We find more and more ethnography providers don't provide ethnography at all. Instead, a lot of what is called "ethnography" is really just in-context observations and interviews. We think it is great that focus group moderators and marketers are doing qualitative research in natural settings. At the same time, calling it ethnography isn't only a misnomer, it can lead research managers to wrongully lower their expectations of what ethnography can provide.
Ethnography is more than just watching people while they channel surf or eat breakfast at a pancake place. Ethnography is an approach to understanding, and the values of ethnography, of exploration, holism, and induction, drive everything we do. These values dictate what projects we bid on, how we design our methodologies, how we devise sampling strategies, how we go about doing fieldwork, and in the end how we finally analyze and report our findings.
So, we work with a set of lofty goals, the result of the continual methodological discussions that go on in the social sciences. This takes certain qualifications (formal training in ethnography for one!) and commitments that many other providers who claim to provide ethnography simply do not have.
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