See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/263763780

From the Ethnographic Turn to New Forms of Organizational Ethnography

Article · April 2014

DOI: 10.1108/JOE-02-2014-0006

CITATIONS READS

30 983

3 authors, including:

Linda Rouleau Mark De Rond

HEC Montréal - École des Hautes Études commerciales University of Cambridge
46 PUBLICATIONS   2,566 CITATIONS    40 PUBLICATIONS   1,107 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Institutional Stability and Change View project

Extreme contexts View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Linda Rouleau on 01 August 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/2046-6749.htm

JOE GUEST EDITORIAL

3,1
From the ethnographic turn to
new forms of organizational
2 ethnography
Linda Rouleau
Management, HEC Montreal, Montreal, Canada
Mark de Rond
Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, and
Geneviève Musca
Strategy and Organization, Department of Management,
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Paris, France

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline the context and the content of the six papers that
follow in this special issue on “New Forms of Organizational Ethnography”.
Design/methodology/approach – This editorial explains the burgeoning interest in organizational
ethnography over the last decade in terms of several favourable conditions that have supported this
resurgence. It also offers a general view of the nature and diversity of new forms of organizational
ethnography in studies of management and organization.
Findings – New forms of organizational ethnography have emerged in response to rapidly changing
organizational environments and technological advances as well as the paradigmatic transformation
of ethnography and ascendency of discursive and practice-based studies.
Originality/value – The editorial highlights an “ethnographic turn” in management and
organization studies that is characterized by a renewal of the discipline through the proliferation of
new forms of organizational ethnography. A focus on new organizational phenomena, methodological
innovation and novel ways of organizing fieldwork constitute the three main pillars of new forms
of organizational ethnography. It encourages researchers to develop forums and platforms designed
to exploit these novel forms of organizational ethnography.
Keywords Management, Organization studies, Ethnography
Paper type Research paper

Over the last decade or so, there has been a growing interest in ethnography in
management and organization studies (Cunliffe, 2010; Yanow, 2009). One might say that
research in these fields has taken an “ethnographic turn”, with renewed excitement in what
is, to all intents and purposes, thoroughly old-fashioned. For example, for the past nine
years, Keele and Liverpool University (UK) have jointly hosted a symposium on
organizational ethnography. We have equipped ourselves with a set of reference books
on organizational ethnography (e.g. Atkinson et al., 2007; Neyland, 2008; Ybema et al.,
2009), and even our own, dedicated, journal. The Journal of Organizational Ethnography
seeks to promote a diversity of approaches to fieldwork and encourages methodological
Journal of Organizational innovation (Brannan et al., 2012). In 2013, a permanent working group on ethnography
Ethnography
Vol. 3 No. 1, 2014
was launched as part of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) Colloquium
pp. 2-9 in Montreal. The aim of this EGOS Standing Working Group is to create a multi-
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2046-6749
disciplinary forum for studying how the practices and processes in situ are contextually
DOI 10.1108/JOE-02-2014-0006 and historically constructed (http://www.egosnet.org/swgs/current_swgs/swg_15).
 In such vibrant context, it might be useful to reflect on what it is that Organizational
characterizes this ethnographic turn, and how the activities of today’s generation of ethnography
organizational ethnographers contributes to renewing the discipline. This editorial
sets out to do just that, before outlining the context and the content of this special
issue on “New Forms of Organizational Ethnographies”.

