This clear, straightforward textbook embraces the practical reality of actually doing fieldwork. It tackles the common problems faced by new researchers head on, offering sensible advice and instructive case studies from the author’s own experience. Barbara Czarniawska takes us on a master class through the research process, encouraging us to revisit the various facets of the fieldwork research and helping us to reframe our own experiences. Combining a conversational style of writing with an impressive range of empirical examples she takes the reader from planning and designing research to collecting and analyzing data all the way to writing up and disseminating findings. This is a sophisticated introduction to a broad range of research methods and methodologies; it will be of great interest to anyone keen to revisit social research in the company of an expert guide.

Analyzing Field Material

Analyzing Field Material

In this chapter, I review ways of analyzing field material in which text analysis is not the goal: grounded theory approach, content analysis, discourse and conversation analyses, and visual analyses. The necessary brevity of various descriptions is compensated by a longer list of further reading.

Within a broad definition – the famous one by Barthes (1977), for example – every kind of field material can be interpreted as text. A more conventional definition would distinguish between texts and pictures, although scholars have recently become interested in sound, tactility, and taste (see e.g. Mann et al., 2011). I decided to dedicate the next chapter specifically to text analyses; in this chapter I discuss the analysis of field material that may consist of or ...

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