After method? Ethnography in the knowledge economy

Introduction

The setting: a packed Oxford seminar-room. The debate: the future of ethnographic research in a knowledge economy. There are two protagonists: one is a senior professor of anthropology; the other a professor of education who has used ethnographic methods throughout her career to address educational problems. The first professes disinterest in defining ethnography, seeing it as a licence to explore the curious, the messy, and the unexpected. Her view is that ethnography is best understood as a methodological and existential sensibility to be cultivated. She argues for seeing ethnographic fieldwork as a process of discovery, a sensibility developed through one’s dislocation by encounters alien and the unexpected. Her opponent insists on the importance of an explicit and rigorous set of methods and approaches for ethnography, and defends a robust, disciplined empiricism.

It quickly becomes clear that there are rather different understandings of ethnography within the room – two fields divided in their understanding of a common method. Whilst this is perhaps no surprise – methodological and epistemological allegiances have long been a proudly worn badge of academic affiliation – we were surprised at the extent of their disagreement. Did their methodological disagreements stem from different disciplinary traditions of training and socialization? Or were they also the product of the contradictory expectations and possibilities placed upon ethnography in a knowledge economy?

In this article we explore both of these explanations, and ask how the measurement of the monetary value of social research may be changing ethnographic practice. With an increasing interest in anthropological research techniques within and beyond universities (e.g. Neyland, 2008; Westbrook, 2008), ethnographic rhetorics and imageries are being appropriated across a range of fields and contexts. We see a connection between the new fashion for ethnography beyond the academy and the growing market for qualitative research. We begin with quotes from our interviews with anthropologists about these changes, linking this to the way that within the broader economy, the value of ethnographic knowledge is now being calibrated in monetary terms. We explore how this development affects the status of fieldwork in anthropology and the influence of ethnographic methods and imaginaries beyond the discipline.

A core aspect of our argument is that social research practices have become increasingly intertwined with what Thrift calls the ‘cultural circuits’ of capitalism (2005). For Thrift, the critiques and models developed by business theorists (whether in the media, business schools or management consultancies) have a symbiotic relationship with academic research: their analytical practices are built from and redefine academic values of rigour and craftsmanship. We suggest that this history is key to the success of a ‘knowledge economy’, but also key to academic responses to it. The revaluing of social research in commodity terms is made possible by academics’ beliefs in a higher purpose to their work, echoing the role of the producer’s moral economy in the development of commodity production and transformation of social relations during the industrial revolution (Thompson, 1970; Willis, 1977). Whilst caught up in these shifts, disciplinary debates over method also offer a way of understanding and responding to such pressures.

Anthropologists and the knowledge economy

Sadly, having the skill to produce really nice ethnography is different from being employable. Even within anthropology departments, contemporary anthropology isn’t based on the old LSE anthropology. Very few departments do that sort of thing. That way of looking at things is no longer epistemologically possible, because the only way you could do with those kinds of writings was to pretend that the outside didn’t impinge, and we can’t pretend that any more. (NH, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology)

Conducting biographical interviews with anthropologists trained in a variety of UK departments, conversation increasingly turned to the implicit pressures they felt under to be productive researchers. ¹ We have written elsewhere about the gendered and embodied aspects of these expectations (Mills and Berg, 2010). Here we want to focus instead on our interviewees views of changing anthropological research practices. The quote with which we start this section is from a senior researcher, wistful about the passing of ‘really nice ethnography’ inculcated during her training at the London School of Economics (LSE).

These pressures led others to talk about no longer being real anthropologists, especially if they were working as contract researchers or in multidisciplinary research teams. There was repeated attention drawn to deadlines and a lack of time to complete long-term ethnographic research. Whilst there has been much work on the intensification of the work pressures facing today’s academics (e.g. Acker and Armenti, 2004; Menzies and Newson, 2007; Nelson and Watt, 2004; Walker, 2009), little of it has focused on the consequences for disciplinary methods and research practices.

Our respondents’ views on their anthropological identity partly depended on their working environments, and whether they felt they had the time to conduct what they called ‘proper’ anthropological research. When asked whether she would call herself an anthropologist, BC, working in development studies, said ‘No, I’m not sure if I want to call myself an anthropologist – it might be counter-productive. I might use something like ‘a freelance development consultant’. Despite being a privately enthusiastic about her anthropological identity she suggested that others in development studies ‘feel that anthropology is very narrow and not very practical – especially when development projects are time-bound’.

