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This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit -- rare in sociology but common in anthropology -- when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study -- a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of refutable implications and test their plausibility, using another data set on the network ties of all better dress apparel firms in the New York apparel economy. Results reveal that embeddedness is an exchange system with unique opportunities relative to markets and that firms organized in networks have higher survival chances than do firms which maintain arm's-length market relationships. The positive effect of embeddedness reaches a threshold, however, after which point the positive effect reverses itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an application of a method recently developed by Heckman and MaCurdy (/984) to estimate a simultaneous-equations model with dichotomous endogenous variables. The substantive issue is the determinants of native-language maintenance among the Canadian Indian population. A simultaneous-equations model in which retention of an indian mother tongue and various aspects of labor-force activity have reciprocal effects is contrasted with a model in which both language retention and economic activity are determined jointly by background characteristics such as education. Results support the latter model. This suggests that attempts to improve the economic conditions of native Indians (for example, by increasing education levels) may have a cost in terms of cultural maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review and partial reformulation of the sociological literature on the persistence of ethnicity in American society. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on the transplanted cultural heritage as the principal antecedent and defining characteristic of ethnic groups, we suggest that the development and persistence of ethnicity is dependent upon structural conditions characterizing American cities and position of groups in American social structure. Attention is focused on the question: under what conditions does ethnic culture emerge? Specifically, what social forces promoted the crystallization and development of ethnic solidarity and identification? As an emergent phenomenon, ethnicity continues to develop with the changing positions of groups and individuals within society. As society changes, old forms of ethnic culture may die out but new forms may be generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do national institutional contexts mediate the global? This article aims to answer this question by analyzing screen translation—the translation of audiovisual materials like movies and television programs—in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. A cross-national, multi-method research project combining interviews, ethnography, and a small survey found considerable cross-national differences in translation norms and practices, sometimes leading to very different translated versions of the same product. The analysis shows how differences between national translation fields are produced and perpetuated by the interplay of institutional factors on four interdependent levels: technology, and the organizational, national, and transnational fields. On each level, various institutions are influential in shaping nationally specific translation norms and practices by producing institutional constraints or imposing specific meanings. I propose a model that explains the persistence of national translation systems—not only from the logics of specific institutions, fields, or levels—but by the feedback loops and interdependencies between institutions on various levels. This analysis has implications for the sociological understanding of globalization, the production of culture and media, cross-national comparative research, as well as institutional theory and the role of translation in sociological practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this comparative ethnographic case study of the implementation of a reform related to the Affordable Care Act in two community health centers, I find that professionals may not compete to claim new tasks (and thereby not implement reform) if these tasks require them to acquire information unrelated to their professional expertise, use work practices that conflict with their professional identity, or do impure or low-value tasks that threaten their professional interests. In such cases, reform may be implemented if lower-status workers fill in the gaps in the division of labor between the professions targeted by the reform, playing a brokerage role by protecting each profession’s information, meanings, and tasks in everyday work. When the new tasks represent professionally ill-defined problems, brokers can be more effective if they use buffering practices rather than connecting practices—managing information rather than transferring it, matching meanings rather than translating them, and maintaining interests rather than transforming them—to accomplish reform. By playing a buffering role in the interstices between existing professional jurisdictions, lower-status workers can carve out their own jurisdiction, becoming a brokerage profession between existing professions that need to collaborate with one another for reform to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on more than 15 years of research to analyze “Black Mexicans,” phenotypically “Mexican-looking” youth who identified as Black during adolescence, used this identity to become upwardly mobile, and then abandoned it in early adulthood. Black Mexicans are potentially iconic cases among emerging varieties of U.S. ethnic and racial life, given Mexicans’ status as a key, usually negative, case in assimilation theory. Most such theory posits that assimilation into Black, inner-city culture leads to downward mobility. To explain how and why this did not happen for Black Mexicans, I propose a sensitizing framework using the concepts of conjunctural ethnicity, emphasizing analysis of racial and ethnic identity in local, historical, and life course contexts; and operating identity, which analyzes identities in interactions and can accommodate slippage in informants’ understanding or use of ethnic and racial categories. Some Mexicans used a Black culture of mobility to become upwardly mobile in the late-1990s and early-2000s in New York, adopting a socially advantaged operating identity that helped them in ways they felt Mexicanness could not in that historical conjuncture, especially given intra-ethnic competition between teen migrants and second-generation youth. This article uses case-based ethnographic analysis and net-effects analysis to explain why and how Blackness aided upward mobility among Black and non-Black Mexicans, but was left behind in early adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although recent increases in imprisonment are concentrated in poor Black communities, we know little about how daily life within these neighborhoods is affected. Almost all ethnographic work in poor minority neighborhoods was written before the expansion of the criminal justice system, and the bulk of research on “mass imprisonment” relies on survey data, field experiments, or interviews, conceptualizing its impact in terms of current or former felons and their families. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article shifts the focus from imprisonment and criminal records to the increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods, and what this has meant for a growing status group of wanted people. For many young men, avoiding jail has become a daily preoccupation: they have warrants out for minor infractions, like failing to pay court fees or breaking curfew, and will be detained if they are identified. Such threat of imprisonment transforms social relations by undermining already tenuous attachments to family, work, and community. But young men also rely on their precarious legal standing to explain failures that would have occurred anyway, while girlfriends and neighbors exploit their wanted status as an instrument of social control. I discuss the implications of my ethnographic observations relative to prior treatments of the poor and policing, and with regard to broader sociological questions about punishment and surveillance in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory ethnographies are the shop-floor studies of the knowledge economy. Observational data from 11 months of fieldwork in a multidisciplinary neuroscience lab suggest that scientific skepticism, long understood as an evaluative mechanism, also serves social control and monitoring functions. The author applies insights from organization theory, social psychology, science studies, and the sociology of science to demonstrate that skepticism is socially organized at the microlevel of laboratory interactions. This organization makes skepticism a solution to the problems of control, coordination, and evaluation raised by uncertain scientific work conducted in a physically dispersed multidisciplinary setting. The diverse roles skepticism plays in laboratory interactions resonate with examinations of work in a number of occupational settings while providing direct insight into mechanisms that may account for the patterning of rewards and status across knowledge-intensive workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After reviewing some of the methodological difficulties which have faced investigation trying to investigate the rise of revitalization movements, the methodological advantages of studying the acceptance of the Ghost Dance (circa 1889) by North American Indians are delineated. These advantages are: (1) a relatively large number of tribes (N=3 7) were all exposed to what was more or less the same revitalization movement; (2) information on the degree to which each tribe accepted the movement is available from a source contemporary to the event and (3) information relating to some of the social characteristics of these tribes is available from Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. The sample thus provides what is probably a unique opportunity for quantitatively testing several hypotheses relating to the acceptance of revitalization movements. After ascertaining that diffusion alone could not account for acceptance of the Ghost Dance, several other hypotheses, derived from different theoretical frameworks, were tested. Thus, using a "cultural deprivation" argument, it was predicted, and found, that those tribes recently deprived (because they were living in areas in which the buffalo had only recently been exterminated) were far more likely to accept the Ghost Dance than those not recently deprived. The assertion -implicit in Worsley `s analysis of Cargo Cults-that acceptance of a revitalization movement would vary inversely with degree of political centralization was not supported by the data. Finally, based upon a consideration of the social conditions promoting "integration" in Durkheim `s sense of that word, it was predicted, and found, that acceptance varied inversely with the presence of unilineal kin groups and with the presence of a system of inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]