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A ‘Behavioural Insights’ movement has emerged within governments. This movement infuses policymaking with behavioural scientific insights into the rationally bounded nature of human behaviour, hoping to make more effective and cost-efficient policies without being too obtrusive. Alongside sustained admirations of some, others see in Behavioural Insights the threatening revival of technocracy, and more particularly a ‘psychocracy’: a mode of public decision-making that wrongfully reduces the world of policymaking to a rational-instrumental and top-down affair dictated by psychological expertise. This article argues, however, that the claims of technocracy and psychocracy are overgeneralizations, emanating from a frontstage-focused debate that ignores a vast backwater of emerging behavioural policy practices. Grounded in four case studies on behavioural policymaking in Dutch governance, it will be demonstrated that at least part of this backwater is neither so technocratic nor so psychocratic as the critics claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to Wacquant's call for a 'Carnal Sociology'-an approach best realized through a method Wacquant calls 'enactive ethnography.' In this essay, I explore the ways in which certain aspects of Wacquant's carnal sociology-specifically the sentient, the sedimented and the situated-can enhance our understanding of cognition and meaning-making. I reference an ongoing research project on the deciphering of olfactory messages to make my case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates the social ontology and methodology of carnal sociology as a distinctive mode of social inquiry eschewing the spectatorial posture to grasp action-in-the-making, in the wake of debates triggered by my apprenticeship-based study of boxing as a plebeian bodily craft. First I critique the notions of (dualist) agent, (externalist) structure, and (mentalist) knowledge prevalent in the contemporary social sciences and sketch an alternative conception of the social animal, not just as wielder of symbols, but as sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated creature of flesh and blood. I spotlight the primacy of embodied practical knowledge arising out of and continuously enmeshed in webs of action and consider what modes of inquiry are suited to deploying and mining this incarnate conception of the agent. I argue that enactive ethnography, the brand of immersive fieldwork based on 'performing the phenomenon,' is a fruitful path toward capturing the cognitive, conative, and cathectic schemata (habitus) that generate the practices and underlie the cosmos under investigation. But it takes social spunk and persistence to reap the rewards of 'observant participation' and achieve social competency (as distinct from empirical saturation). In closing, I return to Bourdieu's dialogue with Pascal to consider the special difficulty and urgency of capturing the 'spirit of acuteness' that animates such competency but vanishes from normal sociological accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loïc Wacquant's provocative call for a flesh and blood sociology holds promise for ethnographers willing to engage their bodies while doing research. Specifically, it allows ethnographies to experience the same bodily and emotional sensations as their study participants, which then improves their understanding of how bodily crafts inform human life. However, a 'carnal' approach may encounter three obstacles: first, mainstream researchers who are trained in traditional observational methods and writing; second, the time, effort, and thought needed to methodologically link the researcher's body to the research; and third, the fear of ethnographers wanting to avoid being labeled as 'narcissistic' and 'unscientific.' [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]

This article explores some of the complexities of fieldwork for ethnographers conducting research in the ethnographic settings of significant ‘others’. The fieldwork in question took place in the rural, geographically isolated community of Ubang, in Obudu, Nigeria, where I was following in the footsteps of my anthropologist father. Drawing on personal experience, I attempt to candidly examine the challenges inevitably faced in this situation, including acceptance by the community as a bona fide researcher, pressure to fulfill the expectations of others familiar with my father’s work, and the struggle to carve out a professional identity distinct from my father’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lecture on the Igbo “family and home” is at once a detailed study of the core components, complexity, and values of Igbo social organization, and at the same time a lecture in anthropological theory and a study in dialectical anthropology. In his introduction, the author who was himself an insider of Igbo culture, points to the challenge of interpreting Igbo society to its custodians and culture bearers . Reflecting on ethnography and interpretations of culture, he illustrates his comments with an Iranian folk tale as well as references to Susanne Langer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred N. Whitehead, and Chinua Achebe Uchendu begins with the general possibility of profiling a culture along two clusters of culture traits such as Ezi and Ulo, as separately identifiable units of Igbo cultural organization against anthropological theories, proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn, Clifford Geertz, Max Weber, Victor Uchendu, Ralph Linton. Margaret Mead, and Chinua Achebe, In his next step, Uchendu profiles Igbo culture specifically, as complex and holistic, and immediately warns against two type of academic pitfalls evoked by the culture’s specifics: I) Foreign scholars’ surprise and fascination with an open, decentralized society whose “strength and resilience under stress” is found in features other than “a single over-arching institution,” that is monolithic state power, 2)... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contribution of Egon Mayer to the Jewish population, community, and family studies. One of the reasons advanced for the prominence of Jews among the leading lights of sociology has been the notion that as quintessential outsiders, Jews could ask questions in western society. However, there are other intellectual and social-psychological reasons for this trend. The fact that many of academic sociology's most prominent figures, such as Mayer, emerged from the traditional Jewish communities was no accident.

