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Ethnographic research is now practised across a wide range of disciplines, and as such it draws on a rich palette of theoretical and methodological frameworks. It is important to note that ethnography lends itself to and is influenced by a variety of theoretical positions. Ethnography is not reduced to a single approach to theorizing about the social world. Indeed ethnography has been adopted and shaped by a range of methodological approaches to the making sense of social life. It is generally understood that ethnography sits at the inductive end of the theoretical spectrum, and that a value of ethnography is its capacity to enable study of social worlds in their ‘natural’ state – inductively through close and detailed attention. Early adopters of anthropological ethnography began with a specific setting, culture or community at hand – and set out to learn about and understand that setting through close study and participative engagement. They did not start, at least explicitly, from the position of a hypothesis to be tested or a theory to prove or improve. However, early ethnographic practitioners were increasingly influenced by a view of the social world that is orderly and functional, and by an understanding that society is achieved by organization and through social institutions. This functionalist–structural perspective included a focus on the role of social institutions in supporting the everyday functioning of society (and indeed in turn led to a particular preoccupation with the role of the family and kinship as a particular, and presumed universal, social institution). A focus on structure and function led to the pursuit of ethnography as an empirical project, where social action, behaviour and belief are revealed as social ‘facts’ to be gathered – ‘objectively’ and untainted by researchers, who are but neutral observers. Inherent within this model is a rather uncritical adoption of a naturalistic perspective. That is, a view that social worlds can and should be studied in their natural states, with the main aim being to describe what is actually and naturally happening. Following this through to a natural conclusion, if we are to understand what it is we are describing then we need an approach that provides access to behaviour and the patterning of that behaviour. Thus prolonged engagement provides the opportunity to observe and to learn, coming to understand the ordering and functioning of the social world in much the same way as the social actors themselves.

Symbolic interactionism, influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, focuses less on institutions and the identification of patterning, and much more on the ways in which human actions are imbued with social meanings which are made and revealed through social interaction. Thus people, as social actors, are active and interactive agents in social worlds where there is continual interpretation, revision and reshaping. This is a more dynamic and moving view of social life, and one which brings with it an assumption of the self as socially constructed, and ‘made’ through action and interaction. In terms of ethnography, symbolic interactionism brought to the fore a focus on meanings and symbols; less a focus on objects and behaviours than on how they are and come to be imbued with social and symbolic meaning. There is also an interest in how social actors learn and interpret these meanings in and through their everyday practice. These meanings are uncovered through an exploration of the symbols in which meanings are encoded, and shared in the course of interaction. Interactionist ethnography does not ‘presume too much in advance’ (Rock, 2001, p. 29); rather, through ethnographic fieldwork researchers can seek to identify symbols and meanings in order to gain understandings of how social actors act in and make sense of social worlds. Such ethnographic work assumes an immersion in the social world in order to make sense of that world from the perspective of the actors themselves. Interactionism is one of the major perspectives or set of perspectives within sociology. There are a variety of versions of interactionism; for ethnography the interactionism associated with Erving Goffman (1959, 1963, 1967, 1969) has been particularly influential. Goffman himself did not explicitly identify himself as an interactionist (Fine and Manning, 2003). However, his work on the purposive construction of the self through active impression management – the presentation of self – highlights the ways in which people describe their actions and how they ‘perform’ the self. Goffman likened this to performance and drama; this dramaturgical approach is concerned with how social actors purposively act in different situations and how they make sense of those actions in terms of meanings. Performativity remains a key concept in contemporary ethnography.

The influence of symbolic interactionism on ethnography is most obvious in relation to the ways in which we describe ethnography itself as an interactional process. We ‘do’ ethnography; doing ethnography is an act in itself – reliant upon and constructed through interactions between the ethnographer, the field of study and social actors with/in the field. There is here a focus on participation – with the researcher being a participant in and within the setting in order to uncover and make sense of meanings. There has been considerable debate on the extent to which ethnographers can and should participate in the field of study (Adler and Adler, 1994). This is often expressed as a continuum from ‘complete participant’ on the one side through to ‘complete observer’ on the other (see Chapter 5 for a longer discussion of the role of the researcher in ethnography). For our purposes here it is worth noting that interactionism makes visible the importance and impact of researcher engagement in the field and the significance of interaction for the ethnographic process itself.

Ethnography has also been influenced by, and in turn has influenced, the theoretical work of ethnomethodology (Pollner and Emerson, 2001). Ethnomethodologists are particularly concerned with the understanding of social life at the micro-level and through uncovering meaning in the close and detailed study of interaction. Ethnographic approaches are also used in order to pay close attention to social life at this micro-level. Both ethnomethodology and ethnography are situated within the interpretive social sciences, and are concerned with understanding the life worlds of social actors in the context of their setting. While the two perspectives have had different followers and have not always been aligned, they have nonetheless ‘grown older together … where once clearer boundaries have become blurred’ (Pollner and Emerson, 2001, p. 118). Ethnomethodology, like ethnography, has had a wide disciplinary appeal, including from within sociology and discursive psychology, and has been particularly concerned with the ways in which reality and social order are constructed and maintained through interaction. Ethnomethodologists have a particular interest in language – including spoken words and conversations, but also sounds, gestures and body language. There is an interest in the sequencing of language, alongside spatial and temporal contexts; and thus in how social actors work together to construct and maintain social order, and at times to change that order in nuanced and subtle ways. So, from an ethnographic perspective, there is a resonance and shift from a preoccupation with culture or society itself towards the techniques through which interactional realities are maintained; how people use and identify social cues, what is said and left unsaid, how reciprocal relations are shaped and reinforced, and what methods people use used to persuade each other of society and the shared sense of order. Ethnomethodologists have used and developed ethnographical approaches in order to collect what might be identified as naturally occurring interactional data, such as conversations and other language encounters (Silverman, 2011). The analysis of these encounters has helped to uncover techniques through which social actors develop and perform shared understandings, persuading each other of the society of which they are parts. There has been considerable debate about ongoing similarities and differences between ethnomethodology and ethnography (Atkinson, 1988), within a context of recognition that dialogue between the two is ethnographically valuable, expanding the appreciation of ‘the depth, limits and complexity of its own practices and those of the persons or groups comprising its substantive focus’ (Pollner and Emerson, 2001, p. 131).