Collecting outdoor adventurers' stories for research is best done using the naturalistic inquiry paradigm. This type of hypothesis-free investigation, used in the study of folklore, requires maintaining the normal storytelling context while meeting scholarly demands for reliability and validity. Choice of focus and site, the participant-observer…

Examines how the minority drug problem is framed in terms of anomie and underclass models suggesting that drug subcultures in urban black areas are formed as an adaptation to aggregate community conditions. The article considers how researchers use ecological and ethnographic data to back up claims that drug subcultures are a response to inner…

Examines a work initiative that moved welfare recipients into jobs as nurse assistants at a geriatric facility. The women's stories describe a welfare-to-work program in practice and illustrate how and why earnest efforts to mediate poverty resulted instead in the continued marginalization and stigmatization of poor people. (RJM)

States that in a methods course for elementary education majors, students are asked to keep a notebook to respond to course readings, collect writing starts, reflect on their schooling histories, and collect data from their 10-week field experience in an elementary classroom. Discusses one notebook; presents a sample ethnographic research…

A writing group of Philadelphia elementary and middle school women principals and an educational ethnographer share some of their journal entries and reflections on that writing. The connection between the group's work and that of educational ethnographers is discussed. (MMU)

Discusses the relationship between liberal democratic principles and multiculturalism as it applies to implementation of educational policies. An ethnographic/ethnic studies and critical multiculturalism model is proposed to ensure the acknowledgment and empowerment of the ethnic identity of the students. (MMU)

Describes a qualitative ethnographically informed case study of an electronic text center in a large academic library designed to reveal the underlying metaphors that library staff and patrons used in thinking about electronic texts. It draws upon theories from cognitive anthropology concerning metaphors and mental scripts. (Author/LRW)

Presents data from an ethnographic case study that describes how an administrator in a theater organization manipulated language by using the minutes from a board of directors meeting to influence board members to vote to disband the organization. Discusses implications for teachers, researchers, and practitioners of business communication. (SG)

Examines the nature, extent, and rhetorical exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy in aircraft engine development and testing, focusing particularly on the role of technical documents in creating these margins and in the rhetorical transactions that transpired. Suggests the conditions and implications of these rhetorical transactions need to…

Provides a critical ethnographic account of how members of a small design company experienced a work environment riddled with ambiguous communication. States that although management's objective in providing vague goals was to spark creative freedom, employees experienced the environment as paradoxical and constraining. Contends that interplay of…

Presents environmental education as a sharing of contested stories about the relationship between humans and nature. Suggests that the best storytelling occurs in nonformal and informal educational settings. Employs ethnographic research methods. Contains 19 references. (DDR)

Based on personal ethnographic experience of "becoming the phenomenon" of migrant laborer in Canada's postsecondary education system, critically examines three anthropological perspectives--the neoclassical, the historical structuralist, and the neo-Marxist--on labor migration. Argues that both migrant laborers and sessional lecturers…

Investigates the career development experiences of Latinas employed in counseling and faculty positions in higher education. Research reveals strong images of an inhospitable and nonsupportive place to work and suggests that Latina women are inhibited from achieving the same levels of success as men or other women in higher education. Implications…

Studies the socialization processes of two writers new to an organization in terms of writing tasks, writers' social roles, and methods of socialization. Reveals 15 different writing roles depicting a continuum from novice to expert. Argues the implications of this study are relevant to current school-based approaches to writing instruction. (NH)

Examines the role of information and theories of "life in the round" through a study of ways in which inmates at a maximum-security prison for women in Neuse City (North Carolina) redefine their social world to survive incarceration. Findings from ethnographic research and interviews with 80 women at the prison revealed that a life in the round…