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The purpose of this chapter is to propose a new direction in ethnographic research in education through the emergence of critical presence ethnography (CPE). Through a review of the evolution of the field of ethnography as well as the positionality of the self as ethnographer, this chapter illuminates the ways in which critical ethnographic commitments and critical reflexivity can support a critical presence perspective that captures the ways in which the researcher impacts the internal epistemology and ontology of the research environment. This chapter is a conceptual chapter and does not include a specific research design, methods, or approaches. As a conceptual piece, there are no clear-cut findings, however a review of the extant literature concerning the field of ethnography is presented as well as the roles, opportunities, and tensions that ethnographers experience in the field. Based on the authors’ ethnographic work in the field, they employ a CPE to capture the ripples of self in the research context.

The limitations of this work are that it is only presented in its conceptual form and has not been implemented nor tested in the field. As such, the implications of this work are that it be further developed and operationalized in the field of ethnography. Upon implementation and in depth testing, CPE may have the potential to positively impact the way in which education ethnographers manage researcher identity, conceptions of the self, and researcher bias within a given context. This chapter builds upon a strong body of literature concerning ethnography and critical ethnography in education. Using these processes of ethnography and the ways in which the positionality of the ethnographic researcher have been conceptualized and operationalized in the extant ethnographic literature, our work seeks to provide a way in which the ethnographer can measure his or her impact on the given context. Although infant in our conceptualization, we aspire to contribute to the conversation about ethnography, researcher positionality, and context.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a general review of the ethnographic method. It uses metaphors to read several pieces of ethnographic research and discuss the different issues encountered during the research process. The review consisted of new articles but also important books that helped to construct and maintain the field of organizational ethnography.

The paper aims to discuss the ethnography research process through the metaphor of the Christian Seven Sins. It proposes a reflection on planning and conducting ethnographic research. The seven sins are used as a metaphor that can lead to more reflexive research for educational and explanatory purposes. Ultimately, the authors encourage organizational scholars to conduct ethnographic research.

The metaphors of the Christian seven sins represent issues that may arise during an ethnographic research. Gluttony is the dive in all topics that may appear; Greed is to lose yourself in the amount of data; Lust is to get too much involved in the field; Wrath is to take the struggles of the subjects as your own; Envy is to judge other's research according to your paradigm; Sloth is to not collect enough ethnographic data and Pride is forgetting to have a critical perspective toward your data. The redemption of these “sins” brings reflexivity to ethnographic research.

The paper opts to treat ethnography as a methodology that can be utilized with different epistemological and ontological approaches which could diminish the degree of reflection. No metaphor would be able to explain all the details of an ethnographic research project, still the seven sins provided a wide range of ideas to be reflected upon when using the methodology.

As a paper on ethnography, researchers and especially PhD students and early careers can get to know the issues that can arise during ethnographic research and put them in contact with good examples of ethnography in Organization and Management Studies.

This paper groups different complexities and discussions around ethnographic research that may entail research reflexivity. These ideas were scattered through various ethnographic publications. With the review their highlights can be read in a single piece. With these discussions, the paper aims to encourage researchers to conduct good quality ethnography.

This chapter considers the values and challenges of a highly embedded participant ethnographic methodology that has evolved over the last four years in the course of two formal ethnographic studies in higher education. The method has been developed by a practitioner-researcher in tandem with the learning design of a new programme. As such, the roots of the method lie very much within the paradigms of heuristics and action research but lend themselves equally well to more formal, extended ethnographic work. The nature of this method raises several interesting, messy and difficult issues that are further explored. The first is the nature of practitioner research and the purpose of participant ethnography in this context. What does it mean for the teacher to concurrently and contemporaneously inhabit the role of researcher? This leads neatly into an exploration of the attendant ethical considerations. Issues of power and positionality must be tackled, and the ability of the researcher to engage in fully reflexive practice and research is key to unpacking this. Who or what is being observed, and from what perspective? Whose experience is really being interrogated – that of the teacher or the student? Finally, as this method has evolved from, and shares much in common with, action research, consideration will be given to the nexus of action research, observation and formal ethnography – both in terms of the participation and contributions of the teacher-researcher to the process and the students, who in effect become auto-action researchers, investigating themselves as learners and their experiences with their peers.

There are certain accepted points that influence ethnographic work, even though they do not condition or fully determine it. They include the notion that in order to develop theories about human life, an ethnographer must study human activities and the way people interpret their realities in their every-day context and must also identify and then synthesise the conditions of the field, the perspectives of the participants, the latent meanings of the context and the researcher's own ideas for the grounding, generation and expansion of propositions about what is actually going on in the events and places researched. In this process, foreshadowed problems are accepted to frame the initial focus, but producing and analysing materials from multiple sources and perspectives are also important in order to prevent over-steering from private ideas and concepts. Once formed, ethnographic propositions, descriptions or theories are explored and tested in terms of their general scope against further data. Ethnographic field-notes are one of the most important foundations in this activity.

