HOW TIMES CHANGE: ON INTELLECTUAL ACTIVISM AND WORKPLACE ETHNOGRAPHY 1965-2000.

History assembles the past into new narratives. Some of those narratives tell stories about how practices change over time, revealing shifts that are predictable and confirmatory, or that are inconvenient, even subversive. Our purpose is to examine the workplace ethnography practices in Britain over the period 1965-2000 to show how research practices have changed, especially in relation to the political and ‘intellectual activism’, where they are linked ‘directly with the questions thrown up by concrete daily justice issues and demands’ (Contu, 2020, 738). Specifically, we show how ethnographers construed their research practice in relation to personal involvement in forms of activism, and the shaping effects of career, institutional and general intellectual, socio-economic and political contexts. Having shown significant change in intellectual activism over this period, we reflect on what this historical tale means for contemporary workplace ethnographic practice, and what that might mean for the world.