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Organizing at a Global Level: Contributions from Ethnography
Organizing at a Global Level: Contributions from Ethnography
Wednesday, 13 July 2016: 09:00-10:30
Location: Seminar 31 (Juridicum)
RC17 Sociology of Organization (host committee) Language: English
“Globalization” has become one of the keywords in contemporary sociology of organization. Widely considered to be essential in creating the necessary conditions for the emergence of a recognizable global world, organization is nonetheless difficult to study at the scale of “the global”.
However, ethnography has made significant contributions to how sociologists understand some of the dynamics this entails. The distinctiveness of an ethnographic sensibility includes methods of participant observation (e.g. Burawoy, 2000) and more recent commitments to multi-sited study (Çalışkan, 2010; Røyrvik 2011).
At its most challenging such ethnography poses questions to the established analytic categories that other sociological imaginaries have struggled to relax. Moreover, an ethnographic attentiveness to how the global is actualized, over and above the need to defend a theoretical edifice, means that global ethnographies in sociology can be brought to the table alongside ethnographies from other social sciences.
We invite papers from scholars working broadly on “the global” and who are interested in developing this conversation. Ethnographies not explicitly about organization or globalization, also contribute to this conversation (e.g. Maurer and Schwab, 2006; Miyazaki, 2013; Riles, 2011) and we are interested in contributions from anyone who is also engaged or wishes to participate in this conversation.
Session Organizers: