Ethnographic strategies for making the familiar strange: Struggling with ‘distance’ and ‘immersion’ among Moroccan-Dutch students

Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education

Japanese business in the Dutch polder: the experience of cultural differences in asymmetrical power relations

The article investigates the interrelation between organizational context and human agency in intercultural interactions. Arguing against the dominant approach in cross-cultural research that relies heavily on 'objective' dimension scores and therewith dissociates culture from actual intercultural encounters in specific contexts, it proposes that, under certain social-political conditions, organizational members may perceive or present particular cultural characteristics as especially significant. The article employs data from ethnographic materials gathered in the European head office of a Japanese multinational in the Netherlands. The implications of the findings are discussed with specific focus on the impact of the distribution of power and resources in an organizational setting on the salience of cultural differences in transnational cooperation. © 2005 Taylor & Francis

Ethnography

Many qualitative studies in journalism and mass communication research draw on ethnographic methods that originated in anthropology and sociology. These methods involve studying people within their own cultural environment through intensive fieldwork; they emphasize the subjects' frames of reference and understandings of the world. This article uses a comparison between journalism and ethnographic research as a framework for highlighting common problems with manuscripts using this method. It offers veteran ethnographers' tips about what they look for in a manuscript and identifies three ethnographies that are examples of successful application of the method to topics of interest to journal readers