Ethnography

Recap
Quantitative vs Qualitative Approaches

Quantitative research is used to answer questions about relationships among

measured variables with the purpose of explaining, predicting, and controlling
phenomenon.

Does brand trust increase intention to buy?

Qualitative research answers questions about the complex nature of

phenomena, with the purpose of describing and understanding the
phenomena from the participants’ point of view (emic)…also referred to as the
interpretive, constructivist, or post-positivist approach.

What are the consumers experiences of socializing through visiting

supermarkets?
 Purpose

Quantitative research seeks explanations

and predictions for purposes of
generalization to other persons or places.

Qualitative research seeks a better

understanding of complex situations, and
may use their observations to build from
the ground up.
 Task 1:
Write down a research question that can
be answered with a quantitative study.

Write down a research question that can

be answered with a qualitative study.
 Ethnography

Ethnos = people

Grapho = to write

To write about
people, peoples
lives, etc.
Where is it Used?
 Cultural Anthropology
 Sociology
 Business
 Organizational
Psychology
 Marketing
 Human Resources
 UX Design
 OPM
Ethnography
Firsthand personal study of a
local cultural setting

Ethnographers try to understand

the whole of a particular culture,
not just fragments (e.g., the
economy).

An extended period of time living

with the group
Ethnography Then
 Bronislaw Malinowski - generally
considered the first ethnographer.

 He saved ethnography in a way -

he recorded cultural diversity that
was threatened by westernization
- (scientific) accounts of unknown
people and places.

 Margaret Mead
Malinowski:
 All aspects of culture are linked.

 It is impossible to write about just one

cultural feature without discussing how it
relates to others.

 Understanding the emic perspective, the

native’s point of view, was the primary
goal of ethnography.
 Ethnographic Present
The early ethnographies were often written
in the ethnographic present, a romanticized
timelessness before westernization, which
gave the ethnographies an eternal,
unchanging quality.

Ethnographers today recognize that

cultures constantly change & this quality
must be represented in the ethnography.
 Ethnographic Realism
The writer’s goal was to produce an accurate,
objective, scientific account of the study
community.

Is this possible?

The writer’s authority was rooted in his or her

personal research experience with that
community.
 Ethnographic Realism

Traditionally involved
spending a long time
in a remote location
far away from home,
seeking a deeper
cultural
understanding of a
certain
phenomenon.
 Ethnography Today

Today we can witness use of a variety of methods

including long-term and shorter-term stints in the
field, interviews, participant observation, digital
ethnography aka netnography, videography,
photography, narratives and story telling.

Thompson & Arsel (2006) study on Starbucks and

how it shapes local coffee shops and experiences.
 Ethnography Today
Allows us to explore and examine the cultures and societies that are a
fundamental part of the human experience.

Unlike many other research strategies, the researcher is not typically a

detached or uninvolved observer.

The ethnographer collects data and gains insight through firsthand

involvement with research subjects or informants .

With few exceptions, the ethnographer conducts research by interacting

with other human beings that are part of the study;

This interaction takes many forms, from conversations and interviews

to shared ritual and emotional experiences.
 Critique of ethnographic research
Advantages:
Depth of understanding
Can challenge ‘taken for granted’ assumptions

Disadvantages:
Takes a long time
Does not have much breadth
It can be difficult for some to write up the findings
 Task 2
Write down a research question that you
find interesting which can be answered by
using ethnography.

Mine is: what benefits do people get from

consuming digital art?
 Intel’s Anthropologist Ken
Anderson:
“Our goal is to see people’s behavior on
their terms, not ours. While this
observational method may appear
inefficient, it enlightens us about the
context in which customers would use a
new product and the meaning that
product might hold in their lives”
Example: Ethnography for
Market Research
Ethnography because… the only
plausible way to study social and
cultural phenomena is to study them
in action.

The complexity of human lives and

social interaction cannot be reduced
to a sterile laboratory experiment
with the strict control of variables
characteristic of a scientific
experiment.
Example: Ethnography for
Market Research

Let’s go shopping with people.

