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What is qualitative research? Aspers and Corte (2019) make a case for a definition that they believe captures what many qualitative researchers intuitively know. Although I agree with many of the authors' points, I argue that the effort to identify what makes qualitative research qualitative requires there to be a clear single thing to define, and there is not; that confronting this fact forces their paper into a central contradiction; and that in spite of these and other problems, the paper succeeds in crystalizing questions that qualitative researchers must grapple with today. The authors' most valuable contribution may be less its definition than the issues we are forced to clarify when concluding what we think about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitization of schools has increased significantly in recent years and is generating a massive innovation boost in education. This development is accompanied by an increased demand for new digital educational objects for schools. The resources required for creating such objects (expert knowledge from teaching contexts versus technological knowledge and infrastructures) are distributed among different groups of actors from digital economy and educational practice. Therefore, the production of such new objects requires new forms of cooperation in the education sector. This article discusses such a hybrid collaboration between a software developer and the teachers of two pilot schools for the creation of interactive learning software. We examine this collaborative relationship in light of different bodies of knowledge that both groups of actors bring to the relationship and that need to be reconciled. We also examine the ways in which the organizational boundaries between schools and companies are temporarily blurred, and the distribution of costs and benefits between the participating groups of actors. By looking at the various dimensions of the cooperative commercial production of these digital objects as well as their (prototypical) experimental stage, the paper analyses the digital transformation of teaching as an innovative social process, structured by economic and educational rationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon intensive ethnographic research on the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles, this paper investigates the backstage work done by the leaders and activists within a movement to create cohesive and disciplined frontstage performances. These backstage techniques and strategies are important to examine because frontstage unity is not natural or automatic. As most campaigns are made up of heterogeneous individuals, organizations and groups, frontstage coherence is something that needs to be worked upon. We show that this essential backstage work consists of 1) training activists to become disciplined frontstage performers; 2) converging the feelings of activists through emotionally intensive disciplinary techniques; and 3) managing differences and conflicts in the free spaces of the movement. This paper thus aims to encourage scholars to look under the hood of public protests and give greater weight to studying the backstage work needed to produce strong and powerful voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, ethnographers often presented themselves in the classic hero frame, where they appeared authoritative and calm. Recent ethnographers, though, reveal hardship and vulnerability yet prevail as "new age heroes" who overcame danger and doubt. Missing are the important methodological insights of ethnographers who experience multiple setbacks and obstacles, ones that lead to a broken ethnography, or one that never materializes or starts. Here, the ethnographer suffers, becoming dispirited and wanting to surrender or give up. This paper breaks that methodological silence, showing how difficult gang research in Los Angeles County placed me in a broken ethnography, one where I became disillusioned and questioned my abilities and resolve. In the end, the experience revealed important methodological lessons, ones that provide guidance for future ethnographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actor-Network Theory, as a theoretical and methodological approach, is particularly insightful when applied to domains of social activity that are in flux, thus making it particularly useful for ethnographic research about unsettled socio-technical systems. Drawing from field research conducted over the last decade, this paper presents two empirical cases that reveal how ANT enables researchers to trace the associations that form the socio-technical objects of political and journalistic practice. We focus on “black-boxed” technical objects, exploring two distinct, yet complementary, analytical moments that emerged during our respective fieldwork. First, we detail the work that an electoral map performs in stabilizing networks of political representation and creating new capacities to act. We then go inside a journalistic organization to reveal a moment of breakdown when the black box of a content management system unravels and fails to do what it is seemingly supposed to do, throwing news production into a tenuous state. The paper concludes by interrogating our empirical findings through the lens of cultural practices, highlighting a few ways sociologists might need to supplement ANT-analysis with a more robust understanding of culture and symbolic belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gangs within minority communities often focuses on gang crime and violence, and gang organization. Few studies examine the non-gang member side of the equation, especially in how potential victims make sense of gang encounters. This paper reveals how young Black and Latino men interpret gang encounters, interpretations that differ because of the following: one’s ethnicity, a gang’s ethnicity, the state of interethnic gang conflict, and a space’s ethnic makeup. It will also examine the intersection of time, specifically as to how shifting neighborhood demographics change the perceptions of these young minority men. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in both Compton and South Central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the multiple expressions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism in the Pico Union district of Los Angeles. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in three temples and informal conversations with over 30 active Pentecostals, this paper shows that Central American immigrant Pentecostals tend to congregate on the basis of “congregational homophily,” or shared social and cultural characteristics, especially in terms of age, marital status, presence of infirmities or ailments, and national/regional origin. This paper also explores the ways in which Central American immigrant Pentecostals tailor their religious practices to reflect their “congregational homophily” through the differential inclusion/exclusion of practices such as healing, “roommating,” and formal and informal discussions of shared histories. By focusing on “congregational homophily” and the active constructions and reconstructions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism, we gain more insight into the ways some Central American immigrants negotiate their lives and experiences in the increasingly fettered social, cultural, and political topography of contemporary Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists and anthropologists often struggle over how to accurately convey ethnographic data from the field setting to a final report. This paper examines ethnography as a form of translation in order to clarify what occurs between the acquisition of data and the formulation of a thesis about the data. The paper argues that the ethnographer’s mind should be seen as a transitional space which in the act of translating field data into an analytic report (1) poses unique challenges to ethnography’s claims for providing an accurate account of field situations while (2) simultaneously offering paths to insight which quantitative and survey research can not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates precisely how issues of access-in this case differential access to informants and the scenes that they populate in three sites-can reveal substantive findings. In the case it features, a comparative study of small cities with growing populations of lesbian couples, actors' disparate and place-specific sexual identities produced disparate and place-specific responses to research. Integrationist sexual identities impeded access, whereas identity-politics orientations facilitated it. The paper identifies three mechanisms via which sexual identities influenced access: directly, by shaping informants' orientations to the research topic, and, indirectly, by influencing local networks and institutions that emerge from and reinforce local identities. By explicating one ethnographer's path from methodological trouble to substantive insight, the article traces the utility of an expansive and flexible reflexivity that begins with but extends beyond the researcher's identity and role. This reflexivity, the article proposes, encourages identification of substantive findings and the development of social theory, and can advance a comparative sociology of ethnographic access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is possible to define ANT in a series of abstract bullet points to do so is to miss most of the point. Instead it explores and theorises the world through rich case studies. This means that, like symbolic interactionism, for ANT words are never enough: you need to practice it. In this paper we work empirically, drawing on an ANT-inflected ethnography of Norwegian salmon farming, and also dialogically. We do this because we want to show that for ANT theory is created, recreated, explored and tinkered with in particular research practices. Indeed, ANT is probably best understood as a sensibility, a set of empirical interferences in the world, a worldly practice, or a lively craft that cherishes the slow processes of knowing rather than immediately seeking results or closure. In particular it is sensible to materiality, relationality, heterogeneity, and process. At its best it understands itself as working in the world to create analytical contexts; but also on the world, to articulate and press particular contexts and their politics. As a part of this it explores the contingencies of power, generating tools to undo the inevitability of that power, while working on the assumption that other and better worlds are possible. [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]

This paper deals with some of the linguistic difficulties I encountered during fieldwork conducted among cloistered and non-cloistered communities of Roman Catholic nuns. I illustrate here the necessity for taking both active and passive research modes - that is, moving from observer to participant and back-in order to counteract problems related to interaction styles, lack of language, meaning inversions, and silence as a mode of communication. These problems represent a continuum - a progression from least to most problematical in terms of the connection between researcher and researched. I argue that by adopting a stance appropriate to the groups being studied-that is, by using both active and passive research strategies with equal rigor-many linguistic barriers can not only be overcome, but used as sources of important data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnography has become a useful method in procuring sensitive infonnation from the 'hidden population' who may not be accessed with quantitative survey techniques. Researchers are generating huge amounts of qualitative/textual data. Qualitative data require careful planning in storage, coding retrieval, and analysis. Personal computers have solved data management problems, but data analysis remains problematic. The paper describes some qualitative data management and analytic problems faced by a team of ethnographers engaged in a longitudinal epidemiological study of cocaine and crack distribution/abuse in New York City. Ethnographic data was collected through multisession open-ended interviews with more than one hundred cocaine/crack dealers and extensive field-notes were kept Compared to other programs, a hypertext software - Folio Views - was more useful in solving (a) data management and (b) analytical pmblems. Authors used this software to handle more than twenty-five thousand pages of texts; search and sort the database by any words or codes; and retrieve relevant textual materials needed to complete comparative and thematic analysis. Authors analyzed the data from outsiders' point of view (etic) as well as from the viewpoint of the subject populations (emic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I inaugurate a feminist sociology of imperialism that extends the work of postcolonial scholars interested in explaining how Western women are located in global projects of imperialism. As part of an ethnographic study of the lives of contemporary development workers in Gilgit, northern Pakistan, this analysis describes and theorizes the significance of clothing choices to the formation of Western women's subjectivities and to transcultural power relations in this postcolonial setting. I demonstrate that decisions Western women make about what to wear in Gilgit develop into arenas of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion through processes of identification and differentiation, as clothing styles are used to naturalize power hierarchies between Western and local Muslim women. [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]

Political sociologists have typically studied the state as a self-enclosed institution hovering above civil society. In this formulation, the state is rendered as omniscient, gazing out over a passive civil society as if it were a naturalized landscape. But in this special issue, we think about how states "see" in relation to whom and what is seen, and how these subjects and collective actors become visible in the first place. We advocate a relational political ethnography that views the state and civil society as inextricably intertwined and mutually co-constitutive. People's experiences with the state shape their visions of that state, which in turn inform their strategic decisions and everyday engagements. And these decisions and engagements affect how the state views them. To put it differently, in this special issue, we explore the dialectical relationship between how the state "sees" and how it is "seen." They are inseparable processes. As we argue here, the very unity and coherence of the state apparatus turns not just upon its self-representation but equally upon how people make sense of these representations. How people understand this apparent state in the context of their everyday lives is a crucial source of its power and authority; it explains the reproduction of the state as a social institution. We conclude by introducing the seven empirical contributions to this issue, all of which practice relational political ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In each of four nearby city areas, residents orient to local centers of collective activity in different geographic patterns. In a "perimeter" neighborhood, residents and outsiders are drawn to religious and retail organizations located on streets that form a rectangle. In an "intersection" neighborhood, residents are most visible to each other at an agglomeration of stores and services located where two high traffic streets cross. Residents of an "in-between" area travel to socio-economically and culturally different neighborhoods centered in all directions elsewhere. In a "contested" geography, rival organizations disagree over who, living where, for what purposes, has the right to define the neighborhood's boundaries and social identity. These different social ecologies took shape without coordination yet became an interdependent, quadriplex set. After 1965, a series of retreats in government control of local social life created unprecedented opportunities for intermediaries who reshaped the social landscape with new businesses, cultural institutions, and interpretations of neighborhood identity. This case study revives the "collective action" explanations of the "Chicago School" by showing how urban social ecology was transformed in the late twentieth century as people of different generations and in different geographic areas interacted indirectly, creating durable neighborhood patterns without centralized, top-down leadership from business or government, in response to locally recognized affordances of anarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on literature on the body and embodiment, body pedagogics, and conversation analysis, this article adopts an integrative approach to the body and seeks to demonstrate the process through which bodily experiences are interpreted and transmitted across individuals, time, and space in the case of 911 emergency communication. With data from three years' fieldwork in an urban 911 center in the US, the author shows how this process is accomplished in two key steps—foregrounding and visualization—and how this process is patterned by the organizational context of emergency communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are "good" kinds of archival evidence for theorizing? Surprisingly, the word archive and discussions of the archival process rarely appear in methods textbooks or discussions of methods in historical sociology. Yet, much recent historicized sociology relies upon documents left over by a small group of actors to make large-scale claims. To address this oversight, we leverage the evidentiary strengths of qualitative sociology and translate them for historical sociology. Our central argument is that three kinds of archival evidence are likely to produce generalizable claims: positive contingency, learning by mistakes, and plausible alternatives. Examples are illustrated with the cases of jail overcrowding in Los Angeles County, anti-redlining policy in the Federal Reserve, and immigration policy in the Dillingham commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Good News Businessmen's Brotherhood (GNBB) is a Christian organization with evangelical commitments, charismatic practices, and whose members insist that their organization is secular. How are we to understand