Toward a Method of Industrial Ethnology

Ethnologists are increasingly turning their attention away from their traditional interests in tribal and agrarian societies (see Gamst 1974:l-10) to industrial urban societies (see Angrosino 1976a; Gamst 1977). However, only a few of our number have turned their inquiry to the industrial (work, occupational) sectors of the latter. The purpose of this article is to provide some guidelines for the methodology, techniques, rationales, and strategy of an ethnological study of industria1 organization. In providing these guidelines, I also discuss the nature of ethnological inquiry as a basis for the two concluding sections on the place of the field in the modern industrial world. As working definitions, ethnology is considered to be the study of all aspects of existing cultural (and hence social) systems, technique to be the procedure for gathering or analyzing ethnographic (descriptive) data, and methodology to be the relating of techniques to theory for attaining basic and applied goals of research. Methodology, including techniques of gathering and analysis of data, has never been a major concern in ethnology, whose students have traditionally learned of these in a haphazard way. As Raoul Naroll and Ronald Cohen explain in the introduction to their monumental work, A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology (1973:3):