Mark de Rond is a Reader in Strategy & Organization and a Fellow of Darwin College at Cambridge Judge Business School. His research interests are (1) the experience of being human in collaborative high-performance environments; (2) the means by which teams solve problems collectively; and (3) the causal explanations people give of why things are as they are and not otherwise. Mark's fieldwork has included long stints with war surgeons in Afghanistan, elite rowers in Cambridge, biochemists in Oxford, and comedians in London. His most recent project involved rowing the length of the Amazon river so as to learn, first-hand, how collaboration unfolds, and how problems are solved, under trying conditions. His work has appeared in The Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, and Organization Science.

The Circle is a series of informal, multidisciplinary discussions featured around presentations by leading ethnographers and method sessions, where we as a group get together to analyse ethnographic data, exploring the range of interpretations, and reflecting for the purposes of our own work.

The Circle aims to stimulate collegial discussion between faculty and students in WBS, the broader University and other institutions toward exploring ways in which ethnography is, or could be, usefully employed in our research projects. We will gather roughly once a month from January to June 2015 to engage with the intricacies and challenges of doing ethnographic work, in order to stimulate debate, challenge myths, and learn from each other.