Key Concepts in Ethnography

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1 European Accounting Review ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Key Concepts in Ethnography Teemu Malmi To cite this article: Teemu Malmi (2011) Key Concepts in Ethnography, European Accounting Review, 20:2, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 13 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 281 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at wnload by: [Aalto-yliopiston kirjasto] Date: 05 July 2016, At: 03:10

2 European Accounting Review Vol. 20, No. 2, , 2011 Book Reviews Key Concepts in Ethnography Karen O Reilly SAGE Publications Ltd, 2009, 240 pp, EUR 25.80, ISBN This is a valuable book for anyone interested in ethnography or case-based research in general. The book is organised around 38 concepts, each presented in a short chapter of a few pages. The concepts are covered in alphabetical order. Therefore, the book is not something you pick up when you need to understand the process of ethnographic research from start to finish for the first time: there are other books on the market for that purpose. This book is something between an encyclopaedia and dictionary. I consider this is a merit as the book is comprehensive yet concise. A concept of interest can be accessed easily and its essential content can be understood quickly. The number of concepts included is not limited to 38, as many of these themes are discussed with the aid of a number of other concepts. To give an example, the concept interpretivism (one of the 38 key themes) is explained with the aid of phenomenology and hermeneutics (not included in the 38 key themes). The author also defines ethnography itself in the introduction. At the end of the book, there is a section Where to Find other Ethnographic Concepts, listing another 17 concepts that are discussed under one or several of the 38 key themes. Perhaps this list could have been expanded to include all the major concepts related to research methodology and the philosophy of science discussed within the book; for instance, picking the example above, by including concepts such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. The concepts covered include some which you may find in most books on ethnography, such as key informants, access and participant observation. There are also themes that are sometimes excluded in other texts, such as ethics, reflexivity and writing. Some of the concepts, such as sampling and positivism, are perhaps not something most of us would expect to see in a book on ethnography, and themes related to more recent developments, such as virtual and multi-sited ethnography are included. Overall, these selected 38 themes plus all the other concepts covered can be said to cover a broad range of issues relevant to ethnography, many being directly relevant to all types of casebased research Print/ Online/11/ DOI: / Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the EAA.

3 418 Book Reviews I also found the book valuable because of the way concepts are presented. They are discussed critically, avoiding a single worldview on issues. The author illustrates issues with examples when necessary. From the accounting researcher s perspective, however, some of those examples could have been taken from a business context. Each chapter contains references organised in two sets; general ones for those interested in exploring issues in more depth and specific examples of ethnographies. Concepts are also well cross-referenced in each chapter. The writing style is effective, avoiding an overly complex and colourful vocabulary, making the text easy to read and understand. Reading books on methodology may raise questions regarding the quality and type of research we do in the field of accounting. For what kind of phenomena of interest, or type of research questions, could we use ethnographies? Are we spending enough time in the field when doing our case studies? What questions can be addressed properly by using less time-consuming methods? Are all or some businesses or other organisations, their subsets or networks of organisations so unfamiliar to us that we need to engage in ethnographic research to understand them properly? Beyond these general ponderings that may be raised by this book, it also provides some food for thought regarding the virtual world and new technologies. How the virtual world impacts on the accounting profession, and could such impacts be studied by methods that are typical to ethnography? Another interesting concept covered is multi-sited and mobile ethnographies. Could accounting researchers use multi-sited and mobile ethnographies to understand the development of accounting practices and the profession? For me, a book on research methodology that provides a good exposition of some key concepts and raises questions regarding the research in my own field is always a welcome addition to my bookshelf. Teemu Malmi Aalto University School of Economics # 2011, Teemu Malmi Management Accounting in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Severin Grabski, Stewart Leech and Alan Sangster Oxford: CIMA, 2009, vii pp., EUR 32.95, ISBN , Management Accounting in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems is a book that provides insight and advice to management accountants whose organisations are undergoing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (re-)implementation project. The objective of the book is to provide further insight into the changes resulting from the implementation of ERP systems on the work and behavior of management accountants (p. 2). In particular, the book focuses on the differential effects of successful as compared to less-than-successful ERP

