‘In the Company of Men’: A Reflexive Tale of Cultural Organizing in a Small Organization

A tale of fieldwork in a small organization is discussed in this article with a view to highlighting how social processes, cultural understandings and expressions of gender are produced during fieldwork interaction. The tale is told reflexively and retrospectively, recording an ongoing conversation about fieldwork experience. Central to the tale is discussion of how the researcher is drawn into ‘culture–making’ within the organization and the ways in which fieldwork interaction creates a ‘space’ through which organizational members engage with, work through and realize work–place values. In this article there are multiple levels of reflection. At one level it is examined how the organizational–researcher role of ‘emotional nurturer’ was constructed during fieldwork. At the same time some cultural insights drawn from ethnographic inquiry and intensive interviewing within the small organization are presented. The analysis is also shaped by a further layer of post–fieldwork reflection and interpretation which draws in emotional issues and expressions of gender. It is argued that a close scrutiny of fieldwork roles is important to organizational research in that it makes explicit how the researcher–‘native’ interaction is central to the theorizing process and how the researcher can become a participant in organizational culture–making.     

No hiding place: on the discomforts of researching the contemporary policy process

It has never been easy to conduct research into currently sensitive policy issues, but there is now accumulating evidence to indicate that various forms of resistance to scholarly investigation are on the increase. Such a climate handicaps all social policy research, but may have the greatest impact on ethnographic projects. Yet, it is argued, ethnography is increasingly widely recognised among academics as having a particularly valuable contribution to make to the study of the policy process. Unfortunately, many policy practitioners (and occasionally some academic colleagues) perceive ethnographic research as being of questionable validity and low helpfulness. This behaves policy-oriented ethnographers to demonstrate that they do indeed have procedures for assuring validity, even if their style of investigation is never likely to be popular with government.     

Palestinian Children: Authors of Collective Memory

This article investigates the premise that Palestinian children are the authors of collective memory. Palestinian society employs an oral tradition that propagates the collective experience among different generations in which the individual dimensions of each is apparent. The oral history for Palestinian children not only illustrates past events, it also provides the tool for grasping the present and traversing the future. In this ethnographic study, 12 Palestinian children from cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank were interviewed. The children demonstrated active roles in reconstructing previous collective memory in relation to their own experiences and vigorously restructured the collective memory as a prerequisite for passing it to the next generation.     

Analogical Problems with Digital Data

Current initiatives of digitally archiving ethnographic and linguistic data promise considerable advantages with regard to longevity and accessibility. This article discusses these ‘digital promises’ in the context of projects funded by recent research programs on endangered languages and cultures. It is argued that far from being merely a new technological tool for preserving data, digital archiving has considerable impact on the ways in which knowledge and research is organised and on the relationship between the participants in the research process. The new technological means change the structure of ethnographic data collections while highlighting a number of questions of data access and property rights that are analogous to earlier, and largely still unresolved, debates about the ethics of research and about data access and ownership.     

Gender and the Japanese puppet theatre

The manifestation of gender in the Japanese puppet theatre is also a study of men who depict male and female roles. The visual sociologist must take into consideration the intermeshing and communication of voice (tayu), with music (shamisen player) and puppeteers on stage in the dramaturgy of roles and their enactment. The researcher explores aspects of front and backstage as we learn about male and female role making and taking. It could be argued that women are fictionalized, idealized and subject to stylization, while men are allowed to be more free in their depiction of emotional variation. At the same time there is a long tradition of gender interpretation which contains sexual ambiguities and varied meaning levels. This research addresses the masked and unmasked aspects of the Bunraku theatre and the ways that maleness and femaleness can be visually and verbally conceived.     

Once More With Feeling: Ethnographic Reflections on the Mediation of Tension in a Small Team of Call Centre Workers

This article explores the labour process of a team of call‐centre workers based in a multi‐client call centre in the West Midlands. Founded on the basis of a 13‐month ethnographic study into workplace resistance in call‐centre environments, this article provides insights into control in call centres, focusing on sexuality, internal team dynamics and discipline. It is argued that control is exerted through management and information technology but it is crucially exerted laterally in the team and sexuality is an important medium of such control. This article focuses specifically on how worker sexuality is deployed to regulate the tension between contradictory imperatives faced by workers. The article then considers the emotional content of the call‐centre labour process, arguing that the apparent resolution of potentially contradictory logic, in fact, depends upon the development by call‐centre workers, encouraged by more senior employees, of informal, pseudo‐sexualized client relations at the point of production. Crucially however the fieldwork reveals that the demands placed upon customer service representatives are subtly gendered.     

