Virtual organization and critical management ethnography: retrospectives of repair

This paper explores what it might mean to be engaged in ethnography from a critical management studies perspective in the examination of virtual organization discourse. It reflexively recounts what might be occluded when we pursue research that is checked by, and subject to the normalising violence and disciplinary constrictions of management and organization epistemology. The paper engages ‘after-method’ (Law, 2004) in ways in which a critical management orientation to ethnography would emerge from the ‘direction of travel’ of critical enquiry that would displace traditions of ethnographic anthropology. The paper shows how the opportunities for non-traditional ethnographies such as that opened up in exploring virtuality depend not only on the reflexive engagement of the organisational ethnographer but the overcoming of reactionary institutional norms in the academy.