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This paper critically scrutinizes the thesis put forward by Jennifer Platt in a recent article in The Sociological Review about the general relation between theory and method, based on her investigation of the specific example of functionalism and survey research in post-war US sociology. The present paper questions the extent to which Platt's analysis and general conclusions mask important levels of connectedness between theory and method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subscribers to the British Sociological Association will be aware that its newsletter, Network, has recently been carrying correspondence on the ethics of covert observation, provoked by Roger Homan's paper, in a previous Sociological Review, 'Interpersonal Communication in Pentecostal Meetings'. Homan, himself, has contributed to this correspondence and defended his stance at more length in a paper, published with a rejoinder by Martin Bulmer, in the British Journal of Sociology.[1] I am not, however, convinced that we have yet reached some of the core issues in this area, because the ethical discussion has become so far removed from an adequate understanding of the nature of fieldwork. In this paper, I want to reunite these two topics, partly because I believe ethical debate to be a rather futile activity if it is not grounded in everyday practice and partly to show that there are so many grey moral areas in ethnography that an over-academic analysis may ultimately be inimical to our continued use of this approach to social life. Although I shall concentrate on field practice, this should not be taken to imply a disregard for planning and writing-up research. Plainly the ethical questions are at least as important, but their better documentation makes an extended consideration a less urgent matter for this present paper. By ethnography I intend to include all research based upon naturalistic modes of inquiry within a predominantly inductivist theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that what is missing from many ethnographic accounts is a recognition that dilemmas inevitably emerge for the researcherbeforethey make contact with the research setting,duringthe process of ethnographic research, and subsequently in the lengthy time taken to unravel the theoretical importance of the researchafterthe fieldwork has ended. Using a comparison of two ethnographies as case studies, and by recourse to a realist methodology, such dilemmas are, we argue, overdetermined by many non-observable social structures that influence the everyday research process. We argue that specificmechanismsdetermine both the process and the outcome of the ethnographic journey in thebefore,duringandafterstages of research. For example we demonstrate how biography and the wider process of institutional knowledge production are two key resources that influence research practice. We use the termpragmatic realismas a means to reflect upon some of the connections between the dilemmas of research and real structures in these three stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]