Analytical ethnography does not presume a principal analytical frame. It does not know (yet) where and when the field takes place. Rather, the ethnographer is in search for appropriate spatiotemporal frames in correspondence with the occurrences in the field. Accordingly, the author organizes a dialogue between conceptual frames and his various empirical accounts. He confronts snapshots of English Crown Court proceedings with models of event and process from micro-sociology and macro-sociology. A range of–more or less early or (...) late, relevant or irrelevant, contingent or predetermined–processual events serves as the vantage point to access event and process relations. In this line, Crown Court proceedings serve as an introductory and exemplary field for analytical ethnography, because they involve both: (strong) events and their process and (strong) processes and their events. (shrink)

This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has over the last two decades helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Even earlier —in his College de France 1978-9 Birth of Biopolitics lectures, to be precise—Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite being more than three decades old, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh (...) and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current social science literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. This article critically reviews contributions from a small but growing group of neo-Foucauldian researchers that avoid these tendencies. These researchers investigate the changes wrought by neoliberalism through methodologies that involve combining an analytics of governmentality with ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic methods, and in doing so they avoid deterministic, homogenous and static accounts of social transformation. By beginning with the “everyday,” these works reject the idea that neoliberal governmentality forms a coherent apparatus. Instead these ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities focus on governmental ensembleges that link neoliberal political rationalities with non-liberal rationalities, and they explore how neoliberal thought and practice is transformed across time and space. (shrink)

This analytic autoethnographic and autobiographical essay addresses several interrelated questions regarding the use of ethnographic and otherwise ‘qualitative’ research methods in the study of contemporary urban society. The testy relationship between qualitative and quantitative research has historical as well as logico-deductive roots that continue to haunt the social sciences. As to hermeneutics, the debate parallels my academic career journey from Indiana University to Brooklyn College by way of New York University during which I learned that the normative practices of the (...) social and not so social sciences come in a myriad of different competing, and occasionally conflicting, pre- and proscriptions. My intention in this essay is not to construct a fine, or even a crude, philosophical discourse but to argue for more attention to be paid to what social scientists do best as opposed to the labels they apply to each other and their trades. As the positivist founders of sociology would agree, social science is not exempt from the laws of social science. At the conclusion, an example will be given of the kind of knowledge accessible only through direct observation and best conveyed by thick description. (shrink)

In this book, Fitzpatrick and May make the case for a reimagined approach to critical ethnography in education. Exploring how critical ethnography works within contemporary inquiries, the authors argue that many researchers already do the kind of critical ethnography that readers imagine, whether they call their studies critical or not. Such studies employ the tenets of ethnography and are grounded in work that attends to, reimagines, troubles, and questions notions of power, in/justice, in/equity, and marginalization. Understanding (...) the tensions and complexities that come with the posts-including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and posthumanism-Fitzpatrick and May argue that social, theoretical, and political issues in education can be more profoundly viewed through a lens that is personal, embodied, and lived: critical ethnography. Offering a wide-ranging and insightful commentary on approaches and influences on critical ethnography over time, Fitzpatrick and May interrogate how it has moved and engaged with ongoing theoretical developments to now include a wide range of possible analytical approaches. With extensive examples, excerpts, and personal discussions, they demonstrate how critical ethnography is an expansive, eclectic, and inclusive methodology. Linking work across a range of topics, this book highlights the ongoing importance of this methodology in education. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers in qualitative inquiry, ethnography, educational anthropology, educational research methods, sociology of education, and philosophy of education. (shrink)

We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain (...) interplay between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy. (shrink)

Following a review of a call for a new rhetoric in the 1970s with new conceptualizations of language as symbolic and its occurrence within symbolic forms, this article details the role of ethnography in rhetorical analysis. Through a review of those studies that have examined the indigenous understandings of the choice of when or when not to speak and through what cultural frames, we advance a study of rhetoric within a study of localized cultural discourses. The article concludes by (...) bridging the prevailing understandings of rhetoric within an ethnography of communication suggesting that cultural analysis is not just an optional analytical method for consideration, but a crucial part of future rhetorical analyses. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the practice of conducting research in one's own field, in this case, from a position as a researcher with a nursing background doing fieldwork in a hospital and in one's own organization, an orthopedic surgical department. We show how an “insider” researcher position paves the way for analytical insights about sleep as an institutional phenomenon in the orthopedic surgical infrastructure and how acute and elective patient trajectories differ but build on the same logic, creating (...) the same dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Through a situated and sociomaterial perspective, we analyze different clinical interactions in which we follow the hospital bed as an example of a central relational element that co‐creates sleep as an institutional phenomenon. Inspired by Karen Barad, we demonstrate how to move diffractively when doing and analyzing fieldwork and argue how moving diffractively as a researcher doing fieldwork “at home” is productive and challenges the concept and demand of “distance” as the phenomenological exercise in fieldwork. (shrink)

