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3 Ethnographic Methodology: Approaches,

Scholars and Modes

In: Doing Ethnography

By: Giampietro Gobo

Pub. Date: 2011

Access Date: July 21, 2021

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London

Print ISBN: 9781412919210

Online ISBN: 9780857028976

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857028976

Print pages: 33-52

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the

online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857028976

3 Ethnographic Methodology: Approaches, Scholars and Modes

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• To understand the usefulness of a historical reconstruction of research

methodologies.

• To date and reconstruct the advent of the ethnographic methodology.

• To gain knowledge of the main ethnographic approaches and their main

differences.

• To be aware of their main strengths and weaknesses.

• To recognize ethnographic styles.

3.1 Introduction

Felson's law

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

Why a chapter on the history of ethnography? Is one really necessary? We have grown accustomed to

viewing history as a sort of musty portrait gallery. When history is described thus, those who dismiss it as

boring asa discipline smelling of mothballs are certainly right. However, history can be looked at from another

point of view: it can be construed as an attempt to ‘denaturalize’ our categories of thought.

3.1.1 The usefulness of a historical gaze

Let me explain. We take numerous things for granted: we are convinced that we have a ‘self,’ an ‘identity’ and

an ‘individuality’; that human action is driven by ‘intentions’ and ‘motivations’ or that it results from ‘causes’;

and that there exists a past, present and future. Although these things seem natural and obvious, in actual fact

they are not. The Ancient Greeks and Romans, and many other non-Western societies, did not possess these

concepts, not even that of a ‘future.’ In fact, the future tense of verbs appeared much later than did those of

the past and present. Ancient Greek culture between the twelfth and eighth centuries bc the culture described

by Homer did not even have a unified concept of ‘body.’ The ancient Greeks did not perceive the body as a

whole object; they saw only arms, necks, legs, feet and chests, describing them as separate objects. Ancient

Greek had a term for the body (cros) which denoted it as ‘skin, bodily surface and pigmentation’; the word

soma instead denoted the body as a ‘corpse, dead, lifeless, abandoned by the psyche (the breath of life),’

and in Homer soma is never used to refer to living beings (Snell, 1953: 7). I could continue at length, and

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those interested will find innumerable examples in studies on ancient cultures or in anthropology. What I wish

to stress, however, is that a historical overview helps us see that apparently natural concepts and categories

are in fact products of a particular culture. History immunizes us against the ingenuousness (increasingly

commonplace among contemporary social scientists) of proposing as novel things which have already been

said 70 or 80 years ago. Knowledge of history saves us from having to constantly re-invent the wheel, to use

the well-known expression.

Reviewing the birth of the ethnographic methodology is useful for various reasons. It furnishes understanding

of the spirit of the times when the methodology was invented, the problems that it addressed and solved,

and the directions in which it moved. But it also serves to put into perspective numerous current approaches

which are propounded as innovative theories and methodologies yet have already been known for some time.

Finally, it serves to highlight the link between social theory and ethnography. It is with this aim in mind that I

shall now review the intellectual traditions that have fashioned ethnography into a resource for the discovery

of things which other methodologies have failed to grasp. There, accordingly, follows a survey of the main

theoretical contributions made by these traditions.

3.1.2 The making of the ethnographic methodology

Contrary to what one might think, ethnographic methodology (as we know it today) arose rather belatedly in

sociology doing so in the first years of the 1940s. Notwithstanding a first and inchoate appearance at the end

of the 1910s, one can only speak of a proper ‘ethnographic methodology’ from the early 1940s onwards. In

anthropology, though, the methodology was already in use at the end of the nineteenth century.

Ethnographic methodology has been used in different forms and for different purposes by numerous

theoretical approaches. In the next two chapters, I shall provide brief outlines of the most important of them:

the Chicago School, interactionism, grounded theory, structuralism, realism and ethnomethodology in this

chapter; reception ethnography, feminist studies and postmodernism in the next. This is obviously not the only

possible classification of the ethnographic tradition in sociology, but it follows (more or less) a chronological

story.

3.2 The period of ‘nosing around’ and the ex-post facto construction of

a myth: The ‘First’ Chicago School

As I have said, the ethnographic methodolgy was first introduced at the end of the 1910s by teachers

and researchers at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. Empirical research in the

department began under the guidance of the sociologists William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947) and Robert

Ezra Park (1864-1944). The latter had begun his career in journalism, but in 1914 he left the profession to

take up an appointment as director of the Chicago Department of Sociology. Because Park and Thomas

were scholars of a strong practical bent, they were attentive to the changes taking place in their city. By that

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time Chicago was already a metropolis, and consequently had numerous social and urban problems. This

was the period of prohibition, of rampant crime and subsequently of the Great Depression. 1 Chicago had

expanded enormously following its already rapid development in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One factor in this explosive growth was a huge influx of immigrants from Germany, Russia, Ireland, Poland,

Italy and Sweden. Naturally, therefore, Park and Thomas's research interests centered on their great modern

city and on the integration of its immigrants. Park, in particular, believed that social scientists should concern

themselves with problems of urban malaise: such matters, he maintained, should not be left to socially

engaged novelists like Émile Zola alone.

