ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ethical challenges that arise in such practice-oriented fieldwork due to the tendency in ethical guidelines to focus on research populations as a singular actor. This makes “textbook ethics” incapable of addressing differences between ethical needs of the various actors involved in a practice. The chapter addresses the gap between pre-fieldwork ethics, or “ethics in the books”, and ethical dilemmas that practice-oriented ethnographers encounter in the field. It shows how the actor-centered character of ethical guidelines makes them not necessarily useful when using practice-oriented methods. In his classic social science research methods book Alan Bryman shows how ethical principles are formulated around four main topics: a lack of informed consent, invasion of privacy, deception, and causing harm. An obstructed trajectory of the file carries a totally different ethical concern for a bureaucrat than for a potential deportee.
