The Architecture of Ethnographic Knowledge: Narrowing Down Data and Contexts in Search of Sociological Cases

Introduction

The “turn to practice” in the sociology of knowledge has impacted how qualitative researchers reflect upon building connections between “descriptive information and analytic statements” (Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011:3; also see Ragin and Becker 1992; Swedberg 2012; Tavory and Timmermans 2014; Vaughan 2004). Widespread debates over best practices demonstrate how qualitative knowledge has integrated broader disciplinary concerns about the relationship between causation, interpretation, and explanation. These debates also reveal a fracturing in the field of qualitative knowledge production (e.g., Anderson 2002; Duneier 2002; Newman 2002; Wacquant 2002).

Practitioners learn and take for granted different underlying assumptions about building cases. These distinctions in qualitative knowledge are not simply based on competing data-gathering techniques. Whether a person conducts interviews, archival research, or participant observation certainly impacts available types of data and sociological questions. Yet, sociologists employing specific data-gathering techniques also learn to incorporate “epistemological machinery” that makes “social knowledge possible and intelligible” in distinct ways (Abend, Petre, and Sauder 2013:640).

There are wide-ranging empirical and analytic approaches in the field of ethnographic knowledge. These include abductive analysis (Tavory and Timmermans 2014, 2009; Timmermans and Tavory 2012), analogical theorizing (Vaughan 1992, 1996, 2004, 2006, 2014), analytic induction (Becker 1958; Katz 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Lindesmith 1968; Znaniecki 1934), analytic ethnography (Lofland 1995; Snow, Morrill, and Anderson 2003), carnal sociology (Wacquant 2004, 2005), the extended case method (Burawoy 1991, 1998, 2009; Gluckman 1961), grounded theory (Charmaz 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967), institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 2005), peopled ethnography (Fine 2003), and relational ethnography (Desmond 2014).

This article neither proposes another distinct framework for constructing ethnographic knowledge, nor does it refute the utility and value of any of the existing approaches. Instead, it shows that underlying divergent approaches are mundane phenomenological and hermeneutic foundations that shape the architecture of ethnographic knowledge. ¹ Tacit epistemic competencies enable researchers to begin the process of turning the complex noise of observable reality into the pursuit of sociological cases.

Melvin Pollner (1974) argues that people take for granted a shared “reality” of the “objective” world that allows for “continued experiential access” between interaction partners. What he calls “mundane reasoning” is built upon tacit knowledge. Mundane social competencies allow subjects to maintain the momentum of an interaction situation even amid confusions. As Steven Shapin (1994:31–33) points out, tacit social competencies are also fundamental to the pursuit of “truth.” Even scientific endeavors build upon mundane conventions that allow participants to “repair” disruptions, not simply about observations of the basic facts, but “about what the object was all along.”

Ethnographers similarly absorb tacit epistemic competencies about the object of investigation in pursuing their cases. These discreet and taken-for-granted proficiencies play an important role in the reproduction of the fractured field. Ethnographers develop mundane competencies to carve out and stabilize distinct forms of data and contexts from the complex and multidimensional possibilities of observable reality. No researcher can include every empirical instance from their field sites into their sociological cases. They produce rich and varied data sets over lengthy periods of time, but just as importantly, they learn how to narrow down what they focus on in their field sites, field notes, memos, articles, and book chapters to make their research relevant to other sociologists.

This article focuses on two iterative stages of narrowing down data and contexts as the architecture of ethnographic knowledge. The first stage involves learning to see and take for granted a distinct form of social ontology. Ethnographers learn to hold constant empirical units as social relationships of the same kind. The second stage requires ethnographers to pare down the boundaries of time and space to contextualize the data. By stabilizing coherent boundaries as the social context, ethnographers reinforce how they apply levels of analysis into causal connections. Narrowing down both data and contexts as units and levels of analysis is necessary for generalizing up in the pursuit of sociological cases.

Narrowing Down Sociological Data

Those who have studied or taught sociology know that seeing the world through sociological eyes often requires a strategic break from students’ overtly individualistic orientations toward interpretations of human life as “social.” A similar learning process exists in producing ethnographic knowledge. Ethnographers learn to see relatively autonomous human experiences, and increasingly human relationships with nonhumans, as social. Researchers have multiple options available about how to empirically construct “the social” as data, how and where to look for it, and how to write about it. Over time, researchers develop specific social ontologies into mundane competencies. ² They learn to take for granted empirical observations as sociological data.

According to Howard S. Becker (2005), ethnographers do not sit back and wait for interesting topics and facts to appear out of thin air. He argues, “It’s better to say that we ‘emerge’ them, that we invent them as a result of what we learn once we begin our work” (Becker 2005). This learning is not only built upon experiences and observations in a field site with subjects. Ethnographers employ conventional ways of seeing even before they enter the field. These interpretive competencies allow researchers to sustain observations of the same units of social data over time.