The Chicago Sociology Department was thoroughly dissatisfied with the statistical data furnished by the

surveys commissioned by government agencies. First, the data only superficially described phenomena,

failing to grasp their complexity; second, it did not cover certain aspects essential for the full understanding

of a city's life. Consequently, under Park's leadership, a far-reaching research program began with the stated

purpose of studying urban phenomena ‘live,’ in their concrete and everyday settings. Park urged his students

thus:

You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and a liberal

coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of

routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant

applicants for aid or fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called ‘getting your hands dirty

in real research.’ Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons they offer are of

great value. But one more thing is needful: first-hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of the

luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum

shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesk. In short, gentlemen, go

get the seat of your pants dirty in real research (personal note by one of Park's students reported in

Bulmer, 1984: 97).

If we cleanse Park's recommendation from its sexist spirit and the lack of reference to female students, his

advice still holds today.

3.2.1 Findings

The Chicago researchers and students thus set about constructing sociological maps of their city. They

did so by going into its neighborhoods and collecting first-hand information about their ethnic groups and

social classes. Their approach was called ‘ecological’ in the sense that it sought out connections between

the environment (its geographical and spatial aspects) and the social structure. This was a sort of human

ethnology that contended that the morphology of the urban territory (rivers, main roads, bridges and railways)

divides a city into relatively isolated zones, each with its particular economic and social structure (called

‘natural areas’). Today this seems obvious, but at the time it was an absolute revelation. Park's approach

enabled his researchers to show that apparently chaotic phenomena displayed regular patterns when they

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were examined carefully: suicide rates were high in areas of Chicago where people lived in furnished rooms;

crimes occurred in particular zones of the city (called ‘delinquency areas’ by Frederic M. Thrasher); so too did

prostitution and mental illness. Juvenile delinquency and gang activity characterized certain neighborhoods,

while ethnic minorities were localized in particular zones of the city. The descriptions and the maps were

(albeit with some excesses) extremely detailed, and the research for them took several years of fieldwork.

Park and his colleagues sought to reconstruct the sociological profiles and quantitative dimension (by the

counting) of people who lived in hotels, furnished rooms, rented apartments, their own dwellings or on the

street. They also collected information (almost entirely non-existent at the time) on their professions: in

particular on people who worked as shopgirls, policemen, peddlers, cabmen, night watchmen and vaudeville

performers, and on what they did in their everyday work (Madge, 1962: 90). Thus was born the sociology

of the professions. These studies described the changes then traversing the city of Chicago (and American

society in general) and the social disintegration that they caused: an example of which was the progressive

replacement of guest houses which still reproduced, albeit weakly, the rituals of family life with furnished

lodgings and hotel rooms. These transformations exacerbated the breakdown of family ties and cultural

codes, generating anomie and the depersonalization and commercialization of social relations: themes

developed 30 years earlier by the German sociologist George Simmel, whose student Park had been in

Germany.

3.2.2 Criticism

Except for some particularly scrupulous and systematic researchers like Frederic M. Thrasher and Clifford

Shaw, the research methods used by most of the Chicago School's members were rather primitive. As Madge

recalls, ‘a concern with method was left very much to the initiative of each investigator’ (1962: 117) because

‘the abiding fact … is that it is unified by its field of interest rather than by its methods’ (p. 125), which were

always of secondary concern. Participant observation was given no particular importance, being just one of

the many methods that the Chicago School used. Indeed, strictly speaking, the Chicago School's methods

cannot be termed ‘ethnography’; and its members themselves only expressly used the terms ethnography

and participant observation after the 1940s. 2 What authors since the 1960s have retrospectively called

‘ethnography’ (thus creating a myth see Platt, 1983; Hammersley, 1989) was nothing but a general form

of qualitative research. If anything, the Chicago researchers produced case studies 3 (Platt, 1983, 1992;

Hammersley, 1989); monographs produced using a melange of methodologies and methods such as:

• use of informants (social workers, police officers, politicians, hotel porters and landlords);

• direct observation (participant observation and home visits);

• analysis of primary documents (letters, messages and school essays); and

• analysis of secondary documents (newspaper articles, official archives, census data, archives of

charitable and voluntary organizations, social worker reports, federal documents on crime, court

registers and clinical records).

