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This content downloaded from 81.140.189.75 on Mon, 18 Jun 2018 09:39:08 UTC
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The Fact of Fiction in "The temptation to form premature theories upon insuffi-
Organizational Ethnog- cient data," remarked Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Mac-
Donald in The Valley of Fear (Baring-Gould, 1967), "is the
raphy
bane of our profession." The same could be said of those
of us conducting social research in organizations since, fol-
John Van Maanen lowing the customary and respected practices of the day,
we tend also to theorize well in advance of our facts thus
allowing for the possibility that the facts that emerge from
our studies are twisted to fit a given theory. Yet, it is still
the case that provisional hypotheses, tentative speculations,
commonsensical hunches, and other tenderly held presup-
positions about the world often represent the best we can
do when attempting to see, grasp, and perhaps decode em-
pirical phenomena. Faced with routine uncertainty and
doubt, the most we can do with or without the scientific
method is to wait for time and fuller knowledge to explode
whatever theoretical constructions we have built.
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period of intimate study and residence in a well-defined
community employing a wide range of observational tech-
niques including prolonged face-to-face contact with mem-
bers of local groups, direct participation in some of the
group's activities, and a greater emphasis on intensive work
with informants than on the use of documentary or survey
data."
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The Fact of Fiction
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questioning the police about the actions they had just taken
(or not taken) was I able to corroborate and elaborate upon
what my informants were telling me. This is simply to say
that my second-order conceptions of the first-order class of
events known to policemen as "call jumping" rested upon
both my talking to the police and observing the contextual
contingencies upon which the use of the label was based.
On the other hand, the understanding of this class of
events carried by my informants rested on their continuing
socialization in the natural setting and the sense of normality
that results from such a process (Van Maanen, 1977). Thus,
the meaning of "call jumping" to an informant was self-
evident and in no need of explanation while to me its mean-
ing was almost totally obscured by my [initial] ignorance of
police work.4
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The Fact of Fiction
ing been first told what to look for. A wink, a blink, or nod is
not merely a fleck of behavior to be described without am-
biguity but is rather a potential sign that must be read as to
what is signified.
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tices (operational data) without merely parroting back the
normative abstractions (presentational data) used by mem-
bers of the studied group to both describe and account for
their behavior. Events bearing on an individual's behavior are
often quite literally hidden from view. For both the
fieldworker and the informant, particular events take on sig-
nificance and meaning insofar as at least one cultural in-
terpretation exists for what is taking place. From this stand-
point, ethnography (and everyday life) is as much "believing
is seeing" as it is "seeing is believing." Inference and trust
are central matters here and therefore evaluating the be-
lievability of what one hears and sees is critical in the ana-
lytic task of separating the operational from the presenta-
tional data.
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The Fact of Fiction
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shops was a thing of the past. However, others in the de-
partment told me the opposite. To check these contradictory
statements, I occasionally "buzzed a clerk" (displayed my
police badge) when paying for certain goods in certain
downtown stores and was rewarded with information as to
who was more knowledgeable among my informants.
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The Fact of Fiction
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of the world." In this case, I was blinded by my own per-
ceptual screen and did not see that persons who regarded
themselves as very independent, self-reliant, and decisive
would, naturally enough, find others who appeared to re-
quire outside help in what were thought to be private and
usually trivial matters to be persons unworthy of human re-
spect.
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The Fact of Fiction
REFERENCES
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Manning, Peter K. 1977 "Experiencing organization." 1978d "Notes on the production of
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