In this paper we consider the development of ‘digital records’ to support ethnographic study of interaction and collaboration in ubiquitous computing environments and articulate the core concept of ‘record and replay’ through two case studies. One focuses on the utility of digital records, or records of interaction generated by a computer system, to ethnographic inquiry and highlights the mutually supportive nature of digital records and ethnographic methods. The other focuses on the work it takes to make digital records support ethnography, particularly the work of description and representation that is required to reconcile the fragmented character of interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. The work involved in ‘making digital records work’ highlights requirements for the design of tools to support the endeavour and informs the development of a Replay Tool. This tool enables ethnographers to visualize the data content of digital records; to extract sequences of relevance to analysis and remove non-relevant features; to marry recorded content with external resources, such as video; to add content from internal and external resources through annotation; and to reorder digital records to reflect the interactional order of events rather than the recorded order of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the methodological philosophy and strategy of Paul Willis's classic, Learning to Labour . We use King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry as a litmus test, showing how Willis's work meets, diverges from, and innovatively reconstructs “good social science research.” Drawing from Learning to Labour and Willis's writings on methodological issues, as well as key texts on the science of sociology, this article evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a reflexive method and the potential this method holds for qualitative work in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of participant-observation and ethnographic writing in the shaping of medical practice since Hippocrates. Drawing on a range of historical sources and genres that include the 17th- and 18th-century medical topographies and medical geographies, 19th-century medical ethnography and folklore, and their marginal persistence into the 20th century in the form of Mexican pasante reports, I argue that these writings should not be approached as part of the history of anthropology, but as specifically medical genres related to medical practice. The abandonment of these ethnographic practices by modern biomedicine is, I conclude, a consequence of two related developments: the hegemony of clinical epistemology and the depersonalization and depoliticization of physicians' commitment to their patients. To Eduardo L. Menéndez [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith‘s wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith‘s conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society‘s ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines kinship linkages in the Austrian village of Feistritz. Relinking is a concept of structural anthropology developed in contemporary and historical studies by researchers who have shown the importance of marital relinkages between families as a means of alliance in European villages. Marital relinking of the ancestral lines of two or more couples occurs when there exists a circuit of consanguinal links among them. In the genealogical graphs for this Austrian case, there are many circuits created by relinking marriages, and many of them overlap to form larger blocks. Blocks and circuits differ fundamentally from simple intermarriage between two families, since circuits of relationships glue different families together in an entirely different way. In the present case, by identifying such blocks, the constitution of class differences both in intermarriage and the transmission processes governing the flows of property is better studied. Matrimonial blocks entail easily recognizable social boundaries that may be involved in a variety of social inclusion and exclusion processes. Matrimonial relinkings have a dual aspect at the boundary between the individual and the social. While at the individual level they may embody specific marriage strategies, when considered sociologically, they may have group and boundary formation as a consequence.

The article discusses the use of the word function, which is a neglected mode of sociological enquiry. The identification of functionalism as a point of view that seizes upon the likeness of social processes to organic processes comes up time and again, and is alluded to by both friends and foes of the functionalist approach. The danger for social science of wholesale importation from the conceptual apparatus of physiology is a well-taken caveat. An inquiry into the etymological roots of the terms "function" and organ suggests a reason for this perception of similarity. Even in its mathematical sense the word derived its relevance from the social connotations it carried. So, although the social sciences had merely recaptured an old birthright in their application of the concepts of function and organ to social phenomena, it must be admitted that, on being repatriated, the terms have found themselves much estranged, placed in an unaccustomed ambience. More generally, the opening up of the point of view that one's very conception of reality may come from an analogical application of concepts originally constitutive of social systems introduces an important shift in paradigmatic models for any science.

