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AbstractThis paper draws on the biography of Sam Watson, a miners' leader in the North East of England, to examine the ways in which power relations operated within the British labour movement in the forties and fifties. At that time the Marshall Plan and the concern by the US government to control the spread of communism in Europe provided a critical backdrop with the CIA's labor attaché programme providing links between the AFL and the CIOand the British TUC. Recent research has identified the significant role played in the development of these arrangements by Watson.The reliance of the Labour Party on the networks of national, regional and local trade unions has not been a central concern of students of this period. Certainly in accounts of the Marshall Plan, national figures like Ernest Bevin predominate. The "unveiling" here of Watson suggests the possibility of more fruitful investigations on a wider canvass. His relationship with the US mission in itself raises questions as to the social and political processes that made it possible for a middle ranking trade union official to occupy such a significant position of power and influence.The article draws on archival research and, most significantly, upon interviews conducted by the authors in the late seventies with key trade union officals and polticians. It explores the different ways that Watson dealt with communism and with members of the Communist Party, and the key role he played during critical struggles within the Labour Party. The detail of the "insider" accounts reveals the complex ways in which power was performed across and within different arenas – in North East England as regional secretary of the NUM; in London on the national executive committees of the Labour Party and NUM; and abroad as a member, then Chair, of the Labour Party's International Committee.

This article relates the current transformation of ethnographic practice to the emergence of new media technologies. It contrasts multi-sited ethnography with actor network theory's method of following the construction of new media worlds through chains of mediators. The authors exemplify this through the extraordinary emergence of global poker and its shifting constitution across the entire spectrum of traditional and new media technologies. They argue that poker vividly illustrates how following makes sense of these emergent new worlds while at the same time it is an excellent vehicle for problematizing key issues of ethnographic practice.

This article explores tensions in the study of innovation, the practice of fieldwork and the narratives these produce, particularly as represented in the work of Latour. It argues that Latour's ethnographic studies of science and technology parody a variety of sociological and literary genres, particularly detective fiction, and that he uses this literary device as a way of pinpointing unexpected links between fictional and sociological modes of investigation. In Latour's hands, parody illuminates important issues of fieldwork practice and becomes an innovative method that problematizes conventional sociological narratives and practice.

Abstract
The Durham Miners Gala has taken place annually for over a hundred years. In its heyday it was an immensely popular occasion. In the post‐war period it became an established part of the British Labour calendar, being attended regularly by Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers and foreign ambassadors. The Gala can be understood as a ceremony which links twentieth century class politics with the more spontaneous and religious forms of political activity in the nineteenth century. This historical continuity is rooted in the culture of mining and mining villages, developed by the social isolation of miners and their particular legal status and adapted periodically by the formal structures of the mining union.

While the practices of social workers have been extensively researched, qualitative researchers have paid less attention to how child protection work is accomplished through networks that bridge the human and non-human worlds of assessment and intervention work for 'at risk' children and families. Drawing on the work of Actor Network theorists, we argue that child protection social work can be tracked as multiple partially connected networks that are organized around children and families, while at the same time incorporating hierarchical occupational group practices. The circulation, prioritization and hierarchical ordering of professional reports, case notes, court reports and assessment documents that organize particular sets of action by social workers has seldom been analysed. This article examines child protection social work as sets of associations between human and non-human actants with significant outcomes for individuals, whanau and families. It draws on detailed interviews with child protection social workers throughout New Zealand who spoke about their experience of particular cases, their interactions with other human service professionals and the documents they accessed, analysed and created as they assessed whether children were 'at risk'.