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Sociological Perspectives
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DOI: 10.1177/0731121418755121
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Sociological Cases

Andrew Deener1

Abstract
Building ethnographic knowledge is a tacit epistemic process involving two steps: narrowing down
the framework through which ethnographers hold constant empirical units as social relationships
of the same kind, and paring down the boundaries of time and space to contextualize the data
as levels of analysis. This article explicates the workings of and relationships between these
hermeneutic and phenomenological processes as the underlying architecture of ethnographic
knowledge. It shows that narrowing down data and contexts is fundamental to moving beyond
the substantive contribution to the development of sociological cases. In this regard, case
development is paradoxical: Narrowing down is necessary for generalizing up.

Keywords
ethnography, theorizing, sociology of knowledge

Introduction
The “turn to practice” in the sociology of knowledge has impacted how qualitative researchers
reflect upon building connections between “descriptive information and analytic statements”
(Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011:3; also see Ragin and Becker 1992; Swedberg 2012; Tavory
and Timmermans 2014; Vaughan 2004). Widespread debates over best practices demonstrate
how qualitative knowledge has integrated broader disciplinary concerns about the relationship
between causation, interpretation, and explanation. These debates also reveal a fracturing in the
field of qualitative knowledge production (e.g., Anderson 2002; Duneier 2002; Newman 2002;
Wacquant 2002).
Practitioners learn and take for granted different underlying assumptions about building cases.
These distinctions in qualitative knowledge are not simply based on competing data-gathering
techniques. Whether a person conducts interviews, archival research, or participant observation
certainly impacts available types of data and sociological questions. Yet, sociologists employing
specific data-gathering techniques also learn to incorporate “epistemological machinery” that
makes “social knowledge possible and intelligible” in distinct ways (Abend, Petre, and Sauder
2013:640).

1University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:
Andrew Deener, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.
Email: andrew.deener@uconn.edu
2 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

There are wide-ranging empirical and analytic approaches in the field of ethnographic knowl-
edge. These include abductive analysis (Tavory and Timmermans 2014, 2009; Timmermans and
Tavory 2012), analogical theorizing (Vaughan 1992, 1996, 2004, 2006, 2014), analytic induction
(Becker 1958; Katz 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Lindesmith 1968; Znaniecki 1934), analytic ethnogra-
phy (Lofland 1995; Snow, Morrill, and Anderson 2003), carnal sociology (Wacquant 2004,
2005), the extended case method (Burawoy 1991, 1998, 2009; Gluckman 1961), grounded theory
(Charmaz 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967), institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 2005), peo-
pled ethnography (Fine 2003), and relational ethnography (Desmond 2014).
This article neither proposes another distinct framework for constructing ethnographic knowl-
edge, nor does it refute the utility and value of any of the existing approaches. Instead, it shows
that underlying divergent approaches are mundane phenomenological and hermeneutic founda-
tions that shape the architecture of ethnographic knowledge.1 Tacit epistemic competencies
enable researchers to begin the process of turning the complex noise of observable reality into the
pursuit of sociological cases.
Melvin Pollner (1974) argues that people take for granted a shared “reality” of the “objective”
world that allows for “continued experiential access” between interaction partners. What he calls
“mundane reasoning” is built upon tacit knowledge. Mundane social competencies allow sub-
jects to maintain the momentum of an interaction situation even amid confusions. As Steven
Shapin (1994:31–33) points out, tacit social competencies are also fundamental to the pursuit of
“truth.” Even scientific endeavors build upon mundane conventions that allow participants to
“repair” disruptions, not simply about observations of the basic facts, but “about what the object
was all along.”
Ethnographers similarly absorb tacit epistemic competencies about the object of investigation
in pursuing their cases. These discreet and taken-for-granted proficiencies play an important role
in the reproduction of the fractured field. Ethnographers develop mundane competencies to carve
out and stabilize distinct forms of data and contexts from the complex and multidimensional pos-
sibilities of observable reality. No researcher can include every empirical instance from their
field sites into their sociological cases. They produce rich and varied data sets over lengthy peri-
ods of time, but just as importantly, they learn how to narrow down what they focus on in their
field sites, field notes, memos, articles, and book chapters to make their research relevant to other
sociologists.
This article focuses on two iterative stages of narrowing down data and contexts as the archi-
tecture of ethnographic knowledge. The first stage involves learning to see and take for granted
a distinct form of social ontology. Ethnographers learn to hold constant empirical units as social
relationships of the same kind. The second stage requires ethnographers to pare down the bound-
aries of time and space to contextualize the data. By stabilizing coherent boundaries as the social
context, ethnographers reinforce how they apply levels of analysis into causal connections.
Narrowing down both data and contexts as units and levels of analysis is necessary for general-
izing up in the pursuit of sociological cases.

Narrowing Down Sociological Data

Those who have studied or taught sociology know that seeing the world through sociological
eyes often requires a strategic break from students’ overtly individualistic orientations toward
interpretations of human life as “social.” A similar learning process exists in producing ethno-
graphic knowledge. Ethnographers learn to see relatively autonomous human experiences, and
increasingly human relationships with nonhumans, as social. Researchers have multiple options
available about how to empirically construct “the social” as data, how and where to look for it,
and how to write about it. Over time, researchers develop specific social ontologies into mundane
competencies.2 They learn to take for granted empirical observations as sociological data.
Deener 3

