Ethnography in the Construction Industry: Competing Bodies of Knowledge in Civil Engineering

The ethnographic, or participant observation, approach to the study of culture originated in anthropology and has been a feature of anthropological and sociological research for over one hundred years. Possibly the earliest example of this approach is the work of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, who spent a decade from 1871 to 1882, studying the way of life of the people of the Madong district in New Guinea (Cheater 1989). Some important studies in anthropology and sociology have been Evans-Pritchard (1937), Whyte (1955), Wieder (1974) and Anderson, Hughes and Sharrock (1989). Some examples of the application of the approach in management studies have been Mintzberg (1973) and Kunda (1992). The essential feature of the participant observation approach is that the researcher gets to know a culture by living within it. This means that the researcher learns the culture in the same way that members of that culture learned it themselves: by talking to them; witnessing the way they live their lives; and taking part in their activities. There are a variety of ways in which such research can be pursued, depending on the time available to the researcher and the extent of the access to the research setting which s/he can negotiate. Much of the research is done through semi-structured interviews, or in-depth discussions with informants.