Doing Ethnographies

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world. Informed by the authors′ fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced.

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world. Informed by the authors′ fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced.

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world. Informed by the authors' fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced.

With regular exercises, lists of key terms and points and self-evaluation checklists, Doing Ethnography systematically describes the various phases of an ethnographic inquiry and provides numerous examples, suggestions and advice for the novice ethnographer. Ethnography seeks to understand, describe and explain the symbolic world lying beneath the social action of groups, organizations and communities. This book clearly sets out the coordinates and foundations of this increasingly popular methodology. Giampietro Gobo discusses all the major issues, including the research design, access to the field, data collection, organisation and analysis, and communication of the results.

This book presents a new way of understanding organizational ethnography due to its strong emphasis on what the word organizational means in organizational ethnography. In the past five years, a new organizational studies research field has developed involving organizational ethnographies, which is when organizations are studied using ethnographical methods. This development has shed light on the methods and difficulties of organizational ethnography, and yet we argue that confusion still remains as to what organizational ethnographical approaches are. This edited volume offers students and scholars a profound understanding of organizational ethnography by presenting concrete examples, reflections and discussions of how to understand and adequately conceptualize the word organizational in organizational ethnography. All the chapters illustrate the work of analytically combining different organizational phenomena (e.g. strategy making, policymaking), analytical perspectives (e.g. sensemaking, narratives) and ethnographical methods (e.g. texts, observations, shadowing, interviews) and demonstrate different ways of doing organizational ethnography. At the end of each chapter, an experienced researcher in the field offers comments and discussion on the contributions of the chapter, providing reflections on the implications for research in the field to which they ascribe. In Doing Organizational Ethnography, organizational is defined as polyphonic ways of organizing based on the interactions of the many voices, discourses, practices and narratives in and around organizations and the book provides readers with in-depth reflections on what organizing and organizations become when doing organizational ethnography.

This book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings, providing an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offering a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.

Doing Ethnography is invaluable reading for anyone collecting data through observation. Innovative and thought provoking, it is a refreshing take on ethnography stressing both academic rigor and practical necessity. It combines theoretical perspective with tangible action plans and walks you step-by-step through designing, conducting, and evaluating ethnographic research. The book skilfully introduces the varied tasks and decisions you need to consider before entering the fieldhelping you to avoid common mistakes and to conduct safe, ethical research. The redesigned Second Edition has cutting edge case studies and examples from across the social sciences and has an embedded awareness of the importance of digital research tools and social media. It also includes a detailed discussion of: Autoethnography Digital Ethnography Visual Ethnography Feminist Ethnography Managing and Analysing data This is an ideal companion for every novice researcher.

Making use of his own research experiences in Papua New Guinea, Southern Ontario, and Newfoundland, Wayne Fife teaches students and new researchers how to prepare for research, conduct a study, analyze the material (e.g. create new social and cultural theory), and write academic or policy oriented books, articles, or reports. The reader is taught how to combine historic and contemporary documents (e.g. archives, newspapers, government reports) with fieldwork methods (e.g. participant-observation, interviews, and self-reporting) to create ethnographic studies of disadvantaged populations. Anthropologists, Sociologists, Folklorists and Educational researchers will equally benefit from this critical approach to research.