Making and breaking the manual – a case of tests and rapport in an interdisciplinary team
Journal of Organizational Ethnography
ISSN: 2046-6749
Article publication date: 10 March 2020
Issue publication date: 12 June 2020
Abstract
Purpose
This article engages the concept of tests–here understood as social tests of collaborative abilities in the interdisciplinary teamwork–to examine how they are central to an applied anthropologist's positioning and influence within an organization.
Design/methodology/approach
Presented as an auto-ethnographic methodological exploration, the article takes its point of departure in ethnographic material from the work by Helene Ilkjær as an Industrial Postdoc with an interdisciplinary team of engineers, scientists and designers in a Danish technology start-up company.
Findings
Within this ethnographic context, the article examines not only the case of “the manual” to unfold how the dynamics of careful development but also notorious circumvention of manuals came to serve as social tests–moments that fundamentally changed the anthropologist's position within the interdisciplinary team. Analytically, the manual serves as a prism through which it explores the slippery and negotiable nature of the anthropologist's professional position as an Industrial Postdoc–suspended between anthropology “for” and “of” the company, officially employed by the company while also engaged in academic research.
Originality/value
The article offers anthropologists a tool to visualize the different movements and placements within continua of professional positionality while working as applied researchers with(in) private sector organizations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Business and Organizational Anthropology research group at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen for their continuous support of our work and for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. We also wish to thank the editors, the other contributing authors to this special issue, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thorough reading and insightful suggestions for this article.The research for this article has been enabled by Ilkjær's Industrial PostDoc grant which is co-funded by the Danish start-up company Exruptive A/S and the Danish Innovation Fund. The grant supported Ilkjær's position as an Industrial Postdoc (2016-2019) and sponsored Madsen's position as the project's research assistant (October 2018 – January 2019). The financial sponsors of the research have not been involved in any decisions about the article's theoretical and empirical focus, nor have they influenced the article's analysis and findings. The CEO of Exruptive received the manuscript for reading and commenting prior to submission but he has not enforced any revisions on this basis. Exruptive has not wished to be anonymized in the article.
Citation
Ilkjær, H. and Madsen, M.M. (2020), "Making and breaking the manual – a case of tests and rapport in an interdisciplinary team", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 173-188. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-01-2019-0002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited