Participant Observation as Ethnography or Ethnography as Participant Observation in Organizational Research

Sandiford’s contribution is a good example of the interpretative variation of the pragmatist research ideology, which is obviously his philosophy underlying this, and that which underlies the ethnography-observation-participation dilemma he critically analyzes in this chapter. His within-group qualitative unit of analysis focuses on “the implications of participating or only observing when conducting ethnography during organizational field studies” (editor’s interpretation). It is customary for a researcher at the far right of the pragmatist ideology—but not quite constructivist—to take an interpretative approach while encouraging participants to assist in the reflection and clarification in the meaning of the data and phenomena collected. His approach seems close to action research insofar as he advocates the researcher to participate in ethnography so as to promote a better expression of the phenomena from the socio-cultural perspectives of the participants as a whole. Speaking from my own experience, I advise researchers to clarify their research design ideology, otherwise they are likely to have their manuscripts returned from fundamentalists at the end of a double-blind peer-review process due to incorrectly applying a formal methodology.