such a Christian claim to secularity? Members of GNBB draw on the multiple overlapping meanings of the secular in order to reach otherwise inaccessible places and audiences, but they also do so in an attempt to disavow conventional religious-secular distinctions. The GNBB claim to secularity is, therefore, an everyday life instantiation of two kinds of recent scholarly criticism: the secular injunction to separate religion from politics is a practical impossibility; and the apparent neutrality of secularism's public/private and church/world distinctions masks an underlying affinity with a Protestant Christian worldview. Good News brothers' everyday intertwining of faith and politics mirrors these scholarly critiques, with the exception that, where the latter finds grounds for criticism, the former find practical possibilities for building a project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though social movement research has developed an elaborate understanding of how individuals get involved in collective action, our theories frequently fail to capture the full diversity of activists’ experiences following recruitment. In this article, I argue that in order to analyze why people follow different trajectories after they join a movement we need to focus on the interaction between their individual backgrounds and their experiences while mobilized. I address these issues through the study of activists in the unemployed worker’s movement in Argentina (also known as the Piqueteros), one of Latin America’s most influential contemporary instances of collective action. Drawing on 133 in-depth interviews with current and former activists, as well as participant observation of events in their organizations, I find that through the interplay between their practices in the movement and other aspects of their lives, some of them gradually see participation as an end in itself. Their involvement provides refuge from the personal consequences of long-term socioeconomic decline by offering a combination of three particular rewards: access to places to belong, a feeling of empowerment, and the recognition by others in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article complicates the prevailing portrait of substance use as being incompatible with work. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data of one informal economic zone collected over a four-year period between January 2010 and January 2014, I expose the daily interactions through which substance use becomes compatible with work and the mechanisms by which drug and alcohol use become embedded in the local ecology of a public work site. To capture the ways in which people link their substance use to their experience of work, I utilize three concepts-taking a break, maintaining a cycle, and tipping the balance-each of which is suggestive of different patterned relationships between substance use and work in public. Data indicate that people link their substance use to their work in different ways and with different consequences and that each of these patterned relationships becomes an interrelated part of a single social system. These findings add necessary nuance and complexity to substance use literature, which is more frequently focused on abject abuse and disorder, and provide a more complete understanding of the ways in which substance use practices become linked to urban economies. Furthermore, they illuminate how participation in informal economic activity can play a variety of roles in the lives of people engaged in substance use practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of calls-for-help to police and fire communications centers and their incident record forms, we present a detailed investigation of how documents play a constitutive role in formal organizations. We take an ethnomethodologically informed approach to the problem, delineating how standard forms in bureaucracies enable organizational participants to coordinate actions across time and space and, at the same time, produce people who perpetually produce such documents or work from them. We focus in this regard on person description. The call-taker needs to translate the call into preset categories, and thus enlist the citizen in the work of inscribing the incident in the way the form requires, (re)producing certain categorizations of personhood, especially race and sex. In this way, organizational documents and their inscriptions function as a kind of technology of reification for these categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending recent seminal studies that focus on networks of multiple actors in Chinese civil society instead of state-society dichotomy, this article explores independent film consumption in contemporary urban China. It shows how a collectiveentity composed of independent films, people, and discourses is assembled to become civil society, despite the continuing existence of government restrictions on independently produced films. Relying on data collected through ethnography set in the capital city of Beijing, I use the “three moves” suggested by Bruno Latour’s recent description of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to follow the actors themselves. I first “localize the global” concept of civil society and its attendant notion of state-society relations by discussing an independently organized film festival in which I participated and observed. Second, by discussing an empirical case of DVD stores, through which independent films circulate, I “redistribute the local” by detailing the processes in which particular local sites of the retail spaces of DVDs are connected to “actants” dispatched throughout the globe. Finally, I “connect sites” by putting to work the conceptual tools provided by Latour including “connectors,” “mediators,” and “plasma.” I conclude by arguing that ANT contributes to a seemingly modest, but essential political task of preventing the hasty closure of what is to be included in the collective, as well as how the collective is to be composed. In the case I examine, ANT clears the path for the future reassembling of civil society in contemporary urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]