Ethnographic Research Articles

The “insider” ethnographic diagnostic radiographer thinking like “an outsider”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how the ethnographic researcher navigates their insider–outsider status and provides a methodological contribution to this important aspect of ethnographic research; this will be framed from the researcher’s perspective using a semi-autoethnographic approach. The ethnographic study being reflected upon explored the culture in a Diagnostic Imaging Department (DID), looking at how radiographers work and what the issues were within their working environment. The original study was carried out within one DID in a District General Hospital in the East of England (Strudwick, 2011).Design/methodology/approachIn the original study, the researcher used ethnography to study the culture in a DID. Observation was carried out for a four-month period. Field notes were recorded and used to formulate topics for the interviews that were to follow. After the observation, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants from the DID. Ten key informants were purposefully sampled from the DID to provide a cross-section of opinion from the staff. The data collected were analysed to identify key themes. This paper reflects on the data from the original study to explore the tensions between the insider and outsider researcher role and how this contributes to the way the ethnographic researcher views the environment, reports on their findings and how they feel about the data from their own perspective.FindingsEthnographers carrying out research in their own area of practice need to try to think like an outsider in order to see the environment with a sense of strangeness but also try to make sense of what the participants are thinking and doing. There is a tension between becoming part of the group in order to understand it and looking at the environment as an outsider in order to make a note of what is happening. Findings from the original ethnographic study will be used to illustrate this point and will be used to reflect on the feelings of the researcher, considering her insider and outsider status.Research limitations/implicationsThis study was carried out in one diagnostic imaging department in the east of England.Originality/valueThe author, who is a diagnostic radiographer and radiography educator reflects on how she managed the insider–outsider tension during her ethnographic observation and after the event when reflecting on the data from the original study.

Governing Inter‐Organizational Collaboration through Purpose Work and Purpose Borrowing: How Social Enterprises' Normative Aspirations Influence Business Partners' Practices

AbstractSocial enterprises may boost their impact by convincing collaborating businesses to contribute to their purposes. However, such enterprises typically lack the leverage to influence mainstream businesses. We investigate to what extent their abundant social resources might enable them to remedy this weakness to some extent. Taking a practice‐based perspective, we conduct an ethnographic case study of a social enterprise's collaborative relationships. We discover a collaboration process grounded in social purpose: If a social enterprise's underlying normative aspiration is to put ‘purpose before profit’ and it practices ‘purpose work’, its partners may conversely engage in ‘purpose borrowing’, which involves actions espousing the social enterprise's purpose even if they go against business common sense. We advance research on hybrid organizations by explaining how social enterprises can exert a significant degree of influence on their business partners thanks to their inherent social resources, which are more diverse and powerful than assumed so far. Furthermore, we contribute to inter‐organizational collaboration research by identifying a new mode of relational governance founded on social purpose that goes beyond the established modes based on legitimacy, trust, and reciprocity.

“We’re a Disease to Someone”: Embodying Safety and Freedom in a State Motorcyclists’ Rights Organization

ABSTRACT Public health and safety experts have advocated mandatory helmet laws as an important means to increase motorcyclists’ safety and public health for over 50 years. Despite these recommendations, some motorcyclists have successfully organized to challenge such laws. This is an ethnographic study of the largest state motorcyclists’ rights organization (SMRO) in the United States and its institutionalized opposition to mandatory helmet laws. I argue that in addition to its focus on individual freedom, the motorcyclists’ rights movement has characteristics of an embodied health movement in the sense that activists challenge expert understandings of health issues based on their personal experiences. Motorcyclists’ rights activists oppose mandatory helmet laws advocated by experts because they interfere with their understanding of freedom but also do not work to increase safety as they understand it. Exploring the embodied health characteristics of the motorcyclists’ rights movement helps us understand how the movement has been able to grow and maintain itself and the boundaries of embodied health movements. Other movements that combine a focus on both freedom and health and safety may exist and provide fruitful opportunities for future research.

