Workplace ethnography and transformative interventions at work: relevance and challenges for psychological research and practice

This paper aims at exploring the complementarities and differences between ethnographic and clinical perspectives in fieldwork. For doing so, we build upon the work of Edgar Schein (1987) as well that of Schütz (1944) and Favret-Saada (1980). Our analysis is based on the comparison between a clinical intervention in a youth judicial protection service and a two-year ethnography in an inbound health call center. Both ethnography and clinical intervention rely on the active involvement of the researcher. While the ethnographer commits herself to document “naturally-occurring” situations, the interventionist focuses on the dialogical and relational dimensions of her action in the field in order to trigger and sustain reflexive and elaborative processes. Following this analysis, we argue that interventions in the field of work psychology would benefit from integrating an ethnographic perspective to workplace development, as situated, sociomaterial and embodied phenomenon. notReviewed other