Let’s make coffee with them at home

to find out what more we can offer
them as a coffee brand.

Let’s observe how new parents

change nappies and see what
Pampers can offer them.
Ethnography for Market Research

Going shopping with

consumers?

Observing them as mystery

shoppers?

Watching TV with
consumers?
 Ethnography
Purpose – to describe and explain

Hypotheses and questions: qualitative research

does not begin with a hypothesis. It begins with
a question.

Hypotheses may emerge to be tested later as

data are amassed. Not a must!
 The Fieldsite (where we do
the ethnography)
can be a neighborhood,
an office,
a social media site,
a store,
a shopping mall,
a factory,
a brand community,
a coffee shop, fast food chain, etc.
 Methodology
Fieldwork Methods

 Participant observation

 Interviewing

 Autobiographical interviewing

 Questionnaires

 Projective techniques

 Existing documented information

 Notes, notes, notes!!! (Fetterman, 1998)

Observation & Participant
Observation
“Participant
observation,”: involves
the researcher taking
part in the activities
being observed.

Ethnographers do not
isolate variables or
attempt to manipulate
the outcome of events
they are observing.
 An example of ethnographic research in marketing:
 Star Trek is one ofKozinets
the great consumption
(2001)
phenomena/ Has 4 spin-off series, 9 major motion
pictures, and billions of dollars in licensed
merchandise revenues
 Kozinets used ethnography to study Star Trek’s
sub-culture of consumption.
 He used participant observation at various fan
gatherings and fan-related meetings. He also
used email interviews with 65 self-proclaimed Star
Trek fans.
 He later topped this off with netnography
 Kozinets’ article
 Informs our understanding of entertainment and
mass media consumption

 Portrays a group of devoted consumers socially

constructing reality, rather than merely passively
consuming a product

 Suggests that entertainment products are key

conceptual spaces that consumers use (Kozinets,
2001)
Problem-Oriented Ethnography
Ethnographers address a
specific problem or set of
problems within the broader
context.

Variables with the most

significant relationship to the
problem being addressed are
given priority in the analysis.
 Conversation, Interviewing,
and Interview Schedules
Ethnographic interviews range in
formality:
undirected conversation
open-ended interviews focusing on
specific topics
formal interviews using a predetermined
schedule of questions.
Survey Research –
complementary
Anthropologists working in
large-scale societies are
increasingly using survey
methodologies to
complement more traditional
ethnographic techniques.

Survey research is
considerably more
impersonal than
ethnography.
 Reporting Ethnography
To what extent reality is or can be represented in
fieldwork, and whose voices are made explicit in
the fieldwork?

We need to question gender, class and race and how

these relate to issues of power between the
researchers and the informants (Denzin, 1997).

Reflexivity:
 concern about how data are collected and analyzed
 how theories used in the analysis are written
 concern about how the ethnography is written
 Ethnography
Denzin (2001, p. 324):

Writing is not an innocent practice.

Reflexivity: orientations of researchers will be

shaped by their socio-historical locations,
including the values and interests that these
locations bestow upon them (Hammersley and
Atkinson, 1995, p. 16).
 Ethnography
Thick description (Geertz 1973):

Thick descriptions emphasized in realistic

ethnographies have been criticized for an inability
to recognize power relationships and factors
behind such relationships (e.g.Arnould,1998).

Van Maanen (1988) discusses different ways to

present research, such as the realist, confessional
and impressionist tales.
 Ethnography
Geertz (1973):
anthropological writings are
fiction, shaped by literary
conventions and devices.
 Some approaches to ethnographic research
Different schools or views about
ethnography:
 The holistic school – emphasizes empathy
and identification with the people
 The semiotic school – emphasizes ‘thick
description’
 Critical ethnographers – emphasize
critique
 Netnography – fieldwork with online
communities over the Internet
37
1950s-1980s: Ethnography as “thick
description” (Clifford Geertz)
Culture based

Meaning oriented. Meaning is “a set of culturally

constructed and historically specific guides, frames, or
models of and for human feeling, intention, and action”
(Ortner 1999: 137)

