Field research

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Field research The term "field research", is used by many industries as a generic reference to collecting or creating new information outside of a laboratory or typical workplace. Biologists prefer fieldwork to captive studies because it gives them a chance to let the animals interact with items in their environments.

Field research is less technically known as Fieldwork, a term originating in farm and plantation manual labor, and a term sometimes used to refer to the temporary fortifications constructed prior to battle. Fieldwork, which is conducted in situ, can be contrasted with laboratory or experimental research which is conducted in a quasi-controlled environment. In survey research, fieldwork refers to face-to-face or telephone interviewing. Fieldwork can also include methods such as sociometry.

The interviewing or observation of people to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures constitutes fieldwork. Especially when humans themselves are the subject of study, protocols must be devised to reduce the risk of observer bias and the acquisition of too theoretical or idealized explanations of the actual workings of a culture. Participant observation, data collection, and survey research are examples of field research, in contrast to what is often called experimental or lab research.

History

Fieldwork has a long history. Cultural anthropologists have long used field research to study other cultures. Although the cultures do not have to be different, this has often been the case in the past with the study of so called primitive cultures, and even in sociology the cultural differences have been ones of class. The work is done... in "'Fields' that is circumscribed areas of study which have been the subject of social research".^[1] Fields could be education, industrial settings, or Amazonian rain forests. Likewise field research could be done by zoologists such as Jane Goodall, Radcliff-Brown[1910] and Malinowski[1922] were early cultural anthropologists who set the stage for future work.^[2]

Business use of Fieldwork is an applied form of anthropology and is as likely to be advised by sociologists or statisticians in the case of surveys.

Consumer marketing Fieldwork is the primary marketing technique used by businesses to research their target market.

Defining Fieldwork

Fieldwork is scholarly work that requires first hand observation, recording or documenting what one sees and hears in a particular setting - a rural artisan community, a city market place, hunting and gathering with a highland tribe or the plush interiors of a corporate head office. The term is mainly used in the social sciences studies, such as in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, management and economics. It is also known as Participant Observation. ^[3] ‘’Participant observation is a structured type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or sub cultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, usually over an extended period of time. The method originated in field work of social anthropologists, especially the students of Franz Boas in the United States, and in the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology.’’ ^[4]

Edward J. Nell (1998, p. 101) argued that:

‘’Fieldwork means finding out what people actually do, how they actually think and behave, and what they mean when they say something. Fieldwork calls for participation; to know the meaning of a social practice it is necessary to experience it in some way. It may be possible to gain an understanding imaginatively, or through discussions with participants, (e.g. Lawrence Klein, 1982). But participation ensures that the observer directly experiences the social practice, and can check the meaning and appreciate the nuances by asking other participants.’’

The advantages of fieldwork are that people are closer to real world conditions and that the business can design the research in the best way to discover the particular information required. Business can also be sure that the information gathered is up to date.

Disadvantages of fieldwork are that it takes time for the business to gather the information and that it is likely to be of a small sample size due to the high costs and time it takes

Conducting Fieldwork

Fieldwork involves the collection of primary data or information that is new. This is collected through surveys and questionnaires that are made out specifically for a purpose.

In biology, fieldwork typically involves studying of free-living wild animals in which the subjects are observed in their natural habitat, without changing, harming, or materially altering the setting or behavior of the animals under study. Field research is an indispensable part of biological science.

In public health the use of the term fieldwork refers to epidemiology or the study of epidemics through the gathering of data about the epidemic (such as the pathogen and vector(s) as well as social or sexual contacts, depending upon the situation).

The object of fieldwork in economics for example, to put it in Nell’s words, is to get beneath the surface, to contrast actual behaviour with the official view, and to relate language and description to behavior (e.g. Deirdre McCloskey, 1985).

Without fieldwork our numbers and therefore our statistical analyses will give us distorted picture of the world. Without fieldwork we cannot know the operating rules in our economic institutions or the true motivations of agents. As argued by Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase (1937), "It's important to go out and discover the facts for yourself.” Coase developed his ideas about the "nature of the firm" during a year of visits to firms throughout the US.

The quality of results obtained from fieldwork depends on the data gathered in the field. The data in turn depends upon the field worker himself or herself, the worker’s psyche, level of involvement, and ability to see and visualize things that any other person visiting the place might fail to notice. The more open a researcher is to new ideas, concepts and things which he or she may not have seen in his or her own culture, the better will be the absorption of those ideas. Better grasping of such material means better understanding of the forces of culture operating in the area and the ways they modify the lives of the people under study. Anthropologists have always been taught to be free from ‘ethnocentrism’ i.e. the belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group.

A fieldworker spends a lot of time in the field, observing people. Thomas (2004, p. 150) has reminded us, social scientists are privileged in being able to ask direct question of the objects they study. Physicists are not able to interview their atoms; if they could, would they be able to remove some of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty? But they would have to treat the answers with great caution.

