Cultural Approach to Organizations

• Ethnography
  • Study of subjects in their own environment
  • Goal = detailed understanding of the circumstances of the few subjects studied

• Ethnographic accounts
  • Descriptive - detail is crucial
  • Interpretive - significance must be determined without gathering broad, statistical information

• Thick description (Geertz, 1973)
  • Methodology of the ethnographer
  • Layers of common meaning
  • Best guess at what a cultural performance means

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