Everyday Justice amply demonstrates the value of revitalising the theme of justice in ethnographic work by revealing how both justice and injustice are woven into the fabric of the everyday life in manifold and widely differing ways. The authors account for this complexity across particular social relations, places, and times, disavowing any attempt to essentialize the construal of justice both as an idea and in practice. By means of this approach, concepts and experiences of justice are rendered analytically visible. In (...) the best scholarly tradition, Everyday Justice provides theoretical readings of justice and injustice, justice and law, as well as relational justice, designed to cut through the specificity of myriad social, political and legal conjunctures. One outcome is to orient readers to future research, by highlighting ethnographically specific, yet theoretically distinctive, questions about justice. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in justice in theory and practice. (shrink)

Since its inception, modern anthropology has stood at the confluence of two mutually constitutive modes of knowledge production: participant-observation and theoretical analysis. This unique combination of practice and theory has been the subject of recurrent intellectual and methodological debate, raising questions that strike at the very heart of the discipline. How Do We Know? is a timely contribution to emerging debates that seek to understand this relationship through the theme of evidence. Incorporating a diverse selection of case studies ranging from (...) the Tibetan emotion of shame to films of Caribbean musicians, it critically addresses such questions as: What constitutes viable anthropological evidence? How does evidence generated through small-scale, intensive periods of participant-observation challenge or engender abstract theoretical models? Are certain types of evidence inherently better than others? How have recent interdisciplinary collaborations and technological innovations altered the shape of anthropological evidence? Extending a long-standing tradition of reflexivity within the discipline, the contributions to this volume are ethnographically-grounded and analytically ambitious meditations on the theme of evidence. Cumulatively, they challenge the boundaries of what anthropologists recognise and construct as evidence, while pointing to its thematic and conceptual potential in future anthropologies. (shrink)

In recent analytic philosophy, there is a growing interest in the project of conceptual engineering. This paper examines two ways this project might be applied to scientific research, specifically anthropological research. It argues that both of them are harmful to this research. Specifically, it argues that a reliance on the axiological standards of analytic philosophy conflicts with the goal of empirical adequacy. Section one proffers two forms that the engineering project might take when applied to the science. Section two proffers (...) a case study drawn from anthropology. Specifically, it lays out Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, paying particular attention to the inconsistency he discovered in Azande witchcraft. Sections three and four argue that attempting to remove this inconsistency via the two forms of engineering disable critical features of emic research and discard empirical findings. Finally, I close by noting how the conflict between axiological standards and empirical adequacy might generalize beyond anthropology. (shrink)

The hazards of the use of English as a default language in analytic philosophy are obvious to everyone except mainstream analytical philosophers. The uncanny conceptual resemblance between what one is told about Jerry Fodor’s universal Language of Thought and current globalese basic academic English calls for reflection. [...] What I am pleading for is not just a matter of paying great attention to other philosophical traditions. It is a matter of understanding how English cannot serve as any centre or (...) point de départ for the description of all cognitive systems. We need to try to define the topology of the human cognitive space where English must show up as the very untypical case of a natural language that it manifestly is. Pace Donald Davidson, English is not the measure of all things. And historical cognitive ethnography is relevant to philosophical epistemology. The indispensable basis for any philosophy with global ambitions is a conceptual “experimental method” applied to the problems of conceptual diversity among human languages regarding not least of all the conceptual schemes of which one’s own philosophical keywords are an integral part. (shrink)

Within the literature that circulates in the discourses organizing nursing education, there are embedded assumptions that link student performance on maths examinations to safe medication practices. These assumptions are rooted historically. They fundamentally shape educational approaches assumed to support safe practice and protect patients from nursing error. Here, we apply an institutional ethnographic lens to the body of literature that both supports and critiques the emphasis on numeracy skills and medication safety. We use this form of inquiry to open an (...) alternate interrogation of these practices. Our main argument posits that numeracy skills serve as powerful distraction for both students and teachers. We suggest that they operate under specious claims of safety and objectivity. As nurse educators, we are captured by taken‐for‐granted understandings of practices intended to produce safety. We contend that some of these practices are not congruent with how competency actually unfolds in the everyday world of nursing practice. Ontologically grounded in the materiality of work processes, we suggest there is a serious disjuncture between educators' assessment and evaluation work where it links into broad nursing assumptions about medication work. These underlying assumptions and work processes produce contradictory tensions for students, teachers and nurses in direct practice. (shrink)

This Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture discusses the relationship between the phenomenological life-world analysis and the methodology of the social sciences, which was the central motive of Schutz’s work. I have set two major goals in this lecture. The first is to scrutinize the postulate of adequacy, as this postulate is the most crucial of Schutz’s methodological postulates. Max Weber devised the postulate ‘adequacy of meaning’ in analogy to the postulate of ‘causal adequacy’ (a concept used in jurisprudence) and regarded both (...) as complementary and, in the context of sociological analysis, critical. Schutz extracted the two postulates from the Neokantian epistemology, dismissed the concept of causality, and reduced Weber’s two postulates of adequacy into one, namely, the adequacy of meaning. I discuss the benefits and shortcomings of this reduction. A major problem, in my view, is that Schutz’s reformulation lost the empirical concern that was inherent in Weber’s ‘causal adequacy’. As a result, the models of economics (which shaped Schutz’s conception of social science) are considered to be adequate if they are ‘understandable’ to an everyday actor, even when they are based on the most unrealistic assumptions. To recapture Weber’s empirical orientation I recommend a more restrictive interpretation of the postulate of adequacy that links it to qualitative research and unfolds the critical potential of Schutz’s phenomenological life-world analysis. My second goal is to report on some current developments in German sociology in which a number of approaches explicitly refer to Schutz’s analysis of the life-world and attempt to pursue ‘adequate’ empirical research. This lecture focuses on three approaches: ethnophenomenology, life-world analytic ethnography, and social scientific hermeneutics. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the concept of waiting from a phenomenological point of view. In order to do so, we start with a definition from Andreas Göttlich and contextualize it within the theoretical framework provided by Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger. Additionally, we discuss waiting on the basis of our previous research, specifically within the context of a field extract from an earlier life-world analytical ethnography on the parents of pre-adolescent, non-professional soccer players. The (...) field vignette depicts a mother who has problematic possibilities of conflicting preferences due to the apperception of her soccer playing child, who was injured during the match. This negotiation within projects of action will be outlined as a specific facet of waiting. (shrink)

This autobiographically based article aims to consider the practical application of Anderson’s conception of analytic autoethnography under particular circumstances and requirements for its use. It reflects on the friendships that developed between me and my key informants during ethnographic research. In this context I refer to autoethnography as a method that allows researchers to identify aspects of their lives that have relevance beyond the personal and deal analytically with friendships in the field. Moreover, I consider how the researcher can analytically (...) handle friendships in the field using analytic autoethnography, even when he is not a complete member of the community under investigation. (shrink)

This study focuses on nursing in an inpatient mental health setting. Its analytic structure follows from a previous review of nursing studies by Allen, which did not include studies of mental health nursing. Allen's review concluded that the nurses’ role could be understood as that of healthcare intermediary and that nurses’ work could be analysed as eight interrelated bundles of activity. These bundles include such matters as managing the work of others. This study aims to assess the fit of this (...) model to mental health nursing and to add to the body of work concerning the social organisation of nursing. The research materials discussed are derived from an ethnography of a psychiatric unit. The analytic framework employed leads us to conclude that the work of mental health nurses can be understood, too, as that of the healthcare intermediary. However, one bundle is found to fit less well and this is attributed to the fragile uncertainty of knowledge in psychiatry. The use of an additional bundle to describe in‐context nursing interventions is suggested. It is argued that getting to grips with the reflexive relationship between individual patient care and the social organisation in which this is practised is essential for any practice development efforts. (shrink)

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

A cognitive ethnography of how bioengineering scientists create innovative modeling methods. In this first full-scale, long-term cognitive ethnography by a philosopher of science, Nancy J. Nersessian offers an account of how scientists at the interdisciplinary frontiers of bioengineering create novel problem-solving methods. Bioengineering scientists model complex dynamical biological systems using concepts, methods, materials, and other resources drawn primarily from engineering. They aim to understand these systems sufficiently to control or intervene in them. What Nersessian examines here is how (...) cutting-edge bioengineering scientists integrate the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of practice. Her findings and conclusions have broad implications for researchers in philosophy, science studies, cognitive science, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as scientists, educators, policy makers, and funding agencies. In studying the epistemic practices of scientists, Nersessian pushes the boundaries of the philosophy of science and cognitive science into areas not ventured before. She recounts a decades-long, wide-ranging, and richly detailed investigation of the innovative interdisciplinary modeling practices of bioengineering researchers in four university laboratories. She argues and demonstrates that the methods of cognitive ethnography and qualitative data analysis, placed in the framework of distributed cognition, provide the tools for a philosophical analysis of how scientific discoveries arise from complex systems in which the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of problem-solving are integrated into the epistemic practices of scientists. Specifically, she looks at how interdisciplinary environments shape problem-solving. Although Nersessian’s case material is drawn from the bioengineering sciences, her analytic framework and methodological approach are directly applicable to scientific research in a broader, more general sense, as well. (shrink)

