Field Research II: Issues in Political, Policy, and Organizational Ethnography and Participant Observation

Participant-observer ethnographic field research– central among the many methods that fall under the umbrella of interpretive and qualitative research methods – have, in one view, been ‘borrowed’ from sociology and anthropology into many subfields of political science, including comparative governmental studies, international relations, area studies, public policy (domestic/state, regional, local; international, EU, etc.), public administration/local government studies, public law/legal studies, and organizational studies.  They are not new, however, either to organizational studies or to political studies generally, having been employed at least since the 1950s, and some would say even earlier, pointing to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early 20th century observations of workers and the 1930s Hawthorne studies.  Indeed, one might argue, as Salemink (2003[1]) does, that ethnography originated as a colonial administrative practices, its anthropological version being a subset of those.  Whatever its origins, ethnography is useful in a wide range of settings for research questions that seek to explore the meanings of particular practices, concepts or processes to situational actors, often in order to illuminate a wider-ranging, at times more theoretical issue of concern.  The latter might include studying how street-level bureaucrats implement national policies; how policy-makers or legislators actually think about the decisions they make and how they go about them; how workers shape their work practices and their relationships to managers; and so on.

The course, which aims to encompass both qualitative-positivist and qualitative-interpretive approaches to ethnography and participant observation, is designed for those who are in the midst of conducting field research or who have already completed the fieldwork component of their research project and who are thinking about, starting to or already working on writing up their field notes and drafts of chapters or papers/articles.  (Those who are planning on conducting such a study but have not yet gone into the field should first take Field Research I or an equivalent course.)  The project might be a traditional ethnographic or participant-observer study (based in a community or an organization, for instance); it may have involved ‘shadowing’ a political leader or policy-maker; and/or it might have entailed formal (expert, elite or other) interviews (i.e., in conversational style – engaging people in talk). Researchers may also have used ethnographic methods (observing, with whatever degree of participation; talking to situational members) along with a close reading of topic-relevant documents or visual materials in some form (e.g., in archives, newspaper morgues, and the like, or webpages) to generate data which they are intending to analyze using other methods (e.g., discourse analysis; metaphor, category or other language-focused analysis; space analysis; narrative analysis; and so on). 

The course will focus on several of the concepts and issues central to current debates about political, policy, and organizational participant-observer ethnography.  These include: 

• the relational turn in understanding ethnographic research, including power and politics issues in the conduct of field research;
• questions of reflexivity and positionality, especially as these bear on the generation of data and the trustworthiness of one’s knowledge claims;
• issues in research ethics, in light of growing formal attention to this topic on the part of institutionalized ethics review committees and ensuing requirements presented by journal publishers;
• writing as method – looking at knowledge claims and their evidentiary base, and the ways in which these are presented in a research ‘report’.

Classes will combine lecture with discussion.  Students will be expected to come to class with their own questions in hand, prepared to discuss the readings and to draw links between them and their own research designs and field experiences.  Additional class exercises may be added later.

This course is designed as an ‘advanced’ course in interpretive-qualitative research methods. It is intended for students who have completed their field research.  That prerequisite can be waived for students who have taken and successfully passed Field Research I: Introduction to Ethnography and Participant Observation or its equivalent. In addition, participants should have already taken at least one course that introduced them to the methodological underpinnings of interpretive and qualitative research, ideally including some readings in the philosophy of social science. (Examples of such courses in the ECPR Methods School include “Introduction to Interpretive Research Designs” and “Knowing and the Known: The Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences.” Those who wish to brush up on the methodological background will find suggested readings at #10, below.)