Mind mapping the knowledge structure of the ethnographic research literature

Mind mapping the knowledge structure of the ethnographic research literature

Joseph Kim-keung Ho

Independent Trainer

Hong Kong, China

Abstract: The topic of ethnographic research is a main one on qualitative research methods in the subject of Research Methods. This article makes use of the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach to render an image on the knowledge structure of ethnographic research. The finding of the review exercise is that its knowledge structure comprises four main themes, i.e., (a) Definitions and basic features, (b) Underlying theoretical thinking and theories (c) Research practices and techniques and (d) Application challenges and issues. The article offers some academic and pedagogical values on the topics of ethnographic research, literature review and the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach.

Key words: Ethnographic research, literature review, mind map, the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach

Please cite the article as: Ho, J.K.K. 2016. “Mind mapping the knowledge structure of the ethnographic research literature” Joseph KK Ho e-resources blog October 30 (url address: http://josephho33.blogspot.hk/2016/10/mind-mapping-knowledge-structure-of_30.html)

Introduction

Ethnographic research has been a main qualitative research methods topic in the subject of Research Methods. It is of academic and pedagogical interest to the writer who has been a lecturer on Research Methods for business management and housing studies students for some tertiary education centres in Hong Kong. In this article, the writer presents his literature review findings on ethnographic research using the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach. This approach was proposed by this writer this year and has been employed to review the literature on a number of topics, such as supply chain management, strategic management accounting and customer relationship management (Ho, 2016). The MMBLR approach itself is not particularly novel since mind mapping has been employed in literature review since its inception. The overall aims of this exercise are to:

1.      Render an image of the knowledge structure of ethnographic research via the application of the MMBLR approach;

2.      Illustrate how the MMBLR approach can be applied in literature review on an academic topic, such as ethnographic research.

The findings from this literature review exercise offer academic and pedagogical values to those who are interested in the topics of ethnographic research, literature review and the MMBLR approach. Other than that, this exercise facilitates this writer’s intellectual learning on these three topics. The next section makes a brief introduction on the MMBLR approach. After that, an account of how it is applied to study ethnographic research is presented.

On mind mapping-based literature review

The mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach was developed by this writer this year (Ho, 2016). It makes use of mind mapping as a complementary literature review exercise (see the Literature on mind mapping Facebook page and the Literature on literature review Facebook page). The approach is made up of two steps. Step 1 is a thematic analysis on the literature of the topic chosen for study. Step 2 makes use of the findings from step 1 to produce a complementary mind map. The MMBLR approach is a relatively straightforward and brief exercise. The approach is not particularly original since the idea of using mind maps in literature review has been well recognized in the mind mapping literature. The MMBLR approach is also an interpretive exercise in the sense that different reviewers with different research interest and intellectual background inevitably will select different ideas, facts and findings in their thematic analysis (i.e., step 1 of the MMBLR approach). Also, to conduct the approach, the reviewer needs to perform a literature search beforehand. Apparently, what a reviewer gathers from a literature search depends on what library facility, including e-library, is available to the reviewer. The next section presents the findings from the MMBLR approach step 1; afterward, a companion mind map is provided based on the MMBLR approach step 1 findings.

Mind mapping-based literature review on ethnographic research: step 1 findings

Step 1 of the MMBLR approach is a thematic analysis on the literature of the topic under investigation (Ho, 2016). In our case, this is the ethnographic research topic. The writer gathers some academic articles from some universities’ e-libraries, two books on ethnographic research as well as via the Google Scholar. With the academic articles collected, the writer conducted a literature review on them to assemble a set of ideas, viewpoints, concepts and findings (called points here). These points from the ethnographic research literature are then grouped into four themes here.

