Updated September 2019
I am a third-generation Chicago-school field worker, using ethnographic
methods to study processes of trouble and social control.
I was drawn into the Chicago-style seat-of-the-pants field work on
beginning graduate work in the Brandeis Sociology Department in the early
1960s. Everett Hughes, Bob Weiss and Irv Zola were my instructors and mentors.
Coming to UCLA in 1969, I began teaching a two-quarter graduate field research
methods course, over the years collaborating with colleagues including Peter
Orleans, Mel Pollner and Jack Katz. The heart of doing ethnographic field work
lies in producing detailed, sensitive written accounts of what one sees, hears, and
experiences in continuing encounters with those whose worlds and lives one
wants to understand. Hence most class time involved reading, reflecting on and
analyzing students’ accumulating corpus of fieldnotes. Drawing on my own and
these students’ experiences, I gave close attention to the mundane, ground-level
processes of doing ethnography. These processes are keyed to how fieldworkers
orient to and record written accounts of ongoing social interaction, accounts
which can then be closely examined to produce empirically grounded analyses of
ongoing social life.
My dissertation at Brandeis involved a case study of day-to-day operations
of a juvenile court, revised and published as Judging Delinquents in 1969. The
study moved from a Hughesian analysis of the court as an ongoing institutional
concern to examine how court staff distinguished between “real delinquents” and
youth who had engaged in illegal acts but whom they continued to view as of
essentially normal moral character. Drawing on Becker, Goffman and Garfinkel, I
emphasized court staff’s close attention to signs of “trouble” in youths’ behavior
and living circumstances. During a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the UC
Berkeley Center for the Study of Law & Society, Shelly Messinger and I began to
integrate his research on relational troubles as key to the involuntary
hospitalization of wives as mentally ill with my juvenile court materials on
“trouble,” eventually publishing our article on “The Micro-Politics of Trouble” in
1977.
Over the course of my career I have used ethnographic materials to explore
two related sets of trouble phenomena: First, the informal, indigenous micro-
politics of everyday relational troubles: When and how do people come to
experience some relational moment as off-putting, irritating, upsetting, or worse?
How do they deal with these experiences, whether by acting as if “nothing
unusual is happening,” by expressing some non-verbal or verbal discontent, or by
making an implicit or explicit complaint to the relational other? How do these
local responses develop and change over time, perhaps “remedying” the trouble,
perhaps creating ill-will and resentment and hence escalating it? When and how
do troubled parties turn to others outside the relationship – to friends for support
and sympathy, to handy local influential or troubleshooters for advice and help,
or to official third parties for some sort of official intervention? What are the
effects of these different forms of response and intervention on parties’ emerging
understandings of the trouble?
My second concern with trouble has been to analyze the decision-making
processes of “the bureaucratically organized activities of agencies of control”
(Kitsuse 1964:101) that regularly become involved in interpersonal troubles that
have proved persistent or unmanageable. Using data drawn from a variety of
institutional settings – juvenile and criminal justice sites, psychiatric agencies,
schools, group homes -- I have sought to identify distinctive but taken-for-granted
processes of such decision-making. Here I have analyzed the use of “last resort”
rationales in invoking severe sanctions, the “holistic effects” that arise from
working with collections of cases, the relevance of retrospective and prospective
“organizational horizons,” and the importance of organizationally-based
“typifications.”
Read about my books and current projects.