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The purpose of this paper is to provide a sociological analysis of everyday interaction on the physical front line of the Norwegian welfare state.

The data are from a short-term ethnographic study in the reception/waiting rooms of three local welfare offices. These are important sites for access to benefits and services. The focus is on the situational and interactional aspects: how do people behave and interact with fellow visitors as well as with front line staff in this institutional context? For the analysis, Goffman’s conceptual framework on behaviour in public places is combined with concepts from a theory of access to welfare benefits.

The analysis shows how people fill these spaces with different activities, and how they are characterized by a particular type of welfare “officialdom”, boundary work and the handling of welfare stigma. Everyday interaction on the front line gives insights into the tensions in an all-in-one welfare bureaucracy and into the implementation of digitalization. The paper concludes that “old” and “new” tensions are expressed and managed at the front line, and suggests that more attention be paid to the new barriers that are developing.

The study contributes an ethnographic approach to a seldom studied part of welfare administration. The waiting rooms in the Norwegian welfare organization are actualized as a social arena influenced by new trends in public administration: one-stop shops, a new heterogeneity, activation policies and digitalization processes.

Focussing on the stratification of expatriates and the boundaries between different types of expatriates and locals, this study investigates the lived experiences and testimonies of Eastern European expatriates and their relationships in Dubai. The purpose of this article to develop the current knowledge on expatriates cohabiting in a cosmopolitan city by providing empirical evidence on expatriate bubbles in Dubai.

Explorative qualitative research was conducted using online and face-to-face interviews, along with a week-long intensive ethnography with observations, interviews and informal discussions.

Three distinct groups of people live in Dubai, namely, Westerners, expatriates from the East and Emiratis. They hardly mingle with each other on equal terms, but they do work in a complementary fashion. In Dubai, the status of East European experts, a subgroup of Westerners, is similar to their Western counterparts and in that they are considered European. Consequently, they experience a slight status development in comparison to when they work in the West. The research provides evidence on social stratification of expatriate bubbles.

This very short ethnography with a relatively small number of qualitative interviews could be complemented by a further in-depth study.

Expatriate bubbles have not previously been empirically investigated from an Eastern European perspective, nor has the unique case of Dubai been analysed extensively. Distinct expatriate bubbles with their stratified hierarchies have been identified in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the tests the author faced in her sociolegal fieldwork on Hawaiian cockfighting, and to draw broader lessons from these tests for other ethnographers of illegal organizations.

The author draws on six weeks of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing.

Relational work in ethnographic fieldwork requires skills academia does not always impart – including humility, a sense of humor and patience with yourself and other people. Each test we face is a part of the ongoing process of building these relationships.

As ethnographers, it is sometimes considered “taboo” to tell our stories – to explain our internal and external struggles in the field. This taboo makes a certain amount of sense. After all, we are trying to understand society, not reflect on our own development as people. Yet the taboo is also a pity. For one, it is unrealistic to think that we are “mere observers” whose presence in the field does not affect it. “Scrubbing” ourselves from the field necessarily scrubs out some of our data. It also omits parts of the story that other researchers might find interesting or instructive.

The purpose of this paper is to problematise the dominant conceptualisation of entrepreneurship by recognising the everyday resistance inherent in mundane entrepreneurial practices. Its principle purpose is to show how entrepreneurial activities enacted by ordinary individuals in a marginalised and oppressed context can be an important means of resisting economic adversity, social marginalisation and political (colonial) domination.

Framed within de Certeau’s conceptualisation of the practices of everyday life, this study utilises a “focussed ethnography”, relying on “participant observation” and “informal interviews”, to explore the perceptions and experiences of Palestinian women street vendors, and how they use everyday entrepreneurial practices in the open-air market of the Old City of Jerusalem to become socially and politically empowered.

The arguments in this paper demonstrate how marginalised Palestinian women, who are equipped with a genuine critical vision of their reality and a biophiliac attitude, use entrepreneuring to enact new possibilities for themselves and for their families. Through their entrepreneurial act of street vending, these women exemplify a struggle against economic and socio-political constraints, transforming the act of entrepreneuring from a mere economic practice to an all-encompassing human project, one with a more human face.

This paper extends the argument for the complex and dynamic nature of the phenomenon and exposes its political nature, hitherto inadequately addressed in existing literature, as well as uncovers the potential of entrepreneurialism to enhance individual empowerment and contribute to meaningful social change. In addition, it addresses the need for scholarly work that focuses on the everyday entrepreneurial activities carried out by ordinary individuals experiencing various forms of oppression in new and challenging spaces, which are seldom acknowledged within the dominant theoretical and research frameworks.

Little is known about gender relations in young African migrant families residing in Hong Kong (HK). This study aims to present a first-hand account of daily lived experiences of African international doctoral student couples residing in HK, with special emphases on their Africa–HK migratory motivations, perceptions of female-breadwinning status, the effects of HK Immigration policy on marital power structures and the influence of spousal relative statuses (“breadwinner” versus “dependent”) on couples gender role performances and decision-making participations.

This study used ethnographic method involving several indoor family visits, non-participant observations and 21 in-depth interviews in six African student families. Fieldnotes were taken and interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and interpreted using thematic content analysis.

Couples, especially dependent men, had a hard time deciding to migrate to HK for family reunion, unlike dependent women who willingly resigned to join their husbands in HK. Among the male dependents, the main reasons for migrating included anticipated economic returns, while women migrated in response to neolocal cultural expectations. Overall, patriarchy persisted – while men had the final say over key household decision-making domains, women remained primary performers of household chores, but manifested little bargaining power, restraining husband’s ability to spend family income when they are the family’s sole-earners. Women’s relative breadwinning status had very minimal significant impact.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of HK’s immigration policy on married African students’ migration motivations and the effects of female-breadwinning status on spousal gender relations in HK’s African student migrant households.