The vision of the passive mind, however, is no longer acceptable philosophically. The underlying theory of perception has been shown to be inadequate. Sensory impressions, especially those arising in social contexts, have to be actively interpreted. Interpretation, in turn, is guided by conceptual truths which themselves arise from the activity of the mind. As a consequence empirical observation cannot be neatly separated from reasoning; to put it another way, truths of reason may sometimes convey important information about the world. And the world may intrude upon the activity of the mind. ^[5]

Such research involves a range of well-defined, though variable methods: ‘’informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, results from activities undertaken off or online, and life-histories. Although the method is generally characterized as qualitative research, it can (and often does) include quantitative dimensions. Traditional participant observation is usually undertaken over an extended period of time, ranging from several months to many years, and even generations. An extended research time period means that the researcher is able to obtain more detailed and accurate information about the individuals, community, and/or population under study. Observable details (like daily time allotment) and more hidden details (like taboo behavior) are more easily observed and interpreted over a longer period of time. A strength of observation and interaction over extended periods of time is that researchers can discover discrepancies between what participants say—and often believe—should happen (the formal system) and what actually does happen, or between different aspects of the formal system; in contrast, a one-time survey of people's answers to a set of questions might be quite consistent, but is less likely to show conflicts between different aspects of the social system or between conscious representations and behavior’’. ^[6]

Fieldwork Approach and Social Sciences

Fieldwork and Anthropology

Fieldwork has been long regarded as the main stay in anthropological research, and we will present the essential ideas by distilling here some key insights from anthropology. The first generation of anthropologists, studying mostly people under colonial rule, had tended to rely on locally based missionaries and colonial administrators to collect ethnographic information, often guided by questionnaires that were issued by theorists from ‘back home’.

In anthropology Malinowski is credited as being the most important figure in the development of the modern fieldwork tradition, through his study of the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea. ^[7] Equally important contributions were made, however, by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Morgan, Taylor, Benedict and others to this tradition of anthropology. Jarvie (1967) claimed that all schools of anthropology emphasize that fieldwork stands at the center of the subject. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, who thought anthropology was a science, placed the same emphasis on fieldwork as does Evans-Pritchard, who denies that it is a science?

Early cultural anthropologists who set the stage for future work. Business use of field research is an applied form of anthropology and is as likely to be advised by sociologists or statisticians in the case of surveys. Consumer marketing field research is the primary marketing technique used by businesses to research their target market.’’

Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of study (a relevant contemporary example: the recent book of Karen Ho (2009) on “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street”).

In anthropology, ‘’participant-observation is organized so as to produce a kind of writing called ethnography. It can be applied or academic in nature. A key principle of the method is that one may not merely observe, but must find a role within the group observed from which to participate in some manner, even if only as "outside observer." Overt participant-observation, therefore, is limited to contexts where the community under study understands and permits it. Critics of overt participant observation argue that study is subsequently restricted to the public fronts socially constructed by actors. Gate-keepers ensure that known research never goes backstage, making covert strategies necessary especially when conducting studies on government entities or criminal organizations’’. ^[8]

More recently, Rice et al. (2004, p. 1) described fieldwork as generating ‘’a multitude of entanglements emotional, financial, professional, intellectual or ethical. It is by talking and writing about these experiences in the field that we become familiar with the experiential core of social anthropology, the richness, complexity and contradictions of relationships. The data produced through these often compromised and compromising encounters is ultimately transformed into an authoritative academic text, and these articles seek to elucidate the process through which raw experience has been translated into vehicles for the production of ethnographic knowledge.’’

Fieldwork and Sociology

Pierre Bourdieu played a crucial role in the popularization of fieldwork in sociology. During the Algerian War in 1958-1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples, of the Berbers laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation. The result was his first book, Sociologie de L'Algerie (The Algerians), which was an immediate success in France and published in America in 1962. The book (‘’Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House or the World Reversed: Essays’’), published in English in 1979 by Cambridge University Press , established him as a major figure in the field of ethnology and a pioneer advocate scholar for more intensive fieldwork in social sciences. The book was based on his decade of work as a participant-observer with the Algerian society. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data.

All along his career Bourdieu sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in everyday life. His work can be seen as sociology of culture. Bourdieu labeled it a "Theory of Practice". His contributions to sociology were both empirical and theoretical. His conceptual apparatus is based on three key terms, namely, habitus, capital and field. Furthermore, Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Choice Theory as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Bourdieu argued that social agents do not continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. According to Bourdieu, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic—a practical sense—and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their "feel for the game" (the "feel" being, roughly, habitus, and the "game" being the field).

