Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships

In response to critiques from feminist, existential, and postmodern qualitative researchers, the idea of maintaining objective and distant relationships with research subjects gave way to the belief that researchers could and, in some cases, should become intimately connected to research participants. These traditions opened the door for contemporary field workers to unapologetically forge close relationships to setting members. Several ethical evaluations have emerged from this intimate literature warning researchers of the harm that can come when we “go to far” in the quest for intimate familiarity. In this paper, I reflect on some of the debates regarding intimacy and exploitation by examining my experiences of dating, marrying, and eventually divorcing my key informant. I trace the way that, despite my attempts to follow the existing ethical guides, I reinforced several larger inequalities in my intimate stance. Using my failure to avoid or mitigate harm, I argue that our discussions of intimate methods and immersion in the field have failed to accurately note how we reinforce or resist structure in our research endeavors. Viewing ourselves as “doing structure” in the field would lead us to stop debating whether intimacy is better than objectivity, celibacy is better than sex, disclosure is better than silence, or conventional behavior is better than deviance in the field. Instead, we should locate how our behaviors, research roles, or discursive choices enact structures and the effect this enactment has on the people who we research.

“Which One Is Yours?”: Children and Ethnography

This paper explores roles that children play in ethnographic research. Based on the limited literature on children in the field, and drawing on examples from ethnographies across disciplines, I identify four roles for children: 1) as “wedges,” or as instrumentally important in helping adult ethnographers gain access in various ways; 2) as collaborators; 3) as objects of study; and 4) as subjects of study. I also discuss the ways in which these roles illuminate key methodological issues in ethnography, like reflexivity, ethics, and agency. The paper synthesizes and integrates previously disconnected research on the presence of children in the field with ethnographies in which children and childhood are the topics of research. I draw on my own fieldwork experiences for further illustration.

Civil Society Opposition to Nonferrous Metals Mining in Guatemala

Drawing on a range of fieldwork interviews, this paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Guatemala. Guatemala’s mineral resources, and government efforts to encourage their extraction, are discussed, as is the emergent civil society of that nation. Guatemalan civil society has opposed mining due to the impacts of its environmental effects upon the poor engaged in subsistence agriculture. This opposition has involved protests, community consultations against mining, and networking with the forces of global civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a manifestation of the opposition to neoliberalism currently underway in Latin America.

“A New Sort of ‘Salvation Army’”: Historical Perspectives on the Confluence of Psychoanalysis and Social Work

No profession in the United States has a broader perspective on human needs than social work. Bold but also functional, social work distinctively places the pursuit of social justice on a par with the clinical treatment of individuals, pairs and families. Yet for much of the twentieth Century, proponents of the “macro” and of the “micro” approaches to practice have challenged each other’s commitment to social progressivism and humanist values. Interestingly, this on-going debate has hardly changed the core “person-in-environment” psychoanalytic paradigm at all. It is time to set aside this hidebound dispute, I argue in this article: social work is not two institutions folded into one but one profession that must be understood dialectically. Drawing on the history of the early psychoanalyst’s intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes, I show how psychoanalysis shares in the transformation of civil society and helps restore individuals and communities alike to self-regulation and productivity.

When Social Work and Psychoanalysis Meet

In this paper I share my personal journey from agency social worker to psychoanalyst. I show how I have brought to my psychoanalytic work the teachings of such well known social workers as Mary Richmond, Bertha Reynolds, Gordon Hamilton, and Florence Hollis as well those of such contemporary social workers as the late Gertrude and Rubin Blanck, Nancy Bridges, and Eda Goldstein, among others. In the presentation, I also consider how social work values, social work ethics and social work attitudes have influenced my approach to the practice of psychoanalysis. The attitudes which I refer to, include flexibility, beginning where the client is; an appreciation of the importance of understanding a patient’s cultural background and a recognition of the importance of the relationship in the therapeutic encounter. These were not standard for psychoanalysts at the time I began to practice. Today however psychoanalysis has largely caught up with social work, and this paper affirms how those of us who have had a social work background are well prepared for psychoanalysis in the 21st century.

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.

Government Intervention in Public Sector Industrial Relations: Lessons from the Alberta Teachers’ Association

In the public sector, Canadian governments intervene frequently in labor disputes by suspending collective bargaining and curtailing legal strikes. Previous research has focused on the contours of government intervention, such as its overall effects on collective bargaining and strikes. The discussion highlights one actor, a government, restricting the behavior of another actor, a union, using legislation and policy making. As a result, we know less about more micro-level elements and implications of the process of government intervention. I address these themes using a detailed case study of the Alberta Teachers’ Association and the strikes it coordinated in 2002.