Researchers absorb a set of observational skills to carve up the world into traceable social interdependencies that sociologists previously agreed to be the kind of observable instances of social life that matter. Ethnographers emerge their data, as Becker says, but they do it by locating subjects acting in and upon the existing world as distinct kinds of points of view, actors, actions, interactions, interpretations, groups, organizations, material and symbolic arrangements, hierarchical relations, and/or other kinds of taken-for-granted social interdependencies vis-à-vis others.

Moving back and forth between institutional interactions and fieldwork interactions communicates and solidifies ontological priorities. Institutions transmit knowledge claims and applicable classifications, thus reproducing the epistemological styles of sociological knowledge production toward particular kinds of empirical data and analyses (Abend et al. 2013; Glaeser 2010). The disciplining of sociological categories comes from mentors, teachers, and colleagues through training, in classroom discussions, reading and writing groups, conferences, and by reading different studies and theoretical and methodological debates.

Institutional training to see social units follows distinct historical legacies and epistemic configurations. That is, scholars bridge together their previous training with forms of knowledge production in their home institutions and new scholarly networks. Epistemic configurations are ongoing processes across generations and institutions, such as in the transmission from Georg Simmel to Robert Park to Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer to Howard Becker and Herbert Gans to their many students at many different institutions. These institutional configurations give rise to contingent, cumulative, and historically specific alignments as “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 2009).

A mentor’s ethnographic training style, and the department’s training culture, emphasizes certain interpretive competencies over others. For instance, Elijah Anderson learned field methods from Howard Becker at Northwestern University and the urban sociologist Gerald Suttles at the University of Chicago. When Anderson moved to the University of Pennsylvania, Erving Goffman, a colleague there, further influenced his empirical approach to face-to-face interactions in public. Anderson also became taken with the legacy of W. E. B. DuBois in Philadelphia (see Anderson 1996). Building on these influences, he developed a micro-interactionist perspective to study race and urban public life, which then shaped the epistemic competencies of another generation of scholars studying race and urban life. His students conducted field research on the interactional dynamics of African American girls in the inner city navigating potential threats of violence (Jones 2009), the relationship between black neighborhoods and the dreams of a basketball career (Brooks 2009), and the construction of interaction order and safety amid precarious inner-city constraints (Duck 2015).

Jack Katz and Robert Emerson, the former a student of Howard Becker and John Kitsuse, the latter a student of Everett Hughes, taught field methods at University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) for decades. They brought together interactionist and phenomenological traditions of their own previous training as well as sociological developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis through colleagues like Garfinkel, Shegloff, Heritage, and Pollner (e.g., Emerson and Holstein 2012; Emerson and Pollner 2001; Pollner and Emerson 2001). These currents directly and indirectly influenced their students in studies of mundane everyday processes among Orthodox Jews (Tavory 2010), individuals losing objects (Berry 2012), the local grammars of rule-making among pick-up basketball and soccer players (DeLand 2013; Trouille 2014), as well as mundane interactional processes and emergent stages of enacting practical situations, as in studies of physical fights (Jackson-Jacobs 2013) or street corner rap battles (Lee 2009a).

The Chicago School transmission tends toward ecological relationships, temporal biographical processes, and face-to-face interactions. Yet epistemic transmission is not particular to any kind of school or empirical emphasis. Burawoy, the leading proponent of the extended case method in the United States, was trained at the University of Zambia by Manchester-trained anthropologist Jaap Van Velsen. Van Velsen was a student of Max Gluckman, one of the originators of the extended case method as part of the Manchester School (Burawoy 1991). Michael Burawoy (1991, 1998, 2000, 2005) formalizes key lessons from Jaap Van Velsen’s (1967) “situational analysis” and Max Gluckman’s (1961) “extended case method,” and connects them to critical theoretical traditions at University of California (UC) Berkeley.

In fact, how scholars describe Gluckman’s extended case method is revealing of epistemic priorities. Jack Katz (2001b:462) interprets Gluckman as developing cases “over time and through distinguishable stages,” much in the way that Hughes and Becker have contributed to the study of interaction stages over time. He writes, “[The extended case method] shows the interplay of multiple individuals and social groups who, through a sustained collective focus, shape cultural themes into an evolving drama” (Katz 2001b: 462). Burawoy (2000) gleans different insights from Gluckman about unequal relationships between African and European societies as contributing to sustained local dramas. He argues that by conducting fieldwork, Manchester anthropologists focused on situated contradictions between local practices and structural norms as political dramas; and external colonial administration and labor migrations enabled and constrained such internal contradictions that reproduced “class relations of colonial capitalism.”

Burawoy’s (1991, 2000, 2005) epistemic configuration, practiced at UC Berkeley, oriented him to external and historically configured power structures and the interdependence of macro-systems and micro-life worlds. He has taught participant observation to students over the course of decades, since 1976, passing along epistemic competencies for seeing the social world through the lens of hierarchical relationships and guiding student projects on macro-micro interdependencies. We see this alignment of social reality in cases of changing state politics on, and increasing stigmatization of, welfare recipients in Hungary (Haney 2002), political-economic changes on gambling in South Africa and the United States (Sallaz 2009), and on the political-economic, institutional, and discursive production and practices of homelessness in San Francisco (Gowan 2010).