4 European Accounting Review 419 system implementations on the role of management accountants. The authors of this CIMA project come from three different continents (i.e. from the USA, Australia and UK). The book comprises an executive summary, nine chapters, references, appendices and an index. Chapter 1 discusses the importance of examining ERP systems that have become commonplace in many large and mid-sized organisations. It also interestingly identifies a gap in the existing research in that the goal of having the management accountants become more like business analysts has not been reported in the majority of cases examined. It also presents the (above-mentioned) objective of the research project, the data collection methods and the contribution of the project. Chapter 2 presents a literature review of the reasons for adopting ERPs, ERP success and failure factors, impacts of ERP implementation upon management accounting and management accountants, and implementation success. It is explained that the study uses a model slightly modified from that by Granlund and Malmi (2002). The model originally highlighted direct effects between ERP system implementations, management accountants and management accounting systems, as well as indirect effects via changes in management practices, changes in business processes, etc. In addition to these, the revised model also considers ERP system success. The literature review on ERP studies seems comprehensive in covering key articles published in scholarly journals in the fields of accounting and information systems in the early 2000s. Chapter 3 briefly describes some aspects of the research methodology. All the data were collected during the period The data collection methods included the following: pilot interviews in 2003, a mail survey (and a followup) mailed out in early 2004 to CIMA members and case studies. The focus of the book is on the case studies, which were conducted by interviewing a total of 12 individuals in seven organisations located across England in autumn The interviewees included various kinds of professionals (such as several senior managers and executives, a management consultant, a management accountant and a purchasing engineer). Chapter 4 describes the seven case organisations, which have gradually shifted towards using an ERP system after having used a wide range of non-integrated legacy systems. All case examples are large publicly traded companies from a wide variety of industries and had implemented their ERP systems already at the turn of the 2000s. The chapter begins with a description of the most successful ERP implementation and ends with the most unsuccessful ERP implementation case. Each case description has a coherent and rather standardised structure as follows: background information is first provided about the organisation and its ERP implementation. The role of management accountants, the way they use the system and the way their roles have changed are described next. Thereafter, the authors present recommendations for management accountants and offer brief summaries of each case, which improves the readability of the chapter.

5 420 Book Reviews The chapter ends with a Lessons Learnt section, which is likely to be very useful for practitioners. The findings indicate that the year 2000 issues were the main drivers for the new system in almost half of the seven cases, whereas the desire to move to a common standard worldwide system was a significant motivator for all the others. As presented in Table 4.2 (on p. 87), the completeness of the ERP implementation and the relative success of the ERP implementation was found to vary across the companies, likewise the length of time taken to implement the ERP system (i.e. from less than a year to an ongoing project). A key result indicates that when management accountants are involved in ERP system implementation processes, there is a greater likelihood that the implementation will have a positive effect on their roles and tasks and is perceived as a success. A successful ERP implementation was found to be associated with radical changes in accountants roles. In line with existing research, it was proposed that a successful ERP implementation tends to be treated as a programme of organisational change initiatives rather than as a mere software installation effort. Other critical factors for success included training in the use of the system and in the new business processes. Previous findings of the failure factors of ERP implementations such as, low key user involvement, inadequate training and instruction, inadequate business process re-engineering and ineffective consulting services got support in those cases where success was not achieved. Many of these findings are further discussed in the chapters that follow. Chapter 5 presents the motivations for ERP deployment based on both existing literature and the case study evidence collected. While some of the expected advantages include reduced costs, rapid implementation and high system quality, the authors stress that the ERP systems need to be carefully selected and implemented in their socio-economic environments. The authors conclude that trying to fit the software around the existing business process generally results in failure, likewise a failure of the organisation to switch from a functional focus to a process focus. The chapter culminates (on p. 91) with the observation that the greater the perceived need for the ERP system, the greater the chance of implementation success. Chapter 6 further discusses the role of management accountants in the ERP system implementation process. Consistent with existing research, it is stressed that management accountant involvement from the start is an essential factor for successful ERP. Chapter 7 provides a wide range of businessand software-related advice for management accountants in implementing and using ERP systems. A wide range of normative principles is summarised in Table 7.1 on p. 96. The ERP implementation guidance ranges from the need to have clear objectives to the need to utilise the ERP system to become business partners and to demonstrate what they do and how they can perform in the best interest of the organisation. The monitoring and post-implementation issues discussed cover: ongoing monitoring of the

