Introduction

Abstract

The book offers a portfolio of commentaries on the current state of play of ethnography from a variety of disciplinary and international perspectives. Its auspices lay with the ambiguity in the title of Hammersley's seminal What's Wrong With Ethnography? text, which can be read both as a powerful critique and as an equally powerful defence. In approaching this collection, Hammersley's text was used as a reference point from which to see the directions ethnography had pursued in subsequent years. Drawing upon the another key text emerging at that time within the United Kingdom (Atkinson's The Ethnographic Imagination in 1990), a positive reading of the situation was adopted. That is, following Atkinson's lead, it acknowledged the implications of a reflexive understanding of the constructed nature of ethnography in order to comment on the business of ethnography. Here the emphasis is upon what work ethnographers are really involved in less the science of the white lab coat and more the messy, complex and inherently partial.

Citation

Hillyard, S. (2010), "Introduction", Hillyard, S. (Ed.) New Frontiers in Ethnography (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. ix-xiii. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-3192(2010)0000011003