ethnographers looking back

One on-going aspect of ethnographic work is the never-ending reflection and re-evaluation of conclusions made months, years, or decades prior. Retrospection invites extended analysis of findings that were otherwise cut short; it also facilitates shift from a worm’s eye to a bird’s eye contextualization of a case. Michael Burawoy’s “Ethnographic Fallacies: Reflections on Labour Studies in the Era of Market Fundamentalism” offers one such contemplation.*

In this research note, Burawoy re-examines several decades of his participant-observations in workplaces in various nations; he reveals the actual names of his most famous disguised field sites. Looking back, he summarizes six revelations while imparting a warning to those overly invested in the merits of particular methodologies:

From the ethnographer’s curse, therefore, I turn to the ethnographic fallacies that limited my vision of market fundamentalism. First, there are three traps that await the ethnographer who seeks to comprehend the world beyond the field site: the fallacies of ignoring, reifying and homogenizing that world. Second, there are three traps awaiting the ethnographer who fails to give the field site a dynamic of its own: the fallacies of viewing the field site as eternal or, when the past is examined, the danger of treating the present as a point of arrival rather than also as a point of departure; and finally the danger of wishful thinking, projecting one’s own hopes onto the actors we study.
I describe these six fallacies not to indict ethnography but to improve its practice, to help ethnographers grapple with the limitations of their method. No method is without fallacies, it is a matter of how honestly and openly we approach them. Being accountable to the people we study requires us to recognize our fallibility and, thus, to wrestle with that fallibility. The methodological dogmatists, who declare they have found the flawless method and spend their time condemning others for not following the golden trail, are the real menace to our profession.

Burawoy then elaborates how, for example, several of his conclusions were too narrowly circumscribed by a lens that was too-nationalist and too-time limited. He closes with a call for studies of efforts to counter the seeming inevitabilities of capitalist excesses.  Burawoy’s reference  to the latter as “embryonic institutions” suggests that such efforts are around us, but some may have escaped scrutiny due to their small scale or relative newness.

For ethnographers, Burowoy’s research note offers the chance to consider how analyses can mature over time. This research note is also ideal as an assigned reading alongside Burowoy’s books in a research methods class or substantive class on work.

 

* To recognize several award-winning articles, Sage has temporarily ungated this and other author’s publications.

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