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This special issue gathers empirical papers that develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. Each paper, in its own right, offers key sociological insights, and as a collection, this special issue demonstrates the need to bring ethnographic methods to digital communities, interactions, practices, and tools. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, "the digital" points us to the need to update, rethink, and grow qualitative sociology. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope and structure of social theory are often analyzed as part of or preamble to theorizing proper. This paper takes an indirect approach to the metatheoretical question, "what does social theory look like in terms of scope and structure?" by analyzing a form of social theory that sociologists tend not to think of as social theory: namely, judge-made law produced in Federal appellate courts. We argue that judges engage in social theorizing on a routine basis, and that they arrive at some of their theoretical claims through a process of theorizing that has features in common with sociological theorizing. The social theorizing of judges holds up a mirror to our own. By recognizing and examining judicial social theorizing as a form of structured, social theorizing, we aim to facilitate a clearer understanding of the social conditions enabling (and constraining) the production of social theory within sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do abstract philosophies turn into lived reality? Based on 2 years of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews of vipassana meditation practitioners in Israel and the United States, the paper follows the process through which meditators embody the three main Buddhist tenets: dissatisfaction, impermanence and not-self. While meditators consider these tenets central to Buddhist philosophy, it is only through the practice of meditation that the tenets are experienced on the bodily level and thereby are 'realized' as truth. This realization takes place in the situated environment of the meditation center, where participation in long meditation retreats facilitates the production of specific subjective experiences that infuse the knowledge of Buddhist tenets with embodied meaning. The paper illustrates how abstract concepts and embodied experience support one another in the construction of meditators' phenomenological reality and suggests a general framework for studying the variety of relations that exist between the conceptual and embodied dimensions of different types of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every social scientist knows that it would be a mistake to treat a sample of journal articles as a true representation of the phenomenon at hand. Yet the group of eight articles that have been selected for the July 1, 1997, issue of "Qualitative Sociology," strikes the author as providing windows on some of the key changes that are now occurring in American families. Every single paper addresses some new aspect or recent development in family life, ranging from new family forms to egalitarian gender roles and new ways for families to relate to the wider community. At the same time that they raise new issues in new family settings, all of these articles contain a common theme. They reveal a fresh understanding of how feminism actually works in family life. The papers intertwine two contrasting themes, on the one hand, an exploration of how new family forms can liberate women from traditional ascriptive bonds that are imposed by the familiar gender system, and on the other hand, a discovery that traditional and particularistic solutions crop up in many aspects of child rearing and family life.

This paper reports on the use of aerial photographs to study the social structure of a dairy farm neighborhood in St. Lawrence County, New York. The paper compares information from aerial photographs of farmsteads and farm work to data gathered in a sociological survey. I examine how the visual data compares to other sociological information; how photographs, in this research, amplify, supplement, or contextualize nonvisual data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who use autobiographical perspectives in the practice of sociology and related disciplines have noted, with concern, the association of their work with self-indulgence (Devault, 1994; Jackson, 1990; Okely, 1992; Kreige, 1991). This paper elaborates this concern by directing analytic attention to the nature of the charge of self-indulgence. The paper reads as an autobiographical defense of autobiographical sociology. It uses the naming of my own work as self-involved as a point of departure for explicating the implications of this regulatory practice. The device of irony is used to expose how self-indulgence, as a critique invoking highly insular relations of readership, authorship and subject/object distinction, relies on the conventions of a traditional masculine academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social organization of a craft profession (as opposed to an art world), namely production pottery. The analysis focuses on control as the important dependent variable and examines features of the social organization that may influence the amount of control that a production potter has over matters such as work schedule, product and choice of marketing outlets. One conclusion is that stratification along a time dimension (i.e. the length of time that one has been in the profession) is an important independent variable influencing amount of control. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of the controversy surrounding the concepts of "art" and "craft" as members of the study perceive this distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the satire of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to examine the arguments posed by William J. Goode's analysis of the function of the inept in social life. Drawing on methodology developed in our earlier paper on Catch-22 ("Social Death: or What Happened to Doc Daneeka?") this paper shows first the depiction of Major Major Major Major's group relationships which are useful in developing ideas which further Goode's essentially functionalist orientation; and second how other material from the novel extends the functionalist direction and presents an entirely new look at the sociology of the inept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the state imagine the people? In what ways does it come to know the targets of its policies? This paper examines the transformation of the state through a focus on the visions implied in tools and practices of results-based management in state bureaucracies. When scholars