This article explores the lived experiences of Polish nurses’ transition into the Norwegian healthcare system and analyses the emerging differences in nursing practices and professional identities between Poland and Norway. It draws on ethnographic findings and argues that nursing is a complex practice, which involves not only nursing knowledge, but also less obvious and often taken for granted nursing imaginaries and actions. In doing so, the article looks at different ways of walking, speaking and listening, which are not merely nurses’ (...) daily habits, but also the embodiments of hierarchical relations, agency and empowerment in healthcare settings. This kind of analytical perspective of the existing differences in nursing practices and professional identities between Poland and Norway raises crucial questions about transitional contexts of nurse migration and shows that nursing is not static, but rather a dynamic and processual way of conduct. (shrink)

Implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non‐Western populationsIn this article, I argue that implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research transcends the limitations of modern cultural theories in exploring the health problems of non‐Western populations. Providing nursing care in pluralist countries like Canada remains a challenge for nurses. First, nurses must reflect on their ethnic background and stereotypes that may impinge on the understanding of cultural differences. Second, dominant health ideologies that underpin nurses’ everyday practice (...) and the structural barriers that may constrain the utilization of public healthcare services by non‐Western populations must be further examined. Postcolonial feminism is aimed at addressing health inequities stemming from social discriminative practices. I will draw on extant literature and data of an ongoing ethnography exploring the Haitian caregivers’ ways of caring for ageing relatives at home to unveil how the larger social and cultural world has an impact on caregivers’ everyday lives. Marginalized locations represent privileged sites from which health problems, intersecting with power, race, gender, and social classes, can be addressed. Postcolonial feminism provides the analytic lens to look at the impact of these factors in shaping health experiences. It also suggests redirecting nursing cultural research and practice to achieve social justice in the healthcare system. (shrink)

The conversation analytic view of context is often critiqued as being too narrow. In this article, we join the ongoing debate regarding conversation analysis and context by 1) synthesizing existing scholarly attempts at either conceptualizing or exploring the possibilities of combining CA and ethnography and 2) giving further considerations to whether or how resorting to talk-extrinsic data may be beneficial. We do so by providing four illustrative cases, with increasing complexity, from four different settings. In each case, an initial (...) CA analysis is followed up with an informal ethnographic interview with the participants. By offering some specificity to this ongoing methodological controversy regarding talk-extrinsic data, we aim to begin building a useful framework within which further discussions on analysis, context, and cross-fertilization may proceed. (shrink)

Analysis has always been a core part of humanistic studies. In the domain of philosophical research, where it has assumed a larger-than-life status in the analytic tradition, analysis is a methodological device for conceptual clarification, the unpacking of loaded terms and expressions, and the achievement of overall understanding in every sphere of philosophical discourse. Scholars have expressed doubt about whether reductive analysis is an attractive methodological framework for African philosophy. In a recent article, Balogun raises the need for African philosophy (...) to evolve its own unique method of analysis with the aim of decolonising analysis in the context of African philosophical investigations. This article advances this need by proposing a genre of philosophical analysis called “ethnolysis”. Coined from two words, “ethnography” and “analysis”, ethnolysis is a kind of analysis rooted in the search for ethnographical materials as a means of opening up an array of insights into the proper meaning of African concepts, terms, or expressions. The article defends “ethnolysis” in the light of the inappropriateness of mainstream analysis in producing an understanding of some philosophically interesting African concepts, terms and expression which are not completely amenable to the reductive analysis or fragmentation of the kind central to the analytic approach in African philosophy. (shrink)

