Mike Rowe

Dr Mike Rowe

Small Group Project 2022-23

Observing, theorizing and coping with ‘nothing’ in ethnographic fieldwork

With Annika Lindberg & Bagga Bjerge & Tobias Eule

This project will engage with the awkwardness that appears when we observe, hear, and research nothing. In doing so, we will address the methodological, ethical and political challenges of ethnographic research and its limits. In focusing on activity, do we risk misrepresenting our fields of study? By excluding inactivity from our representations, do we fail to fully grasp the activities which we set out to study, the object of our study? We argue that these questions are significant as a tool for better understanding and contextualising the object of study, the activities intended for research.

More information

Areas of interest

Housing Ethnography Police Public Services Public Administration Policymaking Social Security Social Care Policing

Cohort

FG8

Biography

Dr Mike Rowe is Senior Lecturer in Public Sector Management at the University of Liverpool. Before completing his PhD, which was sponsored by the National Audit Office, he spent a number of years as a civil servant working in both management and policy roles. His research has spanned accountability, urban regeneration partnerships, community land trusts, and housing policy, and continues to embrace community activism and social enterprise.

His primary research interests are currently in policing. With colleagues, he was involved in a six-year (2013–2019) ethnographic study of police discretion, observing uniformed officers in the course of their duties. This work resulted in a first book published Open Access by Hart in 2020 and a second with Routledge in 2023. He was also Vice Chair of an EU COST Action on Police Stops from 2018 to 2023. More broadly, his research brings together an interest in public services and ethnographic methods, with a particular focus on street-level bureaucrats, the subject of a further book published by Routledge in 2025.

Since 2006, he has been part of the organising team for the annual Ethnography Symposium at the University of Liverpool, and from 2012 to 2021 was co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

Biographical details correct as of 20.04.26