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Understanding the intricate details and intertwined power plays and shifts in complex urban processes is a key to actually empowering change for the better. A longitudinal qualitative research approach can be particularly valuable to that endeavour. In this chapter, a ‘phronetic long-haul’ methodology is proposed, based on the authors’ ongoing research into certain practices that have been popularised in the name of urban sustainability. The motivation for articulating such an option derives from discontent with the predominance of perfunctory, snapshot studies of contemporary urban development projects. To offset that ascendancy, the authors have sought ways to facilitate a rich, deep, holistic and integrated understanding of contemporary urban change over time, underpinned by the concept of phronesis. Phronetic practice involves the exercise of situational knowledge, intuition and common sense derived from experience, values and judgement.¹ Keeping attention on issues of power, using multiple narratives to show how power works, the approach seeks to comprehend urban planning situations in a practical way by maintaining a long-term, ethnographic and reflective connection with the practices under study.

This study examined teachers’ cognitive development when interacting with video ethnography. It used grounded theory to discover embedded meanings and relationships that emerge from descriptive data collected from six teachers. Findings revealed (a) the categories of cognitive activities when using video ethnography, (b) the influence of experience and beliefs on these activities, (c) the scaffold that video ethnography provides, and (d) teachers’ progression in a cognitive development process through interaction with video ethnography. The study has implications in improving technology use in teacher development, production of multimedia cases, and research on case-based pedagogy and other related areas.

In this paper, we responded to recent calls for the use of a greater variety of qualitative methods in the study of inter-organizational encounters, including mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The paper provided a reflection on the authors’ experiences in carrying out two studies of merger processes in the UK and Finland, one ethnographic and one combing also auto-­ethnographic methods. Contrasts between the former case of an “outsider” entering into an ethnographic study and the latter case of an auto-ethnographer with a dual role as a researcher and integration team member were highlighted. The paper offered three contributions to extant research. First, the paper extended the methodological debate in the study of M&As to the level of individual methods. Second, the paper identified the finding types that emerge when using ethnographic methods in the study of mergers. Third, the paper discussed the unique challenges posed when conducting ethnographic work investigating organizational combinations in times of mergers as opposed to ethnography in traditional, single organizational settings.

In organizations that have to meet demands from multiple sponsors, and that mix missions from different spheres, such as “civic,” “market,” “family,” how do participants orient themselves, so they can interact appropriately? Do participants’ practical navigation techniques have unintended consequences? To address these two questions, the authors draw on an ethnography of US youth programs whose sponsors required multiple, conflicting logics, speed, and precise documentation. The authors develop a concept, navigation techniques: participants’ shared unspoken methods of orienting themselves and appearing to meet demands from multiple logics, in institutionally complex projects that require frequent documentation. These techniques’ often have unintended consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to offer theoretical and methodological guidance for ethnographers of finance and financialization. It critiques the notion of financialization as a macro process and argues for more in-depth ethnographic studies of professional financial actors.

The author analyzes existing ethnographies of financial “elites” and “non-elites” and draws on his years of employment at two contrasting British retail stockbroking firms. The concepts of “identity” and “self” are used to analyze the ways in which professional financial actors are shaped by their activities and working cultures.

The processes through which financial actors are constructed and the consequent ways in which they come to understand their professional selves are influenced by a variety of dynamics: occupational and organizational cultures and practices, the nature of the work itself, technological development, and social interactions with colleagues.

The paper demonstrates the situated nature of financial action and suggests that future research grapples with these dimensions.

The application of an ethnographic perspective to British retail stockbroking and the method of “ethnographic reflection” evoked to achieve this are new contributions. The broad analysis of ethnographies of finance through the lens of identity offers a fresh view of the literature. The paper may be of interest to those wishing to study stockbrokers, financial actors, and financial organizations, as well as those in the social sciences, more generally, who are interested in the micro-dynamics of organizations, financialization, and capital circulation.

In this chapter, the author explores the ethical challenge of preserving participant anonymity when using visual methods in ethnographic research. Referring to her own ethnographic study in post-conflict Northern Ireland, the author explores how social, cultural, and political contexts may accentuate the need to preserve anonymity. The author discusses her rationale for opting not to use photographs in this context and puts forward the case for using participant-produced drawings as an alternative to photographs. Drawings accomplish similar rich benefits as photographs but may ameliorate the ethical challenges inherent in photographic work of maintaining participant anonymity.

Organizational wrongdoing researchers often look to past cases to empirically develop and support theoretical understanding. Their research is therefore conducted at a temporal distance to focal events and frequently relies on retrospective accounts and surviving documentary evidence. These methodological circumstances define historical research practice, and we demonstrate in this paper the valuable insights that historical approaches can provide organizational wrongdoing research. Specifically, we draw on a range of practices from history and the social sciences to introduce four historically informed approaches: narrative history, analytically structured history, historical process study, short-term process study. We differentiate these based on their particular affordances and treatment of two key methodological considerations: historical evidence and temporality. We demonstrate the specific value these approaches represent to organizational wrongdoing research with several exemplars showing how they have been used in related fields of research.

This chapter discusses the impact of the sociological imagination and ethnographic research methods on identifying the ‘real’ nature of conceptualized phenomena. The examination is done by comparing the researcher’s experience of work-related precarity in ethnographic methods and in the researcher’s personal circumstances immediately following the fieldwork. Such a juxtaposition shows what had been emphasized by ethnography and the effects of the researcher’s social context on the concepts under study. In the case of fieldwork, many of the practical difficulties of precarious work were encountered. However, the context of being an ethnographer altered how work precarity was felt. In the personal circumstances that followed the fieldwork, precariousness was strongly felt in a more general manner. This occurred in a discrete event that involved multiple factors of employment, housing, institutions relied on, and personal relationships. Such differences between fieldwork and personal circumstances illuminate on the tendency to isolate phenomena in fieldwork, which poses the risk of making ethnographic reality out of ideal types.