Yet those working outside universities sometimes use their anthropology as a passport, whilst admitting that they were not able to do what they called ‘real ethnography’. KM, working in applied social research, acknowledged that ‘sometimes I drop in that I’m an anthropologist. If it’s like a cross-cultural thing . . . I’ll use it when it suits me and a lot of the time, I won’t’. Asked whether the ‘skills required of applied anthropologists differ from those required of applied social researchers more broadly’, she made her views very clear:

there isn’t such a thing as applied anthropologists. I think applied anthropologists are just doing social research. Well, how many applied anthropologists do you know who go off and do ethnography? I don’t think they do . . . there isn’t the money to do the in-depth ethnography we’re all trained to do.

This repeated attention to time has a number of sources, not least the UK research and funding council expectations for research productivity. Our interest is less in time constraints per se than in the consequences of measuring academic efficiency and research utility. We suggest that this is moving research design away from exploratory and long-term fieldwork towards more tightly defined research frameworks. It leads to a preference for predictability in outcome, and away from a vision of ethnography as discovery. It led us to begin to think about the ways that, in and beyond the UK, anthropological understandings and ethnographic practices were being redefined by the expectations and values of the ‘knowledge economy’, a term presaged in Bell’s (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and later popularized by business gurus and policy think-tanks (e.g. Drucker, 1993; OECD, 1996).

Valuing research in the knowledge economy

Public investment in research makes certain that the UK is able to compete in the global economy. RCUK (Research Councils UK) ensures that the UK is a world leader in a global market. RCUK confirms that our research excellence and relevance today, positions the nation strongly to seize tomorrow’s opportunities. (RCUK, 2010)

An association between knowledge production and larger economic forces is nothing new. Universities have long shaped, and been shaped by, the national and transnational polities and economies in which they are located. The economic role of science, particularly in the development of industrial production, was increasingly explicit from the 19th century onwards. The two-way intellectual thoroughfare linking pure and applied research has sustained and regenerated many an academic discipline. If anything, the traffic of ideas, artefacts and value across the academic/non-academic divide is intensifying. Challenged to train knowledge workers by governments, universities are being redefined by this intense circulation of concepts and commodities. It is almost 50 years since Kerr’s prescient aside that ‘the university and segments of industry are becoming more alike’ (1963: 90). But this is not simply to argue for the loss of university ideals under the pressures of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). As Delanty notes, even if the university is ‘no longer the privileged site of particular kinds of knowledge’, ‘it can become a key institution in a society that is coming to depend more and more on knowledge’ (2001: 7). Delanty talks not of the knowledge economy but of the ‘knowledge society’. He refuses to see the university reduced to a ‘passive actor drawn helplessly into the market’, instead arguing that it as a ‘transformer of such value systems’ (Delanty, 2001: 151). Whilst we admire his vision, and accept that the term ‘knowledge economy’ is over-used and under-defined, we nonetheless wish to explore how the university is both transforming and being transformed through these new connections.

In The Uses of the University, Kerr suggested that ‘as the university becomes tied into the world of work, the professor . . . takes on the characteristics of an entrepreneur’ (1963: 90). Amongst others, Olssen and Peters (2005) have convincingly shown how governments now see universities as key drivers of an entrepreneurial knowledge economy. Core to this reconfiguration have been closer links between industry and academia, whether defined in terms of a ‘triple helix’ (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997) or as ‘mode 2’ science (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001, 2003), with the economic contributions of the universities now measurable by governments through proxies such as ‘impact’, ‘employability’, ‘engagement’ and ‘knowledge transfer’. Such inventive ways of measuring bring their own risks, and Barry has pointed to the ‘fragility of metrological regimes’ (Barry 2002). Metrics have profound and unanticipated consequences, such as the institutional ‘isomorphism’ (Di Maggio and Powell, 1983) that accompanies global university league tables (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Hazelkorn, 2011), or strategically instrumentalist responses to research evaluation exercises and student experience surveys. Tuchman (2009) wittily describes how a slew of new administrator-convened one-credit courses were offered to first-year students by her university to improve its position within US News and World Report league tables. The new politics of measurement is simultaneously also linked to a profound, and intensely resented, reordering of academic governance (Evans, 2004; Shore and Wright, 1999).

