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This edited volume gathers top scholars from across disciplines, generations, and countries to provide constructive commentary on the theory, methods and practices of institutional ethnography. These contributions explore themes of relevance to institutional ethnographers that are both enduring and newly emerging: how institutional ethnographers can take an expanded view of social institutions, how they might explore the dynamics of ruling relations over time, what results from understanding experience as dialogue (including internal or in-skull dialogue), the significance of “standpoint,” and the opportunities for institutional ethnographers to move beyond texts as they discover and describe social relations. A key aspect of Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, and one that distinguishes it from others, is the forward-looking orientation of the authors. This perspective allows them to establish bridges between the institutional ethnography that has been developed heretofore and the potential that is looming for such a mode of inquiry into the social. As such, the book is both informative and inspirational.

Africa is a continent on the upswing, developing great economic momentum. If German companies want to participate in Africa's upswing, they need to be familiar with some special features. This book shows the way to successful business in Africa. It is a practical, yet scientifically based guide for all entrepreneurs and economically interested parties who want to be successful in Africa. It combines the experience of many companies with the scientific perspective and findings of the Centre for Business and Technology in Africa at Flensburg University of Applied Sciences.In the 2nd edition new developments on the African continent are taken up and current answers are given to the classical questions, which each actor must answer for itself, which wants to be economically successful in Africa: WHY Africa is interesting for the business, WHERE the largest chances of success exist, HOW to proceed and WHICH approaches for the future organization of the economic relations between Germany and Africa are promising.The book describes how to invest in Africa and bundles the current experiences of managers of large corporations and family businesses with a long history on the continent.

Afrika ist ein Kontinent im Aufschwung, der eine große wirtschaftliche Dynamik entwickelt. Wenn deutsche Unternehmen am Aufschwung Afrikas partizipieren wollen, müssen sie mit einigen Besonderheiten vertraut sein. Das Buch zeigt diesen Weg zu erfolgreichen Geschäften in Afrika. Es ist ein praxisorientierter, gleichwohl wissenschaftlich fundierter Ratgeber für alle Unternehmer und wirtschaftlich Interessierten, die in Afrika erfolgreich sein wollen. Es vereint dabei die Erfahrungen vieler Unternehmen mit der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive und den Erkenntnissen des Centre for Business und Technology in Africa der Hochschule Flensburg.In der 2. Auflage werden neue Entwicklungen auf dem afrikanischen Kontinent aufgegriffen und aktuelle Antworten gegeben auf die klassischen Fragen, die jeder Akteur für sich beantworten muss, der in Afrika wirtschaftlich erfolgreich sein will: WARUM Afrika für das Geschäft interessant ist, WO die größten Erfolgsaussichten bestehen, WIE vorzugehen ist und WELCHE Ansätze zur künftigen Gestaltung der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Afrika erfolgsvorsprechend sind.Das Buch beschreibt, wie in Afrika investiert werden kann und bündelt die aktuellen Erfahrungen von Managern großer Konzerne und Familienunternehmen mit langjähriger Geschichte auf dem Kontinent.

Kompost ist zugleich eine Ontologie und eine Art und Weise des Wissens, der Wissensproduktion, die gemeinsam das vermeintlich Gegebene ‚der Welt‘ auseinanderdröseln, um daraus vielzählige Welten hervorzubringen. Alles ist und bedeutet gleichzeitig, ereignet, affiziert, transformiert sich: Wissen kompostiert Welt kompostiert Wissen. Kompost unterläuft Trennungen von Ästhetik, Ethik, Epistemologie und Ontologie, wie sie für das westliche Denken charakteristisch sind. Ausschließung, Einschließung, Gewalt, race, class, gender müssen kompostiert werden, müssen ver/antwortet, gehalten, anders gedacht und anders erzählt, Privilegien zersetzt und verlernt werden. Hierbei nehmen radikal nichtbinäre, pluriversale, relationale, queerfeministische Ökologien onto-epistemologische Gestalt an, die Relationalitäten, Responseabilities und Sorge sowie RaumZeiten und Materien/Materialisierungen verschränkt mit-denken, gerade ohne über sie zu verfügen.

