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British Journal of Sociology of Education
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British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1995 389
ABSTRACT This paper reviews and critiques sigficant developments within contemporary ethnogra-
phy. Thefirst part of the paper traces the antecedents of ethnography in an anthropology which was itself
closely identiied and entwined with colonialism and imperialism. The paper then goes on to review
contemporary developments within ethnography, particularly those associated with postmodernism.
Attempts to establish a critical ethnography are reviewed and critiqued in the following section. The paper
then goes on to suggest ways in which the concepts of 'really useful knowledge' and the processes of action
research might be combined in order to assist in .the construction of critical ethnography. The paper
concludes by acknowledging the difficulties which exist for educational researchers and practitioners who
wish to practice critical ethnography in the current educational climate in both Britain and North America.
Introduction
There can be no doubt today that qualitative research is widely accepted as a leg
mode of inquiry within the social sciences. Indeed, given the long reign of posit
hegemony since the mid-nineteenth century, its ascendancy in the last 25 years h
quite remarkable. Not only has the 'qualitative turn' challenged the adequ
quantitative methods, it has simultaneously valued and sanctioned the use of non
tivist methodologies, although some would argue that qualitative research in gener
ethnography in particular, has not broken clearly enough with positivism (see Ham
sley, 1994a). In educational research the 'qualitative turn' has had dramatic effec
that it would now be almost unthinkable to begin a study without first consideri
it might be conducted from a qualitative standpoint. Within the sociology of educ
some researchers have even warned of the danger of instituting a new 'orth
founded upon ethnographic procedures (Sharp, 1982). However, while ethnograph
achieved widespread acceptance within the academic community this has not alw
even often, extended to policy-makers and funders of research and this has impli
which we return to at the end of the paper.
Historically, the transition to qualitative research in the British sociology of ed
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390 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
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Critical Ethnography 391
Ethnography: antecedents
Williams (1983) notes that the terms ethnology (a theory of cultural development) and
ethnography (a descriptive study of a culture) both derive from the Greeks 'ethnikos,'
meaning heathen. From the 14th until the 19th century the English term 'ethnic' was
used 'in the senses of heathen pagan or Gentile' (p. 119). By the 1830s and 1840s (when
ethnology and ethnography came into usage) ethnic took on its modern racial overtones,
so that 'Ethnics' in the US by 1961 was used as 'a polite term forJews, Italians and other
lesser breeds'. It is apparent therefore, that both ethnic and ethnography have nuances
of otherness, subordination and marginality. Given these origins, it was not surprising
that ethnography came to be closely associated with, and developed by, an emergent
anthropology in the 19th century which itself was given form by colonialismn and
imperialism.
This last point, the relation between anthropology and colonialism/imperialism has
been the subject of critical examination by Asad (1973, 1986, 1994), Feuchtwang (1973),
Kabbani (1986), and Said (1985, 1989, 1993). All four writers show that modern
anthropology (particularly British and American) retains a theoretical perspective and
conceptual framework that were shaped by colonial conquest and imperialism. Conse-
quently, anthropology was implicated in a complex historical web of colonial-imperial
relations that also influenced developments in ethnography. In advancing their historical
critique of anthropology, these authors also point to some significant problems in
ethnography which we explore in what follows.
Asad (1973) observes that (social) anthropology was coeval with colonialism because:
The colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study access-
ible and safe-because of it sustained physical proximity between the observing
European and the living non-European became a practical possibility. It made
possible the kind of human intimacy upon which anthropological fieldwork is
based, but ensured that intimacy should be one-sided and provisional. (p. 17)
Within this context the colonial power structure not only constituted the material basis
which made practically possible the emergence of an anthropology, but the discipline was
also defined through its readiness to adapt to colonial ideology (Asad, 1973, p. 17).
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392 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
Stephen Feuchtwang (1973) has also shown that the British imperial state developed an
interest in the discipline of anthropology primarily because it allowed it to collect
information and data on its subject territories. Knowledge in this context explicitly
implied power and domination. He points out, for example, that by the late 19th century
British anthropological organisations began a long campaign 'to make anthropology
attractive to British colonial administrators' (1973, p. 81). By the 1920s, anthropologists
such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were receiving private foundation (e.g. Rocke-
feller and Carnegie) funds and government grants to train colonial administrators in the
fieldwork practices of anthropology (i.e. mapping techniques such as surveys and reports).
