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This paper outlines the authors’ experience of working with international cross‐cultural teams, and is an attempt to address the question about how international organizations can give rise to a sustainable capability in which generations of teams build on each other’s experience. The paper outlines some of the behavioural dynamics, both constructive and destructive that seem to occur in international teams, and focuses on ways of working through the destructive dynamics. The paper suggests that sustainable learning can happen when organizations and teams engage with the “cultural whirlpool” that their internal diversity creates; when they maintain ongoing cross‐cultural conversations which bring cultural differences and understandings alive; and where they engage with the strategic moments that are afforded by their emotional and relational dynamics.

In this paper, we investigate the process by which social control agents define wrongdoing over time and the principles they employ in drawing the boundary between right and wrong. We empirically examine how Italian state actors sought over four decades to categorize behaviors in the so-called “gray area,” i.e., the conduct of individuals supportive of the mafia organization Cosa Nostra and its criminal aims, but not members of the organization. Based on an archival analysis of texts produced since the 1960s, we reconstruct how state actors started from a preliminary definition of wrongdoing, moved to stigmatize the behaviors in question on moral grounds, and ultimately criminalized them with legal sanctions. We conceptualize the main principles behind this evolving categorization as intentionality of conduct, freedom of choice, and scope of harm. The paper contributes to the debate on the factors and conditions shaping the definition of wrongdoing over time and the contribution that social control agents provide to this aim.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how inequality – in the way ethnography as a research tool itself is used – underwrites many of the methodological tensions in the recently published and widely-debated On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman.

The author conducts an in-depth, critical analysis of On the Run as an epistemological case to visualize methodological and moral challenges that burden ethnographic practice at large.

The author opens dialogue on undercover ethnography, the overreach of institutional review boards, privilege in the use of ethnography as a research tool, “Othering” and the exoticization of the underclass, and the boundary shift from observer to participant roles with deep immersion. The author unpacks these areas of contention toward the construction of a potential alternative combining public sociology with what is called a sociology of compassion.

While the book provides an intimate, rich account of the experience of law among the underclass, the author demonstrates that it constitutes an epistemological case ideal for examining how the issues of pre-fieldwork preparation, positionality and deep immersion are conceived – and problematized – in mainstream ethnographic practice.