* What is ethnography in social research?* To what use can ethnographic data be put?*
Who are its fiercest critics?* Does ethnography have a future? Ethnography is one of the
principal methods of qualitative research and has a long-established tradition of use in the
social sciences. However, the literature on ethnography has become a battleground as
ethnography is attacked from within and without the qualitative tradition. Post-modern critics
attack the methodological status of ethnography and challenge the importance of its …

Mike Ball is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology at Staffordshire University, UK.
His teaching and research interests are in interactional analysis, research methods and
ethnomethodology. He has published extensively on the analysis of visual data. He is co-
author of Analyzing Visual Data (1992), organizing editor for a special edition of the journal
Communication and Cognition entitled 'Studies in Visual Analysis', and a contributor to Jon
Prosser's edited collection, Image-Based Research (1998).