Sociologists understand the term ‘organization’ in very broad terms to mean any structure by which social life and behaviour are managed. The term is more narrowly understood to mean formal organizations with a bureaucratic structure. Some formal organizations process ‘clients’, like schools and police stations, where the principal purpose is the management of people and their needs. Others are...

98 Introduction Collectively qualitative research is a group of methodologies, with each approach offering a different lens though which to explore, understand, interpret or explain phenomena in real word contexts and settings. This article will provide an overview of one of the many qualitative approaches, ethnography, and its relevance to healthcare. We will use an exemplar based on a study t...

All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis— and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available ...