6 European Accounting Review 421 investment decision and the impacts of the ERP system implementation, education, assessing post-implementation benefits and post-implementation review. Chapter 8 provides further details on the impact of ERP systems on management accountants and their work. First, a total of 11 possible changes ranging from changes in time spent on data collection to changes in the management accountant s job satisfaction resulting from the ERP system were analysed. Second, skills needed by management accountants in ERP environments were addressed. It was pointed out that as the role of management accountants in an ERP environment changes, they need a slightly different set of skills than the skills that sufficed in a non-erp environment. Table 8.2 on p. 112 summarises the various skills needed by management accountants. In brief, the skills are classified into the following groups: good communication skills; leadership, decision-making, analytical and planning skills; technical skills; business understanding; educator skills; and general skills. Third, the general impact of ERP systems on the work of management accountants is discussed in the context of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, ISO 9001, and data stewardship. Overall the role of management accountants was found to change dramatically in the more successful ERP implementation cases (i.e. from gathering data from multiple sources and creating spreadsheets reporting historical results, to proactive participation in the managerial planning and control processusinginpartforecastdata from the ERP system). However, it was pointed out that such changes in the role of management accountants could also occur if an organisation has not implemented an ERP system (or is in the process of implementing it). By contrast, in those organisations where the ERP implementation was less successful, the management accountant was often overworked (i.e. needing to verify the data coming from the ERP system and provide the same reports as before, while seeking to provide some forward-looking information accessible from the ERP system). Finally, Chapter 9 presents a good summary of the key findings and conclusions. To a large extent, the findings seem to provide empirical support for the previous studies reviewed in Chapter 2. Overall, this book focuses on ERP system success, which has become an extremely important area of management accounting research after Poston and Grabski s seminal work (2001). The book can be very useful for professionals such as management accountants and consultants, (senior) managers, information system experts, etc. to learn from the experiences of the seven case organisations and to benchmark their own organisations against them. The book also provides practically oriented case study material for accounting information system courses. Finally, the book offers several extremely interesting topics for future academic research, such as testing the associations proposed in a larger sample.

7 422 Book Reviews References Granlund, M. and Malmi, T. (2002) Moderate impact of ERPS on management accounting: a lag or permanent outcome? Management Accounting Research, 13(3), pp Poston, R. and Grabski, S. (2001) Financial impacts of enterprise resource planning implementations, International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 2(4), pp Lili-Anne Kihn and Lauri Lepistö School of Management University of Tampere, Finland # 2011, Lili-Anne Kihn and Lauri Lepistö Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research: An Introduction Laura L. Ellingson London: Sage, 2009, 224 pp., 22, ISBN Qualitative research consists of the collection of empirical materials that portray both the fabulous and especially the ordinary moments and meanings in individuals lives, making sense of them using diverse interpretive practices and representing them in accounts that convincingly convey a contribution to our understanding of a phenomenon. In contrast with quantitative studies, qualitative studies stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the contingent nature of inquiry and the relevance of the researcher subjectivity (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). But qualitative research approaches are also varied: different sensibilities coexist, ranging from those that try to minimise subjectivity (realists and postpositivists) to those that interrogate or even celebrate subjectivity (poststructuralists). Realists and postpositivists privilege social scientific analysis and writing conventions. Poststructuralists have taken a narrative turn, favouring literary and artistic genres of analysis and representation that enable showing rather than telling (p. 65) their qualitative findings. Realists and postpositivists criticise the narrative turn for lack of rigour and objectivity and for being navel gazing. Poststructuralists sustain that no method can deliver the ultimate truth and that conventional texts based in the scientific method may lead not only to conveying the impression that things are simpler than they actually are but also to re-creating existing forms of power. Both streams of qualitative research deny each other. This book is written from a poststructuralist perspective, but its premise is that the art/science dichotomy that justifies the divide between realists/postpositivists and poststructuralists is itself a social construction that limits the possibilities of sense-making and representation in qualitative research. Instead, Ellingson contends that there is a continuum of forms of interpretation and representation of qualitative findings, straddling conventional realist research report and artistic genres, with a fertile middle ground of qualitative research methods in between.

