 You can’t report what you don’t know: Methodological considerations of an ethnographer navigating organizational secrecyElise Lobbedez
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: This note reflects on the methodological challenges I faced as an ethnographer navigating organizational secrecy, the conscious suppression of knowledge through practices related to keeping oneself or keeping others ignorant, during my dissertation fieldwork on the French yellow vest movement. In the course of this ethnographic study, I got involved with highly committed people willing to engage in radical actions and high risk activism (McAdam, 1986), ranging from civil disobedience and illicit occupations to collective action based on black bloc tactics (Dupuis-Déri, 2003; Juris, 2005). These activities usually required some degree of clandestinity and organizing practices kept under the radar; groups within the movement often worked hard at keeping certain things invisible and untraceable. As a consequence, the yellow vest organizational attempts frequently supposed concealment of knowledge from external actors and between activists' groups themselves, hence creating pockets of ignorance within the movement. Keywords: organizational secrecy; organized ignorance; ethnography; methodological challenges; Yellow vest movement; risks (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Ephemera : Theory and Politics in Organization, 2023, 23 (1), pp.189-200 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04266363 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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