Doing ethnography: introduction

The derivation of the word ‘ethnography' is from the Greek ‘ethnos', meaning ‘a people' and ‘graphy', meaning writing, so ethnography literally refers to writing about people. This omits ethnography's most important aspect: it is an active, agentive practice – the ethnographer ‘goes into the field', spends a more or less extended time living in and studying a community, and returns to their desk to write up their experiences, deriving meaning and insights as they do so. But, curiously, there is no verb ‘to ethnograph'. Many years ago, before Google and the internet, one of us was told that ethnography ‘is what anthropologists do'. That begged such questions as: what is an anthropologist and in what ways are they distinguished from sociologists, what exactly do they do, and if ethnography is what anthropologists do, what do ethnographers do? The answer she was given was, firstly, that anthropologists spend more time in the field than sociologists, leading to the answerless question: where is the dividing line between anthropological time and sociological time? Secondly, she was told that anthropologists just ‘go into the field', become part of the community they are studying, but remain apart from it in order to study it. That took her round in circles – ethnography is what anthropologists do – but with the added conundrum of how to remain both immersed within and separate from ‘the field'. Management scholars have the additional problem of distinguishing between observation studies (participant and non-participant) and ethnography: the dividing lines between them appear very vague. [...]