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But the marked methodological pluralism of the Chicago School was not the result of a deliberate choice

and it thus differed, for example, from the recent ‘mixed methods’ approach (see 2.7). Observation was one

of the methods that the criminologist Sheldon Messinger (1925-2002) called ‘nosing around’ (see Lofland,

1980: 4) and which were unconcerned with the methodological problems access to the field, the ethics of

research, the relativity of informants’ points of view which only much later became important. Finally, although

the Chicago School's monographs were empirically grounded, they suffered from two serious methodological

shortcomings (Sacks, 1992: 254): (i) the data was presented in a such a way that the reader could not repeat

the analysis; and (ii) they were excessively based on (and did not sufficiently contextualize) the informants’

accounts and categories, so that it was impossible to develop more independent analysis (for details on

Cressey's methodology, an important member of the ‘First’ Chicago School, go to http://www.sagepub.co.uk/

gobo).

3.3 The institutionalization of ethnography: The ‘Second’ Chicago

School

During the 1930s the Chicago Faculty of Sociology was joined by new members of staff, among them Louis

Wirth (1897-1952), Herbert Blumer, Lloyd W. Warner (1898-1970) and Everett C. Hughes. These scholars

were distinguished, amongst other things, by a greater methodological awareness which had a strong impact

on their pupils and followers (most notably William F. Whyte, Howard Becker, Blanche Geer, Anselm Strauss,

Melville Dalton, Erving Goffman, Fred Davis and Rosalie Wax), who after World War II produced a series of

studies that revolutionized the current theories of deviance, education and work. And it was in this period,

too, that ethnographic research became institutionalized by being taught, described in articles, subjected to

methodological reflection, and eventually (in the 1960s) codified in textbooks.

Ethnographic methodology, as we know it today, came into being largely through the work of Hughes

(1897-1983). After gaining his Ph.D. as a pupil of Park, Hughes worked in Canada. In 1938 he returned

to Chicago to take up an appointment specifically to teach fieldwork at the university. As Herbert Gans, a

doctoral student at the time, recalls,

just after World War II, no one talked much about participant-observation; we just did it. Like many

of my fellow sociology students, I enrolled in Everett Hughes's course ‘Introduction to Field Work’

and like them, I found it a traumatic introduction; we were sent to a census tract in nearby Hide

Park4 and asked to do a small participant-observation study. Everett Hughes gave us some words

of introduction and of instruction, but good father that he was, he quickly pushed us out of the nest

and told us to fly on our own (1968: 301).

Hughes was convinced that participant observation was a method to collect data which enabled objectivation

of the activities and experiences of certain actors. Participation was in this sense ancillary to observation,

although it was its complement for the correct production of theoretical material.

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http://www.sagepub.co.uk/gobo

The methodological approach used by Hughes and his assistants gave great importance to comparison,

synchronic as well as diachronic, so that research did not become merely self-referential. The information

gathered was more than simply descriptive: it was constantly related to general theoretical issues, and its

collection was guided by curiosity in other disciplines, especially anthropology and history. Hughes’ pupils

conducted participant observation on the activities of small groups in firms and institutions, or in specific

situations, and their papers were often characterized by irreverence towards the self-definitions furnished by

their interviewees. Under Hughes’ guidance, they selected a research topic and then pursued it across a large

number of professions. This method essentially based on comparisons enabled the Chicago researchers to

grasp counter-intuitive aspects which they wittily pointed out: Hughes remarked that the sociologist of work

can learn about doctors by studying plumbers, and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists (Hughes, 1971:

88).

However, besides being a theoretical undertaking, Hughes’ approach displayed a taste for debunking society,

creating a deliberate confusion between the higher and lower levels of the social scale, harbouring a malicious

irreverence towards the loftier professions and rejecting the traditional ranking of social prestige.

Although Hughes was scrupulous when analyzing his data, he was suspicious of the systematization of

information collecting methods. He maintained that the situations and circumstances of fieldwork are so

diversified that any textbook which attempts to lay down detailed rules is useless. Ethnographic research

is marked by a high level of unpredictability which very often frustrates research designs conceived in

the abstract. However, his approach was genuinely innovative especially if viewed in relation to the

methodological negligence predominant at the time, when no one thought it necessary to codify and teach

research practices. Statistical techniques were regarded as abstruse, and they therefore required special

training; but fieldwork, so it was believed, could only be learnt through doing it. Thus, until the second half

of the 1980s, American departments of anthropology did not teach field research methods, their belief being

that all they had to do was send their students into the field, where they would learn methodology by trial and

error.

EXERCISE 3.1

When discussing the research studies by the ‘first’ Chicago School, I pointed out that some

of them highlighted a particular fact: that the progressive demise of guest houses which

still reproduced, albeit weakly, the rituals of family life and their replacement by furnished

lodgings and hotel rooms, had increased anomie and depersonalized social relations.

Now think about your self-catering accommodation at university:

• If it didn't have a communal kitchen where you mix with other students at breakfast,

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when you take a study break, make yourself a cup of tea or prepare supper, what

would your social relations be like?

• How many friendships have you made, how many confidences have you

exchanged and how many laughs have you had in the kitchen?

• Would these have happened if you lived in a hotel or in a bedsit? Discuss these

questions among yourselves or with your professor. Think about the contingency

of social relations and the role of spaces (in this case the kitchen) in friendship

formation.

3.4 Interactionism

The participant observation method was given a privileged role and specific theoretical importance by

interactionism, an approach developed between the 1930s and 1950s by Herbert Blumer (1900-87). Although

the Chicago School (which developed within the Department of Sociology) and interactionism (this developed

within the Department of Philosophy around the philosopher George H. Mead) were two distinct realities,

there were numerous contacts and influences between them. Mead's work was a constant referent for

Thomas, Park and their pupils; while the research methods of the latter provided the empirical bases and the

methodological premises for the theories of Blumer, who never seriously involved himself in field research.

Blumer believed that social research must adopt a ‘naturalistic’ approach and rely on fieldwork in order to

grasp the perspective of social actors and see reality from their point of view. In this Blumer contradicted his

mentor, Mead, who instead recommended the experimental method already being used by psychologists.

Blumer thus furnished the theoretical-methodological basis for a research practice which the first Chicago

School had commendably introduced but had used in a confused manner. The methodological principles of

interactionism have been well summarized by Denzin (1970: 719) and Silverman (1993: 48, Table 3.2). Stated

extremely briefly, they are:

(1) relating symbols and interaction, showing how meanings arise in the context of behavior;

(2) taking the actors’ point of view;

(3) studying the ‘situated’ character of interaction;

(4) analyzing processes instead of structures, avoiding the determinism of predicting

behavior from class, gender, race, and so on; and

(5) generalizing from descriptions to theories.

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These principles together with Hughes’ teachings inspired a new generation of researchers. Known as

the ‘neo-Chicagoans,’ they distinguished themselves (as said) in the sociology of deviance and of the

professions by conducting methodical and systematic research, of which the most outstanding example is

Becker, et al. (1961), a three-year ethnographic study of students in a medical school. However, although

the interactionists paid closer attention to methodological questions than their predecessors had done, their

interest lay more in constructing theories on an empirical basis than in developing a rigorous method of

inquiry. Consequently, while rejecting the positivist methodology of empirical research, they were not always

able to avoid the accusation that their use of participant observation made the results unreliable: for they

never made clear the extent of the researcher's involvement in the situation being observed. Moreover, the

fact that the interactionists almost always chose to observe groups with little bargaining power aroused two

suspicions among their critics: (i) that the information collected could be easily manipulated; and (ii) that the

interactionists identified to a biased extent with the ‘underdogs’ drug addicts, the mentally ill, homosexuals

that they most frequently opted to study.

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3.5 Grounded Theory (GT)

The task of introducing methodological rules and procedural rigor into interactionism fell to two sociologists

of medicine: Barney G. Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1916-96). The former had trained in the department of

sociology of Columbia University, headed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton; the latter at the University

of Chicago. Glaser's logical-quantitative background, with a marked partiality à la Merton for the construction

of ‘theories of the middle range,’ and Strauss’ qualitative approach merged creatively in their book The

Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (1967), which rapidly became the

standard methodological reference work not least because it was the first structured study on qualitative

methodology. Glaser and Strauss’ aim was to bridge the gap between theory and empirical research that

previous approaches had failed to close. To this end they set about constructing a logical procedure which

led to discovery of a theory inductively that is, by using solely empirical (grounded) observations. Grounded

Theory (GT) was therefore an approach, a mode of reasoning, a way to analyze data that could be applied to

both qualitative and quantitative research.

Glaser and Strauss’ book was also the first study to organize ethnographic methodology into its various

phases: the gathering of information, its classification and then its analysis. This was also by virtue of Strauss’

wide experience as an ethnographer. Why did it take so long for a systematic work to be written? Probably

because qualitative researchers did not feel threatened or challenged by their quantitative colleagues. In

fact, according to Barry A. Turner (1988: 112), the main reason that induced Glaser and Strauss to write

their book was, above all, political: supplying a methodological text which students and researchers could

quote every once in a while when they presented a research project to institutional organizations usually

prejudiced against qualitative research, which they deemed unscientific. Their book came out in a particularly

contentious atmosphere (which no longer exists because qualitative methods are considered legitimate)

where qualitative sociologists had to defend themselves against quantitative ones. Moreover, Glaser and

Strauss had grown weary of seeing so many of their pupils’ projects rejected because they were not based

on surveys, tests or experiments; hence, their intention was to provide their students with adequate and

reasonable answers. Unfortunately, however, Glaser and Strauss’ book was used by their followers more to

assert the scientific legitimacy of the qualitative method (and to oppose quantitative ones) than to conduct

scrupulous research.

Later on the positivistic stance of ‘emerging concepts’ in GT, as described by Glaser (1978: 2002), is thus

given up in favor of a social constructionist perspective that urges the researcher to constantly reflect on the

choices made within the research process.5

GT has recently regained popularity through the work of Tom and Lyn Richards, two Australian sociologists

who have transposed Glaser and Strauss’ theoretical principles and instructions into a software program,

originally termed QSR NUD∗IST now NVIVO, which assists researchers in the classification and analysis of data.

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EXERCISE 3.2

Go to the website http://www.groundedtheory.com/vidseries1.html and listen to the

interview with Barney G. Glaser, the inventor (with Anselm Strauss) of Grounded Theory.

Then answer the following questions:

• What is GT?

• How can we do GT?

• Is it a quantitative or qualitative method?

3.6 Structuralist ethnography

Another fruitful approach that has contributed to the prestige of ethnography is ‘structural’ analysis. The term

denotes an approach less interested in the subjective aspects of action (contrary to interactionism) than in its

social context. To use a celebrated phrase from Goffman (a representative of this approach), it is an approach

concerned with: ‘Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men’ (1967: 3).

3.6.1 William Foote Whyte

Whyte (1914-2000) was a protagonist of structuralist ethnography. While studying for a masters degree in

economics at Harvard between 1936 and 1940, he conducted ethnography in North End, a poor district of

Boston (which he renamed Cornerville) inhabited by a large number of Italian immigrants. His aim was to

study the relationship between everyday life in Boston's juvenile gangs, the formation of their leaderships

and politics in the slums. His monograph, published with the striking title Street Corner Society (1943a),

was the first urban ethnography ever produced. Focusing on the bottom-up growth of political activities and

their relationships with the politics of the city in general, Whyte observed Cornerville in light of its dependent

relationship with the broader urban context. In this respect his approach differed from that of the urban studies

conducted by the Chicago School, which described the slums as autonomous and isolated spaces.

Whyte's approach differed from the Chicago School in another respect. For Thomas and Znaniecki suicides,

crime, divorces, political corruption, violence and mental illness demonstrated that the anonymous and

chaotic nature of the city generated ‘social disorganization.’ These phenomena, they maintained, were

symptomatic of a decline in collective values and social rules which were being superseded by individualism.

This was a vision of the city that Park and his colleagues had learnt from Simmel. Whyte, by contrast

presumably because of his ignorance of the Chicago tradition propounded the opposing view, that he had

probably gained from his direct observation of interactions within and among the district gangs. According

to Whyte the gangs produced ‘social organization,’ not disorganization. The poverty of Cornerville, and

its inhabitants’ myriad activities (including illegal ones like racketeering), were sources of an order whose

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http://www.groundedtheory.com/vidseries1.html

existence only a strongly deductive (and therefore prejudiced) view like that embraced by Park and his

colleagues would deny:

For too long sociologists have concentrated their attention upon individuals and families that have

been unable to make a successful adjustment to the demands of their society. We now need studies

of the way which individuals and groups have managed to reorganize their social relations and adjust

conflicts (1943b: 37).

Whyte's ethnography is not only important on the substantive and structural level; it also has methodological

implications. After its publication, Street Corner Society had very little impact. However, in 1955, when the

publisher was deciding whether to bring out a second edition of the book, the idea came to Whyte of giving

it greater interest by adding a methodological appendix. For the first time in research the appendix recounted

how the ethnographic research had been conducted. Whyte thus introduced what is now termed reflexivity:

the self-aware analysis of the dynamics between researcher and participants, the critical capacity to make

explicit the position assumed by the observer in the field, and the way in which the researcher's positioning

impacts on the research process. Whyte also emphasized his ‘subjectivity’ in regard to both the less edifying

aspects of his behavior in the field (as when he took part in an electoral fraud) and the problems that usually

arise in fieldwork. The appendix introduced innovations which are today treated as obvious, or almost banal,

but this is largely because since 1955 it has been studied and emulated by ethnographic researchers.

3.6.2 Erving Goffman

Another leading representative of structural ethnography was the Canadian Goffman (1922-82). His

intellectual development was influenced by four theoretical traditions which I have already outlined: the

Chicago School, Simmel's theory, Everett C. Hughes’ work and Durkheim's analysis. As regards the first

tradition, although Goffman never specifically concerned himself with urban sociology, he was very much

aware of the ecological dimension of social behavior: as witnesses his concept of ‘personal territory,’ his

division of interactional space into ‘front and back regions,’ and his definition of institutions in specifically

spatial terms. It was Simmel's theory that aroused Goffman's interest in the structure of face-to-face

interaction (Simmelian dyads and triads), and in those aspects of everyday life apparently ephemeral and

marginal but which instead underpin the social order and co-existing. Superficially, Goffman argued, good

manners, courtesy rules, small sanctions, greetings, blushing from embarrassment, etc., seem irrelevant

elements of social life, but in actual fact they are the foundations of social action. Thus, in Goffman's theory,

banalities became the prime subject matter of sociological study; they lost their triviality and acquired rich

significance.

Also profoundly influential on Goffman were a group of sociologists and ethnographers of work at the

University of Chicago who researched under the brilliant guidance of Hughes whose student Goffman had

been. Finally, the fourth tradition that shaped Goffman's intellectual development consisted of the theories

of Durkheim. Goffman's work therefore, represents the continuation of this structuralist tradition. His interest

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in the sacral and ceremonial nature of the self, in the rituals of everyday life and their importance to the

constitution of identity, derived from radical application of Durkheim's theories (Collins, 1986). Goffman,

however, recast those theories and eventually distanced himself from them.

Goffman's method of empirical research was almost exclusively ethnographic observation. However, he

was not a systematic researcher, and his works do not refer to specific settings.6 Some authors have

sought in vain to reconstruct Goffman's method by examining his writings. Yet those who saw Goffman's

ethnographic notes remember them as simple jottings made according to his impressions of the actual

moment. His research strategy reflected Hughes’ approach, with its unusual comparisons among apparently

antithetical categories, behaviors and professions: all mixed together by an unsystematic procedure and an

impressionistic style, which on Goffman's own admission (see the ‘Preface’ of 1959), deliberately emulated

Simmel's. To conclude, therefore, methodology was not Goffman's principal concern; as evidenced by the

following passage:

Obviously, many of these data are of doubtful worth, and my interpretations especially of some

of them may certainly be questionable, but I assume that a loose speculative approach to a

fundamental area of conduct is better than a rigorous blindness of it … my own experience has

been mainly with middle-class conduct in a few regions of America, and it is to this that most of my

comments apply (Goffman, 1963: 45).

3.7 Ethnomethodology

During the 1950s, alongside interactionism and the works of Goffman, there arose a new approach developed

by Harold Garfinkel (1917), which he subsequently termed ethnomethodology. By this term he meant the

study of the means (methods) that people (ethno) use in their everyday lives to recognize, interpret and

classify their own and others’ actions. As a young student of Talcott Parsons (under whose supervision he

obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard in 1952), Garfinkel developed his ideas at the end of the 1940s

while attending seminars held by Schutz. His theories gave rise to the revelatory exercises or ‘breaching

studies’ which Garfinkel devised for his students. The aim of these exercises was to violate a social

convention, a rule or a norm. In some cases the students were invited to behave (from 15 minutes to an hour)

as if they were boarders in their own homes; in others their task was to enter a shop and talk to a customer

as if he were a member of the sales staff; or to enter a supermarket with fixed prices and try to negotiate a

discount. Garfinkel's breaching studies were not a complete novelty; they resembled the stunts of the film/

TV producer Allen Funt (1914-99), the inventor of the television program Candid Camera (1947), where

he filmed the reactions of unwitting victims of surreal hoaxes. Garfinkel's breaching studies also resembled

the laboratory experiments conducted at the end of the 1940s by social psychologists interested in how

subjects resolved incongruities, and the psychological reaction mechanisms of compliance with, or rebellion

against, group pressure. However, Garfinkel was not interested in individual psychological mechanisms,

but rather in the strength of common-sense assumptions and the resistance of the moral and social order.

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Indeed, by means of his breaching studies, Garfinkel sought to show that the essence of the social order

consists not in socially shared values, but in common-sense conventions, trust and reciprocal expectations.

His breaching studies, which ‘are not properly speaking experimental’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 38), became so

famous that they created the stereotype of the ethnomethodologist: a peculiar fellow who, impertinently and

sometimes annoyingly, enjoys putting his interlocutors in awkward situations, the purpose being to bring out

the tacit conventions that underpin social relations and to disrupt the social order.

The theoretical core of ethnomethodology drew on the work of various authors: it continued the study of

the conditions (trust, normative expectations, etc.) which sustain the social order (Parsons); it examined the

properties of the natural attitude (Schutz) represented by common-sense reasoning in the everyday world

or Lebenswelt (Husserl); and it criticized the concept of rule as a cognitive resource able to determine

human actions (Wittgenstein). Ethnomethodology mixed these and other ingredients together in an original

synthesis whose strength consisted in the radicalism with which theories were applied to the analysis of

concrete, everyday activities. In particular, besides his emphasis on ‘tacit knowledge,’ Garfinkel empirically

demonstrated the presence of two essential and (in his opinion) intrinsic characteristics of social practices:

indexicality and reflexivity (see 5.6.3).

In the second half of the 1950s Garfinkel also conducted a series of ethnographic observations in institutional

settings: he studied, for example, a courtroom jury (with Saul Mendlovitz) and the psychiatric staff of the

U.C.L.A. School of Medicine (with Egon Bittner). These ethnographies were not conducted methodically and

systematically probably because they were intended as demonstrations of the inescapability of indexicality

and reflexivity rather than as empirical findings. But they nevertheless opened the way for a new type of

process-based ethnography which sought to grasp phenomena as they unfolded. This approach inspired a

series of ethnographic studies conducted by Garfinkel's colleagues, assistants and pupils during the 1960s

and 1970s in a variety of institutional settings: police departments, newspaper editorial offices, law courts,

therapy sessions, hospitals, halfway house and so on.