In this sense, anthropology was imbued with 'la mission civilisatrice' (Said, 1993, p. xix);
the cultural mapping of subject peoples for the purposes of objectifying, controlling and
regulating their entry into capitalist social relations. More recently, Asad (1986, 1994) has
also argued that anthropological theory and method continue to develop and deploy
objectified forms of anthropological knowledge that could potentially act as methods of
social regulation. This is most notable in the contemporary period with a return to the
'empiricist tradition' in the discipline that has lead to the re-emergence of two,
interconnected, historical tendencies: first, the separation of 'observation' and 'theorisa-
tion' as two distinct moments in the ethnographic enterprise; second, the urge to
quantify. The latter is a particularly dangerous trend in that, as he notes, 'statistics has
been not merely a mode of representing a new kind of social life but also of constructing
it' (Asad, 1994, p. 70).
In the last decade Said and Kabbani's work on Orientalism has shown how the West
has attempted to maintain its hold on empire through culture. Central to their analysis
is the way in which Europe and the US constructed a discourse of Orientalism which has
simultaneously represented the Orient as Other and subordinate. In this context, Said
notes:
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Critical Ethnography 393
to other areas, notably cultural studies, that have borrowed their methodologies and
methods from anthropology. For example, in relation to the key anthropological concept
of 'representation' he observes, 'In much recent theory the problem of representation is
deemed central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily
imperial' (pp. 56-57). A second point that Said (1989) draws attention to is the way in
which modern anthropology has become submerged within an institutionalised and
disciplinary identity of its own making. Quite simply, anthropologists (and ethnographers
we will argue) are too much concerned with reproducing the field strategies inscribed
within their academic canon, and too little in exploring alternative epistemological
standpoints. Although some moves have been made in this direction under the auspices
of postmodernism, as we show, this remains an essentially conservative project in purpose
and orientation.
To sum up, the main thrust of our argument is that we can not separate ethnography,
as an anthropological practice, from the historical context from which it emerged. We
suggest that these historical antecedents have had two important, related effects upon
contemporary ethnographic practice. First 'narrative realism' (Gitlin et al., 1993), remains
dominant within anthropology and ethnography. Narrative realism is both a product of
the empiricist tradition (Asad, 1994) and what Said (1989) terms the problematic of the
observer, which he claims has been remarkably underanalysed, even within the more
radical and critical versions of anthropology. This problematic is primarily related to the
anthropologist's epistemological position. That is, while their work gives often detailed
and attractive ethnographic accounts of their stay(s) in the field, the ethnographer's
institutional or material standpoint within the everyday world is rarely connected or
made problematic in relation to his or her 'subjects' lived actualities. There is a
'thunderous silence over the ethnographic subject'. Or, put another way, 'the contribu-
tions of empire to the arts of observation, description, disciplinary formation and
theoretical discourse have been ignored; and with fastidious discretion' (Said, 1993, p.
304).
This implies that educational researchers, particularly sociologists of education, should
adopt participant-observer methods with some caution. In Foucault's language, the
participant observer-observed relationship can, in certain contexts, materialise as a
technology of power, inscribed with messages of domination. For example, in the
contemporary era, the renewed emphasis on the use of ethnography in policy and
programme evaluation oriented research renders such an effect more likely (Finch, 1988;
Hammersley, 1992). As ethnographers we also have to question our own institutional
practices. That is, even in the modern (or postmodern?) era, the state still has a direct
interest in promoting research that provides it with facts for the purposes of social
regulation (Abrams, 1968; Corrigan & Sayer, 1985; Corrigan, 1990). That is, the
connections between contemporary ethnography and its antecedents, anthropology and
sociology, are enmeshed within the historical development of state forms of power,
control and regulation of collective (class, gender, race) and individual identities.