According to Howard S. Becker (2005), ethnographers do not sit back and wait for interesting
topics and facts to appear out of thin air. He argues, “It’s better to say that we ‘emerge’ them, that
we invent them as a result of what we learn once we begin our work” (Becker 2005). This learn-
ing is not only built upon experiences and observations in a field site with subjects. Ethnographers
employ conventional ways of seeing even before they enter the field. These interpretive compe-
tencies allow researchers to sustain observations of the same units of social data over time.
Researchers absorb a set of observational skills to carve up the world into traceable social
interdependencies that sociologists previously agreed to be the kind of observable instances of
social life that matter. Ethnographers emerge their data, as Becker says, but they do it by locating
subjects acting in and upon the existing world as distinct kinds of points of view, actors, actions,
interactions, interpretations, groups, organizations, material and symbolic arrangements, hierar-
chical relations, and/or other kinds of taken-for-granted social interdependencies vis-à-vis
others.
Moving back and forth between institutional interactions and fieldwork interactions commu-
nicates and solidifies ontological priorities. Institutions transmit knowledge claims and applica-
ble classifications, thus reproducing the epistemological styles of sociological knowledge
production toward particular kinds of empirical data and analyses (Abend et al. 2013; Glaeser
2010). The disciplining of sociological categories comes from mentors, teachers, and colleagues
through training, in classroom discussions, reading and writing groups, conferences, and by read-
ing different studies and theoretical and methodological debates.
Institutional training to see social units follows distinct historical legacies and epistemic con-
figurations. That is, scholars bridge together their previous training with forms of knowledge
production in their home institutions and new scholarly networks. Epistemic configurations are
ongoing processes across generations and institutions, such as in the transmission from Georg
Simmel to Robert Park to Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer to Howard Becker and Herbert
Gans to their many students at many different institutions. These institutional configurations give
rise to contingent, cumulative, and historically specific alignments as “epistemic cultures” (Knorr
Cetina 2009).
A mentor’s ethnographic training style, and the department’s training culture, emphasizes
certain interpretive competencies over others. For instance, Elijah Anderson learned field meth-
ods from Howard Becker at Northwestern University and the urban sociologist Gerald Suttles at
the University of Chicago. When Anderson moved to the University of Pennsylvania, Erving
Goffman, a colleague there, further influenced his empirical approach to face-to-face interactions
in public. Anderson also became taken with the legacy of W. E. B. DuBois in Philadelphia (see
Anderson 1996). Building on these influences, he developed a micro-interactionist perspective to
study race and urban public life, which then shaped the epistemic competencies of another gen-
eration of scholars studying race and urban life. His students conducted field research on the
interactional dynamics of African American girls in the inner city navigating potential threats of
violence (Jones 2009), the relationship between black neighborhoods and the dreams of a basket-
ball career (Brooks 2009), and the construction of interaction order and safety amid precarious
inner-city constraints (Duck 2015).
Jack Katz and Robert Emerson, the former a student of Howard Becker and John Kitsuse, the
latter a student of Everett Hughes, taught field methods at University of California–Los Angeles
(UCLA) for decades. They brought together interactionist and phenomenological traditions of
their own previous training as well as sociological developments in ethnomethodology and con-
versation analysis through colleagues like Garfinkel, Shegloff, Heritage, and Pollner (e.g.,
Emerson and Holstein 2012; Emerson and Pollner 2001; Pollner and Emerson 2001). These cur-
rents directly and indirectly influenced their students in studies of mundane everyday processes
among Orthodox Jews (Tavory 2010), individuals losing objects (Berry 2012), the local gram-
mars of rule-making among pick-up basketball and soccer players (DeLand 2013; Trouille 2014),
4 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

as well as mundane interactional processes and emergent stages of enacting practical situations,
as in studies of physical fights (Jackson-Jacobs 2013) or street corner rap battles (Lee 2009a).
The Chicago School transmission tends toward ecological relationships, temporal biographi-
cal processes, and face-to-face interactions. Yet epistemic transmission is not particular to any
kind of school or empirical emphasis. Burawoy, the leading proponent of the extended case
method in the United States, was trained at the University of Zambia by Manchester-trained
anthropologist Jaap Van Velsen. Van Velsen was a student of Max Gluckman, one of the origina-
tors of the extended case method as part of the Manchester School (Burawoy 1991). Michael
Burawoy (1991, 1998, 2000, 2005) formalizes key lessons from Jaap Van Velsen’s (1967) “situ-
ational analysis” and Max Gluckman’s (1961) “extended case method,” and connects them to
critical theoretical traditions at University of California (UC) Berkeley.
In fact, how scholars describe Gluckman’s extended case method is revealing of epistemic
priorities. Jack Katz (2001b:462) interprets Gluckman as developing cases “over time and
through distinguishable stages,” much in the way that Hughes and Becker have contributed to the
study of interaction stages over time. He writes, “[The extended case method] shows the inter-
play of multiple individuals and social groups who, through a sustained collective focus, shape
cultural themes into an evolving drama” (Katz 2001b: 462). Burawoy (2000) gleans different
insights from Gluckman about unequal relationships between African and European societies as
contributing to sustained local dramas. He argues that by conducting fieldwork, Manchester
anthropologists focused on situated contradictions between local practices and structural norms
as political dramas; and external colonial administration and labor migrations enabled and con-
strained such internal contradictions that reproduced “class relations of colonial capitalism.”
Burawoy’s (1991, 2000, 2005) epistemic configuration, practiced at UC Berkeley, oriented
him to external and historically configured power structures and the interdependence of macro-
systems and micro-life worlds. He has taught participant observation to students over the course
of decades, since 1976, passing along epistemic competencies for seeing the social world through
the lens of hierarchical relationships and guiding student projects on macro-micro interdepen-
dencies. We see this alignment of social reality in cases of changing state politics on, and increas-
ing stigmatization of, welfare recipients in Hungary (Haney 2002), political-economic changes
on gambling in South Africa and the United States (Sallaz 2009), and on the political-economic,
institutional, and discursive production and practices of homelessness in San Francisco (Gowan
2010).
Epistemic configurations transmit mundane competencies to interpret lived human experi-
ences, yet ethnographers must also go somewhere and interact with people or other forms of
relevant documentation that become used as ethnographic and empirical sociological data.
Ethnographic fieldwork classes often serve as an initiation into this process, a bridging mecha-
nism between an institution’s epistemic culture and the practices of conducting field studies. This
back and forth between the epistemic culture and empirical documentation further solidifies and
naturalizes the classificatory frames by narrowing down ways of seeing the empirical world.
Sociologists become practitioners of certain traditions of the ethnographic craft and learn to
make interpretive choices about seeing “the field,” “the subjects,” and “the data.” Being out at a
field site, talking to people, and writing field notes are all key to this process of describing the
substantive, practical, and normative frameworks that matter in the field from the points of view
of their subjects (Camic et al. 2011; Geertz 1983; Smith 2005).
Ethnographers must negotiate between the two sides of classification. Many ethnographers
spend years with subjects to come as close as possible to accurately depicting how they experi-
ence reality. Yet even then, as Clifford Geertz (1973:30) points out, ethnographers do not and
“largely cannot perceive what . . . informants perceive.” They cannot become “natives,” so to
speak (also see Narayan 1993). Ethnographers are interested in interpreting the world through
their learned social ontologies, while subjects are not typically attuned to classifying their lives
Deener 5

