Mobile Ethnography Research Articles

Generation Y: evaluating services experiences through mobile ethnography

PurposeThis paper suggests mobile ethnography as a method for data collection, where Generation Y customers are integrated as active investigators. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on museums as experience‐centred places, to understanding how the experience is perceived by Generation Y, to identifying the customer journey, to providing an insight into service experience consumption and to deriving managerial implication for the museum industry of how to approach Generation Y.Design/methodology/approachMobile ethnography is applied to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra with a sample of Generation Y visitors as the future visitor market.FindingsThe paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in measuring museum experiences, especially with regard to the definition and improvement of the service‐delivery processes. Service experience must be appropriately managed by museum operators by collecting, evaluating, storing and reusing relevant data on customer experience. Mobile ethnography and tools such as MyServiceFellow offer an important potential source of sustainable competitive advantage by improving customer experience, particularly for Gen Y.Research limitations/implicationsThe most significant limitation is the exploratory nature of the single case study derived from a small sample within only one museum.Originality/valueThis is one of the few studies to have addressed mobile ethnography in a service context and examined the museum experience of Generation Y. The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in service design to improve the service‐delivery process, especially with regard to the different mindsets of the Millennials.

Shadow circuits: urban spaces and mobilities across the Mediterranean

In Italy, as in other southern European countries, both the notions of diversity and multiculturalism have only recently come into use. In this article, we show how over the last 30 years two Italian cities, Turin and Naples have been transformed and reshaped by patterns of mobility and informal commerce that we have referred to as ‘shadow circuits’. Shadow circuits work through the connection of distant places in Europe and the Mediterranean and contribute to the understanding of complex, stratified societies, mobile societies in particular. A mobile ethnography perspective has been carried during fieldwork and is discussed in length in this article. The examples of Turin and Naples are particularly useful because, unlike many other Italian cities, both have developed pro-multiculturalism and pro-diversity policies in the last two decades. This makes them particularly interesting case studies for addressing the gap between diversity as a policy and diversity as a social fact.

Moving through the city: visual discourses of upward social mobility in higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile

Chile is one of the world's most neoliberal countries with a high level of privatised healthcare and education. The presence of advertising for both public and private universities points to the radically altered relationship between public and private higher education as a consequence of neoliberalism. Some authors describe the increasing similarities between the representations of public and private universities as evidence of their hybrid nature whereas others contend that what comes across as contingent hybridity is the dominance of a neoliberal discourse that has invaded public universities. This article looks at how public and private universities’ visual and textual representations of themselves evolve in a context of mobile, neoliberalised public spaces. The research is based on a mobile visual ethnography of higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile in 2010. The visual and textual dimensions of the advertisements are analysed by means of critical discourse analysis. The universities’ particular sales messages with regard to promised upward social mobility and employability through education are reinforced by the intertwining of images, mobile spaces and actors. However, as the discourse analysis shows, the promises of equal upward social mobility are in contrast with the realities of neoliberal higher education and the increasing financial debt faced by students.

Making Place in the Media City

The article discusses practices of placemaking through empirical fieldwork undertaken in the subculture of urban exploration in Copenhagen. The making and experience of place is discussed, firstly, in relation to methodology and academic representation and secondly, in relation to urban space and media. The article begins by suggesting that the ethnographic research process should be grasped as the making of an ’ethnographic place’ (Pink 2010), which invites readers/audiences to imagine themselves into the places represented. Based on findings from the fieldwork, the article moves on to the methodologies associated with the examination of urban exploration and its academic representation. The article points to a ’multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995) and mobile ethnography (Lee & Ingold 2006) that acknowledges the ethnographer as ’emplaced’ (Howes 2005) in the research setting. Finally, urban exploration and the placemaking practices involved are positioned in a wider theoretical framework focusing on social media and urban space. The urban explorers use different social media platforms to share information and pictures, which is said to accelerate ’a mediatised sense of place’ (Jansson & Falkheimer 2006). Urban exploration is seen as a practice tied to the late modern ’media city’ (Fornäs 2006; McQuire 2010), where spatial experience is transformed due to the increased convergence of mobile and pervasive media with urban space.

One Case, Three Ethnographic Styles: Exploring different ethnographic approaches to the same broad brief

In a research project aimed at suggesting improvements at an annual advent fair three different ethnographic research approaches were used; Social Anthropology, Interaction Design and Mobile Ethnography. The paper focuses on how the three different approaches on ethnography affected choices in the research process, the outcomes of the research and how the outcomes were presented. It is found that the different motivations for doing ethnography between the three approaches make their outcomes differ in a clear way. These differences make the three ethnographic approaches suitable for achieving different research outcomes.

