Ethnography, Grounded Theory and Phronesis

The Relevance of Context

Abstract

In this article I will discuss the crucial relevance of context to make sense of the social. I claim that when reducing social reality to structured, closed, and predictive models, the possibilities of understanding human life are severely curtailed. To support this, I introduce and describe Danish sociologist Bent Flybvjerg’s notions about the role of the Aristotelian term phronesis in sociological research, and I will especially try to establish how this idea is useful for key qualitative sociological approaches such as grounded theory and ethnography. I will finally present an example of empirical work developed within two factories of a dairy company in Uruguay (CASTLETON, 2017).