Spradley took his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington in 1967 and joined Macalester College in 1969, where he produced an extraordinary volume of methodological writing before dying of leukemia in 1982. He was a central figure in the “new ethnography,” which treated every ordinary person as a carrier of culture worth interviewing rather than treating culture as the property of its notable artists and officials.
His authority on this page is methodological, and it is the deepest on the page. Nobody else cited here spent a career on the specific problem of how an outsider asks an insider about a world the outsider does not inhabit, which is exactly the founder’s problem on a calibration call. The Ethnographic Interview is a self-teaching handbook, not a theory: it gives the grand-tour question and its four variants, the mini-tour, the example question, and the distinction between phrasing a question personally and phrasing it culturally, each with worked examples. Management Craft borrows that apparatus wholesale. He is adjacent to management rather than devoted to it, so his word carries weight on interview technique and not on hiring judgment.