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There is a fruitful tension in ethnomethodological work. On the one hand, real-world data are used to rein in analytical privilege. On the other, conceptual discussions necessarily take place in a more open analytical space. Describing settings in detail and thinking about things in the abstract are both essential components of the ethnomethodological project. What ethnographies might consist in complicates this picture. Garfinkel initially deflated the concept of 'ethnography', using it to refer to how all members of society make sense of their world. Sacks, on the other hand, initially construed his sociological project as a more rigorous form of professional ethnography. Ethnographic methods rightly remain an important tool for ethnomethodological analyses. They provide an empirical grounding for analysis and facilitate 'thinking about things' in a more open manner than some other forms of data. This paper argues that ethnographic analyses more generally can be used as ethnomethodological resources, (re)introducing the idea that others' fieldwork and analyses are legitimate resources for ethnomethodological work. Some materials from Elijah Anderson's classic ethnography A Place on the Corner are used to illustrate the possibilities taking this approach might offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on 2 years' worth of ethnographic observation of team meetings to explore decision‐making in an NHS clinical genomics service. The focus of discussions was on ambiguous genomic results known as VUS or Variants of Uncertain Significance, which may be pathogenic but which also may turn out to be benign. In examining decision‐making around such results, we note how, in contrast to much policy and promotional material in this area, clinicians in these meetings (clinical geneticists and genetic counsellors) place great emphasis on parental phenotypes and whether the parents of a patient share the symptoms and signs of the suspected condition. This information is then combined with the result of genomic tests to decide whether the variant a patient has is responsible for their condition. This article explores the way in which clinicians attempt to flexibly enrol parents into genomic explanations through informal diagnosis of their possible phenotypes and the way in which actually meeting parents allows some clinicians to trump explanations based on documentary or photographic data. The paper sheds light on the way that earlier scholarly understandings of such decisions (around, say dysmorphology) remain relevant and explores claims that laboratory tests overrule clinical decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational discourses have embraced therapeutic discourse, a psychology-based system of assumptions about the self, its boundaries, development and social relations. While scholars have debated the virtues of this therapeutic turn, there has been little empirical study of therapeutic discourse in teacher pedagogical discourse. This article, using theoretical frameworks of teacher learning and the sociology of therapeutic discourse and employing linguistic ethnographic methods, features close analysis of therapeutic discourse in teacher workplace conversations. The focal case, in which a teacher consults with her colleagues regarding a non-compliant student, features four episodes of therapeutic reasoning (ETRs) in which various therapeutic logics are employed. Analysis uncovered three central manifestations of therapeutic discourse especially pertinent to education: the role of emotions; perceptions of the self; and temporality. Attending to these manifestations in each ETR reveals conditions under which they may enhance or impede potential for teacher learning and pedagogic action. When therapeutic modes of reasoning are deployed by teachers to discuss their problems of practice, they are found to be multifaceted, elastic, and to bear potential for agentive teacher action under certain conditions. This article calls for a more nuanced, temporally-sensitive perspective on therapeutic discourse in education, and addresses implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its colonial, class‐ and caste‐based history, English in India has come to be seen as a powerful resource that opens doors for those who 'have' it and holds back those who do not. For women, English ostensibly offers various promises in addition to employment: progressiveness and 'empowerment'; and the potential for upward mobility through marriage. Yet, the conversion of English capital for English‐speaking Indian women proves to be intensely complex in practice, as many find themselves forced to navigate between shifting moral regimes attached to 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an NGO in Delhi that offers free English training to 'disadvantaged youth', this paper explores how English capital is managed by young women striving to attain middle classness through English, and how their class, caste and gender positionings are negotiated across particular time‐space configurations as they seek to become English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for "theory building," but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make implicit external validity claims. I analyze several exemplary ethnographies to show that (a) the distinction between theoretically and empirically oriented ethnography revolves around competing conventions for making claims that others accept as provisionally externally valid, (b) comparative-historical sociology provides a framework for evaluating how theoretically oriented ethnographies make such claims, and (c) each approach to making validity claims is optimized by different kinds of cases. Empirically oriented ethnographies make inductive claims via "pointy" cases wherein a phenomenon is pronounced or bifurcated. Theoretically oriented ethnographers are like post–Millian historical