Internships have been characterized as workplace-based learning opportunities (Stretch and Harp, 1991). As such, they have their roots in the medical and nursing professions where an internship is a formal step in achieving the professional accreditation needed to be hired in these particular occupations. In recent years, internships have become a far more widespread phenomenon to the extent that many employers expect graduate applicants to have held at least one internship, and often more, and are reported to use internships as a way of identifying future employees. The importance of the role of internships in serving to facilitate the transition of young people from educational institutions to places of work is evidenced by the offers from companies and recruitment companies on the Internet for internships in employment disciplines that include marketing, sales, retail, engineering, finance, human resources, and law.

Prior research on internships indicates that graduates who have an internship experience have a higher probability of securing employment at a higher salary than those who do not gain this experience. There are others who claim that internships, that are often low-paid or unpaid, are used by companies to displace full-time higher paid, salaried employees and to, thereby, reduce their wage costs. In addition, U.S. survey data indicate that internships are used by companies as a tool to evaluate potential recruits for full-time roles. There are few empirical studies of what takes place within internships and the impact of the experience for the student, existing employees, and the company where the internship takes place. There is also a paucity of prior research on how companies go about designing internships and recruiting student participants.

This study makes visible, using an interactional ethnographic approach, how an internship was designed, for what purpose, and how an intern was identified and selected for that position through a process of recruitment. This empirical study was conducted by the CEO of ACME who led the efforts by the company to recruit an intern in which activity he played a central role. The CEO-researcher/researcher-CEO—stepping back from ethnocentrism (Heath & Street, 2008) and emic knowledge of the actions, activity, and events—assembled a corpus of data and re-entered the research archive to conduct an analysis of what transpired between the many actors, how, and in what ways the internship formed and developed, and with what outcomes. Findings from the study challenge prior research findings on recruitment processes, identify social equity factors that influence who has access to internship opportunities, and identify the roles of different actors and how they shaped who may have access to an internship and under what conditions. Finally, this study has demonstrated how the empirical analysis of business processes (e.g., the design of an internship and recruitment of an intern) that uses an interactional ethnographic approach (as opposed to an organization behavior approach) can uncover the consequences for individuals and companies of how and in what way, with whom, for what purpose, drawing on what resources they interact with each other in particular social contexts.

A Reflexive Approach In Coming to Know: Uncovering the Logic-of-Inquiry in Ethnographic Research

By

Monaliza Maximo Chian

For the past three decades there has been a growing call for researchers in the social sciences across disciplines and in educational research, to place a greater emphasis on being more reflexive in both the research process and the reporting not only what was found but also their methodological logic-of-inquiry they engaged to construct the “findings” or accounts from their studies (Marcus & Clifford, 1986; Atkinson, 1990; Ellen, 1994). In Education, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) addressed this argument by constructing a set of Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research ( 2006) framed the argument the need for transparency in reporting on the conduct of both qualitative and quantitative research studies. Furthermore, as inscribed by many scholars and leaders in the field of educational as well as educational research (e.g., Arthur, Waring, Coe, Hedges, 2012; Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012; Anderson-Levitt, 2006; Green, Camilli & Elmore, 2006; American Educational Research Association, 2006; Heath, 1982) the basic foundation of any educational research is an understanding of the researcher’s ontological and epistemological assumptions on the nature of the phenomena under study. Therefore, this dissertation takes a reflexive approach in coming to understand how to think ethnographically by examining how and in what ways an intergenerational Interactional Ethnography (IE) research team jointly conceptualized a shared logic-of-inquiry that framed the (co) construction of a logic-in-use in order to address the challenges of conducting a multifaceted and technology-enabled ethnographic research study of a developing instructional program within a larger institutional project initiative in a public regional university. Guided by the Interactional Ethnography framework, the ethnographer conducted a reflexive analysis of two telling cases (Mitchell, 1984) of her reconstruction of key cycles of analysis that were undertaken by her with her IE team in order to examine the series of actions and decisions required in order to uncover what she and her team needed to know, understand, and undertake in order to strive to develop emic perspectives on the development of the principles and processes of integrating long term and futures thinking concepts into established contents of undergraduate courses within the Organizational Communication department in higher education. The researcher drew on both archive records collected and constructed by her team (video records, transcripts of interviews, field notes, and final reports) and archive records of the external team (annual reports, 8 syllabi, lesson plans, course notes). Discussions of findings from this reflexive study presented a set of principles of operations (c.f, Heath; 1982; Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012) that there were developed to reflect on and to interrogate the ontological as well as epistemological theories guiding the methodologies of data collection, construction, analysis, and interpretation at multiple points across the research process.

The present study sought to make visible how and in what ways critique, as a disciplinary practice and process, was discursively constructed among actors in and through the opportunities for learning afforded in a third-year, 24/7 access architectural design studio. To gain an emic perspective (Agar, 1994), as an outsider entering a new disciplinary study, required a multilayered approach to trace over time how and in what ways processes and practices were proposed, established and (re)formulated. Discourse-in-use (Bloome & Clark, 2006) was the driving construct of this research project, as a way to trace how critique practices and processes were inscribed in this course of study. Data were constructed using written fieldnotes completed in the course, email correspondences with the instructor, video records of the course, course records, and ethnographic interview-conversations. Analyses made visible that opportunities for learning the practices and processes of critique. Opportunities that varied from formal to informal, engagement with different actors (Spradley, 1980), and participation in different learning environments were all critical to preparing students for the academic, social, and cultural demands in the architecture profession. The findings lay a foundation for further analyses about other phenomenon/a central to work in the design studio.