1 What is ethnography?
Ethnography is one of many approaches that can be found within social research
today. Furthermore, the label is not used in an entirely standard fashion; its meaning
can vary. A consequence of this is that there is considerable overlap with other labels,
such as ‘qualitative inquiry’, ‘ﬁeldwork’, ‘interpretive method’, and ‘case study’, these
also having fuzzy semantic boundaries. In fact, there is no sharp distinction even
between ethnography and the study of individual life histories, as the example of ‘auto/
ethnography’ shows; this referring to an individual researcher’s study of his or her own
life and its context (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2001; Holman Jones 2005). There is also the
challenging case of ‘virtual ethnography’, whose data may be restricted entirely to what
can be downloaded from the internet (Markham 1998, 2005; Hine 2000; Mann and
Stewart 2000). While, for the purposes of this opening chapter, we will need to give
some indication of what we are taking the term ‘ethnography’ to mean, its variable and
sometimes contested character must be remembered; and the account we provide will
inevitably be shaped by our own views about what form ethnographic work ought
to take.
The origins of the term lie in nineteenth-century Western anthropology, where an
ethnography was a descriptive account of a community or culture, usually one located
outside the West. At that time ‘ethnography’ was contrasted with, and was usually
seen as complementary to, ‘ethnology’, which referred to the historical and comparative
analysis of non-Western societies and cultures. Ethnology was treated as the core of
anthropological work, and drew on individual ethnographic accounts which were initially
produced by travellers and missionaries. Over time, the term ‘ethnology’ fell out of
favour because anthropologists began to do their own ﬁeldwork, with ‘ethnography’
coming to refer to an integration of both ﬁrst-hand empirical investigation and the
theoretical and comparative interpretation of social organization and culture.
As a result of this change, since the early twentieth century, ethnographic ﬁeldwork
has been central to anthropology. Indeed, carrying out such work, usually in a society
very different from one’s own, became a rite of passage required for entry to the ‘tribe’
of anthropologists. Fieldwork usually required living with a group of people for extended
periods, often over the course of a year or more, in order to document and interpret
their distinctive way of life, and the beliefs and values integral to it.
Moreover, during the twentieth century, anthropological ethnography came to be
one of the models for some strands of research within Western sociology. One of these
was the community study movement. This involved studies of villages and towns in
the United States and Western Europe, often concerned with the impact of urbanization
and industrialization. A landmark investigation here was the work of the Lynds in
documenting life in Muncie, Indiana, which they named ‘Middletown’ (Lynd and Lynd
1929, 1937).
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
In a parallel development, many sociologists working at the University of Chicago
from the 1920s to the 1950s developed an approach to studying human social life that
was similar to anthropological research in some key respects, though they often labelled
it ‘case study’. The ‘Chicago School’ was concerned with documenting the range of
different patterns of life to be found in the city, and how these were shaped by the
developing urban ecology.
From the 1960s onwards, forms of sociological work inﬂuenced by these developments,
especially by Chicago sociology, spread across many sub-ﬁelds of the discipline,
and into other disciplines and areas of inquiry as well; and they also migrated from
the United States to Europe and to other parts of the world. Furthermore, for a variety
of reasons, an increasing number of anthropologists began to do research within Western
societies, at ﬁrst in rural areas but later in urban locales too.1
Another relevant development
in the latter half of the twentieth century was the rise of cultural studies as an
area of investigation distinct from, but overlapping with, anthropology and sociology.
Work in this ﬁeld moved from broadly historical and textual approaches to include
the use of ethnographic method, notably in studying audiences and the whole issue of
cultural consumption. Furthermore, in the later decades of the twentieth century, ethnography
spread even further, for example into psychology and human geography. Indeed,
it tended to get swallowed up in a general, multidisciplinary, movement promoting
qualitative approaches; though the term ‘ethnography’ still retains some distinctive
connotations.2
This complex history is one of the reasons why ‘ethnography’ does not have a
standard, well-deﬁned meaning. Over the course of time, and in each of the various
disciplinary contexts mentioned, its sense has been reinterpreted and recontextualized
in various ways, in order to deal with particular circumstances. Part of this remoulding
has arisen from the fact that ethnography has been associated with, and also put in
opposition to, various other methodological approaches. Furthermore, it has been
inﬂuenced by a range of theoretical ideas: anthropological and sociological functionalism,
philosophical pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, Marxism, phenomenology,
hermeneutics, structuralism, feminism, constructionism, post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Increasingly, it has been compared and contrasted not just with experimental
and survey research but also with interview-based studies, macro-historical analysis,
political economy, conversation and discourse analysis, and psycho-social approaches.
In short, ‘ethnography’ plays a complex and shifting role in the dynamic tapestry
that the social sciences have become in the twenty-ﬁrst century. However, this term
is by no means unusual in lacking a single, standard meaning. Nor does the uncertainty
of sense undermine its value as a label. And we can outline a core deﬁnition, while
recognizing that this does not capture all of its meaning in all contexts. In doing this
we will focus, initially, at a fairly practical level: on what ethnographers actually do,
on the sorts of data that they usually collect, and what kind of analysis they deploy
to handle those data. Later we will broaden the discussion to cover some of the ideas
that have informed, and continue to inform, ethnographic practice.
2 What is ethnography?
1 For an account of the development and reconﬁguration of ethnographic work within British anthropology,
see Macdonald (2001).
2 Diverse strands and trends of the qualitative research movement are exempliﬁed in the various editions
of the Handbook of Qualitative Research: Denzin and Lincoln (1994, 2000, 2005).
What ethnographers do
In terms of data collection, ethnography usually involves the researcher participating,
overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching
what happens, listening to what is said, and/or asking questions through informal and
formal interviews, collecting documents and artefacts – in fact, gathering whatever
data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry.
Generally speaking ethnographers draw on a range of sources of data, though they
may sometimes rely primarily on one.3
In more detailed terms, ethnographic work usually has most of the following features:
1 People’s actions and accounts are studied in everyday contexts, rather than under
conditions created by the researcher – such as in experimental setups or in highly
structured interview situations. In other words, research takes place ‘in the ﬁeld’.
2 Data are gathered from a range of sources, including documentary evidence of
various kinds, but participant observation and/or relatively informal conversations
are usually the main ones.
3 Data collection is, for the most part, relatively ‘unstructured’, in two senses. First,
it does not involve following through a ﬁxed and detailed research design speciﬁed
at the start. Second, the categories that are used for interpreting what people say
or do are not built into the data collection process through the use of observation
schedules or questionnaires. Instead, they are generated out of the process of data
analysis.
