The power of accounts: authority and authorship in ethnography

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Abstract
This paper focuses on the production of ethnographic texts. It explores how claims to authority and authenticity are contested within the ethnographic enterprise and help to shape the finished written product. The paper draws upon fieldwork in an elite occupational setting and argues that in such settings the crafting of ethnographic texts may be particularly problematic. The paper explores the parallels between ethnographic writing and fiction and attempts to make sense of the texts researchers create and the status these texts carry. The paper concludes that the right of the author to construct versions of social reality cannot be divorced from the rights of the researched to impose their own definitions of reality.

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