Field research

The data in turn, depend upon the field worker, their level of involvement, and ability to see and visualize things that other individuals visiting the area of study may fail to notice.

Better grasping of such material means a better understanding of the forces of culture operating in the area and the ways they modify the lives of the people under study.

When humans themselves are the subject of study, protocols must be devised to reduce the risk of observer bias and the acquisition of too theoretical or idealized explanations of the workings of a culture.

The process of field notes begin as the researcher participates in local scenes and experiences in order to make observations that will later be written up.

The method originated in field work of social anthropologists, especially the students of Franz Boas in the United States, and in the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology.

[3] Max Gluckman noted that Bronisław Malinowski significantly developed the idea of fieldwork, but it originated with Alfred Cort Haddon in England and Franz Boas in the United States.

[5]: 4 Anthropological fieldwork uses an array of methods and approaches that include, but are not limited to: participant observation, structured and unstructured interviews, archival research, collecting demographic information from the community the anthropologist is studying, and data analysis.

Field research also can involve study of other kingdoms of life, such as plantae, fungi, and microbes, as well as ecological interactions among species.

For instance, researchers have used ethnography, netnography, and in-depth interviews within Consumer Culture Theory, a field that aims to understand the particularities of contemporary consumption.

The objective of field research in economics is to get beneath the surface, to contrast observed behaviour with the prevailing understanding of a process, and to relate language and description to behavior (Deirdre McCloskey, 1985)[clarification needed].

[11] In a recent interview Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom discuss the importance of examining institutional contexts when performing economic analyses.

They believe that policymakers need to give local people a chance to shape the systems used to allocate resources and resolve disputes.

This is a point of view that fits very well with anthropological research, which has for some time shown us the logic of local systems of knowledge — and the damage that can be done when "solutions" to problems are imposed from outside or above without adequate consultation.

Using this combination, she contested longstanding assumptions about the possibility that groups of people could cooperate to solve common pool problems, as opposed to being regulated by the state or governed by the market.

Although institutions and practices are intangibles, such a picture will be objective, a matter of fact, independent of the state of mind of the particular agents reported on.

The schools of thought derive from Taylor, Henri Fayol, Lyndall Urwick, Herbert A. Simon, and others endeavored to prescribe and expound norms to show what managers must or should do.

Aktouf (2006, p. 198) summed-up Mintzberg observations about what takes place in the field:‘’First, the manager’s job is not ordered, continuous, and sequential, nor is it uniform or homogeneous.

Fourth, the manager acts as a focal point, an interface, or an intersection between several series of actors in the organization: external and internal environments, collaborators, partners, superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and so forth.

During the Algerian War in 1958–1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle people (a subgroup of the Berbers), which provided the groundwork for his anthropological reputation.

One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies and his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data.

In the preface to his book The Craft of Sociology, Bourdieu argued that: "I use Correspondence Analysis very much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose philosophy fully expresses what in my view constitutes social reality.

One of the classic ethnographies in Sociology is the book Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations & Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood by Jay MacLeod.

The researcher spent time studying two groups of teenagers in a housing project in a Northeastern city of the United States.

The study concludes that three different levels of analysis play their part in the reproduction of social inequality: the individual, the cultural, and the structural.

[22] Similar to Bourdieu's work, this perspective gathers statements, observations and facts from real-world situations to create more robust research outcomes.