have discussed the state's vision or imagination they have often critically examined how the state constructs aggregates of the population as a whole. But an emphasis on or critique of aggregation can only be the beginning of understanding the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways in which people are imagined in governance today. Results-based management has created a new way in which the state imagines people. In some policy arenas citizens have been turned into 'beneficiaries' through the practices of state managers. Beneficiaries differ from citizen in a number of ways: Citizens are thought to benefit from policies with broad goals; beneficiaries are shown to benefit from specific interventions. Citizens are owed service; beneficiaries are selected for intervention if it suits specific funding priorities. Citizens are the origins of politics and the end of policies; beneficiaries are a means to an organization's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary art, the curator plays an important role in the production of artistic meaning through exhibition-making. Although sociology has tended to see this work as the exercise of tacit or embodied knowledge, curatorial knowledge and plans may be elaborated and altered by the situated actions of exhibition installation. While curators know a successful installation 'when they see it,' this depends on the indexical particularities of artworks and environments which cannot be predicted in advance. In demonstrating the practical ways in which culture is mobilized in situations of object (inter)action, this paper emphasizes the 'making' in artistic meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores inherent tensions between two democratic ideals: citizen representation and accountability of the state. Specifically, I argue that the method by which state officials make themselves accountable-through their creation of the appearance of transparency-results in the exclusion of alternative, non-scientific ways of knowing, including those that are gendered, local and indigenous, because these ways of knowing often employ non-standardized methods which are not 'transparent' in the same way as science and therefore easily dismissed by state officials as indefensible to citizens' questioning. I explore this tension by drawing on examples from ethnographic work I completed with two groups of knowledge practitioners, Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations (Native American) traditional marine harvesters and government biologists, both of whom work with clams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial intellectual movement has been growing in the social sciences around the adoption of mechanism- and process-based explanations as complements to variable-based explanations, or even as substitutes for them. But once we have recognized the validity and dignity of studying mechanisms and processes, what is the next step? Recently, both political scientists’ and sociologists’ discussions have begun to turn away from correlation to mechanism-based approaches to causation. But there is still a widespread assumption that mechanisms are unobservable. We maintain that ways can be developed to observe the presence or absence of mechanisms either directly or indirectly. In this paper, by way of example, we put forward four methods—two direct and two indirect—for measuring mechanisms of contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural sociology has recently developed new tools with which to understand and analyze meaning in terms of cultural discourse. Specifically, this paper further develops the Alexanderian form of discourse analysis through application on the micro-level. Utilizing extensive ethnographic data, the mythopoetic men's movement is examined in terms of how its participants construct political meaning that motivates and guides their action. In empirical detail, these actors can be seen as creating a cultural discourse that constitutes the social movement at a fundamental level while at the same time the discourse is continually negotiated, contested, and reconfigured. Exposed is the “discourse of liberational masculinity” which is used by movement participants to challenge and confront hegemonic masculinity in American society. Examining the mythopoetic men's movement from this perspective demonstrates the analytic utility of this approach through revealing in unique ways the dynamics of morality, political belief, and perceived hegemony within this popular contemporary social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about symposium on methodology in qualitative sociology. The symposium presents papers that critically reflects upon the methodological strengths and limitations of works of qualitative sociology. This symposium addresses the concern, shared by quantitative social scientists, general readers, and not a few qualitative sociologists themselves that qualitative sociology lacks methodological rigor and, accordingly, truly reliable or generalizable findings. Some social scientists view qualitative sociology, in no uncertain terms, as methodologically and empirically "soft" and highly subjective, if not completely solipsistic, a characterization that a few qualitative researchers have ironically embraced. At best, according to certain critics, qualitative sociology might generate provisional hypotheses that more rigorous social scientists can then go forth to test and revise, but it cannot itself glean much solid understanding of the social world. or a vast social movement. Qualitative researchers are able to see social settings in much of their richness.

This article discusses the negotiated order approach to organizational analysis in qualitative sociology. The approach represented in the concept of "negotiated order" tends to lead to a focus on the species rather than on the environment. Both, however, need to be embraced, by sociologists as much as by actors. Sociologists turnout to be rather good teachers, or at least rather good at producing appropriate documentary evidence to back up their claims to being good teachers. The author suspects that all studies of the social construction of data have given sociologists an edge in the generation of paper to fit performance indicators. Overall, sociology seems to be around the middle of the research rankings, which is about what would be expected from a discipline that is heavily represented in 1992 universities with a limited research tradition. For a discipline so identified with collectivism, sociologists are remarkable individualists who remain reluctant to learn from their own discipline's work. They know the importance of teamwork in successful organizations and they reject the lessons for their own.

