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The authors examine facilitative aspects of field research with deviant Street populations. Based on the authors' research with the homeless and with male Street prostitutes, the facilitative aspects include access to settings, social relationships, acquisition of information, and the maintenance of researcher interest. The authors argue that in each of these aspects street deviants may in some ways be easier to study than other populations. The paper concludes with suggestions for maximizing the efficiency and quality of fieldwork with specific deviant populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on culture identity and dress. The sociology of dress is a vibrant field, exploring intriguing theoretical, methodological, and empirical domains. During the mid-twentieth century, clothing scholars began investigating the sociological and psychological implications of dress and appearance. In 1989, a group met to discuss the direction of the analysis of dress. The published papers from that meeting considered a wide range of topics, including identity, social psychology, cultural anthropology and sociology, semiotics, affect and cognition, social construction of gender, literary analysis, as well as qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Recent textbooks in the area continue to thaw from sociology and other fields to refine theories of dress and human behavior. Related to the misperception that dress only applies to the psychology of the self is the notion that dress is trivial both substantively and theoretically. Perhaps sociologists' neglect of dress might also be linked to a misperception that it is nonrational behavior similar to other actions that do not lend themselves to systematic analysis. Again these articles provide a contrasting view. In organizational and institutional settings, such as greedy organizations, total institutions, and mass media, dress and all it symbolizes are debated and discussed in ways that can be studied scientifically. Further, all of the articles have identified patterns in how dress is used in identity embracing and distancing that can be incorporated into broader theoretical frameworks.

This article argues that the epistemic and ethical implications of surrendering sociological privilege underlying the debate among qualitative sociologists over the "crisis of representation," is much about values as much as epistemology. Nowhere are the links between epistemological, political, and ethical issues more visible than in the recent highly polarized debate among qualitative sociological researchers over the "crisis of representation." The crisis of representation involves a profound questioning of ethnography's claims to scientific objectivity and, in turn, the authority of the ethnographer's account. In sociology, a group of self-consciously postmodern researchers see themselves as a "loosely defined interpretive community," which is, nevertheless, carrying out a "quiet revolution" against conventional, realist ways of doing qualitative research. While these postmodern ethnographers are relatively few in number, their critique is important because it raises serious questions about qualitative sociology's reason for being and its method of doing.

This essay focuses on one epoch in one culture, the ‘war painter’ system m Nazi Germany, and considers its social trappings (professional, political) as characteristics shared by another epoch and culture, evaluation systems in contemporary Western science. The parallels are instructive not only for a self-critical sociology of knowledge such as that envisioned by Karl Mannheim and Alvin Gouldner, but moreover as an anthropological test of cultural relativism as explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]