1 1. Doing ethnography: introduction Nancy Harding and Monika Kostera The derivation of the word ‘ethnography’ is from the Greek ‘ethnos’, meaning ‘a people’ and ‘graphy’, meaning writing, so ethnography literally refers to writing about people. This omits ethnography’s most important aspect: it is an active, agentive practice – the ethnographer ‘goes into the field’, spends a more or less extended time living in and studying a community, and returns to their desk to write up their experiences, deriving meaning and insights as they do so. But, curiously, there is no verb ‘to ethnograph’. Many years ago, before Google and the internet, one of us was told that ethnography ‘is what anthro- pologists do’. That begged such questions as: what is an anthropologist and in what ways are they distinguished from sociologists, what exactly do they do, and if ethnography is what anthropologists do, what do ethnographers do? The answer she was given was, firstly, that anthropologists spend more time in the field than sociologists, leading to the answerless question: where is the dividing line between anthropological time and sociological time? Secondly, she was told that anthropologists just ‘go into the field’, become part of the community they are studying, but remain apart from it in order to study it. That took her round in circles – ethnography is what anthropologists do – but with the added conundrum of how to remain both immersed within and separate from ‘the field’. Management scholars have the additional problem of distin- guishing between observation studies (participant and non-participant) and ethnography: the dividing lines between them appear very vague. Small wonder then that what Nigel Barley (1986) calls ‘the innocent anthro- pologist’ may be wracked with uncertainty when s/he ‘enters the field’. Sarah Gilmore describes how on the first day of her ethnographic studies of a major league football club in the UK, she had no idea of what she was supposed to do, except that she had to look as if she knew what she was doing (in Gilmore and Harding, forthcoming). Another Sarah, Bloomfield (in this volume) had no such qualms: the ethnographic elements of her study were an adventure that gave her a privileged peep behind a façade that few people can cross. The aim of this volume is to prepare you, the reader, to ‘enter the field’ with as much confidence as Sarah Bloomfield (Chapter 13). To do this, we will ask you to treat each chapter as an action-learning project. This Introduction provides the guidelines, roadmap and template for this. It summarizes each Nancy Harding and Monika Kostera - 9781786438102 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 01/22/2022 08:03:18AM via free access