This article argues for the value of working with conflicts in social practice as resources for collaboration, learning and development. The interest in conflicts in social practice is rooted in a preoccupation with social power relations and how to understand and analyse power relations from a subject-science perspective. Following this interest, a methodological framework, best described as a kind of ‘mobile ethnography’, is discussed and exemplified through an empirical example. A preliminary conceptual framework for understanding power as a capacity (...) for action is presented. The overarching ambition of the article is to consider what democratic collaboration and coexistence entails and how it might be supported conceptually and analytically by the notion of conflicts as heuristics for social inquiry and by the notion of power as a capacity for action and social participation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:396 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel A View of Women’s Studies from Afar and Near As a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Studies, I have had the pleasure of reading the submissions to this special issue on the state of women’s, gender, feminist, and sexuality (WGFS) studies programs. All the accepted articles highlight why WGFS studies programs have been, (...) and continue to be, a vital part of intellectual training in US academies. I read the submissions from a particular perspective: that of having been trained in a discipline I happen to love, cultural anthropology, and at the same time always having been a feminist scholar within my discipline. When I was deciding which PhD program to enter, feminist anthropology was beginning to garner much attention. Along with feminist historians, feminist anthropologists were not only trying to include women in the picture, but were asking instead how attention to gender transforms the big questions about politics, social relations, and cultural meanings. This feminist approach would forever change how anthropologists analyze culture and power. Since I was both a feminist and an anti-imperialist activist, anthropology felt like the right discipline to choose. That might seem like a strange juxtaposition—anti-imperialism and anthropology—for those not familiar with the history of the discipline. When I entered graduate school, some anthropologists had already begun the self-critique of the discipline and its collusions with colonialism. As I moved through my graduate program, I was part of the creative efforts to figure out what kind of anthropology we could Lisa Rofel 397 foster that would be anti-colonial as well as post-colonial. It was a heady and exciting time to experience how we could develop a critique of culture and power. Reading over the submissions for this special issue, I was reminded of feeling troubled by those students in interdisciplinary programs (and not just from WGFS studies programs) who approach faculty in conventional disciplines only for training in methods. Frankly, I am very tired of being treated this way. In my discipline, methods are tied to the kinds of theoretical questions someone wants to ask. Texts that explain, for example, how to do an oral life history demonstrate how the method is tied to analytical/political questions. One of the best texts in this vein is Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.1 We never train our students merely in how to engage in participant-observation or how to conduct an interview, but rather how to think analytically about what the student wants to ask in the first place. For example, one of the graduate students I work with, Kali Rubaii, just finished her PhD dissertation, “Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province,” for which she also did analogous research in the Palestinian territories. In such conditions, one has to think very carefully about how one works with—rather than does research on—the people whose horrendous living conditions (thanks to US imperialism) under what Rubaii calls “less-than-lethal counterinsurgency” matter a great deal for the rest of us to understand.2 Rather than interview them or do something called participant-observation, Rubaii did what she calls “transhumant ethnography,” which meant she decided that ethically she had to live through everything that her interlocutors were living through, including constantly moving from one unsafe or only temporarily safe place to another. Rubaii’s work, as an example, reminds us that methods are inextricably linked with the power dynamics infusing the worlds we study. In addition to the matter of methods, I am concerned about a problematic assumption that what distinguishes and even defines WGFS 1. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2. Kali Rubaii, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018). 398 Lisa Rofel studies programs is attention to power. This assumption reflects the need for students in interdisciplinary programs to learn more about the genealogy of the theoretical... (shrink)

This collection brings together a strong ethnographic and theoretical field. The volume includes chapters that address issues of identity formation and change in relation to ‘educational’ political projects and politically coloured notions of citizenship. Drawing on their different ethnographies and on comparative analysis, the contributors address the problematic of the relationship between rulers and the ruled and between élite and non-élite groups, critically raising issues of legitimacy and responsibility in the management of power and political decision-making. The empirically based analyses (...) offered here graphically demonstrate that urban issues are at the forefront of political and social debates. More specifically, the contributors address, from different perspectives, the more or less successful attempts of the state to legitimise its approach and authority through urban policies. A collective reading of the chapters provides a powerful analytical framework for the study of the processes that underlie ideologically biased definitions of citizenship and of their effects on urban dynamics. (shrink)

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by (...) drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. (shrink)

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 11, Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, examines the work and influence of scholars, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, A. Irving Hallowell, and Edward Westermarck, and anthropological (...) practices and theories in Vietnam and Ukraine as well as the United States. Contributions also focus on the influence of Western thought and practice on anthropological traditions, as well as issues of relativism, physical anthropology, language, epistemology, ethnography, and social synergy. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, concepts of “disorder as political instrument in Africa,” “politics of belly,” and “re-traditionalization” have been used and reused in African studies by European and African scholars to describe the African social and political condition of the last decades. However, despite their canonization, one can question their efficiency and relevance to the analysis and understanding of what is really happening in postcolonial Africa. One might even wonder if these analytical concepts are not reawakening the imaginary (...) of the colonial anthropology which pathologized the “Dark Continent” in order to enclose it in its difference and represent it as the absolute alterity as Hegel did in his philosophical ethnography. (shrink)

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in (...) anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory. Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. (shrink)

IntroductionThis special issue brings together researchers from psychology and linguistics who apply the ethnomethodologically informed analytic technique of conversation analysis (henceforth CA) to examine a range of ethical issues as they emerge in transcribed recordings of interactions collected as part of routine research encounters. The data authors analyse are diverse, including naturalistic audio and video recordings of members’ everyday and professional practices (Mondada 2014), an ethnography of a gynaecology unit in a public hospital in Italy (Fatigante and Orletti 2014), (...) focus group interviews on domestic family life (Alby and Fatigante 2014), and semi-public meetings, recorded as part of an ethnography of ageing, poverty, and social exclusion (Paoletti 2014b). Noting that “ethical issues in research have seldom been the focus of ethnomethodological studies” (Paoletti 2014a: 174; see also Mondada 2014: 182–183), the primary aim of this special issue is to “open a debate on e. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate the process of coordination between three ‘bodies’ of surgery: the patient-ensemble(s) constructed in pre-operative activities; the surgeon-body constructed with these ensembles in the operating room; and the body-world inhabited by the surgeon. This investigation is done through an ethnography of a neurosurgical clinic, with an analytical focus on the relationship between the spatial configuration of the body of the surgeon and the embodied practices of operating that this configuration demands. My argument is that (...) coordination between those three bodies is organized in the layered space into which the multiple ensembles of surgery are assembled. This relationship, I suggest, lies at the core of the power and technical expertise held by surgeons, and constitutes a challenge for explorations of other forms of articulation between subject body-worlds and the embodiment of power in subject-bodies. (shrink)