Practice Theory in Folklore and Folklife Studies

Since the 1960s, folkloristic approaches in North America and Europe have been thematised with the keywords of performance and practice, respectively. Although the orientations built around the keywords share a concern for conceptualising folklore as a type of expressive action, significant theoretical differences are apparent. Arising at a similar juncture in the twentieth century in response to social upheaval, they differ in the use of explanation or generalisation with performance often representing singularity (and emergence) of an event and practice signifying the aggregate (and precedence) of folk behaviour. An evaluation of their trajectories into the twenty-first century suggests the more expansive explanatory potential of practice theory in folklore and folklife studies, particularly if the mission of such studies is oriented toward a "mobile ethnography" of everyday life. Although sharing sociological and anthropological theories of practice advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, folkloristic ideas of practice focus on cognitive and cultural rationales underlying repeated, variable behaviour and framed activities.

Mobilities II

This second report on mobilities considers some key themes in mobilities research by (mostly) geographers over the last two years or so. Following on from some of the themes outlined in the first report, this report explores accounts of historical geographies of mobility in order to put claims to ‘newness’ in perspective. Second, it surveys how mobility research has influenced methodology focusing, in particular, on ‘mobile ethnography’. Third, the report looks at the blossoming arena or research on the forms of waiting, stillness and stuckness that have become an important component of our understanding of mobility. The conclusion reflects on the continuing importance of the politics of mobility and urges greater consideration of the mobility of ideas alongside people and things.

Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts investigates lineups at small island ferry terminals. Drawing upon fieldwork including travel to, on and from ferry boats, for a total of about 250 journeys over three years, and about 400 qualitative interviews, this mobile ethnography focuses on practices of ferry mobility in coastal British Columbia. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time‐spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.

Mapping the Super‐Whale: Towards a Mobile Ethnography of Situated Globalities

In empirical discussion on global connections, frequent allusions are made to Michael Burawoy’s ‘global’ and George Marcus’ ‘multi‐sited’ ethnographies. While both have inspired transnational fieldwork, neither methodological approach has sufficiently analysed the local‐global dichotomy embedded at their core. Drawing on actor‐network theory (ANT), this article suggests an alternative framework for mobile ethnography, better suited to a social world conceived in network‐relational terms. Employing metaphors of mobility, scale‐making, and cartography, an empirically driven approach to situated and plural ‘globalities’ is outlined. These claims are developed drawing on the author’s inquiries into Japanese whaling practices, showing how ‘ethno‐socio‐cartography’ can contribute to the mapping of global‐scale micro‐cosmoses.

The role of disciplining/translating accounting practices in patient‐centred care

PurposeThis paper aims to offer a critical pathway to understanding recent changes and improvements in organizing and managing healthcare – such as the emerging “patient‐centred care” (PCC) approach.Design/methodology/approachThe research is based on fieldwork performed as a mobile ethnography of translations of everyday healthcare work at a Swedish healthcare institution in which an analysis of the significance of contemporary accounting practices for disciplining action and thought was carried out.FindingsAccounting is increasingly interlinked with medical practices today, with more and more people involved in translating action and thought into accounting‐based terms and values at all levels of their work lives; as this happens, accounting “produces” a way of thinking and valuing that even modifies professional identities. The discipline of medical knowledge is played out differently as accounting‐based valuation measures become internalised into the performance of medical professionals and as additionally their images of themselves and their patients change. Patient‐centred care is thereby seen not as a means of generating a pure or positive value for patients, expressed in the form of greater efficiencies and nation‐wide performance indicators. The loosely coupled forms of patient‐centred care are about how nurses, having translated accounting practices into their work and selves, use them as a means of managing the constraints and “cracks” in the PCC approaches.Originality/valueAccounting allows the dynamics of the PCC approach to be understood and acted on in new ways. Accounting as a discipline involves both accounting professionals and medical professionals who circulate accounting numbers and values. Accounting, thus, is an activity that takes place inside and outside the self.

Etnografía en movimiento para explorar trayectorias de niños y jóvenes en Barcelona

Este artículo presenta la aplicación de una metodología móvil en el marco de una investigación sobre adopción. Acompañando a los participantes en sus recorridos cotidianos —caminando con ellos—, compartí los espacios públicos donde se movilizan las construcciones sociales por las que a veces son “confundidos” con “inmigrantes. Caminar con ellos me permitió acceder a la percepción que tienen los participantes sobre su ciudad, cómo la habitan y cómo la practican. Se presenta la metodología del “recorrido acompañado”, basada en otras metodologías móviles que se describen de forma sucinta —con especial énfasis en la literatura francesa menos conocida. Como resultado obtenemos una práctica de etnografía móvil que introduce Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación [TIC], se plantea desde la horizontalidad, valora el silencio, y hace acopio de las emergencias urbanas y el azar para acceder a informaciones vedadas a las preguntas directas e incluso a las indirectas.