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394 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
In this respect, the postmodern condition constitutes the framing story for a postmodern
ethnography (Tyler, 1986). From this story flow their central analytical insights. First, the
decay and exhaustion of existing paradigms and paradigmatic styles of discourse has
provoked an intellectual and institutional crisis within the social sciences. Within
anthropology and ethnography this has resulted in the disintegration of 'Man' as telos for
a whole discipline (Clifford, 1986). Second, this crisis has made possible an experimental
moment within anthropology which has led to the exploration of new ethnographic
modes of enquiry centred on performative notions such as poetics, evocation and new
styles of sensibility and writing which understand ethnography as always caught up in the
invention, not representation of cultures (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Clifford, 1986). Third,
postmodern ethnography cannot rely upon the authorial practice of narrative realism
(Gitlin et al., 1993), but must seek to produce a polyphonic text, none of whose
participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing
synthesis-a discourse on a discourse (Tyler, 1986). Finally, a postmodern ethnography
leads to an engaged relativism, restored and constantly adapting to the changing
conditions of the world (Marcus & Fischer, 1986). Postmodernism is coeval with an
expansion and pluralisation of the conditions of contemporary multicultural life, and it
is only through a fully reflexive, postmodern ethnography, that this can be apprehended.
Clifford (1986) sums up the results of the postmodern turn in ethnography thus:
There is no longer any place of overview (mountain top) from which to map
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Critical Ethnography 395
human ways of life, no Archimedean point from which to represent the world.
Mountains are in constant motion (...) Human ways of life increasingly
influence, dominate, parody, translate, and subvert one another. Cultural
analysis is always enmeshed in global movements of difference and power.
However one defines it, and the phrase is here used loosely, a world system
now links the planet's societies in a common historical process. (p. 22)
Combined, these theoretical and methodological advances in conventional and postmod-
ern ethnography have been important in challenging positivism as the dominant mode
of praxis in qualitative research. Yet both have important limitations as forms of reflexive
ethnography. In relation to conventional ethnography, critical ethnographers in particu-
lar have argued that it has ignored questions relating to political economy under
capitalism. Further, although conventional ethnography has began to question its key
conceptual terms and language, such as validity, generalisability and so on (Hammersley,
1992; Maxwell, 1992), this questioning often responds to a problematic and discourse
inherited from positivism (Carr & Kemmis, 1993).
In some ways the postmodern turn in ethnography appears to move beyond these
criticisms, particularly if Marcus' (1986) critique of Willis (1977) and Tyler's (1986)
manifesto for a postmodern ethnography are considered. Nevertheless, feminist anthro-
pologists have criticised the new ethnography for ignoring a long tradition of feminist
theory on ethnography in favour of postmodernism. This has led, they argue, to merely
exposing power relations within texts rather than overcoming these relations in the field
(Messica-Lees et al., 1989, p. 33). bell hooks (sic) (1990), while approving of the attempt
to break new ground in ethnography which Writing Culture makes, does not get beyond
the photograph on its front cover before noting that:
It blatantly calls attention to two ideas that are quite fresh in the racist
imagination: that notion of the white male as writer/authority, presented in the
photograph actively producing, and the idea of the passive brown/black man
who is doing nothing, merely looking on. (p. 127)
She goes on to claim that as we look at this photograph we see visual metaphors of
colonialism, domination and racism. There are other problems with which a postmodern
ethnography presents us. The condition of postmodernity is simply asserted. But we may
ask, postmodern conditions for whom? The peoples of the former Soviet Union?
Somalis? The Chinese working class? Muslims in Bosnia? Further, as Said (1993)
observes, intellectuals in the Third World are still very much engaged with capitalism
and modernity! Relatedly, the postmodern condition is vaguely connected to Waller-
stein's (1976) notion of the world system but this relationship remains opaque and
under-analysed. While arguing that meta-narratives are dead, are not post-modernists
creating another with their adoption of the idea of 'world system'? Do postmodern
ethnographers suggest that because every society is in the grip of the world-system, this
same system is necessarily postmodern in nature? Concepts such as power, hegemony
and domination also have little meaning in this perspective; rather they appear on the
page as if some deux ex machina. Ultimately, in postmodern ethnography, we have a vision
of the contemporary world which celebrates diversity, difference, identity, equivalence, in
short multiculturalism, on a global scale. Understood this way, postmodern ethnography
amounts to little more than a re-assertion, under late capitalism, of the politics of a
renascent liberal-pluralism within anthropology (see Rieff, 1993). Indeed, we would go so
far as to say that postmodernism is in need of political economy.
