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Exposing the hidden lives of female public relations (PR) practitioners requires deep connection with those lives. Stories need to be uncovered, interrogated, and ultimately told, to shine a light on the lived experiences of those working in PR. The methods used to collect these stories require deep immersion in the field and the ethnographic method is ideal for this. Ethnographic research methods have long been utilised to gain insights into the lived experiences of individuals and communities. This chapter provides an understanding of the strengths and limitations of ethnographic research methods in capturing the nuances of women's experiences of working in PR.

Organisational ethnography is an established field in business studies and has been used to investigate disciplines cognate to PR, including advertising and media, but, to date, has failed to be fully explored in PR research. This chapter examines the potential for ethnography to open new areas of PR theory and considers its potential as a means of bridging the gap between PR theory and practice.

Ethnography is not without its limitations; key concerns surround objectivity, the role of the researcher, and that of the participant, and ethics. Nonetheless, this method would appear to offer huge potential for the study of PR practices; the diverse nature of the sector makes it a rich area to study.

This chapter explores the potential of this method to offer an opportunity to investigate areas such as working practices, ethics in practice, power, gender, diversity, and culture.

In this chapter, we underscore the enduring importance of research on work, workers, labour markets, and the places and spaces of work. We then examine the particular and valuable contributions that come from ethnographic research in providing detailed studies of work, particularly when these are situated and interpreted in their wider socio-political contexts. We discuss the key dimensions of ethnography before overviewing the contributions to the volume. The volume presents cutting-edge ethnographic research on contemporary worlds of work and the experiences of workers from a range of contexts including an alternative community, working online, the gig economy, and the hospitality industry. Alongside novel empirical chapters, the collection includes the reflections of ethnographers with regards to, for example, the experience as a young female management researcher working amongst journalists in a media firm, personal feelings of precarity within and beyond the field, and how to navigate the challenges of researching inequalities ethnographically.

The present chapter explores the topic of death in the context of contemporary New Delhi, India. Building upon what I chose to call an ‘expanded ethnography’, it explores the multiple ways in which sensory, visual and digital mediations and tools can help researchers address such an existentially delicate topic. Building on a mix of online visual ethnography (of computer screens and smartphones), of bodily/sensory practices, of sound recording and image-making, my research focussed on retirement homes and shelters amidst a bulging Indian metropolis. I engaged with subjects who, because of personal choices or family difficulties, have ended up finishing their lives in solitude amidst a city forced to co-live with the presence of death. Alternating between photographic portraits, filmic observations and moments of playful exchanges in front of a camera (with me as one of the objects portrayed) my method capitalizes upon the integration (and problematisation) of bodily (sensory and affective) as well as digital techniques. All together these different mediations have granted me access to different layers of connection to the topic of death in Delhi and also to my ageing guides/interlocutors.

This chapter presents a methodological discussion about ethnographic practice from a feminist perspective that contributes to the field of communication studies methodology and theory. The ethnography engages Black (Afro-Brasileiro and African-American) and economically disadvantaged youth from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and New Orleans (USA) regarding their strategies of social and media visibility. This multi-sited ethnography proposes to improve the objectives of ethnography through theoretical flexibility, liberation from a priori assumptions, greater representation of the voices of community members, disavowal of the imperatives of positivist work, and abiding respect for the “other.”

Good ethnographic work produces stories. Stories are told to us by our interlocutors. We record them in our fieldnotes and read about them in archival or policy documents. We see and hear them occur around us, we participate in them, and they become a core part of our memories of the field. Given that ‘telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as human beings’ (Falconi & Graber, 2019, p. 1), stories are perhaps the most crucial resource by which we as ethnographers make sense of a field, allowing us to translate what happened to others so that they might be able to vicariously travel through the fields which we studied.

Yet when we look at the ethnographies published in leading management and organization studies journals, stories are increasingly hidden from view. We argue in this short chapter, for a return to storytelling at the centre of the production of ethnography. We seek an opening of the closed world of academic storytelling to those audiences excluded from such networks, including those whom we ethnographers are writing about. We retell nine short stories from an ethnography of Traffic Officers and the breakdowns they encounter on the strategic road network. These vignettes form a non-linear narrative of some of the most emotive and embodied encounters in our fieldwork in transport and mobility spaces between 2018 and 2019. We leave our readers to draw conclusions, implications, and linkages from these stories and offer an invitation to debate and conversation on the themes encountered therein.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.

While scholars have demonstrated persistent demographic inequalities in hiring, performance evaluations, and compensation decisions, many of the mechanisms driving these effects remain less clear. Qualitative research methods, including ethnographic approaches, are uniquely poised to fill this gap because they can illuminate how workplace inequalities are produced and reproduced on the ground. But studying workplace inequalities qualitatively also poses specific methodological challenges and considerations. In this essay, I discuss common issues researchers face when studying workplace inequalities ethnographically, including barriers in gaining access to sensitive organizational processes, building sufficient trust and rapport to move beyond official narratives of organizational practice (‘the company line’), and managing the emotional and psychological burden of discovering what lies beyond that line. I discuss potential strategies for navigating these challenges.

This chapter is based on experiences from two field studies, conducted in Tanzania and Pakistan, with a focus on women entrepreneurs. When conducting research in the global south, there are several ethical challenges to carefully consider, especially when research involves vulnerable groups of people. The aim of the chapter is to shed light on the complexities of power dynamics and to reflect on how to handle ethical dilemmas that may arise. Stories of women I met during the field work are placed at the centre and used as starting points for reflections on power dynamics. These stories lead to a discussion on whether it is legitimate for (privileged) Westerners to engage in research in the global south. The value of ethnography and auto-ethnography within entrepreneurship research is thereafter discussed in hopes of assisting future studies, where different power structures have to be considered.

This chapter reviews identity, culture, and Indigeneity, examining indigenous research pathways as a decolonizing research method. In this context, the chapter explores indigenous research challenges. It explores phenomenology of practice, reflexive ethnography, and grounded theory as possible research methods to advance indigenous studies and help decolonize research methods.

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.