Balancing Breadth and Depth

1145655
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OSS0010.1177/01708406221145655Organization StudiesPrasad and Shadnam
Method/ology Article
Organization Studies
Balancing Breadth and Depth

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DOI: 10.1177/01708406221145655
https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221145655
Conceptualizing performativity www.egosnet.org/os
through multi-sited ethnography
Ajnesh Prasad
Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
Royal Roads University, Canada
Masoud Shadnam
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Abstract
While performativity, as a theoretical concept, has gained much purchase in the field of management and
organization studies (MOS), there remains a dearth of empirical work operationalizing the idea. In this article,
we argue that empirical studies on performativity in organizational settings have been scarce mainly due to two
methodological challenges: (1) the problem of breadth, and (2) the problem of depth. In terms of breadth, to study
how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, researchers need to follow threads of meanings and
practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford. In terms of depth,
studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through
the symbolic world, which few methodologies possess the analytical resources to unravel. We offer multi-
sited ethnography as a promising methodological approach that has the potential to concomitantly overcome
both challenges. Through a vignette of a study that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, we illustrate how multi-sited ethnography enables empirical research on performativity in MOS.
Keywords
ethnography, fieldwork, methodology, multi-sited ethnography, Palestine, performativity, qualitative research
[N]ot only are empirical claims not ruled out, they are understood to be particular intelligible speakings of
the world (with all due regard to all the various qualifications required to make good sense of this claim).
In particular, empirical claims do not refer to individually existing determinate entities, but to phenomena-
in-their-becoming, where becoming is not tied to a temporality of futurity, but rather it a radically open
relatingness of the world worlding itself.
(Barad, 2011, p. 148)
Corresponding author:
Masoud Shadnam, Graduate School of Management and Economics, Sharif University of Technology, Teymoori Street, Tehran,
Islamic Republic of Iran.
Email: shadnam@sharif.edu
2 Organization Studies 00(0)
Introduction
The management and organization studies (MOS) literature reveals that while the concept of per-
formativity has proved to be generative on the theoretical front, it has not been easy to operational-
ize in empirical work (Gond, Cabantous, Harding, & Learmonth, 2016; Harding, Gilmore, & Ford,
2022; Marti & Gond, 2018; Pollock & Williams, 2016; Shadnam, 2019). The question remains:
Why is this the case? Indeed, if empirical claims are “speakings of the world” as Barad (2011,
p. 148) reminds us in the introductory quote, why have we not listened?
We attribute this oversight to the limitations found in commonly used research methods.
Empirical research on performativity faces several methodological challenges, of which two are
especially conspicuous. The first problem relates to breadth. To study how a cultural/symbolic
construction becomes performative, we need to follow threads of meanings and practices that
stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford (Muniesa, 2014).
The second is the problem of depth. Studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized
understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies
offer (Pollock & Williams, 2016). It is from the pressure to concomitantly achieve breadth and
depth that the prospects of empirical research on performativity have been stymied.
Before proceeding, a caveat merits note. The categories of breadth and depth are meta-descrip-
tions for the challenges of research on performativity. As such, they are not meant to be adopted as
new requirements or ideals akin to data saturation. In other words, our goal in this article is not
normative: we do not intend to argue that performativity researchers must achieve this level of
breadth or that level of depth. Rather, our goal is descriptive. We assert that the process of collect-
ing and analyzing data to study performativity often requires going broader and deeper than what
commonly used research methods accommodate.
This article offers multi-sited ethnography as a method that would be adept in overcoming the
challenges of breadth and depth. Multi-sited ethnography is the practice of conducting ethno-
graphic research through following the phenomenon of interest in multiple sites, in different times
and locations (Marcus, 1995). While MOS researchers have employed multi-sited ethnography for
a variety of research purposes (e.g., Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020; Keim & Shadnam, 2020; Prasad,
Prasad, & Mir, 2011; Rauf, Prasad, & Razzaque, 2018; Van Maanen, 2010), it has rarely been
employed in empirical work on performativity. This is due to a deep-seated tension between eth-
nography and performativity. Ethnographic research is often conducted by those who are skeptical
of abstract theorizing and, thus, focus on immersing themselves in the empirical field, whereas
performativity seems to have emerged from musings of armchair theorists who share more affinity
with the humanities than with the empirical social sciences. As such, performativity and multi-sited
ethnography have been, for the most part, debated in starkly different scholarly communities on
two sides of disciplinary walls, which is why the synergies between the two have remained under-
explored and underutilized. Given the analytical tools that multi-sited ethnography proffers
researchers, we contend that it is an especially conducive methodological approach to study per-
formativity. As such, we call on MOS researchers to adopt the approach when seeking to unravel
performative circuits.
The remainder of this article is structured in five sections. First, we introduce the concept of
performativity and selectively review the wave of research that it has catalyzed in MOS. We also
discuss the problem of breadth and depth drawing on the concepts of citationality, agencement,
subject formation, and intra-activity. Second, we offer a review of multi-sited ethnography and
situate it within the historical conditions in which it emerged. Third, we build upon the previous
two sections to argue that multi-sited ethnography is a method that can enable MOS researchers in
overcoming the dilemmas of breadth and depth, which currently obfuscate empirical work
Prasad and Shadnam 3
on performativity. Here, we discuss how the challenges of breadth and depth can be effectively
placated by drawing on four affordances made by multi-sited ethnography: mobile focus, translo-
cal construction, focused understanding, and field formation. Fourth, we illustrate our arguments
through a vignette of a multi-sited ethnography that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. Finally, in the fifth section, we close this article with some concluding
remarks.
Performativity Research
MOS researchers have expressed growing interest in the concept of performativity (Gond et al.,
2016; Marti & Gond, 2018; Shadnam, 2019). The theoretical inspiration underlying the corpus of
this work has come from a host of influential thinkers such as John Austin, Jean-Francois Lyotard,
Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad. Notwithstanding
the differences between the theoretical (and the political) projects of these thinkers, there is a foun-
dational claim prevalent in most conceptions of performativity—namely, the non-representational
view of symbols and, most prominently, language. The core idea is that language (words, descrip-
tions, theories, etc.), or cultural/symbolic constructions more broadly (including, for instance, bod-
ily expressions), do not innocuously represent pre-existing realities; rather, realities and
representations are mutually constitutive. For example, in contrast to the representationalist asser-
tion that underpins most fields of empirical knowledge, which purports scientific theories to be
only observations and descriptions of the reality out there, Callon (1998, p. 2) shows how “eco-
nomics, broadly defined, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it
functions.” Similarly, in contrast to the representationalist belief that presupposes a natural sub-
stance that is represented in our gender expressions, Butler (1990) explains that there is no gender
prior to or beyond its expressions; instead, gender emerges only through parodic practices expressed
corporeally. As these examples illustrate, performativity research: (1) is focused on deconstructing
the cultural/symbolic constructions that are assumed as taken-for-granted realities of social life,
such as gender and economics; and (2) captures the tautological nature of how they are performed
often through the very symbolic processes that purport to be describing them as realities.
Working from this purview, the very idea of performativity shares certain affinities with widely
used concepts in MOS such as institution and discourse. The cultural/symbolic constructions that
appear as facts of life can be categorized as institutions inasmuch as they are “enduring rules, prac-
tices, and structures that set conditions on action” (Lawrence & Shadnam, 2008, p. 2289; for a
nuanced discussion of various definitions of institution see Abdelnour, Hasselbladh, & Kallinikos,
2017). As cultural/symbolic constructions, they can also be classified as discourses that organize
how we socially relate to one another. In sum, it is not surprising that researchers invested in the
study of performativity have engaged with the concepts of institution and discourse, and have, in
turn, significantly advanced the extant literature on these ideas. Notwithstanding these points, per-
formativity maintains distinct conceptual parameters due to its characteristically radical ontologi-
cal claims. Studies of institutions and discourses may focus on how certain gender discourses get
diffused, legitimated, and institutionalized, but they do not typically make ontological assertions
such as the performative claim that gender only exists in its continued expressions (Butler, 1990).
Within MOS scholarship, the concept of performativity has been evoked in a variety of con-
texts, including but not limited to economic language, gender, resistance, decision-making, rou-
tine and change, strategy, philanthropy, and information technology (e.g., Ferraro, Pfeffer, &
Sutton, 2005; Harding, Ford, & Lee, 2017; Keevers, Treleaven, Sykes, & Darcy, 2012; Shadnam,
in press; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). It has also been employed to consider whether critical manage-
ment studies should be considered anti-performative (Fournier & Grey, 2000) or critically
performative (Spicer, Alvesson, & Kärreman, 2009); or, more recently, whether it should embrace
failed performatives (Fleming & Banerjee, 2016). The bulk of these studies, however, are theo-
retical discussions of the idea of performativity in different organizational domains. The few
empirical studies that have referred to performativity focus on carefully bounded cases where
traces of meaning and practice are naturally confined to a limited scope of the social phenomenon
under study. Unfortunately, such carefully set boundaries do not represent the realities of organi-
zational life.
Before delving into a discussion of methodological challenges, we must address a more funda-
mental question: What exactly does it mean to conduct an empirical study on performativity? After
all, a non-representationalist view of symbols seems to discredit any claim to represent empirical
reality. Here, one must note that while the non-representationalist view is in contrast to the positiv-
ist belief that considers scientific methods as mirrors of empirical reality, it equally rejects the
idealist forgoing of empirical reality. Performativity is built upon a postpositivist recognition of
there being no theory-free observation or description of facts, acknowledging that all empirical
data are theoretically informed. Even in the natural sciences, empirical observations take the
appearance of hard evidence only because their underlying theories are agreed upon and largely
presupposed among its scientific practitioners (Kuhn, 1970). As Kuhn (1970, p. 91) illustrated, in
the periods when this taken-for-granted agreement is disrupted there is “recourse to philosophy and
debate over fundamentals.” The significance of theory, however, is more evident in the social sci-
ences as there exists a range of inconsistent views, which equivocate on the definitions and the
assumptions as well as the empirical referents of the objects of study. This character, as Alexander
(1987, p. 23) elucidated, makes for “the overdetermination of social science by theory and its
underdetermination by fact.” For example, when we conduct an empirical study of organizational
performativity, we acknowledge that different sets of actors (including ourselves) are describing
and interpreting the organization through our a priori theoretical views and, by doing so, we are
partly reshaping and partly reproducing the organization. As Butler (2004, p. 274) notes, “any
effort at empirical description takes place within a theoretically delimited sphere.” She further
adds: “Theory operates on the very level at which the object of inquiry is defined and delimited,
and that there is no givenness of the object which is not given within the interpretive field—given
to theory” (p. 274).
As this discussion illuminates, performativity has for the most part remained in the domain of
theoretical articulations and as such little attention has been paid to methodological challenges of
empirical research. Empirical research on performativity, as an agenda for deconstructing what
appears as “facts of life” and elucidating their autopoietic symbolic processes, needs to attend to
meanings and practices that often lurk beneath or beyond what we access using our habitual
research methods. This effectively means that this agenda faces two key empirical challenges,
which we call the problem of breadth and the problem of depth.
The problem of breadth