Epistemic configurations transmit mundane competencies to interpret lived human experiences, yet ethnographers must also go somewhere and interact with people or other forms of relevant documentation that become used as ethnographic and empirical sociological data. Ethnographic fieldwork classes often serve as an initiation into this process, a bridging mechanism between an institution’s epistemic culture and the practices of conducting field studies. This back and forth between the epistemic culture and empirical documentation further solidifies and naturalizes the classificatory frames by narrowing down ways of seeing the empirical world. Sociologists become practitioners of certain traditions of the ethnographic craft and learn to make interpretive choices about seeing “the field,” “the subjects,” and “the data.” Being out at a field site, talking to people, and writing field notes are all key to this process of describing the substantive, practical, and normative frameworks that matter in the field from the points of view of their subjects (Camic et al. 2011; Geertz 1983; Smith 2005).

Ethnographers must negotiate between the two sides of classification. Many ethnographers spend years with subjects to come as close as possible to accurately depicting how they experience reality. Yet even then, as Clifford Geertz (1973:30) points out, ethnographers do not and “largely cannot perceive what . . . informants perceive.” They cannot become “natives,” so to speak (also see Narayan 1993). Ethnographers are interested in interpreting the world through their learned social ontologies, while subjects are not typically attuned to classifying their lives through the same “social” lenses. In fact, subjects sometimes dispute ethnographic depictions as partial or even biased (e.g., Lareau 2012; Scheper-Hughes 2000; Whyte [1943] 1993), that is, if they show any interest whatsoever in reading sociological depictions of themselves (e.g., Duneier 1999). Any sociological perspective can directly challenge the taken-for-granted knowledge of other epistemic systems, like those found in art worlds, which have historically valued notions of “originality” and “individual genius” over collective accomplishments and social organization (Becker 1982; Moulin 1987).

Ethnographers discuss what they have seen “out there” in an effort to formalize sociological ways of seeing. In Howard Becker’s fieldwork classes, he asked students “what’s been happening?” to open up conversations about fieldwork and interpreting evidence (DeVault 1999; Sanders 2012). Dorothy Smith regularly asked students “how it’s put together,” which involved the exercise of connecting the “extralocal organization of everyday experience” to subjects’ relations in and through administrative institutions (DeVault 1999: 49). In one of Burawoy’s field methods seminars—the projects documented in an edited volume (see Burawoy et al. 1991)—students could not identify a clear theoretical agenda as they were conducting research. Yet they still produced patterned tensions across their projects between particular notions of agency and structure and configurations of macro- and micro-relations, which speaks to this epistemic transmission. Ethnographers in the class not only advocated “respect” for subjects constructing their own worlds but also wanted to show the “silencing” that prevented subjects’ own understandings. Likewise, they expressed interest in locating the “social forces” that determined subjects’ lives, as well as the ability of subjects to “transcend” those social forces (Kurzman 1991).

Some faculty members and colleagues review field notes on a recurring basis and make comments on the documents themselves. In fieldwork classes, students may circulate field notes to peers and develop workshop-like settings to discuss and focus the data and analyze the empirical world through specific kinds of sociological eyes. Those who have participated in these types of workshop settings may recognize their utility in opening up questions about the data, which subtly guide the directions of analysis: What is happening in this description; what are the potential interpretations of this data passage; how can we complicate the actions or interpretations of subjects in this particular instance; how are different passages related to each other; what possible alternative themes can we see in this passage; can we come up with alternative explanations for the causes of this situation or action?

Workshop settings often lack a clearly directed goal, a frustrating reality for many novice ethnographers trying to develop individual projects. While ambiguity remains a central feature of ethnographic knowledge (Deener 2017), the collective workshop setting still refines interpretive competencies for constructing certain kinds of social data, in turn, closing down alternative perceptions of empirical social relationships. Writing field notes, conducting interviews, and transcribing interviews objectify preferred interpretations of social ontologies into material documents and cemented “data.” Collective discussions and classroom workshops about field notes and interview transcripts allow for social and spatial distance from the field. Only the researchers commonly have direct connections to the field site and to the intricate and often overlooked decisions made in the field—who to talk to, how to act, where to sit or stand, who was ignored and overlooked, and when to go home—through which they document the facts. Everyone else reading the work reifies the written field notes as the presentation of documented facts. Discussions about field notes as “the facts” focus researchers to more specific ways of seeing their field sites and their subjects. ³

By writing and discussing field notes and observations, ethnographers solidify preferences for how to develop empirical links. It narrows down the taken-for-granted framework, further clarifying how to locate the forms and processes of race and class public space interactions (Anderson 1990); emphasize subjects as fitting into institutional “ruling relations” that administer and manage subjects’ experiences (Smith 1974); see comparative instances across situations, settings, and cases (Vaughan 2004); prioritize the evolution of stages of development (Katz 2010); write about subjects as complex characters (Duneier 1999); document the workings of an interacting group (Fine 2003); or locate external social forces impinging on internally emergent subjective situations (Burawoy et al. 1991).

By turning subjects and field sites into sociological data, ethnographers consistently make other possible points of data—other potential types of facts—invisible. What begins as a process of developing interpretive choices to see the world in specific ways gradually narrows into naturalized dispositions and competencies that constrain knowledge production toward identifying sociologically relevant topics such as public space regulations, political conflicts between groups, commodification of sex, or everyday knowledge production.

I am not stating ethnographers simply create the empirical worlds they want to see. “Mundane reasoning” occurs as the development of tacit competencies to accumulate and take for granted agreed-upon ways of seeing among practitioners of the same empirical and analytic traditions (Pollner 1974; Shapin 1994). The process solidifies underlying assumptions and preferences for seeing, categorizing, and comparing social instances and developing agreements about the social interdependencies as units worth focusing on. These mundane assumptions reinforce fragmented standards of evidence and analytic development. As the narrowing process crystallizes taken-for-granted perceptions and analytic preferences, practitioners develop evaluative logics to judge the depth and quality of evidence and analysis. All research requires making some aspects—even if unknowingly and through taken-for-granted competencies—invisible so as to narrow down the understanding of how to build good empirical cases.

Some ethnographers come to associate their preferred social ontologies (i.e., focusing on individual character development, face-to-face interactions, or hierarchical relationships) with the very function of conducting good ethnographic research. They equate specific types of observed social units with the foundational purpose of participant observation, which generally means a researcher is there with subjects as they are acting out their routines in their own habitat. One main idea that surfaces over time in discussions about qualitative research is that “actions speak louder than words.” Authors argue that the most accurate evidence about motives and actions is that which is directly observed in context (Becker and Geer 1957; Dean and Whyte 1958; Jerolmack and Khan 2014).

The idea that certain modes of seeing are better than others equates techniques and units of analysis with methods. It encloses different practices with different degrees of investment and different understandings of “data” as the same thing, without reflecting on the hermeneutic and phenomenological underpinnings of developing distinct and preferred kinds of social ontologies, and, as I show in the next section, social contexts, too. This process occurs in many different forms of methodological expertise.

Interviewing in and of itself does not shape an author’s empirical focus. Interviewing can document cultural repertoires and frames, life-course transitions, oral histories, mnemonic devices, biographical narratives, public discourses, among other kinds of information and interpretation (Lamont 2000; Pugh 2013; Lamont and Swidler 2014). The empirical focus is linked to the learning and application of preferences and assumptions about how to develop sociologically relevant interview questions with goals of achieving a certain social ontology that guides an analytic direction. Many factors alter the function and framing of interviews and the possible data: The questions researchers ask, experience in conducting interviews, familiarity with subjects, or familiarity with settings, events, organizations, professions, or modes of expertise on which researchers empirically focus. The uses and goals of interviewing differ when the very framing of the projects differs: Identifying similar groups in different communities (Brown-Saracino 2010; Ghaziani 2014) is different than locating different groups within the same communities (Deener 2012; Pattillo 2007; Small 2004), which is again different from comparing similar groups in different nations (Lamont 2000; Saguy 2003).

The limits of interviewing are dependent on the limits of framing studies and the approaches and logics of combining interviews with other modes of inquiry. Participant observation is like interviewing in this respect: A common method encloses complex degrees of technical skill, interpretive specialization, and degrees of closeness with the phenomena and subjects themselves. Some engage in intense immersion with subjects doing the action (e.g., Wacquant 2004). Others participate through direct observations and interactions with subjects without joining their subjects in doing the action (e.g., Bourgois 1996). Still others take part in a combination of approaches, including recurring interviews and oral histories with individuals or small groups while hanging out over time or living in the place they study (e.g., Pattillo 2007). Sometimes, ethnographers are necessarily separated from the situated experiences of which they are really interested but cannot access or directly observe, as might be the case for those studying violence or illegal activities (Contreras 2012), elites’ cultural preferences (Khan 2011), or conducting global research (Hannerz 2003).

Embodied knowledge, commonly understood as operating at the micro level, is an interesting topic to think about multiplying techniques toward achievement of the same interpretation of social ontology. Ethnographers can train to become a pianist (Sudnow 1978), a boxer (Wacquant 2004), a glassblower (O’Connor 2005), a firefighter (Desmond 2007), or a lindy hop dancer (Hancock 2013). These are all cases of devoted immersion that document learning by being there and doing the disciplined work on one’s own mind and body over a period of time. The ethnographer comes to understand firsthand the sensual experience of personal investment, discipline, and transformation: the adrenaline rush of a punch, feeling the scorching heat of fire, or the rhythmic intertwining of movement with music.

One can also rigorously study embodied knowledge by hanging around with others: a mechanic in his workshop (Harper 1987), religious converts learning moral rituals (Winchester 2008), students at a boarding school (Khan 2011), or opera fanatics enacting “love for” the music (Benzecry 2011). In such cases, ethnographers do not necessarily become one with the activity under study, mirroring their subjects, but they still observe others, interact with subjects doing the activity, and ask their subjects questions, making it possible to construct vivid and recurring descriptions of lived and felt experiences.