4 The focus is usually on a few cases, generally fairly small-scale, perhaps a single
setting or group of people. This is to facilitate in-depth study.
5 The analysis of data involves interpretation of the meanings, functions, and
consequences of human actions and institutional practices, and how these are
implicated in local, and perhaps also wider, contexts. What are produced, for the
most part, are verbal descriptions, explanations, and theories; quantiﬁcation and
statistical analysis play a subordinate role at most.
As this list of features makes clear, as regards what is referred to in methodological
texts as ‘research design’, ethnographers typically employ a relatively open-ended
approach (see Maxwell 2004b). They begin with an interest in some particular area of
social life. While they will usually have in mind what the anthropologist Malinowski
– often regarded as the inventor of modern anthropological ﬁeldwork – called
‘foreshadowed problems’, their orientation is an exploratory one. The task is to
investigate some aspect of the lives of the people who are being studied, and this
includes ﬁnding out how these people view the situations they face, how they regard
one another, and also how they see themselves. It is expected that the initial interests
and questions that motivated the research will be reﬁned, and perhaps even transformed,
over the course of the research; and that this may take a considerable amount of time.
Eventually, through this process, the inquiry will become progressively more clearly
focused on a speciﬁc set of research questions, and this will then allow the strategic
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 3
3 These methods can include those that are ‘unobtrusive’: Lee (2000). There has been some dispute
about whether ethnographic studies can rely entirely on interview or documentary data, without
complementary participant observation. See Atkinson and Coffey (2002).
collection of data to pursue answers to those questions more effectively, and to test
these against evidence.
Collecting data in ‘natural’ settings, in other words in those that have not been
speciﬁcally set up for research purposes (such as experiments or formal interviews)
also gives a distinctive character to ethnographic work. Where participant observation
is involved, the researcher must ﬁnd some role in the ﬁeld being studied, and this will
usually have to be done at least through implicit, and probably also through explicit,
negotiation with people in that ﬁeld. Access may need to be secured through gatekeepers,
but it will also have to be negotiated and renegotiated with the people being studied;
and this is true even where ethnographers are studying settings in which they are
already participants. In the case of interviewing, too, access cannot be assumed to be
available automatically, relations will have to be established, and identities co-
constructed.
The initially exploratory character of ethnographic research means that it will often
not be clear where, within a setting, observation should be begin, which actors need to
be shadowed, and so on. Sampling strategies will have to be worked out, and changed,
as the research progresses. Much the same is true of the use of interviews. Here, decisions
about whom to interview, when, and where, will have to be developed over time, and
the interviewing will normally take a relatively unstructured form, though more structured
or strategic questioning may be used towards the end of the ﬁeldwork. Furthermore, as
already noted, the data will usually be collected in an unstructured form, by means
of ﬁeldnotes written in concretely descriptive terms and also through audio- or videorecordings,
plus the collection of documents. Given the nature of these data, a considerable
amount of effort, and time, will need to go into processing and analysing them. In all
these respects, ethnography is a demanding activity, requiring diverse skills, including
the ability to make decisions in conditions of considerable uncertainty.
This is true despite the fact that, as a set of methods, ethnography is not far removed
from the means that we all use in everyday life to make sense of our surroundings, of
other people’s actions, and perhaps even of what we do ourselves. What is distinctive
is that it involves a more deliberate and systematic approach than is common for most
of us most of the time, one in which data are speciﬁcally sought to illuminate research
questions, and are carefully recorded; and where the process of analysis draws on previous
studies and involves intense reﬂection, including the critical assessment of competing
interpretations. What is involved here, then, is a signiﬁcant development of the ordinary
modes of making sense of the social world that we all use in our mundane lives, in a
manner that is attuned to the speciﬁc purposes of producing research knowledge.
In the remainder of this chapter we will explore and assess a number of
methodological ideas that have shaped ethnography. We shall begin by looking at the
conﬂict between quantitative and qualitative method as competing models of social
research, which raged across many ﬁelds in the past and still continues in some even
today. This was often seen as a clash between competing philosophical positions.
Following some precedent we shall call these ‘positivism’ and ‘naturalism’: the former
privileging quantitative methods, the latter promoting ethnography as the central, if
not the only legitimate, social research method.4
After this we will look at more recent
4 What is ethnography?
4 ‘Naturalism’ is a term which is used in a variety of different, even contradictory, ways in the literature:
see Matza (1969). Here we have simply adopted the conventional meaning within the ethnographic
literature.
ideas that have shaped the thinking and practice of ethnographers, some interpretations
of which are at odds with the earlier commitment to naturalism.
Positivism versus naturalism
Positivism has a long history in philosophy, but it reached its high point in the ‘logical
positivism’ of the 1930s and 1940s (Kolakowski 1972; Halfpenny 1982; Friedman
1991; Hammersley 1995: ch. 1). This movement had a considerable inﬂuence upon
social scientists, notably in promoting the status of experimental and survey research
and the quantitative forms of analysis associated with them. Before this, in both
sociology and social psychology, qualitative and quantitative techniques had generally
been used side by side, often by the same researchers. Nineteenth-century investigators,
such as Mayhew (1861), LePlay (1879) and Booth (1902–3), treated quantitative and
qualitative data as complementary. Even the sociologists of the Chicago School, often
portrayed as exponents of participant observation, employed both ‘case-study’ and
‘statistical’ methods. While there were recurrent debates among them regarding the
relative advantages and uses of the two approaches, there was general agreement on
the value of both (Bulmer, 1984; Harvey 1985; Hammersley 1989a; Deegan 2001). It
was only later, with the rapid development of statistical methods and the growing
inﬂuence of positivist philosophy, that survey research came to be regarded by some
of its practitioners as a self-sufﬁcient methodological tradition.5
Today, the term ‘positivism’ has become little more than a term of abuse among
social scientists, and as a result its meaning has become obscured. For present purposes,
the major tenets of positivism can be outlined as follows:
1 The methodological model for social research is physical science, conceived in
terms of the logic of the experiment. While positivists do not claim that the methods
of all the physical sciences are the same, they do argue that these share a common
logic. This is that of the experiment, where quantitatively measured variables are
manipulated in order to identify the relationships among them. This logic is taken
to be the deﬁning feature of science.