The first methodological challenge for MOS research on performativity is the problem of breadth.
The cultural/symbolic constructions through which we live—such as gender, state, economy,
market, organization, or even the price of a cup of coffee—appear as pre-existing realities because
the performative relations that contribute to their construction are often hidden out of sight/site.
Performativity research seeks to deconstruct this taken-for-granted appearance and “describe a set
of processes that produce ontological effects, that is, that work to bring into being certain kinds of
realities” (Butler, 2010, p. 147). To do so, researchers need to follow the chain of representations
associated with their object of study into multiple, sometimes unusual and ephemeral arenas,
because that is where performative circuits are best revealed (Muniesa, 2014). At times, research-
ers may also find the chain of representations extending to domains that are not amenable to vis-
ual and verbal data collection, which necessitates the capturing of embodied experiences (such as
visceral or emotional sensations). This endeavor is not consistent with the guidelines of most
established methodologies, which call on the researcher to delimit the context and the scope of
study from the outset (Bickman & Rog, 2009). Reflecting on this issue, Steyaert, Marti, and
Michels (2012, p. 47) suggest that MOS research on performativity should pay closer attention to
how their object of study “unfolds from multiple sociospatial arrangements, while research (pres-
entations) are always restricted to specific socio-spatial sites (e.g. actors, identities, perspectives,
or localities).”
Within the theoretical lexicon of performativity, two core concepts illustrate the problem of
breadth most vividly: citationality and agencement. Citationality refers to the Derridean idea that
signs are essentially citational, which means they conform to a norm or law—an iterative model—
that makes them intelligible. Any understanding of a social phenomenon (or reference to things)
takes place through a series of signs whose meaning is contingent upon the norms and the laws that
they cite. Taking a performativity perspective entails a focus on ontological norms—norms that
establish what is really out there—and analyzing how a cultural/symbolic construction takes on the
appearance of a fact or substance through reiterations of acts that cite ontological norms. Applying
this line of argument to gender performativity, Butler (1993) argues (p. xii) that “performativity
must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational
practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”
An empirical investigation of performativity using the concept of citationality requires an anal-
ysis of the norms and the conventions that are cited and recited in contexts that often stretch in time
and space beyond predefined boundaries. It entails interrogation of citational acts in multiple set-
tings because, as Derrida (1979) contends, signs are vulnerable to being reiterated in various,
sometimes unforeseen, contexts and appropriated in unexpected ways. Accordingly, citationality is
a kind of interdiscursivity, an act that links multiple sites, events, identities, and discourses. This
point is demonstrated empirically by Nakassis (2012), whose analysis of brand performativity
traces citational chains into territories such as brand counterfeits, remixes, and simulations.
The other concept that plays a key role in performativity research is agencement. Agencement
refers to particular arrangements of heterogeneous sociomaterial elements that possess the capacity
to act (Callon, 2007). The core idea is that it is usually not a cultural/symbolic construction alone
that can cause its own realization. Rather, for a cultural/symbolic construction to become per-
formative, it must be carefully arranged along with an entire symbolic and material assemblage—
an agencement—where agency originates. The Black and Scholes formula in economics, for
instance, becomes performative “through the intense work of articulating, experimenting and
observing that has been required to produce the gradual, mutual adjustment of sociotechnical
agencements and formulae” (Callon, 2007, p. 320). Thus, an empirical investigation of performa-
tivity using the concept of agencement entails examining a wide range of sociomaterial elements
that can be considered “the world” in relation to the cultural/symbolic construction under study. It
includes the understandings and brain structures, practices and effects, actors and bodies (including
movements, gestures, gazes, and postures), institutions and spaces, networks and connections, and
all of the other aspects of both the symbolic and the material. The holistic conception of agence-
ment requires the researcher to broaden the empirical context to include a wide range of elements
that are often beyond one site. As an example, Mcfall (2009, p. 49) studies the performativity of
the market for “a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at working class thrift”
by studying the relevant agencement that includes multiple sites and even domains such as the
political, commercial, and cultural, as well as “hybrid combinations of human bodies, material
equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes.”
The problem of depth

