Undergraduate Module Descriptor

ANT2041: How Organisations Work: Ethnography in Institutions

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

  • Ethics
  • Finding a Site
  • Gatekeepers
  • Learning How to Ask
  • Rapport
  • Observing and Participating
  • Infrastructure
  • Paper
  • Numbers
  • Writing Up
  • Disseminating Findings

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching ActivitiesGuided independent studyPlacement / study abroad
221280

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

CategoryHours of study timeDescription
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activity1111 x 1 Hour Lectures
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activity1111 x 1 Hour Practicums
Guided Independent Study8Ethics Assessment
Guided Independent Study44Weekly Reading for Seminars
Guided Independent Study48Hands-on Ethnographic Research
Guided Independent Study6In-Class Presentation
Guided Independent Study22Research Report

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Smith, Dorothy. 2005. Institutional Ethnography. Altamira.

Borges, J.L. 1969. ‘The Ethnographer’. Penguin

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’. Writing Culture, Marcus and Clifford, eds. University of California Press.

Marcus, George. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Nader, Laura. 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained From Studying Up’. Reinventing Anthropology, D. Hymes, ed. Pantheon.

Briggs, Charles. 1986. ‘Introduction’. Learning How to Ask. Cambridge

Hull, Matthew. 2010. ‘Democratic Technologies of Speech’. Linguistic Anthropology.

Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. University of Chicago Press

Lewis-Krauss, Gideon. 2016. ‘The Trials of Alice Goffman’. New York Times

Deloria, Philip. 1998. Playing Indian. Yale University Press.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioural Scientist.

Latour, Bruno. 1990. ‘Technology is Society Made Durable’. The Sociological Review.

Hull, Matthew. 2003. ‘The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy’. Language and Communication.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. ‘Good Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinical Records’. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity.

Porter, Theodore. 1995. Trust in Numbers. Princeton University Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’. The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press.

Ortner, Sherry. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’ Comparative Studies in Society and History