and shaped by the researcher's positionality and access within the field. Future research could examine similar dynamics across multiple organizations and industries to assess the transferability of the findings and further develop understanding of authenticity as a contemporary mechanism of normative control.Originality/value This study contributes to normative control theory by demonstrating how authenticity - commonly positioned as resistance to organizational conformity - has been appropriated as a contemporary mechanism of control. By empirically illustrating how demands for authentic self-presentation intertwine with visibility management and recognition systems, the research advances understanding of how identity regulation operates in modern organizational contexts. The study also contributes methodologically to organizational ethnography through rich accounts of front-stage and back-stage performances, ideological communication rituals and the micro-processes through which members internalize organizational interests while experiencing themselves as authentic. Theoretically, it problematizes the celebratory discourse of authenticity in organizational life, reframing it not as liberation from control but as its contemporary expression.
Purpose Despite its growing relevance, the global evolution of business ethnography across sectors, regions, and disciplines remains understudied. This study provides an empirically grounded overview of research patterns and methodological practices within a defined corpus of peer-reviewed publications on ethnographic studies conducted inside business organizations. Design/methodology/approach This study analyses a corpus of 180 peer-reviewed academic papers. Bibliometric techniques, implemented with the bibliometrix package in R, were used to examine patterns of scientific production, disciplinary distribution, and thematic networks. In parallel, manual coding was applied to assess the characteristics of ethnographic fieldwork, including data collection tools and fieldwork duration. Together, these approaches map where and how business ethnography is practiced, identify thematic clusters, and reveal methodological trends. Findings Within this corpus, business ethnography appears multidisciplinary and adaptable, with the strongest concentration in ICT, industry/manufacturing, and professional services, and weaker presence in finance, construction, and energy/logistics. Fieldwork locations are heavily skewed toward Western Europe and North America. Thematic patterns combine established organizational concerns (e.g. culture, identity, routines) with expanding digital and socio-technical topics (e.g. algorithms, data work, crowdsourcing). Methodologically, studies rely primarily on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, and most report comparatively short fieldwork periods, consistent with a broader shift toward rapid and time-bounded ethnography in organizational settings. Originality/value By integrating bibliometric mapping with systematic coding of fieldwork practices, the study provides a focused evidence base on how business ethnography in organizations is being published and conducted, highlighting recurring emphases, blind spots, and methodological trade-offs relevant to both scholars and applied researchers.
Purpose This paper clarifies the role of abstraction in governance-level organisational ethnography. The problem of abstraction is not unique to organisational ethnography, but it becomes especially visible in board and committee settings, where strategy, accountability, regulation, fiduciary duty, interpersonal history and documents such as papers, dashboards, minutes and risk reports are densely entangled. The paper asks how ethnographers can focus on one aspect of such complexity without implying that the selected focus exhausts the episode. Design/methodology/approach The paper develops a conceptual argument supported by a governance vignettes. They draw on Aristotle's idea of considering something qua something else, or under a specified respect, to explain how ethnographers focus analysis. The paper describes this as aspectual specification: the practice of stating which aspect of a complex situation is being examined. The vignette shows how the same governance episode may be read as strategic deliberation, fiduciary accountability, documentary inscription or analytic coding. Findings The paper argues that ethnographic abstraction need not be understood as fragmenting a complex episode into separate pieces. Instead, it can be understood as a responsible act of analytic limitation. A board meeting may be analysed qua strategic deliberation without claiming that it is only strategic. Aspectual specification enables the ethnographer to explain what is foregrounded, why that focus matters and what remains present but outside the main analytic frame. Originality/value The paper contributes a practical vocabulary for governance-level organisational ethnography by reframing abstraction as aspectual specification. It clarifies how ethnographers can make analytic focus explicit without denying relational complexity. The article also extends reflexivity beyond researcher positionality by treating it as a declaration of analytic aspect. This helps writers, readers and reviewers assess ethnographic claims according to the aspect foregrounded, rather than expecting any single account to represent the totality of a governance episode.
