ABSTRACT
Ethnographic methods, despite wars with the quantitative tradition over the years, have gained increasing legitimacy, well regarded by most segments of the discipline for their ability to offer fine grained descriptions of events and provide an in-depth examination of everyday situations. However, some critics still quip that ethnographers are often simply “poor journalists,” who spend years working on projects that are conceptually bereft and no better than a weekly news documentary. Of course this is an unfair charge. At its best, ethnographic research provides concepts that extend beyond the particular case study in question and hold lasting value due to their elegance, insight, explanatory value, or broad application. As Gary Alan Fine (2008) put it in his keynote address at the recent 25th annual Qualitative Analysis Conference in New Brunswick, Canada, ethnographers differ from journalists mostly because of a six-letter word: theory. Indeed, to the extent ethnographic work provides even one or two lasting
theoretical concepts, it moves beyond the level of a faddish news story and becomes a more durable contribution to sociology, explaining or contextualizing social life in new and compelling ways. These ideas can then be used, challenged, or refined through future research by others. After all, how sociologically or analytically revealing is our writing if we do little more than journalists? Journalists typically tell a story better than we do, because they’ve been trained in ways that sociologists haven’t been. They can cover a story far more quickly, and they can locate their sources of information with greater dispatch. One may be reminded of the community activist Saul Alinsky’s musing that a sociology department “is the kind of institution that spends $100,000 on research projects to find the locations of houses of prostitution which a taxi driver could tell you for nothing” (quoted in Berson 1971: 141). Certainly, gaining an intimate familiarity with a locale often provides a better sense of how social life works, and where the most significant things to insiders are, in a more efficient manner. Still, familiarizing oneself with the ins and outs of a scene, and crafting a lasting work of sociology are not quite the same thing. What makes ethnographic work special is that its authors are able to generate
new theoretical concepts, identify the steps in a particular social process,
reveal the organizational principles of social groupings, identify explanatory mechanisms in social dynamics, and link these issues to broader theoretical frames of understanding. For example, ethnographers might study the career route of drug addicts, mental illnesses, religious conversions, professional socialization-in ways journalists do not, and cannot, since they have neither the training nor the time. Further, larger theoretical frames can often provide a context and a trained sociological eye to approach and interpret the social patterns, viewpoints, and behavior of the groups we observe in unique, imaginative, and penetrating ways. Key ideas, concepts, and theoretical statements are what make sociological careers, generate citations, furnish high-profile publications, and most importantly, provide the most lasting contributions to scholarship. Think for example of Howard Becker’s (1963) notion of a “deviant career,”
Edgerton’s (1967) theory of a “cloak of competence,” Everett Hughes’ (1971) concepts of “dirty work,” or “routine and emergency,” Fred Davis’ (1961) idea of “deviance disavowal,” John Kitsuse’s (1970) discussion of “peopleprocessing institutions,” Erving Goffman’s (1961) description of “total institutions,” and Anselm Strauss’ (1978) formulation of the “negotiated order” found within organizational protocols. Consider also Sheldon Stryker’s (1980) observations of a “salience hierarchy” in multiple role identities, Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) insights into the hidden “emotional labour” of flight attendants, Lonnie Athens’ (1980) notes on the “phantom communities” carried around by violent criminals, and Jack Katz’s (1988) argument for the emotional attractions of crime. More recent examples include Dianne Vaughn’s (1996) discovery of the organizational basis of risk in NASA, Elijah Anderson’s (1999) depiction of local systems of justice in the “code of the street” of the inner city, and Gary Alan Fine’s (2007) analysis of how scientists draw on incomplete information and uncertain data, yet manufacture predictions of certainty for the public, in his study of meteorologists. These examples surely only scratch the surface; the present volume contains a number of equally compelling examples of strong conceptual contributions in the ethnographic tradition. The point is simple; the more theoretically relevant a piece of ethnographic work is, the more it is able to travel from local community concerns and substantive areas to capture wider academic interest and make a more lasting contribution to scholarship. This book asks the authors of successful book-length ethnographies to reflect back on how they crafted winning ideas, to reveal the process of their own stages of “theory-work” as it unfolded in practice. Unfortunately, the topic of theoretical development in ethnography has been
badly neglected in the literature, in favor of orientations toward methodological concerns and research ethics. Of course, there are manuals that provide frameworks for conducting theoretical work in ethnography and qualitative research (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Blumer 1969; Strauss 1993; Prus 1996; 1997; Strauss and Corbin 1998; Clarke 2005; Charmaz 2006). Certainly, all
of these efforts to guide theory in ethnographic work are important, yet these are often presented as “top-down” approaches, in that, while they may draw on useful examples from their own work or those of others to bolster their theoretical points, the ideas are often discussed in rather abstract, and sometimes disconnected ways. In practice of course, theorizing is never as neat and tidy as many qualitative research manuals present it. General conceptual strategies, coding procedures, and rules of thumb are certainly helpful for novice researchers, but probably are not sufficient to truly know what it is to generate creative, dynamic concepts in the lived experience of ethnographic work. It is true that there have been a few valuable first-hand reflective accounts of theory-work in qualitative research, usually appearing as articles in journals for interpretive and qualitative research (e.g. Anderson 2003; Vaughan 2004). Still, these accounts are few and far between, and have never been collected and organized into one coherent volume. This is the very purpose of this book. We invited leading ethnographic
researchers to contribute original reflexive accounts about the conceptual decisions made in the midst of researching their major book-length ethnographies. We asked our contributors to think about and respond to the following questions: Did particular theoretical questions guide their research strategies, and if so, how? How did findings in the field disconfirm or challenge pre-existing principles, ideas, and frameworks initially introduced? How was a good conceptual “hook” for the study developed? When have outside sources and theoretical paradigms helped move the research forward, and when have they become a hindrance? How were new ideas linked not merely to the activities of the researcher immersed in the field, but also to the community of scholars in the broader exchange of academic ideas? These are the sorts of questions we hope this book takes first a step toward answering, by recounting real experiences from some of the most successful ethnographers in the field. It is important to draw on large numbers of such reflexive accounts of “theory-in-practice” if we are to learn about how conceptual work is actually accomplished in ethnographic research. And, by drawing these stories together and reflecting on the lessons gathered, we hope to take a step forward in trying to understand more about the creative process that accompanies successful research projects. In this sense, we hope this book has something very valuable to offer.
