Afterword

Overview

This is a terrifically rich set of papers on global ethnographic comparison (GEC). It includes the detailed illumination of cases from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Mexico, Peru, South Korea and the United States across areas such as education, care, housing, urban entrepreneurialism, policing, work, social movements and organizing. The papers combine the detailed and evocative exploration of specific social worlds, interaction and institutional orders with systematic comparison of those worlds, through a variety of strategies and practices. These comparative ethnographies are also global, not only in their geographic reach but also in the variety of ways that they connect to global processes and social forms. Before going on to briefly explore some questions and future lines of development for GEC, I review some of the key lines of enquiry applied in the papers.

In their very valuable introductory paper, Koppelman and Bustamante make the case for this approach of GECs, laying out the varieties of GECs along two dimensions, centred on the comparative aspect of the approach. The first dimension relates to the ‘procedural order’ of the comparison – or how the comparative approach emerged in the ethnographic process. A clear comparative logic can be built from the start – a demanding approach practically (and maybe one more likely to occur in practice in PhD research or as a revisit). In this volume, for example, Antoine compares the cases of citizenship education in Belgium and Brazil, designing an explicitly comparative study, but based on initial explorations after the initial encounter with Brazilian education had thrown up questions about the system in his native Belgium.

Two other approaches bring cases together sequentially. The first sees the addition of a case as the research process itself develops – sometimes because the second case is a significant element in the rhetorical politics of the first (e.g. Moimaz’s turn to the United States because of the use of the case in Brazilian educational politics), sometimes driven in part by linkages ‘from below’ around particular policies (e.g. Koppelman’s linked cases of housing mobilizations in Santiago and Sao Paulo, where the activists involved were aware of one another’s actions). This approach is most likely, at least as seen in this volume and Table 1 of the introduction, to be pursued by individual researchers over time within their own ethnographic process.

Finally, the comparative logic can emerge a posteriori, after the research is largely completed – and typically, it seems, through the dialogue of researchers already possessed of an understanding of their own case but seeing new and interesting dimensions emerge in the confrontation with the ethnographic cases of other researchers. Typically, this is rooted in ongoing sustained dialogues – in this volume, as graduate school colleagues and friends (Marquez and Marwah) or as mentor and student, now colleagues (Ramirez and Villareal). As Vicki Smith (2011) noted, with the level of commitment required for ethnography, the organization of the work of ethnography deeply affects the kinds of work done and the strategies adopted.

The other dimension along which GECs can be compared is the rationale for the comparative aspect of the research. Perhaps most straightforward is a theoretical rationale, where the comparative dimension is driven by a particular theoretical question – or more likely, in the extended case method tradition, a puzzle or anomaly in particular theories. This poses a dilemma for GEC. The extended case method approach argues for the central importance of the evolving sets of theoretical puzzles and anomalies that drive the researcher’s engagement with the empirical world (Burawoy, 2009). However, this is somewhat at odds with the characteristic ‘fixing’ of conceptual questions and dimensions that typically are important aspects of the comparative method. Both approaches to theoretical formulation are present in the studies in this special issue at different times – but cases (and what kinds of cases they are) are reinterpreted as much through their engagement with the empirical contrasts with their comparative cases as they are through tackling theoretical anomalies.

The other rationales for comparison relate to the nature of the global processes affecting the case study – whether they relate to a ‘shared global process’ or to a ‘mobile policy’. Perhaps more generally, these might be thought of as the impact of a broader global process operating across various sites or the engagement with a social entity that moves transnationally. In the first instance, Lee’s interesting study explores how workers organize in different ways and around different identities in the face of platform and gig work – and in this case, the same multinational platform company – opening up the possibility of examining how global structures and processes interact in varied ways with local contexts.

There are a number of examples of the ‘mobile policy’ as the focus of the comparison, as policy and organizational scripts increasingly ‘travel’ transnationally (typically but not always from a ‘Western’ origin). Here too, there is additional complexity to be explored. Moimaz shows how similar educational reforms were enacted in the United States and Brazil, producing similar teacher experiences – but he also notes that these reforms themselves travelled incompletely from the United States to São Paulo. Bustamante shows how the interpretive frameworks of policy elites in the United States and Peru shape how zero-tolerance policing policies adopted from New York are implemented in quite different administrative practices and morally coded organizational frameworks. Koppelman shows how quite different contexts and apparently different behaviours can, in fact, constitute what are effectively similar social reactions – in this case, ‘contentious participation’ in the face of housing policy models. These are driven at least in part by global connections ‘from below’ as communities and activists learn from their counterparts in other countries and regions.

The papers, within the framework outlined by Koppelman and Bustamante, map the contours of an emergent approach of GEC. The remainder of this short note outlines some potential lines of future development on this terrain.

