Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive studies of globally oriented corporate managers, the paper explores the "edge of ethnography" at the boundaries of the corporation. It advocates forms of “collaborative complicity”, where multiple engagements with counterparts afford anthropological reflection in corporate worlds.

Paper long abstract:

The paper draws on the author's more than 10 years of experience in engaging anthropologically with management practices and rhetoric in diverse corporations, especially through multisited and multitemporal fieldwork in the "global" light metal solutions provider Hydro (Røyrvik 2011). The paper argues that an "edge of ethnography" in corporate worlds is an ethnography where multiple engagements with informants as collaborators and counterparts, positioned at and through corporate boundaries, form the modus operandi. Actively enacting diverse boundaries the opaque worlds of corporations might stand out, afford empiric observation, and be stitched together. This oblique ethnography is challenging in terms of access, entries and exits, yet offers novel research opportunities, and a potential to "push" the boundaries of both ethnography and the corporation. The classical "insider ethnography" and necessary interplay between "empathy and distancing" that sound fieldwork is premised upon, of gaining access by achieving good rapport, I suggest can be translated into notions of "collaborative complicity" (cf. Marcus 1998). To sustain productive working relationships in fieldwork in corporate worlds, forms of "collaborative complicity" can constructively be formed with the organizational actors who stand to gain or lose from the ethnographic projects. Seeking to transcend the apologetic mode of self-descriptive legitimation for doing ethnography in corporate worlds, the paper rather focuses on the challenges and opportunities these scenes of research afford. As part of this effort the paper seeks to free ethnography from its relegation as a form of method, and reaffirm the importance of theory and ontological reflection in ethnographic practice.