Theme 1: Definitions and basic features

Point 1.1.              “…ethnography is…defined as participant observation plus any other appropriate methods/techniques/etc. including statistics, modeling and/or archive work if they are appropriate for the topic” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 1.2.              “Ethnography is about the researcher trying to discover the shared systems of meanings and interpretations deployed by a specific group of people, which leads them to perceive themselves and reality in particular ways, and leads them to interact and behave in regular but distinctive ways” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 1.3.              “..the hallmark of ethnographic research is that it is representational, interpretive, and rhetorical” (Jönsson and Macintosh. 1997);

Point 1.4.              “Ethnography lacks a codified specification of what should be done and how it should be reported…… like much other qualitative research it is flexible and emergent” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 1.5.              “Ethnography is the art and science of describing a group or culture.… the ethnographer writes about the routine, daily lives of people. The more predictable patterns of human thought and behavior are the focus of inquiry. (Fetterman, 1989:11)..” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 1.6.              “Ethnography derives from traditions in social anthropology where the researcher would spend long periods of time out in the field, living amongst what appeared to them, people of alien or exotic cultures…” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 1.7.              “There are a number of methodological features associated with ethnography. First, ethnography prioritises the perspective of the members of the social group being studied….Second, the researcher is usually required to become immersed in the “field” ….. Third … is the focus in ethnography on the inductive approach … Fourth, … ethnography involves case study research … Finally, .. ethnographic data collection occurs mainly through observations and interviews ” (Holloway, 2010);

Theme 2: Underlying theoretical thinking and theories

Point 2.1.              “Ethnography’s general commitment to verstehen means that the researcher needs to develop a comprehension of actors’ behavior based upon those actors’ own terms of reference, or perspective” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 2.2.              “It Is the ways in which people make sense of the events around them, and render these ‘true’ in their own terms, that is most revealing about how their/ our lives are embroiled in larger social, cultural, economic and political processes” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 2.3.              “The provenance of ethnography is typically held to be within anthropology; however, Yanow (2009) suggests that ethnography actually developed within the practices of colonial administrators as they sought to better understand and control the people within their jurisdiction” (Alcadipani, Westwood and Rosa. 2015);

Point 2.4.              “…..Cognitive theory is the most popular ideational theory in anthropology today. Cognitive theory assumes that we can describe what people think by listening to what they say….” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 2.5.              “…..The typical model for ethnographic research is based on a phenomenologically oriented paradigm. This paradigm embraces a multicultural perspective because it accepts multiple realities…” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 2.6.              “According to ethnographers our behavior varies according to the social situations in which we find ourselves: it is generated through social interaction and hence varieties from social context to social context” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 2.7.              “Ethnography is well suited to a close-up view of the continual and messy processes that produce cultures and is especially attuned to the objects, materials and symbolic artefacts that help bring them to life” (Hamilton and Taylor. 2012);

Point 2.8.              “However defined, the concept of culture helps the ethnographer search for a logical, cohesive pattern in the myriad, often ritualistic behaviours and ideas that characterize a group” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 2.9.              “A holistic orientation demands a great deal of time in the field to gather the many kinds of data that together create a picture of the social whole…” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 2.10.         “Modern ethnography has its roots in social anthropology and emerged in the 1920s and 1930s when famous anthropologists such as Malinowski (1922) and Mead (1935), while searching for cultural patterns and rules, explored a variety of non-western cultures and the life ways of the people within them” (Holloway, 2010);

Point 2.11.         “People experience and act in the world at multiple points, times and places and strung together throughout their/our life courses, these experiences and actions form different biographies and self-identities. In turn, these identities are gendered, classed, coloured and, therefore, cannot be understood without understanding the histories and impacts of these and other categorizations” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Theme 3: Research practices and techniques

Theme 3.1: Conventional ones

Point 3.1.1.       “[Participant observation] In its basic form it can be described as a three-stage process in which the researcher somehow, first, gains access to a particular community, second, lives and/or works among the people under study in order to grasp their world views and ways of life and, third, travel back to the academy to make sense of this through writing up an account of that community’s ‘culture’..” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.2.       “For Douglas (1976), participant observation can enable the researcher to penetrate the various complex forms of ‘misinformation, fronts, evasions and lies’ that he thinks are endemic in most social settings, including organizations” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 3.1.3.       “Time boundaries must be drawn as well, considering researchers’ limited resources. As observation around the clock is impossible, “some degree of time sampling must usually be attempted” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983, p. 36)….” (Tunçalp, and Lê, 2014);