Whilst a number of critics of what has been called ‘audit culture’ (Morley, 2003; Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000) have sought to describe the effects of neoliberal educational regulation on educational subjectivities, fewer have focused on its impact on research practice. In particular, we are interested in the consequences of valuing research knowledge in monetary terms. Analytical work on the ‘cultural circuits of capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005) shows how this conversion is made possible by the networks linking producers with the consumers. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish academic knowledge practices from those of business theorists – the two are increasingly interdependent (Olds and Thrift, 2005). The argument is that within a cultural economy value is created through the circulation of images and virtual commodities of various kinds. For this article, the crucial point is that knowledge has a changed role when it can be ascribed a monetary value (Simmel, 1978). This is not just to say that knowledge is being turned into commodity, a point first made by Lyotard (1984), but that the value of ethnographic and social research can increasingly be quantified in economic terms.

What are the implications of valuing research in this way? Universities can no longer resort to an ideology of detachment; their justification now has to be in terms of their economic contributions. They are expected to add value. If social research practices can be both measured and given a monetary value, their material contribution to this economy can be ascertained. In the UK, as elsewhere, social researchers are increasingly expected to pursue research that ‘delivers impact’ (ESRC, 2009) in a public policy context, though precise definitions of impact are proving elusive.

This shift in academic values would seem to be one-way. The business studies theory of the ‘value chain’ (Porter, 1985) becomes increasingly relevant. In this model, value is produced in a linear way – a chain of inputs that can be neatly linked to a set of defined and measurable outputs and outcomes. Within business, the concept of the value chain is now seen as common-sense, along with the expectation that it be constantly refined and improved to remove inefficiencies and inconsistencies. The aspiration is for all the different parts to become aligned and work together in the production of value. Its application to the university is perhaps less appealing. By its logic, researchers can be monitored in terms of their contribution to departmental and universities research agendas. Individual academic idiosyncrasies and research interests become a potential source of inefficiency. So too do unpredictable research methods, such as anthropological approaches to ethnography.

The value chain is all about productivity. The impetus is to increase the rate of what the bureaucrats now calls ‘research outputs’, and where possible to create commercial value from publicly funded research. Along the way, universities are adopting a range of other business practices. University managers are closely concerned with their institutional research rankings and with positioning themselves within a global hierarchy. As in business, there is a new belief that organizational reform drives change and development. The consequence is perpetual reform aimed at gaining a competitive advantage (Pedler et al., 1997; Thrift, 2005).

What do these shifts in value, discourse and practice mean for what we do as researchers?

One positive consequence of this expectation to continually communicate knowledge and confront other ways of thinking is enhanced communication between academic disciplines. There is a greater cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches. But we also see a number of less welcome developments.

First, the focus on the efficient exchange of ideas for value (including monetary value) begins to rework academic values. The ethos of disinterested impartiality competes with new models of academic entrepreneurialism (Marginson and Considine, 2000), participation and engagement. The push for efficiency within the circuit potentially squeezes the unpredictable, the tangential and the creative. This, we suggest, can lead to methodological instrumentalism.

Second, it leads to a loss of academic authority and community. Academia has a diminished epistemological status as gatekeeper, since the new focus on knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange marks a shifted space of knowledge’s reception and validation. Osborne argues that academics and other knowledge workers are increasingly acting like ‘mediators’, ‘bringing ideas quickly and decisively into public focus, brokering their ideas in the context of different spheres of influence’ (2004: 435). Here Osborne is building on Bauman’s influential distinction between knowledge ‘legislators’ and ‘interpreters’ (Bauman, 1989). Increasingly the public and the market are seen as the best arbiters of useful knowledge, via new structures that offer proxies of quality and status, such as citation indexes and university rankings. One might argue that this leads to a crisis of academic community and audience. Academic work is less engaged with intellectually, even as it circulates more widely. There are growing numbers of conferences, journals and sub-fields, but the audience for each is shrinking.

Finally, these new circuits discourage a sustained investment of thought or time by academics. They favour intellectual dexterity, quick responses to emergent funding opportunities and intellectual multi-tasking. The premium placed on planned and programmed deliverables is reworking older scholastic horizons. Academic time is increasingly defined by Gantt charts (named after Henry Gantt) rather than long-term speculative research. It is a productivity focused on predictability.