The second methodological problem that MOS researchers on performativity encounter is the
problem of depth. The objects of performative research are the cultural/symbolic phenomena that
appear as seamless, stable, and ontologically given; the objective of performative research is to
upend this appearance. This work necessarily involves criticizing established ways of understand-
ing and researching with the intent to question taken-for-granted assumptions, counter the reifica-
tion of objects, and raise uncomfortable questions about apparently banal things (Riach, Rumens,
& Tyler, 2016). The list of methodologies that can stand up to the performative disturbance is not
long, since such methodologies must be acutely sensitive to sets of meanings that render social
phenomena intelligible as well as the processes of how social phenomena are culturally/symboli-
cally constituted and deconstituted (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Prasad, 2012). As Simpson,
Buchan, and Sillince (2018, p. 657) note with respect to performative research in leadership, “[t]he
methodological challenge then, is to apprehend a fleeting world that is continuously enacting lead-
ership as it engages, and is engaged by actors in the emergent in-flow-ence.”
To illustrate the problem of depth, we can spotlight two core concepts within the theoretical
lexicon of performativity: subject formation and intra-activity of matter. Subject formation is
related to citationality, though it is specifically concerned with subjectivities and identities.
Contrary to essentialist views that take the subject as fixed and coherent, as it is assumed to be just
out there, the idea here is to interrogate how—that is, the processes by which—the subject is
formed. As such, the question being interrogated is: How do we come to take our position as a
subject? Or, more specifically, how do I become a consumer, employee, manager, student, mother,
philanthropist, doctor, or citizen (Shadnam, 2015, 2020)? Studies on performativity that take their
inspiration from Butler reject the idea that there is a subject who pre-exists actions and structures;
instead, the subject is an effect of these very actions and structures. Thus, “sex and gender are the
effects rather than the causes of institutions, discourses and practices” (Salih, 2002, p. 10). Taking
this point seriously requires empirical investigations of performativity to pierce the commonly
held intuition that actions are caused by actors, doing is caused by being, to be able to uncover the
reversal of cause and effect, to show being is an effect of doing. As an example, Hodgson (2005, p.
56) analyzes the “professional” identity in project management and shows how “the repetition of
identifiable performances enacts the ‘professional’ into being and simultaneously constrains the
‘professional’s’ conduct.”
The intra-activity of matter refers to how all things—social, material, and equally the bounda-
ries between the social and the material—are produced and are productive. The concept is rooted
in the insights of Barad (2003) who questions the taken-for-granted, atomistic view that assumes
the world is comprised of separate and distinct entities that are inter-related. Her use of “intra-
action” instead of “inter-action” is to emphasize the idea that separate entities do not exist but come
into existence through entanglement of agencies. Even categories such as human and nonhuman
emerge out of “the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and desta-
bilized” (Barad, 2003, p. 808) rather than being based on properties inherent in these categories.
From this perspective, performativity is understood as “iterative intra-activity,” an entanglement of
agencies that reconstitutes that entanglement. Empirical studies that are based on Barad’s concep-
tualization of performativity, thus, need to be able to go beyond what appears as distinct, separate
entities and explore the practices that stabilize the boundaries of those entities. As an example,
Harding et al. (2017, p. 1226) study the process of strategy implementation in organizations and
explore “how resistance/resistants are performatively constituted and coemergent in saying ‘no’ to
a power that would deny identity and self-hood.”
Multi-sited Ethnography
Multi-sited ethnography represents a recent trend within ethnographic research that acquired wide
currency since the publication of the seminal article on the method by Marcus (1995). In his article,
Marcus notes that this emerging trend rests upon two coinciding movements. The first movement
is intellectual and pivots on the crisis of representation, which has given rise to a plethora of ideas
broadly associated with postmodern theory. This broad set of ideas has challenged the ontological
and the epistemological underpinnings of classical ethnography and has led to new forms of eth-
nography with labels such as critical, feminist, poststructuralist, and deconstructive. The core
insight that unifies these contemporary variants of ethnography is the questioning of classical
ethnography’s “goal of description” and moving toward “the goal of producing ideologically open
texts” (Koro-Ljungberg & Greckhamer, 2005, p. 285). The postmodern movement has also raised
serious doubts about the adequacy of the established categories that were commonly used to define
the object of ethnographic examination and, thereby, delimit the site for fieldwork. So, rather than
conducting intensive investigations of lifeworlds in a single site—which is the conventional way
of conducting ethnography—ethnographers have increasingly shifted toward questioning the
boundaries of the site and following the flow of lifeworlds into multiple sites across time and
space.
The second movement that has precipitated the emergence of multi-sited ethnography is what
Marcus (1995) called the “empirical changes in the world” (p. 97), referring to all of the transfor-
mations that can loosely be grouped under the umbrella of globalization (on macro shifts of organi-
zational reality, see Shadnam, 2021). It is no longer possible to find a single site where meanings,
identities, and relationships are contained and, thus, untainted by cultural processes outside of that
site. As Van Maanen (2010) observes (p. 244), “with the rise and expansion of vast human migra-
tions, vanishing natives, market globalization, enhanced information, communication and trans-
portation technologies, the anthropologizing of the West, ethnography has become rather
deterritorialized.” One example of this phenomenon is the rise of a global political economy—ena-
bled by the advent of sophisticated technologies, the expeditious transfer of global finances, and
rapid human mobility across historically impervious geopolitical boundaries—which has led to the
creation of a new system of market dynamics. Even national borders have increasingly lost their
boundary function as multinational corporations have begun to usurp and exercise power that had
traditionally fallen within the remit of state governments (Trouillot, 2003). As such, economic
practices of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption can no longer be conveniently
examined at single sites as if those sites are autopoietic. For this reason, conventional ethnography,
which may not be overly concerned with critiques cast by postmodern theory, finds that its object
of study often slips away on threads of a cultural web that quickly expands beyond a single site
(Falzon, 2016). In abridging the sentiments of his field that had begun to ferment as early as the
1990s, Metcalf (2001, p. 65) finds that there was “a growing concern among anthropologists that
[their] material was rapidly outrunning [their] methods.”
Inspired by the cultural shifts engendered by postmodernism and globalization, multi-sited eth-
nography offers fieldwork practices that build upon the rich, nuanced tradition of conducting eth-
nography and yet expands its lens “to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and
identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus, 1995, p. 96). Contrary to conventional ethnography in
which staying in a single site for extended periods of time was considered essential, the essence of
multi-sited ethnography is following. Marcus (1995) provides several examples for this mode of
conducting ethnographic research: following the people, the thing, the metaphor, the story, the
biography, the conflict, or (as will be captured in the vignette we offer below) the discourse. As
such, the multi-sited ethnographer is on the move, often paying multiple visits to several geo-
graphically dispersed sites and continuously juxtaposing the collected data from one site against
another. The research design of multi-sited projects pivots “around chains, paths, threads, conjunc-
tions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal,
physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connections among sites”
(Marcus, 1995, p. 105). It is precisely these connections that serve as the unit of analysis for studies
adopting this method (Green, 1999).
The emphasis on following, however, should not be interpreted as wholly losing the immersion
aspect that is at the crux of the ethnographic method. Multi-sited ethnography is still ethnography;
accordingly, it needs the patience, commitment, and a certain embeddedness in the field to be able
to recount and reconstruct the lifeworlds under study. In other words, the practice of Geertz’s clas-
sic concept of thick description that has been the core of ethnography is not to be lost; rather, it
turns into “ethnography through thick and thin” (Marcus, 2011, p. 21). The multi-sited ethnogra-
pher must act strategically to select which sites should be treated “thickly” and which ones “thinly”
depending on the phenomenon under study. This foregrounds the role of theory as well as field-
work pragmatics in balancing between the thick and the thin.
To date, multi-sited ethnography has been employed in a wide variety of contexts, some of
which lend themselves to this empirical approach in more obvious ways than do others. On the
more obvious end of the continuum, migration studies have extensively used multi-sited ethnogra-
phy as researchers sought to follow migrants in different sites to make sense of the migration
experience (Fitzgerald, 2006). But the more interesting advantages of multi-sited ethnography lie
in the non-obvious applications of this method, where the object of study is not multi-sited to begin
with and connections to other sites are not clear at the onset. As an example, consider Bestor’s
(2001) ethnographic study of Atlantic bluefin tuna trade in Tokyo’s Tsukiji wholesale market. To
understand the interactions of meanings, practices, processes, and social forms in the political
economy of this trade, Bestor followed the fish. The study took him
[T]o the auction floors of the Tsukiji market, on docks in New England, into hearing rooms in
Washington, D.C., to trade shows in Boston, into markets in Seoul, aboard supply boats in the Straits of
Gibraltar, and inside refrigerated warehouses at Narita’s airfreight terminals, among many other places.
(Bestor, 2001, p. 78)
This multi-sited ethnography enabled Bestor to shed light on the intricate processes underpin-
ning cognate phenomena, such as the North American sushi boom.
Within MOS specifically, Prasad et al. (2011) offer an exemplar of multi-sited ethnography in
their study of the design and the implementation of workplace diversity management programs.
While their initial focus was on diversity management practices in the Canadian petroleum and
insurance industries, they followed the diversity management discourse in the industries, which
expanded their study into new sites. This approach led them to study a number of diversity consult-
ants and trainers who were engaged in offering programs and workshops, which in turn led them
to a diversity conference in Philadelphia and a host of educational and promotional material such
as fliers, brochures, case studies, and videos used by diversity trainers. This multi-sited ethno-
graphic study elucidated “a number of themes coalescing around elements of the discourse of
fashion,” which included “the perceived value of following managerial trends, the role of external
consulting firms in designing cutting-edge diversity programs, local organizational disenchant-
ment with ‘brand-name’ diversity programs, and so forth” (p. 709).
It should be acknowledged that while following is a central theme to multi-sited ethnography,