In recent years, critical ethnography has attempted to go beyond the limitations set by
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396 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
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Critical Ethnography 397
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398 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
(region, nation) thereby allowing the 'co-ordination and co-ordering' of social relations
and practices which allow the realisation of governance as an everyday phenomena. A
good example of what Smith refers to here would be 'deficit' or 'debt mania' or
'economic refugee'. Such categories could not be worked up and used to legitimate
government policy on welfare restructuring and cuts, or immigration policy, without the
conceptual infrastructures of either economics or demography.
In the light of this analysis and her own experience as a sociologist, Smith asserts that
we must look beyond and attempt to redefine the dominant themes of contemporary
sociology. In answering this call, she posits an 'institutional ethnography' (1987). This
begins with a 'reorganisation of the relationship of sociologists to the object of our
knowledge and our problematic' (1990a, p. 22). Such reorganisation has two elements:
first, it requires that sociologists are situated 'at the beginning of those acts by which we
know or will come to know; and second, to make our direct embodied experience of the
everyday world the primary ground of our knowledge' (p. 22). Consequently, inquiry
begins with the work organisation within which individuals are situated, whether as
mothers, factory operatives or shop assistants. It is through the social relations of work
that we can connect apparently micro social processes with the wider political economy
of contemporary capitalism (Smith, 1987).
If we accept this position, it means we can dispense with the traditional anxieties of
conventional ethnography in mimicking science and its associated conceptual baggage of
generalisability, validity and so on. For example, rather than adopt the conventional
method of grounded theory where accumulated ethnographies or cases are used to
generate generic explanations across social contexts, we can re-focus our attention on
social relations as 'a point of entry the locus of an experiencing subject or subjects' (p.
157) within contemporary capitalism. Thus, the actuality of the everyday world, not the
conceptual practices of the social sciences, become the point of departure for critical
analysis.
Smith's (1987) conception of an institutional ethnography opens up possibilities for the
construction of a critical ethnographic practice with its shift from the conceptual
practices of sociology to that of the everyday world. It constitutes a critique and a viable
alternative to conventional ethnography, while simultaneously adding a sophisticated
methodological dimension to the approach adopted by Sharp. Nevertheless, there are
problems with her approach. The dense style of Smith's writing does not lend itself easily
to open and accessible interpretation. It is often reified and highly abstract (e.g. her use
of the concept of 'apparatus' or 'relations of ruling'). Yet she is appealing to women (and
men) through the production of a sociology of knowledge which will impinge on the
everyday lives of ordinary women as a form of consciousness-raising. In this way there
is a tension in her writing: at one level she intends to write as a feminist who is concerned
to revoke the everyday oppressions of women; at another level, she addresses the
institutionalised academic, and a very specialised academic too. In short, because of her
leaning to an academic audience, her project remains entangled within the very
conceptual practices she attempts to deconstruct.
Smith (1987) also insists upon an intellectual division between the ethnographer and
subject. Institutional ethnography does not 'involve substituting the analysis, the perspec-
tives and views of subjects for the investigation by the sociologist' (p. 161). She makes
quite clear, that the 'special business of the sociologist' is to reveal, through 'specialised
investigation,' the social bases of power and domination in the social sciences and other
ruling apparatuses. However, she does not argue for the institutional ethnographer as
expert or professional, as conventional ethnography would. Her position is that while the
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Critical Ethnography 399
ethnographer can and should engage with her subjects in the research setting with a view
to the production of critical knowledge, there exists a necessary division of labour that
hinders the harmonisation of the two roles. While this cannot be entirely by-passed the
ethnographer should strive to establish an exchange process that is mutually enriching in
which a sharper, critical account of the everyday world emerges. However, there is a
tension in her work concerning the relationship of the ethnographer to her subjects
which remains unresolved. A final consideration is that although Smith's institutional
ethnography represents a powerful methodology, she has mostly left it to others to
investigate the problematic of the everyday world (see Campbell & Manicom, 1995).
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400 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
In short, critical ethnography has to decide which audiences it intends to address and
how and through what methods it may effectively do this. While critical ethnographers
have been successful in addressing academic audiences, it is less clear whether they
continue to be committed to seeking out and building upon the kind of alternatives that
Thompson refers to.
Second, and of greater importance, is the problem of the dialogue established through
the participant-observed relation. Although critical ethnography purports to present us
with a view from the bottom-up, its practitioners nonetheless come from the ivory towers
of academia. As we saw with Smith, at the end of the day/night shift, the ethnographer's
material location is often at odds with those whom they research. This social relation
poses problems for critical ethnographers who wish to engage with others in the shaping,
production and dissemination of knowledge for the purposes of conscientisation (Freire,
1972). The problem is how to ensure that research findings, which disclose sources of
power and domination, do not decay within the research site. We want to suggest two
approaches to overcoming these problems. The first connects critical ethnography with
the nineteenth century concept of 'really useful knowledge' recently revived by Richard
Johnson (1979, 1988).
The idea of really useful knowledge comes from the attempts of early 19th century
working class radicals to establish independent forms of education before the advent of
mass schooling. In this respect, really useful knowledge relied upon popular culture for
its content and forms. Johnson has shown that it had four elements. First, it was
oppositional to state forms of schooling. Second, it enacted alternative practices of
learning which were concerned with self-education. Third, it was preoccupied with
'education, politics, knowledge and power' (1979, p. 5). Fourth, it focused upon the
formation of autonomous educational practices which served practical ends-for the
learner, from his or her situation within the world. In these respects, it was counter-hege-
monic to the social regulation sought through state schooling.
Through lack of resources, its own internal contradictions and finally, mass schooling,
the educational practices associated with really useful knowledge were virtually erased
from the popular memory. Two hundred years later, really useful knowledge seems like
a mirage. However, as the historical work of Simon (1965), Philips & Putnam (1980), and
Wrigley (1982) on independent working-class education has shown, forms of really useful
knowledge have continually threatened to pose viable alternatives to state provided
schooling and post-secondary education. Indeed, even within the state system, curricu-
lum spaces have been created by teachers who used really useful knowledge as a
resource. Think, for example, of the pioneering work conducted by the higher grade and
central schools during the 'golden-age' (1880-1902) of technical education that was
eventually suppressed by the 1902 Balfour Act (Blackman, 1990; Vlaeminke, 1990).
Contemporaneously, our research experience of the Technical and Vocational Education
Initiative (TVEI) has shown us that although the Initiative did not lead to systematic
innovations that drew upon and produced really useful knowledge, its emphasis upon the
'practical' did lead in a limited number of cases to teaching, learning and assessment
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Critical Ethnography 401
practices that had the potential for its realisation. Another contemporary example
concerns the development of records of achievement. While recording achievement has
an inherent tendency to be used as a technology of surveillance (Hargreaves, 1989), it
also holds out the possibility of allowing students knowledge and experience to inform
and shape teaching, learning and assessment. That is, records of achievement have the
potential to stimulate pedagogical encounters in which students everyday world, within
and without school, is valued in the curriculum. Likewise, as MacDonald & Coffield
(1991), Rees (1988), Rees & Rees (1992), and Skillen (1992) have convincingly argued,
the concept and practice of 'enterprise education' could be redefined using criteria other
than making a loss or profit. Philip Cohen (1990a, b) has attempted to draw upon his
experience with the Inner London Education Authority's No Kidding! project, to develop
forms of social and life skills that avoid the 'negative capability' (i.e. an ideology of
possessive-individualism) implicit within existing school-based work experience and
Training and Enterprise Council schemes. From outside formal schooling and training
the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards' combined committee plan and the projects instituted
under the former Greater London Enterprise Board not only drew upon really useful
knowledge for the purposes of technology utilisation and production but attempted a
redefinition of enterprise itself (Cooley, 1987; Linn, 1987; Wainwright, 1982).
Consequently, we argue that critical ethnography should not only seek out and
constructively engage with such practices, but also support their dissemination. In the era
of a renascent 'English tradition' restored by the national curriculum, critical ethnogra-
phy stands as the only viable research approach that will allow teachers to critically
engage and pose alternatives to the conservative pull of current school reforms. It does
this not by starting from the dead weight of sociological or anthropological theory, as
conventional ethnography does, but from a recognition that critical research begins with
and works from the knowledge and skills of the subjects of our research.