Whilst we are not the first to describe these trends, critical research has tended to overlook academic involvement in the evolution of new knowledge circuits. The knowledge economy works because it is built on established academic values and knowledge practices, even whilst it reshapes them. The new technologies for valuing research co-opt academic values of peer-review, evidence and research. As Strathern notes, ‘auditors are not aliens; they are a version of ourselves’ (1997: 319). Not only is ‘audit culture’ built on an ethos of impartiality and professionalism, the very field of accounting can be traced back to nineteenth century university examinations (Hoskin, 1993). This can make critical distance difficult. The professional principle of peer review has made many academics largely complicit with the increasingly commercial approach of scholarly journals, and in the UK allowed the reification of research within successive research assessment exercises.

Methodological debates in the disciplines

How are disciplinary traditions responding to these demands for impact? The picture is very mixed. Protecting the relative autonomy of an intellectual field is difficult cultural work. It depends on having institutional defences (being based in an elite university is useful), strong personal networks (preferably within the state elite), dedicated scholarly work, and the financial and academic capital to make the temptations of commissioned policy research and consultancy less compelling. Not every field has such resources, which is why these trends are uneven in their scope and impact. Given the 80-year history of social anthropology within British universities, it is a good discipline through which to explore these changes. In this section we explore how anthropologists have interpreted and practised ethnographic fieldwork over the last thirty years, and the emerging relationship between these relatively autonomous disciplinary dynamics and the broader research economy. We then discuss the growing popularity of ethnographic methods beyond the academy.

Different germinations of ethnography have led to rather different national and disciplinary methodological blooms. Even within the UK, anthropologists, sociologists and others have developed different understandings of the ethnographic method. Much of this efflorescence can only be loosely linked to the changing nature of research funding. Within the UK, Malinowski’s evangelical vision for social anthropology at the LSE in the 1930s was underpinned by the central role he accorded to fieldwork, and the importance of the individual ethnographic experience. Skilled at cultivating his patrons, he was less explicit about how his methods led to his functional theories of human sociality, leading critics to accuse him of ‘pseudo-science’, ‘dubious methods’ and ‘synthetic a posteriori’ theorizing (Grimshaw and Hart, 1993: 20). Nonetheless, his ability at creating a minor personality cult ensured a loyal following for his methodological manifesto. His insistence on extended fieldwork and on seeking to capture the ‘native’s point of view’ was championed by his students and followers and gradually spread to Oxbridge. After the war Max Gluckman wrote his new department into this history, arguing that Malinowski’s vision was the precursor to the Manchester school’s commitment to the extended case-study (Mills, 2008). These early manifestos continue to shape the British field today.

As a result, an extended period of fieldwork has continued to be an essential disciplinary rite of passage, and a shibboleth of anthropological rigour amongst many UK anthropologists (Delamont et al., 2000). The emphasis has been on the quality of the social ‘immersion’ made possible through linguistic competency and the social relationships that develop over time. Sometimes time itself becomes a measure of quality, with the minutiae of method left largely unexamined. Extended fieldwork remains a source of cultural capital within the discipline and a vital empirical resource for further development and exploration over one’s anthropological career.

During the past 30 years, the changing has led some US anthropologists to rethink this consensus. For an influential group of anthropologists and cultural critics, initially linked to Rice University, fieldwork was not just an empirical source for the inductive generation of theory, but also a methodological trope that deserved closer investigation. Works such as Geertz’s Works and Lives (1989), and Writing Culture by Clifford and Marcus (1986) highlighted anthropologists’ involvement (and even complicity) in co-constructing the world about which they wrote, and have been a conduit for a range of other theoretical debates into the discipline. For some critics, this literary turn has led to anthropology becoming a form of cultural criticism. Postmodern and postcolonial theoretical perspectives have led some to question a romantic neo-Malinowskian attachment to the insights gained from in-depth fieldwork in one isolated fieldsite. Challenging the ‘spatial metaphysics’ of the British colonial tradition and the accompanying fetishization of the ‘local’, anthropological critics such as Gupta and Ferguson (1997) sought to decentre and rethink the field, suggesting that a single-site ethnography may not capture the multiple and multi-stranded networks of contemporary social life. This challenge to the orthodoxy was also driven by an attention to the politics of the research relationship and the role of collaboration. A recent distillation was entitled Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be (Faubion and Marcus, 2009).

What has been at stake in these debates over fieldwork? Its protagonists have called not for the abandonment of fieldwork, but rather for its reconstruction, as ‘one element in a multi-stranded methodology’, a methodological shift from ‘bounded fields’ to ‘shifting locations’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 37). This shift to what Gupta and Ferguson call ‘location-work’ echoes debates within feminism around the importance of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1991). George Marcus has consistently been an influential anthropological advocate for new models of ‘multi-sited’ and collaborative ethnographic practices. Back in 1995, he labelled this trend ‘mobile ethnography’, the shift from ‘a conventional single-site location . . . to multiple sites of observation and participation’, so allowing the researcher to follow the ‘circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (1995: 96). If the artefacts and meanings one seeks to understand don’t stand still, why should the researcher? The methodological implication – ‘multi-sited ethnography’ – neatly echoed the broader emphasis within social theory (particularly influenced by thinkers such as Deleuze, Callon and Latour) on understanding and following the networks and connections that shape the social. Previous notions of the ‘field’ have been unpicked as it has become theory-rich, multi-sited, rather than an objective place. Ethnography increasingly began to be understood as something intersubjective, co-constructed and mediated.

There were also more prosaic factors at work in these debates. Along with a recognition that people’s social worlds extend far beyond their ‘home’ communities, concerns over research funding and the ethics of access, have encouraged (and sometimes forced) US anthropologists to conduct more ethnographic research ‘at home’ and to rethink the nature of the ‘field’.

While this influential re-imagination of the field as a set of interconnected empirical and conceptual spaces has gradually diffused across the North American discipline, any erosion in the status of fieldwork continues to be contested by many in British social anthropology. The result has been a series of debates around practical questions of fieldwork length. Many British anthropologists now bemoan (in conversation, if not always in print) the misappropriation and short-cutting of what they see as their method by others, scorning high-speed ‘drive-by’ ethnographies and ethnographically-informed studies carried out within predefined research schedules. In a riposte to an article by Marcus (2007a) entitled ‘How short can fieldwork be?’ Okely defended the classic fieldwork method (Okely, 2007). Length becomes a measure of the intensity of the research relationship, even if it is potentially possible to spend three years in a field-site without developing meaningful insights. Ethnographies should be judged on their quality, not on the length of fieldwork. Indeed, Geertz calculates that Evans-Pritchard spent only four months doing the fieldwork with the Nuer that led to his classic monograph (Geertz, 1989). The very existence of the debate acknowledges the iconic status of fieldwork as shorthand for anthropological rigour and awareness, and the disciplinary capital accrued as a result of one’s fieldwork experience.

The debate also reflects an unease that the space for exploratory empirical enquiry is being reduced. Anthropologists have a peculiarly intense degree of emotional and epistemological investment in their ethnographic embodiment. Whilst Ingold has provocatively argued that anthropology and ethnography are ‘endeavours of quite different kinds’ (2009: 69) most within the anthropological tradition would insist that the two are closely linked. For them ethnography is not simply a research tool, but rather an commitment to an open-ended, iterative, non-prescriptive vision for social research, where the researcher is encouraged to acknowledge the complexity and unpredictability of the research encounter. The power of the method comes out of the theoretical and historical traditions of anthropological practice.

Ethnographers more influenced by sociological traditions have been less influenced by these debates, or by the debates around the call for more ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005). Instead they have continued to articulate a systematic and coherent account of ethnographic principles and practices (e.g. Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007 [1983]), downplaying its potential messiness. Delamont and Atkinson (1980) recount this history of sociological ethnography in convincing detail. They later suggest the ‘high degree of explicit reflection and sophistication concerning methodology’ amongst this community has meant that ‘the most successful textbooks on ethnographic fieldwork published in Britain are by authors whose empirical research includes educational settings’ (Atkinson et al., 1988: 235). This ‘sophistication’ and attention to reflexivity reflects its applied character, and the need to communicate to audiences in Education.

This methodological explicitness reflects the different institutional and epistemological politics faced by sociologically-oriented ethnographers in the UK. After all, many anthropologists also engage closely with theoretical debates, but few write methods textbooks. Tasked with defending the validity of ethnographic approaches, particularly in more positivist Education departments, sociologists have repeatedly clarified the nature of ethnography’s empirical depth and rigour, developing a methodological robustness. Eschewing the anthropologists’ fashion-conscious attention to the latest theoretical ideas or explanations, and the more politicized vision of ethnography offered by Smith in her work on institutional ethnography (2006), their focus has instead been on calling theory to account, and defending inductive principles.

Reviving the Popperian project, this work foregrounds close-grained active empirical research, with theoretical ideas refined and tested in relation to findings that are checked and cross checked, rather than absorbed in some mystified non-strategic manner. Hammersley has been a key advocate of this project, and his many textbooks on ethnography underscore the importance of striving for objectivity and rigour: ‘I argue that researchers should be committed primarily to the pursuit of knowledge, and should be as neutral as they can towards other values and interests in their work, in an attempt to maximize the chances of producing sound knowledge of the social world’ (Hammersley, 2000: 12).