2 Universal or statistical laws as the goal for science. Positivists adopt a characteristic
conception of explanation, usually termed the ‘covering law’ model. Here events
are explained in deductive fashion by appeal to universal laws that state regular
relationships between variables, holding across all relevant circumstances. However,
it is the statistical version of this model, whereby the relationships have only a
high probability of applying across relevant circumstances, that has generally been
adopted by social scientists; and this has encouraged great concern with sampling
procedures and statistical analysis, especially in survey research. Here, a premium
is placed on the generalizability of ﬁndings.
3 The foundation for science is observation. Finally, positivists give priority to
phenomena that are directly observable, or that can be logically inferred from what
is observable; any appeal to intangibles runs the risk of being dismissed as
metaphysical speculation. It is argued that scientiﬁc theories must be founded
upon, or tested by appeal to, descriptions that simply correspond to the state of
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 5
5 In social psychology this process started rather earlier, and it was the experiment which became the
dominant method.
the world, involving no theoretical assumptions and thus being beyond doubt. This
foundation could be sense data, as in traditional empiricism, or it may be the realm
of the ‘publicly observable’: for example, the movement of physical objects, such
as mercury in a thermometer, which can be easily agreed upon by all observers.
Great emphasis is therefore given to the standardization of procedures of data
collection, which is intended to facilitate the achievement of measurements that
are stable across observers. If measurement is reliable in this sense, it is argued,
it provides a sound, theoretically neutral base upon which to build. This is sometimes
referred to as procedural objectivity.
Central to positivism, then, is a certain conception of scientiﬁc method, modelled
on the natural sciences, and in particular on physics (Toulmin 1972). Method here is
concerned with the testing of theories or hypotheses. A sharp distinction is drawn
between the context of discovery and the context of justiﬁcation (Reichenbach 1938,
1951). The question of how theoretical ideas are generated belongs to the former and
is outside the realm of scientiﬁc method. It is the procedures employed in the context
of justiﬁcation that are held to mark science off from common sense, since they involve
the rigorous assessment of alternative theories from an objective point of view.
Thus, for positivists, the most important feature of scientiﬁc theories is that they
are open to, and are actually subjected to, test: that they can be conﬁrmed, or at least
falsiﬁed, with certainty. This requires the exercise of control over variables, which can
be achieved through physical control, as in experiments, or through statistical control,
as in survey research. Without any control over variables, it is argued, one can do no
more than speculate about causal relationships, since no basis for testing hypotheses
is available. So, the process of testing involves comparing what the theory says should
occur under certain circumstances with what actually does occur – in short, comparing
it with ‘the facts’.
These facts are collected by means of methods that, like the facts they collect, are
regarded as theory-neutral; otherwise, it is assumed, they could not provide a conclusive
test of the theory. In particular, every attempt is made to eliminate the effect of the
observer by developing an explicit, standardized set of data elicitation procedures. This
also allows replication by others so that an assessment of the reliability of the ﬁndings
can be made. In survey research, for example, the behaviour of interviewers is typically
speciﬁed down to the wording of questions and the order in which they are asked. In
experiments the conduct of the experimenter is closely deﬁned. It is argued that if it
can be ensured that each survey respondent or experimental subject in a study and its
replications is faced with the same set of stimuli, then their responses will be comparable.
Where such explicit and standardized procedures are not employed, as in participant
observation, so the argument goes, it is impossible to know how to interpret the
responses since one has no idea what they are responses to. In short, positivists argue
that it is only through the exercise of physical or statistical control of variables, and
their rigorous measurement, that science is able to produce a body of knowledge whose
validity is conclusive; and thus can justiﬁably replace the myths and dogma of traditional
views or common sense.
Ethnography, and many kinds of qualitative research, do not match these positivist
canons.6
As a result, especially in the middle part of the twentieth century, they came
6 What is ethnography?
6 At the same time it is worth noting that the anthropological work of Malinowski was inﬂuenced by
early positivist ideas: see Leach (1957) and Strenski (1982).
under criticism as lacking scientiﬁc rigour. Ethnography was sometimes dismissed
as quite inappropriate to social science, on the grounds that the data and ﬁndings it
produces are ‘subjective’, mere idiosyncratic impressions of one or two cases that
cannot provide a solid foundation for rigorous scientiﬁc analysis. In reaction, ethnographers
developed an alternative view of the proper nature of social research, which
they often termed ‘naturalism’ (Loﬂand 1967; Blumer 1969; Matza 1969; Denzin
1971; Schatzman and Strauss 1973; Guba 1978). Like positivism, this appealed to
natural science as a model, but the latter’s method was conceptualized differently, and
the exemplar was usually nineteenth-century biology rather than twentieth-century
physics.
Naturalism proposes that, as far as possible, the social world should be studied in
its ‘natural’ state, undisturbed by the researcher. Hence, ‘natural’ not ‘artiﬁcial’ settings,
like experiments or formal interviews, should be the primary source of data. Furthermore,
the research must be carried out in ways that are sensitive to the nature of the setting
and that of the phenomena being investigated. The primary aim should be to describe
what happens, how the people involved see and talk about their own actions and those
of others, the contexts in which the action takes place, and what follows from it.
A key element of naturalism is the demand that the social researcher should adopt
an attitude of ‘respect’ or ‘appreciation’ towards the social world. In Matza’s (1969:
5) words, naturalism is ‘the philosophical view that remains true to the nature of the
phenomenon under study’. This is contrasted with the positivists’ primary and prior
commitment to a conception of scientiﬁc method reconstructed from the experience
of natural scientists:
Reality exists in the empirical world and not in the methods used to study that
world; it is to be discovered in the examination of that world . . . . Methods are
mere instruments designed to identify and analyze the obdurate character of the
empirical world, and as such their value exists only in their suitability in enabling
this task to be done. In this fundamental sense the procedures employed in each
part of the act of scientiﬁc enquiry should and must be assessed in terms of whether
they respect the nature of the empirical world under study – whether what they
signify or imply to be the nature of the empirical world is actually the case.
(Blumer 1969: 27–8)
A ﬁrst requirement of social research according to naturalism, then, is ﬁdelity to the
phenomena under study, not to any particular set of methodological principles, however
strongly supported by philosophical arguments or by the practice of natural scientists.
Moreover, naturalists regard social phenomena as quite distinct in character from
physical phenomena. In this respect, naturalism drew on a wide range of philosophical
and sociological ideas, but especially on symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and
hermeneutics (these sometimes being collectively labelled ‘interpretivism’). From
different starting points, these traditions all argue that the social world cannot be
understood in terms of simple causal relationships or by the subsumption of social
events under universal laws. This is because human actions are based upon, or infused
by, social or cultural meanings: that is, by intentions, motives, beliefs, rules, discourses,
and values.
