“How can one do ethnography today? Clearly, it is almost accepted as a fact that lack of time and increasing ideals of productivism  and  the  pressure  for  ‘academic  capitalism’  moves  research  designs  away  from  exploratory  and  long-term  fieldwork,  toward  more  tightly  defined  research  frameworks  involving  less  time.

While  recognizing  that  the  current  ‘social’  economy  of  research  in  most  institutions  concretely  prevents researchers from spending long periods of time on the field, social sciences, if they are interested in saying something relevant about people’s lives, should invite scholars (especially the nascent ones) to experience what an ethnography can do…an experience that engages “a corpo-real  knowledge  that  provides  a  practical  comprehension  of  the world quite different from the act of conscious decoding that  is  normally  designated  by  the  idea  of  comprehension”  (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 135). This is surely what the four contributions of this Unplugged section strongly illustrate, based on current  or  recently  defended  doctoral  ethnographies  conducted at the OCE Research Centre (Emlyon Business School), Montpellier University, and Esade Business School: it is possible  to  do  long  and  deep  ethnographic  work;  however,  that  practice  engages  the  researcher  morally,  corporeally,  and  cognitively”.

Collective contributions of (in order of appearance): David Courpasson (OCE research center), Eleunthia Wong Ellinger (ESADE), Yousra Rahmouni Elidrissi (OCE research center), Nesrine Bouguerra (OCE research center), Roscoe Conan D’Souza (OCE research center), David Sanson (OCE research center), Claire Le Breton (OCE research center), Clara Roussey (Montpellier university)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37725/mgmt.v23i3.5380

Link: https://management-aims.com/index.php/mgmt/article/view/5380