At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the disruption as they circled back to work they had considered "done" and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.

How can a person draw on her or his sociological knowledge in everyday life? This insightful new volume collects essays from some of the most renowned sociologists working today. They examine the ways that sociological understanding helps them with their daily experiences. Each contributor works in the qualitative tradition, and the essays cast light on how their observations of everyday life can affect research agendas and vice versa. These essays reflect the desire to understand experiences in a broader context rather than as random and isolated events and how the qualitative approach can achieve that end. Within this collection, editors Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz have brought together some of the most distinguished luminaries in the discipline. Many have chosen topics about which they haven't written before, and the essays place the authors sometimes in the roles of insiders, sometimes in the roles of outsiders-occasionally both. Organized around the notion of place-public places, family spaces, interior spaces, and workplaces-the essays touch on the major subdisciplines within sociology. Personal, engaging, and always thought-provoking, Qualitative Sociology as Everyday Life will be of great interest to sociologists and their students, and to qualitative researchers across disciplines.

What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War; facts of life influence research agendas, individual understandings of the world, and ultimately the shape of the discipline as a whole.^NL Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz asked twenty-two of America's most prominent sociologists to reflect upon how their personal lives influenced their research, and vice versa, how their research has influenced their lives. In this volume, the authors reveal with candor and discernment how world events, political commitments and unanticipated constraints influenced the course of their careers. They disclose how race, class, and gender proved to be pivotal elements in the course of their individual lives, and in how they carry out their research. Faced with academic institutions that did not hire or promote persons of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability, they invented new routes to success within their fields. Faced with disappointments in political organizations to which they were devoted, they found ways to integrate their disillusionment into their research agendas. While some of the contributors radically changed their political commitments, and others saw more stability, none stood still.^NL An intimate look at biography and craft, these snapshots provide a fascinating glimpse of the sociological life for colleagues, other academics, and aspiring young sociologists. The collection demonstrates how inequalities and injustices can be made into motors for scholarly research, which in turn have the power to change individual life courses and entire societies.

Few social researchers study elites because elites, by their nature, are very difficult to access. The contributors to this volume provide valuable insights on how researchers can successfully penetrate elite settings. As the authors reflect on their experiences, they provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to maneuver and become accepted in a world that is often closed to them. This book's coverage includes three broad research domains: business elites, professional elites, and community and political elites. Although the studies focus on qualitative methodology, even researchers who emphasize more quantitative methods will benefit from this volume's thoughtful observations on how researchers gather data, construct interview strategies, write about their subjects, and experience the research process. A wide range of researchers in organizational studies, sociology, political science, and many other fields will find this volume to be an important guide to the many subtle and elusive features of conducting successful research with these groups.

Random Families is about the unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media, and the human desire for belonging. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28), their parents and related donors from all over the U.S., Random Families chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make from what donor to use to how to participate (or not) in donor sibling networks. Children reveal their understanding of a donor, the donor's spot on the family tree and the meaning of their donor siblings. Through rich first-person accounts of network membership, the book illustrates how these extraordinary relationships-woven from bits of online information and shared genetic ties-are transformed into new possibilities for kinship. Random Families offers down-to-earth stories from real families to highlight just how truly distinctive these contemporary new forms of family are.

A remarkable number of women today are taking the daunting step of having children outside of marriage. In Single By Chance, Mothers By Choice, Rosanna Hertz offers the first full-scale account of this fast-growing phenomenon, revealing why these middle class women took this unorthodox path and how they have managed to make single parenthood work for them.
Hertz interviewed 65 women--ranging from physicians and financial analysts to social workers, teachers, and secretaries--women who speak candidly about how they manage their lives and families as single mothers. What Hertz discovers are not ideologues but reluctant revolutionaries, women who--whether straight or gay--struggle to conform to the conventional definitions of mother, child, and family. Having tossed out the rulebook in order to become mothers, they nonetheless adhere to time-honored rules about child-rearing. As they tell their stories, they shed light on their paths to motherhood, describing how they summoned up the courage to pursue their dream, how they broke the news to parents, siblings, friends, and co-workers, how they went about buying sperm from fertility banks or adopting children of different races. They recount how their personal and social histories intersected to enable them to pursue their dream of motherhood, and how they navigate daily life. What does it mean to be 'single' in terms of romance and parenting? How do women juggle earning a paycheck with parenting? What creative ways have women devised to shore up these families? How do they incorporate men into their child-centered families? This book provides concrete, informative answers to all these questions.
A unique window on the future of the family, this book offers a gold mine of insight and reassurance for any woman contemplating this rewarding if unconventional step.