For example, at the heart of symbolic interactionism is a rejection of the stimulusresponse
model of human behaviour, which is built into the methodological arguments
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 7
of positivism. In the view of interactionists, people interpret stimuli, and these
interpretations, continually under revision as events unfold, shape their actions. As a
result, the ‘same’ physical stimulus can mean different things to different people –
and, indeed, to the same person at different times.7
Many years ago, Mehan (1974)
provided a striking example that relates directly to the sort of data collection method
supported by positivism:
A question from [a] language development test instructs the child to choose ‘the
animal that can ﬂy’ from a bird, an elephant, and a dog. The correct answer
(obviously) is the bird. Many ﬁrst grade children, though, chose the elephant along
with the bird as a response to that question. When I later asked them why they
chose that answer they replied: ‘That’s Dumbo’. Dumbo (of course) is Walt Disney’s
ﬂying elephant, well known to children who watch television and read children’s
books as an animal that ﬂies.
(Mehan 1974: 249)
Such indeterminacy of interpretation undermines attempts to develop standard measures
of human behaviour. Interpretations of the same set of experimental instructions or
interview questions will undoubtedly vary among people and across occasions; and,
it is argued, this undermines the value of standardized research methods.8
Equally important, naturalists argue that because people’s behaviour is not caused
in a mechanical way, it is not amenable to the sort of causal analysis and manipulation
of variables that are characteristic of the quantitative research inspired by positivism.
Any hope of discovering laws of human behaviour is misplaced, it is suggested, since
human behaviour is continually constructed, and reconstructed, on the basis of people’s
interpretations of the situations they are in.
According to naturalism, in order to understand people’s behaviour we must use an
approach that gives us access to the meanings that guide their behaviour. Fortunately,
the capacities we have developed as social actors can give us such access. As participant
observers we can learn the culture or subculture of the people we are studying. We
can come to interpret the world more or less in the same way that they do. In short,
we not only can but also must learn to understand people’s behaviour in a different
way from that in which natural scientists set about understanding the behaviour of
physical phenomena.9
The need to learn the culture of those we are studying is most obvious in the case
of societies other than our own. Here, not only may we not know why people do what
they do, but often we may not be able to recognize even what they are doing. We are
in much the same position as Schutz’s (1964) stranger: Schutz notes how, in the weeks
and months following an immigrant’s arrival in a host society, what he or she previously
took for granted as knowledge about that society turns out to be unreliable, if not
obviously false. In addition, areas of ignorance previously of no importance come to
8 What is ethnography?
7 For useful accounts of interactionism, see Maines (2001), Atkinson and Housley (2003) and Reynolds
and Herman-Kinney (2003).
8 Cooper and Dunne (2000) provide a similar and more developed analysis of the processes of interpretation
involved in mathematical tests.
9 This form of understanding social phenomena is often referred to as Verstehen. See Truzzi (1974) for
a discussion and illustrations of the history of this concept, and O’Hear (1996) for a more recent
discussion of its role across the social sciences and humanities.
take on great signiﬁcance; and overcoming them is necessary for the pursuit of important
goals, perhaps even for the stranger’s very survival in the new environment. In the
process of learning how to participate in the host society, the stranger gradually acquires
an inside knowledge of it, which supplants his or her previous ‘external’ knowledge.
But Schutz argues that by virtue of being forced to come to understand a culture in
this way, the stranger acquires a certain objectivity not normally available to culture
members. The latter live inside the culture, and tend to see it as simply a reﬂection of
‘how the world is’. They are often not conscious of the fundamental presuppositions
that shape their vision, many of which are distinctive to their own culture.
Schutz’s (1964) account of the experience of the stranger matches most obviously
the work of anthropologists, who typically study societies very different from their
own. However, the experience of the stranger is not restricted to those moving to live
in another society. Movement among groups within a single society can produce the
same effects; generally, though not always, in a milder form. There are many different
layers or circles of cultural knowledge within any society. Indeed, this is particularly
true of modern industrial societies with their complex divisions of labour, multifarious
lifestyles, ethnic diversity, and deviant communities; and the subcultures and perspectives
that maintain, and are generated by, these social divisions. This was, of course, one
of the major rationales for the research of the Chicago School sociologists. Drawing
on the analogy of plant and animal ecology, they set out to document the very different
patterns of life to be found in different parts of the city of Chicago, from the ‘high
society’ of the so-called ‘gold coast’ to slum ghettos such as Little Sicily. Later, the
same kind of approach came to be applied to the cultures of occupations, organizations,
and social groups of various kinds.
According to the naturalist account, the value of ethnography as a social research
method is founded upon the existence of such variations in cultural patterns across
and within societies, and their significance for understanding social processes.
Ethnography exploits the capacity that any social actor possesses for learning new
cultures, and the objectivity to which this process gives rise. Even where he or she is
researching a familiar group or setting, the participant observer is required to treat this
as ‘anthropologically strange’, in an effort to make explicit the presuppositions he or
she takes for granted as a culture member. In this way, the culture can be turned into
an object available for study. Naturalism proposes that through marginality, in social
position and in perspective, it is possible to construct an account of the culture under
investigation that both understands it from within and captures it as external to, and
independent of, the researcher: in other words, as a natural phenomenon. Thus, the
description of cultures becomes the primary goal. The search for universal laws is
downplayed in favour of detailed accounts of the concrete experience of life within a
particular culture and of the beliefs and social rules that are used as resources within
it. Indeed, attempts to go beyond this, for instance to explain particular cultural forms,
are sometimes discouraged. Certainly, as Denzin (1971: 168) noted, ‘the naturalist
resists schemes or models which over-simplify the complexity of everyday life’;
though some forms of theory, especially those which are believed to be capable of
capturing social complexity, are often recommended, most notably the kind of grounded
theory proposed by Glaser and Strauss.10
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 9
10 See Glaser and Strauss (1968); Strauss and Corbin (1998); Pidgeon and Henwood (2004); for critical
commentaries, see Williams (1976) and Dey (1999).
Over the last decades of the twentieth century, the inﬂuence of positivism waned
and with it, in many areas, the dominance of quantitative method; though there are
currently some signs of a revival.11
At the same time, various aspects of naturalism
came under attack from within the ranks of qualitative researchers. In the next section
we shall explore the ideas that stimulated this.
