Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.

In the twenty-first century, more than ever, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are forming an intensely mobile background to everyday life. Social scientists, too, are on the move, seeking new analytical purchase on these important aspects of the social world by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic. Mobile Methods addresses the challenges and opportunities of researching mobile phenomena. Drawing on extensive interdisciplinary discussion, the book brings together a collection of cutting-edge methodological innovations and original research reports to examine some important implications of the mobilities turn for the processes of ‘research’, and the realm of the empirical. Through analysis that addresses questions such as ‘how are social relationships and social institutions made in and through mobility?’, and ‘how do people experience mobility in twenty-first century world cities?', the authors mobilize sociological analysis, bringing new insights and opening up new opportunities for engagement with contemporary challenges. This book is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of disciplines including Human Geography, Social Policy, Sociology and Research Methods.

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.

Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.

This book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings, providing an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offering a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.

Just as newspapers do not, typically, engage with the ordinary experiences of people′s daily lives, so organizational studies has also tended largely to ignore the humdrum, everyday experiences of people working in organizations. However, ethnographic approaches provide in-depth and up-close understandings of how the ′everyday-ness′ of work is organized and how, in turn, work itself organizes people and the societies they inhabit. Organizational Ethnography brings contributions from leading scholars in organizational studies that serve to unpack an ethnographic perspective on organizations and organizational research. The authors explore the particular problems faced by organizational ethnographers, including: - questions of gaining access to research sites within organizations; - the many styles of writing organizational ethnography; - the role of friendship relations in the field; - problems of distance and closeness; - the doing of at-home ethnography; - ethical issues; - standards for evaluating ethnographic work. This book is a vital resource for organizational scholars and students doing or writing ethnography in the fields of business and management, public administration, education, health care, social work, or any related field in which organizations play a role.

Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.