The Heterogeneous Effect of the Passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act on Stock Returns

I analyze how stock prices reacted to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970. Previous studies focus on accounting measures or actual OSHA violations, and my work complements the literature by examining how shareholders expected OSHA to affect firm profitability. Returns fell around the OSH bill’s release to the House floor and its eventual passage, and average market value dropped by $1.5 million over the 3 days surrounding House Rules Committee release. Durable manufacturing and mining industries were hardest hit in OSH passage, losing $2.6 million and $5.7 million in average market value, respectively. I also find that larger firms with poorer working conditions sustained more negative returns, and market power, not union density, explains variation in expected profitability. Furthermore, future penalties appear unrelated to shareholder expectations about compliance costs.

Colonialism and Civil Society in Africa: The Perspective of Ekeh’s Two Publics

Although it has gained wide currency in the analysis of African politics, civil society remains a “mysterious” concept in need of proper grounding and understanding as an integral part of African social formation. This paper argues that one of the widely acclaimed canonical works in African studies, Peter Ekeh’s theory of colonialism and the two publics in Africa provides one of the most original perspectives for locating and understanding the character of modern civil society as a product of colonialism. In particular, the theory provides an explanation for why primordial attachments have remained fundamental to the structuration of civil society and why state–civil society relations have largely been fractured, instrumentalist, and dialectical in the post-colonial period.

Chinese Contract Law and the Economic Reform

China’s previous contract laws had many contradictions and failed to meet the needs of China’s developing market economy. Although some problems still need to be dealt with, the unified contract law is more advanced, systematic and plays an important role in fostering and encouraging transactions.

Global Civil Society and Its Discontents

According to enthusiasts the concept of global civil society is spreading rapidly and becoming pivotal to the reconfiguring of the statist paradigm. However, critics have recently grown more numerous and outspoken in opposition to the term claiming that it is actually perpetuating statism by grafting the idea of civil society onto the global by way of an unhelpful domestic analogy. This paper examines the role the concept is playing in perpetuating/reconfiguring statism. First it summarizes current criticism by identifying three basic accusations: the ambiguity of the term, the “domestic fallacy,” and the undemocratic effects of using it. Second, these criticisms are considered in turn and it is concluded that all three points relate, ultimately, back to the failure of the critics themselves and some global civil society theorists to move beyond a state-centered framework of interpretation. In the final section it is shown how global civil society discourse is beginning to move not only the concept of “civil society” away from its state-centred historical meanings, but also how it is contributing to changing the content of the concept of “the global.”

Hidden Eating Disorders: Attachment and Affect Regulation in the Therapeutic Relationship

From the time I began working at a clinic that specialized in therapy with individuals with eating disorders, I have repeatedly encountered cases of clients hiding these symptoms from their therapists. When they finally do reveal the disorder, their therapists often worry that their clients are more disturbed than they thought and that, they, the therapists, did something wrong in the therapy. Although some therapeutic rupture can be part of the picture, I have found that these disclosures often reflect a client’s growing trust in the therapist’s presence and ability to help with feelings that have been, until now, dealt with through the eating behaviors themselves. In my attempts to understand what happens before and after an individual shares a hidden eating disorder with a therapist, I have found ideas from attachment theory, in particular those that explore links between attachment, affect regulation, and self-reflection, to be very helpful. Many authors have noted that eating disorders are related to problems with attachment, loss and separation, and affect regulation. Difficulties in these areas make it hard for clients to be self-reflective or use insight productively. In this article, I discuss my experience with the integration of these dynamics, which I have found to be key to successful psychotherapy with clients who hide their eating disorders.

A Measure of Justice: The Rabinal Human Rights Movement in Post-War Guatemala

This article explores one region’s struggle for human rights and legal justice in post-war Guatemala. Rabinal—a target of state-directed genocide in the 1980s—suffered one of the highest fatality levels of the war. In the post-war era, Rabinal human rights activists have led the struggle to demand exhumations of mass graves, build memorials, and push for criminal investigations and trials. Despite some important local victories, few of those responsible for the violence have received punishment. But that does not mean this movement is a failure. Instead, this article highlights the cultural, expressive and inprocess benefits of mobilization. Rabinal activists have restored their sense of agency and confirmed their collective identity as fighters for legal justice. Meanwhile, this local mobilization has contributed to Guatemala’s uneven process of democratization.