Specific to time and place (i.e. cultural relativism)

“[C]ulture is not power, something to which social events,

behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally
attributed; it is a context, something within which they can
be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described”( Geertz 1973:14)
Re-emergence of politics and power (Edward
Said and Michel Foucault)

 Social phenomena as effects of external power structures

(e.g. political and economic institutions at the national
and international level)

Poverty as a result of longstanding colonialism

Unemployment as a byproduct of neo-liberal policies in
South America

 Influenced by the rise of new perspectives such as critical

theory and neo-Marxist ideology
 Today’s Ethnography: Holistic and
Evolutionary in nature
 Analysis of local situations with reference to
relevant external institutional/political structures

How does mobile phones reorder our relations with other

people?

How does social media transform the power balance between

companies and consumers?

How is brand value co-created on social media platforms?

 Eclecticism of methodologies/ methods

 Ex: Ethnography in Global
Markets Perspective
One of the challenges of
international marketing
today is....
How much to standardize
or how much to adapt
locally.

Is there one truly global

brand? (refer to our
discussions in Consumer
Behavior class on culture
and consumer
behaviour).
 Put more formally
Should international
marketing strategies follow
the principle of global
standardization or local
adaptation
(e.g.Levitt,1983;
Usunier,2000)?

If so, how much?

e.g. Are banking products

standardized?
Public Diplomacy of Armed
Rebel Groups 
Ethnography - HSBC Local
Global Ads
 Ethnography in Global
Perspective
Grewal and Kaplan (1994, p. 11):

the parameters of the local and global are not

clear cut

How one separates the local from the global is

difficult to decide when each thoroughly
infiltrates the other.
 Multi-Sited Ethnography
 multi-locale ethnography (Marcus 1986,1989),
 multi-sited (Marcus,1995,1998)

Hannerz (2001): this is not just about involving

several field sites, but that the fields are linked
together in a coordinated structure.
 Multi-Sited Ethnography
It is of interest to try to identify which types of chains
and patterns of social relations exist in the network
(e.g., Hannerz, 1996, 2001).

It focuses on identifying the relationships between the

localities (Hannerz,2001).

The social anthropologists at Stockholm University

started early to work along this line and Hannerz
(2001) indicates that they probably have a wider
selection of studies than most anthropological
institutions in the world.
 Multi-Sited Ethnography
(Marcus 1995)

‘Apple World’ Garsten’s (1994):

she studied the organizational culture of Apple in its
office in a suburb of Stockholm, in the international
head- quarters in Silicon Valley, and in the
European headquarters in Paris.
 Grasping the global: multi-sited
ethnographic market studies

Multi-sited ethnographic market studies:

attempt to grasp global or globalizing

market conditions and relations.

What is the appeal of VOD/streaming platforms

across the globe?
 Grasping the global: multi-sited
ethnographic market studies

It studies globalization from within rather

than as an external influencing factor on local
market realities.

What is the appeal of VOD/streaming platforms

in Turkey?
in Ireland?
in Japan?
 Multi-sited ethnographic market
studies
Traditional ethnographic work in anthropology
suggests the deep immersion in and thick
description of a single locality.

Multi-sited ethnography:
to immerse oneself deeply in a transnational
phenomenon one must abandon the
privilege of the locality, embrace mobility
and go with the flow (Burawoy, 2000;
Hannerz,2003).
 Multi-sited ethnographic market
studies
Globalization challenges the units of analysis
of traditional cross-cultural research as well
as the objects and premises of traditional
ethnography.

Beware of Hofstede type categorizations…

 How to do ethnographic research:
some practical suggestions

 Write up field notes on a regular basis –

write it down!
 Write up an interview ASAP
 Regularly review and develop your ideas
as the research progresses
 Develop strategies to deal with a huge
amount of data

53
Evaluating ethnographic research
 Is this telling me something new?
studies
 Does I offer rich insights?

 Have I collected a sufficient amount of

data?

 Have I given sufficient information about

the research method?

