ETHNOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND NATIVE TONGUES

Earlier chapters of this book have taken the reader on travels around the world. We have come across language and the use of language which is familiar to us as well as much which is less so. This chapter tells a story about a further journey: an ethnographic one. But it is not the sort of ethnography which readers might expect. Ethnographies are traditionally anthropologists’ tales of foreign lands, exotic cultures and genuinely foreign languages. My own ethnographic investigation, however, and the theorising about work organisations and their management with which it is connected, occurred in a single factory of a telecommunications and manufacturing company in a British Midlands town.1 Each working day for over a year I walked down to the factory from my own house and worked as a participant observation researcher within the senior managerial team of the company. Although I was very familiar with the world of manufacturing industry, I was nevertheless still a stranger to the natives among whom I had come to live and work. We all spoke standard English. But things were not as simple as this might imply. One of the early conversations with some managers whom I had joined for a meeting went as follows: