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Cross-device tracking has drawn growing attention from both commercial companies and the general public because of its privacy implications and applications for user profiling, personalized services, etc. One particular, wide-used type of cross-device tracking is to leverage browsing histories of user devices, e.g., characterized by a list of IP addresses used by the devices and domains visited by the devices. However, existing browsing history based methods have three drawbacks. First, they cannot capture latent correlations among IPs and domains. Second, their performance degrades significantly when labeled device pairs are unavailable. Lastly, they are not robust to uncertainties in linking browsing histories to devices. We propose GraphTrack, a graph-based cross-device tracking framework, to track users across different devices by correlating their browsing histories. Specifically, we propose to model the complex interplays among IPs, domains, and devices as graphs and capture the latent correlations between IPs and between domains. We construct graphs that are robust to uncertainties in linking browsing histories to devices. Moreover, we adapt random walk with restart to compute similarity scores between devices based on the graphs. GraphTrack leverages the similarity scores to perform cross-device tracking. GraphTrack does not require labeled device pairs and can incorporate them if available. We evaluate GraphTrack on two real-world datasets, i.e., a publicly available mobile-desktop tracking dataset (around 100 users) and a multiple-device tracking dataset (154K users) we collected. Our results show that GraphTrack substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art on both datasets., Accepted by AsiaCCS'22

How do public safety net and elite private mental health providers cope with a key dilemma since psychiatric deinstitutionalization—managing madness when people have the right to refuse care? I observed two approaches to voluntary community-based services, one that tolerates “non-compliance” and deviant choices, and another that attempts to therapeutically discipline clientele. The puzzle, given theories of the paternalistic governance of poverty, is that select poor patients are given autonomy while the privileged are micro-managed. Drawing on comparative fieldwork in Los Angeles, I show how contrasting ecological pressures and resource bases shape divergent practices. In the context of urban poverty governance, mental health care and low-barrier housing offer a way to remove problem people from public space. This “tolerant containment” is linked to limited therapeutic capacity and the construction of clients as beyond transformation. In the context of family systems governance, elite private mental health care is a project to reform wayward relatives and equip them with respectable futures. A “concerted constraint” of deviance, akin to Lareau’s theory of privileged childrearing, is reserved for those who can afford rehabilitation and conceivably recover. Using these cases, I contribute to theories of social control and inequality in advanced liberal societies.

This introductory chapter examines the methodological and practical challenges that comparative ethnographers face. It begins by discussing both the promises and potential pitfalls of comparative field research. It then moves to an examination of how ethnography’s unusually diverse set of traditions provides both unique challenges and possibilities for comparative social science. The chapter proceeds to chart the various ways in which ethnography’s historically diverse traditions translate into divergent approaches to comparison in contemporary research. This is followed by an overview of the structure of the volume, which explains how each of our contributors’ chapters advances comparative ethnographic methodology. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why acknowledging, maintaining, and utilizing ethnographic pluralism, rather than pushing for a single catch-all approach, can benefit both individual scholars and the field of ethnographic methodology more broadly.

This volume is guided by the goal of productive pluralism—the simple notion that even though ethnographic approaches may be partially incompatible with one another, the field as a whole benefits from diverse contributions to understanding social life. Beyond a mutual tolerance that leaves ethnographers in their silos, such a pluralism supports sustained scholarly dialog to clarify points of disagreement as well as illuminate opportunities for collaborative problem-solving. To this end, this volume has included works from prominent scholars representing various traditions to articulate what, why, and how they engage in ethnographic comparison. This concluding chapter contextualizes the contributions of the authors, pointing to both divergences and (perhaps) surprising synergies in the ways they approach ethnography. The chapter begins by considering the basic questions of how and why the contributors perform comparison. Having summarized the approaches, the authors discuss specific comparisons of research processes, research products, and the criteria used for evaluating both. The chapter concludes by suggesting how these synergies open the possibility for a chance to address further concerns in comparative methodology.

How can ethnographers access and assess macro-sociological influences on everyday life? This article extends Burawoy’s multi-case solution, which illuminates structural forces through case comparison, by using then critiquing it. I compare non-sanctioned fight events in two US states and ask why one organizes combat with self-regulation while the other utilizes a rationalized rule set, initially theorizing state regulation as the driver of contrasting niche markets. Yet to solve the first puzzle I must address another: why do organizers talk about avoiding governmental intervention when neither fears investigation? Drawing on ethnomethodology, I show how ‘the state’ becomes a resource for organizational boundary work. My contribution to micro-macro analysis is to reconcile the two frames: actual structural pressures disclosed by multi-case logic and the false discourse of ‘the state’ observed in interaction. Eschewing polemics over ‘relational’ versus ‘comparative’ approaches, I demonstrate the necessity of pluralism to see ‘the macro’ in ethnography.

This article investigates “impaired insight,” a controversial psychiatric category describing a mad person unable to know his or her madness. Like “moral insanity” and other concepts before it, impaired insight offers a way to link the disparate logics of human responsibility in psychiatry and the law. I attribute its development to changes wrought by deinstitutionalization, the rise of antipsychotic medication, and patient incarceration in penal settings. In a system that aims to govern psychiatric patients through their freedom, the logic of impaired insight introduces a wrinkle: can a person make an informed choice to refuse treatment if madness itself impairs awareness of illness? Drawing on tools from the sociology of science, I trace the process by which researchers recast psychodynamic “denial” as a neurological and therefore non-volitional “impairment” in the 1990s. I then show how social movement actors mobilized the materialized form in the legal and policy fields in the 2000s, bringing insight science to bear upon the very questions of custodial management and patient rights that gave birth to it. At stake is this dilemma: how can societies that simultaneously privilege individual responsibility and somatic accounts of behavior govern those at the border of legal capacity, and with what justification?

Sociologists have long been concerned with the extent to which “civilizing processes” lead to the increasing salience of rationalized behavioral guidelines and corresponding internal controls, especially in social situations characterized by violence. Following Norbert Elias’s identification of a civilizing process in combat sports, sociologists have debated, though not empirically established, whether emerging “no-holds-barred” fight practices indicate a rupture in the historical civilization of leisure time violence. Using a critical case study of a “no-rules” weapons fighting group, where participants espouse libertarian values and compete in preparation for hypothetical self-defense encounters, I ask how the boundary between violence and social regulation is negotiated in an arena that putatively aims to remove the latter. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I specify the mechanisms that moderate action: (1) the cultivation of a code of honor and linked dispositions to replace codified rules; (2) the interactional hesitance that arises when participants lack clear rules or norms to coordinate action; and (3) the importation of external rule sets, such as self-defense law, to simulate the “real” world. Contrary to surface readings of “no-rules” discourse, I conclude that the activity is deeply embedded in larger societal norms of order. Participants’ ethos of honorable self-governance, “thresholds of repugnance” when exposed to serious injury, and aim of transforming emotive, violent reaction into reflective, instrumental action all indicate that the ostensibly unrestrained violence is, in Elias’s technical sense, precisely civilized. Los sociologos se han preocupado por el grado en que “los procesos de civilizacion” conducen al incremento de la importancia de las pautas de comportamiento reguladas y sus correspondientes controles internos, especialmente en situaciones sociales caracterizadas por la violencia. Siguiendo la identificacion teorica de Elias sobre el proceso civilizador en los deportes de combate, los sociologos han debatido teoricamente, aunque no empiricamente, si las practicas de lucha conocidas como “sin limites” indican una ruptura en la civilizacion historica de la violencia en actividades de ocio y tiempo libre. Utilizando el estudio de caso del grupo “pro-uso de armas “sin reglas” cuyos participantes defienden valores libertarios y compiten en la preparacion de encuentros en los que realizar peleas hipoteticas de autodefensa, el articulo investiga como se negocia el limite entre la violencia y la regulacion social en una arena que supuestamente funciona para eliminar este objetivo. Basandome en mas de tres anos de trabajo de campo etnografico, se pudo especificar los mecanismos de accion que regulan este entorno: 1) la existencia y el cultivo de un codigo de honor y unas practicas vinculadas a reemplazar reglas codificadas 2) la reticencia a la interaccion con otros cuando los participantes carecen de reglas o normas claras para coordinar la accion y 3) la incorporacion de reglas externas, tales como el derecho a la autodefensa, para simular el mundo “real”. Contrariamente a los estudios emergentes relacionados con el discurso “sin reglas”, la investigacion concluye que esta actividad esta profundamente arraigada en normas sociales de orden superior. La regla de “autogobierno basado en el honor' y los ‘umbrales de rechazo’ de los participantes cuando se exponen a lesiones graves, transforman la reaccion ante la violencia de emotiva a una accion reflexiva e instrumental lo que indica que la violencia aparentemente sin limites es, en el sentido tecnico de Elias, precisamente civilizada.