The ethnographic turn 3

The “ethnographic turn” that management and organization studies are now
experiencing has, of course, long been in the making. Its roots go back at least
65 years, to in-depth case studies by the sociologists interested in the analysis of
organizational bureaucratic form (Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Crozier, 1964).
However, it is in the late 1970s that the story in our field really takes off with the
launching of a special issue on qualitative methods in Administrative Science
Quarterly, edited in by John Van Maanen. During the next decade, a considerable
body of ethnography-based research was conducted within large corporate settings
(Van Maanen, 1986). This traditional tendency in the field of organizational
ethnography has been associated with extended immersion in a single bound
community such as funeral homes (Barley, 1983), Disneyland (Van Maanen, 1991) and
governmental agencies (Feldman, 1991).
Move forward a decade and we find a resurgence of interest in ethnography, and
methodological novelty, driven by what appear to have been several favourable
conditions. First, organizations are constantly changing, meaning that there is a clear
interest in exploiting a method that helps keep tabs on the subtle shifts in
organizational life that result from greater exposure to risk, less predictability and
technological advancement. Organizational activities have today become increasingly
complex, fragmented and dispersed throughout both the temporal and spatial
spectrum. The actors involved in these activities often move quickly from one
geographic spot to another. In this context, research design, particularly when it relates
to longitudinal research with reliance on ethnographic approaches (Rasche and Chia,
2009; Van Maanen, 2011; Yanow, 2009; Czarniawska, 2007), has to be reconsidered and
renewed so as to stay relevant.
Furthermore, the advance of social media and the huge variety among technological
tools and techniques used have also exercised some pressures for renewing the genre
(Robinson and Schulz, 2009). For example, so-called “nethnographers” leverage
membership to online communities to discover how particular people experience,
organize and think about their worlds; others rely on mobile phones as repositories for
subject recording their own thoughts as they go about their everyday lives; yet others
use GPS tracking, video, painting or photo elicitation (even if photography was already
used by such anthropological stallwarts as Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss, Flaherty, Lorenz
and Mead and Bateson), or prefer a series of shorter stints in multiple sites over
traditional, single site ethnographies.
Moreover, there is a strong willingness amongst ethnographic researchers to
promote organizational ethnography as a paradigm. John van Maanen (2011, p. 218)
characterizes organizational ethnography not just as a methodological approach to,
but also an analytical perspective on, organizational research: ethnography is
simultaneously fieldwork, headwork and textwork. Writing ethnography is more and
more recognized as a way of theorizing workplaces and organizations. As much as
theorizing is part of ethnographic fieldwork, organizational researchers, through their
writings, communicate distinct worldviews. Put differently, writing ethnography is a
JOE reflexive process by which organizational researchers explain how and why multiple
3,1 accounts and conflicting views are at play in a specific context. Consequently,
management and organizational researchers are now ever more aware of the fact that
ethnographic works are offering multiple possibilities for theorizing what is going
on in organization, and able to develop rich insights related to the lived and cultural
experience of organizing.
4 Moreover, the ascendency of discursive approaches and of practice-based studies
has given ethnography a new lease of life (Gherardi, 2013; Rouleau, 2013; Sminia and
de Rond, 2012). Discourses and practices are contextual and difficult to fully
understand without taking into account interactions and actions emerging in the flux
of organizational activities. It is in these micro-acts of speeches and sense-making
that we can begin to comprehend how organizations and strategies are constituted
by practitioners (Fauré and Rouleau, 2011). Gathering first-hand data is still often
considered the best way to access these practitioners.

