For my Ethnography assignment, I am working on a research project named Informal Socialization of Employees After Work Hours or Outside Environment. At the moment, I am focusing on the areas of cultural domains and behavior and context for my subjects. The area of workplace sociology is a challenging field to navigate, since it is partially based on the realities of the modern business world. And since its landscape is consistently changing, the socialization that the participants of the office environments undergo changes with it. Thus, it is particularly interesting to examine and explore the areas and patterns that remain constant through the scientific, ethnographic lens (Wood & Mattson, 2019). I chose an informal setting for the assignment purposes to highlight the behavior of the subjects outside of the heavily structured environment.
As the project is dedicated to informal socialization, the concepts of behavior and context are of particular interest to it. Namely, I intend to carry out particular structured observations while taking notes of the clients of the restaurant. Together, the findings must present a picture of the character and composition that the patrons of the restaurant exhibit, as well as how often they exhibit it.
I composed a questionnaire attempting to take into account multiple factors that might influence the ways in which employee socialize in groups. Namely, gender was of a particular interest to me, since the topic of male and female colleagues coexisting within and outside of the work environments has been of a particular interest to business scholars as of late. I believe that ethnography can assist in better understanding social and cultural mechanisms that lay behind real-life situations of wide variety. This angle of analysis unifies multiple social sciences and can therefore be valuable to professionals in different fields.
Reference
Wood, A. E., & Mattson, C. A. (2019). Quantifying the effects of various factors on the utility of design ethnography in the developing world. Research in Engineering Design, 30(3), 317-338. Web.