11718: Behind the Scenes of Highly Cited Organizational Ethnographies: Managing a Research Pipeline

This PDW is aimed at facilitating conversations, knowledge sharing, and connections among scholars who are interested in investigating social phenomena in organizational settings using immersive techniques. Our personal experience and scholarly work on immersive techniques inform us that immersive methods, including organizational ethnography, can be daunting and illusive. With this in mind, our ‘Behind the Scenes’ PDW aims to highlight processes and practices that lead to successful completion of ethnographic and immersive research endeavors that result in interesting and highly cited publications. This year, we are bringing a novel twist to this ongoing and overarching theme: managing new data and your research pipeline as a faculty member. While PhD students have bandwidth and flexibility to devote significant periods of time to data collection, faculty are constrained by teaching, committee, service, and mentoring commitments that can constrain their ability to collect new data. While this issue has been raised in previous ‘Behind the Scenes’ PDWs, this year we hope to devote the session to exploring the strategies and tactics used by successful senior scholars. Thus, through this PDW we address the broad question, ‘what strategies and tactics are useful for supporting ongoing organizational ethnography research programs when transitioning to faculty positions?’ Structured into three interactive segments, the PDW provides participants with the opportunity to hear from and engage in conversations with our panelists and fellow participants. These segments include an open panel discussion during which panelists briefly reflect on their experiences maintaining a robust and impactful research pipeline as a faculty member, a moderated panel discussion addressing questions posed by workshop participants, and themed roundtable discussions allowing small groups of participants to discuss their own work with an expert panelist. The PDW covers both traditional and new methods (such as team and digital ethnography) and addresses issues related to training and supporting young scholars in applying various ethnographic methods in their research. Given the increasing interest in qualitative and mixed-method approaches, the PDW will be of great interest to PhD students, junior scholars, and senior members of the field interested in immersive research methods or whose team members or supervisees require support for their ethnographic research.