SOAS Research Online

Abstract

An account of undertaking ethnographic research in the House of Lords and the House of Commons and contrasting the findings. Ethnographic methods could be valuable for feminist scholars of political institutions in encouraging them to pay more attention to their own assumptions and their informants’ cultural specificity and context, to diversity between informants and within social groups, and to social change. Universal models should be treated with caution, as rules are embedded within the specific cultural meaning making and social relations in that particular place, time, and organization. Gendered differences may be universal, but the forms they take are endlessly varied.