Cracking the Iron Ceiling: On Ethnography as Theory

Abstract

There is no alternative to theory-driven ethnography. Some ethnographers may refuse to acknowledge the epistemological bases of their respective methodological approaches, but this amounts to unreflexive rather than atheoretical fieldwork. This essay elaborates three theses along these lines with the aim of sketching out a self-consciously theory-driven approach to ethnography. First, all ethnography is necessarily theoretical whether researchers acknowledge it or not. Without acknowledging this point, ethnography remains a fundamentally unreflexive enterprise. Second, extending upward toward ‘structure’ from empirics illuminates the conditions under which observations tend to hold true. Third, theoretical reconstruction, rather than confirmation or discovery, is the primary goal of ethnography. Drawing on the works of Michael Burawoy, Imre Lakatos, and others, these three theses motivate a defense of what we term ‘hard-core fieldwork’. We distinguish this approach from both grounded theory and more contemporary iterations of empiricism in sociological ethnography.