Bourdieu’s anthropological work was focused on the analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. Bourdieu’s empirical work played a crucial role in the popularization of correspondence analysis and particularly ‘’Multiple Correspondence Analysis.’’ Bourdieu held that these geometric techniques of data analysis are, like his sociology, inherently relational. In the preface to his book ‘’The Craft of Sociology’’ Bourdieu argued that:"I use Correspondence Analysis very much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose philosophy fully expresses what in my view constitutes social reality. It is a procedure that 'thinks' in relations, as I try to do it with the concept of field," <Ref.> See the Wikipedia article on Pierre Bourdieu<Ref.>

Fieldwork and Management

Mintzberg played a crucial role in the popularization of fieldwork in Management. He published his first book in 1973 (‘’The Nature of Managerial Work’’).^[9] This pioneer work established his reputation worldwide as a major figure in the field of management and ethnography of organizations. It was based on his PhD thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The thesis was based on an idea shared by a professor at MIT and a senior manager in a company: they wanted to study the latter’s work. It grew into a systematic observation and description of five general managers, about whom we know nothing more than the fact that they were ‘’efficient’’ and that they were subjected to the constant presence of Mintzberg, for one week each, every minute of their working day. Mintzberg adopted a method that had hardly ever been used in management research: direct and structured observation (Fieldwork). The Economist Magazine (Jan 16th 2009) pointed out that ‘’ Mintzberg found that managers were not the robotic paragons of efficiency that they were usually made out to be. The pressures of his job drive the manager to be superficial in his actions—to overload himself with work, encourage interruption, respond quickly to every stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the abstract, make decisions in small increments, and do everything abruptly.‘’ The tremendous amount of work that Mintzberg put into the findings earned him the title of leader of a new school of management, the descriptive school, as opposed to the prescriptive and normative schools that preceded his work. This method (Fieldwork) requires the researcher to follow the steps of each of the general managers no matter what activity they are doing. He must carefully note the slightest action, recording the amounts of time spent on each and entering all the data on a grid, which is later to be used to do breakdowns and calculations, make comparisons, and so forth. The thesis title is in itself significant: The Manager at Work-Determining his Activities, Roles and Programs by Structured Observations. The tremendous amount of work that Mintzberg put into the findings earned him the title of leader of a new school of management, the descriptive school, as opposed to the prescriptive and normative schools that preceded his work. The schools of thought derive from Taylor, Henri Fayol, Lyndall Urwick, Herbert A. Simon, and others endeavoured to prescribe and expound norms to show what managers must or should do. With the arrival of Mintzberg, the question was no longer what must or should be done, but what a manger actually does during the day. Mintzberg’s discoveries and deductions appeared to be a veritable revolution. More recently, in his 2004 book Managers Not MBAs, Mintzberg examined what he believes to be wrong with management education today. Two decades ago, Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University who was then teaching MBAs at MIT, discovered a profound "disconnect between the practice of management... and what went on in classrooms." Since that time, he has dedicated himself to the problems of management and management education, both of which he believes are "deeply troubled," and the latter of which has become the wrong that he, with help from colleagues around the world, must right. Using words like "arrogance," "mindless" and "exploitation," Mintzberg outlines just what is wrong with MBAs (the people and the degrees) and why the degree he's developed is rooted in the real world and, as such, is far more relevant and valuable to students, companies and the business world at large. Strong economies are based on good management, not on good business schools, Mintzberg believes, and because the top companies employ the top MBAs and the top MBAs (not to mention the mediocre and bottom-level degree-holders) are, or so he says, the products of an out-of-touch and unrealistic graduate program, then the effects of this miseducation can be felt far beyond the classroom walls. Mintzberg's argument is clearly researched and set forth in a progressively logical and even convincing way. Managers and manager wannabes will be intrigued and can certainly learn a thing or two as long as they, as Mintzberg himself urges in his teachings, consider the source of the education. ^[10] Furthermore, the Economist (Jan 16th 2009) pointed out that ‘’in his book Managers Not MBAs, Mintzberg moved on to another recurring theme of his—that the MBA, the bread-and-butter course of many business schools and the sine qua non of fast-track management careers, “prepares people to manage nothing”. Synthesis, not analysis, he said, “is the very essence of management”, and the MBA course teaches only analysis.‘’ Rather controversially, Mintzberg claims that ‘’prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania are obsessed with numbers and that their overzealous attempts to make management a science are damaging the discipline of management.’’ Mintzberg advocates ‘’more emphasis on post graduate programs that educate practicing managers (rather than students with little real world experience) by relying upon action learning and insights from their own problems and experiences.’’ Mintzberg continues to be an advocate of the relevance of fieldwork even in management education. ^[11]

Aktouf (2006, pp. 197-198) argued that:‘’the managerial literature in the mid-1970s had begun to recognize the importance of the work of Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg has provoked and continues to provoke controversy. From his earliest writings onward, he has often been the focus of severe criticism. He has even been shouted down by those who had previously put him on a pedestal and regarded him as the savior of managerial thinking. In fact, his detractors can be found in every corner of management activity: professors, researchers, practitioners, and senior and middle managers. He is by far the most quoted author in management, and possibly the most taught in our times. He takes the position of a major reformer, if not a revolutionary, whose theories have been the inspiration for a radical rebirth of management.’’