Appropriating ethnography: method beyond discipline

British anthropology has a long tradition of promising utility to colonial officials and others, while constructing itself as a pure scholarly enterprise. While mid-century anthropologists questioned the credibility of applied anthropology (Mills, 2006), anthropologists in the UK, Australia and elsewhere are now confident advocates of the discipline’s wider relevance (Gordon, 1998; Pink, 2006).

In the US, Applied Anthropology has long been a vibrant disciplinary subfield, with its own journal (Human Organisation) promoting the quality and legitimacy of applied work. Inspired by the example offered by Margaret Mead, and receptive to influences from cultural psychology, scholars in the Anthropology of Education have a similar tradition of evaluative and applied research (Eddy, 1985). An early recipient of federal grants to research educational acculturation amongst America’s minority communities, the sub-field has continued to produce a range of empirical single-sited ethnographies based within schools and colleges, sometimes making contributions to broader theoretical debates.

However, in the last two decades these anthropological engagements with public policy have been overshadowed by ethnography’s application and deployment in the commercial sector. In the UK and USA, there is a growing interest in corporate ethnography, and hence career opportunities for anthropologists in the business and development sector (Cefkin, 2009). A range of market research companies, consultancies and design studios employ ethnographers. Whilst this methodological migration is an indicator of the method’s adaptability, in economic terms it reflects the way in which ethnography adds value to a value chain. Ethnography becomes a marketable commodity, which provides it with new opportunities and challenges. In what follows, we explore this trend through the views of more than a dozen applied anthropologists who had trained in British departments but who were now working in the development, business and health sectors.

In our interview and focus groups, we noticed that some of those who now work outside academic anthropology nevertheless espouse a strong sense of disciplinary identity: an identity which purportedly offers a unique perspective on intellectual problem-solving, a certain oblique way of seeing situations and asking questions. Yet at the same time many respondents had difficulty in actually spelling out the specific research and organizational skills they had acquired along with this sense of disciplinary belonging, as if their identity was one based on implicit socialization. Others we spoke to had given their disciplinary past very little thought, sometimes admitting that we were the first people to ask them about anthropology in some years.

Amongst this first group, we identified a spectrum of opinions about anthropology and its utility. At one extreme are those who continue to proselytize for anthropology, and are almost evangelical about the contribution anthropological methods can make. One respondent, ST, working in financial services, admitted that he often pointed to, and made use of, his doctoral background – ‘I leverage it every time I apply for a new job, and in the way I do my work . . . I frankly leverage it more than I have to’. He felt that his anthropological training had acted as a useful preparation for the qualitative approaches that he used in his work, even if he felt he would now do anthropology far better, as it is ‘hard for anthropology lecturers to train students in getting information out of people’.

His reflections on information gathering are reflected in the literature. Writing about the banking industry, Holmes and Marcus (2006) focus on what Reich (1992) called the new ‘symbolic analysts’ leading international financial organizations, and their adoption of a form of anecdotal reasoning that seeks to ‘represent the social nature of the contemporary’ in a way that approximates to ethnographic labour. As a result they suggest that ‘the key cultural practices of expert subjects converge with our own analytical endeavours’ (Holmes and Marcus, 2006: 41). Echoing Osborne’s discussion of academics as mediators, this blending of research and business practices poses academic ethnographers with a number of conundrums. It underscores the end of a positivist and distanced research paradigm, blurs the ‘us’/’them’ distinction, and makes collaborative and participatory knowledge creation more than just a normative vision. Whilst this poses challenges for academic practice, it also opens up opportunities for what Holmes and Marcus call ‘paraethnography’. Marcus has independently been an influential advocate for collaborations between ethnographers and their research subjects. Attentive to contemporary shifts in academic practice, to the real-politik of the research economy, and to the ethical challenges that anthropology has struggled with, he argues for work that ‘blurs the boundaries between the professional community of observers and those observed’. Instead, he has a vision of ‘substantively collaborative projects’, which he argues, somewhat romantically, was a ‘humanistic ideal of anthropology all along’ (Marcus, 2006: 116).

