ABSTRACT
Ethnography is one of many approaches that can be found within social research today. Furthermore, the label is not used in an entirely standard fashion; its meaning can vary. A consequence of this is that there is considerable overlap with other labels, such as ‘qualitative inquiry’, ‘fieldwork’, ‘interpretive method’, and ‘case study’, these also having fuzzy semantic boundaries. In fact, there is no sharp distinction even between ethnography and the study of individual life histories, as the example of ‘auto/ ethnography’ shows; this referring to an individual researcher’s study of his or her own life and its context (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2001; Holman Jones 2005). There is also the challenging case of ‘virtual ethnography’, whose data may be restricted entirely to what can be downloaded from the internet (Markham 1998, 2005; Hine 2000; Mann and Stewart 2000). While, for the purposes of this opening chapter, we will need to give some indication of what we are taking the term ‘ethnography’ to mean, its variable and sometimes contested character must be remembered; and the account we provide will inevitably be shaped by our own views about what form ethnographic work ought to take.