The degree of physical distance from any social phenomena—including sensual feelings—can move further down the chain of researchers’ own bodily investment. One can rely on multiple student researchers to document a wide range of scenarios, conduct intensive, open-ended, and wide-ranging interviews with subjects about practical actions, or compile many different types of primary and secondary sources, such as archival documents, video recordings, media accounts, and previously published manuscripts. All of these tools help researchers describe and represent embodied knowledge as phenomenologically experienced by strategically varying empirical instances of the same kind of social units across situations (Collins 2008; Katz 1999; Sennett 2008).

These approaches differ in their techniques of discovery despite all being lumped together as empirically focusing on embodied practice. In fact, some approaches labeled as participant observation have characteristics in common with interviewing. They involve recurring conversational prodding with the same subjects over an extended period of time rather than direct observations of behavior over time. Vice versa, some approaches to “interviewing” or “archival research” have a clear ethnographic eye for locating situated meanings in documents and transcripts (e.g., Vaughan 1996). In other words, they rely more on talking with people about what they do or reading documents written by people about what they did in the situated moment, rather than directly observing what they do. However, they still reinforce how actors take part in unfolding processes.

Degrees of distance from subjects may alter the questions ethnographers ask, but not necessarily the substance of the study, the interpretations of social ontologies that allow them to turn human processes into empirical data, the logical priorities that shape the novelty of scholarly contributions, or even the expertise at writing descriptive accounts of a process. The institutionally learned classificatory lenses through which one sees and interprets empirical instances are versatile; they vary with the types of ontological priorities that can exist in sociological minds, can be learned and transmitted across generations, and can be accounted for in empirically documented descriptions and analyses. The tools for seeing and interpreting help to document empirically linked “social units,” but ethnographers have to contextualize them as existing somewhere and at some time to narrow down the case as something significant to sociologists.

Narrowing Down Sociological Contexts

Ethnographers develop formal and informal dimensions of time and space to further narrow down social ontologies and move them toward the production of social contexts. Researchers build connections to and ruptures from the past and construct spatial boundaries of action, interaction, and association. The informal elements of time and space refer to subjects’ more flexible and emergent uses of them. The formal elements refer to the sociological objectification of temporal and spatial dimensions as independent of informally emergent uses and processes. These are often experienced as shared understandings of “harder” boundaries, mechanisms, patterns, events, forces, and other objectified forms. How ethnographers apply the informal and formal dimensions of time and space as the social context narrows down levels of analysis. Similar to the previous focus on narrowing down the social ontology, this process is iterative. On one hand, contextual boundaries build on previous interpretive competencies, as a function of one’s training; on the other hand, they are mediated and crystallized through the availability and pursuit of data in field sites (Vaughan 1992).

The definitions and causes of temporality depend on how ethnographers envision social units. The organization of a study may locate certain phenomena as taking place before or after a formalized historical event. In this case, the researchers take into account the subjective experiences leading up to the event and the agreed-upon objective reality of the event itself. Diane Vaughan (1996, 2004, 2006, for example) uses historical documents, technical reports, memos, and oral history interviews to make sense of how engineers and managers within NASA’s bureaucracy made everyday decisions regarding the Challenger space shuttle launch in the months prior to its explosion. Knowing the particular outcome shaped how she sought out emerging causes of the disaster event. Vaughn sought information prior to the disaster to locate and emphasize future-directed sequences of decision-making. Historical documents pointed out prospective subjects to interview, combining into a study of how organizational culture absorbs risks and facilitates technical mistakes.

Starting with the agreed-upon objective reality of a historical event is an important dimension of Vaughan’s study, but it could have also allowed for different starting questions about the informal temporal relationships to the objective event itself that would have changed the trajectory of analysis and created a completely different sociological project. For instance, if Vaughan focused on the organizational culture after the explosion, her questions might be: How do people review organizational protocol or how do they navigate work and life after traumatic moments? We can see this kind of empirical endeavor in the study of transportation planning and technical and promotional safety protocols in the aftermath of 9/11 (Molotch 2012; Molotch and McClain 2003), or how people in a small town reorganized community in the aftermath of a flood (Erickson 1976). Another approach could integrate organizational processes before, during, and after an event, as in the study of accumulating and unequal distribution of deaths during a heat wave in Chicago, and the organizational and community responses to this slow-moving disaster (Klinenberg 2002). Each of these examples reflects formal and informal dimensions of time. One level involves identifying agreed-upon life-altering events—as a bounded period of observation—constructed as external to the subjects of the study. The other involves the level of unfolding social interactions or organizational processes building up to, experienced during, and/or responding to the objective event.

Not all sociological questions call for preconceived boundaries between before and after. In these cases, ethnographers still build relationships between formal and informal dimensions of time. They empirically disentangle temporally ordered transformations to understand what it means to experience and exist in the midst of change. Transformation implies an unfolding process between Time 1 and Time 2. Yet the ethnographic approach to transformation also identifies patterned mechanisms contributing to changes and/or continuation in the lines of action—that is, the objectification of Time 1 and Time 2 as coherently distinct moments.