through the same “social” lenses. In fact, subjects sometimes dispute ethnographic depictions as
partial or even biased (e.g., Lareau 2012; Scheper-Hughes 2000; Whyte [1943] 1993), that is, if
they show any interest whatsoever in reading sociological depictions of themselves (e.g., Duneier
1999). Any sociological perspective can directly challenge the taken-for-granted knowledge of
other epistemic systems, like those found in art worlds, which have historically valued notions of
“originality” and “individual genius” over collective accomplishments and social organization
(Becker 1982; Moulin 1987).
Ethnographers discuss what they have seen “out there” in an effort to formalize sociological
ways of seeing. In Howard Becker’s fieldwork classes, he asked students “what’s been happen-
ing?” to open up conversations about fieldwork and interpreting evidence (DeVault 1999; Sanders
2012). Dorothy Smith regularly asked students “how it’s put together,” which involved the exer-
cise of connecting the “extralocal organization of everyday experience” to subjects’ relations in
and through administrative institutions (DeVault 1999: 49). In one of Burawoy’s field methods
seminars—the projects documented in an edited volume (see Burawoy et al. 1991)—students
could not identify a clear theoretical agenda as they were conducting research. Yet they still pro-
duced patterned tensions across their projects between particular notions of agency and structure
and configurations of macro- and micro-relations, which speaks to this epistemic transmission.
Ethnographers in the class not only advocated “respect” for subjects constructing their own
worlds but also wanted to show the “silencing” that prevented subjects’ own understandings.
Likewise, they expressed interest in locating the “social forces” that determined subjects’ lives,
as well as the ability of subjects to “transcend” those social forces (Kurzman 1991).
Some faculty members and colleagues review field notes on a recurring basis and make com-
ments on the documents themselves. In fieldwork classes, students may circulate field notes to
peers and develop workshop-like settings to discuss and focus the data and analyze the empirical
world through specific kinds of sociological eyes. Those who have participated in these types of
workshop settings may recognize their utility in opening up questions about the data, which sub-
tly guide the directions of analysis: What is happening in this description; what are the potential
interpretations of this data passage; how can we complicate the actions or interpretations of sub-
jects in this particular instance; how are different passages related to each other; what possible
alternative themes can we see in this passage; can we come up with alternative explanations for
the causes of this situation or action?
Workshop settings often lack a clearly directed goal, a frustrating reality for many novice
ethnographers trying to develop individual projects. While ambiguity remains a central feature of
ethnographic knowledge (Deener 2017), the collective workshop setting still refines interpretive
competencies for constructing certain kinds of social data, in turn, closing down alternative per-
ceptions of empirical social relationships. Writing field notes, conducting interviews, and tran-
scribing interviews objectify preferred interpretations of social ontologies into material documents
and cemented “data.” Collective discussions and classroom workshops about field notes and
interview transcripts allow for social and spatial distance from the field. Only the researchers
commonly have direct connections to the field site and to the intricate and often overlooked deci-
sions made in the field—who to talk to, how to act, where to sit or stand, who was ignored and
overlooked, and when to go home—through which they document the facts. Everyone else read-
ing the work reifies the written field notes as the presentation of documented facts. Discussions
about field notes as “the facts” focus researchers to more specific ways of seeing their field sites
and their subjects.3
By writing and discussing field notes and observations, ethnographers solidify preferences for
how to develop empirical links. It narrows down the taken-for-granted framework, further clarify-
ing how to locate the forms and processes of race and class public space interactions (Anderson
1990); emphasize subjects as fitting into institutional “ruling relations” that administer and manage
subjects’ experiences (Smith 1974); see comparative instances across situations, settings, and cases
6 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

