The ethnographic method is that most
distinctively associated with sociology and anthropology. It starts from the
assumption that human activities are socially organised and so, from the outset,
is committed to inquiring into patterns of interaction and collaboration. Unlike
many other quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences which tend to use more formal instruments of data
capture and analysis, the ethnographic method relies on an observer going into
the field and ‘learning the ropes’ through questioning, listening, watching,
talking, etc., with practitioners. The task of the fieldworker is to immerse
him/herself into the work and its activities with a view to describing these as
the skilful and socially organised accomplishment of parties to the work.
One obvious consequence of this is that in the first instance, at least, data
collected will be of the 'messy' and unstructured variety. It may include
interviews, observations of work sequences, anecdotes, speculations, and so on.
The data gathered, in other words, usually takes the form of fieldnotes but is
often supplemented by audio and video data.
From this brief description, we
can identify some features of ethnographic practice that are not always well
understood by new practitioners:
1. Ethnography is naturalistic.
That is, it predicates its
inquiries on the principle that studies should be studies of real people and
their activities, operating in their natural environment, whatever that may be.
An important justification of the approach is that it is not known in advance of
inquiry just what the relevant features of some settings are. As such
ethnography refuses to deal with artificial environments
and controlled versions of work, and instead aims to study the natural
environment of work and its activities.
2. Ethnography is prolonged.
We should perhaps point out that
there is no logical reason why an ethnography should take a long time. The main reason for prolongation is that for the most part
ethnographers have no clear idea what they will find. Because there are in principle any
number of aspects which may turn out to be interesting, and any number of things
which may be mystifying, it will take time to form a coherent view of what is
going on.
3. Ethnographic enquiries seek
to elicit the social world from the point of view of those who inhabit it.
Ethnographies can be undertaken
for any theoretical, analytical, or empirical purpose, and as a result
ethnography is too diverse a set of practices to be described as a method. At a
minimum, however, we would argue that ethnography is (should be) about
uncovering the world from the point of view of the social actors within it. For
this reason, although it is behavioural - interested in the detail of the
behaviour to a greater or lesser extent - it is not behaviourist and it does not
consider the behaviour itself as the appropriate level of analysis. The
appropriate level is the significance of the behaviour for those who
undertake it. Ethnography focuses on the
social organisation of work activities. The fact that such work is socially organised
is not a discovery of the social sciences. Rather the task of ethnography is to take this
‘obvious’ fact about human life and describe and analyse how this social
organisation is accomplished, understood and achieved by social actors.
4. Ethnographic data resists
formalisation.
Ethnography stresses the
importance of 'context' or 'setting', and thus there can be no theoretical
perspective which can explain in advance what one is likely to see in a new
setting, nor any data which constitutes the 'right' data to be
collecting. Ethnographic data takes a variety of forms and can include general
descriptions of behaviours, descriptions of physical layouts, close descriptions
of conversation, thoughts and feelings about what is going on, tentative
hypotheses, examples, repeated occurrences, and so on. Inevitably, this makes it
rather difficult to distil data down to an 'essential' form.
In summary, the primary emphasis in
our own ethnographic study is on understanding the everyday,
practical accomplishment of leadership. Unlike other accounts of leadership the
emphasis in this project is not on ‘theorising’ such work as exemplars or
indicators of more general social processes, but on seeking to understand
leadership through the provision of ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of the
practical, everyday, accomplishment of the work. While we are interested in
how leaders and their ‘followers’ experience and talk about their experiences of leadership/followership, our main interest is on the practices, and the
supporting technologies, of leading. This entails detailed observations of
the everyday work of leadership - how and in what ways leadership 'gets done',
what resources and techniques are deployed in the course of the working day and
so on. The situated nature of the research seeks to provide a more sophisticated,
empirically-based understanding of everyday leadership work which addresses the
complex conditions, processes and outcomes of leadership practices in the
learning and skills sector.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books.
