No ethnographer can record and analyze everything that she encounters in the field. We must make choices about what to look at and how to look at it, which means privileging some aspects of social life while bracketing others. Approaches to Ethnography enumerates the key analytic strategies-which Jerolmack and Khan call approaches-that ethnographers deploy to tame the buzzing confusion of the social world. The book identifies eight approaches that typify ethnography, which it groups and compares along four axes: 1) Micro, organizational, and macro; 2) people and places, and mechanisms; 3) dispositions and situations; and 4) reflexivity. Each approach, it is shown, enables the illumination of a distinct dimension of the social world.
Every chapter is written by a seasoned ethnographer who enumerates one of the approaches and reflects on how that approach shapes their field site selection, observations, and analysis. Taken as a whole, the chapters show how these approaches, which operate more like sensitizing devices than theoretical mandates, can play a greater role in guiding the kinds of questions that get asked and answered in the field than whether one adopts an inductive or deductive stance toward theory. Engaging, accessible, and often inspiring, Approaches to Ethnography offers a practical and novel way to teach, evaluate, and conceptualize ethnographic research.

Ethnography is an increasingly important research method in the private sector, yet ethnographic literature continues to focus on an academic audience. Sam Ladner fills the gap by advancing rigorous ethnographic practice that is tailored to corporate settings where colleagues are not steeped in social theory, research time lines may be days rather than months or years, and research sponsors expect actionable outcomes and recommendations. Ladner provides step-by-step guidance at every turn--covering core methods, research design, using the latest mobile and digital technologies, project and client management, ethics, reporting, and translating your findings into business strategies. This book is the perfect resource for private-sector researchers, designers, and managers seeking robust ethnographic tools or academic researchers hoping to conduct research in corporate settings. More information on the book is available at http://www.practicalethnography.com/.