Book contents
- Measuring Justice
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Measuring Justice
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Legislation – Statutes
- Introduction
- I From Apartheid Administrators to Lawyers of the People: A History of Accountability inside the South African Prosecution Authority (1948–2018)
- 2 Ethnographic Research in a Multi-Local Organisation: Access, Challenges and Methods
- 3 ‘Stats Talk’ and Alternative Expressions of Accountability: NPA Lower Court Prosecutors at Work
- 4 No Fear of Numbers: Reactivity and the Political Economy of NPA Performance Measurement
- 5 At the Top of the NPA
- 6 Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
- Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
2 - Ethnographic Research in a Multi-Local Organisation: Access, Challenges and Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2019
- Measuring Justice
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
- Measuring Justice
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Legislation – Statutes
- Introduction
- I From Apartheid Administrators to Lawyers of the People: A History of Accountability inside the South African Prosecution Authority (1948–2018)
- 2 Ethnographic Research in a Multi-Local Organisation: Access, Challenges and Methods
- 3 ‘Stats Talk’ and Alternative Expressions of Accountability: NPA Lower Court Prosecutors at Work
- 4 No Fear of Numbers: Reactivity and the Political Economy of NPA Performance Measurement
- 5 At the Top of the NPA
- 6 Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
- Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
Summary
The ethnographic study of multi-local organisations provides the researcher with a challenge, ‘given ethnography’s focus on local places, on small scale, more or less observable social units and the cultural meanings and practices that constitute them’ as Merry states(2006: 980; see also Czarniawska 2008: 5). The ethnographer’s units of observation – her field sites – are harder, for example, to locate within a national state organisation like the NPA whose over three thousand employees work simultaneously in nine different provinces in national and regional head offices and in hundreds of district, regional and high courts, scattered around South Africa.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Measuring JusticeQuantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa, pp. 50 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019