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Are public officials held accountable for political scandals? Existing scholarship typically focuses on voters' response to scandals showing politicians are often punished at the polls for scandals. Specifically, they are more likely to be punished for the abuse of public office for personal gain than for scandals involving personal affairs. That said, not all politicians implicated in scandals seek reelection. Although difficult to observe, many politicians may be pushed out of office by their political party before they have an opportunity to stand for reelection – resigning or retiring before the next election. Others are appointed and consequently never stand for election. We collect a new dataset to understand how scandals affect politicians' careers and whether public officials are held accountable at other junctures. We trace the pathways of politicians implicated in scandals. We document the type and onset of scandals, individuals' reactions to scandals, and whether and when they leave office. Our novel data contribution provides rich descriptive statistics on corruption in the US Congress over time, with new insights into the conditions under which scandals end politicians' careers. The common patterns and significant differences revealed in these data suggest that the impact of scandals on public officials' careers may have less to do with the nature of the scandal or the specific actions undertaken by those implicated and may depend more on the actions of political parties.

What is our unit of analysis and by implication what are the boundaries of our cases? This is a question we grapple with at the start of every new project. We observe that case studies are often referred to in an unreflective manner and are often conflated with geographical location. Neat units of analysis and clearly bounded cases usually do not reflect the messiness encountered during qualitative fieldwork. Others have puzzled over these questions. We briefly discuss work to problematise the use of households as units of analysis in the context of apartheid South Africa and then consider work of other anthropologists engaged in multi-site ethnography. We have found the notion of ‘following’ chains, paths and threads across sites to be particularly insightful.

We present two examples from our work studying commissioning in the English National Health Service (NHS) to illustrate our struggles with case studies. The first is a study of Practice-based Commissioning groups and the second is a study of the early workings of Clinical Commissioning Groups. In both instances we show how ideas of what constituted our unit of analysis and the boundaries of our cases became less clear as our research progressed. We also discuss pressures we experienced to add more case studies to our projects. These examples illustrate the primacy for us of understanding interactions between place, local history and rapidly developing policy initiatives. Understanding cases in this way can be challenging in a context where research funders hold different views of what constitutes a case.

This chapter uses critical race theory (CRT) and postcolonial lenses to critique the postrace concept and organizational power differentials mirroring an ethnically coded society. CRT reminds us that despite antidiscrimination laws around the globe, employers still normatively pursue workplace homogeneity; not necessarily a racist impulse, but in an effort to promote perceived organizational efficiency. Understanding how organizations have become hard-wired to perpetuate White privilege helps to dismantle systemic barriers which continue to stand between people of color and an ability to reach their full human potential at work.

Understanding of power and difference in organizations requires consistent diligence. Using ethnic diversity primarily as a means for advancing profit generation motives rather than as an opportunity to advance social justice, too many multinational corporations offer mere lip service to ethnic diversity. For example, organizations tend to imagine that they are more ethnically diverse than they really are and enable prejudice, racism and microagressions against people who constitute ethnic minorities. Among social researchers, attention to ethnic difference requires careful and consistent attention as well. Because skin color ranks among the most visible of social identity dimensions, diversity and ethnicity/race erroneously are considered synonymous and skin color becomes some default condition for diversity in social research studies. Chapter 5 explores these important subthemes: interrogating Whiteness and navigating diversity at work; exposing the “requisite variety” concept for its homophily thesis roots; examining effects of “othering,” liminal spaces and tokenism; racism and microaggressions have gone underground; and intersectionality of ethnicity with other social identity dimensions.

On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government (White House, 2009a) committing his Administration to create an unprecedented level of openness in government and indicating his belief that government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This chapter examines the Obama Administration through June 2010, and looks at how closely the administration is hewing to its promises, in the context of the legacy of secrecy it inherited.

We examine how school districts in California help their high schools respond to state accountability requirements. We discovered two contrasting forms of district interventions: those aiming to increase schools’ internal coherence and those encouraging direct but narrower responses to state requirements. Drawing on interviews in six districts and eight high schools, we find that many district efforts focus on immediate responses to state requirements to raise test scores. Yet, our analysis suggests that without strong district efforts to increase internal coherence, interventions aimed at eliciting school responses will be less beneficial over time.

Purpose – Studies suggest that children's experiences during first grade help establish educational trajectories that eventually shape their life chances. Research also indicates that student attentiveness in the classroom is integral to learning and later academic achievement, with low-income students of color running a greater risk of “attentional difficulties.”

Methodology – Joining these two bodies of work, I map the social conditions that shape attentiveness in the first-grade classrooms of “at-risk” students. Using ethnographic data collected over three school years, I examine how children actively construct attentiveness during their everyday interactions at school.

Findings – First graders sustain attention but often onto their own auto-involvements and mutual engagements, focal concerns teachers consider “distractions.” By learning the moment-by-moment variations of what to pay attention to and how “attentiveness” looks, children navigate the social ropes of schooling. Young students apply these lessons to self and peers, regulating attentiveness and socializing one another to the norms of their classroom. They are also resourceful actors who skillfully use their understandings of attentiveness to maneuver around the strict order of the day. Schoolchildren multitask, conceal other focal concerns, and give the impression of attentiveness, all of which influence what behaviors get detected as “(in)attentive.”