While scholars recognize that parent engagement in children’s education is beneficial, much of the normative parent involvement literature rests on the assumption that marginalized parents of color must be taught white middle-class norms of conduct in order to engage with the school system. In this chapter, we describe the ways our critical ethnographic implementation and analysis of the Parent Mentor Program – a parent engagement project in a small urban school district in Central New York – re-envisions parent engagement in three interrelated ways. First, we argue that the project is race-, class-, gender-, and power-conscious, drawing on the interrelated theoretical frames of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Second, we argue that the program and research are unique in utilizing the toolkit of critical ethnography to not merely describe, but also to intervene in educational inequity. Third, we argue that the program has a more holistic goal than much of the parent engagement literature, as it seeks to connect parent engagement and activism with the larger antiracist goal of using restorative justice strategies to disrupt the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. Focusing on critical ethnographic methods in practice, we analyze the shifting positionalities of a multiracial research team as we grappled with methodological dilemmas in the first three years of the program. We document how we balanced the goals of introducing a race-conscious framework and catalyzing critical consciousness with the realities of constantly renegotiating entry in a school district characterized by colorblindness and colormuteness.

Ethnography has emerged as a potentially valuable empirical means of understanding how and why accounting operates within organisations. However, its use in the accounting literature has not been without controversy. This paper addresses one of the key issues of dispute: the role of critical foundational theories in ethnographic accounting research. First, the paper draws from competing proposals for ethnography in the accounting literature in an attempt to shed further light on the use of critical theory within an ethnographic field study. It is argued that critical theory can be a valuable tool in developing further insights from ethnographic study, but that its timing within the stages of the empirical work is crucial to achieve a balance between understanding and explanation. Second, in highlighting the lessons learnt from the author’s own ethnographic research, the paper discusses the (as yet untapped) potential for critical ethnography to inform directly the design and development of new accounting systems. It is proposed that using ethnography “actively” in this way could provide the methodological basis for the development of new forms of accounting, such as social accounting.

While netnography was established to study virtual communities from the traditional ethnography methodology, over time it has evolved and moved away from standard ethnographic practices. The modifications are especially prevalent in hospitality and tourism research because of the nature of experiential and service-based goods. This gap has created exciting new opportunities for researchers. As netnography has matured into its own methodology, it has provided the opportunity for researchers to use netnography techniques or more traditional techniques by following ethnography methodologies. This paper aims to analyze the differences between these two methodologies within hospitality and tourism literature enabling researchers to choose the methodology that is most suited for their project.

This study reviews netnographic research in hospitality and tourism and compares current uses of netnography against traditional ethnographic methodologies.

There are four major differentiating points between netnography and ethnography: online community definitions, data collection methodologies, ethics in research and data analysis techniques.

In comparing ethnography and netnography in hospitality and tourism research, this analysis provides a foundation to evaluate the best use and best practices for these two distinct qualitative methodologies in the field. The study also provides references to how other hospitality and tourism researchers have used netnography.

Ethnographic principles grounded in the foundation of anthropological doctrines are important and distinct from netnography. The ability to use the diverse tools in the qualitative methods toolbox will help hospitality and tourism researchers understand the transforming marketplace.

Increasing complexity, fragmentation, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life make “being there” increasingly difficult. Where do ethnographers have to be, when, for how long, and with whom to “be there” and grasp the practices, norms, and values that make the situation meaningful to natives? These novel complexities call for new forms of organizational ethnography. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the above issues.

In this paper, the authors respond to these calls for innovative ethnographic methods in two ways. First, the paper reports on the practices and ethnographic experiences of conducting a year-long team-based video ethnography of reinsurance trading in London.

Second, drawing on these experiences, the paper proposes a framework for systematizing new approaches to organizational ethnography and visualizing the ways in which they are “expanding” ethnography as it was traditionally practiced.

The paper contributes to the ethnographic literature in three ways: first, the paper develops a framework for charting new approaches to ethnography and highlight its different dimensions – site, instrument, and fieldworker. Second, the paper outlines the opportunities and challenges associated with these expansions, specifically with regard to research design, analytical rigour, and communication of results. Third, drawing on the previous two contributions, the paper highlights configurations of methodological expansions on the aforementioned dimensions that are more promising than others in leveraging new technologies and approaches to claim new territory for organizational ethnography and enhance its relevance for understanding today's multifarious organizational realities.