it is not unproblematic. Van Duijn (2020) observes that following is neither a clean nor a linear
process. It is usually not clear as to the path a researcher is to follow and, as importantly, the
paths to unfollow. Choices must be made by the researcher during the data collection process,
which will, ultimately, inform which narratives are captured and which narratives are ignored.
As such, Van Duijn advises multi-sited ethnographers to: (1) carefully delimit the fields to follow,
(2) unfollow the fields with an attitude of reflexivity, and (3) sensibly follow guiding questions
and concepts (p. 292).
Multi-sited Ethnography for Performativity Research

As described above, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced in MOS research. Some have
referred to it by name (Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020; McConn-Palfreyman, Mangan, & McInnes,
2022; Prasad et al., 2011; Van Duijn, 2020; Van Maanen, 2010), while others have used its tenets
without explicitly naming it (Lok & de Rond, 2013). With that said, the method’s utility has not yet
been specifically leveraged in MOS research on performativity. In this section, we make a case for
methodologically applying multi-sited ethnography to empirical research on performativity. Our
argument is that the core strengths of multi-sited ethnography correspond to the major methodo-
logical challenges that MOS research on performativity encounters pertaining to breadth and
depth. The cross-synergies between the analytical mechanism of performativity with affordances
of multi-sited ethnography as a method are summarized in Tables 1 and 2.
Addressing breadth through multi-sited ethnography

Multi-sited ethnography provides a way out of the problem of breadth in performativity research
by centering the idea of following and underscoring the need to stay open to expanding the field-
work into multiple sites as the study progresses (Marcus, 1995). Contrary to most other methodolo-
gies that delimit the scope of study from the outset and foreclose opportunities of chasing the
object of study into unanticipated territories, multi-sited ethnography encourages researchers to
take adventurous paths and enter multiple rabbit holes. This is particularly significant for research
on performativity because, as mentioned earlier, performative circuits often expand beyond what
is presumed to be the relevant context for study. In Table 1, we highlight some methodological
affordances of multi-sited ethnography that are particularly useful for tackling the breadth
problem.
Mobile rather than stationary focus. Unpacking performativity circuits implies following threads of
meaning and practice as they travel beyond the taken-for-granted understanding of research par-
ticipants (i.e., beyond the understanding of the “locals” or the “natives” situated at one site). Multi-
sited ethnography focuses on mobility. This focus on mobility entails two elements. First, modes
of data collection do not tie the researcher to one site for too long. Multi-sited ethnographies typi-
cally take the form of “informant work” (i.e., conducting interviews with research participants) and
heavily rely on interviews rather than field participation or observation (Hannerz, 2003). Inter-
views, which are likely to be in the form of informal and loosely ordered conversations, provide
the most efficient way of gathering information for a researcher who is on the go and seeking to
identify a social phenomenon manifest of multiple different spaces and/or actors. The performativ-
ity of cultural/symbolic constructions occur through fast travels of symbols in different contexts,
which can only be studied when methodological tools are adept to mobility. The focus on inter-
views is a departure from the heavy reliance on participant observation of traditional ethnography
Table 1. How multi-sited ethnography helps address the problem of breadth.
The problem of breadth:

Researchers need to follow the chain of representations associated
with their object of study into multiple, sometimes unusual and
ephemeral arenas, because that is where performative circuits are
best revealed
Citationality: Agencement:
Signs take their meaning by Agency is originated in
citing other signs that often assemblages of a wide range of
stretch in time and space symbolic and material elements
beyond predefined boundaries that are often beyond one site
Follow:
Following the people, the thing, the metaphor, the story, the biography, or the conflict into multiple
geographically dispersed sites and continuously juxtaposing the collected data
Mobile focus: Following threads of citation Following heterogeneous
Focus on following threads of through “informant work”; sociomaterial elements as
meaning and practice as they relying on interviews and their particular arrangements
travel beyond the taken-for- mediated forms of data emerge through “informant
granted understanding of the collection rather than field work”; relying on interviews and
“locals” or “natives” situated participation or face-to-face mediated forms of data collection
in one site observation. rather than field participation or
face-to-face observation.
Translocal construction: Following threads of citation Following heterogeneous
Focus on studying translocally through collecting data on sociomaterial elements as their
constructed phenomena translation, interpretation, and particular arrangements emerge
that originates not only from appropriation of signs across through collecting data on
within sites but also from boundaries, and analyzing data translation, interpretation, and
the network of relationships to deconstruct translocally appropriation processes across
between sites originated identities and boundaries, and analyzing data
practices. to deconstruct identities and
practices.
and, to be sure, there is a trade-off here. The mobile researcher who relies primarily on interviews
does not gain the same level of world-encompassing understanding and “feel for the field” as their
traditional counterparts who stay and observe a field for extended periods. However, we contend
that the type of knowledge ascertained through tracking-information from quick interviews is espe-
cially conducive for empirical studies on performativity.
The second aspect of the focus on mobility in multi-sited ethnography alludes to mediated
forms of data collection. Multi-sited ethnographies are often “polymorphous engagements,” which
means studying informants “across a number of dispersed sites, but also doing field work by tele-
phone and email, collecting data eclectically in many different ways from a disparate array of
sources, attending carefully to popular culture, and reading newspapers and official documents”
(Hannerz, 2003, p. 212). This has become more critical in studying current-day organizational life
because people are increasingly relying on digitally mediated encounters in conducting their work
and life. As such, ethnographers must leverage new modes of being co-present with informants by
leveraging digital artefacts (Akemu & Abdelnour, 2020). As Akemu and Abdelnour illuminate,
being able to trace mediated relations will be a key feature of MOS research on performativity due
to the ethnographer’s limited capacity to be physically present in multiple sites simultaneously so
Table 2. How multi-sited ethnography helps address the problem of depth.
The problem of depth:

Researchers need to criticize established ways of understanding
and researching with the intent to question taken-for-granted
assumptions, counter the reification of objects, and raise
uncomfortable questions about apparently banal things
Subject formation: Intra-activity of matter:

