ABSTRACT
To enter the community of researchers who practice educational ethnography, the ‘outsider’ must acquire ways of being, doing and speaking that meet the norms and expectations, rights and obligations, roles and responsibilities of the ‘insiders’ of that community. This chapter explores the challenges faced by someone from the world of business who sought to enter that community in order to better understand how multiple actors shape and are shaped by interactions that take place across time and in multiple locations in the social context of the workplace and elsewhere. An analysis is presented of the transition of the ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’ and is based on a reflexive study of a tracer unit, a CEO-as-ethnographer/researcher-as-CEO, as he went about studying what is required to read the world through an ethnographic lens and applying that lens to the study of the creation of a learning opportunity in the workplace, called an internship.
