Ethnographic-anthropological Research in, on, and with Companies:

A Cycle of Scepticism and Potential Escape Routes

Abstract

Companies are hardly ever considered as potential partners for collaborative ethnographic work. Against the grain of well-founded epistemic concerns and methodological barriers, this paper puts forward the argument that such research encounters may nevertheless be indispensable and worth pursuing. To this end, it first introduces three established forms of ethnographic inquiries into the private sector: corporate ethnography, organizational anthropology and ethnographic-anthropological investigation of contemporary phenomena that assume form amidst the market economy. In a second step, the peculiarities and challenges inherent in these three different modes of studying firms are discussed based on the author’s experience of conducting multi-sited ethnographic research in the food industry. The resulting insights and suggestions complete a plea for explicit ethnographic-anthropological attention to business organizations and market actors as interlocutors and possible research partners.