Ethnography: A Much-Advocated but Under-Used Qualitative Methodology in Published Accounts of Family Business Research

In parallel with the growing interest in qualitative research methods in family business, many family business scholars advocate greater use of ethnographic methods to advance the field further. This endorsement rests at least on two arguments. On the one hand, there is a need to widen, extend, or deepen our perspectives to better understand the ‘boundary crossing’ nature of families in business. On the other hand, the majority of the proposals to extend ethnographic research aim to tap into important but still under-explored complex tacit processes of family firms. However, we found that ethnographic research in family business settings remain scarcely published. This chapter reviews a set of family business studies that have used ethnographic methods, and which have been published in business and management journals in order to examine their orientations, main findings, techniques adopted, and epistemological/ontological stances. Looking forward, we end this chapter with a brief discussion on how the practice of ethnography is changing with reference to visual and virtual applications of ethnographic principles.