Recent developments in autonomous floor-cleaning robots: a review

Purpose Autonomous floor-cleaning robots (AFCRs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to provide efficient and effective cleaning without the need for human intervention. These robots can perform various cleaning tasks, such as vacuum cleaning, mopping, scrubbing or sweeping, in domestic or industrial setups. As the use of floor-cleaning robots continues to grow, this paper aims to document key technological advancements. Design/methodology/approach The structure of the present work relies on published research articles excavated from general online research databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus. The authors use a variety of keywords and titles to search for research papers. Finally, 93 research articles are selected for review based on abstracts and key results that match AFCRs. Findings According to market trends, floor-cleaning robots dominate other cleaning areas. This review mainly focuses on five attributes of floor-cleaning robots: design and development of AFCR, complete coverage path planning, the application of machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL), optimisation strategies for qualitative output and ethnographic studies. It also consists of discussions based on the results of reported technical works. Hence, AFCRs have dominated the market in the past decade and are likely to be more aggressive in the coming years. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, only a survey article based on US-granted patents published in 2013 constitutes a review work in the research domain on AFCRs. In 2021, another review conducted a survey on the latest technological advancements in window-cleaning robots. It reviewed in detail the locomotion aspects, control mechanisms, adhesion mechanisms, sensors and actuators required for window-cleaning robots. In 2019, a comprehensive review was published on cleaning robots from a control strategy perspective for domestic applications. Therefore, the authors have crafted this review to understand the evolution of floor-cleaning robots in the past decade.

Mi-e Dor De Tine: Light Festivals, Emotional Narratives and Romanian Diaspora

This paper explores the significance of urban light festivals and their role in contributing to transnational identities and narratives through a detailed study of the Mi-e Dor De Tine project. This public art project serves as an example of how light-based installations shape transnational affective experiences, particularly within the Romanian diaspora across various locations around the world. Through an ethnographic and netnographic study conducted from 2018 to 2024, this research critically engages with Mi-e Dor De Tine project within the frameworks of aesthetic capitalism, affect theory, and transnationalism. The paper emphasizes that urban light festivals not only serve as tools for urban regeneration and cultural diplomacy but also play a vital role in affirming and developing complex urban identities and affective experiences.

Environmental Scarcity and Natural Resource-Related Disputes in East Hararghe and West Hararghe Zones, Oromia, Ethiopia

This article reports our longitudinal ethnographic study on the nexus between environmental scarcity and natural resource-related disputes in East Hararghe and West Hararghe zones of the Oromia Region, Ethiopia. The data required for the study were obtained through key informant interviews, informal conversations, ethnographic observations and field notes. We systematically organized and analysed the data in such a way that they would reveal the impacts of the long-standing interactions between environmental scarcity and human factors in laying the foundations for and shaping natural resource-related disputes in the study area. The study suggests that natural resource-related disputes in the study area are rooted in the inability to create systems of societal resilience in the face of increasing environmental scarcity. Based on the findings of the study, we underscore that the concerned government and non-government agencies need to take integrated measures to promote environmental protection, environmental justice, conflict sensitivity and socio-ecological resilience.

“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts

AbstractDespite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance‐taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co‐construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense‐making in literacy activities.

From a Community to a ‘Scheduled Tribe’: A Ethnographic Study of the Hatti

The Hatti community of the Trans-Giri region of Sirmaur District with its recent inclusion in Article 342 of the Indian constitution was designated as Scheduled Tribe (ST). The research article is an ethnographic account of the Hatti Tribe of the Trans-Giri region of Sirmaur District, Himachal Pradesh. The study documents the rich culture and tradition of the Hattis in the existing social institutions of caste, family, marriage, kinship, political organisation and religion on account of fieldwork that was conducted in seven villages. The caste system of the Hatti observes strict defined hierarchies, their pre-determined roles and often determines occupation. It is divided into upper, middle and lower caste, with each caste further divided into sub-categories. The institution of kinship amongst the Hattis is unique and the recognition of kin is extended to the father’s father brother family such that kinship is identified and terminology is used for father’s father family. In addition, they recognise both consanguine and affinal kin and there is no distinct kinship term for lineal and collateral kin. The institution of marriage is also unique in its own way with five types of marriages that are known to take place in the area. Some of them are polyandrous marriage, monogamous marriage, remarriage usually/often after divorce, child marriage and marriage by elopement. Interestingly, all marriages have a different cultural process to solemnise the wedding. The political organisation of the Hattis is known by Khumbli, a traditional council that governs the law and order in the villages, is categorised as per village territories and is still considered the first place to resort differences. There is a close relationship between political and religious organisation such that many a times dispute resolution may take place at the deity level. The Hatti reflect a similar culture and tradition to the Jaunsari, a recognised ST in Uttarakhand. The existing Daichara between the two tribes is one of the strong indicators of common ancestral lines. The ethnographic account of the Hatti tribe in the research article is the first of its kind that documents the culture of the Hatti after they were granted the status of the ST before it embarked on the journey of planned development.

