Page 231 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 219
paid to methods and it is ignored that doing ethnography needs more than a well-prepared research plan. I agree with Ingold (2014: 390) that “ethno- graphy doubtless has its methods ... But that it is a method, applied in the service of some greater end, is questionable”. Even though doing ethno- graphy demands the researcher to use methods to enhance observational engagement, ethnography is more than what we commonly understand with ‘a method’ or “a sequence of prespecified and regulated steps towards the realization of a determinate goal” (ibid.).
So, when we teach ethnography in schools, it is important to make students aware of the fact that doing ethnography is not simply the execu- tion of a research plan. Doing ethnography demands more than learning textbooks by heart. It is a skilled work that can only be learned through experience. It demands an intimate coupling between the lives of others with the ethnographer’s own life. It is about learning to use your own body and mind as research instruments, and your laptop, notebook and recorder as extensions. It can only be discovered through constant trial and error, and there is no clearly-defined finishing line to be reached. It might be in one moment an uplifting experience and in the other moment an unsettling experience. Sometimes a lot might happen, and sometimes nothing at all.
As such, doing ethnography demands not only the research process but also the researcher herself to transform. In writing our ethnogra- phies, we do not only reveal our field insights but also, in each word we are writing down, we are reinventing ourselves. We are allowing ourselves to be open for new possibilities of thinking about experiences and reality. Accordingly, doing ethnography demands an “ontological commitment” (Ingold 2014: 388): “a fulfilment, in both letter and deed, of what we owe to the world for our development and formation”. So, doing an ethnography involves a commitment to the job. And that requires courage: you have to trust yourself and your own impulse to act. It helps to remember that the goal of doing ethnography is not to write a masterpiece or a best-seller. The goal is to develop a comprehensive story of how others think and act, and saying: “Yes, that is as good as I can make it”. Just like craftsmen, ethno- graphers need to display a moral imperative to explore and a willingness to fall in love with their work... over and over again.