Suchergebnisse

This article is concerned with the ethnomethodological principle of unique adequacy. The unique adequacy requirement of methods requires that the researcher gains 'vulgar competency' in the practice(s) being studied, and, in the strong version, produces findings that are findings for members. In engaging with some existing critiques of the requirement, I draw from an ongoing participant study of the work of mountain rescue with the aim of considering matters of participation, observation, analysis and competency at the worksite itself. By attending to the lived detail of the field/worksite, I make a recommendation for an attention to what I am calling unique-adequacy-in-action. Here, then, I describe how my own participation at the scene (a technical rescue training session) demonstrates my hybrid status as member/observer/analyst and how unique adequacy is an observable resource in members' own assessments of competency. In doing so, I aim to recover the radicality of Garfinkel's later writings and resist the treatment of the requirement as a narrow methodological stipulation.

This article is concerned with members' talk-in-interaction relating to place and, more specifically, how spatial membership categorization devices serve to delineate parts of the area being discussed thus establishing commonsense topographies. This area under consideration, and in which the interviews were conducted, is Cardiff Bay, a setting constructed within a large-scale program of urban regeneration. Complimenting the foundations established by Sacks and Schegloff, and contributing to recent concerns with the relationship between place and identity, the article pays attention to the way in which "place," far from being a fixed "container" of action is implicated and mobilized in moral accounts relating to spatial organization, membership, and belonging. It is suggested that in paying attention to the use of spatial categorizations one gains access to members' sense-making practices and, thus, how contemporary complex urban settings come to be organized in situated action.

In this article we consider the extent to which interactionist ideas can inform the analysis of current socio-technical trends and practices that surround the emerging contours of digital society. We make reference to four field domains of inquiry that are relevant to this task and highlight how established interactionist insights can be carried forward and inform future studies in this developing area.

This article considers the possibility that small acts of urban care, maintenance and cleaning might make for a good city. This might seem a slim possibility, given the vast sociology of hopelessness to which the contemporary city is home. But it can also be argued that a politics, and a sociology, of hope are best looked for not in big picture or utopian thinking but in the practical instances of everyday care and kindness that are as much a part of the urban everyday as anxiety, insecurity and damage. We explore this possibility through a critical assessment of Nigel Thrift's recent writings on urban repair, drawing (but not reporting) on our own research with street cleaners and outreach workers tasked to look out for the rough sleeping homeless.

In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members' situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay. The article demonstrates that these data yield sociological insight into social actors' interpretive and interactional reasoning in relation to the negotiation, navigation and comprehension of space and place. Through this work the patterned signatures of the urban interactional order can be identified. Furthermore, we illustrate the forms of emic rationality associated with the everyday and ubiquitous constitution of urban space as a meaningful, and thence cultural, milieu. It is our claim that an appreciation of these urban forms of reasoning is important in the ethnographic, sociological and geographical analysis of space and place.

During the course of this paper we mobilise an ideal typical framework that identifies three waves of reduction within contemporary qualitative inquiry as they relate to key aspects of the sociological tradition. The paper begins with a consideration of one of sociology's key questions; namely how is social organisation possible? The paper aims to demonstrate how this question moves from view as increased specialisation and differentiation in qualitative methodology within sociology and related disciplines results in a fragmentation and decontextualisation of social practices from social orders. Indeed, the extent to which qualitative methods have been detached from sociological principles is considered in relation to the emergence of a reductionist tendency. The paper argues that the first wave is typified by conceptual couplings such as 'discourse and the subject', 'narrative and experience', 'space and place' and the second by 'activity type couplings' such as 'walking and talking' and 'making and telling' and then, finally, the third wave exemplified through auto-ethnography and digital lifelogging. We argue each of these three waves represent a series of steps in qualitative reduction that, whilst representing innovation, need to reconnect with questions of action, order and social organisation as a complex whole as opposed to disparate parts.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Notes on contributors -- 1. On Sacks: methodology, materials, and inspirations -- 2. Discovering Sacks -- 3. Action, meaning and understanding: seeing sociologically with Harvey Sacks -- 4. Sacks's plenum: the inscription of social orders -- 5. From ethnosemantics to occasioned semantics: the transformative influence of Harvey Sacks -- 6. Sacks, categories, language, and gender -- 7. A most remarkable fact, for all intents and purposes: the practical matter of categorical truths -- 8. Sacks: omni-relevance and the layered texture of interaction -- 9. Membership categorization and the sequential multimodal organization of action: walking, perceiving, and talking in material-spatial ecologies -- 10. Revisiting Sacks's work on greetings: the 'first position' for greetings -- 11. Sacks, silence, and self-(de)selection -- 12. "Using observation as a basis for theorizing": children's interactions and social order -- 13. Membership categorisation and the notion of "omni-relevance" in everyday family interactions -- 14. Sacks and the study of the local organization of second language lessons -- 15. Categorisation practices, place, and perception: doing incongruities and the commonplace scene as 'assembled activity' -- 16. On Sacks and the analysis of racial categories-in-action -- 17. Harvey Sacks, membership categorization and social media -- Index.

In this paper we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the closure of Woolworths in Wales and the way in which the loss of this familiar high-street brand can be accounted for at a number of levels and within different social arenas. Primarily, the paper demonstrates how Woolworths is positioned as a symbol of a previous era of consumption centred upon community and place based notions of nostalgia and community. What is striking in the analysis is the similarities in the way in which Woolworths is mobilised as a symbol by the general public and elites; albeit with varying outcomes and affects. In presenting the analysis the paper demonstrates a processual framing as providing a fruitful approach to the combination of different approaches and fields of inquiry (sociology, geography, and political science) without diminishing their distinct contributions.

This article engages with the "convivial turn" in writings about the city and offers a reorientation of sorts. Beginning with encounters, rather than particular spaces, we make the case that conviviality and its limits are realised in practices. Rather than starting in set piece urban spaces designed to foster conviviality we start out on the move, with frontline street-based care and outreach workers in Cardiff, Wales, and Manhattan, New York City, as they seek out and meet up with those sleeping on city streets. This provides a view of an improvised conviviality that makes the most of whatever the material affordances of a given city space happen to provide. Our research points to how these encounters necessarily take place in marginal settings and times due to the sorts of exclusions that can be built into contemporary city spaces that can at the same time be welcoming to the public, but hostile toward those most in need and vulnerably located in the centre of things. In this sense, we approach conviviality as a fragile interactional accomplishment and, in doing so, see questions of conviviality and conflict as less of a big-picture paradox of togetherness and distance, hope and hate in urban life, and more of a dynamic relation of co-presence and visibility. Public space, and indeed public life, might then be reconsidered not as a location but, rather, an active, shifting accomplishment, variously coloured by the politics of seeing and being seen.