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Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.

Local marketing decisions are too often made on a dichotomous basis, either standardize or fully adapt. However, similarities are too substantial and differences go too deep to be ignored. This article aims to articulate similarities and differences in local consumer experience across multiple contexts.

Language, being used daily in local contexts, reflects local knowledge (Geertz). This paper shows how translation/back‐translation can be used as a discovery tool, along with depth interviews and checks of researcher interpretations by informants, to generate cognitive mapping of consumption and taste experiences. Local words, used as emic signals, are combined into full portraits of the local experiences as narratives linking people to products and taste. Local portraits can then be merged to derive commonalities emergent from within the contexts studied. The comparative thick description framework is applied to the bitterness and crunchiness taste experiences in ten countries (China, Croatia, El Salvador, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey) and nine languages.

Local experiences in several different languages and countries in different areas of the world can be surveyed, compared, and organized into cognitive maps (Eden), which highlight commonalities and differences between contexts. In essence, differences are qualitative, dealing with creolization patterns, local consumption experience, local preferences, perceptions, and associations.

This approach can be considered as interpretive and, although driven by a systematic approach, depends on researcher and informant expertise and rigor.

Cognitive maps help evaluate cross‐national differences and similarities in local markets. The emergent similarities and differences are highly meaningful for glocalizing marketing strategies, in terms of advertising, branding, and packaging.

Significant insights derived from this method can be tested in a more traditional and applied manner. This allows quicker insights into new local marketplaces and a progressive enrichment of cognitive maps with new languages and countries.

The fundamental task of a business programme is to foster student acquisition of managerial acumen in a classroom setting. This is not a simple undertaking and the current dissatisfaction with business programmes involves many complex issues. Looks at two of the underlying difficulties and discusses three partial solutions to improving our effectiveness as educators.

Methodological pluralism in consumer research is usually confined to post‐positivist interpretive approaches. Argues, however, that a positivistic stance, radical behaviourism, can enrich epistemological debate among researchers with the recognition of radical behaviourism′s ultimate reliance on interpretation as well as science. Although radical behaviourist explanation was initially founded on Machian positivism, its account of complex social behaviours such as purchase and consumption is necessarily interpretive, inviting comparison with the hermeneutical approaches currently emerging in consumer research. Radical behaviourist interpretation attributes meaning to behaviour by identifying its environmental determinants, especially the learning history of the individual in relation to the consequences similar prior behaviour has effected. The nature of such interpretation is demonstrated for purchase and consumption responses by means of a critique of radical behaviourism as applied to complex human activity. In the process, develops and applies a framework for radical behaviourist interpretation of purchase and consumption to four operant equifinality classes of consumer behaviour: accomplishment, pleasure, accumulation and maintenance. Some epistemological implications of this framework, the behavioural perspective model (BPM) of purchase and consumption, are discussed in the context of the relativity and incommensurability of research paradigms. Finally, evaluates the interpretive approach, particularly in terms of its relevance to the nature and understanding of managerial marketing.

I am trying to reason how cultural entrepreneurship research still could become more cultural, by developing two ideas: (1) that cultural entrepreneurship research describes the scholarly effort to inquire into how concepts, plans, recipes, rules, and instructions govern and are battled in the emergence of the organization-creation process. (2) Second, that this reveals a great affinity between the cultural and the entrepreneurial and that a more literary approach to writing cultural entrepreneurship research holds promise of a more nuanced, imaginative, and thus more cultural entrepreneurship research. In effect, the entrepreneurial process would, culturally understood, be the successful struggle to move beyond the comfortable place of dominant normality (and its assuring roles and templates) into an “un-insured” temporary space of potentialities, attractive to the imaginative mind for its motivating intimacy with hitherto undisclosed value. Most of this comes from re-reading Clifford Geertz’s (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures using Stephen Greenblatt’s (1997) The Touch of the Real as a companion. It brings me to the conclusion that we have never quite been Geertzian, and at least not Geertzian enough.