This paper offers an ethnomethodological exploration of fun in Go, the timely delivery of a ‘Monkey Jump’, and its lingering relevance to science studies. In Go terms, the paper makes a ‘pincer’ move: on the one hand, it explores the analytic potential of ‘fun’ for ethnographic purposes and, on the other hand, it questions its manifest abandonment in some quarters of science studies. In particular, the paper challenges their “curious seriousness” :69–78, 1990) whenever grand ontological claims are mixed up with (...) suspended empirical inquiry. That said, the latter criticism does not take the form of a scholarly exercise in conceptual clarification, but remains part and parcel of the author’s ethnography of playing amateur Go, including his dealing with and delivery of a Monkey Jump and reading of Go literature and replaying of professional games. The key point of the paper, then, is to demonstrate the heuristic interest of adopting a practitioner’s stance, not only for understanding a technical domain such as Go in its own terms, but also for launching a phenomenological critique of analytic discretion in science studies. Therefore, the second part of the paper re-examines, from an amateur Go player’s stance, Latour and Woolgar’s Go analogy in and for Laboratory Life —an early exemplar of science studies’ ontological bent. (shrink)

This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge. Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen's emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography (...) as response. The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author's own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer's cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of (...) public (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

Background: Attention to ethical leadership in nursing has diminished over the past several decades. Objectives: The aim of our study was to investigate how frontline nurses and formal nurse leaders envision ethical nursing leadership. Research design: Meta-ethnography was used to guide our analysis and synthesis of four studies that explored the notion of ethical nursing leadership. Participants and research context: These four original studies were conducted from 1999-2008 in Canada with 601 participants. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval from the original (...) studies covered future analysis. Findings: Using the analytic strategy of lines-of-argument, we found that 1) ethical nursing leadership must be responsive to practitioners and to the contextual system in which they and formal nurse leaders work, and 2) ethical nursing leadership requires receiving and providing support to increase the capacity to practice and discuss ethics in the day-to-day. Discussion and conclusion: Formal nurse leaders play a critical, yet often neglected role, in providing ethical leadership and supporting ethical nursing practice at the point of patient care. (shrink)

As an Introduction to the Special Issue on “Formulation, generalization, and abstraction in interaction,” this paper discusses key problems of a conversation analytic (CA) approach to semantics in interaction. Prior research in CA and Interactional Linguistics has only rarely dealt with issues of linguistic meaning in interaction. It is argued that this is a consequence of limitations of sequential analysis to capture meaning in interaction. While sequential analysis remains the encompassing methodological framework, it is suggested that it needs to be (...) complemented by analyzing semantic relationships between choices of formulation in the interaction, ethnography, and structural techniques of comparing selected options with possible alternatives. The paper describes the methodological approach taken to interactional semantics by the papers in the Special Issue, which analyse practices of generalization and abstraction in interaction as they are accomplished by formulations of prior versions of reference and description. (shrink)

An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religion—especially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the “analytic tradition”—is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to “theism” has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of “thick description” that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions (...) of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Examining the Danish poultry industry in a time of rising outbreaks of infectious disease (the so-called ‘pandemic era’) including avian influenza, this study documents the often-unseen harms resulting from current dominant forms of response. Inspired by multispecies studies and ethnography, we pay attention to entangled human and more-than-human worlds. Specifically, we document the multifarious ways in which responses to worsening avian influenza alter the everyday lives of birds in production, their farmers, and public veterinarians. We also show how such (...) changes are distributed in ways that further slant the playing field against smaller scale and organic poultry production, under the hegemony of globalized capitalist agriculture. Throughout, we shed light on the analytical purchase of two key concepts in feminist scholarship and science and technology studies respectively: care and repair. While understood as integral to human and more-than-human wellbeing, care’s tendency to summon pleasant associations is challenged by the reality of embodied care practices in complex and compromised socio-ecological contexts. Repair has been wielded conceptually to interrogate activities that stabilize systems at risk, while largely ignoring or even exacerbating the drivers of instability. Mobilized together, we can better understand how hegemonic logics delimit possibilities for care, but also the limits and limitations of dominant response repertoires. Finally, we illuminate farming practices of care beyond repair, which may help chart alternatives for Danish agriculture within, and perhaps beyond, the pandemic era. (shrink)

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We (...) Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context. (shrink)

