While the recent focus on knowledge has undoubtedly benefited organizational studies, the literature still presents a sharply contrasting and even contradictory view of knowledge, which at times is described as "sticky" and at other times "leaky." This paper is written on the premise that there is more than a problem with metaphors at issue here, and more than accounts of different types of knowledge (such as "tacit" and "explicit") can readily explain. Rather, these contrary descriptions of knowledge reflect different, partial, and sometimes "balkanized" perspectives from which knowledge and organization are viewed. Taking the community of practice as a unifying unit of analysis for understanding knowledge in the firm, the paper suggests that often too much attention is paid to the idea of community, too little to the implications of practice. Practice, we suggest, creates epistemic differences among the communities within a firm, and the firm's advantage over the market lies in dynamically coordinating the knowledge produced by these communities despite such differences. In making this argument, we argue that analyses of systemic innovation should be extended to embrace all firms in a knowledge economy, not just the classically innovative. This extension will call for a transformation of conventional ideas coordination and of the trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective

The global community of qualitative researchers is midway between two extremes, searching for a new middle, moving in several different directions at the same time. Mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically based research, on the one side, renewed calls for social justice inquiry from the critical social science tradition on the other. In the methodological struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, the very existence of qualitative research was at issue. In the new paradigm war, “every overtly social justice-oriented approach to research . . . is threatened with de-legitimization by the government-sanctioned, exclusivist assertion of positivism . . . as the ‘gold standard’ of educational research” (Wright, 2006, pp. 799–800). The evidence-based research movement, with its fixed standards and guidelines for conducting and evaluating qualitative inquiry, sought total domination: one shoe fits all (Cannella & Lincoln, Chapter 5, this volume; Lincoln, 2010). The heart of the matter turns on issues surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice (Torrance, Chapter 34, this volume). In this introductory chapter, we define the field of qualitative research, then navigate, chart, and review the history of qualitative research in the human disciplines. This will allow us to locate this handbook and its contents within their historical moments. (These historical moments are somewhat artificial; they are socially constructed, quasi-historical, and overlapping conventions. Nevertheless, they permit a “performance” of developing ideas. They also facilitate an increasing sensitivity to and sophistication about the pitfalls and promises of ethnography and qualitative research.) A conceptual framework for reading the qualitative research act as a multicultural, gendered process is presented. We then provide a brief introduction to the chapters, concluding with a brief discussion of qualitative research. We will also discuss the threats to qualitative human-subject research from the methodological conservatism movement, which was noted in our Preface. As indicated there, we use the metaphor of the bridge to structure what follows. This volume provides a bridge between historical moments, politics, the decolonization project, research methods, paradigms, and communities of interpretive scholars.

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The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research

Providing a retrospective and prospective overview of organization studies, the Handbook continues to challenge and inspire readers with its synthesis of knowledge and literature. As ever, contributions have been selected to reflect the diversity of the field. New chapters cover areas such as organizational change; knowledge management; and organizational networks.
Part One reflects on the relationship between theory, research and practice in organization studies.
Part Two address a number of the most significant issues to affect organization studies such as leadership, diversity and globalization.
Comprehensive and far-reaching, this important resource will set new standards for the understanding of organizational studies. It will be invaluable to researchers, teachers and advanced students alike.

Institutions and Institutional Work

During the past two decades we have witnessed a rather impressive growth of theoretical innovations and conceptual revisions of epistemological and methodological approaches within constructivist‐qualitative quarters of the social sciences. Methodological discussions have commonly addressed a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing empirical material, yet the critical grounds upon which these were reformulated have rarely been extended to embrace sampling concepts and procedures. The latter have been overlooked, qualifying only as a ‘technical’ research stage. This article attends to snowball sampling via constructivist and feminist hermeneutics, suggesting that when viewed critically, this popular sampling method can generate a unique type of social knowledge—knowledge which is emergent, political and interactional. The article reflects upon researches about backpacker tourists and marginalized men, where snowball sampling was successfully employed in investigating these groups' organic social ne...

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Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research

Introduction - Stuart Hall Who Needs 'Identity'? From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity - Zygmunt Bauman Enabling Identity? - Marilyn Strathern Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies Culture's In-Between - Homi K Bhabha Interrupting Identities - Kevin Robins Turkey/Europe Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is? - Lawrence Grossberg Music and Identity - Simon Frith Identity, Genealogy, History - Nikolas Rose Organizing Identity - Paul du Gay Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management The Citizen and the Man about Town - James Donald

Questions of Cultural Identity

L’espace du désir ou Le « fondement » des Exercices Spirituels

On sait depuis longtemps le role joue par l'Etat monarchique dans la destruction des cultures peripheriques, par l'imposition systematique de la langue francaise dans les actes publics. Alors que l'ordonnance de Villers- Cotterets (1539) ne visait qu'a interdire l'usage du latin et prescrivait celui du « langage maternel francois » — c'est-a-dire laissait place aux idiomes particuliers —, les edits qui suivent l'annexion des provinces nouvellement conquises exigent tous, depuis la moitie du XVIIIe siecle, l'emploi exclusif de la langue francaise. On peut s'interroger cependant sur le but reel que se fixaient de telles directives. Il est evident qu'a Strasbourg l'exclusion linguistique tend, sous la pression des intendants, a devenir le signe de l'exclusion religieuse.

Une ethnographie de la langue: l'enquête de Grégoire sur les patois*

En analysant les Mazarinades (1648-1653), litterature pamphletaire qui a prolifere surtout en 1649 (2 000 pamphlets) et 1652 (1 500), Christian Jouhaud se donne un objet dont le traitement est particulierement delicat. Il entre dans un labyrinthe de textes ephemeres, elliptiques, bourres d'allusions a l'evenement du jour, rompus a toutes les ruses de la controverse, supposes accredites par la place, souvent fictive, qu'ils se donnent dans le debat tout a la fois « convulsif », spectaculaire et commercial (il faut vendre) opposant alors le parti de Conde, celui de Mazarin, et le tiers parti dont Retz se pretendait l'instigateur. Son livre est l'effet d'un choix, qui consiste a faire de l'analyse d'un « cas » historique l'exercice d'une methode. Pour cette raison, il appelle plus de developpements. Il a deux objectifs. D'une part, il cherche a determiner comment lire ces documents. On ne peut supposer que n'importe quel texte est, en histoire, justiciable de la meme methode d'interpretation.

L'expérimentation d'une méthode : les mazarinades de Christian Jouhaud

Entre juin et octobre 1968, l'ordre est revenu. A « l'ivresse » de la prise de parole succede « la gueule de bois ». Dans cet article lumineux, paru en octobre 68 et dont nous republions des extraits, Michel de Certeau previent de l'heritage impossible que represente Mai 68 et des difficultes de la societe francaise a assimiler une rupture culturelle et generationnelle.

Michel de Certeau

Papers

L’espace du désir ou Le « fondement » des Exercices Spirituels

Une ethnographie de la langue: l'enquête de Grégoire sur les patois*

L'expérimentation d'une méthode : les mazarinades de Christian Jouhaud

Pour une nouvelle culture : le pouvoir de parler

Una política de la llengua