New forms of organizational ethnographies

As hinted above, new forms of organizational ethnographies have emerged in response
to rapidly changing organizational environments as well as technological advances.
There are still the usual culprits – longitudinal studies of life inside major corporations –
but also the new and still-strange. While some ethnographers are looking at new
organizational phenomena, others have proposed methodological innovations or indeed
new ways of negotiating access and organizing fieldwork.
Many organizational ethnographers tend to work with settings beyond the scope
of standard organizations, for the purpose of investigating new organizational
phenomena or showcasing classical phenomena. For example, Benoı̂t-Barné and Cooren
(2009) followed a “Médecins Sans Frontie`res” (doctors without borders) team
in the Congo in 2005, while Rix-Lièvre and Lièvre (2010) conducted studies during
a series of polar expeditions. Whether the object is an elite rowing crew (Lok and
de Rond, 2013), a mountaineering expedition (Musca et al., 2014; Rouleau et al., 2013),
or a team of war surgeons (de Rond, 2013), researchers are required to develop innovative
methods and techniques in order to practice ethnography and, in so doing, some have
gone on to propose new forms of organizational ethnography (Van Maanen, 2006).
Other researchers have developed news ways of doing organizational ethnography,
often under new labels. For example, we now speak in terms of “multi-site”
ethnography (Marcus, 1998), network ethnography (Howard, 2002), self-ethnography
(Ellis, 2004), critical ethnography (Madison, 2005), institutional ethnography (Devault,
2006), visual ethnography (Pink, 2007), virtual ethnography (Purli, 2007) to name but a
few. These new forms of ethnographies might be more appropriate for dealing with
complex, ambiguous and volatile contexts while providing a strong set of publishable
data. They propose new research technics and draw on new tools for collecting data
and propose original data set.
Beyond fieldwork, textwork and headwork, organizational ethnography is also
becoming “teamwork”. There are now institutional research groups all around the
world reunited through innovative ethnographic experiences. For example, A Sweden-
based research team on Extreme Environments – Everyday Decisions (TripleED, Umeå
University, Sweden, www.tripleED.com) managed by Markus Hällgren is using
ethnographic research for examining risky situations such as litigation in emergency
rooms and the commercialization of high-altitude mountaineering expeditions
(Aegerter et al., 2011; Hällgren and Wilson, 2011). Markus and the team of
researchers have been present in emergency rooms, and interviewed and followed Organizational
guided and non-guided expeditions to some of the highest mountains in the world, ethnography
including Mount Everest. Most research have either analyzed disasters in retrospect,
or focused on traditional hierarchical organizations for looking at temporary
organizations such as projects. In contrast, TripleED research group takes an unusual
starting point by observing particular temporary settings, the high-altitude
mountaineering to fill the lacuna in the present theorizing about leadership and 5
decisions in temporary and risky organizations.
In France, the GREGOR (Groupe de recherche sur la gestion des organisations –
Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) – Paris – Université
Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne) directed by Geraldine Schmidt, propose what its
members called an art-based, collective and dialogic ethnographic method in order to
unveil corporate restructuring practices (Beaujolin-Bellet et al., 2012). This group is
developing an original research methods based on arts in the aim of creating some kind
of “vicarious experiential knowledge” related to restructuring issues. Traditional
research on restructurings used to emphasize the global and macro context of such
event thus making it difficult to capture the subjective and symbolic as well as the
social and moral order that underpin such events. By drawing on arts work around
restructuring (photos, arts performance, painting and so on), this multi-disciplinary
group of researchers is looking for exploring the heterogeneity of restructurings in
reflexively and collaboratively developing new knowledge with people who are living
restructurings events.
In England, Paula Jarzabkowski and her team are conducting comparative
ethnographic research on risk transfer in insurance and reinsurance trading (see paper
by Smets, Burke and Jarzabkowski in this special issue). They study the complexities of
the trading market in this industry through team-based video-ethnograhy in different
countries. This unprecedented research project opens new possibilities for developing
ethnographic research in the global world. By using video-ethnography in 17 countries,
they are able to innovatively capture and record the minutiae of everyday life and its
cultural embeddedness in organizational competitive contexts. Their work testifies of the
possibility as well as the need of conducting multi-site and comparative research.
We hope that this special issue will stimulate new sort of organizational ethnographic
team-based projects with a similar propensity while based on audacious design.