Ethnographie setzt an der empirischen Erforschung von sozialem Handeln, Lebenswelten, Praktiken, institutionellen Kontexten und kulturellen Orientierungen durch Beobachtung, Ko-Präsenz, längerfristige Teilnahme und Teilhabe an dem zu untersuchenden Feld an. Ihre Ursprünge liegen in der Ethnologie und im Journalismus. Die in den 1910er bis zu den 1930er Jahren durchgeführten Studien der Chicago School haben beide Verfahrensansätze aufgegriffen, um die Dynamik und die zunehmende Unübersichtlichkeit gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit beschreiben zu können. Dies hat zur Entstehung einer soziologischen Ethnographie geführt, die ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf soziale und kulturelle Differenzierungen in der je eigenen Gesellschaft richtet.Ziel und Anliegen des Handbuches ist es, einen systematischen Überblick über Ausgangslagen, zentrale Ansätze, Debatten und Ausdifferenzierungen von soziologischer Ethnographie als Forschungsweise zu geben und zugleich die Entfaltung ethnographischer Forschung von ihren historischen Anfängen und Grundlegungen Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts über Weiterentwicklungen in den 1960er Jahren, entscheidende Weichenstellungen in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren bis hin zu ihrer gegenwärtigen Vielgestaltigkeit nachzuzeichnen.

Das Buch basiert auf Untersuchungen, die zwischen 2017 und 2020 mit 1632 österreichi­schen, deut­schen und Studierenden anderer Nationen in Wien durchgeführt wurden. Die Teilneh­mer und Teilnehmerinnen be­fan­den sich während der Coronakrise teilweise in Quarantäne oder waren zumindest auf Online-Teaching und Home-Office angewiesen. Wie gehen junge Menschen mit Freiheitsbe­schrän­kungen um? Was tun sie, um körperlich und geistig „gesund“ durch die Krise zu kom­men? Neben konstruk­ti­ven For­men des Umgangs mit der Pandemie finden wir in der Gesellschaft und teilweise auch in einzelnen Menschen ver­schwö­rungs­theo­retische Gedanken­kom­­plexe, die ag­gres­sive und destruktive Ver­hal­tens­wei­sen nahelegen. Diese Wider­sprüch­lich­keit hängt mit unserer Urgeschichte zu­sam­men: der Homo sapiens musste sich einesteils wilden Tie­ren stellen und andern­teils in Kalt­zeiten als einzigen Ausweg in Höhlen zurückziehen. Theo­retisch begründet und empi­risch überprüft werden höhlen­be­zo­gene Denkwei­sen und ihre Verbindung mit Mut und Durchhalte­willen, aber auch mit Ver­schwö­rungstheorien, poli­ti­scher Ent­fremdung und Rechts­extremis­mus: Denkmuster aus paläo­histo­ri­scher Zeit als Chance und Risiko in der Corona­krise.Zum Band erscheint eine CD: Höhlenkompetenz in 52 Übungen, auf der die Regeln zusammen mit einer eigenen Komposition von Havard Enstad eingesprochen wurden.