The subject is an effect of Separate entities do not exist
actions and structures but come to existence through
entanglement of agencies
Rich, nuanced, meaning-centered investigation:
Immersing in the symbolic/cultural world that is under investigation and unearth the underlying webs of
identities, relations, and practices
Field formation: Investigating how being is Investigating how different
Include the relevant fields or an effect of doing through entities come to existence
sites as objects of study that extraction of the binary through extraction of the
are in continuous formation oppositions that create and binary oppositions that create
in conjunction with one sustain fields and sites such as and sustain distinctions and
another consciousness, identity, and boundaries in matter.
body.
Focused understanding: Investigating how being is Investigating how different
Pursue a focused an effect of doing through entities come to existence
understanding of the linkages purposeful sampling of data through purposeful sampling of
between multiple local sources on ecologies of data sources on agencies that
ecologies of activities as activities that bring about create and sustain distinctions
they bring about a cultural/ subjects. and boundaries in matter.
symbolic construction rather
than a holistic understanding
of lifeworlds
as to observe how cultural/symbolic constructions are formed, reformed, and performed at diffused
sites. This necessitates the use of mediated forms of data collection to juxtapose what happens at
one site against what happens at multiple other sites.
To study citationality, this focus on mobility enables researchers to follow threads of citation
across site boundaries. For example, in their multi-sited ethnographic study of marriage migration
to Europe, Scheel and Gutekunst (2019) followed the citations of bodily practices that perform
national borders and marriage migration. Threads of citation were stretched from “street-level
bureaucrats, bureaucratic routines like interrogating binational couples, verifying the authenticity
of supporting documents, archiving files and so on” to how “binational couples, in turn, prepare for
their interview, provide the requested paperwork, complete application forms and so forth” (p.
854). The authors had difficulty gaining access to participants in such stretched-out sites, so they
relied on a limited number of research participants. They were also advised by their participants to
look up the term “bezness” on the internet, specifically on the webpage 1001 stories. The digital
data on the internet, in conjunction with how those stories were consulted by European consular
staff, were instrumental in unpacking the practices that constitute “doing border.”
Similarly, to study agencement, the focus on mobility makes it possible for researchers to follow
heterogeneous sociomaterial elements as their particular agentic arrangements emerge in diffused
sites. For example, Soutjis, Cochoy, and Hagberg (2017) conducted a multi-sited ethnography to
understand why electronic shelf labels (ESLs) have not become ubiquitous despite their long his-
tory and many benefits. They studied several retail stores in Sweden and the United States, relying
on interviews with research participants as their primary mode of data collection. They also used a
host of mediated forms of data collection including photos of those pages in journals and maga-
zines where the evolution of ESLs was documented as well as videotapes of some retail stores.
This combination enabled the authors to follow the agencies, both human (manufacturers, retailers,
advertisers) and non-human (price display systems, pricing algorithms) that collectively culmi-
nated in price agencement.
Translocal rather than local construction. The problem of breadth in performativity research occurs
because the processes of symbolic/cultural construction are not bounded to one local site. Instead,
these processes are interwoven in the space between multiple sites. Multi-sited ethnography is
suited for empirical research on performativity because it specifically caters to studying such trans-
locally constructed phenomena. As Hannerz (2003) notes (p. 206), multi-sited ethnographers
“draw on some problem, some formulation of a topic, which is significantly translocal, not to be
confined within some single place.” Accordingly, “[t]he sites are connected with one another in
such ways that the relationships between them are as important for this formulation as the relation-
ships within them; the fields are not some mere collection of local units” (p. 206).
Researchers must collect data not only from within sites but also from the network of relation-
ships between sites. In methodological terms, this entails collecting data on how the meanings
associated with the phenomenon of interest travel across multiple sites, which requires particular
attention to processes of translation, interpretation, and appropriation (Ekström, 2006). In the con-
text of energy infrastructure, Silvast and Virtanen (2019) uncover performativity of energy markets
through studying distribution of assemblages of what they call “framings” and “tamings” across
multiple sites. Given the nuanced and contextualized understanding needed for ethnographic
investigations of translation, interpretation, and appropriation, this work often takes a collective
form. For Silvast and Virtanen’s study, a team of researchers with different backgrounds and com-
petencies collaborated in making sense of the performative nature of energy markets. This collec-
tive mode of conducting an ethnographic investigation is contrary to the single-authored articles
based on traditional ethnographic fieldwork (for further information on team-based ethnography,
see Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, & Cabantous, 2015).
Another methodological aspect of translocal construction in multi-sited ethnography material-
izes in data analysis, where data from multiple sites are juxtaposed and analyzed to reveal how the
phenomenon of interest is performed translocally. This makes it critical for the data analysis and
the data collection processes to commence contemporaneously; ensuring that the emerging analyti-
cal questions can be followed and attended to empirically. The analysis also pays particular atten-
tion to the translocal effects on the identities and the practices that may appear pure and discrete at
first sight. This is wholly in line with how performativity research interrogates seemingly fixed and
seamless categories to excavate underlying performative circuits. Accordingly, the research agenda
on performativity can be equipped with what multi-sited ethnography offer in terms of revealing
translocal constitutive relations.
To study citationality, translocal construction provides a way to follow threads of citation as
signs get translated, interpreted, and appropriated across boundaries of different localities. It ena-
bles researchers to deconstruct translocally originated identities and practices, which helps in
uncovering their performative origin. Berg (2007) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of com-
municative practices among Peruvian migrants in the US to conceptualize how categories such as
self and community are performed. A collectivity of Urcumarquinos in Washington DC and subur-
ban Maryland comes into existence not through any material connection to Urcumarca (a
pseudonym of a Peruvian village), but rather through chains of citation across diffused localities.
She shows “how new and old practices have blended and as a whole contributed to the constitution
of new kinds of translocal and transnational collectivities” (p. 9).
To study agencement, translocal construction enables researchers to follow heterogeneous soci-
omaterial elements across boundaries as their particular agentic arrangements emerge and lead to
particular identities and practices. In her multi-sited ethnography of global value chains in Ghana
and Peru, Niebuhr (2016, p. 37) investigates performativity by focusing on “the power of market
models to gradually construct the realities they attempt to describe.” In doing so, she shows that the
marketization agencement is a translocal field of power built upon the basic module of translation,
which is ultimately predicated on the qualification and singularization of a product. As she writes:
“This occurs when a product is alienated from its original context, is made calculable and. . .its
properties are defined and associated with an economic, ecologic, or other value” (p. 34).
In this section, we illuminated how multi-sited ethnography provides an effective approach for
addressing the problem of breadth in empirical studies of performativity. Focusing on the notions
of citationality and agencement as markers for breadth in performativity research, we highlighted
two core elements of multi-sited ethnography: mobile focus and translocal construction. These ele-
ments enable researchers to achieve needed breadth.
Addressing depth through multi-sited ethnography