The special issue

The proliferation of tools, techniques and vantage points reflects a realization that
organizational life today is more likely to be subject to uncertainty and change than in
previous decades. Competition, in most fields, has intensified. Virtual teaming is
becoming commonplace. Traditional boundaries between the physical and intellectual,
the public and private, workplace and home have eroded, as have those of loyalty and
affiliation, of experience and of authority. All this, of course, raises questions for
research design: How can organizational life be effectively observed when it gets
dispersed in time and space, and if it arises unexpectedly? How is it possible to
reconcile the need to “be there”, for a period long enough to assess the practices, norms
and values of a community with the practical difficulty of collecting data in these new
settings? How can multiple levels of mediated artefacts be used to explore the multiple
ways of organizing in a contemporary economy?
These were some of the questions that we hoped to answer in drafting the call for
an EGOS subtheme on New Forms of Organizational Ethnography (subtheme 22,
JOE Helsinki). We were positively surprised by the strong interest raised around the
3,1 questions and perspective proposed. The subtheme reunited a dynamic group of
researchers from the social sciences as well as management and organization studies.
The interest raised by the editorial team of Journal of Organizational Ethnography –
that we thank for their strong support and patience along the publication process –
suggested it may be worthwhile pursue our subtheme by means of a special issue.
6 As is invariably the case, we received more proposals than it was possible to publish
and the choices we faced were difficult. Yet we hope the final product will contribute to
pursue the conversation around the new forms of organizational ethnographies that
are at the core of the ethnographic turn.
This special issue of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography showcases some of
recent ethnographies that reflect variety, in terms of methodology as well as context.
For example, Michael Smets, Gary Burke and Paula Jarzabkowski propose a three-
dimensional framework for rethinking ethnography’s territory. They push the boundaries
of traditional approaches along three dimensions: site, instrument and fieldworker
and, as an exemplar, refer to their own team-based, 17-site, video-ethnography. Their
exceptional access to trading floors around the world has allowed them to record the
minutiae of everyday life and its cultural embeddedness in organizational competitive
contexts and, subsequently, to explore emerging themes in management and organization
studies such as materiality, embodiment in interaction, spatio-temporality and multi-
modality of actions and engagements. Moreover, based on their experience, they shed light
on the challenges and the possibilities related to gaining access, on using the full potential
of your research tools and on maintaining your position as researcher in a fieldwork
where participants are mobile and work in a complex and multi-modal environment.
Taking their cues from urban sociology and anthropology, Nathalie Raulet-Croset
and Anni Borzeix introduce a technique – spatial shadowing – that enables them to
track ways in which people move in, and about, the spaces in which they live and/or
work. To illustrate how this research tool might be effective, they analyze two cases of
emergent organizations that seek to limit “urban incivilities” in public and quasi-public
spaces, with a particular emphasis on how spatially embedded phenomena are socially
constructed.
In an effort to overcome the geographical and temporal challenges specific to
fieldwork in pluralistic settings, Natalia Aguilar-Delgado and Luciano Barin-Cruz
explore the possibility of a “multi-event” ethnography, of such events as professional
conferences or international regulatory meetings. Using a case study of two
international events organized by the United Nations in the negotiation of instruments
to regulate biodiversity exploitation, the authors show how a combination of three
tools (shadowing, practitioner’s diary and researcher’s reflexive journal) is well adapted
to producing in-depth accounts of a marginal actor fighting against the hegemonic
discourses in the context of a FCE.
Moving from the physical, albeit dispersed, to the virtual, Deniz Tuncalp and
Patrick Lê examine emerging trends in online ethnography so as to highlight
particular challenges raised in this new form of fieldwork. Their review discloses how
it is that online ethnographers are able to define fuzzy boundaries in time and space,
how they engage with their fields, and how engaging with the online world impacts on
research designs more broadly. Their review is based on a quantitative and qualitative
analyses of 59 papers selected as online ethnographies from 40 journals in the
organization and management field, and should be of interest to anyone keen to pull
up their sleeves and get stuck in all things virtual.
 Linda Tallberg and colleagues pick up on a resurgence of interest in the role of Organizational
emotion in fieldwork, a theme that was until recently marginalized in studies of ethnography
organization. Their vantage point is a little different from the usual, however, in using
an auto-ethnographic account of Linda’s experience as participant observer in an
animal shelter. Her witnessing of animal euthanasia, as par for the course, allowed for
the production of data in the form of poetry, dialogue and narrative, alongside
interview data. These genres, in turn, allow not only for a discussion of emotion as 7
experienced at work, but also for a way of establishing a relationship of affect with
the reader.
Tammar Zilber’s article is, like Linda’s, a confessional tale. This time, however, the
subject is not the organization but the field, and its vantage point not a single study
but reflections on a 20-year career. The result is a fertile discussion of the promise
and challenges of doing field-wide fieldwork, problematizing issues of definition,
for example, and of deciding boundaries, and the “nuts and bolts of ‘doing’ and
‘interpreting’ and ‘writing up’ empirically rich studies of entire fields.
So here we are: six very different contributions to novelty in organizational
ethnography: from multi-site, video-based ethnographies that rely on inputs from team
members across the globe to desk-based nethnographies, from explorations of space to
those of emotions, and from studies of single organizations to those of entire fields. The
variety is tantalizing, as is the dedication of these scholars to their method or subject
of choice. There is, no doubt, far more diversity, and far more promise, in today’s
burgeoning field of organizational ethnography than a single special issue can do
justice to. But at least it is a start.

