The ethnographic study of multi-local organisations provides the researcher with a challenge, ‘given ethnography’s focus on local places, on small scale, more or less observable social units and the cultural meanings and practices that constitute them’ as Merry states(2006: 980; see also Czarniawska 2008: 5). The ethnographer’s units of observation – her field sites – are harder, for example, to locate within a national state organisation like the NPA whose over three thousand employees work simultaneously in nine different provinces in national and regional head offices and in hundreds of district, regional and high courts, scattered around South Africa.