Abstract
Our aim in this chapter is to elaborate some of the key issues involved in actually doing fieldwork – i.e., in going and looking at what people do for yourself and developing competence in their work. We focus particularly on a range of practical matters involved in getting into a setting, getting on with a study, and gathering resources sufficient for you to be able to provide a rich account of its work. This includes securing access, gaining acceptance in the setting, the need for informed consent, figuring out where to start your studies, developing vulgar competence in the work and, quite crucially, assembling a corpus of data or an "ethnographic record" with which to develop an analytic account of work that reveals its real world, real time organisation.