Ethnography in Public Management Research: A Systematic Review and Future Directions

ABSTRACT

Ethnography is defined as a research methodology based on sustained, explicit, methodical observation and paraphrasing of social situations in relation to their naturally occurring events. The value of producing local observational data over extended periods of time lies in the ability to systematically explore the subjective construction of meanings and its consequences on organizational and institutional dynamics. Based on a systematic review of published ethnographic studies in the field of public management, this article investigates how ethnography has been conceptualized and employed by the scholarly community in the past 25 years (1990–2014); it highlights the methodological features of the ethnographic design; and it outlines a set of research directions for future applications of the ethnographic approach to the study of theoretically and empirically relevant phenomena. This study contributes to the growing debate of the role of methods in public management literature in informing evidence-based managerial and policy decisions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In order to conduct the systematic review of the literature, I consulted a number of experts to verify and suggest eligible ethnographic studies in the public management domain. I thank these experts, specifically Prof. Rod A.W. Rhodes from University of Southampton, Prof. Stephen Osborne from University of Edinburgh, Prof. Edoardo Ongaro from Northumbria University, Prof. Valentina Mele from Bocconi University. A special thanks to Lorenzo Leotta for his assistance in the data collection. I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and to IPMJ Guest Editors Dr. Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Dr. Lars Tummers, and Prof. Sanjay K. Pandey for their valuable guidance and support in the revision process.

Notes

In a few cases, these were included if additional articles explained in depth the methodology (see Mosse 2004 and Rhodes and Tiernan 2015).

In the United States, both the federal and state governments were included in the central government category.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giulia Cappellaro

Giulia Cappellaro ([email protected]) is assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She received her PhD in Management from the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Her research adopts ethnographic methodologies to address the dynamics of organizational change in the public sector and the relationship between professional groups in contexts of institutional complexity. She is also particularly interested in processes of interorganizational collaboration in transnational settings.