Resources reduction and welfare changes: tensions between social workers and organisations. The Italian case in child protection services

Within the field of studies on professionalism, this paper explores the changes in roles of social workers and the new tensions emerging in the relationship with their organisational contexts, due to the reduction of resources and the introduction of neoliberal and managerial policies in the welfare system. The paper is based on qualitative research carried out through 32 in-depth interviews with frontline social workers engaged in child and family services in Italy. The paper investigates how spending cuts have affected the relationship with the organisation arguing that the ways the cuts are implemented, as well as the room for professional recognition set by the organisation, are relevant. A four-character social worker typology is outlined, drawn from the intersection of two meaningful dimensions: sense of belonging and critical thinking. It is argued that a ‘critically engaged’ type points to a new form of professionalism that may emerge from the current crisis of the relationship between the organisation and social workers.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

“…It’s Just Very Hard To Fail A Student…”: Decision-Making And Defences Against Anxiety – An Ethnographic And Practice-Near Study Of Practice Assessment Panels

The practice learning site is an important place of determining suitability for social work practice and as such is a key site of gate keeping. Research, both international and multi-disciplinary have consistently highlighted the challenging emotional processes involved in failing a student in a practice learning setting. This research has largely focused on practice educators. What has been not been explored however, are wider decision-making processes about students who have failed the placement, namely, what is known in the UK as the Practice Assessment Panel (PAP). The paper thus documents findings from an ethnographic study of four PAPs in England, utilising a practice-near analytical approach. Findings centre around three key themes; the deferring of difficult decisions, powerful voices and the unacknowledged emotional climate. The paper concludes that the PAP can be theorised as a powerful projective field and suggests possible ways forward in light of the themes to emerge.     

Coping with Conflict,Confronting Resistance: Fieldwork Emotions and Identity Management in a South Korean Evangelical Community

Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork—such as gaining access, maintaining fieldwork relations, objectivity, and fieldwork stresses—are intensified for researchers working with “absolutist” religious group, groups that hold an exclusivist or totalistic definition of truth. Based on my fieldwork in a conservative South Korean evangelical community, I explore in this article two central and related methodological dilemmas pertaining to studying absolutist religious groups: identity negotiation and emotional management during fieldwork. Writing from my complex location as a feminist and a cultural/religious insider/outsider in relation to the South Korean evangelical community, I explore in particular the challenges posed by identity/role management in the field and its emotional dimensions, including the issue of the researcher’s power and vulnerability, the quandary of “conformity,” and the emotional costs of self-repression arising from the researcher’s fundamental value conflicts with the group. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of these experiences for ethnographic methodology, most centrally, how we manage our emotional responses in the field, including “inappropriate” ones, and how we can relate them to the research process.

Race,rage and emotional suspects: Ideologies of social mobility confront the racial contours of mass incarceration

Guilt, shame, pride and rage ripple through conversations about racism within the juvenile justice system where the racial contours of mass incarceration challenge the legitimacy of the American ideology of being a colourblind meritocracy. This paper argues that projects of emotional regulation, especially the regulation of young people's emotional response to the hypervisibility of race, are central to the governance of youth in carceral spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research in a southern California juvenile hall, I explore how young people engage with an evolving biopolitics of emotion and the ways carceral spaces shape young people's constructions of racial boundaries and solidarities.     

Knocking on doors: recruitment and enrichment in a qualitative interview‐based study

This paper describes the process of recruiting participants for a qualitative interview‐based study by leafleting and door knocking. It is argued that door knocking can enrich and thicken research that usually takes place ‘behind closed doors’, enabling researchers to engage their ethnographic imaginations by observing neighbourhood interactions, familiarising themselves with the places their participants inhabit and through the embodied, sensory experience of walking itself. By treating the recruitment process as data, it is suggested that the door knocking researcher can ensure his/her individual participants are understood as connected to the wider social, physical and sensory environment they inhabit. Door knocking is also seen as enabling researchers to find interest in an element of the research process often viewed as a somewhat irksome means to an end.     

Operationalizing hunger in rural America: A reexamination of McMurry

The Harvard Physician Task Force report Hunger Counties 1986 evoked several critical responses, including Dan McMurry's (1991) in this journal. McMurry maintained that the Harvard report incorrectly identifies hunger counties in the United States: It is an invalid study that measures economic dependence rather than hunger and malnutrition. In this reexamination of McMurry, it is argued that his field observations lack ethnographic validity and thus draw erroneous conclusions from the data. McMurry, in addition, made false assumptions about the voting behavior of rural residents, which further weakens his arguments against the Harvard Physician Task Force. Finally, it is suggested that researchers find a more inclusive method of measuring rural hunger in America.     