Kunst wird gesehen, gehört, geschmeckt, gerochen und gespürt. Sie wird im Zusammenspiel mit den Sinnen empfunden, erfahren und erlebt. Wie Kunst von wem wahrgenommen wird, ist – so die soziologische These – stets eingebettet in praktisches, inkorporiertes und theoretisches Wissen, das durch kognitive, sinnliche, leibliche und ästhetische Begegnungen mit Kunst zugleich irritiert, nach seinen Grenzen und – noch grundsätzlicher – nach den Grenzen bestehender Gewissheiten befragt werden kann. Wahrnehmen von, durch und mit Kunst wird so auch als soziale Praxis relevant. Mit diesemZugang gehen Fragen danach einher, wie das Sehen, Hören, Schmecken, Riechen, Fühlen, dessen Eindrücken wir uns kaum entziehen können, sozialen Prägungen unterworfen und durch Machtverhältnisse geformt ist, wie aber auch durch das Soziale Interaktionen ermöglicht und Praktiken organisiert werden. Im vorliegenden Band kommen eine Bandbreite an soziologischen, philosophischen, geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Beiträgen zu Wort, die sich explizit den sozialen Aspekten des Wahrnehmens von Kunst in facettenreichen Dimensionen und Aspekten widmen. Der Band eruiert so, wie das Zusammenspiel von Künsten und Sinnen als soziale Praxis aus ganz unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und Schwerpunktsetzungen in den Blick geraten kann: Er fragt, wie sich das Wahrnehmen von Materialien und Dingen, Oberflächen und Räumen, Tönen und Atmosphären durch verschiedene Akteure empirisch wie theoretisch als soziale Praxis in den Blick nehmen lässt.

Culture's Engine offers an insightful and penetrating analysis of the enduring relationship between technology and society. William Gosling explores in absorbing historical detail how humans have experienced change through a sequence of technological revolutions, each giving rise to new social organisation, which in turn influences the shape and timing of the next such revolution. Gosling argues that it is through this dialogue that successful technology sets the direction and pace of all cultural evolution. The state of technology at any time is the major influence on the world, and not just the material world. This book then is not a history of technology, still less of science. It fundamentally questions how technology and social forces interact, leading to these successive revolutions and their outcomes.

The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.

While the term ‘culture'has come to be very widely used in both popular and academic discourse, it has a variety of meanings, and the differences among these have not been given sufficient attention. This book explores these meanings, and identifies some of the problems associated with them, as well as examining the role that values should play in cultural analysis. The development of four, very different, conceptions of culture is traced from the nineteenth century onwards: a notion of aesthetic cultivation associated with Matthew Arnold; the evolutionary view of culture characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology; the idea of diverse cultures characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century anthropology; and a conception of culture as a process of situated meaning-making – found today across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. These conceptions of culture are interrogated, and a reformulation of the concept is sketched. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and education.

The World Multiple, as a collection, is an ambitious ethnographic experiment in understanding how the world is experienced and generated in multiple ways through people's everyday practices. Against the dominant assumption that the world is a single universal reality that can only be known by modern expert science, this book argues that worlds are worlded—they are socially and materially crafted in multiple forms in everyday practices involving humans, landscapes, animals, plants, fungi, rocks, and other beings. These practices do not converge to a singular knowledge of the world, but generate a world multiple—a world that is more than one integrated whole, yet less than many fragmented parts.The book brings together authors from Europe, Japan, and North America, in conversation with ethnographic material from Africa, the Americas, and Asia, in order to explore the possibilities of the world multiple to reveal new ways to intervene in the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism that inflict damage on humans and nonhumans. The contributors show how the world is formed through interactions among techno-scientific, vernacular, local, and indigenous practices, and examine the new forms of politics that emerge out of them.Engaged with recent anthropological discussions of ontologies, the Anthropocene, and multi-species ethnography, the book addresses the multidimensional realities of people's lives and the quotidian politics they entail.

These original articles relate to major themes in the comparative study of the dynamics of cultures, modernization, and social and political change. The authors, ranking scholars in their fields, provide fresh and important insights to the study of topics such as the interface of anthropological and sociological theory, the dynamics of Latin Americ

Ben Light puts forward an alternative way of thinking about how we engage with social networking sites. He analyses our engagements social networking sites in public, at work, in our personal lives and as related to our health and wellbeing, emphasizing the importance of disconnection instead of connection.

Here, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González offer a thought-provoking conversation on the history of Latinos in the pro football leagues. As they weave their way through significant points where culture, politics, and history congeal (an early twentieth century era of Brown Color Lines, the Great Depression, WWII, birth of television, Civil Rights struggles, the twenty-first century Latino demographic explosion, among others), Aldama and González thread together an alpha-to-omega, all-encompassing story of Latinos in the NFL. They push hard at issues such as racial prejudice, including why Latinos have historically had to cross into the Canadian Leagues to prove themselves to white American officiators and the glaring omission of prominent Latino names honored within the hallowed interiors of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Encyclopedic in scope and powerfully pointed in its analysis, they put the spotlight on the significant contribution made by Latinos in the history of pro football.

