Faculty
Rita Denny, Gideon Kunda, Brian Moeran, Patricia Sunderland

Course Coordinator
Brian Moeran

There is an important requirement for all would-be participants and it must be completed prior to the start of the course itself.

All participants must conduct a short period of fieldwork (minimum 10 days, maximum three weeks) in an organizational or other setting of their choice. This may be a company of some kind, a factory, city office, department or other store, train station, airport, golf club, football stadium, bar, restaurant, street corner neighbourhood, supermarket, theme park, and so on. The main criterion in your selection of a fieldwork site is that it should have some physical bounded form. This will help you carry out your participant observation research.

Once you have selected your fieldwork site, you are asked to liaise with Brian Moeran to ensure that you are on the right track and that your choice is acceptable. Then you are on your own!

It is up to you to decide what – if any – equipment you wish to use during the course of your research. Some fieldworkers use video cameras; others tape recorders; yet others notebooks. Some believe in writing everything down on their laptop; others memorise their conversations and interviews, and write them down later. It is suggested that, for the purposes of this course, you at least make use of a notebook to record what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch during yours time in the field.

Once you have completed your fieldwork, you will be expected to write a ten page description (4,000 words) of all that you have observed and experienced in the field. This description should seek to structure the random events and conversations that you have witnessed, but it should not resort to academic theories of any kind. In other words, your aim should be to write an informative account of what you have chosen to study, in such a way that the fieldwork site itself, what people do there, and how they communicate with one another is readily understandable by someone who has no knowledge thereof. You are asked, in short, to present a social world.

This account must be presented to the course coordinator, Brian Moeran, by Friday September 26. It will then be made available on Sitescape to all other participants for reading prior to the start of the course. These fieldwork accounts will form the basis of the group sessions during the first two days.

In order to ensure that you are able to carry out fieldwork and write up your findings in time, the following timetable is suggested:

The aims of the course in The Business of Ethnography are:

It is fast becoming recognised that the standard methodological tools of qualitative and quantitative research (ranging from in-depth interviews to surveys and questionnaires) are inadequate to grasp in totality the everyday practices of business organizations or consumers. As a result, both managers and marketers are beginning to look around for different ways of studying and understanding business methods, organizational set-ups, social structures and consumer lifestyles.

One hitherto relatively untried methodology is that of fieldwork. Strictly speaking, the word fieldwork refers to an intensive, ideally long-term, form of participant observation used to conduct research in an office, factory, city hall, police precinct, residential neighbourhood, shopping mall, theme park, and so on. Ethnography refers to the writing up of that fieldwork as a book, article or Ph.D. thesis. Both terms have been borrowed from the discipline of anthropology.

Bringing together four experienced ethnographers and leading experts in the field, this course in The Business of Ethnography will give research students first-hand experience of an ethnographic situation, as well as acquaint them with the aims and practices of ethnography as a methodological tool in the study of business organizations and marketing.

The course will comprise plenary session lectures, followed by question/answer sessions and discussion in the mornings; and, in the afternoons, more informal group work in which participants present their own fieldwork experiences, interpret videotapes, and engage in intensive discussion.

Monday, October 20

0930-1000 Registration
1000-1050 Plenary Session Introduction: “The Business of Ethnography” (Brian Moeran)
1100-1200 Plenary Session Lecture: “The Lone Ranger or Partners in Crime? Doing Fieldwork” (Rita Denny, Patricia Sunderland and Brian Moeran)
1200-1300 Lunch
1300-1600 Group Work: Participants’ Ethnographies (RD, BM and PS)

Tuesday, October 21

0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “The Ethnography of Consumers” (Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland)
1200-1300 Lunch
1300-1600 Group Work: Participants’ Ethnographies (RD, BM and PS)
1800- Course Participants’ Dinner

Wednesday, October 22
0930-1200 Plenary Session Lecture and Discussion: “The Practicalities of Fieldwork: Everyday Reality behind Data Collection” (Gideon Kunda)
1200-1300 Lunch
1300-1600 Lecture and Discussion: “Writing Ethnography” (Gideon Kunda and Brian Moeran)

It is recommended that you read the following books prior to the course, in order to prepare you for the lectures and discussions that follow.
Kunda, Gideon 2006 Engineering Culture. (2nd Edition) Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Miller , Daniel 1998 A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Moeran, Brian 2005 The Business of Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.

Spradley, James 1979 The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Sunderland, Patricia L. and Rita M. Denny 2007 Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Books.

Van Maanen, John 1988 Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.