ELITE ETHNOGRAPHIES: POTENTIAL, PITFALLS AND PROSPECTS FOR GETTING ‘UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL’

This article celebrates Rod Rhodes’ use of ethnography to study political elites ‘up close and personal’. Initially Rhodes’ work is contextualized within the development of political ethnography more generally, before his ethnographies of ‘Everyday life in a Ministry’ are reviewed, illustrating the potential of ethnography to research policy-making elites. This review highlights epistemological and ontological questions which link to criticism of Rhodes’ work as taking an anti-foundational stance. In looking at future prospects for ethnography in governance settings, this article argues that researchers building on Rhodes’ scholarship can choose whether to use ethnography as a ‘method’ or an ‘interpretive methodology’. In concluding, the case is made for a ‘constructivist modern empiricism’ which utilizes the ethnographic method alongside other research methods as being most useful for public policy and administration scholarship aiming to be practically useful for understanding either the processes of public policy-making or its impact. ADVOCATING ETHNOGRAPHY: AN ENCOUNTER WITH ROD Walking through the grounds of Sunningdale, the (then) Civil Service Training College, during a conference convened as part of the ESRC Whitehall Programme in 1997, this researcher plucked up courage to ask Rod Rhodes about her doctoral research design. These plans owed much to some of Rhodes’ earlier writing about power dependency and the development of trusting networks in government. It was one of those conversations that most academics have just a few times in their careers; helpful, crystallizing, creative, and sometimes taking an unexpected turn. One of the surprising aspects of this conversation was Rhodes’ suggestion of moving beyond elite interviewing to garner the information needed. ‘Spend time there’, Rod advocated, ‘look at the diaries’, and ‘follow people around as they go about their work’. These were ways of researching the informal ‘rules of the game’ in Whitehall which were not common in the analysis of public policy and administration at this time in a sub discipline more wedded to the traditional tools of the historian or constitutional scholar. This period, at the end of the 1990s, coincided for Rod with the beginnings of the most productive of partnerships with Mark Bevir at the University of Newcastle and a growing engagement with interpretivism. Rod went on to establish a specialist group of the British Political Studies Association on ‘Interpretivist Political Science’ to encourage ‘research deploying interpretive approaches especially historical and ethnographic studies of political beliefs, traditions, and practices’. Rhodes’ advocacy of closer participant observation of the key actors and interactions in the core executive demonstrated a rare political science interest in ethnography at the time. This interest in ethnographic methods reflected Rod’s growing desire to ‘put the people back in’ to his analysis of policy-making in networks. It led to an engagement with the epistemological value of anthropological insights and approaches well before these were routinely taught as part of advanced social science research skill training across UK politics departments. Subsequently Rhodes was able to put into practice his exhortations above, gaining access to undertake an ethnography of the workings of three ministerial offices in the