Critical Realism and Contrastive Ethnography

Though critical realism has been featured in sociological debates about the philosophy of science, its relevance to methodological considerations, and especially to ethnographic scholarship, is quite limited. This chapter combines an extended case method approach to ethnography with a critical realist approach to comparison. Critical realism augments ethnographic comparison in two ways: 1) by showing that one can compare across both events and causal mechanisms due to ontological stratification; and 2) by considering the conjunctural and contingent nature of causality. However, critical realism’s emphasis on causality is also complicated by ethnographic research, which sheds light on the mutual causal relationship between structures and actors. This chapter, therefore, considers what critical realism has to offer ethnography and what ethnography, in turn, offers critical realism. It does so by comparing the experiences and beliefs of Somali refugee communities in Minneapolis and Toronto, who are contending with high rates of autism spectrum disorder and have forged epistemic communities united around an etiology, ontology, and treatment protocol that challenges mainstream science.

Comparative Ethnographic Views of Social Structure

The concept of micro social structure is viewed as a level of predication requiring explicit reference to specific knowledge processes and memory systems initiated and sustained by conscious and unconscious contacts with self and others, including verbal and nonverbal observation of daily life settings. Communal life is enabled by micro-level, affective, cognitive, analogical, and relational reasoning; different types of communicative events; and taken-for-granted normative and tacit knowledge. “Macro social structure” refers to large or enlarged complex forms of organization activities: sociocultural, political-economic, sociohistorical, aggregated micro, behavioral, communicative actions essential for eliciting demographic, sample-survey, and archival historical data that ignores tacit, micro-level phenomena—that is, real-time, real-life, conscious episodic and unconscious procedural memory, colloquial language use, gestural events, documented elicitation procedures, and mundane forms of communal daily life. This chapter examines observed and recorded, moment-to-moment, negotiated elements of behavioral outpatient clinical medicine as it emerges in situated, ethnographic settings. One goal of this chapter is to clarify the micro of the concept of cognitive overload, a cognitive/behavioral obstacle inherent in all communicative, socially organized ecological settings. Participant observation data leverages the temporal and situational comparisons of the method required for the study and explanation of micro social structure. Thus micro social structure is essential for understanding the normative, socially organized, institutionalized macro, complex activities called medical clinics, and hospital settings embedded in abstract meso-structures, such as macro-economic systems.

The Thematic Lens

This chapter outlines a comparative framework for ethnographic analysis that combines contributions from formal sociology, symbolic interaction, and the strong program in cultural sociology. Building on the methodological perspective that Eviatar Zerubavel has termed “social pattern analysis,” the authors show how underlying formal properties, including patterns of social interaction, foundational narrative structures, and formulaic modes of performance, tie otherwise quite disparate cases together. Moreover, actors in different contexts merge these social forms with widespread cultural codes, resulting in patterned structures of meaning. Otherwise different cases thus emerge as variant manifestations of a common social theme. Using such social themes as analytic lenses offers great promise for theory construction and serves as a guide for expanding empirical inquiry to a greater range of contexts and cases. Drawing on research pertaining to various topics, the chapter shows how using a thematic lens provides a compelling foundation for comparative multicase analysis while honing the interpretive and descriptive strengths traditionally associated with ethnography on the underlying properties and processes that tie such cases together.

Conclusion

This volume is guided by the goal of productive pluralism—the simple notion that even though ethnographic approaches may be partially incompatible with one another, the field as a whole benefits from diverse contributions to understanding social life. Beyond a mutual tolerance that leaves ethnographers in their silos, such a pluralism supports sustained scholarly dialog to clarify points of disagreement as well as illuminate opportunities for collaborative problem-solving. To this end, this volume has included works from prominent scholars representing various traditions to articulate what, why, and how they engage in ethnographic comparison. This concluding chapter contextualizes the contributions of the authors, pointing to both divergences and (perhaps) surprising synergies in the ways they approach ethnography. The chapter begins by considering the basic questions of how and why the contributors perform comparison. Having summarized the approaches, the authors discuss specific comparisons of research processes, research products, and the criteria used for evaluating both. The chapter concludes by suggesting how these synergies open the possibility for a chance to address further concerns in comparative methodology.

An Ethnography of Comparative Ethnography

This chapter discusses the different pathways to and practices of the comparative extended case method. All three projects examined here seek to relate the microscopic and time-place specific world of ethnographic observation to the broader forces, institutions, and processes that shape them. All are comparative, although they follow different logics of inquiry: variable comparison between two gendered factory regimes in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; incorporating comparison of two patterns of working-class formations in the rustbelt and sunbelt of China; and the third eventful comparison of Chinese state capital and global private capital in Zambia. Beginning with either theoretical inspirations or fieldwork imperatives, the pathways leading to these respective types of comparison is always a dialog and compromise between both.