Such research not only holds out the possibility of a recovery of genuinely popular
forms of social consciousness and the social practices which it generates. It also opens up
opportunities for reconstructing social and political theory, as well as critical ethnogra-
phy. This is because, as Johnson makes clear, really useful knowledge contains within it
profound insights and critiques of the actuality of the everyday world from those who live
there. As well as informing the theory and practice of critical ethnography, a re-appraisal
of the participant-observed relation becomes possible. Rather than providing expert
knowledge, the role of the critical ethnographer should be oriented to facilitating the
production and dissemination of really useful knowledge within the research site. As
Connell et al., have argued, educational research 'should embody a relationship where
expertise is a resource available to all rather than a form of power for a few' (1982, p.
216). For this to happen on an on-going basis and to avoid the problem of data decay,
critical ethnographers have to recognise the essentially pedagogical nature of the social
relations they enter within any research setting.
To create a really useful and critical ethnographic praxis, it is not enough 'to
encourage self-reflection and deeper understanding on the part of the persons being
researched' so as to attain 'full reciprocity in research' (Lather, 1991, p. 60). Rather, we
must aim to learn and impart skills which will allow our subjects to continue investigating
the world in which they will go on living. We emphasise skills here because we believe
it is not only sources of critical commonsense that we need to tap, but the everyday
methods used to produce this knowledge. In short, making the everyday world problem-
atic for ourselves is not enough; making it problematic for those we leave behind in the
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402 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
field should be the point. The researched as researchers then becomes the problem for
critical ethnography.
The second approach to developing emancipatory forms of ethnography draws on the
more contemporary and, we argue, complementary, concept of action research. We
suggest that by drawing upon concepts and methods derived from both 'really useful
knowledge' and action research it may be possible to strengthen the practice of critical
ethnography.
Action research has been defined as 'a form of research carried out by practitioners'
in order to 'improve the rationality and justice of (a) their own social and educational
practices, (b) their understanding of these practices and (c) the situations in which the
practices are carried out' (Kemmis, 1993). The intellectual origins of action research,
particularly in relation to education, can be traced back through Schwab's concept of
practical reasoning (Schwab et al., 1978), Kolb's experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984),
Schon's reflective practitioner (Schon, 1983) to Lewin who coined the term 'action
research' (Kemmis, 1993). However, the history of action research in education over the
last 50 years is complex, containing many strands, emphases, nuances and variations
between national and operational contexts (Nofike, 1994). In Britain, the growth of
interest in action research in education is particularly associated with Lawrence Sten-
house and his colleagues working at the Centre for Applied Research in Education
(CARE) at the University of East Anglia from the 1970s. Certainly in university
education departments, action research is well established on in-service and award-bear-
ing courses for teachers, although how far much of this activity meets the criteria of
action research 'purists' is a moot point. Lomax (1994) has recently pointed out some of
the tensions which exist between action research and the criteria traditionally brought to
bear in assessing work for award-bearing courses in higher education. In similar vein,
Kemmis (1993) argues that the intervention of outsiders may introduce significant
distortions into the processes of action research. He accuses some so-called facilitators of
appropriating action research for the purposes of their careers within the academy.
However, despite the relative popularity of action research in universities, much
British educational research, including ethnographic, funded by government bodies,
research councils and charitable trusts has a much more 'conventional' character, being
concerned with 'outcomes', 'findings', 'dissemination' and, increasingly, the 'provision of
information to policy-makers'. In contrast to this funded and prestigious research, action
research has something of the flavour of a 'cottage industry', although this may be seen
as a strength rather than a weakness.
In terms of the argument presented in this paper the most significant element of action
research is the redefinition of the relationship between the researcher and the researched.
Indeed, action research would dissolve the distinction between the two. Insofar as
professional researchers have a role within action research this is strictly circumscribed.
In this way action research avoids the privileging of the ethnographer which, we have
argued, persists in some forms of critical ethnography. This is not to suggest that there
is no place for the specialist skills of the ethnographer within action research, but that this
expertise should not be privileged but set alongside whatever skills, experience and
knowledge other participants bring to the pedagogical encounter.
As noted above there are many approaches to action research that emphasise different
methodologies and method. Although we cannot detail them here, there is one strand of
the debate within the action research community which has particular relevance to our
argument that action research, in combination with really useful knowledge, provides a
way forward for the future development of critical ethnography. Since its publication in
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Critical Ethnography 403
1986, Carr & Kemmis's Becoming Critical has become one of the most influential texts in
the development of action research. For our purposes, what is significant, is that
throughout the text Carr & Kemmis are explicit in grounding their approach to action
research in the critical theory of Habermas, and by association, the Frankfurt School. In
other words, their analysis begins from a standpoint which is not embedded in the
everyday world, but in an institutionalised, theoretically heavy, academic discipline.
