From Tales of the Field to Tales of the Future

Abstract

John Van Maanen’s account of the evolution of ethnographic narratives provided far more than insight about classic anthropological and sociological texts. By encouraging qualitative researchers to focus on the rhetorical and political qualities of voice, style, authority, and representations of selves and others, he exposed the often hidden assumptions built into fieldwork and scholarship. It is not too much to say that no other single text has so forcefully shaped and inspired our understanding of qualitative research and narrative writing across the social sciences. Van Maanen’s work inspired two cross-disciplinary projects. One charted the cultural, rhetorical, and narrative influences that constructed classic ethnographic texts; the other created a common cultural code for new explorations of organizations and cultures. One result of those projects is that those of us doing qualitative became more comfortable in our textual diversity if at times challenged to find the appropriate evaluative standards to determine its worth and contribution. We have also embraced, if not fully acted upon, a perceived need to make our scholarship more relevant to diverse publics inside and outside of the academy.