Discussing the nature of applied social research with Anne

Over on Anne's excellent, insightful, blog we've been discussing the tensions faced by practictioners of social research in constrained development contexts. It's a discussion that's made me think about the context in which we do research and the importance of what we call what we do. The use of the term "ethnography" is currently particularly problematic: as a shorthand for fieldwork, it threatens to undermine the current usage, but "fieldwork" doesn't quite describe the activity that's being done by researchers working in the corporate environment. I don't have a good replacement, but it'll certainly be a topic for conference hallway discussion.