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The purpose of this article is to persuade ethnographers to consider using composites for studies in which protecting participants from identification is especially important. It situates the argument in the context of the transparency and data sharing movements' uneven influence across disciplines.

The paper reviews problems in maintaining confidentiality of research participants using pseudonyms and masking. It analyzes existing literature on composites, conditions of composite use and identifies composite actors as a form useful to place-based ethnography. Methodological aspects of composite actor construction are discussed along with potential opportunities composites offer.

Construction of composite actors is best accomplished by aggregating thematically during deskwork. Composites provide enhanced confidentiality by creating plausible doubt in the reader's mind, in part, through the presentation of aggregate rather than individual-level data.

This discussion advances the methodology of constructing composites, particularly composite actors, providing guidance to increase trustworthiness of ethnographic narratives that employ composites.

The purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

This essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of “marked” ethnography.

This essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re‐emerging now?; and on related questions, on its way to engaging some of the key methodological issues in organizational ethnography that today merit attention.

The paper may be of value to readers who are interested in the method and in one researcher's conceptual‐methodological take on it.