sociologist who triangulate past studies with resolutive or negative cases to make constitutive arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents some details and some examples of the influence of ethnomethodological work in the fieldwork tradition associated with European CSCW; in particular what has been termed 'ethnomethodologically informed ethnography'. In so doing, we do not wish to downplay other perspectival and methodological contributions but to simply suggest that much of the ethnomethodological work that was done in the UK during the early development of CSCW had a distinctive character and made significant contributions to the study of complex organizational environments for design-related purposes that arguably reinvigorated the European fieldwork tradition. The distinctiveness we speak of in 'ethnomethodologically informed ethnography' had to do with what it owed to Wittgenstein and Winch as much as Garfinkel and Sacks, was rooted in a contempt for methodological fetishism, and emphasized the centrality of reasoning or rationale in the conduct of working and, more generally, social life. This focus and approach drew heavily on the ethnographic work of the likes of John Hughes in Lancaster, Wes Sharrock in Manchester, Bob Anderson at Xerox in Cambridge, and Christian Heath in King's, London, where attention was focused on the actual 'doing' of work as opposed to work in some idealised form – and it is this that we suggest has become important to design and designers of various kinds and in various domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was immediately after the Second World War that the costume from Maramureș and Oaș regions drew the attention of the specialists in ethnography and traditional art. In the same period, Romanian nationalism reclaimed the value of this traditional costume. Until the instauration of the communist regime, the profile of the peasant from these two regions was vague and partially unknown to the Romanian intellectuals. The first part of the study is concerned with the role of the male's costume in the Romanian protochronist discourse. I demonstrate how it evolved from a hazy image emerging during the 19th centruy, to a hypothetic and falsified „Dacian costume" able to contribute to the Romanian nationalist discourse during Ceaușescu's rule1. In the next three sections of the paper I refer to the design and the evolution of this costume, emphasizing the local, unique and differentiating elements. I particularly insist on the attire' elements that were borrowed from different ethnic gropus and various geographic areas which finally had an influence on the Maramureș and Oaș Romanian costume. In the first section of this paper I took into consideration the effects of the contemporary emigration phenomenon in Oas area on the evolution of the traditional male costume. One of the consequences of migration is - perhaps paradoxical - that this local costume does not disappear, but adapts to the contemporary world, evolves and specializes more and more strictly, becoming a ceremonial costume by excellence. The next two chapters are a reconstruction of what the "recent man's suit" and the "old man's costume" meant, highlighting the parallels, influences, takeovers and morphological similarities between the Romanian costume of Oas and Maramures and that of the Slovaks, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Serbians and Croatians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses ethnographic data to engage a critical reflection on the tension between individual responsibility for the environment and inequality. While research has shown that the majority of sustainable consumers are middle and upper class, educated and white individuals, the study explores how the ethical injunction to ecological sustainability is being introduced to lower‐income neighbourhoods in France. It draws on the observation of a national programme which aims at supporting inhabitants of public housing estates in the process of greening their lifestyle in order to fight climate change and fuel poverty. The paper analyses how environmental responsibilization is specific in that it calls upon a responsibility towards others, towards the common good. Using the Foucauldian concept of 'subjectivation', it describes and analyses the moral work implied by such behaviour change programmes. It demonstrates that a negative representation of poor households and a moral framing of the responsibility for the environment lead to a moralization of their lifestyle under the heading of 'eco‐friendly behaviours'. A paradoxical result of such endeavours is that the social group with the least impactful lifestyle on the environment is the one which is moralized in the most intrusive and resolute manner. The article shows, however, that the tenants manage to resist the normalizing discourse on sustainable living, for reasons which are not anti‐environmentalist. This piece thus provides interesting results for sustainability studies as well as for the sociology of the regulation of underprivileged neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attending to the material discursive constructions of the patient body within cone beam computed tomography ( CBCT) imaging in radiotherapy treatments, in this paper I describe how bodies and machines co-create images. Using an analytical framework inspired by Science and Technology Studies and Feminist Technoscience, I describe the interplay between machines and bodies and the implications of materialities and agency. I argue that patients' bodies play a part in producing scans within acceptable limits of machines as set out through organisational arrangements. In doing so I argue that bodies are fabricated into the order of work prescribed and embedded within and around the CBCT system, becoming, not only the subject of resulting images, but part of that image. The scan is not therefore a representation of a passive subject (a body) but co-produced by the work of practitioners and patients who actively control (and contort) and discipline their body according to protocols and instructions and the CBCT system. In this way I suggest they are ' con-forming' the CBCT image. A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be found at: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates on geographies of family and intimate relations, and research ethics in ethnographic research by addressing the ethics of doing ethnography with families. Drawing on debates in human geography, anthropology, and sociology, I argue that the intimate nature of both ethnography and familial relations presents particular challenges to using an ethnographic approach to studying families. Using experiences from two years of ethnographic research with six families in the UK, the ethics of confidentiality (within and between families, and in published materials), and disengagement (following long-term involvement, transforming relationships, and staying in contact with participants) are explored. In addition, the paper sheds light on the geographical and ethical complexities of doing 'ethnography on your doorstep'. The conclusions outline the contributions of the paper to discussions within and beyond geography, family studies, and ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we shift from conventional academic writing toward something similar to a dialogue, an encounter, a few hours spent in a virtual café where we chat and systematically try to excavate our respective ethnographic endeavours. Such experimentation in format is needed, we argue, in order to re-approach the questions characterising in-depth ethnographic work from a different, possibly fresher, perspective, and to communicate those more directly and freely. Rather than embedding our doubts, fears and wishful thinking in academic formalism, we spell those out aloud, as a composite and unfinished flow that touches upon relevant literature but is still raw and grounded in our current and respective fieldwork. Relying on our differentiated works with Roma people in Italy, France and Romania (2004–ongoing), in our dialogue we talk about the challenges of positioning; the construction of new (self)identities; the building of relationships of trust, care and affect, and their break; the role of ethnographic knowledge in activist work; the risk and the certainty of failure; the difficulties associated with entering and leaving the field. The aim of our dialogue is not to offer answers to questions that have been at the centre of the ethnographic discipline since the start, but to open a space of incremental and reciprocal learning that may serve as an inspiration for other young ethnographers like us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Merton's concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent models for the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the importance of a broad sociological engagement with bioethics. It begins by considering why sociologists should be interested in bioethics and then goes on to explore the cognitive critique of bioethics developed by ethnographers. Some of these authors have also suggested that a more robust bioethics might emerge through the incorporation of the tools of ethnographic analysis. In this paper, it is argued that this is an important claim which needs to be analysed further and that Foucault's concept of discursive formations provides a useful framework for doing so. Once bioethics is redescribed as a discursive formation, the paper explores the challenges and obstacles that sociology and ethnography face in their attempt to open up a space for themselves in bioethics. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociologists and ethnographers need to reflect on the ways in which they might democratically secure legitimacy for their own claims in the field of social ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospitals remain the most common location of death in a significant number of countries, and specialist palliative care is positioned as a crucial resource for improving hospital care for those nearing end of life. Little is known, however, about a substantive aspect of this work: how hospital palliative clinicians anticipate and organize a patient's dying trajectory. In this paper I draw from a larger original ethnographic research study of palliative specialists in two Canadian hospitals. Abductive analysis resulted in framing their work as affective labour, both reflecting and re-creating a larger affective economy shaping the affective states of everyone involved in the provision and uptake of care. I articulate six analytically ideal outcomes of clinicians' affective labour that organize end of life, including: 1) proactive co-authorship of disease trajectory; 2) mutual acknowledgement of a dying trajectory; 3) naturalizing direction and outcome of care, 4) ensuring a minimum of social disruption, 5) identification as compassionate and efficient care providers, and 6) increased specialist knowledge and interventions. In so doing, clinicians' practices become understandable as labour to meet a diversity of – at times conflicting – individual, organizational, and societal mandates that necessarily include, but extend well beyond, the patient and her immediate social network. This is the first study to consider hospital palliative care as an affective economy, and presents a theoretically innovative and empirically grounded model to advance new ways of conceptualizing hospital palliative care. I conclude by considering how this model, and the unique insights it affords, can inform the future development of end of life care in hospital settings. • Hospital palliative care is shaped by diverse health system priorities. • Clinicians use affective labour to meet patient, family member, and system needs. • Hospital palliative care can be understood and modeled as an "affective