References
Aegerter, J.F., Alvarez, A.P. and Hällgren, M. (2011), “Escalating commitment in the death zone”,
International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 29 No. 8, pp. 971-985.
Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J. and Lofland, L. (2007), Organizational
Ethnography, Sage Publications, London.
Barley, A.S. (1983), “Semiotics and the study of occupational and organizational culture”,
Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 393-413.
Beaujolin-Bellet, R., Bobadilla, N., Mourey, D., Perret, V., Pichault, F., Schmidt, G. and
Xhauflair, V. (2012), An Art-Based Reflexive Ethnographic Method? Unveiling Corporate
Restructuring Practices, EGOS, Helsinki.
Benoı̂t-Barné, C. and Cooren, F. (2009), “The accomplishment of authority through
presentification: how authority is distributed among and negotiated by organizational
members”, Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 5-31.
Brannan, M., Rowe, M. and Worthington, F. (2012), “Editorial for the journal of organizational
ethnography”, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 5-14.
Crozier, M. (1964), The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Cunliffe, A.L. (2010), “Retelling tales of the field: in search of organizational ethnography 20 years
on”, Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 224-239.
Czarniawska, B. (2007), Shadowing and Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern
Societies, Copenhagen Business School Press, Liber.
de Rond, M. (2013), “Soldier, surgeon, photographer, fly: fieldwork beyond the comfort zone”,
Strategic Organization, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 256-262.
Devault, M.L. (2006), “Introduction: what is institutional ethnography?”, Social Problems, Vol. 53
No. 3, pp. 294-298.
JOE Ellis, C. (2004), The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, AltaMira
Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
3,1
Fauré, B. and Rouleau, L. (2011), “The strategic competence of accountants and middle managers
in budget making”, Accounting, Organization and Society, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 167-182.
Feldman, M. (1991), “The meaning of ambiguity: learning from stories and metaphors”, in
Frost et al. (Eds), Reframing Organizational Culture, Sage, London, pp. 145-157.
8 Gherardi, S. (2013), How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study: Problems and Methods, Edward
Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.
Gouldner, A. (1954), Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Modern Factory
Administration, Free Press, New York, NY.
Hällgren, M. and Wilson, T.L. (2011), “Opportunities for learning from crises in projects”,
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 196-217.
Howard, P.E.N. (2002), “Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: new
organizations, new media, new methods”, New Media & Society, Vol. 4 No. 4, pp. 551-575.
Lok, J. and de Rond, M. (2013), “On the plasticity of institutions: containing and restoring practice
breakdowns at the Cambridge University boat club”, Academy of Management Journal,
Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 185-207.
Madison, S. (2005), Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics and Performance, Sage, Thousand
Oaks, CA.
Marcus, G.E. (1998), Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Musca, G., Rouleau, L. and Fauré, B. (2014), “Time, space and calculation in discursive practice:
insights from the crows’ flight chronotope of the Darwin Expedition”, in Cooren, F.,
Vaara, E., Langley, A., Tsoukas, H. (Eds), Language and Communication at Work:
Discourse, Narrativity and Organizing, Coll. Perspectives on Process Organization Studies.
Vol. 4, Chapter 6, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 127-148.
Neyland, D. (2008), Handbook of Ethnography, Sage Publications, London.
Pink, S. (2007), Doing Visual Ethnography, Sage, London.
Purli, A. (2007), “The web of insights: the art and practice of webnography”, International Journal
of Market Research, Vol. 49 No. 3, pp. 387-408.
Rasche, A. and Chia, R. (2009), “Researching strategy practices: a genealogical social theory
perspective”, Organization Studies, Vol. 30 No. 7, pp. 713-734.
Rix-Lièvre, G. and Lièvre, P. (2010), “An innovative observatory of polar expedition projects: an
investigation of organizing”, Project Management Journal, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 91-98.
Robinson, L. and Schulz, J. (2009), “New avenues for sociological inquiry: evolving forms of
ethnographic practice”, Sociology, Vol. 43 No. 4, pp. 685-698.
Rouleau, L. (2013), “Strategy-as-practice research at a crossroads”, M@n@gement, Vol. 16 No. 5,
pp. 547-565.
Rouleau, L., Musca, G., Perez, M. and Giordano, Y. (2013), “The Darwin mountaineering
expedition in Patagonia: a case of successful leadership failure”, in Giannantonio, C.M,
Hurley-HAnson, A.E. (Eds), Extreme Leadership, Edward Elgar, Northampton, pp. 62-71.
Sminia, H. and de Rond, M. (2012), “Context and action in the context of strategy scholarship”,
Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 49 No. 7, pp. 1329-1349.
Selznick, P. (1949), T.V.A. and the Grass Roots, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Van Maanen, J. (1986), “Power in the bottle: drinking patterns and social relations in a British
police agency”, in Srivasta, S. (Ed.), Executive Power, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA,
pp. 204-239.
 Van Maanen, J. (1991), “The smile factory: work at Disneyland”, in Frost et al. (Eds), Reframing Organizational
Organizational Culture, Sage, London.
ethnography
Van Maanen, J. (2006), “Ethnography then and now”, Qualitative Research in Organizations and
Management: An International Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 13-21.
Van Maanen, J. (2011), “Ethnography as work: some rules of engagement”, Journal of
Management Studies, Vol. 48 No. 1, pp. 218-234.
Yanow, D. (2009), “Organizational ethnography and methodological angst: myths and challenges 9
in the field”, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International
Journal, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 186-199.
Ybema, S., Yanow, D., Wels, H. and Kamsteeg, F. (Eds) (2009), Organizational Ethnography:
Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life, Sage, London.