This is a study of the development of student agency from a gender perspective in a Finnish classroom. The data originates from an ethnographic research project in an elementary school classroom engaging in a play pedagogy project called a “playworld.” The article has two purposes. The first is to examine the potential of imagination and improvised fantasy play in the development of agency. The second is to investigate the role of gender as a social category in shaping the students’ possibilities (...) for agency in the play pedagogical setting. The creative use of imagination is at the center of the playworld pedagogy. However, it has rarely been studied in relation to the potentially uneven or stereotypic consequences of cultural tools, symbols, and categories. The analytical focus is on the gender-related categorization of a ‘horse girl’ and the role it played in the development of the agency of two seven-year-old girls as they participated in the playworld. I have used a multidisciplinary analytical framework to sensitize myself to the data. In the article I combine Vygotsky’s ideas of double stimulation, Sacks’ categorization analysis and, Holzkamp’s concept of action potence . The results show that the playworld pedagogy that explicitly aimed at developing children’s agency and collaboration was strongly gender categorized and thus was constraining for the girls in this study. On the other hand, the girls’ unplanned fantasy play, which took place on the sidelines of the classroom activity, contained important agentive elements. It gave the girls a sense of agency crucial to their enactment of agency in the wider playworld setting. It is argued that the girls were able to become agentive players in the activity through questioning the gendered categories openly in the classroom. (shrink)

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the webs of social relations that embed schools in neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions. Utilizing a variety of narratives (...) and analytical styles, this volume: * explores how curriculum innovations are simultaneously made possible by and undermined by school district politics, neighborhood histories, and the spatial and temporal organizations of teachers' and parents' lives; * situates the educational discourse of administrators and teachers in the changing economic and political climates of the city; * analyzes the motivations behind an effort by school and business proponents to refashion classrooms within the school into business enterprises, and of children's efforts to make sense of the scheme; * examines the role of the school as a neighborhood institution, situating it at the intersections of city planners' efforts to regulate city space and children's efforts to carve out live spaces through out-of-school routines; * contemplates the meaning of school as a site for bodily experience, and looks at how patterns of space and control in the school shaped children's bodies, and at how they continued to use body-based languages to construct maturity, gender, and race; and * investigates the school as a space for the deployment of symbolic resources where children learned and constructed identities through their engagements with television, comic books, movies, and sports. _Tangled Up In School_ raises questions about how we draw the boundaries of the school, about how schools fit into the lives of children and cities, and about what we mean when we talk about "school.". (shrink)

The present study sets out to investigate the role of ‘culture’ as one of the many important factors that influence the evaluation of politeness in Persian from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. The paper argues that Cultural Linguistics, and in particular the notion of cultural schema, has the potential to offer a robust analytical framework for the exploration of polite use of language. We elaborate on this proposal by presenting examples of data from Persian in which speakers interpret impolite behaviour (...) in light of a number of Persian cultural schemas. The study also offers a novel three-layered approach for the analysis of politeness data that combines metadiscourse analysis with the ethnography of cultural conceptualisations, while highlighting the importance of the notion of ‘heterogeneous distribution’ of cultural conceptualisations, a pivotal theoretical concept in Cultural Linguistics which accounts for the variations in speakers’ evaluation of politeness. (shrink)

This paper examines extracts from a daughter’s blog about her father’s time in a care home in the north of England from June 2015 until his death in January 2016. Through these extracts, the author of the paper, who is also the daughter of the title, provokes key ethical issues concerning the identity, agency and voice of an elder in the context of residential care. The wider, rapidly deteriorating, political and economic climate for the care of older people is briefly (...) discussed and the paper makes reference to a feminist ethics of care, in order to both critique and celebrate women’s central place in caring for elders. The paper explores how the ethnographic process of writing about care for another can be considered a route to ethical care practice and it suggests that this blog is part of an autoethnographic analytic tradition [Anderson 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–395]. Finally, the paper asks questions about the ethics of blogging about and on behalf of an elder that, in this case, played a significant role in bringing not only the daughter-author but also other family members closer to the life of their father, grandfather and great-grandfather. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

Museums are key cultural loci of our times. They are symbols and sites for the playing out of social relations of identity and difference, knowledge and power, theory and representation. These are issues at the heart of contemporary anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This volume brings together original contributions from international scholars to show how social and cultural theory can bring new insight to debate about museums. Analytical perspectives on the museum are drawn from the anthropology and sociology of (...) globalization, time, space and consumption, as well as from feminism, psychoanalysis, experimental ethnography and literary theory. These perspectives are brought to bear on questions of museums' changing role and position in the representation of the nation-state, of community, and of gender, class and ethnicity. The examples in this book are drawn from different kinds of museum around the world, and include significant controversial and experimental exhibitions; the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian; feminist exhibitions in Scandinavia; the National Museum of Sri Lanka; Victorian art at the Tate; the representation of race at Colonial Williamsburg and of colonialism and identity in Canada. (shrink)

