All news, announcements and new publications, newest first.
-
Phenomenology-based Ethnography: Special Issue Journal of Contemporary Ethnography #sssi #emca #sociology
Two or three years ago, I met Gary Alan Fine, the ethnographer and sociologist who wrote such wonderful books on restaurant kitchens, young orators in high school debating societies, mushroom collectors and many more. We came to talk about varieties of ethnography and one of its German variations: “Phenomenology-based Ethnography”. This form of ethnography pervades German…
-
Castells’ Internet Galaxy
More than five decades ago Marshall McLuhan published his famous Gutenberg Galaxy. The book has been highly influential in a range of disciples from communication and media studies to sociology, management studies and many more. With the growing popularity in the late 1990s McLuhan became not only the Patron Saint of Wired Magazine but also again…
-
Musical Technologies of Memory
Originally posted on Symbolic Interaction Music Blog: I have an electric guitar in my office. Cherry red and white, it lives on a little stand situated between one of my bookshelves and a file cabinet. Sometimes when I get stuck on a manuscript or course preparation, I pick it up and just play for a…
-
Selfies?
-
Openness in the Academic and Corporate World
“Consultants frequently tell academics that they are obliged to become more “corporate” in outlook-to pay more attention to the bottom line and to develop more proprietary products and services. These pressures are particularly intense in fields with immediate commercial relevance. However, certain principles of openness derived from traditional science and academic life might end up serving…
-
Mobile Guides to Historic Places in Action and Interaction
first published in “Museum & Heritage Magazine” (Winter Issue, 2013) Dirk vom Lehn (King’s College London) Hannah Lewi & Wally Smith (University of Melbourne) Museums and Heritage Sites increasingly offer mobile guides and Apps to encourage people to use their smartphones and tablet computers for the exploration of exhibitions, outdoor spaces and buildings. These Mobile…
-
Are you doing Qualitative or Quantitative Research? #sociology
There is plenty of debate about the ‘quantitative/qualitative divide’ in the social sciences. Howard Aldrich has written an excellent piece arguing to abolish the distinction, and thereby reinvigorated the debate, for example on OrgTheory and Work in Progress. A quick look at Google’s Ngram viewer is quite interesting. For “qualitative research” it shows and for the…
-
Mervyn Horgan’s Review of “Drama of Social Life” edited by Charles Edgley
I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute to Charles Edgley’s fabulous edited volume “Drama of Social Life”. In the most recent (November 2014) issue of Symbolic Interaction Melvyn Horgan reviews Edgley’s volume. He highlights in particular the unconventional departure from a mere focus on Goffman and Goffmanian style studies and the early reference to…
-
Customer Value and Customer Service – It depends whom you ask
Restaurants issue vouchers to attract more custom. For Cafe Rouge, a restaurant chain of some popularity with families in the UK, these Vouchers are offered by Tesco, by the chain itself, and by websites like Vouchercodes. I picked up a voucher from Vouchercode to head for a Cafe Rouge restaurant in Central London on a Sunday.…
-
Museum Visiting: Slowing Down and the Experience of Art
There is a renewed interest in museum visiting and the practices of doing so. Only this weekend (October 9th, 2014), Stephanie Rosenbloom published an article in the New York Times that explores “The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum“. Rosenbloom refers to Daniel Fujiwara’s (now Director at SImetrica) study of the impact of museum…
