Ethnography in Public Management Research: A Systematic Review and Future Directions

Ethnography is defined as a research methodology based on sustained, explicit, methodical observation and paraphrasing of social situations in relation to their naturally occurring events. The value of producing local observational data over extended periods of time lies in the ability to systematically explore the subjective construction of meanings and its consequences on organizational and institutional dynamics. Based on a systematic review of published ethnographic studies in the field of public management, this article investigates how ethnography has been conceptualized and employed by the scholarly community in the past 25 years (1990–2014); it highlights the methodological features of the ethnographic design; and it outlines a set of research directions for future applications of the ethnographic approach to the study of theoretically and empirically relevant phenomena. This study contributes to the growing debate of the role of methods in public management literature in informing evidence-based managerial and policy decisions.