Critical Performativity in the Field: Methodological Principles for Activist Ethnographers

It has been proposed that engagement with activism might make critical organizational scholarship more relevant to practitioners. However, there is a lack of systematic inquiry into how such engagement might be undertaken, which this article redresses. We propose activist ethnography as a suitable methodological framework for critical organizational scholarship, drawing on organizational ethnography, militant ethnography, and participatory action research, to construct a theoretical framework which we use to analyze four ethnographic vignettes of our own experiences of research with activists. Our contribution is to (a), assess the methodological challenges and opportunities of engagement with activism, (b) give an account of our own experiences as activist ethnographers for others to learn from, and (c) propose strategies whereby the challenges of academic activism might be negotiated and the opportunities maximized.