Anti-realist and political critiques of naturalism
The ﬁeld of social research methodology nowadays is a complex one. There has been
considerable diversification in qualitative research, including the rise of discourse
and narrative analysis, of various kinds of action research, of autoethnography and
performance studies, and so on. At the same time, there have been growing calls to
combine qualitative methods with quantitative techniques.12
These have often been met
with charges that this neglects the conﬂicting philosophical and political presuppositions
built into qualitative and quantitative approaches (Smith and Heshusius 1986; Smith
1989; Guba 1990; Hodkinson 2004). Along with this, there has been criticism of older
forms of ethnographic work on the grounds that these still betray the inﬂuence of
positivism and scientism. What is pointed to here is that, despite their differences,
positivism and naturalism share much in common. They each appeal to the model of
natural science, albeit interpreting it in different ways. As a result, both are committed
to trying to understand social phenomena as objects existing independently of the
researcher. And they therefore claim that research can provide knowledge of the social
world that is superior in validity to that of the people being studied. Equally important,
they both regard practical and political commitments on the part of the researcher as,
for the most part, extraneous to the research process – indeed, as a source of potential
distortion whose effects have to be guarded against to preserve objectivity.
Many ethnographers have begun to question the commitment to naturalism, challenging
these assumptions. Doubts have been raised about the capacity of ethnography
to portray the social world in the way that naturalism claims it does. Equally, the
commitment of the older kinds of ethnography to some sort of value neutrality has
been questioned, and politically interventionist forms of ethnography have been
recommended. We shall look at these two aspects of the critique of naturalism separately,
though they are sometimes closely related.
Questioning realism
Many critics of naturalism today reject it on the grounds that, like positivism, it
assumes that the task of social research is to represent social phenomena in some literal
fashion: to document their features and explain their occurrence. What is being questioned
here is sometimes referred to as realism. In part, criticism of realism stems from
a tension within ethnography between the naturalism characteristic of ethnographers’
methodological thinking and the constructionism and cultural relativism that shape
their understanding of the perspectives and behaviour of the people they study
(Hammersley 1992: ch. 3). As we saw, ethnographers portray people as constructing
10 What is ethnography?
11 See Smith and Hodkinson (2006); Denzin and Giardina (2006).
12 Some have argued that mixed methods research can be a new paradigm that transcends the distinction
between the other two: see, for example, Tashakkori and Teddlie (2003).
the social world, both through their interpretations of it and through actions based on
those interpretations. Furthermore, those interpretations sometimes reﬂect different
cultures, so that there is a sense in which through their actions people create distinct
social worlds (Blumer 1969: 11). But this constructionism and relativism is compatible
with naturalism only so long as it is not applied to ethnographic research itself. Once
we come to see ethnographers as themselves constructing the social world through
their interpretations of it, thereby producing incommensurable accounts that reﬂect
differences in their background cultures, there is a conﬂict with the naturalistic realism
built into older ethnographic approaches.
This internal source of doubts about realism was reinforced by the impact of various
external developments. One was changes in the ﬁeld of the philosophy of science.
Whereas until the early 1950s positivism had dominated this ﬁeld, at that time its
dominance began to be undermined, eventually producing a range of alternative
positions, some of which rejected realism. A sign of this change was the enormous
inﬂuence of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions (Kuhn 1996;
ﬁrst published in 1962). Kuhn argued against views of the history of science that
portray it as a process of cumulative development towards the truth, achieved by rational
investigation logically founded on evidence. He, and others, showed that the work of
those involved in the major developments of scientiﬁc knowledge in the past was
shaped by theoretical presuppositions about the world that were not themselves based
on empirical research, and many of which are judged by scientists today as false. Kuhn
further claimed that the history of science, rather than displaying the gradual build-up
of knowledge, is punctuated by periods of revolution when the theoretical
presuppositions forming the ‘paradigm’ in terms of which scientists in a particular
ﬁeld have previously operated are challenged and replaced. An example is the shift
from Newtonian physics to relativity theory and quantum mechanics in the early part
of the twentieth century. The replacement of one paradigm by another, according to
Kuhn, does not, because it cannot, occur on the basis simply of the rational assessment
of evidence. Paradigms are incommensurable, they picture the world in incompatible
ways, so that the data themselves are interpreted differently by those working within
different paradigms. This implies that judgements of the validity of scientiﬁc claims
is always relative to the paradigm within which they operate are judged; they are never
simply a reﬂection of some independent domain of reality.13
Kuhn’s work embodied most of the arguments against positivism that had become
inﬂuential: that there is no theory-neutral observational foundation against which theories
can be tested, and that judgements about the validity of theories are never fully
determined by any evidence. He also proposed an alternative conception of science
that contrasted sharply with the positivist model. However, his critique counted as
much against naturalism, against the idea of the researcher getting into direct contact
with reality, as it did against positivism. On his account, all knowledge of the world
is mediated by paradigmatic presuppositions. Furthermore, the alternative view he
offered made natural scientists look very similar to the people that ethnographers had
long portrayed in their accounts as constructing diverse social worlds. And sociologists
of science have subsequently produced ethnographies of the work of natural scientists
and technological innovators along these lines (see Hess 2001). In this way, natural
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 11
13 There is some ambiguity in Kuhn’s work, and this has led to disputes about its interpretation. For a
detailed discussion see Sharrock and Read (2002).
science moved from being primarily a methodological model for social research to
being an object of sociological investigation; and in many ways this brought the
conﬂict between naturalism and constructionism to a head.
As important as developments within the philosophy of science for the generation
of doubts about realism was the inﬂuence of various continental European philosophical
trends. Naturalism had been inﬂuenced by nineteenth-century ideas about hermeneutics,
about the interpretation of historical texts, notably the work of Dilthey (see Makkreel
1975). This was the source of the idea, mentioned earlier, that socio-cultural understanding
takes a different form from how natural scientists go about understanding
physical phenomena. In the twentieth century, however, this earlier hermeneutic tradition
came to be challenged by a new form of ‘philosophical hermeneutics’, developed by
Gadamer (see Howard 1982; Warnke 1987; Dostal 2002). Where, previously, understanding
human texts had been presented as a rigorous task of recovering the meaning
intended by the author and locating it within relevant cultural settings, philosophical
hermeneutics viewed the process of understanding as inevitably reﬂecting the ‘prejudices’,
the pre-understandings, of the interpreter. Interpretation of texts, and by extension
understanding of the social world too, could no longer be seen as a matter of capturing
social meanings in their own terms; the accounts produced were regarded as constructions
that inevitably reﬂected the socio-historical position and background assumptions of
the researcher.
