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<p>What kind of knowledge does ethnography afford? Why do we need such knowledge? This paper draws upon the authors’ individual work to reflect on the ongoing necessity of good enough ethnographic fieldwork in sociology. Alongside presenting moving stories, unearthing rules of behavior, interpreting meanings through thick description, obtaining fine-grained insight into the working of organizations, revealing the complex interplay of informal and formal rules, and reconstructing and explaining local points of view, we argue that sociological inquiry needs ethnography for a) describing, at a granular level, the meso-level mechanisms that connect large structural transformations with face-to-face dynamics occurring in specific socio-symbolic universes; b) explicating social processes in detail and as they unfold over time (because how things happen explains <i>why</i> they happen); c) transcending agents’ words and official discourse so as to unearth the (both internal and exogenous) motors of social action; d) capturing negotiations over meanings as they happen in real time, as local viewpoints emerge, vanish, and/or crystalize; e) examining the rootedness of extra-ordinary events or bureaucratic processes in daily life; f) grasping the affective dimensions of social phenomena; and g) doing all this in a narrative form so that readers care.</p>

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Why Ethnography?

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月7日

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  • Javier Auyero,
  • Faith M. Deckard,
  • Alex Diamond,
  • Maricarmen Hernández,
  • Katherine Jensen,
  • Allison Lang,
  • Eldad J. Levy,
  • Águeda Ortega,
  • Katherine Sobering,
  • Mary Ellen Stitt

摘要

What kind of knowledge does ethnography afford? Why do we need such knowledge? This paper draws upon the authors’ individual work to reflect on the ongoing necessity of good enough ethnographic fieldwork in sociology. Alongside presenting moving stories, unearthing rules of behavior, interpreting meanings through thick description, obtaining fine-grained insight into the working of organizations, revealing the complex interplay of informal and formal rules, and reconstructing and explaining local points of view, we argue that sociological inquiry needs ethnography for a) describing, at a granular level, the meso-level mechanisms that connect large structural transformations with face-to-face dynamics occurring in specific socio-symbolic universes; b) explicating social processes in detail and as they unfold over time (because how things happen explains why they happen); c) transcending agents’ words and official discourse so as to unearth the (both internal and exogenous) motors of social action; d) capturing negotiations over meanings as they happen in real time, as local viewpoints emerge, vanish, and/or crystalize; e) examining the rootedness of extra-ordinary events or bureaucratic processes in daily life; f) grasping the affective dimensions of social phenomena; and g) doing all this in a narrative form so that readers care.