Search results

This remembrance discusses the intellectual climate and circumstances under which David Maines came to the Metro Detroit area in the early 1990s. It discusses his impact on graduate students at Wayne State University and how he met the historian Linda Benson whom he would marry. It chronicles his arrival to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan in 1997, which provided him a well-deserved academic home after his long 25-year journey in academia. Maines was tenured there in 1998, promoted to full professor in 1999 and chaired the department from 2000–2006.

The study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts.

An ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative.

The festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking.

In this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results.

National and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions.

Community-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation.

There is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.