The Collective Turkish Home in Vienna: Aesthetic Narratives of Migration and Belonging

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Turkish people in Vienna create a collective sense of belonging and position themselves in a complex web of diasporic relations, through the materiality and aesthetics of their homes. It aims to show how the efforts of displaced people to construct a belonging to the new place of dwelling are intertwined with the aesthetic and material practices of making homes. Based on ethnographic research, it will be argued that a particular “Turkish home” is collectively created through shared aesthetic practices and discourses and serves as a material and social medium both for imagining and building collectivities and for constructing and expressing ambiguities, conflicts, multiplicities and contests, played out in the aesthetics of the everyday. Challenging the common view that homes in diasporic or migratory resettlements reflect past lives and locations or a mixture of two cultures and two sets of different objects associated with them, it will be argued that Turkish homes in Vienna are made through a new and particular aesthetic, which serves to produce and reproduce a communal Turkish narrative of migration to and dwelling in Vienna.     

Reflexivity, Ethnography and the Professions (Complementary Medicine). Watching You Watching Me Watching You (and Writing About Both of Us)

That reflexivity is a characteristic of high modernity is now a truism, but its ethical and practical implications for field research have not been explored. The article is based on research conducted among complementary medical practitioners, focusing on issues of professionalisation. This research revealed the problematic and permeable nature of boundaries in ethnographic work. For example, in the course of interviews and observation therapists vouchsafed information to us which seemed controversial, even indiscreet. Was this a matter of their own naivety, their failure to demonstrate the mature ‘professionalism’ to which they aspired? Or was it a conscious strategy, conducted in the expectation that we would make such material public without attributing it to them by name? We were obliged to reflect on the nature of our own ‘professionalism’ as researchers, the ways in which private and public selves interact in the course of research. The confessional nature of some ethnographic writing raises further issues about trust, privacy and the preservation of professional boundaries between researcher and researched. We conclude that social scientists are entitled to critique ‘professionalism’ as a historically situated ‘folk’ concept whose rhetoric often obscures material interests, but they would do well not to abandon it themselves if they are to claim a responsible and ethical form of practice.     

The resilience of migrant money: how gender,generation and class shape family remittances in Peruvian migration

Scholars and policy makers have argued that because altruism drives remittance sending, migrant money is more resilient to uncertainty than other capital flows. In this article, I question this assumption through ethnographic examination of remittance sending by Peruvian migrant families. When in their lives do Peruvian migrants start to remit? Who are the recipients? What is the purpose of their remittances? How long do they last and why do they stop? I argue that, to answer these questions, we need to investigate how migrants make remittance commitments to different household members, how these attribute value to the remittances and how this value becomes the object of negotiation and contestation. The findings indicate that remittances reinforce existing relations of gender, generation and class in Peruvian society and suggest that while short‐lived remittances are based on contractual commitments and driven by altruism, long‐term remittances are based on emotional commitments and driven by both non‐utilitarian and utilitarian motives.     

The managed heart revisited: health and social control1

In this paper I investigate emotional labour in the field of nursing. I show how new ideologies of health promotion have become attached to the prior agenda and already-embedded relationships which structure health provision. Beginning with an outline of health promotion principles and policies the paper goes on to trace how the radical dimensions of health promotion philosophies are subverted in practice by discussing data from a research project into nursing roles in health promotion. I present the data to show how nursing's focus on relationships and relationship skills create divisions of knowledge and information between ‘expert’ discourses located in the institutions of health provision and the everyday agenda of the populations using their services. In the final section of the paper I argue that a focus on the deployment of emotion work in specific social and institutional contexts provides a perspective on emotions as resources that are consciously drawn upon by actors in order to achieve socio-cultural and wider political ends.     

Perceived emotional intelligence and social competence in neglected adolescents

This research work analyses the emotional intelligence (EI) and the social cognitive attitudes and strategies in adolescents between 12 and 17 years of age in residential care. The aim of the work is to identify those aspects that hinder their socio-emotional competence, requiring a more urgent intervention. We explore the presence of significant differences between the variables under study according to gender and age range (12–14 and 15–17) and we analyse the relationship between the dimensions of their EI and their social competence. The results show a lack of EI in these adolescents, with all three dimensions being affected: emotional attention, clarity of feelings and emotional repair. As for social competence, it can be seen that the adolescents are characterised by a lack of confidence and firmness in their interactions. Worthy of note is the impulsive cognitive style, as are the rigidity of thought and the tendency towards social mistrust and suspicion. There are many difficulties concerning the strategies for resolving social problems. This research highlights the need to design training programmes for the residential care centres that will favour their socio-emotional development.     

Covert repertoires: Ecotage in the UK 1

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires.     

Role Strain,Emotion Management,and Burnout: Homeschooling Mothers' Adjustment to the Teacher Role

Drawing from three years of field research with a homeschooling support group in the Pacific Northwest, I present the emotional stages mothers passed through as they tried to integrate the teacher role into their busy lives. In most cases, mothers found teaching more demanding than they had expected, straining their other roles as mothers and homemakers, as well as causing emotional burnout. To manage their insecurity, anxiety, and stress, mothers employed a variety of emotion management techniques. Mothers who successfully overcame burnout prioritized some roles, combined others, and received significant support from their husbands. I conclude by discussing the implications for theories of burnout.