Constructing Ethnography

Abstract

In this chapter, I will discuss methodological concerns regarding the (inter-) organisational ethnography of innovation processes. There are two initial premises that have influenced my research aims, and my theoretical and empirical choices in this study. First, in the literature there has been a clear call for ‘process studies’¹ of innovation and organisation (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Van de Ven and Poole, 2005; Hernes, 2007), which involves making change — or process — the point of departure, and thereby placing stabilisation of innovation and organisation at the centre of attention. There is a need to improve our understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics of how organisation and innovations unfold in practice, or of how they come into being. Therefore, I searched for interesting places to study innovation processes in real time through (inter-) organisational ethnography. Second, when I was granted the opportunity to study innovation processes from the Centre for Cooperative Studies at the Norwegian School of Management BI, the main agricultural food cooperatives in Norway — who were sponsors of the centre — became the most relevant empirical fields of study² — that is, if I could find relevant and interesting cases there.