Marie-Astrid Le Theule, Jean-Luc Moriceau, Frédérique Déjean. Tales from the terrain. EGOS : European Group for Organization Studies, Jul 2011, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Writing ethnography is about making tales, but tales often lose the sense of geography. Deleuze (1968/1994) demonstrated the limitation of thought due to its adherence to representations, and proposed a kind of geo-philosophy. In an empirical research about a Parisian theatre, we felt that such a representational rendering, the will to create “maps or representations that simplify some territory in order to facilitate action” would betray what we learned from the research. We describe our attempts to keep the savour of the terroir in writing about the case studied, and try to understand the implications for a nomadic researcher.