>>A lot of "ethnography" seems like journalism with pretentions to scholarship.
>
>well, it's what i do and i'll bet that if you read what i do you
>wouldn't castigate it as such be/c you'd agree with my politics.
But what are you claiming to do in your ethnography? Explore, say, how middle managers think and feel in an age of downsizing and speedup? Poll-style techniques can be illuminating there, but I think talking to a bunch of them in some depth adds a lot to the picture. But to do that, you'd talk to a bunch of middle managers - the very people you're trying to characterize. Wolfe talked to a fairly upscale group of suburbanites - without disclosing much of his questionnaire or his techniques or quoting responses in detail, which means we have to trust him a lot - and retailed his results as insights into how "America" thinks.
What I meant by the journalism crack is that bad journalism picks out a few dramatic instances of something without bothering to decide how representative they are and draws heroic conclusions from them. Good journalism, though, can bring lifeless stats and trends to life - but without leaping to conclusions recklessly. What Wolfe did in that book was more like bad j'ism than good.
Doug