Multi-sited ethnography provides a rich, nuanced, and meaning-centered method that helps in
overcoming the problem of depth in performativity research. Employing ethnographic research
practices at every site enables researchers to immerse themselves in the cultural/symbolic world
that is being studied and unearth its underlying webs of identities, relations, and practices. This is
of much importance for performativity phenomena since, as we discussed earlier, explication of
performative effects demands particular attention to how people conduct themselves and make
sense of the world through symbolic and cultural means. Table 2 offers a summary.
Focused rather than deep understanding. The cultural/symbolic constructions that constitute the
phenomenon of interest in performativity research are embedded in structures beyond their tran-
sient instantiations. To illuminate their performative character requires a deep understanding of
how they figure in these structured sets of meanings, but does not necessarily require a deep under-
standing of their lifeworld in its entirety. Researchers engaged in empirical studies on performativ-
ity must, proverbially speaking, dive down into the sea of meanings and, at the same time, avoid
drowning. This is the combination afforded by multi-sited ethnography—it is, on one hand, ethno-
graphic and thus concerned with deep understanding and, on the other hand, characterized by
selectiveness and incompleteness. The selectiveness feature highlights that the empirical researcher
must select the focus of inquiry. This is a conscious selection that entails including certain sites
while excluding other sites. As multi-sited ethnographers have observed, “a recurrent characteristic
of multi-site ethnography [is] that site selections are to an extent made gradually and cumulatively,
as new insights develop, as opportunities come into sight, and to some extent by chance” (Hannerz,
2003, p. 207). The incompleteness feature highlights that the goal is not to study an entire culture
and way of life as traditional ethnographers do, but to understand the linkages between multiple
local ecologies of activities as they bring about a cultural/symbolic construction. In other words, it
is incompleteness by design.
Rather than seeking deep understanding, multi-sited ethnography attempts to ascertain focused
understanding. To do so, they engage in purposeful sampling with respect to participants, docu-
ments, and observation domains. The logic is to focus on those sources of data that are particularly
information-rich with respect to the aim of the study. As an empirical study progresses, researchers
continuously adjust their focus and use their judgment to decide where to dig further.
To study subject formation, a focused understanding guides the data collection toward the ecol-
ogies of activities that bring about subjects—to capture how being is an effect of doing. Coffin
(2017) conducted a multi-sited ethnography to understand how LGBT+ groups in Manchester
emerge as place consumers and shift between different formations of their place consumer subjec-
tivities. The author selected four formalized leisure groups and followed them in their regular
meetings in different places. The research does not go into much detail about the various aspects of
the lifeworlds of these groups other than their choice and experience of place. So, while it is an
ethnographic study that captures the layered meanings associated with place, it does not offer a
comprehensive understanding of the studied LGBT+ groups.
To study intra-activity, a focused understanding makes way for investigating how different enti-
ties come into existence through agencies that create and sustain distinctions and boundaries in
matter. Dudhwala (2016) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of a group called Quantified Self
(QS) to understand self-making through those kinds of self-quantifying technologies that have
become popular in recent years (e.g., wearables). Her research uncovers how self-quantifying tech-
nologies are agential intra-actions through which the self is discursively performed.
Methodologically speaking, her research was not aimed at describing the entire lifeworld of QS
members; it was rather focused only on the intra-action of selected aspects of self-quantification—
numbers and visualizations—with how the self is (re)done.
Fieldwork to understand field formation. Performativity research entails unpacking the processes that
maintain seemingly fixed and settled cultural/symbolic constructions, including the very catego-
ries of field or site. Instead of taking the field as a bounded space with clear boundaries and durable
characteristics, performativity researchers make sense of the field through an engagement with
how it is (per)formed. This problematizes depth as it confounds the relations between the researcher
and the researched. It prevents the researcher from settling in any given field and getting comfort-
able within that field. Multi-sited ethnography attends to this uncomfortable subject position as it
challenges the ontological primacy of site boundaries and provides the researcher with the neces-
sary vantage point for understanding how fields are in continuous formation in conjunction with
one another. On this point, Hine (2007, p. 669) argues that multi-sited ethnography helps us “to
pursue the ways in which science is practiced across sites and the ways in which it practices sites.”
Highlighting field formation implies including the relevant fields or sites as objects of study.
This methodologically translates into paying particular attention to “binaries” (such as public ver-
sus private, personal versus professional, sacred versus profane) that sustain articulations of bor-
ders and boundaries (Fortun, 2016). Binary oppositions play a key structuring role in the narratives
that form, reform, and perform fields. As such, data collection must extract which binary opposi-
tions are underlying the established demarcations between what is in and what is out of the corre-
sponding field, and what brings about and gives force to those binaries. Bhattacharjee (2018)
conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study of visitors to the Scottish island of Iona and found the
role of binaries such as religious/secular and tourist/pilgrim in the formation of specialness by visi-
tors to the location.
To study subject formation, methodological attention to field formation enables extraction of
the binary oppositions that create and sustain fields and sites such as consciousness, identity, and
body. In a recent study, Hailwood (2020) conducted a multi-sited ethnography of a secondary
school mindfulness program called ‘.b’ in the UK. The author demonstrates how mindfulness sites
of practice and interpretation are constituted “by binaries of what is more/less true, authentic, real:
being/doing, sensing/thinking, present/absent” (p. 57). This paves the way to analyze subject
formation among the children for whom the .b curriculum is designed and delivered. The author
reveals that while mindfulness is often presented as a healing for the divided self of modernity, the
binaries such as nature/culture, mind/body, and self/other are still reverberated throughout contem-
porary interpretations of mindfulness practices.
To study intra-activity, methodological attention to field formation provides an entrance into
extracting the binary oppositions that create and sustain distinctions and boundaries in matter. This,
in turn, enlightens how different entities come into existence. Jokinen and Nordstrom (2020) ani-
mate this idea in their study of new literacies in a technology-assisted learning environment. They
reconceptualize their ethnographic study “as ‘field’ and ‘nonfield’ cannot be separated anymore as
they are constantly implicated with each other” (p. 642). This enables them to see new fields
formed in the course of their ethnography and to make sense of human–machine performative
entanglements.
In this section, we argued that multi-sited ethnography allows researchers to overcome the prob-
lem of depth in empirical studies on performativity. We focused on notions of subject formation
and intra-activity of matter as vivid manifestations of the need for depth in performativity research
and we highlighted two core elements of multi-sited ethnography: field formation and focused
understanding. These elements offer a way for researchers to achieve needed depth. To animate our
argument, we now turn to an illustrative vignette from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory
of the West Bank. The vignette captures how concerns related to breadth and depth are remedied
through multi-sited ethnography.
Illustrative Vignette: Performativity and Multi-sited Ethnography