Another powerful inﬂuence on ethnography has been post-structuralism and postmodernism.
These labels refer to a diverse set of ideas and work, but we shall mention
just two of the most inﬂuential ﬁgures: Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ and the work of
Foucault.14
Like philosophical hermeneutics, deconstruction has also led to a questioning
of the idea that ethnographers can capture the meanings on the basis of which
people act. It does this because it argues that meanings are not stable; nor are they
properties of individuals. Rather, they reﬂect the shifting constitutive role of language.
Also important has been deconstruction’s undermining of the distinctions between
different genres of writing: its advocates have sought to erase the differentiation between
ﬁction and non-ﬁction, indeed between literary and technical writing generally. This
has led to recognition of the fact that the language used by ethnographers in their
writing is not a transparent medium allowing us to see reality through it, but rather a
construction that draws on many of the rhetorical strategies used by journalists, travel
writers, novelists, and others. Some commentators have drawn the conclusion from
this that the phenomena described in ethnographic accounts are created in and through
the rhetorical strategies employed, rather than being external to the text; in short, this
concern with rhetoric has often been associated with forms of anti-realism.15
Foucault’s work is also based on a rejection of realism: he is not concerned with
the truth or falsity of the ideas that he studies – for example about madness or sex
– but rather with the ‘regimes of truth’ by which they are constituted and how they
have structured institutional practices during the development of Western society.16
12 What is ethnography?
14 For an excellent account of the rise of these ideas in the context of French philosophy, see Gutting
(2001).
15 See, for example, Tyler (1986), Ashmore (1989); Piper and Stronach (2004).
16 The statement that Foucault rejects realism, while not fundamentally misleading, does obscure both
the, probably witting, ambiguities in his work in this respect, and its emergence out of the tradition
of rationalist epistemology: see Gutting (1989). On Foucault more generally, see Gutting (1994).
He stresses the fact that the psychological and social sciences are socio-historical in
character, and claims that they function as part of the process of surveillance and
control, which he sees as the central feature of modern society. Their products reﬂect
this social character, rather than representing some world that is independent of them.
Foucault argues that different regimes of truth are established in different contexts,
reﬂecting the play of diverse sources of power and resistance. Thus, what is treated
as true and false, in social science as elsewhere, is constituted through the exercise of
power.17
The reception of post-structuralist and postmodernist ideas in the context of AngloAmerican
qualitative research has involved diverse readings and responses to what
was, of course, by no means a coherent set of texts; these extending well beyond those
of Derrida and Foucault. Typically, these readings and responses have reinforced
tendencies towards anti-realism of some kind, encouraged the adoption of non-Marxist
Leftist political orientations, and involved the idea that some discourses/voices are
suppressed and that the function of research should be to liberate them. Much less
commonly, this inﬂuence has also led to the subversion of conventional ethnographic
textual strategies.
While realism has not been completely abandoned by most ethnographers, the idea
that ethnographic accounts can represent social reality in a relatively straightforward
way (for example, through the ethnographer getting close to it) has been widely rejected;
and doubt has been thrown on the claims to scientiﬁc authority associated with realism.
Moreover, in the work of Foucault especially, we have a direct link with the second
criticism of naturalism: its neglect of the politics of social research.
The politics of ethnography
Naturalists shared with positivists a commitment to producing accounts of factual
matters that reﬂect the nature of the phenomena studied rather than the values or
political commitments of the researcher. Of course, both recognized that, in practice,
research is affected by the researcher’s values, but the aim was to limit the inﬂuence
of those values as far as possible, so as to produce ﬁndings that were true independently
of any particular value stance. Since the mid-1980s, any such striving after value
neutrality and objectivity has been questioned, sometimes being replaced by advocacy
of ‘openly ideological’ research (Lather 1986), ‘militant anthropology’ (Scheper-Hughes
1995), or research that is explicitly carried out from the standpoint of a particular
group, for example women, those suffering racism, indigenous peoples, or people with
disabilities (see Denzin and Lincoln 2005).
In part this has resulted from the continuing inﬂuence of Marxism and ‘critical’
theory, but equally important has been the impact of feminism and of post-structuralism.
From a traditional Marxist point of view the very distinction between facts and values
is a historical product, and one that can be overcome through the future development
of society. Values refer to the human potential that is built into the unfolding of history.
In this sense values are facts, even though they may not yet have been realized in the
social world. Moreover, they provide the key to any understanding of the nature of
current social conditions, their past, and their future. From this point of view, a science
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 13
17 For discussions of the implications of Foucault’s work for ethnography, see Gubrium and Silverman
(1989); Kendall and Wickham (2004).
of society should provide not only abstract knowledge but also the basis for action to
transform the world so as to bring about human self-realization. On this argument,
ethnography, like other forms of social research, cannot but be concerned simultaneously
with factual and value matters, and its role inevitably involves political intervention
(whether researchers are aware of this or not).
A similar conclusion about the political character of social research has been reached
in other ways, for example by those who argue that because research is always affected
by values, and always has political consequences, researchers must take responsibility
for their value commitments and for the effects of their work. It has been suggested
that ethnography and other forms of social research have had too little impact, that
their products simply lie on library shelves gathering dust, and that as a result they
are worthless. To be of value, it is suggested, ethnographic research should be concerned
not simply with understanding the world but with applying its ﬁndings to bring about
change (see, for example, Gewirtz and Cribb 2006).
There are differences in view about the nature of the change that should be aimed
at. Sometimes the concern is with rendering research more relevant to national policymaking
or to one or another form of professional practice (see, for example, Hustler
et al. 1986; Hart and Bond 1995; Healy 2001; Taylor et al. 2006). Alternatively, or
as part of this, it may be argued that research should be emancipatory. This has been
proposed by feminists, where the goal is the emancipation of women (and men) from
patriarchy (Fonow and Cook 1991; Lather 1991; Olesen 2005); but it is also to be
found in the writings of critical ethnographers and advocates of emancipatory action
research, where the goal of research is taken to be the transformation of Western
societies so as to realize the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice (Gitlin et al. 1989;
Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). Similar developments have occurred in the ﬁeld of
disability studies (Barnes 2003) and in the context of queer theory (Plummer 2005).