Maintaining Organizational Resilience Amidst Socio‐Political Turmoil: Lessons From the Jewish—Palestinian Context

ABSTRACTWe live in an era dominated by political fervor, escalating social divisions, and increasing polarization, posing challenges to diverse organizations. In this paper, I delve into the impact of mega‐threats—external societal events with wide media coverage that evoke intense negative emotions—on organizations promoting diversity and inclusion. I explore how organizations can sustain resilience, acting as safe spaces where individuals from diverse identities and ideological perspectives feel a sense of belonging and can maintain their unique voice. Drawing on a 15‐month ethnographic study of an organization navigating the protracted national conflict between Palestinians and Jews, I uncover a two‐pronged organizational strategy. This strategy, balancing demographic representation with a commitment to avoiding the national conflict and maintaining neutrality, successfully preserves diversity, as well as crucial elements of inclusion, such as employees' sense of security and, at times, belonging. However, it falls short in cultivating resilience in the voice component, potentially leading to lower well‐being, increased avoidant work behaviors, and compromises in organizational cohesion. Avoidance also compromises organizational learning, preventing the development of capacities to address potential threats. The research contributes to the knowledge on organizational resilience in the face of mega‐threats, urging organizations to move beyond harmony‐focused approaches and address conflicts proactively for sustained diversity and inclusion.

Street-level service journeys: serendipity in outreach work with unstably housed people who use drugs

ABSTRACT People living in situations of homelessness and drug use experience significant barriers when seeking to access services in the Danish welfare state. Yet rarely are journeys to services examined in depth with attention to the factors that may either support or prevent their completion. Towards this aim, the article employs a ‘service journey’ approach by unfolding an ethnographic case study of a service journey pieced together at the street-level. This is achieved through the collective efforts of outreach workers and a man encountered at a drug consumption room in urgent need of medication. The article highlights the role of serendipity in the construction of such ‘street-level’ service journeys. It thus shows how possibilities for initiating or pushing a particular service journey forward occur through serendipitous outreach encounters. Further, it is shown how service journeys of unstably housed people who use drugs are both conditioned by and come up against other shifting everyday ‘itineraries’ of clients as they seek to piece together a living at the urban margins.

Participatory conflict as an intrinsic dimension of participatory communication: An ethnographic study of women self-help groups from Uttarakhand, India

ABSTRACT This paper establishes participatory conflict invoked by intersectional standpoints as a critique of the conventional celebratory understanding of participatory communication for social change. The paper is based on an immersive ethnographic study in the state of Uttarakhand, India with women participants in three self-help groups. Our findings acknowledge the presence of inevitable participatory conflict in women groups’ participation due to intersectional standpoints where gender intersects with caste, economic position, and paid work exposure leading to unequal access to communication resources among members. Our study offers a nuanced framework for participatory communication for social change that can contribute to both theory and development communication practice by acknowledging participatory conflict as an integral dimension of collective and individual empowerment process.

The Quest for "How to do Hybrid right": Moving Beyond Compensating Asymmetries to Experience-Driven Cooperation

Hybrid work has become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its popularity, many organisations still strive to find an answer to "how to do hybrid cooperation right''. Enabling collaboration across digital and physical workspaces, participants, and practices is a great challenge, as it inevitably introduces asymmetric relations, incongruences in frames of reference, and misaligned ecosystems and technical infrastructures. The paper investigates approaches used to manage asymmetries in hybrid work settings and their impact on cooperation. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, we reveal a prevalent reliance on mimicking tools and practices native to fully physical or fully digital settings in the hybrid space. These mimicking practices often arise because the hybrid work setting is viewed through a deficit lens, whereby it is perceived as lacking certain elements (e.g., body, voice, mobility) and access to modalities from especially the physical setting, thereby necessitating the need for compensation work. To provide vocabulary to conceptualize and articulate this type of practice, we introduce the concept compensation work, referring to work that is carried out to offset a deficiency or absence that has been identified, aiming to restore and re-establish a familiar state that has vanished. While compensating through mimicking is intuitive, such approaches assume that our known practices and interactions from the physical workspace can indeed be translated to another context, neglecting the fact that changing the medium inevitably impacts the message. Thus, cooperative practices and interactions taking place in the physical workspace do not remain the same when unfolding in the hybrid space. Finally, we suggest that in order to design technologies and practices that support hybrid cooperation we first need to acknowledge the hybrid workspace as a distinct "third space'' next to the fully remote and fully physical workspace. This includes following an experience-driven approach to hybrid cooperation, encouraging the design of innovative interactions that extend beyond merely compensating for asymmetries and leveraging the unique capabilities and affordances of these settings.

