Methodology: From Paradigms to Paradox

Abstract

This chapter conceptualises as paradoxes ten common challenges to the ethnographer. These include the apparent impossibility of internalising an ‘exotic’ culture while simultaneously maintaining professional distance as well as the expectation for ethnographers to concurrently convey to their subjects both empathy and honesty. Although similar concerns have been extensively debated under the rubric of ethics, this is not the intention for this discussion. Rather, the emphasis here is on both justifying and bolstering the quality and reliability of ethnographic data. To this end, it is argued that paradox must be celebrated rather than concealed or maligned since it is, for the most part, representative of social interaction itself.

In my native field, I have noticed an emerging trend for highly politicised analysis, particularly in what has become known as ‘ critical management studies’. It is a personal preference, but I have lost my appetite for discussions of power and politics. Critical management studies seems to have become a one-stop shop for all things leftist. It also appears to have created a straw man of mainstream management studies. This is not to say that I consider myself a right wing conservative. I don’t. My reservation here is that leftist politics should not have a monopoly on all things critical.

An example may help. In the final year of my doctoral programme, my university won a research grant to explore the concept of ecological resilience from various disciplinary perspectives. I was recruited as part of the team. Unexpectedly, my data revealed that small-scale organic farming methods can be more destructive than large-scale non-organic methods. It seemed that economies of scale—in one sense at least—gave rise to ecologies of scale. My paper was rejected on the basis that it ‘did not contribute to the message that we want to send’. I was flabbergasted. I knew this sort of thing happened in newsrooms, but at universities?

At the time, I found solace in writers such as Jeffrey Pfeffer, Gerald Salancik, and Karl Weick and, more generally, in what might be considered the proto-critical management discourses of the 1970s. However, unlike their contemporary counterparts (for whom power and politics repeatedly trump other considerations), their intellectual methods instead prioritised ontology, subtlety, and complexity. And notably, though by no means explicit, I detected in their work an analytical sensitivity to paradox. Paradox does not sit easily in contemporary critical management discourses because it would, in effect, undermine the ideological proclivities of the movement. And I suspect an analytical focus on paradox would undermine ideological convictions found elsewhere in the academy.