Because of this theoretical orientation, writers such as Elliott (1991) have gone so far as
to accuse this approach to action research of being 'dangerous.' Its debt to critical theory,
he argues, implies that this version of action research has 'tended to perpetuate an
assumption contained in the anthropological theory of cognition: namely, that the
self-understandings teachers have of their everyday practices constitute ideologically
distorted misrepresentations of reality' (p. 115). From within this perspective, it is the
work of critical social theory to provide a critique of ideology that will allow teachers to
penetrate the 'true' nature of their practice, thus reproducing a distinction between
science and ideology. Rightly, we believe, Elliott rejects this view and argues that the
'ambiguities, conflicts and tensions' contained within teacher self-understandings makes
possible the emergence of a 'self-generating, reflexive and critical pedagogy' (p. 116).
However, we would want to take a step back, and add that 'ambiguities, conflicts and
tensions' are embedded within a particular, subterranean, 'moral economy' (Thompson,
1971) of schooling within capitalism. That is, schools as communities can be character-
ised as institutions with their own traditions, customs, practices and notions of 'right' that
stand outside, and sometimes opposed to, government policy (as in testing). In recent
years, such opposition has intensified as the existing moral economy of progressive
education in English schooling has come into conflict with the new vocationalism, the
moribund scholastic philosophy underlying the national curriculum, and the market
provisions of the 1988 Education Reform Act (Avis, 1991). Critical theory may have a
place in developing teachers understandings of these processes, but this should only occur
after they have been encouraged to investigate their own forms of really useful
knowledge. We propose, therefore, that action research should focus on how and by
what means the denser reality of schooling generates oppositional knowledge and
practices to current reforms among teachers. This, we contend, is where action research
should focus its methodological eye, not upon critical theory.
Thus, we foresee a pedagogical encounter in which ethnographic expertise (including
social theory) and practitioner perspectives are brought together without any privileged
elements arising in the ensuing pedagogical encounter. The results of such encounters are
inevitably unpredictable and in this sense problematise the concept and practice of
critical ethnography. Some recent accounts of action research have begun to show how
critical ethnography can work in teacher development (Gitlin & Smyth, 1989; Smyth,
1991; Tripp, 1993). Nevertheless, we hope that future action research turns to really
useful knowledge as both a topic and resource for teacher training and support.
Conclusion
In this paper we have been arguing for a critical appraisal of the dominant
contemporary ethnography (conventional, postmodern and critical). Although
necessity been condensed and partial, our intention was to show that co
ethnography, despite attempts to move beyond positivism, is still concerne
reproduction of normal science (Kuhn, 1970). Conventional ethnography, that
itself as a disinterested, scientific activity, committed to modes of inquiry
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404 S. Jordan & D. Yeomans
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Critical Ethnography 405
develop league tables which measure the 'value-added' by schools, are likely to reinforce
the prevalence of quantitative research in the national policy arena (see Hammersley,
1994b) (not that national policy makers in Britain show much inclination to make use of
any type of research).
The general point is that just as anthropology emerged through the material and
ideological opportunities and constraints offered by imperialism so a critical ethnography
of the sort we have advocated must also take account of the circumstances in which
potential participants find themselves. We must admit that analysed in this way the
prospects for critical ethnography do not look bright. We recognise the unpropitious
circumstances in which potential critical ethnographers find themselves and yet we
continue to hope that teachers and researchers will be able to find 'shady places' in which
they can continue to resist and subvert the coercive and prescriptive effects of current
policies and the attenuated concerns of those who promote and fund research. For
critical ethnographers the task remains to exploit the 'ambiguities, conflicts and tensions'
within the educational state in order to seek out the spaces within which their project can
be advanced.
Acknowledgements
Both authors would like to thank Inge Bates, Nancy Jackson and two of the journal's
reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Steve Jordan wish
to thank the Social Science Research and Humanities Council (SSRHC) of Canada fo
a doctoral grant to support this work. Grant No. 752-92-2643.
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