The keys to the kingdom have been distributed: an organizational analysis of an academic computing center - Qualitative Research

Library Trends, Spring, 1998 by Gillian M. McCombs

CULTURAL ANALYSIS--THE ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

Culture, "the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior" (Spradley, 1979, p. 5), provides people with a way of seeing the world. It categorizes, encodes, and otherwise defines the world in which they live. Whenever people learn a culture, they are to some extent imprisoned without knowing it. Anthropologists talk of this as being "culture bound"--i.e., living inside a particular reality. References to culture have long abounded in library professional literature. However, it is only fairly recently that the literature shows references to culture as a lens through which to interpret and understand organizations, their customers, and the working relationships therein (e.g., Plum, 1994; Lee & Clack, 1966; Shaughnessy, 1988). The "cultural analysis" of organizations, therefore, is the use of organizational culture as a lens through which to examine what is going on in an organization.

WHAT IS ETHNOGRAPHY? EARLY EXAMPLES

The study of culture, known as ethnography, provides observations that say "Before you impose your theories on the people you study, find out how those people define their world" (Spradley, 1979, p. 5). Ethnography has its origins in field work expeditions to places like Samoa and the Kalahari desert and has now become a fundamental tool for understanding ourselves and the multicultural environment of which we are a part. Management theory in the 1980s underwent a sea of change in its realization that an understanding of an organization's culture(s) could be a major step on the road to changing or controlling the direction of that organization. There are both positive and negative sides to how an understanding of culture can be used within an organization. For instance, Edgar Schein (1992) considers the process of creating culture and management to be the essence of leadership, while Gideon Kunda (1992) describes a culture which embodies both the implicit and explicit rules and behavior of a particular group of people and the conscious efforts of management to "engineer" the culture to its own goals.

Contemporary attentiveness to technology can sometimes obscure the importance of culture to a functioning organization. Diane Vaughan (1996) seeks the answer to a national tragedy in her ethnographic study The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. She uses ethnographic thick description, a direct handing down from the father of interpretive ethnography, Clifford Geertz (1973), who expanded on Gilbert Ryle's concept in his seminal essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture." Vaughan's verdict is that the root cause of the accident was not the faulty O-rings but the NASA culture--"a culture which normalized deviance" (deviance in the sense of the unexpected or nonstandard occurrence)--thus leading to a series of decisions culminating in the accident.

The anthropologist's approach in studying contemporary phenomena can be seen in the work of one of today's most highly respected cultural analysts, Sherry Turkle (1996), professor of the sociology of science at MIT and author most recently of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, who has been described as the "leading anthropologist of cyberspace." In an interview in Wired (McCorduck, 1996), Turkle described herself as an ethnologist who "lived within worlds new to me, tried to understand what they were about, and tried to write about my understandings so that the worlds I studied come alive for others" (p. 162). Turkle talks about her books as diaries, uses the term "fieldwork," and describes her work as "sociology as narrative, story, text, language" rather than that of numbers, while being firmly undergirded by sociological method and psychoanalytical theory (McCorduck, 1996, P. 162). Both Vaughan and Turkle use a "soft" technique--intuitive, rich, and impressionistic--characterized by the use of heavy--brush strokes and considered the hallmark of ethnographers trained in the thick description tradition of Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 28).

The characteristics of ethnographic description are that it is interpretive of social action, of the flow of social discourse, and that interpreting it consists of fixing that discourse in perusable terms (Geertz, 1973, p. 20). Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete--i.e., the deeper you go, the less complete it is. The essential point of interpretive anthropology is not necessarily to answer our deeper questions but to make available answers that others--i.e., informants--have given. Culture, the cognitive map to which we refer on a daily basis, cannot be observed directly. It needs to be inferred and is predicated on being able to get inside people's heads. The emphasis is thus shifted from observation of behavior to the meaning of that behavior, from observation of phenomena such as customs, objects, and emotions, to their meaning. An ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse (Geertz, 1973, p. 19).