Comprehending Drug Use, the first full-length critical overview of the use of ethnographic methods in drug research, synthesizes more than one hundred years of study on the human encounter with psychotropic drugs. J. Bryan Page and Merrill Singer create a comprehensive examination of the whole field of drug ethnography-methodology that involves access to the hidden world of drug users, the social spaces they frequent, and the larger structural forces that help construct their worlds. They explore the important intersections of drug ethnography with globalization, criminalization, public health (including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hepatitis, and other diseases), and gender, and also provide a practical guide of the methods and career paths of ethnographers.

'Treating birth as ritual, Reed makes clever use of his anthropological expertise, qualitative data, and personal experience to bring to life the frustrations and joys men often encounter as they navigate the medical model of birthing.'-William Marsiglio, author Sex, Men, and Babies: Stories of Awareness and Responsibility In the past two decades, men have gone from being excluded from the delivery room to being admitted, then invited, and, finally, expected to participate actively in the birth of their children. No longer mere observers, fathers attend baby showers, go to birthing classes, and share in the intimate, everyday details of their partners'pregnancies. In this unique study, Richard Reed draws on the feminist critique of professionalized medical birthing to argue that the clinical nature of medical intervention distances fathers from child delivery. He explores men's roles in childbirth and the ways in which birth transforms a man's identity and his relations with his partner, his new baby, and society. In other societies, birth is recognized as an important rite of passage for fathers. Yet, in American culture, despite the fact that fathers are admitted into delivery rooms, little attention is given to their transition to fatherhood. The book concludes with an exploration of what men's roles in childbirth tell us about gender and American society. Reed suggests that it is no coincidence that men's participation in the birthing process developed in parallel to changing definitions of fatherhood more broadly. Over the past twenty years, it has become expected that fathers, in addition to being strong and dependable, will be empathetic and nurturing. Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal accounts of over fifty men from all parts of the world, this book is as much about the birth of fathers as it is about fathers in birth.

Since its founding in the nineteenth century, social anthropology has been seen as the study of exotic peoples in faraway places. But today more and more anthropologists are dedicating themselves not just to observing but to understanding and helping solve social problems wherever they occur—in international aid organizations, British TV studios, American hospitals, or racist enclaves in Eastern Europe, for example. In Exotic No More, an initiative of the Royal Anthropological Institute, some of today's most respected anthropologists demonstrate, in clear, unpretentious prose, the tremendous contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary society. They cover issues ranging from fundamentalism to forced migration, child labor to crack dealing, human rights to hunger, ethnicity to environmentalism, intellectual property rights to international capitalisms. But Exotic No More is more than a litany of gloom and doom; the essays also explore topics usually associated with leisure or'high'culture, including the media, visual arts, tourism, and music. Each author uses specific examples from their fieldwork to illustrate their discussions, and 62 photographs enliven the text. Throughout the book, the contributors highlight anthropology's commitment to taking people seriously on their own terms, paying close attention to what they are saying and doing, and trying to understand how they see the world and why. Sometimes this bottom-up perspective makes the strange familiar, but it can also make the familiar strange, exposing the cultural basis of seemingly'natural'behaviors and challenging us to rethink some of our most cherished ideas—about gender,'free'markets,'race,'and'refugees,'among many others. Contributors: William O. Beeman Philippe Bourgois John Chernoff E. Valentine Daniel Alex de Waal Judith Ennew James Fairhead Sarah Franklin Michael Gilsenan Faye Ginsburg Alma Gottlieb Christopher Hann Faye V. Harrison Richard Jenkins Melissa Leach Margaret Lock Jeremy MacClancy Jonathan Mazower Ellen Messer A. David Napier Nancy Scheper-Hughes Jane Schneider Parker Shipton Christopher B. Steiner