Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing
ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations,
focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and
gaining the trust of an organisation's members. The thirteen
contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an
organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more
'classical' anthropological environments, but that it also poses some
particular challenges to the ethnographer, with barriers including the
ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of
resources and competition between organisations. A number of
organisational contexts - including corporations, EU policy arenas,
think tanks and the public sector - are explored in case studies from
the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.