Of course, to the extent that the very possibility of producing knowledge is
undermined by the sort of anti-realist arguments we outlined earlier, a concern with
the practical or political effects of research may come to seem an essential alternative
goal to the traditional concern with truth. This too has led to the growth of more interventionist
conceptions of ethnography. In this way post-structuralism and postmodernism
have contributed to the politicization of social research, though in a far from
unambiguous way because they seem simultaneously to undermine all political ideals
(Dews 1987). For example, they threaten any appeal to the interests or rights of
Humanity; and in the context of feminist research they challenge the concept of
woman.
Reﬂexivity
The criticisms of naturalism we have outlined are sometimes seen as arising from what
has been called the reﬂexive character of social research.18
It is argued that what both
positivism and naturalism fail to take into account is the fact that social researchers
are part of the social world they study. A sharp distinction between science and common
14 What is ethnography?
18 ‘Reﬂexivity’ is a term that has come to be used in a variety of different ways, and the meaning we
are giving to it here is by no means uncontested, see Lynch (2000). For discussions of some of the
problems with reﬂexivity, see Troyna (1994); Paechter (1996); Adkins (2002); Finlay (2002); Haney
(2002).
sense, between the activities and knowledge of the researcher and those of the researched,
lies at the heart of both these positions. It is this that leads to their joint concern with
eliminating the effects of the researcher on the data. For positivism, the solution is the
standardization of research procedures; for naturalism, it is getting into direct contact
with the social world, and in extreme form the requirement that ethnographers ‘surrender’
themselves to the cultures they wish to study (Wolff 1964; Jules-Rosette 1978a,
1978b). Both positions assume that it is possible, in principle at least, to isolate a body
of data uncontaminated by the researcher, by turning him or her either, in one case,
into an automaton or, in the other, into a neutral vessel of cultural experience. However,
searches for empirical bedrock of this kind are futile; all data involve presuppositions
(Hanson 1958).
The concept of reﬂexivity acknowledges that the orientations of researchers will be
shaped by their socio-historical locations, including the values and interests that these
locations confer upon them. What this represents is a rejection of the idea that social
research is, or can be, carried out in some autonomous realm that is insulated from
the wider society and from the biography of the researcher, in such a way that its
ﬁndings can be unaffected by social processes and personal characteristics. Also, it is
emphasized that the production of knowledge by researchers has consequences. At the
very least, the publication of research ﬁndings can shape the climate in which political
and practical decisions are made, and it may even directly stimulate particular sorts
of action. In fact, it may change the character of the situations that were studied.
Moreover, the consequences of research are not neutral in relation to what are widely
felt to be important values, nor are they necessarily desirable. Indeed, some commentators
see social research as playing an undesirable role in supporting one or another aspect
of the political status quo in Western societies. As we saw, for Foucault, the social
sciences were part of a modern apparatus of surveillance.
There is no doubt that reﬂexivity, in the sense just outlined, is a signiﬁcant feature
of social research. Indeed, there is a sense in which all social research takes the form
of participant observation: it involves participating in the social world, in whatever
role, and reﬂecting on the products of that participation. However, it is not necessary
to draw conclusions from the reﬂexivity of social research of the kind that critics of
naturalism have done. In our view, recognition of reﬂexivity implies that there are
elements of positivism and naturalism which must be abandoned; but it does not
require rejection of all the ideas associated with those two lines of thinking. Thus, we
do not see reﬂexivity as undermining researchers’ commitment to realism. In our view
it only undermines naive forms of realism which assume that knowledge must be based
on some absolutely secure foundation.19
Similarly, we do not believe that reﬂexivity
implies that research is necessarily political, or that it should be political, in the sense
of serving particular political causes or practical ends. For us, the exclusive, immediate
goal of all research is, and must remain, the production of knowledge.
Reﬂexivity and realism
It is true that we cannot avoid relying on ‘common-sense’ knowledge nor, often, can
we avoid having an effect on the social phenomena we study. In other words, there
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 15
19 For an inﬂuential epistemological analysis that recognizes the fallible character of any evidence but
retains a commitment to realism, see Haack (1993). See also Hammersley (2004).
is no way in which we can escape the social world in order to study it. Fortunately,
though, this is not necessary from a realist point of view. There is as little justiﬁcation
for rejecting all common-sense knowledge out of hand as there is for treating it as all
‘valid in its own terms’: we have no external, absolutely conclusive standard by which
to judge it. But we can work with what we currently take to be knowledge, while
recognizing that it may be erroneous; and engaging in systematic inquiry where doubt
seems justiﬁed. And in doing this we can still make the reasonable assumption that
we are able to describe phenomena as they are, and not merely how we perceive them
or how we would like them to be (Hammersley 1992: ch. 3). All of us, in our everyday
activities, rely on presuppositions about the world, few of which we have subjected
to test ourselves, and none of which we could fully and independently test. Most of
the time this does not and should not trouble us, and social research is no different
from other activities in this respect. We need to reﬂect only on what seems – or can
be shown to be – problematic, while leaving open the possibility that what currently
is not problematic may in the future become so.
It is also important to recognize that research is an active process, in which accounts
of the world are produced through selective observation and theoretical interpretation
of what is seen, through asking particular questions and interpreting what is said in
reply, through writing ﬁeldnotes and transcribing audio- and video-recordings, as well
as through writing research reports. And it is true that some aspects of this process
have not been given the attention they deserve until recently. However, to say that our
ﬁndings, and even our data, are constructed does not automatically imply that they do
not or cannot represent social phenomena. To believe that this is implied is to assume
that the only true form of representation would involve the world imprinting its
characteristics on our senses without any activity on our part, a highly implausible
account even of the process of perception (Gregory 1970).
Similarly, the fact that as researchers we are likely to have an effect on the people
we study does not mean that the validity of our ﬁndings is restricted to the data
elicitation situations on which we relied. We can minimize reactivity and/or monitor
it. But we can also exploit it: how people respond to the presence of the researcher
may be as informative as how they react to other situations. Indeed, rather than engaging
in futile attempts to eliminate the effects of the researcher completely, we should set
about understanding them, a point that Schuman (1982) made in relation to social
surveys:
The basic position I will take is simple: artifacts are in the mind of the beholder.
Barring one or two exceptions, the problems that occur in surveys are opportunities
for understanding once we take them seriously as facts of life. Let us distinguish
here between the simple survey and the scientiﬁc survey. . . . The simple approach
to survey research takes responses literally, ignores interviewers as sources of
inﬂuence, and treats sampling as unproblematic. A person who proceeds in this
way is quite likely to trip and fall right on his artifact. The scientiﬁc survey, on
the other hand, treats survey research as a search for meaning, and ambiguities of
language and of interviewing, discrepancies between attitude and behaviour, even
problems of non-response, provide an important part of the data, rather than being
ignored or simply regarded as obstacles to efﬁcient research.
