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Turning laborious ethnographic research into stylized argumentative prose for academic consumption is a painstaking craft. The purpose of this paper is to revisit this perennial issue, and extend a claim the authors have made elsewhere about the inevitably impressionistic, rather than the oft-claimed “systematic”, nature of this task.

The authors draw and reflect on their own experiences of conducting and navigating across political science, ethnography and interpretation in order to justify and uphold the benefits of impressionism.

The authors argue that the impressionistic account of writing up fieldwork has important implications for these diverse disciplinary terrains.

The authors develop an argument as to how and why an appreciation of this craft’s impressionistic nature can affect how the authors go about creating, evaluating and ultimately thinking about ethnographic research in foreign disciplines like political science.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the myths and challenges in the field of organizational ethnography and methodological angst.

This paper is initially written as an invited keynote address for the 3rd Annual Joint Symposium on “Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences” (University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management, Liverpool, September 3‐5, 2008). It explores what might be distinctive about organizational ethnography and how that might be different from “anthropological” ethnography. In particular, it engages a kind of collective methodological performance anxiety among organizational studies scholars without formal training in anthropology who do ethnographic research.

The paper argues that it is time to be explicit about a variety of forms of professional angst that many ethnographic researchers within organizational studies carry which have not been discussed.

The paper is of value to those willing to consider the myths and challenges that need engaging and perhaps uprooting and casting off.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the current state of political and administrative ethnography in political science and public administration before suggesting that focus groups are a useful tool in the study of governing elites. They provide an alternative way of “being there” when the rules about secrecy and access prevent participant observation. Briefly, it describes the job of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff before explaining the research design, the preparations for the focus group sessions, and the strategies used to manage the dynamics of a diverse group that included former political enemies and factional rivals.

It outlines the approach to analysis and interpretation before reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of focus groups for research into political and administrative elites.

It concludes that focus groups are a valuable tool for making tacit knowledge explicit, especially when all participants work in a shared governmental tradition.

It is the first project to use focus groups to study the political elites of Westminster systems, let alone Australian government.

The purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

This essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of “marked” ethnography.

This essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re‐emerging now?; and on related questions, on its way to engaging some of the key methodological issues in organizational ethnography that today merit attention.

The paper may be of value to readers who are interested in the method and in one researcher's conceptual‐methodological take on it.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

Education ethnographers have long recognised the significance of the researcher's self upon the research process (Burgess, 1984; Walford, 1991; Troman, 2000; Russell, 2005) This chapter attempts to define and examine the relationship between the ‘Personal’, ‘Professional’ and ‘Political’ dimensions of ethnographies and the researcher's self set within the institutional and societal context. We argue that these three aspects form an important part of ethnography, implicitly or explicitly. However these are variously presented depending upon how the ethnography is experienced by the researcher and the researched. The Personal, Professional and Political are often closely related and can at times be difficult to distinguish. The importance that the researcher attributes to each of these aspects and the level of significance they have on the ethnography varies.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of contemporary approaches to the challenge of managing positionality and to discuss their applicability to fieldwork in contested fields.

The paper is driven by the author's experience of disconcertment during her fieldwork for a study of economic prioritization of access to new pharmaceuticals. Here she was pushed to take sides between health economists, clinicians and patients. Based on an iterative literature review, the paper identifies contemporary approaches to side-taking and discusses their practical applicability by constructing counterfactual accounts of a specific situation related to her fieldwork.

The author provides an overview of three “modes of intervention” characteristic of contemporary ethnography: political activism, organizational development and intervening description. The author presents the research agenda, the methodological principles and the means of intervention of each of the three modes, and discusses their applicability to the fieldwork process.

The overview of contemporary approaches to managing positionality is relevant for researchers doing fieldwork in contested fields. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, and is intended as a resource for ethnographers who want to clarify their own positionality and prepare or improve their strategies on how to take sides in the process of doing fieldwork.

While the question of how to take sides is a classical challenge for organizational ethnographers, only few studies exist that look across contemporary ethnographic positions on how to manage positionality in the process of doing fieldwork. In addition to providing an overview for the individual ethnographer, this paper aims to participate in a collective academic conversation on the subject of managing positionality in the process of doing fieldwork.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges, advantages and limits of ethnographical approaches to the study of parliament. Challenges in the study of political institutions emerge because they can be fast-changing, difficult to gain access to, have starkly contrasting public and private faces and, in the case of national parliaments, are intimately connected to rest of the nation.

Ethnography usually tends to be difficult to plan in advance, but especially so when parliament is the focus.

Research in parliament requires clear questions but an emergent approach for answering them – working out your assumptions, deciding on the most appropriate methods depending on what wish to find out, and continually reviewing progress. Its great strengths are flexibility, ability to encompass wider historical and cultural practices into the study, getting under the surface and achieving philosophical rigour. Rigour is partly achieved through reflexivity.

One implication of this is that not only will each study of parliament be different, because each is embedded in different histories, cultures, and politics, but the study of the same parliament will contain variations if a team is involved.

Ethnographical research is a social and political process of relating; interpreting texts, events and conversations; and representing the “other” as seen by observers.