Living with uncertainty: The ethnographer’s Burden

Abstract

This chapter explores the anxieties and challenges of not just being an ethnographer but engaging in an ethnography. The author’s background in positivistic methodologies generates tensions with the philosophical and epistemological values embraced by ethnography. Here these are discussed in relation to organisational change in the Business School of a Higher Education Institution (which at the time was soon to become a university) in the East of England. The chapter reflects upon uncertainty within research as both challenge and opportunity.