This study sheds light on the organizational foundations of sexual harassment. The authors evaluated a theoretical model underscoring the influence of worker power, workplace culture, and gender composition using unique data derived from the population of English-language, book-length workplace ethnographies. The authors used ordered and multinomial logistic regression to test whether organizational explanations vary in their capacity to predict three distinct forms of sexual harassment: patronizing, taunting, and predatory conduct. The findings reveal that organizational attributes influence not only the presence of workplace sexual harassment but also the specific form in which it manifests. The result is a more conceptually refined model of sexual harassment in organizational context. The authors conclude with a discussion of the contribution of this study to sociological explanations of sexual harassment, including linkages to more recent qualitative work underscoring its complexity, and with implications for policy in light of current workplace trends.

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Toxic or harmful working conditions are an important problem for workers and organizations. Fully understanding the consequences of such conditions has been difficult because in-depth information across organizational contexts is scarce. The current article makes use of a new data set based on content coding the full population of organizational ethnographies ( N = 212) to secure in-depth evaluations across a wide range of organizational contexts. The analysis confirms the role of lack of autonomy and lack of skills as toxic working conditions but suggests an equally important role for organizational chaos. Importantly, returning to the narrative accounts allows exploration of the buffering and exacerbating roles of coworker relations and employee involvement and the mechanisms through which these work to moderate other conditions.

This study draws on the sociology of work to extend discussions of informational yield in ethnographic research. The authors examine the existing population of English-language workplace ethnographies and find that relative to interviews, observation and especially participant observation consistently yield more information. Participant observation provides greater informational yield as well as more detailed descriptions of workplace behaviors and group dynamics. Interviews, however, are more likely to provide information on basic organizational characteristics, such as organization size and product market conditions. The authors’ findings have important implications for university institutional review boards, which have in recent years made it increasingly difficult for projects based on participant observation to receive human subjects clearance. Our conclusions caution against bureaucratic and legalistic curtailments of embedded field observation.

The project ofmerging qualitative and quantitative approaches in sociology is advancing on many fronts-most typically through appending in-depth interviews to surveys. This research note describes an alternative approach of amassing in-depth qualitative accounts and content coding them for statistical analysis. Funding requirements for such projects are minimal and students can easily be involved-providing important training opportunities that broaden their appreciation of and expertise in diverse methodologies. Such endeavors thus present valuable opportunities for advancing training and research. We illustrate how this approach has been applied in a project focusing on workplace ethnographies. We conclude with a discussion of additional bodies of ethnographic research similarly ripe for systematic analysis.