If ethnographers aim to document human interactions and the construction of interaction situations, then transformation takes the form of stages of personal development or the identification of key turning points in the life course. In this understanding of temporality, certain patterned interaction events are seen as conditioning and channeling subsequent interactions. The researcher points to different lines of action before and after the objectified moment or stage of change. We see this kind of inquiry in Howard S. Becker’s (1963) work on learning to experience a marijuana high, in Jack Katz’s (1999) sequences of emotional expression, or in Jooyoung Lee’s (2009b) biographical turning points among street corner rappers.

Ethnographers also point to transformations that emerge from conditions external to subjects, as an independent variable outside of subjects’ control. This type of ethnographic knowledge is contingent on incorporating into a study a priori actions of political officials, military leaders, corporate CEOs, or other kinds of powerful actors and institutions. The location of a priori actions and institutions serves a distinct purpose of identifying and objectifying power positions as external social forces like new state-level laws, economic trends, or technical innovations entering the lives of the ethnographic subjects.

Burawoy’s collections of case studies with his students show that situated circumstances—in an organization, a neighborhood, or otherwise—provide the context for new forms of knowledge, new forms of economic survival, and new political-economic regulations that penetrate, alter, and define how subjects experience the situated social contexts (Burawoy et al. 2000; Burawoy et al. 1991). The contextualized temporal boundaries underscore how everyday routines, opportunities, and discourses stem from beyond the local context, often as part of widely experienced historical and spatial transformations in political-economic relationships. The analytic approach has a common thread across national contexts, including the United States, Hungary, China, and South Africa, where political-economic changes materialize onto human bodies or provide a key empirical lens into tracking the reconfiguration between macro forces and informally emergent practices and interpretations of subjects as part of the experience of living during precarious times (Gowan 2010; Haney 2002; Hanser 2008; Sallaz 2009).

The narrowing down of the influence of time works in conjunction with narrowing down the influence of space, together solidifying the idea of a social context. How ethnographers build together interpretations of social ontologies with formal and informal temporal and spatial patterns further impacts this analytic development toward the representation of a unified sociological topic: an organizational culture of risk taking (Vaughan 1996), the inner-city career of an aspiring rapper (Lee 2009), or the distinct bureaucratic orders of spaces of consumption (Hanser 2008). These are subtle analytic conventions. They are not strategically employed as explanatory—by locating cause and effect—but instead they function to narrow down the types of cases that can lead toward levels of analysis and potentially to causal claims. The spatial boundaries further reinforce the idea of the “neighborhood” ethnography, “street corner” ethnography, “organizational” ethnography, “workplace” ethnography, or other institutional spatial relationships.

Temporal and spatial barriers may seem in some circumstances like objective boundaries, but they are not islands void of possible expansion and contraction. How ethnographers interpret their formal and informal dimensions can change depending on the empirical questions or based on what ethnographers observe in the field site itself. In ethnographies with seemingly clear spatial boundaries, like organizational ethnographies, researchers often translate formalized spatial limits—that is, inside and outside the organization—into levels of analysis. Everyday interactions with coworkers occur at the micro level, an organizational culture of decision-making is viewed at the meso level, and state decisions, funding streams, or global networks made outside of the organization are considered the macro level (Vaughan 1996). These spatial levels of “inside” and “outside” are interpretive classifications, dependent on how one understands and takes for granted the social ontology and then contextualizes human actions within and between temporal and spatial relationships as the objectified context.

One useful analytic approach is to track the connections between the levels of analysis, and show how different streams of action, coming from different locations, settings, and actors, become interdependent in ways that influence specific subjects’ actions in specific bounded contexts (Smith 1987). Ethnographers narrow down interpretations of space as levels of analysis to move toward the production of sociological cases. A formal organization like NASA or a department store in China transmits institutional classifications of spatial boundaries. They communicate ordered worlds and potential levels of analysis from distinct points of view.

One example is Amy Hanser’s (2008) work on the reorganization of commerce in Harbin, China, which focuses on three market contexts: an underground vending marketplace; a state-run traditional department store catering to the lower and middle classes; and an upscale, exclusive department store. The spatial boundaries are developed through the market organizations themselves. Hanser does not need to focus on subjective movements between the organized spaces, because the formal dimensions of time and space—the relationship between the shift in the Chinese economy, and distinctive organizational spaces—have narrowed down her analytic focus. She compares how different bureaucracies work, how organizations build supply systems for different products, and how interactions take hold between employees and consumers to make sense of social and economic distinctions in the context of a changing state and market system.

Analyzing the relationship between inside and outside the organizational context defines connections to “macro-level” political-economic transformations. That is, different meso-level organizations adapt to “macro” external changes in different ways, which then filter those changes down into micro-level interactions in the organizations. This approach to contextualizing cases prioritizes seeing and naturalizing levels of analysis as hierarchical relations in a bureaucracy and adaptations within distinct spatial settings. The ethnographer focuses on who makes decisions, how decisions get passed down, when employees need to follow rules and when they can break them, and how customers and employees negotiate status interactions under changing conditions in different types of organizations (Hanser 2008).