(Vaughan 2004); prioritize the evolution of stages of development (Katz 2010); write about subjects
as complex characters (Duneier 1999); document the workings of an interacting group (Fine 2003);
or locate external social forces impinging on internally emergent subjective situations (Burawoy
et al. 1991).
By turning subjects and field sites into sociological data, ethnographers consistently make
other possible points of data—other potential types of facts—invisible. What begins as a process
of developing interpretive choices to see the world in specific ways gradually narrows into natu-
ralized dispositions and competencies that constrain knowledge production toward identifying
sociologically relevant topics such as public space regulations, political conflicts between groups,
commodification of sex, or everyday knowledge production.
I am not stating ethnographers simply create the empirical worlds they want to see. “Mundane
reasoning” occurs as the development of tacit competencies to accumulate and take for granted
agreed-upon ways of seeing among practitioners of the same empirical and analytic traditions
(Pollner 1974; Shapin 1994). The process solidifies underlying assumptions and preferences for
seeing, categorizing, and comparing social instances and developing agreements about the social
interdependencies as units worth focusing on. These mundane assumptions reinforce fragmented
standards of evidence and analytic development. As the narrowing process crystallizes taken-for-
granted perceptions and analytic preferences, practitioners develop evaluative logics to judge the
depth and quality of evidence and analysis. All research requires making some aspects—even if
unknowingly and through taken-for-granted competencies—invisible so as to narrow down the
understanding of how to build good empirical cases.
Some ethnographers come to associate their preferred social ontologies (i.e., focusing on indi-
vidual character development, face-to-face interactions, or hierarchical relationships) with the
very function of conducting good ethnographic research. They equate specific types of observed
social units with the foundational purpose of participant observation, which generally means a
researcher is there with subjects as they are acting out their routines in their own habitat. One
main idea that surfaces over time in discussions about qualitative research is that “actions speak
louder than words.” Authors argue that the most accurate evidence about motives and actions is
that which is directly observed in context (Becker and Geer 1957; Dean and Whyte 1958;
Jerolmack and Khan 2014).
The idea that certain modes of seeing are better than others equates techniques and units of
analysis with methods. It encloses different practices with different degrees of investment and
different understandings of “data” as the same thing, without reflecting on the hermeneutic and
phenomenological underpinnings of developing distinct and preferred kinds of social ontologies,
and, as I show in the next section, social contexts, too. This process occurs in many different
forms of methodological expertise.
Interviewing in and of itself does not shape an author’s empirical focus. Interviewing can
document cultural repertoires and frames, life-course transitions, oral histories, mnemonic
devices, biographical narratives, public discourses, among other kinds of information and inter-
pretation (Lamont 2000; Pugh 2013; Lamont and Swidler 2014). The empirical focus is linked to
the learning and application of preferences and assumptions about how to develop sociologically
relevant interview questions with goals of achieving a certain social ontology that guides an
analytic direction. Many factors alter the function and framing of interviews and the possible
data: The questions researchers ask, experience in conducting interviews, familiarity with sub-
jects, or familiarity with settings, events, organizations, professions, or modes of expertise on
which researchers empirically focus. The uses and goals of interviewing differ when the very
framing of the projects differs: Identifying similar groups in different communities (Brown-
Saracino 2010; Ghaziani 2014) is different than locating different groups within the same com-
munities (Deener 2012; Pattillo 2007; Small 2004), which is again different from comparing
similar groups in different nations (Lamont 2000; Saguy 2003).
Deener 7

The limits of interviewing are dependent on the limits of framing studies and the approaches
and logics of combining interviews with other modes of inquiry. Participant observation is like
interviewing in this respect: A common method encloses complex degrees of technical skill,
interpretive specialization, and degrees of closeness with the phenomena and subjects them-
selves. Some engage in intense immersion with subjects doing the action (e.g., Wacquant 2004).
Others participate through direct observations and interactions with subjects without joining their
subjects in doing the action (e.g., Bourgois 1996). Still others take part in a combination of
approaches, including recurring interviews and oral histories with individuals or small groups
while hanging out over time or living in the place they study (e.g., Pattillo 2007). Sometimes,
ethnographers are necessarily separated from the situated experiences of which they are really
interested but cannot access or directly observe, as might be the case for those studying violence
or illegal activities (Contreras 2012), elites’ cultural preferences (Khan 2011), or conducting
global research (Hannerz 2003).
Embodied knowledge, commonly understood as operating at the micro level, is an interesting
topic to think about multiplying techniques toward achievement of the same interpretation of
social ontology. Ethnographers can train to become a pianist (Sudnow 1978), a boxer (Wacquant
2004), a glassblower (O’Connor 2005), a firefighter (Desmond 2007), or a lindy hop dancer
(Hancock 2013). These are all cases of devoted immersion that document learning by being there
and doing the disciplined work on one’s own mind and body over a period of time. The ethnog-
rapher comes to understand firsthand the sensual experience of personal investment, discipline,
and transformation: the adrenaline rush of a punch, feeling the scorching heat of fire, or the
rhythmic intertwining of movement with music.
One can also rigorously study embodied knowledge by hanging around with others: a
mechanic in his workshop (Harper 1987), religious converts learning moral rituals (Winchester
2008), students at a boarding school (Khan 2011), or opera fanatics enacting “love for” the music
(Benzecry 2011). In such cases, ethnographers do not necessarily become one with the activity
under study, mirroring their subjects, but they still observe others, interact with subjects doing the
activity, and ask their subjects questions, making it possible to construct vivid and recurring
descriptions of lived and felt experiences.
The degree of physical distance from any social phenomena—including sensual feelings—can
move further down the chain of researchers’ own bodily investment. One can rely on multiple stu-
dent researchers to document a wide range of scenarios, conduct intensive, open-ended, and wide-
ranging interviews with subjects about practical actions, or compile many different types of primary
and secondary sources, such as archival documents, video recordings, media accounts, and previ-
ously published manuscripts. All of these tools help researchers describe and represent embodied
knowledge as phenomenologically experienced by strategically varying empirical instances of the
same kind of social units across situations (Collins 2008; Katz 1999; Sennett 2008).
These approaches differ in their techniques of discovery despite all being lumped together as
empirically focusing on embodied practice. In fact, some approaches labeled as participant
observation have characteristics in common with interviewing. They involve recurring conversa-
tional prodding with the same subjects over an extended period of time rather than direct obser-
vations of behavior over time. Vice versa, some approaches to “interviewing” or “archival
research” have a clear ethnographic eye for locating situated meanings in documents and tran-
scripts (e.g., Vaughan 1996). In other words, they rely more on talking with people about what
they do or reading documents written by people about what they did in the situated moment,
rather than directly observing what they do. However, they still reinforce how actors take part in
unfolding processes.
Degrees of distance from subjects may alter the questions ethnographers ask, but not neces-
sarily the substance of the study, the interpretations of social ontologies that allow them to turn
human processes into empirical data, the logical priorities that shape the novelty of scholarly
8 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

