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    Producing persuasive findings: demystifying ethnographic textwork in strategy and organization research

    Jarzabkowski, P. and Bednarek, Rebecca and Le, J. (2014) Producing persuasive findings: demystifying ethnographic textwork in strategy and organization research. Strategic Organization 12 (4), pp. 274-287. ISSN 1476-1270.

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    Abstract

    Despite the importance and proliferation of ethnography in strategy and organization research, the central issue of how to present ethnographic findings has rarely been discussed. Yet, the narratives we craft to share our experience of the field are at the heart of ethnographic papers and provide the primary basis for our theorizing. In this article, we explain the “textwork” involved in writing persuasive findings. We provide an illustrative example of ethnographic data as it is recorded within fieldnotes and explain the necessary conceptual and writing work that must be done to render such data persuasive, drawing on published exemplars of ethnographic articles. This allows us to show how such texts, through various forms of writing and data representation, are transformed from raw fieldnotes to comprehensible findings. We conclude by asserting the value of these specifically ethnographic ways of presenting evidence, which are at odds with the canonical methods of data presentation in management studies.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Ethnographic tales, ethnography narratives, observational data, qualitative research methods, vignettes, writing
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School
    Depositing User: Rebecca Bednarek
    Date Deposited: 22 Dec 2015 09:35
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:20
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/13671

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