54
 What Does Ethnographic Data
Look Like?
What people say
 interview transcripts, notes
 Audio Recordings
 Visual material collected by them
What people do
 Field notes
 Photographs (collected by you)
 Other visual data (movies)
What people leave behind
 Ephemera (brochures, websites, blogs)
 Archives, documents, letters
 Data
Data - verbal descriptions of people, interactions,
settings, objects and phenomena within the
context being studies

Data Collection – done by the researcher through

observation, often combined with formal and
informal interviews

Data treatment and analysis – presentation of

verbal descriptions and/or logical analysis of
information to discover salient patterns and
themes
 Data
Ethnographers should take note of all
impressions
senses,
details about the physical setting including
size, space, noise, colors, equipment and
movement,
people in the setting, such as number,
gender, appearance, dress movement,
comportment, feeling and tone.
 Data
Interactional Detail - observing events in an
intimate microscopic manner to recount
what happened in fine detail

Key Events - focusing on key events e.g.

recent economic crises, weddings,
funerals,layoffs, new jobs, new roles, etc…is
a useful way to organize your fieldnotes; it
involves selecting noteworthy incidents out
of the flow of ongoing activity
 Example 1
Work, Identity and Community in Silicon
Valley
175 people, three interviews, including maps
of work spaces and network “maps,”
contextualized observations, organizational
ephemera. N.S.F. funds used for
transcription and coding.
Product--reports, academic publications.
 Example 2
Personal Health Ecologies
 Multi-year, varying sampling strategies
 Interviews, network maps, health time
lines, photographs of spaces and
objects, observational notes
 Participant-observation
 Project Dynamics and
Purpose Guide Analysis
Team analysis sessions
 construction of persona (for client workshops)
 Theories of embodiment (for contribution to
knowledge)

Product: Professional report, client workshops,

input into forecasting map of global health
economy
 Data Management
 Stay on top of the data

 Copies, copies, copies

 Organization and filing (electronic and physical)

 Type (photographs)
 Source (sampling)
 Category (where was the product bought?)

 Research journals are vital!

 Team communication!
 Theory-Method
Theory shapes your analytical purpose

 What are the structures of work, how is work done, across various
organizational forms?

 What are the organizational implications for trust is relationships

given job mobility and globally distributed teams?

 What are the sources of power in shaping a reputation?

 What are the forms of social capital that flow through egocentric
networks?

 How can we infer meaning, as people articulate “what is consumer

satisfaction?”
 Basic Analytical Techniques
Reading, looking, thinking (sorry, no help
from computing here)
– How do people talk?
– What are people doing?

Sorting, big piles to littler ones

Iterations of theme discovery, reworking of

data (ex. Quantified and qualified self)
When do you do the analysis?

 In the field

 Just after you “come back”

 Upon reflection or several projects later

(re-mining data)
Coding
[coded transcript being readied for data entry into Ethnograph]

WK_JOBDESC,WJ
Dwork, job
description

NET_NONFAM,NN networks,
non-familial

ID_SELF_ID, IS identity, self-

identified culture (list)
 A Note on Technology
One note
Ethnograph
NVivo
 Triangulation
 Analysis of qualitative data does not
mean lack of rigor

 Cross-check, do not be seduced by

colorful outlying examples

 Return to the field and do ground truth

 Other aspects of research
design
 Validity (quant)
 Reliability (quant)
 Trustworthiness* (qual)
 Dependability: showing that the findings are consistent
and could be repeated
 Confirmability: a degree of neutrality or the extent to which
the findings of a study are shaped by the respondents and
not researcher bias, motivation, or interest
 Credibility: confidence in the 'truth' of the findings
 Transferability: showing that the findings have applicability
in other contexts
* See Lincoln, YS. & Guba, EG. (1985).
Naturalistic Inquiry.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
 Validity Revisited
 Internal validity—did the data do a good
job of reflecting the field?
 Construct validity—do the techniques
used really “get at” what we think they
did?
 External validity—can the data
collection techniques and constructs be
used in other studies?