In this paper I describe my experience as a qualitative sociologist on the research staff of a government policymaking agency. Using specific examples from my experience, strategies for survival as a qualitative sociologist in a quantitatively-oriented setting are presented. It is proposed that: 1) qualitative methods need to be promoted as a credible and valuable approach to research and the individual researcher must "sell" him or herself as competent in the use of such methods; 2) social support networks with similarly inclined co-workers and sociologists outside of the workplace need to be developed and maintained and used to enhance the status of qualitative methods and qualitative sociologists; and 3) as is true for all researchers working in a policy making or applied setting, it is necessary to recognize the reticular nature of social research and to demonstrate how qualitative methods generate information that is useful to policy or other applied purposes. By application of this approach in my own workplace, qualitative research methods have become an acceptable and even desirable part of many research projects of the agency and I have been able to continue to practice and to maintain my identity as a qualitative sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little sociological research has been carried out on political assassinations and the methodological experience in sociology regarding this issue is consequently very limited. This paper presents an analytical summary of the methodological problems and experiences which were encountered during three years of research on the sociological and criminological patterns of political assassinations by Jews in Palestine and Israel between 1882-1988. Similar methods could be used to study other phenomena where the information can be characterized as secret, dirty and hidden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes fieldwork experiences in Algeria following the revolution of the 1960s. It is generally known that political context affects both the methodology and findings of research. Although it is assumed that the political scene and the economic circumstances profoundly affect fieldwork, we have few descriptions of how this occurs. We need more reports of the way sponsorship determines access to the setting, permission to study there and the researcher's relationship with in formants. Sociologists are influenced as much by their own ethnic and political identification as they are by sponsorship. How do these factors interact? This reflection on fieldwork in Algeria offers a case study of the various factors influencing access to informants. It contrasts two approaches-the overt and covert presentation of self as a sociologist. I present this note as a contribution towards a sociology of fieldwork conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The kinds of research questions asked in the sociology of sport are no different from those generated by other substantive areas of sociology. However, while the more established areas of social inquiry have developed methods of research specifically suited to the situation in which their research is done, the sociology of sport has not yet reached this stage of development. The theoretical frameworks borrowed from other areas in sociology generate relevant questions, while the research methods borrowed from other areas in sociology often require adaptation to the particular situations found in the sociology of sport. This paper looks at three specific areas of sports study, and points to those problems that require new adaptations of the available research methods in order to deal with specific situational constraints. These areas may be roughly defined as: (a) the analysis of patterns of ownership in professional sports; (b) the analysis of athietic careers within the occupational culture of sport and (c) the analysis of sports audiences. The authors conclude that theoretically informed and relevant research can be conducted in these areas provided that researchers are able to find imaginative adaptations of their techniques and procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature attempting to explain revival phenomena has resorted to psychological explanations to the exclusion of sociological factors. The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation of revival behavior employing a normative framework. Four propositions are stated, each the prerequisite for the next. First, sinner and the revival culture must interact, and definitions of self and others must be forged. Second, structural facilities must be available for learning the Christian role. Third, opportunity structures must present themselves to afford the expression of appropriate behaviors that are in accord with pre-established patterns. Fourth, the status passage from salvation to sanctification is an orderly one, requiring that a sinner be saved before sanctified. The position taken Is that in order to arrive at adequate explanation, revival behavior must be observed as a social process. Therefore, the necessary requisite of the participant observation strategy is noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the central problems that affected a team research effort in a study of professional socialization. The researchers draw the reader's attention to the unanticipated difficulties they encountered in conducting the research--difficulties which, they suspect, are widely shared, but infrequently reported, in the discipline. The authors focus the analysis and discussion around the theme of competing commitments which affected the pace and direction of the research and created strains in team relations, leading eventually to the reconstitution of the team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to the comments made by Jay Corzine on the paper Conspiracy, Paranoia, and the Problem of Knowledge, by Charles W. Lidz. Corzine seems to want to define Lemert's empirical assertions and methods. My objections, however, are not primarily directed to either of these but to Lemert's approach to knowing the phenomenon, to his epistemology. Thus, Corzine objects to one of the two ways in which I suggest that one might go about assessing the objective existence of a conspiracy, namely, to use as a criterion the intentions of the actors involved. I proposed this only as one of the ways Lemert might have meant to assess the objective reality of the conspiracy, since it is a frequent criterion in interactionist sociology. My own position is clearly that it is a mistake to separate existence of a conspiracy from the way it is known, something required by any objective determination of whether or not a conspiracy is real. However, suppose for a moment, that I am wrong about what Lemert means and Corzine is right in every detail. Then it is hard to see why the paper is so widely thought to be important. Corzine's Lemert discovered only that sometimes people unite against people who are labelled paranoid but that this has no causal significance in the production of paranoia. Since Corzine's Lemert believes that conspiracy is a frequent occurrence in U.S. Organizations, there is no reason to believe it occurs more often to people labelled paranoid than to those who are not. While this position can argue that the paranoid has grounds for his feelings of persecution, so does just about everyone else. Corzine defends Lemert by condemning him to triviality.