PhD course: "The Business of Ethnography"

More information on application etc. here

Faculty

Dr. Galit Ailon, Dr. Gideon Kunda, Dr. Timothy de Waal Malefyt

Course Coordinator

Brian Moeran, Lise Skov

Prerequisite

Participants must be enrolled as Ph.D. students in an institution of tertiary education

Prerequisite/progression of the course

There is an important requirement for all would-be participants and it must be completed prior to the start of the course itself.

All participants must conduct a short period of fieldwork (minimum 10 days, maximum three weeks) in an organizational or other setting of their choice. This may be a company of some kind, a factory, city office, department or other store, train station, airport, golf club, football stadium, bar, restaurant, street corner neighbourhood, theme park, and so on. The main criterion in your selection of a fieldwork site is that it should have some physical bounded form. This will help you carry out your participant observation research.

Once you have selected your fieldwork site, you are asked to liaise with Brian Moeran to ensure that you are on the right track and that your choice is acceptable. Then you are on your own!

It is up to you to decide what – if any – equipment you wish to use during the course of your research. Some fieldworkers (like Timothy Malefyt in BBDO) use video cameras; others tape recorders; yet others notebooks. Some believe in writing everything down on their laptop; others memorise their conversations and interviews, and write them down later. It is suggested that, for the purposes of this course, you at least make use of a notebook to record what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch during yours time in the field.

Once you have completed your fieldwork, you will be expected to write a ten page description (4,000-5,000 words) of all that you have observed and experienced in the field. This description should seek to structure the random events and conversations that you have witnessed, but it should not resort to academic theories of any kind. In other words, your aim should be to write an informative account of what you have chosen to study, in such a way that the fieldwork site itself, what people do there, and how they communicate with one another is readily understandable by someone who has no knowledge thereof. You are asked, in short, to present a social world.

This account must be presented to the course coordinator, Brian Moeran, by Friday October 5. It will then be copied and circulated to all other participants for reading prior to the start of the course. These fieldwork accounts will form the basis of the group sessions during the first two days.

In order to ensure that you are able to carry out fieldwork and write up your findings in time, the following timetable is suggested:

July 10: Selection of fieldwork site, and liaison with Brian Moeran

July-August: Fieldwork research

September: Writing up of fieldwork data.

Friday October 5: Presentation of written fieldwork account

Aim of the course

The aims of the course in The Business of Ethnography are:

To have participating students carry out a short period of fieldwork prior to the course itself, and thereby enable them to experience first-hand some of the excitement and difficulties involved in ethnography.

To provide a forum in which students can first describe their fieldwork in written form, and then discuss common issues among these written ethnographies and experiences in the field.

To provide an overview of the main theoretical issues in fieldwork and to take up the challenges of ethnography of organizations and marketing, with a view to translating theory into practice and vice versa.

To discuss the practicalities of fieldwork and the everyday reality of data collection, as well as to examine ways in which to interpret such data in the writing up of fieldwork as ethnography.

Course content

It is fast becoming recognised that the standard methodological tools of qualitative and quantitative research (ranging from in-depth interviews to surveys and questionnaires) are inadequate to grasp in totality the everyday practices of business organizations or consumers. As a result, both managers and marketers are beginning to look around for different ways of studying and understanding business methods, organizational set-ups, social structures and consumer lifestyles.

One hitherto relatively untried methodology is that of fieldwork. Strictly speaking, the word fieldwork refers to an intensive, ideally long-term, form of participant observation used to conduct research in an office, factory, city hall, police precinct, residential neighbourhood, shopping mall, theme park, and so on. Ethnography refers to the writing up of that fieldwork as a book, article or Ph.D. thesis. Both terms have been borrowed from the discipline of anthropology.

Bringing together five experienced ethnographers and leading experts in the field, this course in The Business of Ethnography will give research students first-hand experience with an ethnographic situation, as well as acquaint them with the aims and practices of ethnography as a methodological tool in the study of business organizations and marketing.

Teaching methods

The course will comprise plenary session lectures, followed by question/answer sessions and discussion in the mornings; and, in the afternoons, more informal group work in which participants present their own fieldwork experiences, interpret videotapes, and engage in intensive discussion

Monday, November 5

0930-1000 Registration

1000-1030 Plenary Session Introduction (Brian Moeran and Lise Skov)

1030-1200 Plenary Session Lecture: “The Business of Ethnography” Brian Moeran

1200-1300 Lunch

1300-1600 Group Work: Participants’ Ethnographies (BM & LS)

Tuesday, November 6

0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “Writing Strategies: The Ethnography of Organizations” (Lise Skov)

1200-1300 Lunch

1300-1600 Group Work: Participants’ Ethnographies (BM & LS)

Wednesday, November 7

0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “Advertising and Marketing: The Ethnographic Process” (Timothy de Waal Malefyt)

1200-1300 Lunch

1300-1600 Group Work: Consumer Videotapes and discussion (TW and BM)

Thursday, November 8

0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “The Practicalities of Fieldwork: Everyday Reality behind Data Collection” (Gideon Kunda)

1200-1300 Lunch

1300-1600 Workshop: “Interpreting Ethnographic Situations” (Galit Ailon)

1800- Course Participants’ Dinner

Friday, November 9

0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “Writing Ethnography” (Gideon Kunda and Galit Ailon)

1200-1300 Lunch

1300-1500 Round Table Discussion (Galit Ailon, Gideon Kunda, Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Brian Moeran and Lise Skov)

Course literature

The following books should be read prior to the course, in order to prepare you for the lectures and discussions that follow.

Ailon, Galit 2007 Global Ambitions and Local Identities. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kunda, Gideon 2006 Engineering Culture. (2nd Edition) Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Malefyt, Timothy de Waal and Brian Moeran 2003 “Introduction: Advertising cultures ? Advertising, ethnography and anthropology.” Pp. 1-34 in their edited Advertising Cultures. Oxford: Berg.

Miller , Daniel 1998 A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Moeran, Brian 2005 The Business of Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.

Spradley, James 1979 The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Van Maanen, John 1988 Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.