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To outline the kinds of problems and dilemmas which researchers might experience in professional sports settings and to highlight the way in which gender might shape those experiences.

An ethnography of professional football.

Few social researchers have managed to breach the institutional bounds of professional sport and fewer still have carried out ethnographic work within this context. Gender inevitably impacts the complexion of sporting domains and this manifests itself in everyday behaviours and sub-cultural practices. Qualitative research has the potential to uncover the nuances of individual and collective behaviours within such settings and to shed light upon the ways in which gender relations shape the contours of institutional life.

To situate current debate around methods within wider discussions of gender and social research and against the backdrop of theoretical shifts in the conceptualisation of masculinities.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

This chapter explores the way three teachers developed their primary science teaching in English schools, in an educational climate where training policies and financial pressures result in few opportunities to do so, meaning many schools resort to in-school support. The training needs of primary teachers vary according to their experience and backgrounds. This research project used a combined model of Lave and Wenger's (1991) community of practice with Bourdieu's social theory model (1999, 2004), specifically on science capital, to explore the opportunities for primary science development as well as teacher agency and identity within the primary school. The research consisted of three case studies of primary teachers, using co-teaching and semi-structured interviews to develop a greater understanding of teachers' beliefs and development in science teaching. Thematic analysis was used to organise and interpret the data using the theoretical framework outlined. The combined theoretical models proved useful in considering the ‘science capital’ as part of their identity as a teacher; they contributed to a school or field. The nature and amount of science capital had an impact on the potential for their science teaching development as well as their identity and agency within the school community of practice.

This chapter focuses on the use of outcome-based performance management systems within public administration. It reports two qualitative case studies from respectively the Danish Tax and Customs Administration and the Swedish Tax Agency. Both of these administrations use outcome-based performance management systems to steer subsets of their administrative work. The chapter shows that the systems respond to broader demands for accounting for outcomes, yet, the systems also operate in very different ways. The Danish case shows a quantitative system which measures on a daily basis, the Swedish case shows a qualitative system which measures on a four to five-year basis. What is striking about both cases is that they balance meeting the demands for accounting for diffuse outcomes, with developing measurements that ‘fit’ local contingent concerns. While much of the current research on performance management systems in public administration is critical and stresses the downsides of such systems, this chapter shows that these systems should not always be assumed to be connected to gaming, strategic behaviour and/or reductionism. Instead, the performance management systems can be seen as attempts to reconcile and make ends meet in ‘post-bureaucratic’ organisations that are increasingly expected to account for rather diffuse and abstract outcomes and expected at the same time to steer and prioritise daily administrative work.

This study examines whether Revenue Procedure 2003-61 is an improvement over Revenue Procedure 2000-15, in the areas of taxpayers’ expectations for IRS equitable relief decisions and gender-related in-group bias. The survey instrument includes a vignette adapted from a judicial decision. The results show that Rev. Proc. 2003-61 does improve upon Rev. Proc. 2000-15. Furthermore, taxpayers perceive different expectations of what the IRS should do and what the IRS would do in equitable relief decision making. Also, gender-related in-group biases are found to be present for both genders. Tax policy implications regarding equitable relief are discussed.

The role of implicit provider bias in mental health care is an important issue that continues to be of concern in the twenty-first century for the Black/African American community. Access to mental health and quality care remains elusive as members of this social group lack access to mental health screening, diagnosis, and attention due to institutional and cultural barriers. Supporting the position that implicit and explicit provider bias exists in the mental health profession, this chapter will explore how implicit provider bias is an intractable institutional barrier that prevents Black/African Americans from accessing mental health and quality care. A review of the implications related to mental health outcomes with Black/African American clients will also be explored.

A brief overview of the Black/African American cultural responses to implicit provider bias will be discussed later in this chapter. There will be an exploration of the ways to help identify, address, and eliminate implicit provider bias using evidence-based personal and community engagement strategies that promote mental health wellness within the Black/African American community. Implications for best practices in Black/African American mental health will also be addressed to eradicate the risk of unethical or medical malpractice with Black/African American clients, reduce the mental health disparity experienced by Blacks/African Americans, and create mental health equity for this population.

The act of becoming ‘heavily tattooed’, with its historical association with deviant subcultures, continues to carry a social stigma and evoke negative sanctions. This is especially so for women, who must also contend with gender norms within the highly masculinised tattoo subculture. For women, the experience of becoming heavily tattooed comes to represent an embodied resistance to normative ideals of beauty, against which the participants construct their own alternative gender and beauty philosophies. Besides gender norms, the tattoo world has specific ethos which divides the serious subcultural member from those more casually connected to it. The physical parameter of the subculture finds people gathering in tattoo studios and at tattoo conventions, as well as consuming tattoo-oriented media, such as magazines and television shows. This study draws on in-depth interviews with 36 participants across the United States who consider themselves serious tattoo collectors. From their stories, we learn about the importance of participating in this leisure activity and how becoming heavily tattooed impacts their sense of self, gender and identity.

To examine the recent popularity of the tiny house movement with a critical eye toward the growing commodification of sustainability in a market that continues to shelter economic and class privilege, despite that the movement itself emerges from a desire to consume less and contribute to community more.

Written from the position of a tiny house builder and dweller, this study reads a range of recently published accounts of the tiny house movement, informed by contemporary work in environmental sociology. Investigates current rhetoric surrounding the movement with special attention to issues of mobility, consumption, and the movement’s romanticism, with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau.

Tiny house living can cultivate correctives to possible oversights or entitlements in environmental thought, challenge representations of the movement itself, and encourage those inside the “tiny” house movement to openly discuss the difficulties and capabilities endemic to tiny living.

Tiny houses, while still bound to forms of privilege, hold potential to be what some social science researchers have seen as best practice. Practices that link the practicality of realism with the zeal of romanticism can contribute to what has been found to be a positive correlation between conscious consumption and political activism.

This critique offers a gentle corrective to unmitigated praise of the current tiny house phenomenon in order to highlight the movement’s potential for addressing more pressing social justice and environmental issues.