Balancing Emic-Etic Tensions in the Field-, Head-, and Text-Work of Ethnographic Management Accounting Research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Ethnographers must balance the tensions between the emic and etic dimensions of research. For example, they must simultaneously become an emic insider of the group studied, while at the same time retain their analytical distance to remain an etic outsider. This article discusses how these tensions manifest in head-, field-, and text-work by reviewing 52 self-declared management accounting ethnographies published between 1997 and 2017. The review shows that there is an (over-)emphasis on a realist tale-telling approach, in which the author’s voice is almost always effaced as tale-tellers detach themselves from the tales being told. As alternatives, we highlight confessional and impressionist tale-telling approaches. Although all three approaches offer advantages for addressing the emic-etic balance, they also all involve sacrifices. Thus, we urge researchers to give deeper consideration to text-work choices in management accounting ethnographies.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it