economy". • Negotiation and ambivalence are constitutive features of hospital palliative care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asserts that the religious assumptions of Christian academies need to be fully examined in relation to any analysis of their cultural practices, impact or policy implications. It proposes that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, cultural capital and symbolic power can be broadened out from their traditional use in accounting for social positioning in order to explore the interaction of religious faith and institutional culture. The emergent analytical framework outlined relies on series of theoretical tools drawn from Bourdieu whose social theory and concepts are already employed extensively in sociology of education research and studies of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the notion of a shared social identity resulting from a self care skills training programme through exploring the engagement, experience and outcomes of participants from different social groups: sub-Saharan asylum seekers and gay men. In the former group norms and values about priorities and management of HIV differed significantly from the programme's underlying philosophy of individualism. Some needs were similar, but learning self-management skills was not the priority it was for gay men as pressing needs arising from their asylum status (to address social problems, access welfare and achieve marginal residential status) overwhelmed self care attempts. A focus on self-efficacy and individual behaviour change is likely to leave unaddressed social and material needs, inadvertently adding insult to injury. However, alternative benefits included sharing ‘experience’ and the perceived ‘problem’ that being an asylum seeker posed to other people. The contexts of location, needs, identities and social position are important in understanding self care support innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses a series of emergency calls related to the same event: an accident in a factory. The aim of the analysis is to show how a lack of information hinders operator’s diagnostic work. The paper shows the effects of communication problems on operator’s decision making, that is, how the operator’s diagnostic work is actively resisted by callers, and therefore, how disaligment in relation to the activity at hand influences operator’s decision making and the actual organisation of the rescue activities. I argue that CSCW technologies need to enable negotiation of potentially conflicting social practices and organizational protocols around diagnostic work and should not just support remote collaboration between professionals, but also with the public. [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]

Social relations between people seldom follow regular lattice structures. In the Barabási–Albert model nodes link to the existing network structure with a probability proportional to the number of nodes previously attached. Here, we present an anthropologically motivated interpolation between Erdös–Rényi and Barabási–Albert rules, where people also prefer to help those who helped them in the past and explore some of its properties. The second part of the paper tackles the question how opinions spread through social networks. We restrict our analysis to one end of the spectrum: scale-free networks. We show for two different models how fast and how sustainable single individuals can influence an appreciable fraction of the population through social contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It can be argued that young people’s socialisation into sport follows a general pattern of sampling, specialising and investing (Côté & Hay, 2002a). In the sampling phase children participate in a range of sports for fun and enjoyment. The specialising phase involves more sport‐specific skill development and a reduction in the range of sport activities. The investment phase signals a focus on one activity and a commitment to intensive training and competitive success. This paper develops research where we previously examined the key features of the sampling phase in the junior section of Forest Athletic Club (FAC) (MacPhail et al ., 2003). Continuing our involvement in an ethnography of FAC we are now able to report and discuss key characteristics of the specialising phase that were evident through young people’s involvement at the club. These include a reduction in the number of sporting activities being pursued, enjoyment and success, the notion of deliberate practice and the influence of family, school and club support on those moving into the specialising phase. We note that while some of the key features of the sampling phase carried over to the specialising phase there were subtle differences in how they were practised. We report characteristics of the specialising phase that were not evident when observing and interviewing the same athletes when they were experiencing the sampling phase. In concluding we suggest how the quality of the sporting experience in the specialising years can increase the likelihood that young people will remain involved in sport. [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 concept of cruising has typically focused on gay male activity and, as such, has been narrowly focused and limited. This view has reinforced negative stereotypical images of gay men and has devalued women's more subtle styles and longer-term relationships. This paper argues that lesbians do cruise but also problematizes the definition of cruising in lesbian culture. Utilizing observations and in-depth interviews, I have broadened the definition of cruising to include a range of behavior as evidenced in both the lesbian and gay community. I have developed a typology of cruising, highlighting seven styles based on method, whether the individual approaches or not, intent, and investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]