Further reading
Czarniawska, B. (2008), A Theory of Organizing, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.

About the authors

Linda Rouleau is a Professor at HEC Montreal. Her research work focuses on micro-strategy and
strategizing practices through drawing upon qualitative research methodology. Among other
ongoing projects, she is working with middle managers’ narratives of practice and is a member
of the Darwin Expedition’s research team. Over the past few years, she has published in peer-
reviewed journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Human
Relations, Academy of Management Review. She is co-responsible of GéPS (Study Group in
Strategy-as-Practice, HEC Montreal). Professor Linda Rouleau is the corresponding author and
can be contacted at: linda.rouleau@hec.ca
Dr Mark de Rond (D Phil, Oxford University) is a Reader in Strategy and Organization in the
Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Mark’s fieldwork has included embedding
with war surgeons in Afghanistan and elite rowers in Cambridge. His most recent fieldwork
involved rowing the length of the Amazon river so as to learn, first-hand, how collaboration
unfolds, and how problems are solved, under difficult circumstances. His work has been
published in such outlets as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science and
Strategic Management Journal, as well as in “old fashioned” monographs.
Dr Geneviève Musca is an Associate Professor in Strategy and Organization in the
Department of Management at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France). Her
research focuses on competences dynamics, sense-making and team management in unexpected
and fast-changing environments, as well as on issues related to qualitative research methods.
Geneviève coordinated the “Darwin” research project sponsored by the France’s National
Research Agency (an in situ, real-time ethnographic study of a climbing expedition across the
Cordillera Darwin range in Patagonia, www.projet-darwin.com). She has published in academic
peer-reviewed journals, like m@n@gement, Revue Franc¸aise de Gestion, International Journal of
Project Management.

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com

Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

View publication stats