Reconfiguring Data Relations: Institutional Dynamics around Data in Local Governance

Data infrastructures are major sites through which city government operates and therefore of special interest to critical scholars of technology. Yet ways that these infrastructures are embedded into the institutional fabric of government make them difficult to navigate and often resistant to abstract critique and generalized analysis. We present an ethnographic study of a design effort launched by a team inside a city government to build and deploy a tool with a specific focus on equity and justice. By integrating data from multiple sources and bringing it together in a spatial framework, the team sought to bring neighborhood voices, often marginalized in planning efforts, into the center of the conversation. Tracing the negotiations over data's value in this process, we unveil various tensions involved in this effort, within and between different groups, and how the group of city employees navigated these tensions, mainly by adjusting the relations of the groups around data -- which we call ''data relations.'' Narratives in organizational communications were key in both revealing and mobilizing the data relations constituting the institutional data infrastructure. With the empirical findings, we argue that tracing the data relations can be an effective way for the CSCW community to understand the institutional data politics and make interventions in the systems in power.

Musical creation laboratory as an environment for free expression: An ethnographic observation of creative dynamics

This ethnographic study investigates creative dynamics in a musical creation laboratory at the University of Rio Grande, Brazil. Data collection was obtained through semi-structured interviews conducted after the accomplishment of free improvisation activities. The research focused on the testimonies of 10 volunteer musicians, emphasizing the expectations, transformations, and reflections present in their narratives. The findings highlight how emotional experiences shape musical expression, revealing the transformative role of creativity in both individual and collective artistic practices. The study revealed that the process of creative freedom was deeply influenced by the participants’ emotions. These emotions, when experienced and expressed, reflected meanings and reinterpretations in how they perceived and positioned themselves both artistically and socially.

The Mundane Art of Cybersecurity: Living with Insecure IT in Danish Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are an essential part of the global economy and paramount to local communities and employment markets. They are also considered to be particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks as they lack technical competencies, strict controls, and organizational routines. We present the results of an ethnographic study of 30 SMEs in Denmark to further our understanding of how companies in this segment handle cybersecurity in their daily practices. We suggest that cybersecurity is dealt with as a mundane art: instead of striving for solutions, SMEs must leave things undone, endure partially broken systems, and resort to making things slightly better or worse but never good. In line with CSCW scholarship on care in broken worlds, we emphasize the various tactics of living with insecure technologies. In a broken world, securing is often not about assurance or following rules but about handling dilemmas, breaking things a little but not a lot, or waiting things out.

Teaching mobility, teaching gender in the ladies’ compartments of Mumbai local trains

The local trains of Mumbai, known for their excessive crowding and cramped conditions, are a popular public transport system due to the vast spread of the network and cheap pricing. These trains are also used extensively by women due to the provision of exclusive segregated ladies’ compartments. However, women still need to negotiate with crowds, and push and jostle as they struggle to board and deboard trains. Through an ethnographic study of women’s experiences of travelling by trains, I examine how women learn to be mobile and teach others, such as their children, to navigate the local train system. Analysing women’s narratives of how they learnt to use trains, I find that teaching mobility and teaching gender go hand-in-hand, as women simultaneously internalise codes of appropriate femininity to protect themselves from physical and sexual harm, but also subvert mainstream femininities, as they embark on their everyday train journeys.