He went on to argue that: ‘’In 1975, Mintzberg published an article in the Harvard Business Review, with the resounding title: The Manager’s job: Facts and Folklore. Mintzberg launched his career as a management theorist with a rather severe and critical attack on management. Fifty years ago Herbert Simon spoke of ‘’proverbs’’, and later Mintzberg used the label ‘’folklore.’’ According to Mintzberg, this folklore was nothing more than the eternal PODC (Plan, Organize, Direct, and Control)! During his five weeks of constant observation of the daily work of five senior managers, he simply never saw anything that came close to the traditional image of the manager busy with thinking, analyzing, organizing or co-coordinating.’’

Mintzberg reported that many managers recognized themselves in his descriptions and felt somewhat vindicated because they had believed that they were the only ones to work that way, while the real mangers, the efficient ones, had been able to organize themselves to plan, analyze, co-ordinate and so on. This leads us to the ‘’facts’’ that Mintzberg presents in contrast to this ‘’folklore’’. Mintzberg calls attention to numerous popular but false views about the nature of managerial work, separates fact from folklore, and provides the best information yet published on what managers do and how they do it. He analyzes models, characteristics, and approaches to managing. He examines commonalities and differences in managing in various contexts, including business, government, health care, and social services. By shadowing 29 managers through a day in their lives, he reveals how managing is affected by many factors -- including national and industry cultures, organizational differences, level of the manager in the organization, and personal styles -- and examines the various strategies that managers adopt to deal with these factors. Mintzberg then identifies the main "conundrums" or dilemmas that managers must wrestle with (such as delegating versus retaining control, balancing order and flexibility, and gathering more data versus needing to take action) and describes how managers deal with those conundrums. And he offers provocative and powerful new understandings of what makes managers effective and ineffective. ^[12]

Aktouf (2006, p. 198) summed-up Mintzberg observations about what takes place in the field:‘’First, the manager’s job is not ordered, continuous, and sequential, nor is it uniform or homogeneous. On the contrary, it is fragmented, irregular, choppy, extremely changeable and variable. This work is also marked by brevity: no sooner has a manager finished one activity than he or she is called up to jump to another, and this pattern continues nonstop. Second, the manager’s daily work is a not a series of self-initiated, willful actions transformed into decisions, after examining the circumstances. Rather, it is an unbroken series of reactions to all sorts of request that come from all around the manager, from both the internal and external environments. Third, the manager deals with the same issues several times, for short periods of time; he or she is far from the traditional image of the individual who deals with one problem at a time, in a calm and orderly fashion. Fourth, the manager acts as a focal point, an interface, or an intersection between several series of actors in the organization: external and internal environments, collaborators, partners, superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and so forth. He or she must constantly ensure, achieve, or facilitate interactions between all these categories of actors to allow the firm to function smoothly.’’

Fieldwork and Economics

Three leading economists, namely, Alan Blinder of Princeton University, Edward J. Nell of the New School and Truman Bewley of Yale, have recently advocated the importance of fieldwork in economics.

Alan Blinder of Princeton and his graduate students visited 200 American companies, to find out why managers are slow to raise and lower prices. Steve Keen in his review of Blinder’s book (April 1, 2006) argued that ‘’Blinder is no maverick, but firmly within the mainstream of economic thought. And yet the research he reports in this book challenges many of the accepted tenets of both micro and macro economics. The publication should therefore be taken seriously by the economics profession, and raked over carefully to find out whether what Blinder reveals is really the case, or simply a product of poor research. It speaks volumes for the way that economics handles contrary evidence to accepted beliefs that this has not happened. Blinder's book has instead simply been ignored. Blinder mounts an effective defense of the survey method, and also applies more resources to the issue than any previous researcher. He and his team of economics PhD students conducted face to face interviews with Presidents, CEOs and senior managers of 200 firms. The firms surveyed represented 7.1% of the USA's GDP, so what was found was statistically robust: what these firms reported was representative of US industry as a whole. As Blinder put it, "we interviewed an astounding 10 to 15 per cent of the target population-a large fraction by any standard. The research was used to explain the macroeconomic phenomenon that interests Blinder of "sticky prices". Economic theory implies that price adjustments should dominate market responses, but prices are notoriously inflexible, at least in the downward direction. Blinder's macroeconomics presumes this, but he wanted to know the microeconomics of why. His survey was designed to test 18 different theories as to why this might be so, and the results did let him distinguish between them. But the key surprise for Blinder and his team was the extent to which economic reality did not look at all like the models that economists assume are true."