At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the disruption as they circled back to work they had considered "done" and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.

""Working Families is a pioneering study by scholars of great capability and insight. This book is a gold mine of observations and information about new approaches to the study of work and family."--Arlene Daniels, co-editor of "The Most Difficult Revolution

"Hertz and Marshall have pulled together an impressive collection. The range of well-known authors provide a broad perspective by looking at both women and men across class, work site, and race. "Working Families provides cutting edge and original contributions that go well beyond previous research on work and families."--Naomi Gerstel, author of "Families and Work

"The information age is transforming family life and the relationships between families, the workplace, and larger society. "Working Families moves the discussion of work and family beyond the simplistic notion of 'balancing' by examining the complexity and diversity of everyday family life, as well as the wider economic and political contexts of our current dilemmas."--Arlene Skolnick, author of "Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty

"The worlds of work and family in which we live our lives are ever more complex. This important volume sheds lights on the issues faced by working families at home, at work, and in their community."--Kathleen Christensen, Director, Program on Working Families, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

How can a person draw on her or his sociological knowledge in everyday life? This insightful new volume collects essays from some of the most renowned sociologists working today. They examine the ways that sociological understanding helps them with their daily experiences. Each contributor works in the qualitative tradition, and the essays cast light on how their observations of everyday life can affect research agendas and vice versa. These essays reflect the desire to understand experiences in a broader context rather than as random and isolated events and how the qualitative approach can achieve that end. Within this collection, editors Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz have brought together some of the most distinguished luminaries in the discipline. Many have chosen topics about which they haven?t written before, and the essays place the authors sometimes in the roles of insiders, sometimes in the roles of outsiders?occasionally both. Organized around the notion of place?public places, family spaces, interior spaces, and workplaces?the essays touch on the major subdisciplines within sociology. Personal, engaging, and always thought-provoking, Qualitative Sociology as Everyday Life will be of great interest to sociologists and their students, and to qualitative researchers across disciplines.

Increasingly, qualitative researchers are concerned with issues pertaining to how their studies are written and recorded. They are equally concerned with creating a new ethnography in which the authorÆs voiceùas well as the voices of the subjectsùis more fully realized, especially for the reader. This edited volume, a significant expansion of a special issue of the Journal of Qualitative Sociology, presents an array of contemporary ethnographers grappling with the problems and new conventions of ethnographic writing. The chapters cover topics including communication problems in intensive care units, fieldwork strategies in cloistered and non-cloistered communities, gender and voice, writing in social science, limits of ethnographic informants, and interactive interviewing. With contributions from leading scholars in many disciplines, Reflexivity and Voice is the ideal tool for scholars, researchers, and students in qualitative research, communication studies, anthropology, and sociology.

By placing the dual-career marriage in its economic and social context, "More Equal Than Others" goes beyond the media image of dual-career couples as self-sufficient units and compels the reader to confront the dilemmas and possibilities of modern marriages.

Few social researchers study elites because elites, by their nature, are very difficult to access. The contributors to this volume provide valuable insights on how researchers can successfully penetrate elite settings. As the authors reflect on their experiences, they provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to maneuver and become accepted in a world that is often closed to them. This book's coverage includes three broad research domains: business elites, professional elites, and community and political elites. Although the studies focus on qualitative methodology, even researchers who emphasize more quantitative methods will benefit from this volume's thoughtful observations on how researchers gather data, construct interview strategies, write about their subjects, and experience the research process. A wide range of researchers in organizational studies, sociology, political science, and many other fields will find this volume to be an important guide to the many subtle and elusive features of conducting successful research with these groups.