Organizational ethnography after lockdown: “walking with the trouble”

Abstract

Particularly, Down to Earth (2018), to which his new book is described as “sequel” [4], marks and links this dual crisis of COVID-19 and the global climate: “After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and the lockdowns, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’” [5]. In the hope of learning skills to process and cope with this all inclusive climactic and ecological lockdown, this dress rehearsal for the climate mutation, the challenge to re-understand where we stand as inhabitants of this strange place called Earth, also offers new opportunities to ethnographers. While the discovery of organizations as “fields” has drawn ethnographers inside the walls of plants and boardrooms, the present ecological drama forces them back into their “natural” habitat to take up what has been their strength from the start, fieldwork, into what Tsing calls “third nature”, the possibilities to live life on the planet after capitalist transformation of the environment in “second nature” (Tsing, 2015, p. viii). [...]we know the San cosmology cannot be uprooted and incorporated into our ways of living and being.