Ethnography is an extremely broad church, and the range of methodological stances adopted by ethnographers extends across theoretical, political and technological divides. As a method it is intense and often makes considerable personal demands on the researcher, but as an academic product, the ethnography can be a vivid document with human resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other methodology. This collection emphasises something of the range of possibilities by focusing on Ethnography in different settings. Implicit in the text is the very specific problems encountered by ethnographers engaging with these very specific fields. Volume One: The Urban Condition addresses attempts by ethnographers to describe and understand urban life. Volume Two: Work covers a range of employment experiences and highlights issues surrounding the ethnographic penetration of the work environment and the cultures that lay hidden within them. Volume Three: Body, Sport and Leisure considers the sociologies of health, sport and the body. Volume Four: Deviance features the move towards more contemporary forms of transgression in Ethnography itself.
Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology. He worked in a number of manual and clerical jobs before training as a schoolteacher and working in London schools. He undertook postgraduate work at the LSE and the University of Surrey, and worked at the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Oxford, and briefly at the Polytechnic of Central London, before taking up a post at Durham University in 1990 where he worked in both the Sociology and Law Departments. He joined the LSE in September 2005. His interests focus on ethnographic work, working class entrepreneurship, the sociology of deviance, professional and organized crime, violence, drug markets, and the night-time economy. Dick Hobbs is currently working on a book looking at the sociology of organized crime in the UK. He is also working on a 4 volume edited collection on ethnography, and a collaborative book on the policing and security implications of the 2012 Olympics.
VOLUME ONE: THE URBAN CONDITION Jelly's Place: An ethnographic memoir - Elijah Anderson Ethnography and Housing Studies - Adrian Franklin "People's Lives Are Hanging Here": Low wage workers share their experience of job loss - Amanda Gunn The Toilet Paper: Femininity, class And mis-recognition - Beverly Skeggs Inside the Empire: Ethnography of a global citadel in New York - Gregory Smithsimon Talking City Trouble: Interactional vandalism, social inequality, and the "urban interaction problem" - Mitch Duneier and Harvey Molotoch Keeping Ethnography Alive in an Urbanizing World - Roger Sanjek The Asshole - John van Maanen New Hobos or Neo-Romantic Fantasy? Urban Ethnography beyond the Neoliberal Disconnect - Teresa Gowan Hospital Ethnography: introduction - Sjaak van der Geest and Kaja Finkler Habits and Amusements of Costermongers - Henry Mayhew A Stranger at the Gate: Reflections of the Chicago School of Sociology - Nels Anderson Police Lying - Peter Manning Behind Bars: Social Control in Licensed Premises - Phil Hadfield The Hustler - Ned Polsky Wine Alley: The Sociology of a Dreadful Enclosure - Sean Damer A Night in a Taxi-Dance Hall - Paul Cressey East End Entrepreneurship - Dick Hobbs Empire of Scrounge: Inside the urban underground - Jeff Ferrell Being at Home: Space for belonging in a London caff - Suzanne Hall VOLUME TWO: WORK Work Culture in the Nursing Home: Adaptation and resistance among nursing aides - Nancy Foner Becoming a Firefighter - Matthew Desmond Bodies for Rent: Labor and marginality in Southern Louisiana - Rylan Higgins Working in the Fantasy Factory - Elizabeth Anne Wood Clinging to Collectivism? Some Ethnographic Shop-Floor Evidence from the British Lock Industry 1979-98 - John Black, Annie-Marie Greene and Peter Ackers The Driver: Adaptations and Identities in the Urban Worlds of Pizza Delivery Employees - Patrick Kinkade and Michael Katovitch Self for Sale: Notes on the work of Hollywood talent managers - Sasha David Organisational Time: Temporal demands and the experience of work in restaurant kitchens - Gary Alan Fine Service and Surveillance: Infrapolitics at Work Among Casino Cocktail Waitresses - Lorraine Bayard de Volo The Fate of Idealism in Medical School - Howard Becker and Blanche Geer Teaching Wedding Rules: How bridal workers negotiate control over their customers - Marisa Corrado Ladies, Flirts, and Tomboys: Strategies for managing sexual harassment in an underground coal mine - Kristen Yount The Bonus - Peter Bearman "The Dog You Deserve": Ambivalence in the K-9 officer/patrol dog relationship - Clinton Sanders Muck and magic: Cultural transformations in the world of farm animal veterinary surgeons - Lindsay Hamilton Class in Construction: London building workers, dirty work and physical cultures - Darren Thiel VOLUME THREE: BODY, SPORT & LEISURE Undressing the researcher: Feminism, Embodiment and Sexuality at a Queer Bathhouse Event - Alison Bain and Catherine Nash The Mundanity of Excellence: An ethnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers - Daniel Chambliss Looking Good, Feeling Good: The embodied pleasures of vibrant physicality - Lee Monaghan Pugs at Work: Bodily capital and bodily labor among professional boxers - Loic Waquant Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight - Clifford Geertz 'Hard' Women and 'Soft' Women: The social construction of identities among female boxers - Christine Mennesson The Female Bodybuilder as a Gender Outlaw - Chris Shilling and Tanya Bunsell 'We're Not From Norway': Football and civic pride in Bergen, Norway - Gary Armstrong and Hans Hognestad Skydiving and the Metaphorical Edge - James Hardie-Bick American Hegemony, Dominican Resistance and Baseball - Alan Klein Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities - Michael Messner The Occupational Culture of the Boxer - S Kirson Weinberg and Henry Arond Small Groups and Culture Creation: The idioculture of little league baseball teams - Gary Alan Fine Scotland's Tartan Army in Italy: The case for the carnivalesque - Richard Giulianotti A Woman's Place is in the Cardiovascular Room: Gender relations, the body and the gym - Shari Dworkin Sport Ethnography: A personal account - Susan Brownell VOLUME FOUR: DEVIANCE "Banana Time": Job satisfaction and informal interaction - Donald Roy Up it Up: Gender and the accomplishment of street robbery - Jody Miller One Hundred Dollars and a Dead Man: Ethical decision making in ethnographic fieldwork - Steven Vanderstaay Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture - John Irwin and Donal Cressey Becoming a Marihuana User - Howard Becker Shifts and Oscillations in Deviant Careers: The case of upper-level drug dealers and smugglers - Patricia Adler and Peter Adler In Search of Masculinity: Violence, respect and sexuality among Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem - Philippe Bourgois The Madam as Teacher: The training of house prostitutes - Barbara Sherman Heyl Crack to Heroin: Drug markets and transition - Bruce Jacobs Alibis and Aliases: Some notes on the 'motives' of fiddling bread salesmen - Jason Ditton Sociology of Vincent's Place - Carl Klockars A Successful Female Crack Dealer: Case study of a deviant career - Eloise Dunlap, Bruce Johnson and Ali Manwar Methods: The Sociologist as Voyeur - Laud Humphreys Taking Care of Business: The heroin users life on the streets - Edward Preble and John Casey