The GEC triangle

GEC seems to be less a single mode of carrying out research than a triangulation of three approaches that can veer in different directions depending on how they are practised and combined. The three points of this triangle in many ways map a space where research can veer between different approaches that combine two of the elements. These are global ethnographies, or ethnographic studies of global processes; comparative ethnographies, where ethnographic studies compare social phenomena of apparently similar character in different contexts, and global comparison, where various global processes (potentially of different scales and times) are compared. We can briefly review each of these.

The central logic of global ethnographies is one of vertical connections between local sites and global processes. Burawoy et al. (2000) argued this involved examining global forces, connections and imaginations in and across local fieldwork sites, generally employing the ‘extended case method’ to use ethnography to tackle global theoretical puzzles. The ‘extensions’ involved can be not only theoretical but also empirical and personal (Ó Riain, 2009).

The studies in this issue extend the range of ethnographies of globalization significantly, adding a developed comparative dimension that reaches well beyond the ‘shadow comparisons’ used in many global ethnographies to construct the empirical and theoretical puzzles that motivated them. However, this raises other questions as the logic of comparative ethnographic research is typically ‘horizontal’, comparing social worlds that are broadly similar analytical units – at the same spatial scale with similar social and institutional boundaries. Comparing ‘global ethnographies’ means that these aspects of scale and boundaries are problematised as these elements are made more fluid in the ‘vertical’ logics of global ethnography. The comparison greatly enriches global ethnography, but researchers are faced with new challenges for comparison. Instead of fixing units at the start of their ethnographic research (as is relatively typical in comparative methods), they must constantly re-construct the boundaries of their cases and dimensions of comparison as their research proceeds.

This is a familiar challenge from previous debates about global comparisons. In some ways, globalization could make classic comparisons between similar fixed analytical units easier as the external context for different social worlds is increasingly shared or at least similar. However, GEC poses a challenge close to that noted by McMichael (1990: 385) when he noted the challenge of conceptualizing ‘variation across time and space when time and space dimensions are neither separate nor uniform’. This is arguably all the more pressing as transnational and global relations become not only denser but more complex, reaching across different spatial scales through networked organizational forms and social relations. Crucially, many globalization processes are heterarchical – power relations and social organization operate in ways that are not strictly ordered but entangled, shifting and often contradictory or at least in tension. As McMichael (1990: 395) argued for (world-systems oriented) historical analysis, ‘comparison of time and place occurrences reveals continuities and at the same time attaches world-historical meaning to those occurrences’.

GEC provides a triangular methodological framework that maps out a path to carrying such analyses. This involves managing these tensions between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ construction of analytical units, and between global processes as ‘context’ (or shared processes) and ‘linkages’ (or mobile elements). A key question for any ethnographic or similar research is ‘what is this a case of?’ (Walton, 1992), but as McMichael notes, the nature of the process and the boundaries of the cases being studies are constantly constructed as the research progresses. Retaining this dynamic concept of the case is critical to the development of GEC and may be a challenge given the tendency within much of the comparative analyses to want to ‘fix’ the character of the comparison cases.

The authors in this issue navigate this differently. There are varying relations to theory. Bustamante discusses the challenges of comparing cases that are separated not only by space but over time – and indeed by the researcher’s learning from the first ethnographic case. However, he places these within a classic comparative frame by laying out three conceptual dimensions of the process of policy transfer – here, the comparative method is made possible by identifying a central social process and its three key dimensions. Antoine’s comparison of citizenship education (framed in various ways) in Brussels and São Paulo also compares ‘incomparable cases’ and provides a rich description of how the practice of ethnographic research on similar topics and processes varies based on the context. He also explicitly bases his comparison on the identification of key social processes and conceptualizing their dimensions. However, his mode of generalization focuses on how the understanding of one case is shaped by dialogue with the other cases. Each case is used to problematise the assumptions and categories of the other, confronting key theories in the process. While the two papers share fundamental elements of comparison based on conceptualization of important dimensions, Bustamante’s paper leans more heavily towards Millsian comparative methods while Antoine is closer to Burawoy’s extended case methods.

There are also variations in the empirical points of comparison and construction of the unit of analysis. Some analyses present two largely parallel ethnographic cases and then summarize the similarities and differences at the level of the ‘whole case’, characterizing each as a whole under contrasting conceptual labels (Marquez and Marwah). Others look for ‘moments’ of comparability. For instance, Lee explicitly draws on CK Lee’s (2020) ‘eventful comparison’ in her comparison of the pandemic and its attendant economic and safety crises for workers in Seoul and Toronto. Similarly, Moimaz focuses on a moment (the pandemic) when long-standing issues become visible (in this case, the importance of public education).

We have seen earlier that Bustamante takes particular conceptualizations of social processes as mechanisms for comparing empirically uneven data and contextually influenced cases. Similarly, Koppelman identifies patterns based on uneven data but found along conceptually identified dimensions such as ‘contentious participation’.