Point 3.1.4.       “Using the twin methods of participant observation and interviewing offers an unparalleled insight into participants’ world that is typical of ethnography (Spindler, 1982; Gilbert, 1993). It also acts as a way to triangulate data to achieve trustworthiness” (Holloway, 2010);

Point 3.1.5.       “……interviewing has been a primary means through which ethnographic researchers have attempted to get to grips with the contexts and contents of different people’s everyday social, cultural, political and economic lives” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.6.       “..interviews need not involve sitting and talking in a fixed setting….. Interviewing ‘on the move’ can enable people to situate and recount complex and fluid events and memories” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.7.       “it is important to understand how people work out their thoughts and feelings about certain matters in social contexts, i.e. on the basis of interactions with other people whom they learn from, react to, misunderstand, resist and so on… Focus groups are hence a key means through which researchers can study these kinds of processes..” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.8.       “Fieldwork is the most characteristic element of any ethnographic research design… The most important element of fieldwork is being there – to observe, to ask seemingly stupid yet insightful questions, and to write down what is seen and heard….” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 3.1.9.       “…In the process of gaining access, researchers usually endure days or weeks of doubt and frustration before….becoming quite suddenly overjoyed when things somehow work out, sometimes better than could have been planned” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.10.   “Traditionally, visual methods have had only a very small impact on ethnographic research… Most researchers confine themselves to the odd illustrative photo which is often assumed to be a factual record of the field” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.11.   “Notepads, computers, tape recorders, cameras – all the tools of ethnography are merely extensions of the human instrument, aids to memory and vision” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 3.1.12.   “Another way of engaging with multiple truths, and literally and metaphorically multiple viewpoints, is to discuss the photos that people have already taken about the issue you want to study” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.13.   “…how ethnographers can validate their truth claims? How can they ensure that their research is thorough, rigorous, systematic and convincing? For us, the answers to these questions lie in trying to undertake research which is theoretically sampled, saturated and adequate” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 3.1.14.    “Anthropologists learn about the intricacies of subgroup or community in order to describe it in its richness and complexity. In the process of studying these details, they typically discover underlying forces that make the system tick. These cultural elements are values or beliefs that can unite or divide a group, but that are commonly shared focal points” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 3.1.15.   “Ethnographers look for patterns of thought and behavior. Patterns are a form of ethnographic reliability. Ethnographers see patterns of thought and action repeat in various situations and with various players” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 3.1.16.   “Triangulation is basic in ethnographic research. It is at the heart of ethnographic validity, testing one source of information against another to strip away alternative explanations and prove a hypothesis” (Fetterman, 1989);

Point 3.1.17.   “..in ethnographic work, you cannot start collecting data with a description or potential theoretical explanation already formulated because this would prejudge issues yet to be identified” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 3.1.18.   “What …. formal stage of analysis is supposed to do, then, is to reconfigure this data, to look at it much more carefully and critically, and to perhaps de- and recontextualise different parts so as to be able to see new themes and patterns in it” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Theme 3.2: Recently developed ones

Point 3.2.1.       “..so-called “nethnographers” leverage membership to online communities to discover how particular people experience, organize and think about their worlds..” (Rouleau, Rond and Musca, 2014);

Point 3.2.2.       “…The literature on digitally mediated ethnographic research is emergent, but, over the last decade, constitutes an established corpus. The rise of “digital ethnography”/ “cyber-ethnography” highlights this (Ardet and Thome., 2004; Domı´nguez et al., 2007; Hine, 2005; Dicks and Mason, 2006; Murthy, 2008). The former is ethnography which is digitally mediated and the latter is conducted wholly online and does not involve face-to-face ethnography…” (Murthy, 2013);

Point 3.2.3.       “…Social researchers have begun examining Facebook as a meaningful research space and to conduct ethnographic work on groups within Facebook as well as on the medium of Facebook itself (Martı´nez Alema´n and Wartman, 2009; Boyd, 2007; Boyd and Ellison, 2007; Ellison et al., 2007; Lampe et al., 2006)….” (Murthy, 2013);