From the second half of the 1960s onwards, Garfinkel's theories attracted an increasing number of adherents:

indeed, in the state universities of Southern California principally Los Angeles (where Garfinkel taught from

1954 until his retirement), Santa Barbara and San Diego there developed a veritable ethnomethodological

movement. Besides Garfinkel, its main exponents were Aaron Cicourel (1928) and Harvey Sacks (1934-75).

Cicourel represents the methodological side of ethnomethodology, or its less radical component that is more

amenable to dialogue with the traditional social sciences. His research in education, on the relationship

between the police, prosecutors and juveniles under arrest, and doctor/patient relations contributed to

creating an ethnographic method of ethnomethodological stamp. Although not based on ethnography, the

work of Sacks inaugurated a new sector of inquiry within ethnomethodology which gained great currency from

the late 1960s onwards: conversation analysis.

3.8 Realist ethnography: Ergonomics and human ethology

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It is usually believed that ethnographic methodology belongs naturally to the category of ‘interpretative

methods’ or, at least, this is how it is described by the contemporary methodological literature. In reality,

however, ethnography has also been widely used as part of a positivist approach. The French philosopher

August Comte (1798-1857), considered the founder of sociology, stated that ‘pure observation’ (together with

experiments and the comparative method) was one of the three tools of positive sociology. In more recent

times, however, ethnography was conducted within ergonomics.

The purpose of ergonomics, which has a long tradition of applied research, is to adapt environments to human

needs, reasonings and behaviors by modifying the technologies already in use or by introducing new ones.

Most well-known is ‘physical’ ergonomics, mainly based on anthropometrics and physiology, which seeks to

adapt objects (like chairs, tables, glasses, handles and so on) to the human body. Ergonomic ethnography

arose after World War II as an attempt to overcome the limitations of laboratory experimental methods. Even

today, the main shortcoming of laboratories is that they are artificial environments and therefore differ greatly

from the natural settings of everyday life. Consequently, the subjects of laboratory experiments are required

to perform tasks and to solve problems very different from those which they encounter in their everyday lives.

For this reason, at the end of the 1940s ‘ergonomic ethnography’ was developed as a method to observe

real behaviors. An idea of this style of research can be gained from the film Kitchen Stories made by the

Norwegian director Bent Hamer in 2003. The film narrates the friendship that slowly developed between

a researcher (the observer) and a Norwegian farmer (the observed). The basis of the story is a study in

ergonomic ethnography conducted by the Swedish Home Research Institute, an organization which designed

appliances to streamline the work of housewives as they did their daily chores. The new appliances were then

tested in laboratories by the housewives themselves, as illustrated by the following still taken from the film

(Photograph 3.1).

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Photograph 3.1 Test on the physical effort produced when using a vacuum cleaner

However, the ethnographies yielded some surprising results: experts on house and home found out that

simply by organizing the kitchen's workstations properly, using the assembly-line layout of factories as their

model, the financial benefits for a household could be enormous. Or, as a Swedish advertisement for the new

ideal kitchen put it: instead of a housewife having to walk the equivalent of Sweden to the Congo during a

year of cooking, she now only needed to walk to Northern Italy in order to get food on the table.

After thoroughly mapping the Swedish housewife's behavior in the kitchen, scientists at the Home Research

Institute felt ready to venture beyond their own geographic and gender-based limitations. This is the social

philosophy that underlies IKEA, the household furnishings multinational. The film narrates how in the early

1950s the Institute sent 18 observers to the rural district of Landstad, Norway, with its surplus of bachelors, to

study the kitchen routines of single men. In order to be on 24-hour call, the observers lived life in egg-shaped

campers outside each subject's house. From high, custom-made observation chairs strategically placed in

each kitchen (see Photograph 3.2), few activities would escape this new science.

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Photograph 3.2 The researcher observes the participant in his everyday kitchen activities

These details encapsulate the positivist conception of research and its ethics: the observers adopted a

neutral, objective stance; they were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and under no circumstances

could they be spoken to or included in kitchen activities. Ergonomic ethnography is an extremely apt metaphor

for social engineering, the blind faith in progress, positivism and behaviorism, the golden age of social

democracy.

Over the years, ergonomics has not only furnished applications but also made a major contribution to theory

and knowledge about human behavior.

3.9 Concluding remarks

The different traditions described in this chapter are often grouped in the literature under the heading

‘qualitative studies.’ This drastic simplification has produced confusion among theories which, on careful

consideration, reveal irreducible differences with important consequences for research practice.

The best way to grasp these differences is to read the original texts. However, today this is rather difficult

as the proliferation of handbooks, textbooks, critical summaries and re-interpretation books has dramatically

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increased the reading of third-hand texts, rather than the original ones. This tendency facilitates the

simplification that ends up by concealing the theoretical and methodological differences among the various

schools of thought.

EXERCISE 3.3 Recognizing ethnographic styles

The three texts in this exercise exemplify three different ways of ‘doing’ ethnography.

