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This chapter reflects on how ethics was managed in Basque educational ethnographic research. Specifically, it addresses researcher positionality when relating to research collaborators in an attempt to manage inclusive ethics in situ. Nowadays, most research is evaluated by an ethical review board that ensures adequate research practice. However, unexpected fieldwork events need to be managed in the field, and this chapter addresses the impact of these events on the relationship between researchers and collaborators. Influenced by a post-qualitative stance we posit that research collaborators should be included in the research process. It reflects on the data collected during an ongoing ethnographic study with higher education students. The method used includes several interview meetings between researchers and collaborators, multimodal representations of collaborators' learning, and participants' self-observations. In the interviews, participants' discourses, representations, and self-observations were collaboratively analysed. The ethnographic data from these meetings show how researchers use a collaborative approach to practise ethics. Through such meetings, the knowledge derived from the ethnographic data is co-constructed in a research relationship where participants engage in dialogue and negotiation about the discourse created around them. Based on this relationship, we propose the concept of inclusive ethics as a process requiring an honest, inclusive, and collaborative relationship with the research subject.

Highly educated and skilled contract workers come from a range of occupations, have different worker characteristics, and work under organizational practices that are precarious in varied ways. Our current understanding of the experience of contract work does not fully encompass this diversity. This chapter focuses on early-career contract workers who contract across national borders – an increasingly prevalent but little understood phenomenon – to broaden our understanding of contract work. I draw on an analysis of 38 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 international and early-career contract workers in the United Nations (UN) system in Geneva, Switzerland. Eight participants were included in follow-up interviews. I find that my participants demonstrate flexibility to their employer. They accept uncertain and short-term contracts, because they hope to secure longer-term positions within the prestigious UN system. Demonstrating flexibility impacts them, their relationships, and has financial implications as participants center the demands of their contracts. At times, participants place limits on how much uncertainty they will bear. This chapter thus illuminates the experiences of an understudied group of contract workers – early-career workers in transnational settings – who fall within the broad umbrella of contract workers. It highlights how even elite workers experience challenges as they engage in contract work.

Labor process research has documented a shift in the nature of control – from techniques that aim to limit worker discretion to consent-oriented controls that are believed to generate greater effort by increasing intrinsic rewards or bonding employees to managers and/or the firm. Over the past several decades, however, growing pressure to increase profits has prompted firms to adopt cost-cutting strategies that have eroded job security, relationships with management and commitment to organizational goals. This study investigates how a changing labor process and rising job insecurity shape workers’ orientations toward work, managers and the firm, and in turn influence workplace behavior. Analyses of content-coded data on 212 work groups confirms that discretion-limiting controls (supervision, technology and rules) are associated with more negative orientations and/or reductions in effort (with variations across distinct forms of control), while investment in workers’ human capital (but not involvement of workers in decision-making) has the reverse effect – ­generating more positive orientations toward work, managers and the firm, and (in turn) promoting discretionary work effort and limiting covert effort restriction. Implications of insecurity are more complex. Both layoffs and temporary employment reduce commitment to the organization, but layoffs generate conflict with management without reducing effort, whereas temporary employment limits effort without producing conflict. We illuminate underlying processes with evidence from the qualitative case studies.

This chapter outlines the history of ethical regulation and considers how the position of ethics has shifted. The intent of this book is to explore novice and accomplished ethnographers ‘everyday, real-life’ ethical challenges and considerations against a backdrop of theoretical and ethical guideline scrutiny.

Over the past several decades, there has been a growth in nonstandard professional work. One area where this can be seen is the academy, where tenure-track positions are being replaced by non-tenure-track (NTT) positions such as adjuncts and lecturers. Studies of nonstandard professional workers have found significant variation in job satisfaction, and this is also true for NTT faculty. Why is job satisfaction among NTT faculty so variable, and how can we understand it? Drawing on in-depth interviews with one hundred NTT faculty at two large public research universities, the author argues that NTT faculty vary in two important ways: the role of the income from their NTT job in their family and their pathway to the NTT position. The author develops a typology of NTT faculty based on these two dimensions and argues that these two dimensions intersect in important ways that affect the job satisfaction and job experiences of NTT faculty. The only group of NTT faculty that experiences high job satisfaction are those who prefer a NTT position over a tenure-track one, and who do not rely on the income from this job as the primary source of income for their family. This research has implications for understanding the job satisfaction of other nonstandard professional workers, who may vary in similar ways.

In this final chapter, I offer some conclusions relating to the issues discussed across the volume as a whole. Drawing together common as well as contrasting themes from the different empirical accounts that have been presented by the different authors, I argue for a reflexive and necessarily unpredictable mode of research ethics in the context of ethnographies of education.

Purpose – The technologies teams use in organizations have dramatically changed in the 11 years since the 2000 Volume, Research on Managing Groups and Teams: Technology. This is an update focusing on new research and perspectives.

Approach – I recall where we left off in 2000 and then present a plea for changing our research approach to one that focuses on actionable research more aligned on how teams design their work than the effects we see when they do. I review a variety of literatures relevant to teams and technology and then suggest what the next 10 years may bring.

Findings – The scholarship on teams, technology, and teams and technology has blossomed, though not evenly. We are only beginning to see actionable research related to teams and technology.

Practical implications – The pace of organizationally relevant technology change has outstripped our ability to provide high-quality research in a timely manner if we maintain our current practices of studying individual or even interactions of effects as they exist in organizations. Our research will be more helpful if we shift our focus to how team members design their work.

Originality – I make two direct and dramatic requests of my colleagues. First, that they become more precise in their presentation of or at least specify the technological settings used in their research. Second, that they shift to actionable research that explicitly considers team, technology, and the processes through which team members design their work.

A large and growing literature examines the explicit social responsibility practices of companies. Yet corporations’ greatest consequences for social welfare arguably occur through indirect processes that shape the social fabric that sustains generosity and mutual support within communities. Based on this logic, we theorize and test a model that suggests two pathways by which large corporations affect community philanthropy: (1) through direct engagement in community philanthropy and (2) by indirectly influencing the efficacy of community social capital, defined as the relationships among community members that facilitate social support and maintenance of social welfare. Our analysis of United Way contributions in 136 US cities over the 46 years from 1952 to 1997 supports our model. We find that the presence of corporations weakens the contributions of both elite and working-class social capital on community philanthropy. Our findings thus contribute to a novel view of corporate social responsibility based on how corporations influence the social capital of the communities in which they are embedded.

The erosion of autonomy in traditional professions has been explained by client capture – professionals increasingly work under close control of powerful corporate clients. However, research is missing on how knowledge workers in rapidly rising knowledge professions of the twenty-first century experience and respond to the risk of client capture. Evaluation is one such exploding field. This study examines the narratives of professional evaluators to understand how they navigate their mandate to deliver independent assessments of complex social programs under the threat of client capture. Data come from 29 interviews with evaluators of 65 interdisciplinary graduate training projects funded by the US National Science Foundation in the first two years of the program (2015–2016). Evidence of client capture is found in how evaluators discuss scope creep with limited resources, being asked to misrepresent their findings, and burying of evaluation reports. The authors also find evidence of evaluators navigating client capture by rationing their labor, using state-based rules to mediate demands, drawing on professional expertise, and generating savvy emotional labor. But this study argues the client capture concept obscures the dynamics of knowledge production, in which evaluators shape scientific programs in innovative ways. This study sheds new light on the context in which inequalities operate in this emerging profession, and how the structure of knowledge work may generate novel pathways of professional influence where work conditions might otherwise rule against it.