Point 3.2.4.        “…Where teams comprise members from different disciplinary background, they can tackle new questions that span multiple theories…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Point 3.2.5.        “…multi-site, team-based ethnographies enable researchers to ask new questions about how cultured practices operate across organizational units, organizations, or even industries…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Point 3.2.6.        “…recent calls for and moves towards “multi-site” ethnographies (Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995, 1999) indicate a broader range of choices researchers have available. These range from taking a single-site approach, to “shadowing” participants across the multiple sites they inhabit (Czarniawska, 2007), to studying as many discrete sites as the fieldworker considers feasible and useful…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Point 3.2.7.       “……video ethnographies can foreground those socio-material environments that have recently come to fascinate organizational scholars (Orlikowski, 2007), zoom in on verbal, material, spatial, symbolic and bodily cues, and ask new questions about how their interactions shape organizational practice (e.g. Clarke, 2011; Streeck et al., 2011)…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Theme 4: Application challenges and issues

Theme 4.1: Conventional ones

Point 4.1.1.       “…they [the ethnographers] had to avoid ‘going native’ and being captured by that culture by actually becoming a member and thereby forgetting their research role as a trained social anthropologist from another culture” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 4.1.2.       “…..ethnographers must also consider how they cross the boundaries separating them from their research object, i.e. how they engage their field and relate to their informants” (Tunçalp, and Lê, 2014);

Point 4.1.3.        “..it is not uncommon for people under the researcher’s gaze to feel self-conscious or threatened knowing that anything they say may be ‘written down and used in evidence against them’..” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 4.1.4.        “Traditionally, the assumption with participant observation research has tended to be that the researcher befriends and establishes empathy and rapport with people in her/his research community. While we certainly think this is part of the process, it seems to set a normative model that is not always, or often, realistic or helpful” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 4.1.5.        “…ethnographic note-taking can take a considerable amount of time..” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 4.1.6.       “A field site can be defined as “the stage on which the social processes under study take place” (Burrell, 2009, p. 182). While the observation that a field site is constructed rather than discovered is crucial to contemporary practice, the practical work of defining a field site remains understudied (Burrell, 2009)…” (Tunçalp, and Lê, 2014);

Point 4.1.7.       “…there are numerous aspects to the field role which an ethnographer may adopt, and perhaps the most important relate to the extent to which the researcher decides to ‘participate’ in the natural setting of members’ behavior, and the extent to which the identity and purposes of the ethnographers are revealed to those members” (Gill, Johnson and Clark, 2010);

Point 4.1.8.        “Whatever language(s) in which a research project is conducted, there will inevitably have to be some kind of translation between the language(s) that the researcher learns to use in ‘the field’ and that/those which she/he should use when presenting her/his findings to academic and other audiences” (Crang and Cook, 2007);

Point 4.1.9.       “..….[Sampson, 1988] while ethnographies (e.g., Gans 1962) provide rich descriptive accounts of community processes, they are too few to provide quantitative data on macro-level variations” (1988, p. 767)” (Culyba, Heimer and Petty, 2004);

Theme 4.2: Recently developed ones

Point 4.2.1.       “…if one obtains informed consent to quote from a web forum, Facebook group, etc., it is not always possible to provide complete and total anonymity through pseudonyms and the removal of identifying Information. “Googling” identifying data can often make it very easy to reveal sources…” (Murthy, 2013);

Point 4.2.2.       “…The ways in which certain applications work within Facebook or the ways in which data are stored can lead to some organizational researchers feeling a lack of control or inability to grasp these types of online spaces as they are constantly shifting and fluid…” (Murthy, 2013);

Point 4.2.3.       “…The use of iPhones in ethnographic work is very recent and scholarly literature on the subject is minimal…” (Murthy, 2013);

Point 4.2.4.       “For online ethnographers, the first challenge of drawing space boundaries is to decide over the degree of online/offline integration, which is reflected in the literature by various definitions” (Tunçalp, and Lê, 2014);