Purpose Evaluation philosophies, methods and practices in Ghana and Africa at large have been predominantly Euro-American-centered, with little to no regard for Afrocentric methodologies that are rooted in indigenous norms, values and other cultural realities. Thus, the recent quest for new evaluation knowledge is anchored in cultural values, norms, ideals and relational patterns. The notion is that a holistic understanding of indigenous values and assumptions could aid in developing alternative evaluation theories, methods and procedures for assessing development initiatives. Design/methodology/approach Using key informant interviews (KII) and in-depth interviews, supplemented by observations, 32 participants from three traditional areas were interviewed in the Eastern Region, Ghana. Employing a thematic analysis approach, the data were analyzed. Findings This paper identified several indigenous evaluation instincts, such as social accountability, relational stakeholders, neighborhood webs, community participation, empowerment, relational information gathering and feedback and consensus building. These key indigenous notions are embedded in the six-sphere traditional governance structures, which can be espoused to indigenize and decolonize evaluation frameworks in Ghana. These evaluative impulses, rooted in the six-sphere framework, when adopted, could greatly complement contemporary evaluation theories, methods and practices. Research limitations/implications This paper utilized a qualitative data analysis approach and therefore cannot make generalizations except to attribute the findings to the thirty-two (32) respondents and three (3) traditional areas used as a case study. Originality/value This paper concludes by proposing an integrative indigenous relational-decolonial evaluation framework embedded in Ubuntu, Afrocentricity and communitarian knowledge systems, which emphasizes that decolonization and indigenization need political, epistemic and theoretical restructuring.
Purpose This manuscript presents the translated oral life history of Yang Jianrong, a Hui zu entrepreneur from Ningxia, whose rise from very humble beginnings to international business success offers empirical insight into an Indigenous Business Ownership Style (BOS) in China. Based on in-person interviews transcribed in Mandarin and translated into English, the case study traces Yang's progression from early humble beginnings through to industrial growth and civic leadership. Design/methodology/approach This case affirms the ethnographic methodological value of oral life history in BOS research and contributes to scholarship on Hui commercial practice and decentralised economic development. It avoids cultural or religious framing, offering a literal. Findings His enterprise model rejects nepotism and family privilege, instead favouring merit-based hiring, servant leadership, and stakeholder reciprocity. Research limitations/implications The only research undertaken thus far is based on the Hui religion and culture; no field research has been undertaken on the Hui zu Business Ownership style in Privately Owned Enterprises in Ningxia, China. Practical implications Providing actual one-on-one data from fieldwork relating to their contribution to the GDP of Ningxia and China. Social implications The Hui zu are totally committed to working with and networking their business with community groups, and sharing with these communities. Originality/value Fieldwork-based account of how one Hui zu entrepreneur navigated China's legal economy to achieve scale and legitimacy through diligence and self-discipline.
Purpose This paper argues a for different methodological approach in organisational ethnography: Ethnodrama - a fusion of ethnography and performance. It shows how ethnodrama is uniquely equipped to expose injustices such as institutional racism via the case of the Dutch Childcare Benefit Scandal (Het Toeslagenschandaal). While traditional organisational research (and the public at large) often reduces such scandals to managerial failures, ethnodrama can better perform the affective, historical and systemic dimensions of racial injustice, making them visible and tangible to audiences. The paper argues how artistic methodologies can complement scholarly analysis in Management and Organisation Studies (MOS) to challenge colonial legacies and racialised governance.Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a qualitative, practice-based approach, drawing on the author's experience as a playwright and ethnodramatist. It integrates archival and documentary analysis, interviews and testimonies, theoretical frameworks and artistic practice.Findings Het Toeslagenschandaal shows how racialised groups bear the burden of proof and systemic discrimination, obscured by bureaucratic neutrality and under researched concepts like race in MOS. Ethnodrama disrupts this by performing the emotional and relational impacts of institutional racism, centring marginalised voices without reducing them to trauma narratives and creating spaces for public reflection on racial justice, beyond academic or policy silos. This makes it an important methodological addition in MOS.Originality/value This paper advances decolonial methodology in MOS by positioning ethnodrama as a tool for embodied knowledge production, critiquing the epistemological limitations of traditional organisational research in addressing racism and offering a practical, artistic framework to engage diverse audiences in systemic critique.