contributions, or even the expertise at writing descriptive accounts of a process. The institution-
ally learned classificatory lenses through which one sees and interprets empirical instances are
versatile; they vary with the types of ontological priorities that can exist in sociological minds,
can be learned and transmitted across generations, and can be accounted for in empirically docu-
mented descriptions and analyses. The tools for seeing and interpreting help to document empiri-
cally linked “social units,” but ethnographers have to contextualize them as existing somewhere
and at some time to narrow down the case as something significant to sociologists.

Narrowing Down Sociological Contexts

Ethnographers develop formal and informal dimensions of time and space to further narrow
down social ontologies and move them toward the production of social contexts. Researchers
build connections to and ruptures from the past and construct spatial boundaries of action, inter-
action, and association. The informal elements of time and space refer to subjects’ more flexible
and emergent uses of them. The formal elements refer to the sociological objectification of tem-
poral and spatial dimensions as independent of informally emergent uses and processes. These
are often experienced as shared understandings of “harder” boundaries, mechanisms, patterns,
events, forces, and other objectified forms. How ethnographers apply the informal and formal
dimensions of time and space as the social context narrows down levels of analysis. Similar to
the previous focus on narrowing down the social ontology, this process is iterative. On one hand,
contextual boundaries build on previous interpretive competencies, as a function of one’s train-
ing; on the other hand, they are mediated and crystallized through the availability and pursuit of
data in field sites (Vaughan 1992).
The definitions and causes of temporality depend on how ethnographers envision social units.
The organization of a study may locate certain phenomena as taking place before or after a for-
malized historical event. In this case, the researchers take into account the subjective experiences
leading up to the event and the agreed-upon objective reality of the event itself. Diane Vaughan
(1996, 2004, 2006, for example) uses historical documents, technical reports, memos, and oral
history interviews to make sense of how engineers and managers within NASA’s bureaucracy
made everyday decisions regarding the Challenger space shuttle launch in the months prior to its
explosion. Knowing the particular outcome shaped how she sought out emerging causes of the
disaster event. Vaughn sought information prior to the disaster to locate and emphasize future-
directed sequences of decision-making. Historical documents pointed out prospective subjects to
interview, combining into a study of how organizational culture absorbs risks and facilitates
technical mistakes.
Starting with the agreed-upon objective reality of a historical event is an important dimension
of Vaughan’s study, but it could have also allowed for different starting questions about the infor-
mal temporal relationships to the objective event itself that would have changed the trajectory of
analysis and created a completely different sociological project. For instance, if Vaughan focused
on the organizational culture after the explosion, her questions might be: How do people review
organizational protocol or how do they navigate work and life after traumatic moments? We can
see this kind of empirical endeavor in the study of transportation planning and technical and
promotional safety protocols in the aftermath of 9/11 (Molotch 2012; Molotch and McClain
2003), or how people in a small town reorganized community in the aftermath of a flood (Erickson
1976). Another approach could integrate organizational processes before, during, and after an
event, as in the study of accumulating and unequal distribution of deaths during a heat wave in
Chicago, and the organizational and community responses to this slow-moving disaster
(Klinenberg 2002). Each of these examples reflects formal and informal dimensions of time. One
level involves identifying agreed-upon life-altering events—as a bounded period of observa-
tion—constructed as external to the subjects of the study. The other involves the level of
Deener 9

unfolding social interactions or organizational processes building up to, experienced during, and/
or responding to the objective event.
Not all sociological questions call for preconceived boundaries between before and after. In
these cases, ethnographers still build relationships between formal and informal dimensions of
time. They empirically disentangle temporally ordered transformations to understand what it
means to experience and exist in the midst of change. Transformation implies an unfolding pro-
cess between Time 1 and Time 2. Yet the ethnographic approach to transformation also identifies
patterned mechanisms contributing to changes and/or continuation in the lines of action—that is,
the objectification of Time 1 and Time 2 as coherently distinct moments.
If ethnographers aim to document human interactions and the construction of interaction situ-
ations, then transformation takes the form of stages of personal development or the identification
of key turning points in the life course. In this understanding of temporality, certain patterned
interaction events are seen as conditioning and channeling subsequent interactions. The researcher
points to different lines of action before and after the objectified moment or stage of change. We
see this kind of inquiry in Howard S. Becker’s (1963) work on learning to experience a marijuana
high, in Jack Katz’s (1999) sequences of emotional expression, or in Jooyoung Lee’s (2009b)
biographical turning points among street corner rappers.
Ethnographers also point to transformations that emerge from conditions external to subjects,
as an independent variable outside of subjects’ control. This type of ethnographic knowledge is
contingent on incorporating into a study a priori actions of political officials, military leaders,
corporate CEOs, or other kinds of powerful actors and institutions. The location of a priori actions
and institutions serves a distinct purpose of identifying and objectifying power positions as exter-
nal social forces like new state-level laws, economic trends, or technical innovations entering the
lives of the ethnographic subjects.
Burawoy’s collections of case studies with his students show that situated circumstances—in
an organization, a neighborhood, or otherwise—provide the context for new forms of knowl-
edge, new forms of economic survival, and new political-economic regulations that penetrate,
alter, and define how subjects experience the situated social contexts (Burawoy et al. 2000;
Burawoy et al. 1991). The contextualized temporal boundaries underscore how everyday rou-
tines, opportunities, and discourses stem from beyond the local context, often as part of widely
experienced historical and spatial transformations in political-economic relationships. The ana-
lytic approach has a common thread across national contexts, including the United States,
Hungary, China, and South Africa, where political-economic changes materialize onto human
bodies or provide a key empirical lens into tracking the reconfiguration between macro forces
and informally emergent practices and interpretations of subjects as part of the experience of liv-
ing during precarious times (Gowan 2010; Haney 2002; Hanser 2008; Sallaz 2009).
The narrowing down of the influence of time works in conjunction with narrowing down the
influence of space, together solidifying the idea of a social context. How ethnographers build
together interpretations of social ontologies with formal and informal temporal and spatial pat-
terns further impacts this analytic development toward the representation of a unified sociologi-
cal topic: an organizational culture of risk taking (Vaughan 1996), the inner-city career of an
aspiring rapper (Lee 2009), or the distinct bureaucratic orders of spaces of consumption (Hanser
2008). These are subtle analytic conventions. They are not strategically employed as explana-
tory—by locating cause and effect—but instead they function to narrow down the types of cases
that can lead toward levels of analysis and potentially to causal claims. The spatial boundaries
further reinforce the idea of the “neighborhood” ethnography, “street corner” ethnography, “orga-
nizational” ethnography, “workplace” ethnography, or other institutional spatial relationships.
Temporal and spatial barriers may seem in some circumstances like objective boundaries, but
they are not islands void of possible expansion and contraction. How ethnographers interpret
their formal and informal dimensions can change depending on the empirical questions or based
10 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

