![]() Like Geertz, we see our role as exposing the social ground and import of social structures yet we tend to do it in a different way than was available to Geertz. They can then see their own culture in the subtle ways that cannot be exposed by surveys and sound bites alone. ![]() We are suggesting that thick descriptions can be useful to people within an organization in order to better understand themselves and the complexity of organizational life. Surveys provide thin descriptions at best. Thin description by contrast, is stating facts without such meaning or significance. Thick descriptions provide enough context so that a person outside the culture can make meaning of the behavior. Geertz described the practice of thick description as a way of providing cultural context and meaning that people place on actions, words, things, etc. What Geertz was saying is that anthropological writing is fiction in the sense that they are made and fashioned but they are not false. To paraphrase, they were explicating other’s explications of explications. ![]() 9) Geertz was concerned that anthropological research was more interpretive than anthropologists admitted. Clifford Geertz, the cultural anthropologist who influenced the practice of symbolic anthropology, wrote “analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification…and determining their social ground and import.” (Geertz, 1973, p. ![]()
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