Ethnographic methodology is not a neutral tool that automatically produces results. These

stem from a research project's cognitive objectives, which are determined both by

common-sense theories and by the scientific theories to which the researcher refers.

Your task is therefore to read the texts (available at http://www.sagepub.co.uk/gobo),

and as you do so identify the main methodological differences among the ethnographic

styles of the three authors. You can then compare your conclusions with my observations

that follow the texts. The first extract is taken from the well-known study by Howard

Becker (1951), ‘The Professional Dance Musician and his Audience,’ first published in the

American Journal of Sociology and then included in Becker's book, Outsiders: Studies

in the Sociology of Deviance (1963: 85-91). Becker carried out his research in 1948-49

when, still a university student, he worked as a musician in a number of Chicago clubs.

The second text, taken from Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization

of Gatherings (1963: 1815), is a typical example of Erving Goffman's style.

Finally, the piece by the ethnomethodologist David Sudnow is an extract from his best-

known study, begun in the summer of 1963 at two hospitals, entitled Passing on: The

Social Organization of Dying (1967: 778-3).

KEY POINTS

• Historical overview helps us see that apparently natural concepts and categories

are in fact products of a particular culture.

• The history of research methodologies and techniques immunizes us against the

ingenuousness of proposing as novel things that have already been said 70 or 80

years ago.

• In sociology, ethnographic methodology (as we know it today) arose rather

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http://www.sagepub.co.uk/gobo

belatedly, in the first years of the 1940s.

• However a first and inchoate appearance of ethnographic methodology dates back

to the end of the 1910s and the work of the ‘first’ Chicago School.

• The main schools and ethnographic styles are: Chicago School, interactionism,

Grounded Theory, structuralism, realism, ethnomethodology, reception, feminist

and postmodernism.

• The first phase of ethnographic research (1910-40) has been termed ‘nosing

around.’ By this expression is meant a haphazard use of ethnography jointly with

many other methods.

• The institutionalization of ethnographic research as a methodology distinct from

others began in the 1940s with the ‘second’ Chicago School.

• In this period the sociologist Everett C. Hughes (1897-1983) was one of the first

to teach ethnography as a methodology, into which he introduced the comparative

method.

• Subsequently, in the 1950s, interactionism adopted the actors’ point of view to

uncover the meanings of action that arose in the context of behavior.

• Instead, in the 1960s, the Grounded Theory developed by Barney G. Glaser and

Anselm Strauss gave greater systematicity to ethnographic research (which was

divided into various phases) and a more rigorous way to reason on hypotheses

and theories.

• Structuralist ethnography (William F. Whyte, Erving Goffman and others) once

again paid close attention to the social context of action, the structural

conditionings on people's behavior, but without neglecting the creative ability of

individuals to alter situations in their favor.

• With ethnomethodology, these two only apparently opposing tendencies (structure

and action) were explored further by focusing on the social order and the strategies

(methods) routinely used by actors (ethno) to recognize, make sense of, and

classify the actions of others and themselves.

• Finally, we should not forget that since the 1950s ethnographic methodology

has been used (within a realist and positivist framework) for applied research, in

particular, to conduct ergonomic studies.

KEY TERMS

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Actors’ point of view (see p. 39) Taking the actors’ point of view means learning their everyday

conceptions of reality, their way to see the world.

Comparative method (see p.

38)

Comparing and contrasting are ordinary intellectual activities which seek to uncover

a basic process which assumes many forms in many situations. Hughes was one of

the first to demonstrate the importance of comparison, the purpose of which is to

discern conceptual similarities, to refine the discriminatory power of categories, and

to discover patterns. Glaser and Strauss (1967) then outlined a systematic way to

perform this intellectual process which they called the constant comparative

method.

Ecological approach (see pp.

356)

This approach is a theoretical and methodological proposal first put forward by

Ernest W. Burgess (1925), an authoritative member of the first Chicago School. It is

‘ecological’ in the sense that it seeks out connections between the environment (its

geographical and spatial aspects) and the social structure. It recognizes that urban

expansion is not haphazard but quite strongly controlled by community-level forces

such as land values, zoning ordinances, landscape features, circulation corridors

and historical contingencies. External factors are neither random nor intended, but

rather arise from natural forces in the environment which limit the adaptive spatial

and temporal relationships among individuals.

Ethnomethods (see pp. 445)

These are the means (methods) that people (ethno) use in their everyday lives to

recognize, interpret and classify their own and others’ actions. They are routinized

strategies, procedures and techniques with which to manage everyday affairs.

Meanings and context (see

p. 39)

Meaning is a social product: it arises from the context and is created through

interactions among individuals. It is not intrinsic to things and it cannot be taken as

given.

Reflexivity (see p. 43) The

self-aware analysis of the

dynamics between researcher

and participants, the critical

capacity to make explicit the

position assumed by the

observer in the field, and the

way in which the researcher's

positioning impacts on the

research process.

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