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In France, as in other countries, the idea of installing rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels in private homes is based on an incentive scheme (tax advantages, feed-in tariffs, etc.) inspired by neoclassical economic theory. In the case of electricity producers in Reunion Island, unlike economists, we argue that producers’ calculations involve decision-making criteria which go further than any simple evaluation of economic costs and benefits.

Our approach is based on concepts of economic anthropology and on observations and semi-structured interviews conducted in the homes of the producers.

This ethnographic method allowed us to examine economic rationalities which revealed the anticipation of an energy landscape that will be subject to issues relating to the environment, access to electricity, evolution in the local electricity market, and household budget management. In this context, producers’ representations of solar power and of processes for commoditizing and decommoditizing the electricity produced (sold on the network/“free” when consumed) make compatible preservation of the environment and social norms of consumption.

This paper focuses on PV energy producers (who have been the object of very little research) and thus provides input for existing reflection on the diversity of economic rationalities. Such insight is important for understanding how people respond to policy appeals for PV panels. Anthropology therefore has an important role to play in the debate on energy transition. This conclusion paves the way for similar research in other contexts (of a non-insular nature in particular) which would allow for a promising comparative anthropological approach.

Purpose: To examine the refugee women's empowerment and integration component of the pilot program of a Turkish social entrepreneurial organization (SEO) specialized in supporting disadvantaged women's empowerment. Methodology/Approach: The chapter utilizes a comparative qualitative case study approach to investigate the interplay between the dimensions of: business model, knowledge acquisition, and learning experiences, the achievement of goals, and scalability in determining social innovations. Findings: Despite the widespread belief that women's cooperative is an ideal business model for inclusivity, the chapter presents a variance in achieving this goal. The results propose that a strong business model, enhanced with knowledge acquisition and learning, and an inclusive approach to innovation, enable a women's cooperative to offer desirable solutions to community needs, improving its chances for higher impact. Research Limitations/Implications: The chapter adds to social entrepreneurship literature by offering multilevel analysis in examining social innovation, which has been often neglected as a research approach in the field. It asserts that an investigation into the community as a unit of analysis promises to be viable research in social innovation studies. Practical Implications: An inclusive approach that develops relations with the broader community and networking with other cooperatives and social actors is essential for women's cooperatives. Social Implications: The SEO's increasing local reach and impact have made it a strong actor in women's empowerment on the ground and force for institutional change. In the long term, SEOs' actions targeting multiple actors of influence will increase the chances of suggested framework changes accepted by policymakers.

Mobile games and ICT-based mixed reality tools offer significant opportunities for tourism. This chapter reviews the existing literature in both these areas, and presents a novel way of combining games and virtual reality into an interpretive tool. As a complex, threatened marine ecosystem, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef faces significant interpretive challenges, and almost no new interpretive tools have been developed over the last 30 years. Here, the authors unpack the stages and interdisciplinary approach required to design the tool and highlight how it might fit within the broader scope of ICT developments in tourism. We outline areas of future research, with a particular focus on how ICT might contribute to making nature-based tourism more sustainable, by finding fun, innovative ways to engage tourists in the conservation of some of our most iconic natural assets.

Purpose – We seek to understand under which conditions care work emerges from shadow economy and becomes visible, either within families or in a professional frame, both at a political level and at the micro level of social perceptions.

Methodology – We analyze the recent history of French social policies devoted to dependent people and we use a study describing the members of 91 French families confronted, in 2004, with one of their elderly members’ dependence.

Findings – The French State subsidizing compensation for daily difficulties of dependent people leads to a surprising parallel between the rise of specific jobs and the public recognition of family care work. When looking at family structures, there is a huge difference between multiple-members families and trapped kin, erasing gender effect in this latter case. Family care work becomes more visible when there exists a professional equivalent: cleaning, doing the laundry, or washing the dependent person. Thus, male family care work when existing, such as home repairs or administrative tasks, remains invisible.

Research limitations – We analyze the case of France, with two major specificities: a universal State insurance system in a process of including the risk of dependence and a high unemployment rate. We exclude childcare from our study.

Originality of paper – Care studies have developed from two traditions: one emphasizing the ethics of care, and the other straddling between family economics and sociology of domestic work. The paper takes place within a third literature, raising the issue of care work as intimate work, dealing with the personal relationship between a caregiver and a care receiver.

It is doubtful whether Max Weber would have been appreciative of his current status as the father of organisation theory. Weber did not develop the concept of bureaucracy as part of a quest to advance a science of organisations, or in order to do a microanalysis of the internal structure of particular organisational units. The concept of bureaucracy was an ideal-typical concept developed as a point of departure for comparisons across historical periods and geographic settings. Weber’s research was motivated by macroscopic and historical questions such as ‘why did capitalism develop in the West’ and, ‘how do persons in the West and other civilizations attach meaning to their activities?’ Unlike consultants and organisation theorists that make use of him today, it was not a major concern for Weber to develop criteria for the most efficient kinds of organisations. Rather, his concern was to identify variations in administrative and bureaucratic cultures and patterns by the means of the bureaucratic ideal type. It is maintained in modern textbooks in organisation theory that there has been a development from a closed and rationalistic paradigm towards an understanding of organisations as open and natural systems, and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is taken as a point of departure for this kind of narrative. This classification of Weber as an example of a rational and closed approach is highly questionable. The cross-societal and historical approach used so effectively by Weber, is put on a sidetrack in such mainstream narratives. It would be more in the spirit of Weber to focus on organising as an activity, bureaucracy as an ethos and to study organisations within their particular political and cultural contexts.

The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically calls for a paradigmatic reassessment of concepts used to map human societies comparatively. By differentiating “social analytics” from “explanatory narratives,” we can distinguish concept and generic model development from causal analyses of actual empirical phenomena. In so doing, we show how five heuristic models of “modes of social practices” enable such paradigmatic formation in sociology. This reinforces Max Weber’s emphasis on the irreducible historicity of explanations in the social sciences.

Explanatory narrative.

A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts, modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models presents a range of “theoretical tools” capable of facilitating empirical analysis as flexibly as possible, rather than cramping their range with overly narrow conceptual strictures.

To render social theory as flexible for practical field research as possible.

Develops a way of synthesizing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in a highly pragmatic fashion.

A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this chapter, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in Austria, and discuss implementation issues that may arise in similar settings, including the use of bandwidth selection algorithms and bias-correction procedures. Although recent developments in nonparametric estimation (Calonico, Cattaneo, & Farrell, 2014; Imbens & Kalyanaraman, 2012) are sometimes interpreted by practitioners as pointing to a default estimation procedure, we show that in any given application different procedures may perform better or worse. In particular, Monte Carlo simulations based on data-generating processes that closely resemble the data from our application show that some asymptotically dominant procedures may actually perform worse than “sub-optimal” alternatives in a given empirical application.

Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.