Access as Trajectory: Entering the Field in Organizational Ethnography

Since ethnography has been recognized as a proper method for organizational analysis, many textbooks and articles have acknowledged its characteristics and specificities and sought to account for them. Curiously, many of these works have not considered (or have explicitly avoided) one important issue concerning organizational ethnography, namely the negotiation of access to the field. Drawing on a one-year organizational ethnography on the production and reproduction of inequalities in accessing health services in Italy, this paper focuses on the organizational and ethnographical dynamics involved in accessing the field. In particular, it shows that the negotiation of access may per se be an important moment of observation in that it reveals some of the principal characteristics of the organizational processes that the ethnographer is about to study. Moreover, drawing on ethnographic observations, the paper shows that there are no substantial reasons for assuming that negotiating access to the field takes place in a dimension unconnected with the actors 'everyday logics and practices of action. Accessing the field is thus framed as a trajectory, a never-ending process of engaging with multiple actors and organizational dynamics which can lead in different directions, depending on the ethnographer's ability to follow organizational processes and to demonstrate his/her ability to take part in them.