on what ethnographers observe in the field site itself. In ethnographies with seemingly clear spa-
tial boundaries, like organizational ethnographies, researchers often translate formalized spatial
limits—that is, inside and outside the organization—into levels of analysis. Everyday interac-
tions with coworkers occur at the micro level, an organizational culture of decision-making is
viewed at the meso level, and state decisions, funding streams, or global networks made outside
of the organization are considered the macro level (Vaughan 1996). These spatial levels of
“inside” and “outside” are interpretive classifications, dependent on how one understands and
takes for granted the social ontology and then contextualizes human actions within and between
temporal and spatial relationships as the objectified context.
One useful analytic approach is to track the connections between the levels of analysis, and
show how different streams of action, coming from different locations, settings, and actors,
become interdependent in ways that influence specific subjects’ actions in specific bounded con-
texts (Smith 1987). Ethnographers narrow down interpretations of space as levels of analysis to
move toward the production of sociological cases. A formal organization like NASA or a depart-
ment store in China transmits institutional classifications of spatial boundaries. They communi-
cate ordered worlds and potential levels of analysis from distinct points of view.
One example is Amy Hanser’s (2008) work on the reorganization of commerce in Harbin,
China, which focuses on three market contexts: an underground vending marketplace; a state-run
traditional department store catering to the lower and middle classes; and an upscale, exclusive
department store. The spatial boundaries are developed through the market organizations them-
selves. Hanser does not need to focus on subjective movements between the organized spaces,
because the formal dimensions of time and space—the relationship between the shift in the
Chinese economy, and distinctive organizational spaces—have narrowed down her analytic
focus. She compares how different bureaucracies work, how organizations build supply systems
for different products, and how interactions take hold between employees and consumers to
make sense of social and economic distinctions in the context of a changing state and market
system.
Analyzing the relationship between inside and outside the organizational context defines con-
nections to “macro-level” political-economic transformations. That is, different meso-level orga-
nizations adapt to “macro” external changes in different ways, which then filter those changes
down into micro-level interactions in the organizations. This approach to contextualizing cases
prioritizes seeing and naturalizing levels of analysis as hierarchical relations in a bureaucracy and
adaptations within distinct spatial settings. The ethnographer focuses on who makes decisions,
how decisions get passed down, when employees need to follow rules and when they can break
them, and how customers and employees negotiate status interactions under changing conditions
in different types of organizations (Hanser 2008).
Another useful analytic approach involves altering and inverting the temporal, spatial, and
social units, as in the micro-production of macro categories (Krause 2013). In organizational
studies, ethnographers can locate bureaucratic actors shaping professional knowledge or con-
gressional leaders imposing budgets and organizational regulations—how they interact, how
they come up with standards, or how they shape laws or knowledge. In such cases, conditions
that are typically classified as occurring at the macro level (e.g., “the state”) are transformed into
meso- or micro-level descriptions and framings about how people collectively govern, legislate,
or regulate others’ lives (e.g., Glaeser 2010; Watkins-Hayes 2009).
The same can be found in studies of globalization. The global economy is often thought of at
the macro level. Yet, globalized market systems can be studied through different starting orienta-
tions to time and space, leading to different kinds of cases. Prevalent examples of commodity
chain ethnographies in anthropology and geography are part of a tradition of “multi-sited”
research to “follow the thing” (Marcus 1995). They focus on the production and distribution of
market objects in the context of geographically diffuse and transforming global economies (e.g.,
Deener 11

