14507: Staying with the Trouble: Conducting Ethnographic Research on Grand Challenges

Organizational scholars have started to care about how we can organize in the face of the grand challenges we encounter. While most empirical work has been focused on explaining why efforts for change fail, some have elected to follow actors who seek to address grand challenges from the inside. Studying such ‘insider activists’ and how they organize is an important element in our collective methodological repertoire to understand how grand challenges can be tackled from within organizations and at the field-level. This PDW specifically focuses on ethnographic approaches to studying such change efforts. Based on Harraway’s (2016) notion of ‘being with’ and ‘staying with the trouble’, we will reflect on the methodological positioning and choices of conducting qualitative, ethnomethodological fieldwork on the work of such insider activists. We offer a framework of three approaches – joining, helping, and following the activists – and their respective challenges. The workshop aims to provide a constructive learning experience by combining an experiential approach about these different forms of ‘being with’ with roundtables focused on participants’ own research. The goal is to help participants reflect on the challenges that this kind of ethnographic fieldwork involves and work through them as part of a community of engaged scholars.