ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE TRAFFIC IN PAIN

Whereas it may once have been perfectly respectable to generate knowledge for knowledge’s sake, management scholars today appear increasingly concerned with the production of societally relevant research. Thus, the 20th editorial committee of the Academy of Management Journal defined its three-year term by a focus on “societal grand challenges”(George et al., 2016), culminating in a Special Issue with articles that tackle such varied but fundamental humanitarian issues as neglected diseases (Vakili and McGahan, 2016), conflict minerals (Kim and Davis, 2016), organizational responses to natural disasters (Williams and Shepherd, 2016) and pricing practices in healthcare (Heese, Krishnan and Moers, 2016). A couple of years earlier, twenty-four senior management scholars created Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM), a network designed to encourage meaningful research as “a means to a better world”. One of its co-founders, Anne Tsui (2013), noted that a considerable number of Academy of Management presidents expressed concern around the irrelevance of our research, 1 and not just for practising managers. A subsequent book by one of these, Engaged Scholarship, went on to receive one of the Academy’s most important prizes, 2 from which the following quote is tell-tale:Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be interesting—almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth… the problem must be such that it matters what the answer is …