Drawing on four `tales from the field', provided one each by the authors, this article examines the ethical and moral dilemmas ethnographers can face during their research. In particular, we address two key questions. First, what does being ethical actually involve? Second, is there a moral duty owed by researchers and, if so, to whom is this duty owed? The article reviews current debates over ethics in ethnographic research, specifically the responsibilities of the researcher to his/her research subjects, before turning to the four `tales from the field'. These tales form the basis for a discussion of a researcher's ethical responsibilities when confronted with wrongdoing, in different forms, in the course of their fieldwork.

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Research on body-worn cameras (BWC) has tended, through evaluations or randomized controlled trials, to look to demonstrate some assumed benefit or consequence of the use of BWC. This article is concerned with the ways in which police officers use and talk about BWC and draw on ethnographic research over the past 30 months in one force as it rolled out the use of cameras. BWC have become a useful tool in the array of those available to officers. At the same time, they come with some downsides. There are pressures to use the cameras in more and more encounters with the public and while their use may raise the standards of police-citizen interactions, there is also a concern that they constrain discretion. Beyond their immediate use, questions about their evidential value have also emerged. Finally, we begin to question the model of accountability cameras present to the public.

This article reviews Lipsky's Street-level Bureaucracy, a classic work of central importance to the discipline and teaching of public administration. The paper argues that Lipsky's portrayal of the dilemmas faced by front line workers challenges us to focus on the ethical, professional and personal development of student-practitioners.

Purpose As a critical and intimate form of inquiry, ethnography remains close to lived realities and equips scholars with a unique methodological angle on social phenomena. This paper aims to explore the potential gains from an increased use of ethnography in social enterprise studies. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop the argument through a set of dualistic themes, namely, the socio-economic dichotomy and the discourse/practice divide as predominant critical lenses through which social enterprise is currently examined, and suggest shifts from visible leaders to invisible collectives and from case study-based monologues to dialogic ethnography. Findings Ethnography sheds new light on at least four neglected aspects. Studying social enterprises ethnographically complicates simple reductions to socio-economic tensions, by enriching the set of differences through which practitioners make sense of their work-world. Ethnography provides a tool for unravelling how practitioners engage with discourse(s) of power, thus marking the concrete results of intervention (to some degree at least) as unplannable, and yet effective. Ethnographic examples signal the merits of moving beyond leaders towards more collective representations and in-depth accounts of (self-)development. Reflexive ethnographies demonstrate the heuristic value of accepting the self as an inevitable part of research and exemplify insights won through a thoroughly bodily and emotional commitment to sharing the life world of others. Originality/value The present volume collects original ethnographic research of social enterprises. The editorial develops the first consistent account of the merits of studying social enterprises ethnographically.