Marlot Kuiper

95 On Ethnography ing In this dissertation, I thus started off with a selected, specified topic. Rather than studying ‘surgical care’ as a field, I focused on the question how professionals together work with a formalised standard. The scarce ethnographic studies that have been conducted in operating theatres, have mostly concentrated around big concepts like ‘safety culture’, that are – as self-confessedly stated by the authors, not unproblematic (McDonald et al., 2005). By studying specific, demarcated practices I got to see the many processes and interactions that constitute professional work ‘from the inside out’, and provide rich contextualized narratives. To further demarcate the study and find illustrative examples of such standards, I needed input from the field. 4.4 Fieldwork: Commencing into the field The previous section already shows how headwork and fieldwork got blended, as access to the field is indispensable in selecting a field, and exploratory conversations were crucial for selecting surgical as a field. By further commencing into the field, I was able to further explore the research field, and gain more focus. 4.4.1 Exploring the field After gaining informal access to the research field – that is, having a contact person and the permission to start conversations, the initial focus from the literature was specified from a native point of view. In this exploratory phase, I conducted both exploratory conversations with a gate-keeper (Burgess, 1982, 1991; Miller & Bell, 2002; Whyte, 1955) and a senior policy advisor of the Quality and Safety department, and exploratory observations shadowing the gate-keeper, to ‘get a feel’ of the research field and narrow down the research topic. During the conversations, the implementation of safety standards in the surgery department appeared a ‘hot topic’ from both managerial and professional points of view. When entering the field, it often didn’t feel like as a researcher I had to initiate a conversation and pose questions. On the contrary, respondents were willing to share their thoughts on the Surgical Safety Checklist. I selected the Surgical Safety Checklist as a starting point for close analysis (see box). 4.4.2 Selecting the research sites To address the research question I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at two research sites. In this ethnographic study, I decided to first study the research topic thoroughly in one research setting, and then move to another site to 4