in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
One of the authors conducted extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Israel and the occu-
pied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. At the onset, he intended to study the very broad ques-
tion: How do organizations survive under precarious political conditions? (Prasad, 2019). The
following vignette is drawn from the study. To acknowledge and preserve the ethnographer’s van-
tage-point, and consistent with anthropological tradition of writing ethnography, first-person voice
is used in presenting the vignette.
***
I found the West Bank to offer a picturesque landscape, replete with hills and valleys that seam-
lessly flow between metropolitan centers, fertile farmlands that appear to extend to infinity, and
fields of trees yielding the most potently delicious olives. However, as I traveled from the twin
cities of Al-Bireh and Ramallah (usually my departure point) to other major cities and villages
within the West Bank, I quickly became witness to the deleterious conditions under which
Palestinians conduct daily life.
The hills of the West Bank are punctuated by red-roofed structures that signify Israeli settle-
ments. Abrogating any notion of Palestinian self-determination, these are areas within the geo-
graphical boundaries of the West Bank that are preserved solely for Israeli-Jewish settlers. The
roads used to access these settlements are likewise reserved for settlers, only further codifying
feelings of closure and segregation in the region.
Visits to the small villages told an even more devastated story. Grounds were littered with rem-
nants of Israeli artillery used to violently repress Palestinian subjects—and to maintain Israeli
hegemony in all aspects of social life. Friday afternoons, following Islamic prayers, seemed to be
especially popular times for the incitement of violence against Palestinians and their property. It
was not uncommon to see homes with windows shot out, young men and boys walking with an
uneasy—though poignantly familiar—gait after becoming prey to the might of the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF), and bright fencing used to demarcate the Israeli confiscation of parcels of land that
had once belonged to Palestinian families for generations.
What remained most ubiquitous in the context were the myriad mobility restrictions. The
approximately 2,200 square miles that constitute the West Bank is awash with hundreds of check-
points, which require Israeli security screening and clearance before travel is permitted. There are
also what are referred to as flying checkpoints—checkpoints which suddenly appear anywhere,
anytime, and without any prior notice (Alvi, Prasad, & Segarra, 2019; Khoury & Prasad, 2016).
The time and the energy involved with crossing the maze of checkpoints render travel between
West Bank cities, which are relatively close in geographical proximity, to appear more comparable
to crossing borders between countries elsewhere (Prasad, 2014a, 2014b). For example, on one
occasion when I had to travel from Ramallah to Nablus—cities separated merely by some 22
miles—it had taken me in excess of three hours. I was required to pass through multiple orches-
trated checkpoints between the two cities as well as flying checkpoints within those cities.
Depending on where one lives in relation to where one works or attends school, these checkpoints
may have to be crossed on a daily basis for local residents. These are just some of the wretched
conditions of a twenty-first-century military occupation.
As I commenced fieldwork and witnessed firsthand the abject circumstances that constitute life
under military occupation, I asked Palestinians what they believed to be the underlying reason for
Israel to erect a system of occupation that render everyday life so challenging. I posed the open-
ended question: “Why do you think Israel makes life generally, and doing business specifically, so
difficult for Palestinians?” Much to my surprise, I received a consistent response from Palestinians.
I was told repeatedly that the military occupation can be attributed to one, and only one, reason:
“They [Israelis] want the land without the people.”
What struck me most about the discourse that had emerged during my fieldwork was its cohe-
siveness and repetition. Indeed, it appeared that regardless of who I was speaking with in the West
Bank—whether local entrepreneurs, heads of NGOs, analysts at international donor agencies, dip-
lomats of foreign embassies, ministers in the reigning Palestinian government, or leaders at social
movement collectives—the discourse remained intact. Given the emergence of the reified dis-
course, I decided to follow it to see how it manifested in the identities, the practices, and the imagi-
nations of the individuals with whom I interacted during my days in the field. The decision to
follow this discourse in multiple sites made my work characteristically a multi-sited ethnography.
I followed the discourse by asking questions such as “who exactly?”, “why?”, “to what extent?”,
“since when?”, “until when?”, “how do you know?”, and by following the trail of clues. Ultimately,
this led me to travel throughout the West Bank to interview relevant research participants, gather
copious amounts of multi-sited ethnographic data, and collect germane artefacts. I investigated the
past (through spoken memories, written memoirs, and archival data), the present (through observa-
tions, interviews, and limited participation), and the future (through subsequent visits and follow-
up interviews) with those who had connections to the discourse regardless of the site(s) at which
they were located. One specific tale from my multi-sited ethnography is particularly revelatory for
empirically unravelling performativity and, concomitantly, redressing issues of breadth and depth
related to citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity.
During my first round of fieldwork in the region in 2009, I interviewed a Palestinian woman
named Noor (a pseudonym)—the co-owner of a small enterprise, which she operated alongside her
husband. Noor was born in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and experienced firsthand life
under military occupation. She moved to the US where she attended university and, while there,
she met her Palestinian husband. She and her husband eventually became American citizens and
settled into living as what she called “an all-American family.” During a visit “home,” Noor and
her husband decided to return to the West Bank permanently and to raise their young family there.
As she explained to me:
We both went to university in California. We came to visit (Palestine) and the atmosphere and the culture
and the way people handled the occupation then was so overwhelming. We felt, what are we doing in a
country that’s not ours? We should be here. We should be part of this [resistance] and we decided to come
back. And, I still believe that those times were good times in terms of the Palestinian identity, so to speak.
There was a lot of unity within the people.
Noor further elaborated that “this is our home and that’s how it felt. It felt more home here than
any other time in all our life.”
At the time I first met Noor, her daughter had just graduated from a West Bank high school and
was to commence college at a highly prestigious private university in the US later that fall. During
my interview with Noor, she described to me the difficulties that her daughter routinely encoun-
tered when doing what, in other geographical contexts, would be the most mundane of tasks. She
offered the example of the logistical challenges that met her daughter while she traveled back and
forth between home and school. As Noor explained, her daughter often encountered various road
closures and flying checkpoints erected by the IDF. These physical elements of the military occu-
pation would often significantly delay Noor’s daughter’s commute to her classes. It was certainly
not outside the norm for her to miss entire days of school after being prevented from crossing
certain checkpoints. This resonated with my own experiences as I encountered similar blockades
and delays on countless occasions though, admittedly, as a non-Palestinian and the holder of a
Canadian passport, I was meaningfully less encumbered from traveling between geographical sites
within the West Bank than are local Palestinians. Thus, in approaching my fieldwork as a multi-
sited engagement, I was in a position to corporeally relate what I was hearing from Noor with what
I was experiencing myself as I traveled between West Bank cities.
Noor recalled an especially traumatizing incident that her family experienced during the Second
Intifada, a so-called uprising that occurred between 2000 and 2005. At the height of the Intifada,
the family home was commandeered by a heavily militarized unit of the IDF and the family was
relegated to a small space within their compound. Noor and her family were essentially imprisoned
within their own home. As armed members of the IDF moved around their home with impunity,
Noor described how her daughters lived in ubiquitous fear during that period, not knowing whether
they would escape the event unharmed.
Given the challenges emanating from the military occupation that Noor’s daughter experienced
growing up, Noor contemplated whether her daughter would return to the Occupied Palestinian
Territories once she finished her undergraduate studies in the US. As she explained to me during
our first interview:
If my daughter were to say I’m coming back, sure we’re still here. We have the house—we’re not going
anywhere. She’s always welcome to come back. But I don’t really think that once she graduates from MIT
that that’s going to be the first thing on her mind—to come back here.
Coincidentally, I returned to conduct a second round of fieldwork in the West Bank in late
2013—shortly after Noor’s daughter had graduated from university. I had the opportunity to re-
interview Noor in the very office where I had interviewed her some four years earlier. Noor’s state-
ment from 2009 proved prophetic.
When I spoke with Noor in 2013, she told me that just a few months before her daughter was to
graduate from university, she told Noor that she wanted to stay in the US to attend graduate school.
Noor empathized with her daughter’s decision to stay in the US, given all that she encountered
growing up under the architecture of military occupation in the West Bank. In proffering astute
maternal advice, Noor told her daughter that if she wants to pursue graduate school, then she
should do just that; however, she should not use graduate school as an excuse to remain in the US.
Noor further advised her daughter that she would support her decision to live where she felt most
happy and, therefore, her daughter does not need any reason beyond that to remain in the US and
not return to the West Bank.
This illustrative case captures the performative nature of the discourse that I was following. By
performative, my intention is not to negate the material conditions of military occupation. Indeed,
in following the tenets of multi-sited ethnography, which required me to regularly travel between
Israel and the West Bank, and between militarily segregated localities within the West Bank itself,
I personally encountered many of the impediments to mobility—and the symbolic as well as the
physical violence emanating thereof—from the military occupation conveyed by Palestinians.
Rather, the point that merits underscoring is how the discourse on the military occupation was
performative insofar as it engendered the very outcome it was purporting to explicate.
In terms of the Palestinian discourse, “they want the land without the people,” Noor’s story
about her daughter captures the emergence of citationality—namely, the discursive actualization of
the very belief among Palestinians that the harsh conditions of their life are intentionally designed
to make them leave their ancestral lands. As a result of this belief, many Palestinians willingly
vacate their land and move to other countries in pursuit of a better life for themselves and for their
children. As more Palestinians flee the occupied territories and experience the contrast between
their living conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories versus more hospitable locations
elsewhere, the discourse gets cited and becomes reified as a matter of fact. As the anecdote shows,
even when a Palestinian such as Noor’s daughter mentions other reasons for not returning “home,”
other Palestinians tend to interpret that decision through the lens of, “they want the land without
the people.” Noor’s suggestion that her daughter was using graduate school as a pretense to remain
in the US alludes to this notion. As citationality would suggest, these dynamics have the double
effect of perpetuating the discourse and strengthening its self-fulfilling character. What helped me
in studying citationality in this case was the mobile focus of multi-sited ethnography, whereby I did
