I’ve spent forty years inside institutions — job centres, military catering, housing associations, dot-com era telecoms — not studying them but actually working in them. Not as a planted observer. As someone who needed the job.
What I’ve been thinking about recently is what that actually produces methodologically. There’s a category of knowledge that doesn’t survive being extracted from the body that holds it — what I’ve been calling Grey Knowledge, borrowed loosely from ASHEN. The coal trimmer knew things about his work that he couldn’t have written down even if he’d wanted to. The institution he worked for certainly didn’t know it. When he retired, that knowledge ceased to exist.
I think the same thing happens at the level of organisational complexity. The gap between how an institution describes itself and how it actually functions is only visible from inside, over time, with genuine skin in the game. Most organisational research either watches from outside, or it announces its presence and watches the institution perform a slightly improved version of itself.
I’m developing a methodology I’m calling the Embedded Observer. Working residency, one year, functional staff level. Dual output: complexity diagnostic and artwork. I’m genuinely curious whether anyone here has thought about the epistemological problem this is trying to solve — whether long-duration covert participant observation can generate a category of data that’s otherwise simply unavailable.
I’ve spent forty years inside institutions — job centres, military catering, housing associations, dot-com era telecoms — not studying them but actually working in them. Not as a planted observer. As someone who needed the job.
What I’ve been thinking about recently is what that actually produces methodologically. There’s a category of knowledge that doesn’t survive being extracted from the body that holds it — what I’ve been calling Grey Knowledge, borrowed loosely from ASHEN. The coal trimmer knew things about his work that he couldn’t have written down even if he’d wanted to. The institution he worked for certainly didn’t know it. When he retired, that knowledge ceased to exist.
I think the same thing happens at the level of organisational complexity. The gap between how an institution describes itself and how it actually functions is only visible from inside, over time, with genuine skin in the game. Most organisational research either watches from outside, or it announces its presence and watches the institution perform a slightly improved version of itself.
I’m developing a methodology I’m calling the Embedded Observer. Working residency, one year, functional staff level. Dual output: complexity diagnostic and artwork. I’m genuinely curious whether anyone here has thought about the epistemological problem this is trying to solve — whether long-duration covert participant observation can generate a category of data that’s otherwise simply unavailable.