8 European Accounting Review 423 The book is not a radical departure from qualitative methodology, but offers a valuable way of thinking through the links between the more positivistic and the more creative genres of analysis and representation in qualitative research. The options discussed in the book include from the more traditional to the more creative grounded theory, ethnography, autoethnography, poetry, narratives, fiction, video representations and live performance. Drawing on this continuum and in feminist methodology Ellingson builds the focal point of the book: crystallised qualitative research. The aim of crystallisation is to break the generic boundaries between (and to blend) scientific and artistic approaches to sense-making and representation. Her objective with the book is to move readers past dualistic partitioning of qualitative methods, into art and science, and instead to encourage you to conceptualize productive blending of the two (p. 7). Accordingly, the book explains crystallisation and guides the reader through the intricacies of this combined method of interpretation and representation and it does so by elaborating on pragmatic and strategic concerns raised by putting crystallisation in practice. With this pragmatic aim, the book sketches a typology of crystallisation strategies, considering whether crystallisation is achieved in a single (integrated crystallisation) or in several (dendritic crystallisation) representations. Integrated crystallisation involves the production of a single representation in which multiple genres along the qualitative continuum are woven or patched. By bringing together different forms of representation, this strategy has allegedly the power of illuminating different angles of a phenomenon in the same representation. While the book uses exemplars drawn from the discipline of the author (health communication and communication management), a useful example of integrated crystallisation in accounting is Jönsson and Macintosh s case for ethnographic accounting research (1997), an article that includes itself elements of autoethnography, narrative in the form of dialogue and conventional research report. As a different strategy, dendritic crystallisation involves the production of dispersed representations, each employing a single genre. Ellingson pragmatically asserts the validity of this form of crystallisation on the grounds of its potential for circumventing external constraints (including the reluctance of mainstream journals to publish this material), while enabling to reach different audiences and promote positive change. The publication of conventional research papers, the intervention in social conflicts (Neu et al., 2001) and the publication of poems in journals such as Critical Perspectives on Accounting make a good example of dendritic crystallisation, provided that they are published by the same accounting scholars and illuminate different angles of the same topic and/or reach different audiences. Whether the issue of publication and academic careers is too pragmatic, given the epistemological perspective of the book, is debatable. However, by raising this issue the author complies with the standards of reflexivity: not by omitting the subject the book would have been more objective. In this respect, I found that the book is reassuring for qualitative scholars and revealing for students.

9 424 Book Reviews Prejudices about what counts as academic research hinders publishing qualitative research articles in many mainstream accounting journals, let alone more creative genres of representation. The subsequent confusion between the knowledge dissemination and career promotion functionalities of those journals creates tedious difficulties to practise qualitative research (and crystallisation). Many of us, as qualitative researchers have this kind of experience. An informative example in the accounting discipline that came to mind reading this book are the concerns expressed in the academic community (often in the form of jokes) about the validity of papers published beside poems in Critical Perspectives on Accounting. Implicit in this rationale is the art/science dichotomy: by being bound together the poems are somehow transmitting their art to the neighbouring papers, making them less scientific. The importance attached to the ethical dimensions of representations is a further expression of the pragmatic approach of the book. Setting aside the ethics of fieldwork and data collection, beyond its scope, the book contains revealing discussions about the ends of crystallised research and the interplay between representation, participants, the researcher and her or his ends. These discussions are not limited to the second chapter, devoted to the ethics of representation, but are present all through the book. From a social constructionist perspective, the author explains that the research process itself has a constructed and constructing nature. In this respect, I found convincing the case made in the book for qualitative research as an instrument for emancipation and intervention. Further, the fact that the research representation is in itself a social construction confers crystallisation with the power of not forgetting this fact, by constantly expressing its inherent partiality. As a crystallised piece of research itself, the book contains a great deal of reflexivity not only about a singular research, but also about the different investigations carried out by the author and the act of writing a book about writing articles and books. As a qualitative researcher, I found most useful her discussion about the research process, including not only the problems of representation but also the role of our own academic ends in the whole process and the conditions of possibility for qualitative research. The pragmatic aim of the book is also reflected in definitions, formulae and a prescriptive flavour that is present all through the book. The reader needs to remember that this is a narrative licence to construct a functional book whose aim is to provide a concise epistemological basis and the strategies to practise crystallisation. I stress this point because a reading that would reify the suggested formulae will not conform to the spirit of the proposed methodology. The author herself explains that no formula for crystallised design exists and cautions repeatedly not to follow literally her strategies, but to use them as starting points. Crystallisation is for her a journey and an ideal, not simply a destination or a standard (p. 144). For example, her definition of crystallisation, as involving at least one genre of representation, needs to be read as a working definition. Likewise, the above-mentioned classification of crystallisation strategies should be taken as a heuristic intended to organise the discussion. Consequently, I advise to read

10 European Accounting Review 425 the book as a questioning of the closures and dichotomies that characterise the academic literature/research. In this respect, this is an enlightening, insightful, well-written and lively book that would be of interest for students and faculty that are already familiar with qualitative methodology and postmodern ideas. References Denzin, N. K. and Lincoln, Y. S. (2000) Introduction: the discipline and practice of qualitative research, in: N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). Jönsson, S. and Macintosh, N. B. (1997) CATS, RATS, and EARS: making the case for ethnographic accounting research, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 22, pp Neu, D., Cooper, D. J. and Everett, J. (2001) Critical accounting interventions, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 12, pp Carlos Larrinaga-González Universidad de Burgos # 2011, Carlos Larrinaga-González