Purpose The aim of the paper is to discuss the contributions and limitations of using shadowing for studying hybrid work practices, more specifically, "work from anywhere." Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of the first author, we revisit and extend three key characteristics of shadowing: mobility, the researcher-participant relationship and fieldwork duration.Design/methodology/approach The fieldwork was designed in two stages. First, the first author conducted a series of interviews with 56 corporate nomads to identify those who would be relevant to follow and create a relationship of trust with these people, and to elaborate the main themes for the analysis. Then, she followed 8 corporate nomads among the interviewees in various locations, during their remote working times. For this paper, we have focused on this second stage of the research design.Findings Mobilty: Dislocated shadowing understands mobility as the flexibility to make oneself available to shadowees and to "what the situation calls for," as well as the agility to understand their work practice both offline and online. Research-participant relation: Dislocated shadowing understands the intimate relation between shadowers and shadowees as complicit reflexivity. This allows the shadower to capture not only actions and practices, but also the subject's sensitive and embodied experiences. Continuity and duration: In dislocated shadowing, the shadower ensures continuity in discontinuity by following the trajectories of the shadowees and the narratives they themselves make of their "work from anywhere" on social media platforms.Originality/value The paper offers a renewed conception and application of shadowing, what we coin "dislocated shadowing," which emphasizes flexibility, diversification of methodological techniques and ongoing negotiation between researcher and participants and proposes to think of shadowing in hybrid fieldwork as a method-in-(e)motion.
Purpose This study investigates how informal recruitment practices in Nordic banking institutions reproduce gendered exclusion beneath formal equality policies. Although Iceland and Denmark are globally recognized for progressive gender frameworks, specialist-level hiring continues to reflect implicit organizational logics that often disadvantage women.Design/methodology/approach Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with HR professionals, external recruiters, mid-level managers and specialists from major banks in Iceland and Denmark, the study uses an interpretivist, qualitative interview design with grounded theory-inspired coding. It explores how hiring criteria like "fit," "stability" and "risk" operate as coded mechanisms of exclusion, especially for women with caregiving roles or non-linear career paths.Findings The analysis reveals how informal organizational "playbooks" sustain bias and homosocial reproduction despite formal commitments to gender equality. Women often respond through strategic navigation. This includes managing self-presentation, emphasizing performance and building informal support networks. The analysis identifies four organizational playbooks that shape how candidate signals are interpreted, and a process model illustrating how these playbooks reproduce exclusion and how candidates strategically respond.Originality/value The paper shifts focus from leadership diversity to the specialist tier, where long-term career paths are shaped. It contributes to organizational and gender theory by showing how inequality is embedded in routine hiring decisions. The findings offer practical and theoretical insights into recruitment as both a mechanism of exclusion and a potential site for change.
Purpose This paper examines how universities reproduce ethnic-racial inequality through the temporal organization of academic life. Drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time, it introduces the concept of academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes. The study asks how Dutch universities enact racialized temporal regimes of inclusion and belonging. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on a qualitative organizational study conducted across two Dutch universities. Fifteen in-depth interviews with academics of colour were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis informed by critical race theory and decolonial thought. Counter-storytelling was employed to foreground lived experiences and examine how institutional temporalities reproduce racialized hierarchies within academic careers. Findings The analysis identifies three mechanisms of academic time theft. First, prolonged uncertainty operates through racialized precariousness that keeps academics of colour in a condition of academic probation through insecure contracts and housing precarity. Second, ongoing disruption emerges through everyday racism that fragments attention, diverts emotional and intellectual labour, and interrupts academic continuity. Third, recursive evaluation operates through the continual resetting of inclusion and promotion criteria, producing perpetual states of “not yet” recognition and deferred academic futures. Together, these mechanisms sustain racialized temporal regimes in which academics of colour are positioned as perpetually “almost there” while white institutional time remains uninterrupted. Research limitations/implications The study focuses on two Dutch universities and primarily reflects the experiences of women of colour. Future research could further examine how academics of colour collectively resist institutional temporal regimes and generate alternative temporalities of care, relationality and refusal within academia. Practical implications The findings demonstrate that academic inequality is not only spatially or materially organized but also temporally structured. Universities should therefore treat temporality as an equity issue by addressing how evaluation systems, precarious employment and institutional practices unevenly distribute uninterrupted academic time and delay recognition for academics of colour. Originality/value By theorizing academic time theft, this paper contributes to critical organization studies and higher education scholarship by showing how universities sustain racial inequality through the temporal regulation of academic progression, belonging and recognition.