Truman Bewley (1999, p. 430) argued that ‘the views of business people and labour leaders suggest a morale theory of wag rigidity’.Commenting on Bewley’s book, Howitt (in Bewley, 1999, jacket blurb) wrote: ‘’Bewley’s argument will be hard for conventional macroeconomists to ignore, partly because of the extraordinary thoroughness and honesty with which he evidently conducted his investigation, and the sheer volume of evidence he provides. Although Bewley’s work will not settle the substantive debates related to wage rigidity, it is likely to have a profound influence on the way macroeconomists construct models. In particular, the concepts of morale, fairness, and money illusion are almost certain to play a big role in macroeconomic theory. His demonstration that there exist in reality simple, robust behavioral patterns that cannot plausibly be founded on traditional maximizing behaviour also raises the prospect of a more empirically oriented, more behavioral macroeconomics in the future.‘’ ^[13]

Edward J. Nell(1998) argued that conceptual analysis of fieldwork can put together the real patterns of behaviour and motivation, in the context of the available and actually operating technology, ways of working, making and doing things. Such conceptual analysis may be concerned with deconstruction, a literary analysis taking apart the reported picture, discovering concealed mean¬ings and hidden agendas, both on the part of observers and the observed. First, conceptual truths provide a basic framework for understanding the structure of human social systems. Such a structure, in turn, provides the setting in which behaviour takes place, a setting that limits and conditions behaviour. Finally, rationality guides behaviour, but ration¬ality works through, and must be understood in terms of, conceptual truths. In economics such truths provide a frame¬work, a set of guidelines, telling us how to construct theory and to build models to picture the world adequately. Second, conceptual analysis based on fieldwork will provide the essential assumptions and definitions on which model-building should be based. In order to construct the kind of models that will enable economists to understand the way the system works, we need to start from conceptual truths, fleshed out by understanding from the inside, and then to develop stylized facts by interpreting statistics in the light of the fieldwork. ^[14]

Commenting on the relevance of fieldwork approach in economics, the Economist Magazine (The fruits of fieldwork, August 15th 2002) observed: ‘’ECONOMISTS, the worldly philosophers, do not on the whole live up to that tag. They are familiar enough with the economy as it exists in equations and official statistics, but are fair strangers to the economy as it exists behind cash tills and on assembly lines. It was not always so. Adam Smith opens “The Wealth of Nations” with a finely observed account of a visit to a pin factory, from which he goes on to demonstrate the benefits of the division of labour. Surprisingly few economists visit the pin factories of today. An exception is Alan Blinder of Princeton University. For his 1998 book, “Asking About Prices: A New Approach to Understanding Price Stickiness,’’ Russell Sage Foundation, Mr Blinder and his graduate students visited 200 American companies, to find out why managers are slow to raise and lower prices. America's National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) went a step further. It launched its own “pin-factory initiative”, dispatching scores of economists to car makers, razorblade manufacturers and gene splicers, in a hunt for the source of America's productivity growth. Even so, most economists still consider fieldwork—“learning by asking”, as Mr Blinder puts it—a doubtful activity, one reserved for the lowest orders, such as reporters and sociologists.Should economists get out more? The desk-bound point to over 10m business establishments in America: what can a handful of visits tell you about the economy as a whole? Statistical research has rigorous, agreed-upon standards for generating a sample and inferring beyond it... Fieldwork, they aver, does not. Neither objection is fatal. Visiting can be just as rigorous as counting. After all, data is just the plural of anecdote—as long as the anecdotes are scrupulously and systematically chosen. Nor can the official statistics measure everything that economists consider important. Mr Blinder wanted to know why prices are less flexible than they theoretically should be. Yet no government bureau compiles statistics on what prices should be, only on what they are. The official statistics are not much better at measuring productivity. Back in 1987, the year he became a Nobel laureate, Robert Solow complained of a “productivity paradox”: the computer age was to be seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics. By the late 1990s, the statistics finally seemed to get it, apparently confirming a productivity miracle thanks to information technology. Since then, however, downward revisions have put the miracle in doubt. Paradox, miracle, or mirage? Little wonder some economists want to go out and check for themselves.’’

The 2009 Nobel Prize Winners in Economics, namely, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, have advocated mixed methods and complex approaches in economics and hinted implicitly to the relevance of fieldwork approach in economics. ^[15].In a recent interview Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom discuss the importance of examining institutional contexts when performing economic analyses. ^[16] Both Ostrom and Williamson agree that “top-down” panaceas or “cookie cutter” approaches to policy problems don’t work. They believe that policymakers need to give local people a chance to shape the systems used to allocate resources and resolve disputes. Sometimes, Ostrom points out, local solutions can be the most efficient and effective options. This is a point of view that fits very well with anthropological research, which has for some time shown us the logic of local systems of knowledge — and the damage that can be done when “solutions” to problems are imposed from outside or above without adequate consultation. Elinor Ostrom, for example, combines field case studies and experimental lab work in her research. Using this combination, she contested longstanding assumptions about the possibility that groups of people could cooperate to solve common pool problems (as opposed to being regulated by the state or governed by the market. ^[17]

