Episode 13 - Melissa Mazmanian and Christine Beckman: Research in Intimate Spaces

Ethnography Atelier Podcast

In this episode with Prof. Christine Beckman and Prof. Melissa Mazmanian, we talk about
the promises and challenges involved in conducting research in intimate spaces, such as in
people’s homes, instead of the workplace, where most organization and management research usually takes place. Christine and Melissa reflect on the research for their recent book “Dreams of the Overworked” where they explored nine families in California and what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of growing expectations about one’s productivity amplified by smart devices. Christine and Melissa share tips on the relational work in fieldwork, the value of working in teams to gain reflexive distance, and how observing work and organization topics from intimate spaces can bring new insights.
Christine Beckman is the Price Family Chair in Social Innovation and Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy. She is the current Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly and Past Division Chair of the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management. Her work has focused on a range of topics including social innovation and inequality, organizational learning, entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship; technology and work, and organizational control.
Melissa Mazmanian is a Chancellors Fellow, Professor and Chair of the Department of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences, and Professor of Organization and Management in the Paul Merage School of Management (joint) at University of California, Irvine. Her work revolves around the experience of communication
technologies as used in-practice within organizational and personal contexts, specifically in relation to identity projection and the nature of time in the digital age.
Further information:
Beckman, C. M., & Mazmanian, M. (2020). Dreams of the Overworked. In Dreams of the Overworked. Stanford University Press.
Mazmanian, M., & Beckman, C. M. (2018). “Making” your numbers: Engendering organizational control through a ritual of quantification. Organization Science, 29(3), 357-
379.
Mazmanian, M., & Lanette, S. (2017, February). “Okay, One More Episode” An Ethnography of Parenting in the Digital Age. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 2273-2286).
Mazmanian, M., Beckman, C. M., & Harmon, E. (2015). Ethnography across the work
boundary: Benefits and considerations for organizational studies. In Handbook of Qualitative Organizational Research (pp. 294-303). Routledge
Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2013). The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals. Organization science, 24(5), 1337-1357.