Another useful analytic approach involves altering and inverting the temporal, spatial, and social units, as in the micro-production of macro categories (Krause 2013). In organizational studies, ethnographers can locate bureaucratic actors shaping professional knowledge or congressional leaders imposing budgets and organizational regulations—how they interact, how they come up with standards, or how they shape laws or knowledge. In such cases, conditions that are typically classified as occurring at the macro level (e.g., “the state”) are transformed into meso- or micro-level descriptions and framings about how people collectively govern, legislate, or regulate others’ lives (e.g., Glaeser 2010; Watkins-Hayes 2009).

The same can be found in studies of globalization. The global economy is often thought of at the macro level. Yet, globalized market systems can be studied through different starting orientations to time and space, leading to different kinds of cases. Prevalent examples of commodity chain ethnographies in anthropology and geography are part of a tradition of “multi-sited” research to “follow the thing” (Marcus 1995). They focus on the production and distribution of market objects in the context of geographically diffuse and transforming global economies (e.g., Bestor 2004; Cook 2004). These subtle analytic and empirical shifts have profound influence over the case. In Hanser’s study, organizations operate as internal spaces shaping and reproducing social and economic distinctions, as reactions to external macro political-economic conditions. In multisited commodity chain ethnographies, interdependent cultural practices and market processes break down distinct national and organizational contexts into the production of a global division of labor. The empirical and analytic focus in commodity chain studies is on the interdependencies of organizational settings rather than explaining how these settings became distinct.

Interpretations of less coherent spatial boundaries also take into account formal and informal relationships. A neighborhood or a street corner is a less rigid spatial distinction than a school or bureaucratic organization unless some recurring limitation is placed on access, as when neighborhoods have security guards, require identification to enter, or have strict standards of social and symbolic territoriality, based on race, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, gang affiliation, commercial life, or architectural form (e.g., Caldeira 2000; Deener 2007; Suttles 1972). Typically, people can move within and between the boundaries of a neighborhood, yet the ethnographic focus on distinct points of view, how subjects develop expectations about spatial limits, and potentially how different points of view negotiate a common terrain can alter the types of cases.

For instance, ethnographers can deconstruct the spatial boundaries of a neighborhood by exploring how it works in people’s lives. Does the neighborhood have clear spatial limits? What determines them? Are the determinants visible to any observer or just to people who live there? Are they based on how people move around the space or on how people define the limits and represent those limits to others? Are they based on architectural, economic, infrastructural, or other organizational designs and interventions? Have the spatial boundaries changed over time, and from whose perspectives and uses? How ethnographers frame empirical questions about seeing the spatial limits of the neighborhood shapes what kinds of analytic and ultimately theoretical questions will become possible in the same location.

If the ethnographer’s goal is to understand how neighborhoods change and how different individuals and groups become configured in that process, the approach will focus on complementary or oppositional relations within historically defined neighborhood contexts (Deener 2012; Pattillo 2007; Rieder 1985). However, a subject-centered focus—like a commodity-centered focus—can shift the meaning and experience of the uses of urban space. “Extended-place” (Duneier 1999) ethnographies represent the spreading out of spatial contexts and practical uses by individuals and groups over time—or “follow the people,” as George E. Marcus (1995) describes this approach. This research strategy sheds light on how individuals, objects, or information move across spatial situations and multiply cultural and status presentations and performances to advance the logical connections as distinct sociological questions.

Another analytic approach is to combine these distinct notions of subjects and spatial contexts. Ethnographers develop an understanding and representation of coherent relationships and hierarchies within a context, but then show how actors traverse the boundaries of the context to locate alternatively structured relationships in different contexts (Anderson 1976; Duneier 1999; Halle 1984). Anderson’s (1976) study of Jelly’s, a tavern in inner-city Chicago, provides an intimate examination of the lives of lower-income black men during a period of deindustrialization. Although his subjects share a racial identity within the same time and space context, they also employ situated folk categories that are hierarchical: regulars, wineheads, and hoodlums. Anderson offers a window into a local context and the search for status amid marginality. Yet, he also takes it a step further by demonstrating that those who occupy the highest status inside the tavern—the so-called “regulars”—have relatively lower status outside of the tavern. Anderson follows Herman, one of Jelly’s most respected regulars, into his workplace Christmas party. Herman’s status as a black janitor in a white corporate environment shatters his previously observed status position, as he uses his association with Anderson—then a PhD student—to legitimate his status at his place of employment. Seeing the movement across time and space boundaries demonstrates fragile status hierarchies in the context of persistent inequalities.

This methodological trick applies to various kinds of bounded contexts. Organizations may seem like rigidly bounded worlds, but subjects can typically move in and out of different organized settings over time. If the ethnographer focuses on the subjects and their movements across social relationships, rather than inside the organization alone, they ask different types of questions related to shifting and fluid social status and group classifications. David Halle (1984) shows in his study of factory workers that individuals leaving the factory become immersed in suburban lives of leisure, family, religion, and community in ways that mirror middle-class conventions. This approach allows him to blur the taken-for-granted distinction between white-collar and blue-collar workers. It also shifts the sociological object. The book is not about life on the factory floor, per se, but rather about how class boundaries work in suburban community life.