Nell (1998, pp. 101-105)) argued that Fieldwork has not been prominent in economics. However, he pointed out that there are exceptions: The Institutionalists did it; much Industrial Organization is based on fieldwork, as in much Labor Economics (J. R. Commons, 1968; P. Sargent Florence, 1972; P. Andrews, 1951; Edwards, 1979). Recent work on ‘Informal Economy’ provides another good contemporary example (Portes, Castells and Benton, 1989). More recently, Alan Blinder ‘s 1998 book (‘’ Asking About Prices’’) and Truman Bewley ‘s 1999 book have revived the fieldwork approach tradition in economics and constitute a significant contribution.

Fieldwork means finding out what people actually do, how they actually think and behave, and what they mean when they say something. Fieldwork has not been widely discussed or widely employed in economics – but it has been there right from the beginning. Adam Smith visited a pin factory, and observed it closely. This led him to explain how the division of labor worked. But in general economists have not done much fieldwork.

In view of the importance of Smith’s example, why are economists reluctant to give prominence to fieldwork? There are exceptions: the Intuitionalists did it; much Industrial Organization is based on fieldwork, as is a good deal of Labor Economics (P. Andrews, 1949; J.R. Commons, 1968; P.S. Florence, 1972; Edwards, 1979, Blinder, 1998; Bewley, 1999). Recent work on the ‘informal economy’ provides a good contemporary example (Portes, Castells and Benton, 1989). Surveys of consumer confidence (Survey Research Centre, Oxford Surveys, Conference Board, INSEE) reflect fieldwork, but most so-called empirical work today is based on number crunching.

Susan Helper (2000) thinks that fieldwork allows exploration of areas with little pre-existing data or theory. Indeed, she wrote:‘’I started my dissertation research thinking I would look at automakers' make/buy decisions. But when I started interviewing and reading trade journals, I realized that important changes--not reflected in the existing literature--were occurring on the 'buy' side. US automakers were moving from adversarial deals (in which they "would steal a dime from a starving grandmother", one supplier said) to "voice" relationships in which they worked with suppliers to improve performance’’. ^[18]

Udry (2003, p. 1) noted that Development Economics has benefited from a rich tradition of field research. Within this broad tradition there is a huge variety of methods, from short qualitative studies to large-scale surveys: ‘’Typically, empirical work in economics relies on existing data. However, it is becoming more common in development economics to complement existing data with relatively short, often less structured visits to the field site in order to clarify aspects of the data, to better define the economic environment, or to collect limited amounts of complementary data. For example, ICRISAT hosted and provided institutional support for a series of visiting scholars during the collection of the Village Level Surveys. This proved to be a relatively inexpensive mechanism that generated an important sequence of insights regarding economic institutions in India‘’. ^[19]

However, Edward J. Nell (1998, pp.96-97) argued that:‘’A widespread problem in the economics profession is ‘armchair empiricism’, the idea that empirical work can be done sitting in a room with a computer, messing around with a data base. The empirical economist doesn’t have to know anything about the world, about the way things are actually done, ‘know’, that is, in the sense of having direct, intimate acquaintance …Conceptual theorizing must be based on and embody empirical work (here in the sense of fieldwork), which will tell us the identifying characteristics of the objects under study. The common belief that conceptual truths are supposed to make it possible to understand the world by just thinking about it has the true relationship exactly backwards. On the contrary, to do pure thinking, to theorize about the world, it is also necessary to investigate the world.Much of the confusion in economics is generated by trying to apply models and approaches suited to one era, and its institutions, to another, with different institutions. Science is supposed to provide universal laws, and under this misapprehension, economics has sought to develop universal principles of market behavior.‘’

Bewley (1999, p. 468) has argued that:‘’The subject of economics has an enormous impact on everyone’s life, and yet the discipline lacks the status of a real science, follows rather than leads ideological trends, and sometimes indulges in fanciful theoretical representations of reality. Many branches of economics are not anchored in empirical knowledge, probably because the subject originated as part of moral philosophy and is still regarded as having to do more with thinking than with observation. This attitude is compatible with the field’s dependence on easily accessible statistical data, which, though essential, are also inadequate. Often it not clear what they measure, and without this knowledge they can be used to support almost any contention. How can the unemployment rate be interpreted without knowledge of it means to be unemployed? What sense can be made of wage data without knowing the impact of workers on pay raises and cuts? Empirical knowledge means systematic experience with the object of study, and this can be had only by taking responsibility for data collection.‘’

