Faculty
Professor Brian Moeran and Associate Professor Ester Barinaga

Course Coordinator
Associate Professor Ester Barinaga and Professor Brian Moeran

Participants must be enrolled as Ph.D. students in an institution of tertiary education. They must also be familiar with the course literature listed below.

All participants must write a three to five page description (1-2,000 words) of their observations of a socio-cultural setting of some kind. This may be something as complex as rehearsals for a music concert, as apparently banal as a supermarket queue, or as familiar as a family gathering. It is up to you to find a situation in which people interact, and observe them closely. What do they say to one another? How do they say it? What does their body language tell you? What kind of clothes do they wear? And so on and so forth.

This account must be presented to the course coordinators two weeks prior to the start of the course itself. It will then be made available for all other participants to read. These written observations will form the basis of the group sessions during the first part of the course.

The Business of Ethnography is a two-part course in which students will be introduced to the theory and craft of fieldwork as an analytical method. The second part of the course is described seperately on this website, but the course fee covers participation in both courses.

In the first part of the course, participants will be introduced to the basic tenets of fieldwork and ethnography. They will then be required to put theory into practice by carrying out joint fieldwork with their colleagues over a five day period. They will analyse their data and present results in the following week.

In the second part of the course, students will be required to carry out their own individual fieldwork research and to present a 4,000 word description thereof prior to two days of lectures and discussion with Professor Gideon Kunda, of Tel Aviv University. Only students who have participated in the first part of The Business of Ethnography, or who have already taken a comparative introductory course in ethnographic methods, will be permitted to enrol.

Ethnography is the qualitative method par excellence. Nothing can begin to compete with it. Many a researcher within the field of organizations and management uses it today, either as the main method for the generation of empirical material, or to complement other more quantitatively oriented methods. And yet, many researchers first confront the difficulties of doing ethnographic work when in the field and are unprepared for what they find there.

The Business of Ethnography aims at opening up this black-box of fieldwork. Throughout the first part of the course, we will discuss issues ranging from how to access the field, locate informants, present oneself, and build relations in the field, to what kinds of questions to ask and how to go about analyzing ethnographic material.

This will be done through lectures, exercises, listening to the experiences of more senior researchers, and discussions with fellow students who share their concerns within the framework of their own research projects.

In sum, the first part of the course focuses both on theory and, most importantly, on the practice of doing ethnography. It will:

§ Provide participants with an overview of the theory and practice of fieldwork in organizational settings.

§ Examine the issues surrounding the practice and analysis of participant observation as a research method.

§ Present and discuss ethnographic interview techniques.

§ Help participants think about different ethnographic writing styles.

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 well as social interaction and organizing processes in general. 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.

The Business of Ethnography is an introductory course that 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 and marketing organizations.

After the course the students should have:

Lecture plan

Time/period	Faculty	Title
Monday, 16 November 2009 9.30-12.30	Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	The Craft of Fieldwork - Introduction
Monday, 16 November 2009 13.30-16.00	Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	The Craft of Fieldwork - Written work
Tuesday, 17 November 2009 9.30-12.30	Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	Participant Observation and Ethnographic Interviews
Tuesday, 17 November 2009 13.30-16.00	Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	Fieldwork in Action
Monday, 23 November 2009 10.00-16.00	Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	Joint Fieldwork Analysis and Results

Depending on the number of participants and invited faculty, 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.
The first part of the course will run over three days.

The following books may help you prepare you for the course.

Please send your application to Maja Dueholm ( md.ikl@cbs.dk) before 19 October 2009.