Bestor 2004; Cook 2004). These subtle analytic and empirical shifts have profound influence
over the case. In Hanser’s study, organizations operate as internal spaces shaping and reproduc-
ing social and economic distinctions, as reactions to external macro political-economic condi-
tions. In multisited commodity chain ethnographies, interdependent cultural practices and market
processes break down distinct national and organizational contexts into the production of a global
division of labor. The empirical and analytic focus in commodity chain studies is on the interde-
pendencies of organizational settings rather than explaining how these settings became distinct.
Interpretations of less coherent spatial boundaries also take into account formal and informal
relationships. A neighborhood or a street corner is a less rigid spatial distinction than a school or
bureaucratic organization unless some recurring limitation is placed on access, as when neigh-
borhoods have security guards, require identification to enter, or have strict standards of social
and symbolic territoriality, based on race, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, gang affiliation, com-
mercial life, or architectural form (e.g., Caldeira 2000; Deener 2007; Suttles 1972). Typically,
people can move within and between the boundaries of a neighborhood, yet the ethnographic
focus on distinct points of view, how subjects develop expectations about spatial limits, and
potentially how different points of view negotiate a common terrain can alter the types of cases.
For instance, ethnographers can deconstruct the spatial boundaries of a neighborhood by
exploring how it works in people’s lives. Does the neighborhood have clear spatial limits? What
determines them? Are the determinants visible to any observer or just to people who live there?
Are they based on how people move around the space or on how people define the limits and
represent those limits to others? Are they based on architectural, economic, infrastructural, or
other organizational designs and interventions? Have the spatial boundaries changed over time,
and from whose perspectives and uses? How ethnographers frame empirical questions about see-
ing the spatial limits of the neighborhood shapes what kinds of analytic and ultimately theoretical
questions will become possible in the same location.
If the ethnographer’s goal is to understand how neighborhoods change and how different
individuals and groups become configured in that process, the approach will focus on comple-
mentary or oppositional relations within historically defined neighborhood contexts (Deener
2012; Pattillo 2007; Rieder 1985). However, a subject-centered focus—like a commodity-cen-
tered focus—can shift the meaning and experience of the uses of urban space. “Extended-place”
(Duneier 1999) ethnographies represent the spreading out of spatial contexts and practical uses
by individuals and groups over time—or “follow the people,” as George E. Marcus (1995)
describes this approach. This research strategy sheds light on how individuals, objects, or infor-
mation move across spatial situations and multiply cultural and status presentations and perfor-
mances to advance the logical connections as distinct sociological questions.
Another analytic approach is to combine these distinct notions of subjects and spatial con-
texts. Ethnographers develop an understanding and representation of coherent relationships and
hierarchies within a context, but then show how actors traverse the boundaries of the context to
locate alternatively structured relationships in different contexts (Anderson 1976; Duneier 1999;
Halle 1984). Anderson’s (1976) study of Jelly’s, a tavern in inner-city Chicago, provides an inti-
mate examination of the lives of lower-income black men during a period of deindustrialization.
Although his subjects share a racial identity within the same time and space context, they also
employ situated folk categories that are hierarchical: regulars, wineheads, and hoodlums.
Anderson offers a window into a local context and the search for status amid marginality. Yet, he
also takes it a step further by demonstrating that those who occupy the highest status inside the
tavern—the so-called “regulars”—have relatively lower status outside of the tavern. Anderson
follows Herman, one of Jelly’s most respected regulars, into his workplace Christmas party.
Herman’s status as a black janitor in a white corporate environment shatters his previously
observed status position, as he uses his association with Anderson—then a PhD student—to
12 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

legitimate his status at his place of employment. Seeing the movement across time and space
boundaries demonstrates fragile status hierarchies in the context of persistent inequalities.
This methodological trick applies to various kinds of bounded contexts. Organizations may
seem like rigidly bounded worlds, but subjects can typically move in and out of different orga-
nized settings over time. If the ethnographer focuses on the subjects and their movements across
social relationships, rather than inside the organization alone, they ask different types of ques-
tions related to shifting and fluid social status and group classifications. David Halle (1984)
shows in his study of factory workers that individuals leaving the factory become immersed in
suburban lives of leisure, family, religion, and community in ways that mirror middle-class con-
ventions. This approach allows him to blur the taken-for-granted distinction between white-col-
lar and blue-collar workers. It also shifts the sociological object. The book is not about life on the
factory floor, per se, but rather about how class boundaries work in suburban community life.
These examples break down common assumptions and stereotypes—a popular stereotype of
racial disorganization (Anderson 1976) or assumptions about the distinction between blue-collar
and white-collar workers (Halle 1984)—into complex moving parts about status and inequality.
The active movements of subjects in and out of bounded spatial settings over time provide ana-
lytic lenses into the meaningful escapes from preconceived and even dominating external condi-
tions. By looking at these different analytic approaches together, we see that ethnographers
narrow down their interpretations of social ontology and time/space contexts to begin building
sociological units and levels of analysis. Researchers crystallize their interpretations of the
parameters of the study, which help them to identify the sociological case by making ethno-
graphic contributions relevant to other sociologists with interests beyond empirical specificity.

Conclusion: From Mundane Competencies to Sociological Cases

The architecture of ethnographic knowledge is built upon the back and forth configuration
between narrowing down interpretations of empirical data as particular kinds of social relation-
ships and narrowing down interpretations of formal and informal dimensions of time and space
to contextualize the data. This hermeneutic and phenomenological process allows for continued
access to sociological traditions of seeing, understanding, and evaluating units and levels of
analysis. Tacit epistemic competencies become solidified in field notes, classroom discussions,
workshops, memos, project outlines, papers, and books. Mundane competencies are necessary to
narrow down data and contexts to move beyond substantive information and local folk knowl-
edge. In this regard, case development is paradoxical: Narrowing down is necessary for general-
izing up.
Narrowing down perceptions of data and contexts involves establishing different forms of
reliability and validity than those sociologists typically discuss. For quantitative researchers, reli-
ability refers to the stability and consistency of operational definitions in empirical research
(Dixon, Singleton, and Straits 2016). Ethnographers often point to concerns about accuracy—
rather than reliability—of the observed and recorded reality of subjects, events, actions, interac-
tions, processes, or places through triangulation and other fact-checking and verification
standards (Duneier 1999; Jerolmack and Murphy 2017). Verifying the facts is important, but it is
different than the process by which ethnographers learn to hold constant the units and levels of
analysis that give ethnographic research its sociological shape.
Validity refers to analytic precision beyond the specificities of empirical documentation. In
quantitative research, there are multiple axes of validity: how well one’s operational definition is
associated with the concept it purports to measure (measurement validity); the ability to rule out
whether factors other than the manipulated or central independent variable explains an outcome
(internal validity); and the extent to which findings may be generalized to other settings, con-
texts, measurements, populations, and time periods (external validity) (Dixon et al. 2016).
Deener 13