Point 4.2.5.       “The idea of a research field as a single bounded space, containing a whole culture, has eroded over time” (Tunçalp, and Lê, 2014);

Point 4.2.6.       “…“Being there”, the traditional hallmark of ethnographic study, has become increasingly difficult given the increasing fragmentation, complexity, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Point 4.2.7.        “…ethnography is proliferating—more researchers are doing ethnography within sociology, in other academic disciplines, and even outside academia…..  authors disagree about what ethnography should be and are split over whether new forms of ethnography should be celebrated or curbed ….” (Culyba, Heimer and Petty, 2004);

Point 4.2.8.       “..there is a strong willingness amongst ethnographic researchers to promote organizational ethnography as a paradigm..” (Rouleau, Rond and Musca, 2014);

Point 4.2.9.       “Over the last decade or so, there has been a growing interest in ethnography in management and organization studies (Cunliffe, 2010; Yanow, 2009). One might say that research in these fields has taken an “ethnographic turn”..” (Rouleau, Rond and Musca, 2014);

Point 4.2.10.   “Ethnographers of organization … seek to decipher the values and meanings that help the organization to keep going despite the multiple challenges and demands of self-interest, individualism and politics (Czarniawska, 2008; Munro, 2009)….” (Hamilton and Taylor. 2012);

Point 4.2.11.   “….The increasing local, international, and disciplinary fragmentation of organizations raises questions of where ethnographers have to be to effectively witness the production and repair of their social fabric…” (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2014);

Point 4.2.12.   “…the traditional ethnographic tools of observation and asking questions need to be sharpened (blurred?) to carve out (feel?) the contours of material-social sensory experiences” (Warren, 2012);

Each of them has a set of associated points (i.e., idea, viewpoints, concepts and findings). Two themes have subthemes; they are theme 3 (Research practices and techniques) and theme 4 (Application challenges and issues). Together they provide an organized way to comprehend the knowledge structure of the ethnographic research topic. The referencing indicated on the points identified informs the readers where to find the academic articles to learn more about the details on these points. The process of conducting the thematic analysis is an exploratory as well as synthetic learning endeavour on the topic’s literature. Once the structure of the themes, sub-themes and their associated points are finalized, the reviewer is in a position to move forward to step 2 of the MMBLR approach. The MMBLR approach step 2 finding, i.e., a companion mind map on ethnographic research, is presented in the next section.

Mind mapping-based literature review on ethnographic research: step 2 (mind mapping) output

By adopting the findings from the MMBLR approach step 1 on ethnographic research, the writer constructs a companion mind map shown as Figure 1.

Referring to the mind map on ethnographic research, the topic label is shown right at the centre of the map as a large blob. Four main branches are attached to it, corresponding to the four themes identified in the thematic analysis. In the same vein, two branches have sub-branches, which represent the sub-themes recognized in the thematic analysis findings (i.e., the MMBLR approach step 1). The links and ending nodes with key phrases represent the points from the thematic analysis. As a whole, the mind map renders an image of the knowledge structure on ethnographic research based on the thematic analysis findings, see also the Literature on ethnographic research Facebook page for additional information on ethnographic research. Constructing the mind map is part of the learning process on literature review. The mind mapping process is speedy and entertaining. The resultant mind map also serves as a useful presentation and teaching material. This mind mapping experience confirms the writer’s previous experience using on the MMBLR approach (Ho, 2016). Readers are also referred to the Literature on literature review Facebook page and the Literature on mind mapping Facebook page for additional information on these two topics.

Concluding remarks

The MMBLR approach to study ethnographic research provided here is mainly for its practice illustration as its procedures have been refined via a number of its employment on an array of topics (Ho, 2016). No additional MMBLR steps nor notions have been introduced in this article. In this respect, the exercise reported here primarily offers some pedagogical value as well as some systematic and stimulated learning on ethnographic research. Nevertheless, the thematic findings and the image of the knowledge structure on ethnographic research in the form of a mind map should also be of academic value to those who research on this topic.

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