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Fieldwork Techniques for Our Times: Shadowing

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Qualitative Methodologies in Organization Studies

Abstract

This chapter contains a description and a discussion of a fieldwork technique suitable for what can be called a mobile ethnology – using fieldwork techniques that allow one to capture the ways of living and working of people who are quickly moving from one place to another and use the modern means of communication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    He stressed, however, that is not the same as lack of viewpoint: Everyone has a point of view, which is also a source of information (Bruyn 2002).

  2. 2.

    My study of Warsaw was published in Polish exactly 20 years after I conducted it (Czarniawska 2014a, b, c). It was apparently too sensitive at the time to publish; time and distance were necessary to accept certain of its insights. The people studied rarely appreciate direct feedback: Either they know it already, or they do not like it. Or both . (On this issue see Latour 2005).

  3. 3.

    It could also be tracking a movement of the selected object (Czarniawska 2007, 2014d), but I do not describe it in this chapter.

  4. 4.

    Bakhtin’s beliefs are consistent with the theory of Niklas Luhmann. (See Luhmann 1995; Seidl and Becker 2005).

  5. 5.

    A detailed description of the various uses of shadowing technique can be found in McDonald (2005).

  6. 6.

    Wolcott and Mintzberg did not know anything about each other, because in the 1970s nobody talked about management as a profession, and the idea that school principals and business were engaged in the same work would be considered eccentric.

  7. 7.

    Although, curiously enough, it took 30 years.

  8. 8.

    M was a man, as was the speaker. This is not a homosexual allusion, but the usual way of addressing people one likes in Italian.

  9. 9.

    I am still awaiting the gadget promised by the IT researchers a while ago (Czarniawska 2007): a camera plus a voice recorder plus a notepad.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Barbara Czarniawska

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  1. Barbara Czarniawska
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Teesside University Business School, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

    Malgorzata Ciesielska

  2. Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego, Warsaw, Poland

    Dariusz Jemielniak

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Czarniawska, B. (2018). Fieldwork Techniques for Our Times: Shadowing. In: Ciesielska, M., Jemielniak, D. (eds) Qualitative Methodologies in Organization Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65442-3_3

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