These examples break down common assumptions and stereotypes—a popular stereotype of racial disorganization (Anderson 1976) or assumptions about the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar workers (Halle 1984)—into complex moving parts about status and inequality. The active movements of subjects in and out of bounded spatial settings over time provide analytic lenses into the meaningful escapes from preconceived and even dominating external conditions. By looking at these different analytic approaches together, we see that ethnographers narrow down their interpretations of social ontology and time/space contexts to begin building sociological units and levels of analysis. Researchers crystallize their interpretations of the parameters of the study, which help them to identify the sociological case by making ethnographic contributions relevant to other sociologists with interests beyond empirical specificity.

Conclusion: From Mundane Competencies to Sociological Cases

The architecture of ethnographic knowledge is built upon the back and forth configuration between narrowing down interpretations of empirical data as particular kinds of social relationships and narrowing down interpretations of formal and informal dimensions of time and space to contextualize the data. This hermeneutic and phenomenological process allows for continued access to sociological traditions of seeing, understanding, and evaluating units and levels of analysis. Tacit epistemic competencies become solidified in field notes, classroom discussions, workshops, memos, project outlines, papers, and books. Mundane competencies are necessary to narrow down data and contexts to move beyond substantive information and local folk knowledge. In this regard, case development is paradoxical: Narrowing down is necessary for generalizing up.

Narrowing down perceptions of data and contexts involves establishing different forms of reliability and validity than those sociologists typically discuss. For quantitative researchers, reliability refers to the stability and consistency of operational definitions in empirical research (Dixon, Singleton, and Straits 2016). Ethnographers often point to concerns about accuracy—rather than reliability—of the observed and recorded reality of subjects, events, actions, interactions, processes, or places through triangulation and other fact-checking and verification standards (Duneier 1999; Jerolmack and Murphy 2017). Verifying the facts is important, but it is different than the process by which ethnographers learn to hold constant the units and levels of analysis that give ethnographic research its sociological shape.

Validity refers to analytic precision beyond the specificities of empirical documentation. In quantitative research, there are multiple axes of validity: how well one’s operational definition is associated with the concept it purports to measure (measurement validity); the ability to rule out whether factors other than the manipulated or central independent variable explains an outcome (internal validity); and the extent to which findings may be generalized to other settings, contexts, measurements, populations, and time periods (external validity) (Dixon et al. 2016). Ethnographers need to establish the connection between reliability and validity as an ongoing phenomenological and hermeneutic process of empirical and analytic inclusion and exclusion. Developing the scaffolding of units and levels of analysis, and further gaining the sociological competencies to scrutinize the fit between them, is fundamental to establishing case validity.

Ethnographers reflecting on their methods overemphasize the process of empirical inclusion. We learn from methods appendices that writing an ethnographic book is based on incredible amounts of fieldwork, often over lengthy periods of time, which can result in thousands of pages of field notes and hundreds of interviews. There are important reasons researchers should document how they find their sites, build connections to their subjects, influence situations as a participant, and, in turn, compile their own data sets. Ethnographers need to describe where the data come from, how much work went into gathering them, and how much of them there are. The discussion about empirical inclusion is one way that ethnographers demonstrate the reliability of their data.

Yet, emphasizing the process of data collection without reflecting on the process of narrowing down the case overplays the image of the lone ethnographer. The research process is a collective and institutional project even if the act of collecting data and typing pages of a book chapter is accomplished without colleagues. How researchers learn to exclude certain subjects, points of data, emergent processes, and alternative analytic themes is difficult to recount and assess, but it is of equal importance to constructing cases. Empirical errors occur when ethnographers misstate or misidentify basic facts as they relate to subjects, situations, events, locations, and other circumstances. Empirical errors are different than the observational and interpretive omissions necessary to narrow down and hold constant the units and levels of analysis. Ethnographers should be very concerned about getting the facts right, but they should be equally concerned about getting the case right. The methodological structure requires understanding the process of elimination and omission in pursuit of sociological cases.

All researchers encounter empirical noise as they go along. Any social setting provides multiple empirical angles and topics for advancing sociological research. As research projects develop, authors often face the issue of too much data—and too many options for analysis and themes—rather than not enough information (Vaughan 2004). Ethnographers must, at some point, demarcate the boundaries of their cases from the vast interpretive chain of historical and social circumstances (Geertz 1973). The social, temporal, and spatial connections can always extend beyond directly observed meanings and practices of a given interaction order (Baiocchi, Graizbord, and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2013; Duneier 1999; Latour 2005; Marcus 1995). Scholars must delineate when and under what conditions the circumstances under study began their process of formation and transformation (Hirschman and Reed 2014).

Mundane epistemic competencies direct researchers in how far to go in the hunt to define, clarify, and detail empirical social interdependencies that are understood as informing individual and collective lines of action. This process of narrowing down units and levels of analysis directs researchers toward distinct types of sociological questions, empirical leads, and theoretical claims. These tacit epistemic competencies, carried out consistently over time, instruct ethnographers of the same traditions to identify mutually agreeable terms of reliability for assessing the data and contexts in search of mutually agreeable terms of validity for assessing the analytic structure of sociological cases.