Doing Ethnography. Amanda Coffey
of the researcher within the culture. However, the very idea of understanding a setting from the point of view of those engaged in that setting, and doing so through on the ground engagement in and with that setting, remains a powerful underpinning of contemporary ethnographic approaches.
The School of Sociology at the University of Chicago is often credited with bringing ethnography to wider sociological attention, drawing on anthropological sensibilities in more mundane research settings. Founded in 1892, the Chicago School was the first dedicated university department of sociology, and is responsible for helping to shape the social sciences, both empirically and methodologically. With an emphasis on urban sociology, The Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s theorized about the city, drawing on ethnographic research of Chicago and its environs. Chicago scholars encouraged their students to get first-hand experience of social life in different parts of the city. To do so they adapted the idea of engaged fieldwork, including participant observation, to study the contemporary urban cityscape. The journalist Robert Park, alongside Ernest Burgess and W.I. Thomas, was a key figure in the development of the Chicago School, bringing with him an early interpretation of investigative journalism, relying on ethnographic methods of sorts – listening, experiencing, asking questions and observing social life first-hand. This brought anthropological ethnographic methods ‘home’, using participant observation to study familiar and everyday settings on the doorstep, as opposed to the study of the ‘exotic’ or ‘different’ that had been favoured by early social and cultural anthropologists.
Park and his colleagues transformed the study of the city, through close and varied empirical and ethnographic inquiry. Following the Second World War, this influence endured, with students learning about and practising interpretative sociology and ethnographic methods with scholars such as Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer. This ‘second’ Chicago School was a key influence in shaping the development of post-war American sociology, and indeed the discipline more generally (Fine, 1995). The Chicago School approach is credited with influencing the ways in which social institutions are studied and understood by sociologists; this influence has been wide reaching, including in fields such as health care and education, as well as organizational studies more generally. The way was also paved for the wider adoption of qualitative research methods in the medium term, grounded in and emergent from ethnography. This influence though was not just in relation to methods of inquiry, but also relatedly to sociological theory and methodology. The Chicago School was pivotal in the development of the theoretical perspective and frameworks of symbolic interactionism. Drawing on the philosophical work of George Herbert Mead, symbolic interactionism focused on shared meanings that are generated and maintained through social interaction. While not exclusively so, symbolic interactionism has been particularly associated with ethnography and qualitative research methods, with its emphasis on meaning and process, and ‘where acts, objects and people have evolving and intertwined local identities that may not be revealed at the outset or to an outsider’ (Rock, 2001, p. 29). In the next section the theoretical and methodological frames of and for ethnography are further explored.
The methodological contexts of ethnography
Ethnographic research is now practised across a wide range of disciplines, and as such it draws on a rich palette of theoretical and methodological frameworks. It is important to note that ethnography lends itself to and is influenced by a variety of theoretical positions. Ethnography is not reduced to a single approach to theorizing about the social world. Indeed ethnography has been adopted and shaped by a range of methodological approaches to the making sense of social life. It is generally understood that ethnography sits at the inductive end of the theoretical spectrum, and that a value of ethnography is its capacity to enable study of social worlds in their ‘natural’ state – inductively through close and detailed attention. Early adopters of anthropological ethnography began with a specific setting, culture or community at hand – and set out to learn about and understand that setting through close study and participative engagement. They did not start, at least explicitly, from the position of a hypothesis to be tested or a theory to prove or improve. However, early ethnographic practitioners were increasingly influenced by a view of the social world that is orderly and functional, and by an understanding that society is achieved by organization and through social institutions. This functionalist–structural perspective included a focus on the role of social institutions in supporting the everyday functioning of society (and indeed in turn led to a particular preoccupation with the role of the family and kinship as a particular, and presumed universal, social institution). A focus on structure and function led to the pursuit of ethnography as an empirical project, where social action, behaviour and belief are revealed as social ‘facts’ to be gathered – ‘objectively’ and untainted by researchers, who are but neutral observers. Inherent within this model is a rather uncritical adoption of a naturalistic perspective. That is, a view that social worlds can and should be studied in their natural states, with the main aim being to describe what is actually and naturally happening. Following this through to a natural conclusion, if we are to understand what it is we are describing then we need an approach that provides access to behaviour and the patterning of that behaviour. Thus prolonged engagement provides the opportunity to observe and to learn, coming to understand the ordering and functioning of the social world in much the same way as the social actors themselves.
Symbolic interactionism, influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, focuses less on institutions and the identification of patterning, and much more on the ways in which human actions are imbued with social meanings which are made and revealed through social interaction. Thus people, as social actors, are active and interactive agents in social worlds where there is continual interpretation, revision and reshaping. This is a more dynamic and moving view of social life, and one which brings with it an assumption of the self as socially constructed, and ‘made’ through action and interaction. In terms of ethnography, symbolic interactionism brought to the fore a focus on meanings and symbols; less a focus on objects and behaviours than on how they are and come to be imbued with social and symbolic meaning. There is also an interest in how social actors learn and interpret these meanings in and through their everyday practice. These meanings are uncovered through an exploration of the symbols in which meanings are encoded, and shared in the course of interaction. Interactionist ethnography does not ‘presume too much in advance’ (Rock, 2001, p. 29); rather, through ethnographic fieldwork researchers can seek to identify symbols and meanings in order to gain understandings of how social actors act in and make sense of social worlds. Such ethnographic work assumes an immersion in the social world in order to make sense of that world from the perspective of the actors themselves. Interactionism is one of the major perspectives or set of perspectives within sociology. There are a variety of versions of interactionism; for ethnography the interactionism associated with Erving Goffman (1959, 1963, 1967, 1969) has been particularly influential. Goffman himself did not explicitly identify himself as an interactionist (Fine and Manning, 2003). However, his work on the purposive construction of the self through active impression management – the presentation of self – highlights the ways in which people describe their actions and how they ‘perform’ the self. Goffman likened this to performance and drama; this dramaturgical approach is concerned with how social actors purposively act in different situations and how they make sense of those actions in terms of meanings. Performativity remains a key concept in contemporary ethnography.
The influence of symbolic interactionism on ethnography is most obvious in relation to the ways in which we describe ethnography itself as an interactional process. We ‘do’ ethnography; doing ethnography is an act in itself – reliant upon and constructed through interactions between the ethnographer, the field of study and social actors with/in the field. There is here a focus on participation – with the researcher being a participant in and within the setting in order to uncover and make sense of meanings. There has been considerable debate on the extent to which ethnographers can and should participate in the field of study (Adler and Adler, 1994). This is often expressed as a continuum from ‘complete participant’ on the one side through to ‘complete observer’ on the other (see Chapter 5 for a longer discussion of the role of the researcher in ethnography). For our purposes here it is worth noting that interactionism makes visible the importance and impact of researcher engagement