The Dynamics of Institutionalization as Translation:
The Case of "Ethnography" within Organization Studies
Tammar B. Zilber
The Jerusalem Business School, Hebrew University
With Patrizia Zanoni, Tilburg University and the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven
In this paper, we explore the microfoundations of institutionalization as translation. Our
case study is the translation of ethnography as a research paradigm within the field of
Organization Studies, based on the analysis of all ethnographic papers published in ASQ
1956-2010. Our findings suggest that the adoption of ethnography as a research practice
within the field of OS was accompanied by continuous efforts to accommodate and make
sense of it. Translation, then, did not end once the method travelled into the field of OS.
Rather it has been adapted and re-adapted through the years, with different constructions
of ethnography prevalent in different historical periods. Translation, while never-ending,
is not accidental or random. Rather one can identify some coherent versions of the
institutionalized in a certain period which then serve as the base for further
transformation in the following years. And those transformations – this institutional work
of meaning – are context-bound. Finally, translation is not merely stylistic or fashion-like.
Rather, the work of translation accompanying the emergence of ethnography in our field
was not only about a specific method of inquiry but also about fundamental
understandings of science itself, and basic debates around issues of professional identity.
The on-going process of institutionalization as translation touches, then, upon
fundamental tensions within the field. Taken together, our findings shed light on the
dynamics of institutionalization as translation.