Thoughts represented by publications of Black social scientists provide a point of departure for the analysts of Black social theory in general and Black sociology in particular. The general aim of this study is to formulate a working definition of Black sociology; distinctions are drawn between the several different uses of the term Black Sociology in the social science literature. Then, beginning with a description of an ideal type of Black sociology, distinctions are made between four different types of race-related sociologies. In closing, attention is focused on some cultural and political implications of Black sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews two essays related to knowledge and culture. Knowledge is a ghost to social scientists. It spooks their work. For them, it is a subject unlike any other. Knowledge, to be sure, is what they, the social ones, like all other scientists, produce. Some people in the humanities may still search for truth, or truths, but scientists produce knowledge. Yet, unlike the more normatively respectable scientists, social scientists understand that their knowledge is forever haunted by the mysterious circumstances of its origins and passing away. Knowledge of the social produced by social beings is never, nor can it ever be, what it seems. It arises necessarily out of the experiences its producers have as members of the social orders they study. For this very reason, its factual certitude withers to a relative wisp nearly as soon as it is born. Knowledge of the social-by-social beings is a subject that, by its very nature, frightens the knower because it cannot, or will not, be contained by the more comfortable methods and categories of science. This is why so many sociologists, a good number of political scientists, and even some academic psychologists and economists will cash their pay checks in the name of an official department of social science, while, in their work-a-day lives, they disavow the rules and ideals of science itself, seeking instead the gentler comfort of methods borrowed from history, ethnography, philosophy, even literary criticism.

Books like "Plainville," "Street Corner Society," "The Gang," "The Irish Countrymen," and a series of others, were part of a kind of sociology done in the U.S. mainly twenty five to thirty years ago. It's associated with the University of Chicago and also with Harvard. At that time those fellows were trying to build ethnographic studies in a tradition that had been developed largely in England in social anthropology largely by studying tribal societies. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to detailed ethnographic work, and the term "ethnographer" which had fallen into considerable disrepute. This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard, that is, not reproduceable, not stating hypotheses, etcetera, the new ethnographic work-which is calling itself things like "ethno-cognitive studies," "ethnocultural studies," "ethno-science" and the like-is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. There are several bases for this renaissance. But the most important one is the development of very strong tools by linguists.

This essay reflects upon a recurrent theme of observation and questioning in the social sciences, the relationship between children and adults. From the point of view of social science practitioners, particularly ethnomethodologists, ethnographers and sociolinguists, who have most recently observed and reported upon child-adult interaction as well as to the scientific community which comprises their audience, it would appear that these observers confront dominant concepts in these fields and, in that sense, produce new ideas. In particular, the notions that children could have a separate culture what is referred to as kids' culture, generationally transmissed by children to other children, that they possess interpretive competence equal to or even greater than that of adults, that they are potentially, when adults avoid judging their behavior narrowly and conventionally, more creative, more honest, in short, in some ways more human than adults, challenge mainstream understandings of the younger members of the society. The elements of this framework represent commonsense convictions about children, which emerge in adult theories and research on them.

Ethnography as a research process is notoriously difficult to articulate. In the anthropological literature, there are descriptions of its mystique, awkward mixtures of detachment and involvement, and efforts to refine elusive concepts like participant observation. Because of its emergent nature, and its emphasis on the apprehension of pattern in activities controlled by others, much of ethnography fits poorly into traditional models of social science. Inference is a word that calls to mind elegant formal systems as Euclidean geometry and first order predicate calculus. Inference can only occur in those systems if small number of rules are followed. Further, rules are guaranteed to work with some truths and the rules of inference, then whatever one winds up, is a truth as well. Further, the incorporation of the concepts into ethnographic work leads to some new concepts of inference and schema. Inference had to do with the need for careful attention to the different traditions that serve as sources for inferences and schemas, those of the ethnographer, informants, and the potential audience of a report may all mix in complicated ways in schema construction. A second had to do with those conventional higher-level schemas that are themes, a traditionally important goal of ethnographic work.