Edward J. Nell (1998, p.71) argued that ‘’The methodology of scientific economics adopted the traditional empiricist’s view of the mind as the passive recipient of sense impressions, organized by definitions and analytic truths. Sense data provided the basis of our understanding of the external world, the building blocks out of which the edifice of knowledge was constructed. These were classified and manipulated by means of analytic truths, such of those of mathematics, forming the building blocks into patterns and structures which pictured the world, that is, were isomorphic to it. Sense data were passively recorded; the structures were built to conform to external reality-the structure of knowledge, even the logical structure of propositions, mimicked the structure of the world. Knowledge was recorded, it was not created. Analytic truths, in turn, were taken to be simply given to the mind and to utterly lack content. Facing the world, the individual mind received sense data as stimuli, and responded by forming them into a picture, using analytical formulae. In this account of knowledge, the mind of the observing agent played no active role.‘’

From the Neo-Classical theory’s perspective the minds of economic agents play no role. They are likewise the recipients of stimuli, to which they respond automatically, applying analytic formulae. The formulae follow from the axioms of rationality- the axioms, in turn, are taken as given. The values and motives of the agents are likewise given; faced with stimuli.

Edward J. Nell and Karim Errouaki (2012) have recently argued that‘’ In economics, fieldwork is necessary, for example , to tell us the real relations in a corporation, as opposed to what the Table of Organization says; it is needed to tell us what really motivates people – as opposed to what they say motivates them, or what we - or the corporations! - Think should motivate them. It can tell us how prices are actually fixed, and what was paid as opposed to ways of concealing profits; what is the difference between income and income defined for tax purposes; what inputs are really necessary, what is really work, as opposed to sophisticated shirking: what consumers really want, as opposed to what they have been induced to want – or whether such a distinction can be drawn. Fieldwork can give us a picture of markets in operation, of the institutions that organize production and sales, and of the way work is structured – as seen from the ‘inside’, and balanced against the ‘official’ picture, for both – and the contrasts – will be part of the truth.’’

Recently Swann (2008, pp.3-5) argued that‘’The only way we can know something is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind’. If economist had followed Mill’s wise advice, we would by now be making use of an extraordinary repertoire of research methods in applied economics, including the vernacular methods described in this book’’ .^[20]

Furthermore, Edward J. Nell (1998) argued that there are two types of fieldwork. One kind can give us a carefully drawn picture of institutions and practices, general in that it applies to all activities of a certain kind of particular society or social setting, but still specialized to that society or setting. Although institutions and practices are intangibles, such a picture will be objective, a matter of fact, independent of the state of mind of the particular agents reported on. Approaching the economy from a different angle, another kind of fieldwork can give us a picture of the state of mind of economic agents (their true motivations, their beliefs, state knowledge, expectations, their preferences and values). ^[21]

More recently, Edward J. Nell and Karim Errouaki (2012) argued that in the case of applied econometrics Trygve Haavelmo (1958), Lawrence Klein (1982) and Jack Johnston (1984) hinted implicitly to the relevance of field work approach in economics. They pointed out that an applied econometrician coming cold to the study would run the risk of very slow progress with much searching through inappropriate formulations. They emphasized the importance of knowledge of the ‘’institutional realities’’. The building of institutional reality (through field work) into a priori formulations of economic relationships and the refinement of basic data collection have contributed much more to the improvement of empirical econometric results than have more elaborate methods of statistical inference. ^[22]

Leading British econometrician Jack Johnston (1984, p. 500) argued that‘’Knowledge of the ‘’institutional realities’’ is of course, valuable in all areas. In a study of cost-output relationships in coal mining this author felt it necessary to don a safety helmet and get to the coal face in the narrow and twisting seams of the Lancashire coal field in order to see at first hand the nature of the production process before sitting down to peruse the statistics at the regional headquarters of the National Coal Board. Similarly in studies of scale, costs, and profitability in road passenger transport and of cost-output variations in a multiple-product firm the author spent time at each firm talking to accountants and managers to study their accounting and decision processes before extracting the relevant data by hand from the firm’s records’’. ^[23]

Fieldwork has its own rules. Fieldwork has to understand the society or sector being studied in its own terms, and then translate the terms into the observer’s language. To illustrate this point I will draw on Whyte’s (1955) book, ‘’Street Corner Society’’. Indeed, Whyte showed us how he learned to conduct efficiently a fieldwork research. He argued that there is one best way to do field research….the parts of the study that interest him most depended upon an intimate familiarity with people and situations….This familiarity gave rise to the basic ideas in his book. He did not develop these ideas by any strictly logical process. They dawned on him out of what he was seeing, hearing, doing and feeling. ^[24]

Famous field-workers

In anthropology

• Georg Forster - ethnographer (1772–1775) to Captain James Cook
• Renato Rosaldo
• Victor Turner
• Margaret Mead
• Colin Turnbull
• Clifford Geertz
• Bronislaw Malinowski
• Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
• W.H.R. Rivers
• Alfred Cort Haddon
• Claude Levi Strauss