Constructing a Classification Scheme - and its Consequences: A Field Study of Learning to Label Data for Computer Vision in a Hospital Intensive Care Unit

Research on data annotation for artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated that biases, power, and culture impact the ways that annotators apply labels to data and subsequently affect downstream AI systems. However, annotators can only apply labels that are available to them in the annotation classification scheme. Drawing on a 3-year ethnographic study of an R&D collaboration between medical and AI researchers, we argue that the construction of the classification schema itself -- decisions about what kinds of data can and cannot be collected, what activities can and cannot be detected in the data, what the possible annotation classes ought to be, and the rules by which an item ought to be classified into each class -- dramatically shape the annotation process, and through it, the AI. We draw on Bowker and Star's [9] classification theory to detail how the creation of a training data codebook for a computer vision algorithm in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) evolved from its original, clinically-driven goal of classifying complex clinical activities into a narrower goal of identifying physical objects and simpler activities in the ICU. This work reinforces how trade-offs and decisions made long before annotators begin labeling data are highly consequential to the resulting AI system.

The Algorithm and the Org Chart: How Algorithms Can Conflict with Organizational Structures

Algorithms are introducing changes to individuals? jobs, but do algorithms also lead to changes in the structures of organizations themselves? Organizational structures, as often formalized into organization (org) charts, are meant to facilitate coordinated decision-making. Yet our 10-month ethnographic study of a large online retail company reveals why the organizational structures that facilitate effective decision-making by humans may be in tension with the organizational structures that facilitate effective decision-making using algorithms. Our findings show that the human decision-makers needed small, divided-up sets of decisions, and they had previously accomplished this through how they structured individuals' roles and teams in the org chart. In contrast, when data scientists developed a new algorithm and first deployed it within organizational structures meant to support human decision-making, they realized that these small divided-up decision spaces were arbitrarily constraining the algorithm's search space. When not constrained in this manner, the algorithm could identify and recommend better solutions, but those optimal solutions did not always align with the structure of roles and teams in the org chart. This study suggests that as algorithms are integrated into the workplace, organization designs may begin to more explicitly reflect the contours of those algorithms' behaviors.

INNOVATING URBAN CHINA: The Rise of the Local Venture State and the Making of New Entrepreneurial Spaces

AbstractIn this article we centralize the analytic of the local venture state (LVS) to offer a novel framework for investigating China's new urban entrepreneurialism, which emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis. As a spatiotemporally specific response to the crisis, the LVS goes beyond GDP‐driven developmentalism, seeking to simultaneously promote economic development, indigenous innovation and social equity using a variety of financialized policy instruments. Ethnographic case studies of new entrepreneurial spaces in Beijing's Zhongguancun area situate the LVS at the interface between Zhongguancun's urban space and China's innovation system. They reveal the rationalities behind the rise of the LVS and discrepancies among policy intentions, the implementation thereof and actual local results. Underlying the mixed results of the LVS, we argue, is the complicated power dynamics within the LVS and a fundamental contradiction between the dynamics of technological innovation and those of wealth redistribution. In our examination of China's LVS vis‐à‐vis global struggles to tackle the protracted economic crisis and achieve a more socially inclusive model of urban development, we stress the need to theorize urban entrepreneurialism from the global East with the aim of enriching the literature of urban China and of variegated urban entrepreneurialism.

Contested and nervous spaces: exploring the environment of healthcare provision for international migrants in the Gauteng province of South Africa

ABSTRACT Background Notwithstanding the global goal of inclusive universal health coverage, and the notion of migrant-sensitive health systems, limited healthcare access or the exclusion of migrants from national health systems persists. South Africa has a rights-based constitution, but there is an inability or a failure of the health system to recognise and address the health needs of migrants. Objective To explore the intersection of the environment of healthcare provision for migrants and the everyday practices and behaviours of health workers and patients in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Methods The conceptual frameworks of health system responsiveness and social exclusion informed this institutional ethnographic study at 13 healthcare facilities in Gauteng province. We developed an observation guide to explore the intersection of culture and environment and its influence on healthcare provision to patients, especially migrants. Following ethics approval, we observed the facilities for 234 person-days. We used thematic analysis to analyse the data. Results Busy, frantic or nervous spaces, and contestations between patients and health workers, and among health workers formed part of the social and cultural environment of healthcare provision. The presence of migrant patients during busy periods served as a detonator for rude or discriminatory remarks, exacerbated by staff shortages and language barriers. Simultaneously, migrants exercised their agency by rebutting or confronting rude health workers. We also observed encouraging examples of kindness, caring and professionalism of health workers. Conclusion The study has implications for achieving a migrant-sensitive health system in South Africa.