NGOs, Global Governance and the UN: NGOs as “Guardians of the Reform of the International System”

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the United Nations (UN), as well as in world politics in general, is increasingly gaining the attention of scholars of international law, political science and social anthropology. Using extensive earlier research on NGO-UN relations and on the concept of global governance, it is concluded that although NGOs are becoming increasingly influential actors on the international arena, several problems impede their influence from growing within the UN. Once the inefficiencies of NGOs participation in United Nations’ bodies and institutions have been described, we propose some modalities of reform of this Organization, with the purpose of improving the involvement of world civil society in UN decision-making processes, and increasing its democratic profile. Finally, the study suggests several areas that require future research and more in-depth study in order to make predictions about how NGO-UN relations will evolve in the coming decades.

Interdisciplinary foundations of urban ecology

Researchers have identified urban ecology as a new field integrating social and ecological science. Critics have portrayed the field as under-theorized with negative implications for research and urban environmental planning. Unprecedented urbanization and historical bias against research integrating social and ecological systems are identified as driving this deficit. Researchers have called for new integrative approaches to address this issue. In response, this paper applies ecology’s analytic framework of “patch dynamics”, Kuhn’s concept of “normal science” and Mazoyer and Roudart’s “evolutionary series” to demographic data and historical texts to perform an analysis of interdisciplinary contributions to theory applicable in the field of urban ecology. The subsequent exploration reveals a rich history of interdisciplinary inquiry along the nature/society divide. The paper concludes that these “largely ignored” contributions offer urban ecology the opportunity to claim much broader depth as a field gaining access to precedents and innovations accomplished during the field’s early theoretical development. Drawing upon this history, a framework for ecological urban development is suggested to inform and assist contemporary research in urban ecology and planning.

Between Market and Civic Governance Regimes: Civicness in the Governance of Social Services in Europe

The paper proposes to discuss the issue of civicness in the governance of social services by analyzing policy changes relative to the regulation and governance of social services in Europe. The empirical analysis is structured around the concept of “governance regime.” The paper shows that modernization processes within the field of social services in Europe develop along two radically different regulative conceptions reflected into two different governance regimes: market-based or competitive governance vs civic-based or partnership governance. The governance of social services in Europe appears to take place within a mix between two ideal-typical governance regimes: the market-based and partnership-based governance regimes.

Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement

Drawing data from works of political non-fiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, this paper seeks to adumbrate a sensualist understanding of political engagement. After beginning with a brief discussion of Weber’s seminal essay “Politics as a Vocation,” I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings that plague traditional explanations of political action. My argument is that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences.

On value-judgements and ethics in health technology assessment

The widespread application of technology in health care has imposed a broad range of challenges. The field of health technology assessment (HTA) is developed in order to face some of these challenges. However, this strategy has not been as successful as one could hope. One of the reasons for this is that social and ethical considerations have not been integrated in the HTA process. Nowadays however, such considerations have been included in many HTAs. Still, the conclusions and recommendations of the HTAs are not followed. The reason for this may be that the methods for integrating ethics for HTA are not sufficiently developed, or that they are not adequate. This article presents a supplementary approach to the ethical inquiry in HTA. It is argued that a value analysis is crucial in order to address the ethical issues of health care technology in a fruitful way and to make viable decisions about such technology.

How Living Wage Legislation Affects U.S. Poverty Rates

I investigate how living wage legislation affects poverty. I find evidence that living wage ordinances modestly reduce poverty rates where such ordinances are enacted. However, there is no evidence that state minimum wage laws do so. The difference in the impacts of the two types of legislation conceivably stems from a difference in the party responsible for bearing the burden of the cost.

Transference Enactments in Clinical Supervision

Transference enactments play a central role in clinical supervision regardless of whether supervisors or supervisees consciously recognize or acknowledge their presence. Supervisors who do recognize enactments better understand the core issues that interfere with supervisees’ capacity to relate therapeutically to patients. Supervisory process is markedly enhanced when supervisors consciously study manifestations of transference within the supervisory relationship and respond to them correctively. Corrective interventions, whether purposeful or unintentional, expand supervisees’ relational and self-reflective capacities.