‘Know yourself’ is the fundamental knowledge principle in the modern world, which superseded, and was once interwoven with, the (now forgotten) Graeco-Roman principle of ‘Take care of yourself.’ In Foucault’s analysis of the different hermeneutical ‘truth games’ played out through history by human beings trying to understand themselves, certain techniques are highlighted such as confession, meditation and dream interpretation. Techniques such as these Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self’. In this chapter it is argued that the capitalist regime (and its many problems) thrives upon a very specific blend of Christian and Stoic technologies of the self, and that it is organized accordingly. On the one hand, the capitalist regime rests upon Christian obedience, the sacrifice of oneself by complete subordination; and, on the other hand, it presupposes Stoic logoi, the teaching of oneself by passively listening to the voice of the master, memorizing what is said and converting this into rules of conduct, and Stoic gymnasia, the training of oneself by physical abstinence and privation in order to test the independency of the individual. From the perspective of these capitalist technologies of the self, an alternative epistemology is narrated in the chapter. Tentatively it is conceptualized in terms of ‘technologies of the commune’, and it represents an emancipatory epistemology that is neither self-centred nor directed towards self-discipline.

To highlight the ‘in-between’ aspects of organizational ethnography an alternative approach to traditional organizational ethnography is explored: inter-ethnography. This approach serves to destabilize the traditional notion of organizational ethnography as an individual and subjectivist project, as well as to escape the notion of a static field position from which the researcher – as observer or participant – learns about an organization’s culture. Inter-ethnography speaks in favour of a dynamic field presence in which the researchers’ cultural positions and understandings alter as they interact with different actors related to the studied organization. Inter-ethnography in this sense denotes a fundamental shift in epistemology: from individual beings to collective becoming. To illustrate the approach, we report from a doctoral course in qualitative methods that turned out to be a study of academic culture. The report progresses in a transparent manner from a realist account of the organizational setting via our confessions about our own learning processes to an impressionistic dialogue between us to inculcate that the ethnographic knowledge making process resides not only between writers of the text, but also between the writers and the readers. In this sense, our report represents an invitation to the reader to partake in the joint production of intersubjectivity.