Conducting Comparative Participant Observation

Following the argument for the importance of comparative participant observation for approaches descendent from the conventional scientific tradition (CST), this chapter outlines how the behavioralist foundations summarized in chapter 1 translate to procedures and techniques for charting causal mechanisms in comparative ethnographic research. The chapter begins by examining the practices and techniques of the behavioralist approach in detail and describes the mode of research design, sampling, data collection, analysis, and explanation associated with this approach, giving examples from prior empirical works. The chapter then turns to longstanding concerns about ethnographic reliability and replication and explains how this approach addresses them. In doing so, it shows how behavioralist criteria align with, and diverge from, other methodological approaches to the collection, analysis, and extension of ethnographic data. The chapter concludes by explaining the contributions that can be made by repositioning participant observation within the spectrum of approaches to understanding causal processes in the social sciences.

Elite Ethnography

As a comparison of three journals reveals, ethnographers in the field of US sociology have largely tended to “study up” rather than “study down.” In other words, problems facing marginalized groups have received far more detailed qualitative study than the habits (and habitus) of elite groups. While recognizing that this pattern has recently shifted toward a flowering of cross-national work on elites, this chapter looks at past disparities to investigate whether the difference in ethnographic focus has been—until now—exceptional within the American academic field. Specifically, the chapter focuses on a cross-cultural comparison of French and American ethnographies. In the United States, many ethnographers assume that elites are hard to study because of difficulties related to access. Yet perusing French ethnography reveals that partly due to the theoretical influence of Pierre Bourdieu, well-known work in France like that of Michel and Monique Pinçon-Charlot has long succeeded in providing detailed chronicles of elite groups’ daily lives. This chapter argues that the issue to date has likely involved dispositional orientations as well as challenges of access. There may be subtle reasons, such as concerns with Goffman-like contagion effects, why sociologists unwittingly prefer to study the downtrodden over the privileged. In addition to analyzing the relative influences of access versus dispositional factors, the chapter ends with four reasons why attention to elites is important for ethnography and sociology, as both strive to grasp growing inequalities and the psychosocial causes of recurrent cycles of power and powerlessness.

Using Computational Tools to Enhance Comparative Ethnography

The medical profession has invested untold treasure in quantifying bodily processes, and excellence in the quantified biological sciences has long been the surest route to professional fame. Yet the profession also recognizes that success in the healing arts requires a grasp and appreciation of narrative and culture. Culture shapes biomedicine in at least three ways, all of which may be interrogated through ethnography. First, biomedicine has imbued the provider–patient relationship with special cultural status, and ethnography can provide insights into the nature of this relationship (which has been variously interpreted as a necessary component of a functional society, a hallmark of occupational power, or an aspect of boundary work by a knowledge profession). Second, biomedicine recognizes that health is shaped by culturally mediated behaviors that typically occur outside the clinical setting and are thus beyond providers’ immediate apprehension and control. Ethnography can provide insights into these behaviors. Finally, the scale of contemporary biomedicine (healthcare spending accounts for one-sixth of gross domestic product) has produced complex cultural institutions. Ethnographic insights are needed to characterize the organizational culture of medicine and improve the practice of healing.

Foundations of the Behavioralist Approach to Comparative Participant Observation

The specter of positivism looms large in both the discussion and the practice of sociological research. Ethnographic traditions such as grounded theory and the extended case method have long emphasized how their approaches provide a critical alternative to the typically quantitative approaches grounded in the conventional scientific tradition (CST) descendent from positivism. In contrast, this chapter takes a different approach by showing how and why an approach to participant observation drawing on behavioralist principles serves a necessary and irreducible role in the realist variable-based approach that has succeeded positivism as the standard for mainline social science. However, addressing CST concerns about validity, generalization, and replication involves more than a symbolic gesture toward these issues or critiques of other methods. Participant observers must employ a rigorous approach to multisite sampling, leverage comparison, and employ reproducible observational techniques to systematically analyze continuity and variation in human behavior. While acknowledging that this can be difficult in the current intellectual environment, this chapter argues that the payoff is substantial—when done well this form of ethnography provides unparalleled resources for observing causal mechanisms in situ, producing robust models that link micro-, meso-, and macro-level social processes, and reducing inferential error in explanations of behavioral patterns.

A Dialog with Aaron Cicourel on Comparative Ethnography

In this chapter, eminent ethnographer and cognitive sociologist Aaron Cicourel shares insights gleaned from using ethnographic methods for the past six decades. In conversation with Corey Abramson, Cicourel addresses a number of important issues about both the practice of comparative ethnography and the academic contexts in which it takes place. Cicourel argues for attentiveness to an often-overlooked strength of comparative ethnography—the way cross-site ethnographic comparisons can be used to chart not just variation, but comparatively invariant aspects of human behavior in a way that captures real-time, localized behavior and language use. Cicourel explains how his approach consequently draws upon diverse traditions ranging from cognitive linguistics to behavioral ecology to produce a more integrated form of comparative sociology that encompasses multiple levels of social and physical reality. In the process, Cicourel proceeds to voice his current position on topics including approaches to comparison, ecological validity and levels of analysis, language use, the historical connection of his approach to ethnomethodology, team science in contemporary academia, analogical and digital approaches to inquiry, the role of theory, and what he hopes future ethnographers will learn from his career.