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This paper aims to empirically test, in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, the external perceptions which hold that a firm that has acted in a socially irresponsible manner can have negative consequences, as an organisation’s success and very survival depends, in part, on satisfying normative expectations from its environment.

A purposive sample of 28 respondents was selected from three communities within the region. In addition, 20 in-depth interviews took place with oil workers, community leaders and elders within the region. These interviews lasted for approximately an hour and were transcribed verbatim.

Drawing on qualitative research methodology, it is proposed that socially responsible investment could promote and facilitate business and social cohesion between corporations and broader communities that impinge on the company, rather than simply viewing business practice exclusively from an economic or political point of view.

This study has examined a small range of companies from an interpretivist ethnographic position in the Niger Delta region using data collected from interviews and observations. Future research could take a more positivistic position and explore a wider range of companies using a variety of data collection methods.

Understanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) tends to be contextually bound, and should be divorced from the mechanistic Western perspective prevailing in most extant literature. Despite this context-specific notion to CSR relevance, there is still an overwhelming dominance of the understanding of CSR from the Western perspective, so companies should more closely consider local issues when drawing up CSR policy guidelines in a non-Western environment.

Forty-eight individuals in the Niger Delta region have been interviewed, and their opinions on CSR issues have been reported.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key drivers for motivation within a small team of academics within a relatively small UK university.

The research follows a combined interpretivist and ethnographic stance and using a mixed methods approach.

The research identifies that fundamentally academics are driven by the desire for expertise and a search for meaning, while material reward and a need for power play a low significance in their forces. Also increase in managerialism has led to reductions in motivation.

The paper provides a limited focus due to the nature of being a small scale study.

The paper considers the drivers which motivate academics. Managers and HR departments may consider approaches to managing and leading individuals to achieve improved organisational performance.

The paper focuses on motivational drivers within the academy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumer researchers working in the interpretivist tradition go about composing well founded theorized storylines, in order to convince audiences of the soundness of the theory‐building which emanates from their studies.

An analytical framework was derived from Golden‐Biddle and Locke's study of organizational ethnographers to see how they made their accounts convincing to their audiences. Golden‐Biddle and Locke's analysis revealed 3Ds – authenticity, plausibility and criticality (each with a variety of sub‐dimensions) – that played key rhetorical roles in convincing readers.

Using this analytical framework (summarized in three tables), examples from a variety of authors' work in Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR) were drawn upon to illustrate how interpretivist consumer behaviour authors tackled these three key dimensions: authenticity, plausibility and criticality.

Only a limited set of JCR studies out of an extensive field of qualitative research in consumer behaviour were analyzed.

Little attention has been paid hitherto to the actual practices of writing qualitative research within the marketing field. The more basic writing techniques involved in qualitative research tend to be regarded as implicit, skills that are acquired by osmosis rather than being formally taught or made explicit. This can make it particularly difficult for less‐experienced interpretivist researchers to learn the tools of their qualitative trade, which are often taken for granted by longer standing researchers. The paper seeks to make some of these writing practices more transparent and some of the rhetorical devices more explicit for authors who may wish to improve their own writing styles or strengthen their ability to use rhetoric.

This paper provides a methodological map for guiding the choice and application of research paradigms and design frames that can be of value to a wide range of researchers in the fields of education, social sciences and interdisciplinary studies who are interested in teaching and learning in context. Following an interpretivist/constructivist paradigm, I used a mixed methods research approach to study the spatial experiences of Emirati female students in a gender--‐ segregated educational context. The main component was qualitative, using ethnography, while the quantitative part included a survey. In such a research approach, my reflexivity and unique positionality as both insider and outsider played a significant role. The paper is divided into three sections: the beginning, which justifies the choice and philosophies of the methodological route; the journey, which illustrates the data collection techniques; and the destination, containing reflexive lessons from the field.

Turning laborious ethnographic research into stylized argumentative prose for academic consumption is a painstaking craft. The purpose of this paper is to revisit this perennial issue, and extend a claim the authors have made elsewhere about the inevitably impressionistic, rather than the oft-claimed “systematic”, nature of this task.