Ethnographers need to establish the connection between reliability and validity as an ongoing
phenomenological and hermeneutic process of empirical and analytic inclusion and exclusion.
Developing the scaffolding of units and levels of analysis, and further gaining the sociological
competencies to scrutinize the fit between them, is fundamental to establishing case validity.
Ethnographers reflecting on their methods overemphasize the process of empirical inclusion. We
learn from methods appendices that writing an ethnographic book is based on incredible amounts of
fieldwork, often over lengthy periods of time, which can result in thousands of pages of field notes
and hundreds of interviews. There are important reasons researchers should document how they find
their sites, build connections to their subjects, influence situations as a participant, and, in turn, com-
pile their own data sets. Ethnographers need to describe where the data come from, how much work
went into gathering them, and how much of them there are. The discussion about empirical inclusion
is one way that ethnographers demonstrate the reliability of their data.
Yet, emphasizing the process of data collection without reflecting on the process of narrowing
down the case overplays the image of the lone ethnographer. The research process is a collective
and institutional project even if the act of collecting data and typing pages of a book chapter is
accomplished without colleagues. How researchers learn to exclude certain subjects, points of
data, emergent processes, and alternative analytic themes is difficult to recount and assess, but it
is of equal importance to constructing cases. Empirical errors occur when ethnographers misstate
or misidentify basic facts as they relate to subjects, situations, events, locations, and other cir-
cumstances. Empirical errors are different than the observational and interpretive omissions nec-
essary to narrow down and hold constant the units and levels of analysis. Ethnographers should
be very concerned about getting the facts right, but they should be equally concerned about get-
ting the case right. The methodological structure requires understanding the process of elimina-
tion and omission in pursuit of sociological cases.
All researchers encounter empirical noise as they go along. Any social setting provides mul-
tiple empirical angles and topics for advancing sociological research. As research projects
develop, authors often face the issue of too much data—and too many options for analysis and
themes—rather than not enough information (Vaughan 2004). Ethnographers must, at some
point, demarcate the boundaries of their cases from the vast interpretive chain of historical and
social circumstances (Geertz 1973). The social, temporal, and spatial connections can always
extend beyond directly observed meanings and practices of a given interaction order (Baiocchi,
Graizbord, and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2013; Duneier 1999; Latour 2005; Marcus 1995). Scholars
must delineate when and under what conditions the circumstances under study began their pro-
cess of formation and transformation (Hirschman and Reed 2014).
Mundane epistemic competencies direct researchers in how far to go in the hunt to define,
clarify, and detail empirical social interdependencies that are understood as informing individual
and collective lines of action. This process of narrowing down units and levels of analysis directs
researchers toward distinct types of sociological questions, empirical leads, and theoretical
claims. These tacit epistemic competencies, carried out consistently over time, instruct ethnogra-
phers of the same traditions to identify mutually agreeable terms of reliability for assessing the
data and contexts in search of mutually agreeable terms of validity for assessing the analytic
structure of sociological cases.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Claudio Benzecry, Black Hawk Hancock, Dan Morrison, Bryan Sykes, Diane Vaughan,
Anjuli Verma, Dan Winchester, Owen Whooley, and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments
on earlier drafts of this article.
14 Sociological Perspectives 00(0)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. It is important to point out that not all ethnographers work within the same empirical paradigm of
gathering evidence and analyzing the empirical world. There are other traditions outside of this realm
of sociological knowledge production that this article does not address. For instance, the cultural turn
in ethnography (e.g., Van Maanen [1988] 2011) and approaches to auto-ethnography (e.g., Richardson
1997) are examples of variations that might not fit fully into the architectural scaffolding presented in
this article.
2. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have articulated an “ontological turn” to address “ontolo-
gies in the plural” (Van Heur, Leydesdorff, and Wyatt 2012). The goal is not to advocate for a favored
social ontology. Instead, the aim is to complicate the production of ethnographic knowledge and to
“interfere with the assumption of a singular, ordered world” by moving toward “enhanced analytic
sensibility towards multi-naturalism” (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013).
3. Reuben A. Buford May and Mary Pattillo-McCoy (2000: 70) ask a related question about whether two
separate individuals can see the same thing in field research. They write, “Despite all of the character-
istics that we shared, we were, of course, not the same person, and our differences led to interesting
twists in the data we collected.” They argue that the researchers’ gender and biographical relationships
to the place of study impacted the fieldwork dynamics. They also found a deep structure distinguish-
ing perception. Understanding and evaluating the inconsistencies in individual perception led them to
conclude, “The simultaneous reading of the fieldnotes we have presented illustrates the failings of each
of our memories, the inaccuracies in each of our perceptions, and the different ways in which people
in the field react to each of us that creates a unique reality for each of us” (May and Pattillo-McCoy
2000:84).

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Author Biography
Andrew Deener is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of
Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an ethnographic and
historical study of five adjacent neighborhoods and why some sustained race and class diversity while oth-
ers became exclusive. He is currently completing a book on the social transformation of the American food
system that examines the changing relationships between urban development, market infrastructure, and the
organization of food distribution from 1880 to the present.