Ethnography in Context

Ethnography is based on the assumption that every social group is distinctive in its own right, and to explore this distinction researchers must engage with the group on its own ground. This requires the ethnographer to adopt a role within the culture or social setting being studied that enables a smooth blending with the rules, codes and expectations of the locals and the researcher's personal engagement with the subject is the key to understanding the setting.

Ethnography is an extremely broad church, and the range of methodological stances adopted by ethnographers extends across theoretical, political and technological divides. As a method it is intense and often makes considerable personal demands on the researcher, but as an academic product, the ethnography can be a vivid document with human resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other methodology.

This collection emphasizes something of the range of possibilities focusing on ethnography in different settings. Implicit in the text is the very specific problems encountered by ethnographers engaging with these very specific fields.
Volume I: The Urban Condition addresses attempts by ethnographers to describe and understand urban life.
Volume II: Work covers a range of employment experiences and highlights issues surrounding the ethnographic penetration of the work environment and the cultures that lay hidden within them.
Volume III: Body, Sport and Leisure considers the sociologies of health, sport and the body.
Volume IV: Deviance features the move towards more contemporary forms of transgression in Ethnography itself.