This is a personal narrative, but I trust not a self-regarding one. For more years than I care to remember I have been working in the field of curriculum (or ‘program’) evaluation. The field by any standards is dispersed and fragmented, with variously ascribed purposes, roles, implicit values, political contexts, and social research methods. Attempts to organize this territory into an ‘evaluation theory tree’ (e.g. Alkin, M., & Christie, C. (2003). An evaluation theory tree. In M. Alkin (Ed.), Evaluation roots: Tracing theorists’ views and influences (pp. 12–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage) have identified broad types or ‘branches’, but the migration of specific characteristics (like ‘case study’) or individual practitioners across the boundaries has tended to undermine the analysis at the level of detail, and there is no suggestion that it represents a cladistic taxonomy. There is, however, general agreement that the roots of evaluation practice tap into a variety of cultural sources, being grounded bureaucratically in (potentially conflicting) doctrines of accountability and methodologically in discipline-based or pragmatically eclectic formats for systematic social enquiry.

In general, this diversity is not treated as problematic. The professional evaluation community has increasingly taken the view (‘let all the flowers grow’) that evaluation models can be deemed appropriate across a wide spectrum, with their appropriateness determined by the nature of the task and its context, including in relation to hybrid studies using mixed models or displaying what Geertz (Geertz, C. (1980/1993). Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. The American Scholar, 49(2), 165–179) called ‘blurred genres’. However, from time to time historic tribal rivalries re-emerge as particular practitioners feel the need to defend their modus operandi (and thereby their livelihood) against paradigm shifts or governments and other sponsors of program evaluation seeking for ideological reasons to prioritize certain types of study at the expense of others. The latter possibility poses a potential threat that needs to be taken seriously by evaluators within the broad tradition showcased in this volume, interpretive qualitative case studies of educational programs that combine naturalistic description (often ‘thick’; Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Towards an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of culture (pp. 3–30). New York, NY: Basic Books.) description with a values-orientated analysis of their implications. Such studies are more likely to seek inspiration from anthropology or critical discourse analysis than from the randomly controlled trials familiar in medical research or laboratory practice in the physical sciences, despite the impressive rigour of the latter in appropriate contexts. It is the risk of ideological allegiance that I address in this chapter.

This chapter focuses on the ethnographic research approach that I employed in a service marketing study. The first part briefly describes ethnography’s key characteristics, that is, emergent research logic, prolonged fieldwork, and multiple modes of data collection, where the main method is observation. The second part discusses the data collection methods: participant observation, informal discussion, interview, and document analysis. This section describes in detail how these techniques were used in practice and highlights the key challenges I faced, especially related to the observations, and how I managed these challenges. The third part describes the case, field setting, informants, and field relationships. The development project that I studied concerned a bank’s website and project members from the bank and different consultant agencies represent the study’s informants. The fieldwork lasted for about one year and covered the entire development process from the initial stages to the launch, and some time after. The chapter ends with a thorough discussion about the research criteria of validity, reliability, and generality, and the coping tactics that I used in this study to enhance these. Prolonged fieldwork, multiple modes of data collection, reflexivity, and specification of the research are among those important tactics that this last section discusses in detail.

Aspects of intellectual competence would not be sufficient for quality teaching that requires a mix of intellectual and personal qualities. The purpose of this paper was to elicit personal attributes of teachers’ college applicants.

This qualitative case study consisted of 99 participants aged 20-24 years of average socio-economic and achievement backgrounds. The authors constructed five qualitative tools, in addition to the two existing standardized exams. Using techniques of the grounded theory, the authors sorted and synthesized the data through three-phase coding.

The authors elicited a general concept map of attributes, from which a personal attribute profile for each participant emerged. This model makes fine differentiations between individuals, providing a personal attribute profile pool of applicants useful for any admission committee and for empowering students’ strengths during studies.

A solid database of non-cognitive attributes opens the door to further research, which will take into consideration multiple variables, such as student knowledge, beliefs and aptitudes.

Training teachers to apply research methodology into practice and limiting the length of tools make the mission possible, interesting and useful. Figuring out how to collect valid measures of such data about large numbers of college students would be a major challenge.

As teachers occupy a central position in the educational enterprise, they become guardians of the country’s collective socio-cultural legacy. In the current context of teacher shortages, the authors offer a model that has the potential of improving recruitment of applicants for teaching and raising teacher quality.

No previous attempt that uses qualitative methodology for this purpose was found.