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As part of a study investigating research productivity of sociology PhD students in Australia, an application to the federal government’s Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) aimed to establish a baseline count of completed sociology doctorates by university. It was anticipated that university totals might be different from PhD completions within the main sociology teaching units. The government data furnished by this inquiry have proved to be problematic in several ways. The gaps in the data may be explained by the fact that universities report sociology PhDs to DESE in more generic rather than discipline-specific Field of Education (FoE) codes or as PhDs in other disciplines. DESE has either not required or been able to enforce consistent reporting. This raises questions about the time and cost value of these annual compliance efforts. It also limits the value of these data to researchers in charting current and potential future trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University librarians occupied an important role in facilitating our academic research project identifying and locating sociology PhDs completed in Australia from 2010–2019. This project was to be based on the supposedly straightforward collection of sociology doctorates to assess research publication practices during and post PhD. This collection process, however, proved to be complex, arduous and time-consuming. When we approached librarians for information or were referred to them by university administrators, their service ethic was evident. Structural university changes, however, sometimes impacted librarians' ability to locate and retrieve sociology PhD theses. Successive technological changes had often fragmented catalogue and repository data, affecting librarians' ability to trace PhDs. Loss of library staff impacted universities' collective memory of where and how theses were stored or could be accessed. The rich interactive process between researchers and librarians in this project is explored through reviewing the corpus of emails and other exchanges developing strategies to overcome barriers tracking down completed PhD theses within Departments of Sociology or their iterations in interdisciplinary Schools of Social Sciences containing sociology 'disciplines', 'programmes' or individual sociologists. The present manuscript aims to chronicle the intricacies of gathering data on completed Australia sociology PhDs with the assistance of librarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologies of New Zealand Crothers, Charles London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 This book offers a concise introduction to anyone interested in the formation of sociology in different national settings across the globe. In the end, whether the book describes a plurality of "sociologies" as the title indicates, or is able to document "the extent to which there is a New Zealand national sociology" (p. 4) remains an open question. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers photographic practice as a method of inquiry in Pierre Bourdieu's early transMediterranean studies and in the ethnographic work of Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg in the United States. This juxtaposition reveals striking similarities in how these authors employ photoethnographic inquiry in their empirical research projects and points to the fact that both the French theorist and Bourgois and Schonberg utilise a large photographic archive for theoretical parsing and further conceptual development at various stages of their intellectual journeys. The article further illuminates what visual methods may add to textual explanations of habitus beyond simple illustration and considers some problems that might arise theorising from photoethnographic work generally, and more particularly among marginalised members of society. The article highlights Bourdieu, Bourgois and Schonberg's strong commitment to using habitus, attentive to seeing beyond conventional and official explanations, in parallel, longterm, sympathetic integration of their photographic and conceptual evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]