This article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.

The article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.

Changing embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.

The article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.

The article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.

This study aims to introduce context-specific intersectionality and trauma-informed perspectives for transformative services theory and practice. While transformative service research concerning vulnerable people has focused on well-being and alleviating suffering, there has been less attention paid to how the intersection of scales of social categorisation such as class, gender and cultural norms shapes experiences and outcomes. Likewise, there is a paucity of attention to how lived experiences of trauma among people, such as human trafficking survivors, can and should influence service interactions, delivery and outcomes.

The authors draw upon insights from a focused ethnographic study featuring narrative interviews with ten human trafficking survivors and seven rescue service industry stakeholders, as well as field observations, in Nigeria. Thus, this work enriches the limited scholarship on transformative services across Africa, where local cultural contexts have a significant influence on shaping service environments.

The authors identify how the intersections of socio-economic class, gender dynamics, cultural norms and trauma shape the service experience for survivors.

The authors argue for the criticality of intersectionality and trauma-informed perspectives to transformative services to improve the mental and economic well-being of survivors of human trafficking in the long term.

While there is anecdotal evidence that internationally mobile workers often form isolated nation-based communities or “expatriate bubbles,” previous academic scholarship on the expatriate communities and their subjective boundaries is limited. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the theoretical or conceptual understanding of expatriate communities as bubbles.

As developed by Lamont and Molnár (2002), the theory of symbolic boundaries is applied and set to scrutinize the production and maintenance of insulated expatriate communities. Empirically, an ethnographic study of a community of Finnish expatriates in a Southeast Asian country is undertaken to describe how symbolic boundaries are constructed.

The main theoretical implication of the paper is the recognition that expatriates themselves are involved in creating the “bubble.” The boundaries separating the national expatriate community are not externally imposed but can be viewed as consequences of the active boundary work of the expatriates. The empirical study demonstrates how the Finnish expatriates negotiated the symbolic boundaries of their community, drawing on cultural, moral and spatial modalities in different levels of boundary work.

There need to be more systematic attempts to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of insulated expatriate communities and their boundaries. This article contributes to the sociological conceptualization of expatriate bubbles by utilizing the symbolic boundary approach, which adds perspective to the embryonic theory of the subjective boundaries of expatriate communities. The multiplicity of different types of symbolic boundaries and their modalities suggests that an expatriate bubble is rarely a finished state or structure.

Existing regulatory frameworks for identifying and treating historic buildings and places reflect deference to expert rule, which privileges the values of a small number of heritage experts over the values of the majority of people who visit, work, and reside in historic environments. The purpose of this paper is to explore a fundamental shift in how US federal and local preservation laws address built heritage by suggesting a dynamic, adaptive regulatory framework that incorporates heterodox approaches to heritage and therefore is capable of accommodating contemporary sociocultural values.

The overall approach used is a comparative literature review from the fields of heterodox/orthodox heritage, heterodox/orthodox law, adaptive management, and participatory methods to inform the creation of a dynamic, adaptive regulatory framework.

Tools such as dialogical democracy and participatory action research are sufficiently pragmatic in implementation to envision how an adaptive regulatory framework could be implemented. This new framework would likely require heterodox definitions of law that move beyond justice as a primary purpose and broaden the nature of legal goods that can be protected while addressing discourses of power to benefit a larger group of stakeholders.

The authors suggest that an adaptive regulatory framework would be particularly beneficial for architectural and urban conservation planning, as it foregrounds considerations other than property rights in decision-making processes. While such a goal appears to be theoretically possible, the challenge will be to translate the theory of an adaptive regulatory framework into practice as there does not appear to be any precedent for its implementation. There will be issues with the need for increased resources to implement this framework.

To date, there have been few, if any, attempts to address critical heritage studies theory in the context of the regulatory environment. This paper appears to be the first such investigation in the literature.

The playground is a commonly advised means to integrate children into the public realm of “child-friendly cities”, yet research has tended not to examine it in relation to adjacent public space. This paper aims to understand the extent to which the playground – a socio-spatial phenomenon – facilitates children's integration into the public realm, enabling critical examination of the “child-friendly space” concept.

An ethnographic study was carried out across three sites in Athens, Greece, where typical neighbourhood playgrounds replicate features common across the global north. Methods combined observation (167 h; morning, afternoon, evening), visual-mapping and 61 semi-structured interviews with 112 playground users (including adults and children from the playgrounds and surroundings). Rigorous qualitative thematic analysis, involving an iterative post-coding process, allowed identification of spatial patterns and emergent themes.

Findings reveal perceptions surrounding the protective and age-specific aspects of child-friendly design, limit the playgrounds' public value. However, a paradox emerges whereby the playgrounds' adjacency to public spaces designed without child-friendly principles affords children's engagement with the public realm.

Reconceptualisation of the “child-friendly playground” is proposed, embracing interdependence with the public realm – highly significant for child-friendly urban design theory and practice globally. Researchers are encouraged to compare findings in other geographical contexts.

This original finding is enabled by the novel approach to studying the playground in relation to adjacent public realm. The study also offers the first empirical examination of child-friendly city principles – participation in social life and urban play – in a Greek context, addressing a geographical gap in literature on children's everyday spaces.