WRITING THE RESEARCH REPORT AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL RESEARCHEXPANSION BOX 4
Four Genres and Rhetorical Forms of Ethnographic WritingAdler and Adler (2008) identified four genres and
rhetorical forms used in field research-ethnographic
writing: classical, mainstream, postmodern, and pub-
lic ethnography.
The classical style is the oldest and is found in
scholarly journals devoted to field research. It stresses
readability and accessibility, to avoid overloading
readers with a high-level vocabulary or long and
complex sentences. Most often, the author will use an
active rather than a passive voice and write simply to
make the report accessible to an educated lay audi-
ence. The report starts with a topic or theoretical issue
and a short literature review. The methods section is
a personal story of the researcher’s journey through
the settings, the people met, and the relationships
forged. Authors describe what they encountered in
the field and how they gathered data in a specific
time and place. Readers often get a subjective view
and a sense that the researcher was “really there.”
Sometimes a discussion of data analysis is presented,
but many classical works do not offer a detailed
analysis. The data section frequently follows a
progression: present a specific concept, next elabo-
rate on it, and then offer data description. The data
often are in a narrative form. The conclusions ad-
vance knowledge by adding to, going beyond,
and/or modifying existing theory and often involve
a shift to a more formal style. Writers often orga-
nize the report around building theory from the
ground up.
Mainstreamstyles appear in mainstream scholarly
journals. Because peer reviewers in these publications
may be unfamiliar with the qualitative/interpretive so-
ciology, they may push a positivist orientation onto
ethnographic writers. As with the classical style, the
author portrays a world accessed by gathering in-
depth, firsthand, naturalistic data. However, the main-
stream style frames the discussion differently than the
classical style does. The mainstream style has more
distance from readers and more of a tone of expert
authority than the classical style. The introduction
tends to be tighter, stiffer, and more formal than in the
classical style. Instead of accessibility, the emphasis is
conformity to standard social scientific rhetoric, often
mimicking the positivist, quantitative research report.
The introduction sections tend to be much longer
than those in the classical style. In these sections,
authors define terms and provide a different type of
literature review, which is longer and in more depth
and often has multiple subsections. The extensive lit-
erature review implies that knowledge advances in a
uniform, linear progression and builds on prior schol-
arly contributions that are consistent with a more pos-
itivist orientation. The methods section is also longer
than in the classical style. It may elaborate to justify the
use of qualitative methods and to explain their epis-
temological bases. Researchers rarely discuss personal
connections to their topics, participants, and settings
because mainstream audiences may interpret such
statements as evidence of bias. Authors often present
the research process as if it was preplanned rather
than inductive and emergent. They use the passive
voice with a tone of objectivity and neutrality. There
is often a discussion of specific techniques or com-
puter programs used instead of the vague, impres-
sionistic discussion of method found in the classical
style. The data or results section of mainstream style
tends to have a subheading and often includes charts
or tables of some form. The form of rhetoric removes
the researcher and presents data in a detached form.
A postmodernstyle has been used only since the
1990s and tends to appear in a few scholarly journals
that share a postmodern orientation. Compared to
the classical style, it rejects attempts at objectivity,
principles of validity and reliability, and notions of re-
searcher authority. Instead, it rests on a belief that
there is no fixed or single standard for doing or
writing field research. To the extent the postmodern
style has principles, they are ones of substantive em-
pirical contribution, aesthetic merit, reflexivity, im-
pact on the audience, and credibility of a person’s
lived experience. Writing leans toward a humanistic
or artistic form. Often it is a story-telling narrative
written in a colloquial manner with a plot, a moral,
and a point to make. The subjective voice of the
researcher-author is common with a high level of
self-exposure and self-awareness or reflectivity. The
postmodern style may have first-person accounts
of the author’s experiences interspersed with semi-
detached discussions of those personal experiences.
The primary or only source of data may be the
author’s personal experiences. Often the postmodern
style flows in a nonlinear, unpredictable manner
with frequent shifts in tone and direction and no