(Schuman 1982: 23)
16 What is ethnography?
In short, ‘what is an artifact if treated naively reﬂects a fact of life if taken seriously’
(Schuman 1982: 24). In order to understand the effects of the research and of research
procedures, we need to compare data in which the level and direction of reactivity
vary. Once we abandon the idea that the social character of research can be standardized
out or avoided by becoming a ‘ﬂy on the wall’ or a ‘full participant’, the role of the
researcher as active participant in the research process becomes clear. As has long
been recognized by ethnographers, he or she is the research instrument par excellence.
The fact that behaviour and attitudes are often not stable across contexts and that the
researcher may inﬂuence the context becomes central to the analysis. Indeed, it can
be exploited for all it is worth. Data should not be taken at face value, but treated as
a ﬁeld of inferences in which hypothetical patterns can be identiﬁed and their validity
tested. Different research strategies can be explored and their effects compared with
a view to drawing theoretical conclusions. Interpretations need to be made explicit and
full advantage should be taken of any opportunities to test their limits and to assess
alternatives. Such a view contrasts sharply with the image of social research projected
by naturalism, though it is closer to some other models of ethnographic research such
as ‘grounded theorizing’, ‘analytic induction’, and the strategy model to be found
alongside naturalism in the work of Schatzman and Strauss (1973). And in this way
the image of the researcher is brought into parallel with that of the people studied, as
actively making sense of the world, yet without undermining the commitment of research
to realism.
Reﬂexivity and the political character of research
Positivism and naturalism, in the forms we have discussed them, tend to present research
as an activity that is done for its own sake and in its own terms. By contrast, as we
have seen, some critics insist that research has a social function, for instance serving
to legitimize and preserve the status quo. And on this basis they argue that researchers
must try to make their research serve a different function, such as challenging the
status quo, in some respect. Often, this point of view is organized around the question:
whose side is the researcher on? (Becker 1967b; Troyna and Carrington 1989; but see
Hammersley 2000: ch. 3).
As we saw earlier, others argue that what is wrong with ethnography is its lack of
impact on policy-making and practice, its limited payoff in the everyday worlds of
politics and work. Here it is dismissed as an idle pastime, a case of ﬁddling while the
world burns; one that is engaged in by intellectual dilettantes who live off the taxes
paid by hard-working citizens.
These criticisms of naturalist ethnography seem to us to involve an overestimation
of the actual and potential contribution of research to policy and practice, and an
associated failure to value the more modest contributions it offers (Rule 1978;
Hammersley 2002). It is also worth pointing out that one may believe that the only
justiﬁcation for research is its contribution to policy and practice, and recognize that
it inevitably has effects on these, without concluding that it should be directed towards
the achievement of particular political or practical goals. Indeed, there are good reasons
for research not being directed towards such goals. The most important one is that this
would increase the chances of the ﬁndings being distorted by ideas about how the
world ought to be, or by what it would be politic for others to believe. When we are
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 17
engaged in political or practical action, the truth of what we say is not always our
principal concern, even though we may prefer to be honest. We are more interested
in the practical effects of our actions, and sometimes this may lead us to be ‘economical’
with the truth, at the very least; perhaps even in relation to ourselves (Benson and
Stangroom 2006: ch. 1). Moreover, even where the truth of our beliefs is the main
issue, in practical activities judgement of factual and value claims as more or less
reliable will be based on somewhat different considerations than in research directed
towards producing knowledge: we will probably be concerned above all with whether
the information is sufﬁciently reliable for our current purposes. Of course, if one
believes, as Marx and others did and do, that (ultimately at least) the true and the good
are identical, one might deny the signiﬁcance of this difference in orientation between
research and other practical activities. But this view relies on an elaborate and
unconvincing philosophical infrastructure (Hammersley 1992: ch. 6, 1993).
It is worth emphasizing that to deny that research should be directed towards political
goals is not to suggest that researchers could, or should, abandon their political
convictions. It is to insist that as researchers their primary goal must always be to
produce knowledge, and that they should try to minimize any distortion of their
ﬁndings by their political convictions or practical interests. Nor are we suggesting that
researchers should be unconcerned about the effects of their work on the world. The
point is that acknowledging the reﬂexivity of research does not imply that it must be
primarily directed towards changing (or for that matter preserving) the world in some
way or other. And, as we have indicated, there are good reasons why it should not be
so directed.
Conclusion
We began this chapter by examining two contrasting accounts of the logic of social
research and their implications for ethnography. Neither positivism nor naturalism
provides an adequate framework. Both neglect its fundamental reﬂexivity: the fact that
we are part of the social world we study, and that there is no escape from reliance on
common-sense knowledge and methods of investigation. All social research is founded
on the human capacity for participant observation. We act in the social world and yet
are able to reﬂect upon ourselves and our actions as objects in that world. However,
rather than leading to doubts about whether social research can produce knowledge,
or to the desire to transform it into a political enterprise, for us this reﬂexivity provides
the basis for a reconstructed logic of inquiry that shares much with positivism and
naturalism but goes beyond them in important respects. By including our own role
within the research focus, and perhaps even systematically exploiting our participation
in the settings under study as researchers, we can produce accounts of the social world
and justify them without placing reliance on futile appeals to empiricism, of either
positivist or naturalist varieties.
Reconstructing our understanding of social research in line with the implications of
its reﬂexivity also throws light on the relationship between quantitative and qualitative
approaches. Certainly there is little justiﬁcation for the view, associated with naturalism,
that ethnography represents a superior, alternative paradigm to quantitative research.
On the other hand, it has a much more powerful contribution to make to social science
than positivism allows. And, while combining different methods, for particular purposes,
18 What is ethnography?
may often be of value, this should not be done at the expense of forgetting the important
methodological ideas associated with ethnography, and with qualitative research more
generally.
Reﬂexivity is an aspect of all social research. It is one that has been given increasing
attention by ethnographers and others in recent years, notably in the production
of ‘natural histories’ of particular studies.20
The remainder of this book is devoted
to spelling out what we take to be the implications of reﬂexivity for ethnographic
practice.
1EEE
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
EEE3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5EEE
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
41EEE
What is ethnography? 19
20 For a listing of examples of natural histories of social research, see Hammersley (2003b).