PurposeThis article explores how relational job crafting unfolded amid the organisational flux of the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines software test engineers (STEs) in a major Irish bank undergoing digital transformation as their work shifted to remote settings. Using a practice theory lens, it examines how relational job crafting enabled individuals and teams to sustain meaning, collaboration, and community through changing work practices, highlighting how STEs co-created belonging and purpose in hybrid environments.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts an insider ethnographic approach. Data were collected through participant observation, autoethnography, reflexive journalling, field notes and 25 semi-structured interviews with internal and external technology professionals.FindingsRelational job crafting enabled STEs to reshape roles and relationships while working remotely. Through reflexive practices, communication and informal support, technical work was increasingly enacted through ongoing interactions and collaboration, fostering a sense of belonging and collective identity. The findings show how workers generate meaning and contribute strategically amid organisational change and physical distance.Research limitations/implicationsWhile insider research allow unprecedented access, challenges persist with being faithful and respectful to my colleagues while presenting robust findings. We have obtained ethical approval from both the university and the organisation under study.Practical implicationsNonetheless, this study carries limitations. As an insider autoethnographic account, the findings are shaped by the lead author's relationships, role and organisational history within the Bank. While this embeddedness afforded depth unavailable to an external researcher, it also introduced risks of over-identification and familiarity. Reflexive techniques, co-author dialogue and the combination of interviews with observational data mitigated, but cannot eliminate, these risks. The focus on a single technology team within one financial institution in a specific national context constrains broad generalisation. However, the contextual specificity that limits generalisability is also a strength of the ethnographic approach, generating situated theoretical insight that invites examination across other organisational settings.Originality/valueThis study provides an insider view of relational job crafting, showing how it supports meaning and connection in remote, technology-mediated contexts. The pandemic created a unique setting to observe the organisational conditions that allow job crafting to emerge. Combining practice theory and autoethnography, the article highlights the overlooked contributions of technical teams in banking and advances understanding of how digital change can foster belonging, identity and strategic relevance at the organisational periphery.
PurposeThrough a knowing-in-practice lens and drawing on the literature on embodied learning, the article aims to unpack how novice journalists learn in a digitalized newsroom that is increasingly dominated by silence and emptiness.Design/methodology/approachThe article is based on an organizational ethnography carried out in a newsroom in Qu & eacute;bec, Canada, comprising 200 h of participant observation and 28 interviews.FindingsThe findings indicate that, contrary to the researcher's own sensory experience in the digitalized newsroom, novices embraced silence and emptiness to create new opportunities for embodied learning. Concretely, they reclaimed the physical space by enacting three moves: seeking validation, pricking up their ears and welding peer ties.Originality/valueThe article offers three theoretical implications for the literature on embodied learning and organizational ethnography. It highlights the role of silence and emptiness as performative, sensory and affective resources for learning, renews the importance of physical spaces for novice journalists and discusses the implications of autonomous embodied learning in digitalized newsrooms.
Purpose This article investigates the discrepancy between decolonial critiques of academic publishing and the emergence of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies adopted by major publishing organizations. It examines whether and how publishers' current DEI initiatives address colonial continuities and epistemic injustice in scholarly communication.Design/methodology/approach A document analysis was conducted on publicly available policy texts from three academic publishers (commercial, non-commercial and society). Drawing on the Critical Diversity Literacy framework's five hooks (Steyn et al., 2018), the study compares publishers' conceptualizations of diversity with a decolonial diversity conception derived from a review of scholarly debates on coloniality of knowledge production and evaluation.Findings Publishers' policies generally emphasize DEI in a solution-oriented manner, recognizing existing inequalities that ought to be overcome. However, their conceptions remain ahistorical and apolitical as they refrain from discussing colonial continuities and power hierarchies. While policy goals often align superficially with decolonial aims, such as epistemic diversity and inclusion of marginalized voices, the underlying ideological frames remain rooted in Western universality and liberal market logic. Differences across organization types are minimal, mainly differing in the scope and amount of DEI resources deployed.Originality/value By juxtaposing decolonial theory with DEI policy documents, this study highlights conceptual gaps and unexamined power relations in current academic publishing reforms. It demonstrates the utility of organizational ethnography for uncovering spaces of potential decolonial practice in academic knowledge production. The findings offer actionable insights for aligning publisher policies with epistemic justice and for future ethnographic inquiry into decolonizing scholarly communication.
