All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis— and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available ...

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This paper surveys the most important frameworks of analysis that could assist the ethnographer in detecting the functional mechanisms of such items as ‘elaboration of identity’ or ‘change of identity’. The relationship between speech and social class is also discussed and a model of ethnographic research is provided. The main argument is that research in the ethnography of communication presup...

Using Pierre Bourdieu's theories of social class differentiation and class reproduction, this paper provides an analysis of class-based identity politics in contemporary suburban America. Through a critical ethnography of the emergent, American, upper-middle-class "soccer mom" phenomenon, this study contributes to a growing body of research that interrogates class-based, cultural practices of s...

Designing information resources that actually meet the information needs of individuals requires detailed knowledge of these needs. This poses a challenge for developers. Because the meaning of particular terms can vary by field, professional knowledge differs to some extent in different disciplines, and the questions that people ask assume a certain amount of unarticulated background knowledge...

Michael Burawoy reflects back on 40 years of industrial ethnography in Zambia, the USA, Hungary and Russia to discover the mistakes he made and, thus, to infer the fallacies to which ethnography is subject. He traces these fallacies not to any ‘theoretical imposition’ but to inadequate theoretical reflection. All methodologies are fallible and scholars should spend more time examining the limit...

This paper describes the contributions of rapid ethnography to the design of a web-enabled educational toy, specifically installation and registration. While HCI practitioners increasingly advocate rapid ethnography for early discovery and requirements phases, we discuss the role played by ethnography that spans open ended observation, story telling, conceptual design and iterative prototype ev...

This article outlines the contribution that ethnography could make to process evaluations for trials of complex health-behaviour interventions. Process evaluations are increasingly used to examine how health-behaviour interventions operate to produce outcomes and often employ qualitative methods to do this. Ethnography shares commonalities with the qualitative methods currently used in health-b...

Through a feminist critique of the ethnography method and the use of reflective HCI and global ethnography methodology, in this paper I will provide a discussion of methodological challenges for transnational design research using ethnographic methods. This discourse is meant to explore potential adjustments to HCI’s common use of ethnographic methods; specific attention is given to transnation...

The origin of preferences and values is an unresolved theoretical problem in behavioural sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values than less intelligent individuals, but gene...