What happens when the social scientist calls in sick?
The world goes on.
Phenomena and events continue. Organizations continue organizing.
It’s like a crime scene.
The detective was not there when the crime occurred.
The detective collects clues and reads the crime scene.
None of their DNA needs to be excluded from the analysis, because they were not there to contaminate the scene.
Of course, we are not the first to compare research to a crime scene. Carlo Ginzburg, who recently passed away, wrote a piece comparing the historian to the detective.
Starter for 10: Do you know which piece I mean?
Historians never get to observe the crime as it happens.
Historical research follows a logic of reconstructing the scene based on clues and what remains of the event.
Social scientists do that far more rarely — they always want to be there to observe the phenomena.
But often they can’t.
So they ask people about the event or issue they are interested in.
But that is not actually the same as seeing it with your own eyes.
Now, when we observe organizations doing their thing, we see very little of what makes them tick.
Why is that?
Because in practice, much of the work of organizing is now digital: email, Slack channels, video calls.
Digital ethnography has been exploiting this for some time.
But what are they observing? Are they actually there all the time? Some are. But not always. So are they effectively accessing a digital archive presented as direct observation? And does that matter?
Good news is, this video series will reveal all. And if you really want to get into this, our paper (co-authored with Adam Nix, David Kirsch and Omeghie Okoyomoh) was just accepted by Organization Studies and should be out shortly. Make sure to subscribe for updates!
What about Ginzburg?
There is one piece, but many versions.
Ginzburg originally compared his method to that of Sherlock in the Italian here:
Ginzburg, C. (1979). Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario. In A. Gargani (Ed.), Crisi della ragione: Nuovi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere e attività umane (pp. 57–106). Einaudi.
This was republished in Italian a few years later:
Ginzburg, C. (1986). Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario. In Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia (pp. 158–209). Einaudi.
The (maybe?) best-known version in English, with the freely available PDF:
Ginzburg, C. (1980). Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific method (A. Davin, Trans.). History Workshop Journal, 9(1), 5–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/9.1.5
This is another good translation:
Ginzburg, C. (1989). Clues: Roots of an evidential paradigm (J. Tedeschi & A. C. Tedeschi, Trans.). In Clues, myths, and the historical method (pp. 96–125). Johns Hopkins University Press.
It’s a fun read - enjoy!