not immerse myself in one bounded locality and instead followed the Palestinian discourse, which
led me to informants living in various cities and villages who only substantiated the sentiment.
At the same time, Noor’s story reveals the discourse to be performative insofar as it reveals the
agencement of state violence. Indeed, perceived security threats to the Israeli state (and to its citi-
zens) are enacted—which functioned as precursors to the Second Intifada—when the state engages
in activities that terrorize Palestinians. In this anecdote, this form of state violence is represented
by Noor’s family home being commandeered by military force and the family being sequestered to
only a small part of the home. The Israeli position that portrays the Palestinian subject as a ubiqui-
tous threat to their existence results in the Israeli state taking material actions to ensure their peo-
ple’s security from Palestinian threat. As such, for the material conditions of military occupation to
be rationalized, political rhetoric that conflates the Palestinian subject as an ontological threat to
the Israeli state must be preserved. In short, Israeli actions in the name of maintaining security
function to create the conditions for more insecurity, which in turn only justifies the need for fur-
ther security measures. What conceptualized agencement of state violence in this case was the
translocal construction of the discourse, which multi-sited ethnography revealed. I studied how
heterogeneous sociomaterial elements of state violence are translated, interpreted, and appropri-
ated across the apartheid walls that segregate Palestinians from Israelis.
Relatedly, I saw that the intra-activity of matter is also unfolding. Namely, there are social and
material boundaries in place that make certain things and categories come into existence. The
belief that positions the Palestinian as an ontological threat leads not only to the orchestration of
the physical elements of the military occupation (i.e., commandeering private property, check-
points), but also to an elaborate set of social fabrications, which are found in the ideological invo-
cation of terms such as “terrorists”, “active threats”, “potential threats”, “human shields”, and so
on. It is the iterative enactments of military occupation that create separate bodies and assign dif-
ferent resources, pathways, and destinies to them, leaving little hope for peaceful coexistence and,
concomitantly, catalyzing acts of resistance from Palestinians. What helped me in studying intra-
activity in this case was the field formation aspect of multi-sited ethnography, whereby I did not
take the distinction between Palestinians and Israelis for granted; rather, I investigated how binary
oppositions such as us/them and secure/unsecure creates and sustains the distinction.
Before concluding this vignette, two points should be underscored about the utility of multi-
sited ethnography. First, the explication of the performative nature of the discourse would be
untenable had it not been for the methodological tools provided by multi-sited ethnography. For
brevity, here, I draw attention to one particular point: How it was only in following the discourse
that allowed me to learn about how Israelis rationalize what would otherwise be widely considered
an inhumane military occupation. Namely, the discourse that “they want the land without the peo-
ple” made familiar reference to how they perceived Israeli Jews to problematically justify the
physical occupation by exploiting the notion of “security.” As Seema, one of my early Palestinian
research participants, explained to me when I asked her about why she believes the notion of “secu-
rity” is exploited by Israelis:
If you oppress me, what can I do? If you blocked my food and income resource and my land and you killed
my son and put my father in prison, what should I do? Thank you? Say, “please let me live?” Or I will
rebel, and say stop, you can’t do this. Is this the way to keep security? To oppress people? To put them in
a cage? The same with what happened in Gaza. [Israel] left them for months, without food. . .they can’t
leave Gaza. They can’t get proper food, proper water, and many, many problems and now, [they] have to
bomb Gaza because [they’re] saying no. [Gaza is] launching some rockets on Israel and so [they] bomb
[them]. What should they do?
When pressed further to explain what she believed to be Israel’s endgame for maintaining the
seemingly unnecessary, though extremely precarious, conditions of military occupation, Seema
said that Israel seeks to make life so unlivable for Palestinians that they willingly vacate their
land—that is, again, Israel desires, “the land without the people.”
Seema’s words offer evidence of subject formation. Indeed, she identifies how Palestinian sub-
jectivities are pivotally informed by their experiences as an oppressed class of people—this also
helps to explain why Noor and her husband chose to return to the West Bank permanently for, as
Noor described, “the way people handled the occupation then was so overwhelming.” Seema alludes
to how the Palestinian subject’s rebellious identity is the corollary of the conditions of military occu-
pation enacted by the Israeli state that seeks to establish a Palestinian territory devoid of Palestinians
(“you killed my son and put my father in prison”). What enabled me to understand subject formation
was the focused understanding offered by multi-sited ethnography. I did not investigate the entire
lifeworld of Palestinians, but focused only on those sources that revealed how their passive
(oppressed) and active (resisters) subjectivities are formed in relation to the occupation.
Second, the data yielded from following the discourse using multi-sited ethnography was rich in
terms of responding to issues of breadth and depth. Specifically, the data addressed questions of
citationality, agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity. To summarize, in terms of depth, the
study enabled me to gain a nuanced understanding of the symbolic and the physical conditions of
military occupation in the region. In terms of breadth, the study allowed me to explicate the ways in
which the symbolic and the physical conditions of military occupation are reproduced through a
discourse that unfolded at multiple locations over extended periods of time. In sum, both depth and
breadth of ethnographic data were precursors to unravelling performative relations.
Concluding Remarks
As MOS researchers continue their empirical journeys into uncharted territories of performativity,
they require methods adept to explicating such a complex phenomenon. In this article, we argue that
multi-sited ethnography fulfills the mandate as it provides both the breadth and the depth necessary
to study performativity. While most of the recent empirical studies on performativity have already
moved toward ethnographic methods, their contribution is often limited due to inadequate attention
to the problem of breadth. They either use speculative arguments to compensate for lack of data
beyond one site, or avoid the issue from the outset by choosing specific cultural/symbolic construc-
tions whose thread of meanings and practices is relatively locked in one delimited setting (e.g., see
the 2021 special issue of Organization Studies on “Power and performativity as interweaving
dynamics of organizing”). For example, Hultin, Introna, Göransson, and Mähring’s (2022) ethno-
graphic study of subject formation takes place in tented settlements of Syrian refugees in Lebanon
where relations of recognition are naturally restricted to the group who are present in or in touch
with the same camp. Our arguments show that moving toward multi-sited ethnography would pave
the way for inclusion of all cultural/symbolic constructions—especially the important and conse-
quential ones—in empirical studies of performativity. In developing a vignette from a multi-sited
ethnography conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we demonstrate how this method
enabled the researcher to follow the performative circuits that were outside the scope of other meth-
ods. Among other things, it allowed the researcher to experience the consequences of the discourse
he had originally heard about from his research participants, and which he ultimately followed, to
make sense of the discourse’s material actualization in daily life. Moreover, in carefully balancing
considerations of breadth and depth, he found himself in a position to trace instances of citationality,
agencement, subject formation, and intra-activity. Thus, we conclude by calling upon MOS research-
ers invested in the study of performativity to leverage this promising, though still underutilized,
methodological approach.
Despite the discussed strengths and synergies with performativity research, multi-sited ethnog-
raphy has its own potential challenges. It requires more resources in comparison to most other
methods because it often requires a team of trained research collaborators, securing access to mul-
tiple sites, more on-the-go time, and higher travel costs. Researchers also need what Marcus (1995)
calls a character of “circumstantial activism” to take on the appropriate identity/persona in each
site and, then, quickly move to wearing another identity/persona at another site. Researchers must
walk a fine line between site hopping and site staying. Moreover, even with the complexities
involved, the knowledge constructed through this process may not await a welcoming academic
outlet for dissemination as reviewers tend to expect the standards of traditional ethnography from
a study that claims to be ethnographic. These challenges, however, are the kind of battles that any
novel and creative idea had to overcome in the history of science, and should not sway us from
pursuing the unique insights that can be born using multi-sited ethnography.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Senior Editor Ignasi Martí and the three anonymous reviewers, whose very detailed and
constructive comments throughout the review process encouraged us to think more deeply about the implica-
tions of our ideas. Ajnesh Prasad gratefully acknowledges research support from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs program.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Ajnesh Prasad https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4368-1796
Masoud Shadnam https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9642-3531
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Author biographies
Ajnesh Prasad is Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Critical Management Studies. His research
interests focus broadly on gender and diversity issues in organizations, interpretive methods, and social
inequality. He has published some 50 journal articles in outlets such as Academy of Management Learning
and Education, Academy of Management Review, American Behavioral Scientist, Business and Society,
Gender, Work and Organization, Human Relations, Organization, Organization Studies, Sex Roles, and
Work, Employment and Society. He is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning, Associate
Editor of Gender, Work and Organization and Human Relations, and Artefacts Reviews Editor of Organization.
He recently completed a five-year terms as chair of the Critical Management Studies division at the Academy
of Management. Ajnesh earned his PhD in organization studies from York University’s Schulich School of
Business in October 2012.
Masoud Shadnam is a faculty member of the Graduate School of Management and Economics at Sharif
University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. He received his PhD in management and organization studies from
Simon Fraser University in Canada, and subsequently held faculty positions at NEOMA Business School in
France, MacEwan University in Canada, and University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. His research
focuses on moral and cultural aspects of organizational settings from a descriptive perspective drawing pri-
marily on insights from the disciplines of sociology and social theory. His articles have appeared in several
journals including Academy of Management Review, Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Business
Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Cross
Cultural & Strategic Management, Journal of Leadership Studies, and International Review of Sociology.

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Balancing Breadth and Depth

through multi-sited ethnography

The problem of breadth

The problem of depth

It should be acknowledged that while following is a central theme to multi-sited ethnography,

Multi-sited Ethnography for Performativity Research

Addressing breadth through multi-sited ethnography

The problem of breadth:

The problem of depth:

Subject formation: Intra-activity of matter:

Addressing depth through multi-sited ethnography

Illustrative Vignette: Performativity and Multi-sited Ethnography

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