In our research we collected particularly rich material from a small number of anthropologists who have been successfully marketing their anthropological skills – especially the ethnographic method – in more commercial settings. A number were involved in market research or for independent research institutes, often in areas like IT and communications technology. In this case, it was often a rather caricatured ethnographic method that they saw as their distinctive contribution, their ‘added value’. Amongst the anthropological ‘missionaries’, TS stands out. After setting up his own anthropological consultancy, which highlighted its ethnographic approach to market research he subsequently joined a major IT hardware provider to lead its research team. An enthusiast for an anthropological take on the world, TS suggested that, within his current company, ‘anthropologists are one of the key tools we use to ensure we connect our technologies with human needs’.

One can easily see the appeal of ethnography in this commercial and public policy context. Amongst policy researchers, the method is seen as offering access to difficult-to-reach communities, accessing day-to-day life, voicing marginal or silenced perspectives, ideal for unpacking failure and operational problems. Ethnography is seen to reach the parts of social life that other methods cannot reach. It provides access to ‘local’ perspectives for marketers, for government, and even the military, as illustrated by the controversy surrounding anthropologists employed in Human Terrain Teams (Gonzalez, 2007).

In commercial worlds, ethnography adds value. Its success is tied into the growth of cultural explanations of how to make organizations successful, the associated rise of behavioural economics and a shift to what has been termed the ‘cultural economy’ (Du Gay and Pryke, 2002). The fact that many of those with anthropological training are now in senior positions within these organizations makes Marcus’ account even more convincing. For example, the FT journalist Gillian Tett makes the argument that her anthropological training enabled her to foresee the impending economic crash in 2008 (Tett, 2009).

Not everyone we spoke to felt able to appropriate ethnography in this way. DI, running a major policy and advocacy NGO saw anthropology as having been ‘very influential in my choice of careers’, and in helping her ‘understand how others could live, and a broad acceptance of the possibilities of living in different ways’. However she was highly critical of her doctoral training, and now found herself working with economists and medical scientists, and having to reconcile ‘two different approaches’. She also admitted that ‘I call myself a lapsed anthropologist, even when talking to other anthropologists’, as she was no longer able to do the ‘pure ethnography’, the ‘long-term research process . . . the nuances of getting to grips with a particular culture’.

Others are much more agnostic. TJ, an ex-PhD now working in the World Bank, admitted that ‘there are many anthropologists in the bank, but I don’t mix much with other social anthropologists – I don’t feel myself as an anthropologist – I don’t use the jargon . . . the infrastructural people see it as bullshit’ He went on to say that ‘they are sometimes too anthropological – most anthropologists are working on purely sociological issues – they don’t need to translate social sciences or understand non-social issues. They never try and understand road-transport economics’.

The last comment reveals the challenge of collaboration. Ethnographers are often brought into multidisciplinary teams, often through the brokerage of anthropologists and sociologists themselves. Indeed sometimes collaboration can seem an end in itself. Within disciplines urged to promote and measure the social and economic impact of their research, collaboration becomes a new target and aspiration. Yet collaboration is never straightforward. There is an extensive literature on the complexities of scholarly collaboration when working across different analytical and disciplinary frameworks (e.g. Barry et al., 2008; Strathern, 2004). In particular, collaborations pose new ethical and professional challenges for the representation and use of ethnographic knowledge and the answers will depend on the ways that particular academic fields understand, create and engage their users.

Moreover, collaboration requires a measure of like-mindedness. As Marcus observes, ‘ethnographic tales of the field’ would only make sense among mixed audiences of fellow anthropologists and our epistemic partners in the same room, so to speak . . . different kinds of stories are required’ (2006: 106). This requires anthropologists to adopt a different narrative style, one that can no longer take a disciplinary speech community for granted. To be useful one has to be accessible, to represent anthropology to others, and to be able to explain oneself. Again, this makes new and rather different demands on disciplinary expertise.

It produces, we suggest, a trend towards short-term studies, whose findings can be easily used by those – be they bankers, investigative journalists, financial analysts or management consultants – whose work benefits from an ethnographic sensibility. These techniques often make use of what one might call quasi-ethnographic skills, approaches that label themselves as ethnographic but that are not easily recognizable by either anthropology or sociology. Given their scope, these studies are accused by some of appropriating ethnography (e.g. Moore, 2002).

These new uses of ethnography place it in a subtly different position. Collaboration, accessibility and the democratization of knowledge practices all sound admirable virtues, but they pose other problems for ethnographic notions of rigour and sensibility. Ethnographic mediators have to be plausible and to demonstrate their research competence. They offer telling anecdotes, a bit of theory and make claim to a method. Yet the contextually rich understandings that come from an epistemological grounding are simply not possible in a drive-by approach to ethnography or in a predefined collaborative research project.

