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In Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange Delamont and Atkinson, each with over 40 years of experience as ethnographers, present strategies for designing, conducting and publishing research that contributes original insights. Ethnography is a core qualitative research method, widely used across the social sciences. However, producing good, interesting and thought-provoking ethnography is never easy. This book provides effective research strategies for combatting familiarity in the context of empirical fieldwork. The authors rehearse ways that challenge the ethnographer to avoid taken-for-granted ideas, and to make the familiar strange. The book covers the cycle of research from research questions to publication and leaving the field and brings together the central themes of their life’s work in one clearly written volume. This book is aimed at researchers at postgraduate level and beyond, their supervisors and principal investigators, and at experienced investigators who want to improve their thinking. Any ethnographer will find ideas and proposals to help them reflect self-critically and creatively about their research practice.
This book explores the philanthropy of Brazilian elites during a key period in recent Brazilian history, from Workers Party president Lula’s last term in office through to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop of political upheaval, the book asks what philanthropy can reveal about the role of corporate and wealth elites in upholding the structures of socioeconomic inequality that continue to define Brazilian society. The book argues that around the world the private sector’s growing engagement in international development has led to the emergence of a global philanthropic project centred on practices of "philanthrocapitalism" and "social finance," which ultimately seeks to legitimise global capitalism and the elite interests it serves. Drawing on an in-depth and wide-ranging ethnographic study among philanthropists and their advisors in over 30 Brazilian foundations and intermediary organisations, the book combines a structural critique of the capitalist ideologies underlying philanthropic practice with a robust exploration into the ways in which wealthy Brazilians appropriate philanthropy directly to legitimise elite reproduction and the accumulation of wealth. Researchers across Latin American studies, development studies and the anthropology of development will find this book a timely contribution to the under-researched areas of elite studies and the study of philanthropy.
Since the financial crisis, the issue of the ‘one percent’ has become the centre of intense public debate, unavoidable even for members of the elite themselves. Moreover, inquiring into elites has taken centre-stage once again in both journalistic investigations and academic research. New Directions in Elite Studies attempts to move the social scientific study of elites beyond economic analysis, which has greatly improved our knowledge of inequality, but is restricted to income and wealth. In contrast, this book mobilizes a broad scope of research methods to uncover the social composition of the power elite – the ‘field of power’. It reconstructs processes through which people gain access to positions in this particular social space, examines the various forms of capital they mobilize in the process – economic, but also cultural and social capital – and probes changes over time and variations across national contexts. Bringing together the most advanced research into elites by a European and multidisciplinary group of scholars, this book presents an agenda for the future study of elites. It will appeal to all those interested in the study of elites, inequality, class, power, and gender inequality.
This handbook articulates how sociology can re-engage its roots as the scientific study of human moral systems, actions, and interpretation. This second volume builds on the successful original volume published in 2010, which contributed to the initiation of a new section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), thus growing the field. This volume takes sociology back to its roots over a century ago, when morality was a central topic of work and governance. It engages scholars from across subfields in sociology, representing each section of the ASA, who each contribute a chapter on how their subfield connects to research on morality. This reference work appeals to broader readership than was envisaged for the first volume, as the relationship between sociology as a discipline and its origins in questions of morality is further renewed. The volume editors focus on three areas: the current state of the sociology of morality across a range of sociological subfields; taking a new look at some of the issues discussed in the first handbook, which are now relevant in sometimes completely new contexts; and reflecting on where the sociology of morality should go next. This is a must-read reference for students and scholars interested in topics of morality, ethics, altruism, religion, and spirituality from across the social science.
This is the first book to provide a precise description of how companies can put purpose into practice. Based on groundbreaking research undertaken between Oxford University and Mars Catalyst, it offers an accessible account of why corporate purpose is so important and how it can be implemented to address the major challenges the world faces today.
Over the last two decades, the advent of cheap, user-friendly video technologies has contributed to a revolution in representational agency. Videos are now made by production units that are at times composed of families, churches, musical groups, community associations or other institutions. Thus, on-demand videos produced and distributed within local and atypical networks profoundly shape contemporary urban imaginaries. This book explores the intertwined relations among infrastructure, technology, and modernity through an ordinary, yet little studied field of "on-demand" audiovisual production, which involves processes of negotiation and interaction between clients and commissioned video makers. On-demand films are considered as a space of collaboration and self-representation, that allows to reflect on the potential of fiction, artifice, and montage to render material desires, aspirations, and ideas of the future.
Drawing on a growing consensus about the importance of community representation and participation for ethical research, community engagement has become a central component of scientific research, policy-making, ethical review, and technology design. The diversity of actors involved in large-scale global health research collaborations and the broader ‘background conditions’ of global inequality and injustice that frame the field have led some researchers, funders, and policy-makers to conclude that community engagement is nothing less than a moral imperative in global health research. Rather than taking community engagement as a given, the contributions in this edited volume highlight how processes of community engagement are shaped by particular local histories and social and political dynamics, and by the complex social relations between different actors involved in global public health research. By interrogating the everyday politics and practices of engagement across diverse contexts, the book pushes conversations around engagement and participation beyond their conventional framings. In doing so, it raises radical questions about knowledge, power, expertise, authority, representation, inclusivity, and ethics and to make recommendations for more transformative, inclusive, and meaningful community engagement. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Public Health journal.
How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability. The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.
Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
A response to Argentina’s shifting political climate, Global Liberalism and Elite Schooling in Argentina reveals how elite schooling encourages the hoarding of educational advantage and reinforces social inequalities. Presenting Buenos Aires’s Caledonian School as part of the growing scholarly discussion on elite education in the Global South, Howard Prosser situates the school’s history in concert with that of the state, the region, and the globe. The book applies new methodologies for the study of elite schools in globalizing circumstances by fusing ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and a wealth of secondary sources. This transdisciplinary approach focuses on the nature of liberalism as a global ideal, positing that eliteness is sustained by an economy with its own culture of value and exchange that, ironically, the scholarship on elites may help perpetuate.