While a distinct approach, GEC is likely to have significant internal diversity, mapped across its triangular conceptual space. While attentive to all three points of the triangle – global, ethnographic and comparative – it is likely that different studies will tend a little more closely to one or other of the three ‘sides’ of that triangle – global ethnography, comparative ethnography and global comparison.

Getting global

Within that triangle, we can ask what light we can expect comparative ethnographies to shed on global processes. The dominant view in the studies is an emphasis on seeing the global in the ethnographies and then using this to shed light on important local variability, even when the overall characterisations of social worlds look to have been homogenized by globalization. Koppelman and Bustamante say that the studies ‘explicitly compare those cases to illuminate how distinct constellations of global and local forces shape the phenomenon under study. In short, they are global ethnographic comparisons (GECs)’.

However, there are varying potentials for contributing to the understanding of globalization and global processes, which are realized to different degrees within the studies in the special issue. Perhaps the greatest contribution is seeing the continuing importance of the local and national in shaping social relations – with all the studies showing how the effects of similar global processes or phenomena are shaped by local social relations, institutions and struggles. Less widely noted in the studies, but effectively the flip side of this point, is the power of the global in limiting local relations – with each study noting the importance of a global discourse (e.g. education and citizenship), actor (e.g. multinational firm), policy (e.g. zero-tolerance policing) or other globally shared social phenomenon.

There is also the opportunity to say more about how the global becomes intertwined in the local; that is, how global elements are inserted into local social relations and mobilized as resources by different actors, or how they come to shape local discourses, scripts for social action and so on. For example, it would be interesting to hear more explicitly about which actors in the local ethnography are connected to which parts of the global, and how – and how we might – conceptualize this. The other side of that coin is that as global processes operate through the local, each locality has a (small but nonetheless real) influence on constructing that global process. Each case of, for example, zero-tolerance policing becomes an element in the transnational social worlds of ‘policing reform’. Each struggle against a global firm becomes an influence on management strategy as the firm spreads to new locations. Piece by piece, global processes are re-shaped through the local – a process that GEC is uniquely placed to describe, explain and aid in reconstructing.

What is the practice of GEC likely to look like?

We can end therefore on some notes about what the practice of GEC is likely to look like, based on these excellent studies. It is striking that these studies are – despite the challenges they face in access and handling diverse and uneven data – deeply ethnographic. They richly characterize and evoke the social worlds they are studying. Despite the challenges of the journal article format for one, let alone two, ethnography, the studies provide deep insight into the social processes at work. In short, they show that GEC is possible.

It is also notable that they draw on a variety of methods. Immersion in the social world is part of all though direct sustained participation in a single location is more unusual than in the ‘classic’ ethnographies of single communities, organizations or workplaces. But the studies draw on a range of data collected in a variety of ways including participation, observation, interviews, documents and texts and more.

Furthermore, these GECs are often collaborative and based on dialogue with other researchers. In some cases, this leads to direct comparative collaborations. This is partly based on the collegial dialogue of researchers, often with a prior connection in their working lives. But it is also driven by some of the constraints of qualitative research as practised. Data are generally not open and often difficult to directly merge and compare for reasons of both ethics and data complexity. While the issues are complex, a development of the open qualitative data agenda would potentially help further comparative ethnographic research. In the studies in this collection, it is encouraging to see so many examples of researchers avoiding battles for supremacy in their fields but constructively ‘using’ each other’s work, generating cumulative knowledge through the rolling progress of their ethnographic studies.

As Koppelman and Bustamante discuss, the GEC approach also seems to inevitably make questions of the researcher’s positionality more complex. Comparative ethnographic research inevitably implies shifting positions of the researcher in relation to the social worlds they study, and we might expect the issues emerging from this to generate quite different debates compared with those around the relation of researchers to ethnographies of urban poverty. As we see in the issue, many of the researchers start out as ‘insiders’ in their ‘own’ country, but that insider status may only exist when defined in distinction to the other country case study – that is, as nationality is made more prominent than domestic lines of division along the lines of class, gender or many more. Moreover, there are certainly challenges of carrying out comparisons between social worlds where the researcher has different positionalities and is therefore likely to learn different things, amplifying the unevenness of data across the contexts being compared.

Finally, Koppelman and Bustamante argue that GEC offers a significant opportunity to engage in public sociology: ‘By placing ethnographic insights into dialogue not just with our academic interlocutors but also the organizations, movements, and communities in which we conduct research, GEC practitioners have unique opportunities to strengthen the globally linked struggles we seek to understand’. Again, this may complicate our relations as researchers to the diverse social worlds we study. As comparative and global analyses and connections take the words and lives of these worlds to quite different contexts, the link between those who are researched and the knowledge produced through them becomes more complex, even as the opportunities to interrogate questions of global power and enable transnationally linked resistances and alternatives are enhanced.