In this new world, the demand is for clarity, and for production in a form that is both simple to digest for its users, and of a content that is relevant for them to do so. There is less interest in complexity and nuance outside the terms of enquiry set by the collaboration. The ethnographer’s role in collaboration can be thought-provoking, but also has to be made explicit and defined. The requirement is to mediate, to be explicit, to add value, to identify key action points for change, and to do so as efficiently as possible.

We have suggested that the market creates a new sphere for ethnographic practice. Yet, beyond the university ethnography risks being less an empirical method than a popular discourse. The danger is that it gets reduced to a marketing strategy that appeals to the vanities of dominant cultural ideologies, such as an anthropology for ‘watching the English’ (Fox, 2005), as a form of reality TV (Caplan, 2005), or even enlisted to advise armies or support military occupations (Gusterson, 2007). For one trenchant critic, ‘the gap between critical intellectuals and simple salesmanship seems only to shrink’ (Frank, 2002: 52). Ethnography risks reemerging not just as tourism, but as a kind of voyeurism, aimed at entertainment and profit. This situates it in very different kinds of meanings from those traditionally associated with ethnographic enquiry.

Herein lies the final message of our article: the vital importance of sustaining disciplinary moral economies. Academic communities and individual scholars respond in different ways to the pressures of the knowledge economy. Peoples’ experience varies: concerns over disciplinary rigour at the centre can coexist with an interdisciplinary ethos of ‘anything goes’ at the borders. Debates over method and methodologies are of less significance to some than others. Sociologists have developed an inclusive approach to professional belonging, hosting major conferences, encouraging students to participate in disciplinary associations, and allowing a plethora of sub-fields and international networks to develop (Platt, 2003). In Britain, by contrast, anthropology has remained relatively small, maintaining a more exclusive identity and collegiality through shared theoretical conversations and intellectual legacies (Mills, 2008). But in the new knowledge economy, both inclusive and exclusive approaches to disciplinary reproduction face the same challenges: maintaining their academic capital, justifying a disciplinary logic, and competing for students, funds and impact. For all these reasons, methodological communities become increasingly important.

The keen temper of methodological battles and boundaries are illustrative of these moral communities. They matter because they offer a way in which disciplines can respond to concerns about the broader reshaping of social research. Yet maintaining methodological traditions is only half the battle. To return to the vignette with which we began, we see an intriguing parallel between those committed to an ethnographic research practice that seeks to promote rigour and minimize bias (Hammersley, 2000) and those, particularly within anthropology, who advocate for an ethnographic imagination that sees the unexpected and unpredicted as key moments of insight. Whilst seemingly in opposition, both are strong visions, both transcend the technicalities of method, and both visions emerge from robust and supportive intellectual communities that view ethnography as a mode of empirical social research. It is these ‘communities of critics’ (Strathern, 2006) that face threat. It is these methodological communities that merit sustaining.

Conclusion: where next for ethnography?

What future awaits ethnography in the knowledge economy? Do heated debates over methodological principles – such as the status of fieldwork – matter outside the disciplines? As Ingold (2009) reminds us, anthropology is not reducible to ethnography, and there are ‘pitfalls involved in identifying such research activity solely or primarily in terms of the method’ (Delamont and Atkinson, 1980: 139). Nonetheless, methodological disputes, such as the tensions surrounding the ‘field’, are valuable prisms through which to understand the larger social forces shaping academic work.

The knowledge economy offers new opportunities, as well as eroding existing practices. As we have shown, ethnography has shown itself to be resilient and to have a lasting appeal. Its migration into other fields and multidisciplinary areas has given anthropologists and others the opportunity to popularize ethnographic approaches. But this comes with the risks of making too much – and too little – of the method. If ethnography is rethought as a ‘way of seeing’ (Berger, 2008) that anyone can invoke, it becomes a populist discourse rather than a method. On the other hand, reducing ethnography to a set of instrumental tools to be deployed by market researchers loses much of what characterizes the ethnographic imagination. We would argue that disciplinary pedagogies in the social sciences serve to challenge both extremes. They nurture a ‘culture of craftsmanship’ (Marcus, 2009), a disciplinary ‘imagination’ (Mills, 1959) and a methodological ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977). The challenge is to defend and rethink these communities and methodological cultures in new times.