This paper takes the form of a ‘performative’ dialogue, a recounting of scenes, which alternate, in the mode of a cinematic montage, with academic analysis of the interfaces between boxing, art, and space. In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks on an Apprentice Boxer, sociologist Loïc Wacquant mixes three genres: analytic sociology, depictive ethnography, and short story. He argues that he used this unorthodox methodology ‘to make the reader simultaneously feel and understand how boxers are “gripped” by their craft (...) and viscerally tied to it’. Similarly, in this paper, the overlapping voices of its two authors engage in both performative, creative and intellectual ways with the critiques and social rituals surrounding boxing, ultimately finding that an understanding of boxing as an epistemological encounter gives rise to interesting ways to think through the relationships between art and urban space itself. The paper ranges widely over each author’s personal experience of boxing, analyses of specific artworks both ancient and modern, and an analysis of the psychogeography of urban space, and in particular, Johannesburg. The form of the paper, as it incorporates narrative experience and analytic mode, can be seen as a text that re-enacts the ‘performance’ of boxing and art-making in which the traditional opposition between the two is integrated, if not suspended. (shrink)

Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politically-relevant discussions. However, analyses of social media data are typically undertaken by focusing on ‘snapshots’ of issues using query-keyword search strategies. This paper develops an alternative, less issue-based, mode of analysing Twitter data. It provides a framework for working qualitatively with longitudinally-oriented Twitter data, and uses an empirical case to consider the value and the challenges of doing so. Exploring how Twitter users place “everyday” talk around the (...) socio-political issue of UK welfare provision, we draw on digital ethnography and narrative analysis techniques to analyse 25 user-timelines and identify three distinctions in users’ practices: users’ engagements with welfare as TV entertainment or as a socio-political concern; the degree of sustained engagement with said issues, and; the degree to which users’ tweeting practices around welfare were congruent with or in contrast to their other tweets. With this analytic orientation, we demonstrate how a longitudinal analysis of user-timelines provides rich resources that facilitate a more nuanced understanding of user engagement in everyday socio-political discussions online. (shrink)

Criticism of post-modernizm and post-colonializm caused to question the mission of anthropology in terms of understanding different societies. Materialist, secular and anthropocentric anthropological approaches based on enlightenment and modern assumptions have faced criticism by many disciplines from philosophy and critical theory to science and quantum theory. Anthropology of religion which is a branch of cultural anthropology is also effected by changes within the broader field of anthropology. The aim of this project is to shed light on the potential of the (...) critical approach, which emerged in anthropology of religion recently and underlined the ontology, to understand religious experiences and practices of different societies. This approach is called ontological turn. In this article, first I point out the historical process in anthropology which led to the turn to ontology. Social structuralism and representationalism which played an important role for the formation of anthropology impacted significantly the ways in which anthropology understands nature and human being. According to these assumptions commonly used in anthropology, while human beings try to understand universal and static natural law principles, they create representations about nature. But, for there is only one nature, there must be only one true representation. This attempt to understand nature through representations created the base for the concepts of belief, knowledge, and mind of Edward Tylor who was the pioneer of cultural anthropology. While the mind refers to rational capacity of human being, belief is an area of irrational representations that human beings pragmatically need. Religious assumptions and practices are listed under incorrect representations. The concept of belief has been frequently used after Tylor as well to understand societies which are located outside of modernity. What ontological turn aims with criticism of conceptual framework is to prevent the domination of Western based reality. Therefore, one of the most emphasized arguments is the multiplicity of reality. This approach of ontological turn is called as taking everything serious. New definitions which are made in a way including the experiences of ethnographic objects mean taking them serious. Acceptance of the concepts by anthropologist in the ethnographic field means acceptance of difference in reality. The act of definition and conceptualizing is the act of creating different realities. In many ethnographic researches, ethnographers choses their concepts before entering to the field. This means that trying to fit differences within existing concepts and confirming the existing thoughts from different perspectives. Understanding ethnographic materials with its own terms or analyzing, explaining or interpreting ethnographic phenomenon by eliminating presumptions was always a concern for anthropology. These questions are asked so commonly that they can be seen as banal questions. The difference of ontological turn is not to ask these questions, but to ask ontological questions as an epistemological approach. The base of this ontological approach is the thought that what forms anthropologists’ perspective are not social or cultural but ontological assumptions. Thus, the question to be asked is how anthropologists’ assumptions about what the world is can be eliminated. To sum up, the idea of taking everything serious in ontological turn aims to eliminate the hierarchy between the subject and object of ethnography. Instead of seeing ethnography as an object of anthropology through modern categories, ontological turn suggests seeing ethnography as a real source to create new concepts and analytical tools. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)