In Sociology

• Pierre Bourdieu

In Management

• Henry Mintzberg

In Economics

• Wassily Leontief
• Trygve Haavelmo
• Lawrence Klein
• Edward J. Nell
• Alan Blinder
• Truman Bewley
• Jack Johnston

In music

• Alan Lomax
• John Peel (with his Peel Sessions)
• Vincent Moon (with his Take-Away Shows)

Books

• Abu‐Lughod, Lila (1988). "Fieldwork of a dutiful daughter." In S. Altorki & C. Fawzi El-Solh (Eds.), Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
• Akbar S. Ahmed (1984), "Al-Beruni: The First Anthropologist", RAIN 60: 9-10
• Akerlof, G. A and Shiller, R. J. (2009) Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism. Princeton University Press.
• Aktouf, O. (2006) Le Management entre tradition et renouvellement. Montréal : Gaétan Morin
• Andrews, P.W.S (1949). Manufacturing Business. London: Macmillan.
• Bewley, T. (1999) Why Wages Don’t Fall during a Recession? Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Blinder, A. (1998) Asking About Prices: A New Approach to Understanding Price Stickiness. Russell Sage Foundation
• Bourdieu, P. (1979) Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House or the World Reversed: Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bourdieu, P. (1979) The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, University of Chicago Press.
• Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bourdieu, P (1984) Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard University Press.
• Bourdieu, P. (1990). Homo Academicus, Polity,
• Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J. C (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press 1991.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Polity.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford University Press.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language & Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press,
• Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology University of Chicago Press.
• Bourdieu, P. and Monique De Saint Martin, M. , Jean-Claude Passeron, J.C. (1996) Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity.
• Bourdieu, P (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press.
• Bourdieu, P (1998) State nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity.
• Bourdieu, P (1999) Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity.
• Bourdieu, P (1999) Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press.
• Bourdieu, P (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Polity.
• Bourdieu, P. (2005)The Social Structures of the Economy. Polity.
• Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940) The Nuer, a description of the modes livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Douglas, J.D. (1976). Investigative Social Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
• Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine.
• Haavelmo, T. (1958)”The Role of the Econometrician in the Advancement of Economic Theory.” Econometrica 26,351-35.
• Helper, S. (2000) ‘’ Economics and Field Research: You can Observe a Lot Just by Watching.’’ American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 90, 228-32.
• Ho, K. (2009) on “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Jarvie, I. C. (1967) On Theories of Fieldwork and the Scientific Character of Social Anthropology, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 223-242.
• Kaminski, M. M ( 2004). Games Prisoners Play. Princeton University Press. I
• Klein, L. R. (1982) “Economic Theoretic Restrictions in Econometrics.” In Evaluation the Reliability of Macroeconomic Models. Edited by G.C. Chow and P. Corsi. New York: Willey.
• Malinowski, Bronisław (1929) The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia: an ethnographic account of courtship, marriage and family life among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. New York: Halcyon House.
• Mead, M. (1928) Coming of age in Samoa: a psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilisation. New York: William Morrow & Co.
• Mintzberg, H. (1973) The Nature of Managerial Work.Harpercollins College Div
• Mintzberg, H. (2004) Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Mintzberg, H. (2011)Managing. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Nell, E. J. (1988) Prosperity and Public Spending: Transformational Growth and the Role of the State, London, UK: Unwin and Hyman.
• Nell, E. J. (1992) Transformational Growth and Effective Demand, London, UK: Macmillan.
• Nell, E. J. (1996) Making Sense of a Changing Economy. London and New York: Routledge.
• Nell, E. J. (1998) The General Theory of Transformational Growth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Nell, E. J. (1998) Transformational Growth and the Business Cycle, London, UK: Routledge.
• Nell, E.J and Errouaki, K. (2008) ‘’Conceptual Analysis, Fieldwork and Model Specification: Laying Down the Blueprints for a Klein-Nell Model,’’ MS. The New School, NY.
• Nell, E. J. and Errouaki, K. (2012) Rational Econometric Man: Transforming Structural Econometrics, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, USA: E. Elgar.
• Nell, E. J. and Errouaki, K. (2012) Hard Drugs and Easy Money. Forthcoming
• Renato, R. (1986) "From the door of his tent: the fieldworker and the inquisitor," in Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Edited by J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Rice, T et al. (2004) , ‘Future fields: introduction ‘. Anthropology Matters Journal, Vol 6 (2).
• Swann, P.G.M (2008) Putting Econometrics in its Place, Cheltenham, UK, E. Elgar.
• Udry, Ch. (2003), ‘Fieldwork, Economic Theory and Research on Institutions in Developing Countries’, UM, Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
• Whyte, W. F. (1955) Street Corner Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

References

See also

• Field experiment
• Participant observation
• Public Health Advisor
• Wildlife observation