Interpretive ethnography faces a cross-road, as of December 1996. It is time to take stock, to review where ethnography has come, to examine the experimental work of the last decade, and the critiques it has produced and confronted. As the boundaries of the realist ethnographic text are challenged, counter-forces, like the article "The Responsibilities of Sociological Poets," by M. Schwalbe, are mobilized. Criticisms of writing are never innocent activities. Schwalbe would purge sociology of the new writing. According to Schwalbe, poetry is an inaccessible, improper sociological form. Good qualitative sociology, in contrast, is accessible to large audiences, makes the social world and its meanings visible to others, and makes its rules known to outsiders, including the claim that writing is not analysis. Schwalbe's prescriptions for good writing enact a theory of the social. The social makes itself visible to those who look and listen. There are stories in the world waiting to be written by careful ethnographers who write good, clean prose.

Debates about representational forms in qualitative research have tended either to celebrate or to condemn particular forms. Such an approach reifies the differences between various means of expression and diverts attention from the interpretive, political and pedagogic issues which, in my view, lend importance to representational choices. Here, I offer an experiential account of performing ethnography, based on my own field work. I discuss performance both as process and product, and find points of convergence between my goals as an ethnographer and the resources of performance. As process, performance encourages participants-performers and audience members alike-to articulate and reflect critically on cultural contexts and meanings; as product, performance models (in ways more difficult through writing) episodes of social life which, often, are the object of naturalistic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of managing chronic illness at home are addressed in terms of the concept of "work:" what types and subtypes of work, entailing what tasks, who does them, how, where, the consequences, the problems involved. Three types of work and consequences of their interplay are discussed: illness work, everyday life work, and biographical work. Theoretical concerns of the sociology of work are addressed as well as the substantive issues of managing chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the findings of several studies on social science and the U.S. citizen. In a survey by George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, people were asked how comforting would certain kinds of support be if they were dying. The survey also asked people what it was that would worry them most as death approached. Although majorities of respondents said they worried about personal pain or how loved ones would fare, when people were asked which overall area they were most concerned about, 38 percent said it was spiritual matters. 21 percent cited practical matters. Men in a swath of South Dakota as well as in the eastern cities of Baltimore and Washington live about as long as men in such developing countries as India and Bolivia, according to a 1997 study by Harvard scientist Christopher Murray. He also said women in some countries die around age 83, while men in a south-central position of South Dakota that contains two Indian reservations have life expectancies of only 61 years. The three major minority groups are purchasing homes, starting businesses and attaining college degrees at such a rapid pace they could reach partly with whites over the next 10 years, according to initial findings of an October 1997 study. The survey also found that whites still have substantially greater household income than African Americans and Hispanics, although less than the third minority group, Asian Americans, and that the annual rate at which minorities are increasing their incomes is virtually equal to that of whites. Although median family income rose in 1995 and 1996, it has yet to recover from the declines suffered in the current decade. For men, the boom has been a bust. Men working full-time jobs suffered, on average, 0.9 percent decline in income in 1996 and currently earn about 10 percent less in real terms than they did at the end of the eighties.

In this article, the authors discuss what is qualitative sociology and why the journal "Qualitative Sociology," has been named so. Qualitative sociology is the endeavor to apprehend the basic elements constituting human social relations. It proceeds by self-awareness, reflective participation in relationships of meaning with the human actors who are under study, whether directly through participant observation or, less directly, through hermeneutic interpretation, historical reconstitution, or theoretical analysis. It respects the meanings in terms of which the activities under study, as instances of human activity, are configured and anticipates the creativity of all situated human endeavors. It emphasizes reflective creativity and expects the vitality of creative conduct to reside in particulars, but connects the possibility of creativity to ongoing institutions that may be large and complicated. Qualitative sociology thus must encompass the fields of macroanalysis and theoretical generalization, even if it is most often practiced in the form of ethnographies of specific situations.

From a certain point of view one can see why Fritz Ringer's "Max Weber's Methodology: the Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences," would be an attractive book. It appears to be comprehensive. It appears to explain a large number of obscure and difficult texts in short sentences and in terms of relatively simple ideas even diagrams with arrows. Yet it is not too simple. There is plenty of technical language, and there are references to specialized texts in a number of disciplines in German and English, both on Weber and on issues in the philosophy of science and social science, including a good deal on some thinkers who arc seldom discussed in the usual literature on the social sciences. The book thus appears to have the best of several worlds something new and challenging but nevertheless introductory about Weber's methodological writing, together with something that is also relevant to such issues of the day as relativism and the divide between the interpretive and causal approaches to social science. The jacket contains blurbs which call it such things as a major work for the history of the social sciences and invaluable, by people who have familiar names and ought to know.