1. A view from the inside: Using
ethnography to study social
entrepreneurship
Paul Tracey
Cambridge Judge Business School

2. What is ethnography?
“It involves… participating … in people’s daily lives for an
extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to
what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data
are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of
the study” (Hammersley & Atkinson 1995: 1)
Key features:
- Behaviour is studied in everyday contexts
- Focuses on a small number of cases
- Relies heavily on observation
- Relatively unstructured approach to data collection
- Concerned fundamentally with how individuals and groups
construct meaning

3. A very brief history of ethnography…
• First ‘real’ ethnographies conducted by
anthropologists in the early 20th Century (Malinowski
1929; Radcliffe-Brown 1922) and the ‘Chicago School
of Sociology’ (e.g. Shaw 1930)
• Also has a long tradition in management, but at the
margins
• Organizational ethnography, like qualitative research
more generally, experiencing a renaissance

4. Motivation for my study
Martha Feldman Steven Barley
Aim: To answer Barley’s (2008: 510) call for institutional researchers
to return to the “coalface” of institutions (i.e. to understand the
effects of institutional processes inside organizations), in the
context of social entrepreneurship

5. : A Brief Overview
• Part of the Development Trust Movement
• Established in 2003
• Has been ‘financially sustainable’ since 2007
• 30 FT staff plus around 15 volunteers
• Keystone aims:
- To improve the quality of life for local people
- To support those individuals, groups and communities who experience
disadvantage or social exclusion
- To encourage all communities to participate in local civic life, and take
control of their futures
- As an organization, to be economically self-sufficient

6. Keystone is located in Thetford, Norfolk

7. The Keystone Businesses:

8. The Core Keystone Social Projects:
Thetford Works!
- Adult Work Clubs
- Volunteer to Work
- Pupils with Prospects
Introduction to Keystone.flv

9. So, what did I actually do when I was
at Keystone?
Phase 1: Observation (month 1)
Phase 2: Participation (months 2-6)
Phase 3: More formal data gathering (months 7-9)

10. Some empirical observations that dominate my
field diary entries:
• Making money in poor places is really hard
• Community engagement and accountability seems
almost incompatible with effective organization
• There are major tensions in the local community, with
Keystone caught in the middle
• Are social entrepreneurs ‘heroes’ after all?

11. Preliminary analysis: (1) the microdynamics of
organizational identity
• Institutional theory and organizational identity theory
emphasize “optimal distinctiveness” (Glynn 2008; Gioia et al.
2010)
• But what if you are an organizational form that is only weakly
institutionalized and poorly understood?
• Social ventures can take advantage of the ambiguity
surrounding their form
• Through the strategic use of identity narratives, social
ventures can be “different things to different people”

12. Preliminary Analysis: (2) social entrepreneurship and
the stigmatization problem
• Keystone helps two groups with “spoiled identities” (Goffman
1968):
- (1) The long-term unemployed who have the stigma of
“scroungers”
- (2) Migrant workers who have the stigma of being “foreigners”
and “stealing jobs”
• Keystone’s support of these groups has led to the transfer of stigma
to Keystone itself, threatening its legitimacy
• Parts of the community appear to be judging Keystone in terms of
their own values and belief systems

13. Preliminary Analysis: (3) The microdynamics of
accommodation and settlement
• Migration one of the most important contemporary social issues
• Institutional theorists have largely ignored the fact that people move
across space (Djelick & Quack, 2008) – yet migration has important
institutional effects (e.g. local services, housing and labour markets,
cultural tensions)
• There is a body of work on translation (e.g. Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008) that
considers how practices, organizations and ideas are altered as they move
across space – but nothing on the movement of people
• Important to understand how organizations can act as intermediaries,
helping communities to accommodate new people

14. The challenges of using ethnography to study organizations
in general, and social entrepreneurship in particular
• Access
• Ethnographic time
• Field relations
• What to observe
• Data analysis/developing a theoretical focus
• Betrayal?

15. The advantages of using ethnography to study organizations
in general, and social entrepreneurship in particular
• Business schools offer a terrible vantage point for studying
poverty and inequality!
• Incredible richness in the observational data that are collected
(polyphony; thick description)
• Being immersed in the field allows you to develop a detailed
and nuanced understanding that emphasizes context
• Interviews tend to be of a high quality
• You learn about yourself – ethnography is partly a voyage of
self-discovery!

16. The future: visual/micro ethnography?
Sally Maitlis, UBC Jean Clarke,
University of Leeds

17. Resources for aspiring organizational ethnographers: