Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the records (converting medications administered to patients into charges) or to
handle all the work; therefore, some records just piled up until it was too late to
charge the patient. Administrators used this same folktale as a scapegoating
mechanism to blame the department for their losses by reinforcing an image of
ineptitude. This folktale led to important insights into the organization's
maladaptive behavior.
Folktales in the emergency room about heroic efforts to save patients main-
tained the morale of the doctors and nurses during especially difficult times.
Folktales also shaped behavior in the administrative sections of the emergency
room. One of the first tales I heard when talking with some of the emergency
room staff was about the supervisor. The emergency room supervisor had a
reputation for reviewing every travel reimbursement to nurses and physicians.
I knew the supervisor very well, and I knew that he did not have time to review
any of these financial concerns—he relegated them to an assistant, who looked
at only a fraction of the expenses incurred in the emergency room. The folk-
tale about the supervisor's tight controls, however, sent a symbolic message
throughout the system that management controls its resources by paying close
attention to detail. This folktale had an effect on petty concerns such as travel
reimbursements and on basic medical practices in the emergency room. Once
again, the perception of reality is more important than so-called objective real-
ity in shaping behavior. (See Fetterman, 1986g, for additional details about
these studies, with a focus on administrative and financial concerns.)
All the methods and techniques discussed in this chapter are used together
in ethnographic research. They reinforce one another. Like concepts, methods
and techniques guide the ethnographer through the maze of human existence.
Discovery and understanding are at the heart of this endeavor. Chapter 4
explores a wide range of useful devices that make the ethnographer's expedi-
tion through time and space more productive and pleasant.
NOTES
1. I decided to focus on the catalog department at this point and asked the following
structural question: “What types of librarians work in this department?” Two specific
types of librarians became the focus of discussion: original and copy catalogers. A nat-
ural attribute question in this context was the following: “What is the difference between
an original and copy cataloger?” This question drew an emotionally charged discussion
about how radically different were their daily lives, how different the required training
was for each position, and how different were the intellectual efforts of each type of
librarian. I learned how the copy catalogers used existing catalog information to do their
job, whereas the original catalogers must decipher the topic first and then follow a
