ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the operation of ethical regulation, and the ways in which this introduces additional complexities into the decisions that ethnographers must make and how, in some respects, it puts serious barriers in the way of their work. A variety of views have been taken towards research ethics, not just about particular substantive issues, but even about the role that ethics should play and the grounds on which a piece of research should be judged ethical or unethical. In particular, there are ways of pursuing inquiry that are unacceptable in ethical terms. The first treat ethical issues as resolvable by compliance with one or more universal rules, or through the application of specific procedures. Some discussions of research ethics that appeal to the notion of rights also fall into social category, for example in relation to research on children. The ethical issues surrounding social research often take distinctive forms in ethnography.
