Faculty
Professor Gideon Kunda, 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.

The course is designed for students who already use ethnographic fieldwork, either in their PhD research or in their previous Masters studies. The course is not an introduction to the idea of qualitative research or ethnography. Rather, it assumes students already have exposure to some teaching of qualitative research methods in the social sciences.

Before the beginning of the course, you are required to submit transcripts from an interview you have conducted as well as some of your field notes. We will use these in class both for discussing method as well as the basis for practising and talking about the process of interpreting the ethnographic material. Students’ material, that is, will be used extensively in class to illustrate and generalize about issues of data generation, documentation, and interpretation.

This material 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 fieldwork materials will form the basis of the group sessions during the course. It will then be complemented by lectures, discussion, and additional reading material.

The aims of the course Doing Ethnography are:

- To provide an overview of the main methodological issues in fieldwork and to take up the challenges of ethnography in organizations.

- To discuss the practicalities of fieldwork and the everyday reality of data generation.

- To examine ways in which to interpret ethnographic material.

- To provide a forum in which to be reflexive about the conduct of fieldwork, and discuss issues arising from experiences in the field.

The term “ethnography” is often used interchangeably with “fieldwork” to refer to a variety of phenomena, all of which will be addressed in the course:

- a collection of methods of data generation, or fieldwork techniques

- a sort of “intellectual effort”, an attitude towards the world, a process by which to reach comprehensive understanding of a people

- a product: the essay/thesis/book

The course uses students’ material to discuss their experiences with data generation methods as well as their efforts to understand the phenomena they study. In other words, it addresses the everyday experience of doing fieldwork, and discusses the intellectual effort of making sense of the world being studied.

The course will use a variety of method ranging from plenary session lectures followed by group discussion to more informal group work in which participants present their own fieldwork experiences, interpret videotapes, and engage in intensive discussion.

The course will run over two days.

After the course the students should have:

Lecture plan

Time/period	Faculty	Title
Monday 15 February 2010, 9.30-12.30	Gideon Kunda, Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	The ethnographic process – Experiences from an organizational ethnographer
Monday 15 February 2010, 13.30-16.00	Gideon Kunda, Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	IInterpreting fieldwork – Work with participants’ own ethnographic material
Tuesday 16 February 2010, 09.30-12.30	Gideon Kunda, Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	Doing fieldwork: observation & ethnographic interview
Tuesday 16 February, 13.30-16.00	Gideon Kunda, Brian Moeran and Ester Barinaga	Interpreting fieldwork – Work with participants’ own ethnographic material

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 course will run over two days.

Required reading prior to the course:

- Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding”. American Scientist, 63:47-53.

- Kunda, Gideon 2006 Engineering Culture. (2nd Edition) Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

- Kunda, Gideon, work in progress. “Reflections on Ethnography: Science, Inspiration and Everyday Life”.

Suggested further reading:

- Barinaga, Ester. 2007. “’Cultural diversity’ at work: ‘National culture’ as a discourse organizing an international project group.” Human Relations, 60 (2): 315-340.

- Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Consult this book for different ways to write up fieldnotes.

- Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”. In The Interpretation of Culture, pp. 3-33. Basic Books.

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

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

Please send your application to Maja Dueholm ( md.ikl@cbs.dk) before 15 January 2010.