Network ethnography and the cyberflâneur: evolving policy sociology in education

Abstract

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings. Here I constitute the network ethnographer as cyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-century flâneur is lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on the cyberflâneur, this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• policy sociology
• network ethnography
• cyberflâneur
• research
• education

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the feedback I received from two anonymous referees from the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education on an earlier version of this paper, and also to my colleagues Professor Bob Lingard and Dr Sam Sellar for their insightful commentaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While multi-sited and global ethnography are not discussed in detail, given the constraints of this paper, both Marcus (1995) and Burawoy (2009) provide important discussion about the reasons for evolving the ethnographic tradition, and it is from these understandings that network ethnography is positioned as another potential construction of contemporary ethnography.