The authors draw and reflect on their own experiences of conducting and navigating across political science, ethnography and interpretation in order to justify and uphold the benefits of impressionism.

The authors argue that the impressionistic account of writing up fieldwork has important implications for these diverse disciplinary terrains.

The authors develop an argument as to how and why an appreciation of this craft’s impressionistic nature can affect how the authors go about creating, evaluating and ultimately thinking about ethnographic research in foreign disciplines like political science.

Critical ethnography first emerged as a distinctive research approach in education studies in the late 1960s (Anderson, 1989, p. 250). It has now achieved a degree of respectability and has taken its place as part of the qualitative tradition in universities (Jordan & Yeomans, 1995, p. 399). Critical ethnography reflects what Geertz (1983) identified as a ‘blurring of genres’. As the name suggests, it is marked by a confluence of interpretivist field studies and critical streams of thought (Goodman, 1998, p. 51). These converging streams, arising from a variety of sources and pushed along by the currents of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist social theory, swirl together into a dynamically enriched mixture of the methods and theories of anthropology, sociology and education. Not surprisingly the streams formed in different parts of the globe, while composed of all of the elements just named, are configured slightly differently. As Priyadharshini (2003, p. 421) recently noted in comparing British and American strands of educational ethnography, the Western side of the Atlantic is marked by a much stronger tradition of educational anthropology than in the UK. And these differences make a difference.

The purpose of this paper is to propose both short-term and long-term recommendations, with the potential to help cultural information systems (IS) research overcome the definitional and epistemological problems that cause it to remain largely immature.

The paper uses an extensive literature review to identify the major definitional and epistemological problems inherent in cultural IS research and to propose ways to overcome these problems.

The paper finds that cultural research in the area of IT and people needs to employ more consistent definitions of the culture construct and that such research could benefit from a diversification of the epistemological approaches employed.

The present paper finds that a more contemporary definition of culture is needed alongside a greater emphasis of the interpretivist approach to move cultural IS research toward maturity. The paper also suggests that anthropology constitutes a promising reference discipline for cultural IS research. In line with recent research in IS and anthropology, future IS research may consider defining culture consistently as shared values among the members of a collective rather than as a nation state since the former definition accounts for the fact that nation states are no longer culturally homogeneous.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the utilisation and application of reflexive ethnography as an interpretative methodology for researching knowledge practices within festival organisations.

The ethnographic approach incorporates two methods of data collection in the research design; participant observation and in‐depth interviews.

The research identified that knowledge management practices and processes are often invisible to festival staff when they are embedded within a cohesive organisational culture. Ethnography enables the researcher to make explicit the tacit and normalised ways of working that contribute to the success (and failure) of festival organisations to manage knowledge. The immersion of the researcher in the ethnographic process provided a rich understanding of the relational dimension of knowledge management that would be difficult to elicit from in‐depth interviews alone.

New fields of study require a range of research methodologies to inform theoretical and practice‐based knowledge related to event participation and management. This article contributes to the growing event management literature through a unique focus on ethnography as a research method that offers a deeper understanding of knowledge practices within festival organisations.

Limited research has applied an ethnographic approach to festival and event management. This article builds upon early adopters and provides critical insight into the benefits and constraints of ethnographic research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the new journal, its history, scope and ambitions.

The paper reviews the current growth in interest in ethnographic research in organizational and management studies, reflected not least in the success of the Liverpool‐Keele Ethnography Symposium.

Surveying the state of the field, this paper has identified a need for a natural home for organizational ethnographers. The continuing growth and development of the Symposium is also a reflection of the shared experience among would‐be ethnographers who find that, when presenting ethnographic work at other conferences, their choice of methodology is more often subject to contrarian rather than constructive discussion. It is only by debating the merits of the empirical and theoretical themes and perspectives that inform the subject in a constructive way with others, who are genuinely appreciative of the tradition, that it will develop.

The paper presents the case for a platform for the publishing of quality organizational ethnographies and for a forum in which to debate and develop the methodology and methods associated with them. It argues for a “collective manifesto” embracing and encouraging the diversity of approaches and introduces the first contributions.

This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.

The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.

Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.

The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.