Addresses continuities and innovations within the ethnographic canon. This title uses Hammersley's (1991) book "What's Wrong with Ethnography" to open and situate the debate, and engages with contemporary debates and arguments on both sides of the Atlantic.
Addresses continuities and innovations within the ethnographic canon. This title uses Hammersley's (1991) book "What's Wrong with Ethnography" to open and situate the debate, and engages with contemporary debates and arguments on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy.
In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana’s Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the Customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of authority act as the engine for changes in state sovereignty. Ghana has served as a model of reform for the neoliberal establishment, making it an ideal site for Chalfin to explore why the restructuring of a state on the global periphery portends shifts that occur in all corners of the world. At once a foray into international political economy, politics, and political anthropology, Neoliberal Frontiers is an innovative interdisciplinary leap forward for ethnographic writing, as well as an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.
This edited collection draws together papers delivered at a symposium on New Frontiers in Empirical Labour Law Research held at the University of Cambridge in April 2014. It contains contributions from established and emerging experts across a range of disciplines (including employment relations, industrial psychology, sociology, economics and political science) to consider four broad themes: the case for empiricism in labour law; the potential for mixed methods; methodological possibilities and insights from other disciplines; and practical challenges and words of caution for those conducting empirical research. This collection seeks to cultivate confidence and competence in empirical methods among both established and young labour law scholars, through an intergenerational and interdisciplinary 'lessons learned' dialogue. It contributes to the broader debate regarding empirical research methods in labour law, and casts light on how empirical research can be conducted in highly contested fields to enhance labour law policy-making. This collection aims to inspire labour lawyers to embark upon new forms of empirical research, both to enrich their existing research projects, and to ask new research questions. It offers the first stage of a collaborative and interdisciplinary dialogue on empirical labour law research, to emphasise the importance of collaboration and intergenerational mentoring in building empirical capacity.
This book is a collection of notable papers from the first six volumes of the journal "Comparative Sociology." Its content represents leading-edge and contemporarily astute analyses in the burgeoning science of comparative sociology, especially relevant to a globalizing world in transition. Given that not everyone is acquainted with comparative sociology, this book offers an opportunity to enlighten readers unfamiliar with the discipline about the importance of comparative sociology to the new world order. Taken together, the articles illuminate various aspects of comparative sociologya "theoretical, methodological, substantive. Some compare social entities in subjective, case-study fashion, while others report on rigorous social research. All contribute in one form or another to describing the many and varied facets of the exciting a oenewa science of comparative sociology. The content of this volume has previously been published in "Comparative Sociology" volumes 1 a " 6.3.
This book calls for those interested in robust construction research to embrace ethnography – in all its forms, including rapid ethnographies, ethnographic-action research, autoethnography, as well as longer-term ethnographies. The diversification of ethnographic approaches, as well as ethnographers, will lead to rich insights that can advance the industry theoretically and practically. We share experiences, key considerations and recommendations from leading construction ethnographic researchers from around the world to provide discussion, reflection and understanding into doing ethnography in the construction industry. This book is aimed at academics, students, consultants, editors, reviewers, policymakers, funders and others interested in robust research in the construction industry and built environment but will also be useful for those undertaking research within organisations in other industries.
"How are notions of 'home' made and negotiated by ethnographers? And how does the researcher relate to forms of home encountered during fieldwork? Rather than searching for an abstract, philosophical understanding of home, this collection asks how home gains its meaning and significance through ongoing efforts to create, sustain or remake a sense of home. The volume explores how researchers and informants alike are always involved in the process of making and unmaking home, and challenges readers to reimagine ethnographic practice in terms of active, morally complex process of home-making. Contributions reach across the globe and across social contexts, and the book includes chapters on council housing and middle-class apartment buildings, homelessness and migration, problems with accessing the field as well as limiting it, physical as well as sentimental notions of home, and objects as well as inter-human social relations. Home draws attention to processes of sociality that normally remain analytically invisible, and contributes to a growing and rich field of study on the anthropology of home."--
Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how—faced with frontiers—they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.
The ethnographic methods that anthropologists first developed to study other cultures—fieldwork, participant observation, dialogue—are now being adapted for a broad array of applications, such as business, conflict resolution and demobilization, wildlife conservation, education, and biomedicine. In Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge, anthropologists trace the changes they have seen in ethnography as a method and as an intellectual approach, and they offer examples of ethnography’s role in social change and its capacity to transform its practitioners. Senior scholars Mary Catherine Bateson, Sidney Mintz, and J. Lorand Matory look back at how thinking ethnographically shaped both their work and their lives, and George Marcus suggests that the methods for teaching and training anthropologists need rethinking and updating. The second part of the volume features anthropologists working in sectors where ethnography is finding or claiming new relevance: Kamari Maxine Clarke looks at ethnographers’ involvement (or non-involvement) in military conflict, Csilla Kalocsai employs ethnographic tools to understand the dynamics of corporate management, Rebecca Hardin and Melissa Remis take their own anthropological training into rainforests where wildlife conservation and research meet changing subsistence practices and gendered politics of social difference, and Marcia Inhorn shows how the interests in mobility and diasporic connection that characterize a new generation of ethnographic work also apply to medical technologies, as those mediate fertility and relate to social status in the Middle East.