ABSTRACT
The late sociologist Everett Hughes introduced the concept “going concerns” to draw our attention to the dynamic and often contested set of interactions between an active core of people and the social definition of how and when they act. While its original use centers on the organizational setting, and actors within, little attention was given to what we might think of as the “going concerns” of the ethnographer. An important exception was Peter and Patricia Adler’s now classic consideration of the ethnographer’s membership role, including how it changes over time. Yet while the Adlers’ typology of membership roles makes clear the differences between how those roles themselves constitute a “going concern” for the ethnographer remains underexamined. Drawing upon examples of fieldwork from two different ethnographic projects—a study of urban nightlife and a study of a public university’s planning and implementation of its diversity initiative—this chapter showcases those “going concerns” of the ethnographer’s membership roles: how they change, in response to what, and how we negotiate these changes from one setting to another. The aim is to reveal the more practical and contingent features of ethnographic fieldwork as a social world itself negotiated in real time.
