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This contribution argues that Kathy Charmaz's career did not burst into full intellectual bloom until the last 25 years of her life – from 55 to her death at 80. I examine why and how this scholarly blossoming happened so late in her life and the nature of its many manifestations, especially research on a wide variety of social justice issues. After her initial focus on medical sociology, specializing in chronic illness, Kathy became an innovative and renowned qualitative methodologist, developing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) method taken up in many amazingly heterogeneous scholarly fields transnationally.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

This chapter focuses on Norman K. Denzin's vast and enduring contributions to sociology and the study of research methods and methodology, particularly with respect to “us[ing] the tools of the critical sociological imagination” (Denzin, 1989) as we conduct our research. Through revisiting and extending lessons and principles from his book The Research Act (1989) – especially the need for “triangulation” – in relation to C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination (1959), this chapter explores how cultivated critical sociological imaginations can help researchers best meet our “obligations to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference” (Denzin, 1989) throughout all phases of the research act.

The paper has two purposes: to introduce a new perspective on power and resistance in equalities work; and to trouble either or theorisations of success and failure in this work. Instead it offers a new means of exploring micro‐practice.

The paper applies/develops an “actor network theory” (ANT) analysis to a single case study of Iopia, a Black woman equalities practitioner working in a prison education context. It uses this to explore the ways in which Iopia interacts with a variety of human and non‐human objects to challenge racism in this context.

Iopia, from an initial position of marginality (as a Black woman experiencing racism) is able to establish herself (by virtue of this same identity as a Black woman combating racism) as central to a “new” network for equality and diversity. This new network both challenges and sustains narrow exclusionary definitions of diversity. Thus, Iopia's case provides an example of the contradictions, and paradox, experienced by those working for equality and diversity.

In the future, this type of feminist ANT analysis could be more fully developed and integrated with critical race and other critical cultural theories as these relate to equalities work.

The approach, and, in particular, the notion of translation, can be used by practitioners in thinking through the ways in which they can use material objects to draw in multiple “others” into their own networks.

The article is one of the first to explore equalities workers via the lens of ANT. It is unique in its analysis of the material objects constituting both diversity workers and diversity work and thus its analysis of diversity workers and their work as part of a complex set of social and “material” relations.

Features a case study of a major bank which aimed to achieve corporate transformation and a dramatic improvement in service quality. The links between service quality, customer satisfaction and corporate profitability in UK banking are outlined in order to set in context the many quality improvement initiatives undertaken by UK retail banks in recent years. Business process re‐engineering has proved to be the most popular of service quality initiatives but most have been limited to single processes rather than corporate transformation as portrayed in the case study. The five‐year corporate transformation programme focuses on employee communications, the redesign of work, recruitment and reward processes and the introduction of consumer research‐based national quality standards. The bank was rewarded for its efforts, coming top for three consecutive years in the Which? service quality surveys and, according to its own data, which contributed to a rise in customer satisfaction and customer retention at a time of declining employee satisfaction. Future developments in service quality segmentation and a working definition of service quality are proposed.

This paper aims to propose a paradigm of case-supported principle-based behavior (CPB) to help ensure ethical behavior of autonomous machines. The requirements, methods, implementation and evaluation components of the CPB paradigm are detailed.

The authors argue that ethically significant behavior of autonomous systems can be guided by explicit ethical principles abstracted from a consensus of ethicists. Particular cases of ethical dilemmas where ethicists agree on the ethically relevant features and the right course of action are used to help discover principles needed for ethical guidance of the behavior of autonomous systems.

Such a consensus, along with its corresponding principle, is likely to emerge in many areas in which autonomous systems are apt to be deployed and for the actions they are liable to undertake, as we are more likely to agree on how machines ought to treat us than on how human beings ought to treat one another.

Principles are comprehensive and comprehensible declarative abstractions that succinctly represent this consensus in a centralized, extensible and auditable way. Systems guided by such principles are likely to behave in a more acceptably ethical manner, permitting a richer set of behaviors in a wider range of domains than systems not so guided, and will exhibit the ability to defend this behavior with pointed logical explanations.

A new threshold has been reached where machines are being asked to make decisions that can have an ethically relevant impact on human beings. It can be argued that such machine ethics ought to be the driving force in determining the manner and extent to which autonomous systems should be permitted to interact with them.

Developing and employing principles for this use is a complex process, and new tools and methodologies will be needed by engineers to help contend with this complexity. The authors offer the CPB paradigm as an abstraction to help mitigate this complexity.

Nearly 40 years since they first appeared, there is renewed interest in dashboards, engendered by the diffusion of business intelligence (BI) desktop software, such as Power BI, QlikView and Tableau, denoted collectively as “self-service” BI. Using these commodity software tools, the work to construct dashboards apparently becomes easier and more manageable and no longer requires the intervention of specialists. This paper aims to analyse the implementation of this kind of commodity dashboard in a university, exploring its role in performance management processes and investigating whether the dashboard affects the organisation (or not).

This paper focusses on an action research project developed by the authors, where the objective was to design and implement a dynamic performance measurement tool fitting the needs of department directors. The three authors were all involved in the project, respectively, as project manager, dashboard implementation manager and accounting manager of the studied organisation.

The results reveal a specific but complex change to the procedures and outcomes in the organisation studied, where the dashboard becomes a boundary infrastructure, thereby reviving technical and organisational problems that had been latent for years.

In this paper, the authors contribute to the debate on the digital age and the role of accounting with their exploration into the “revolution” of self-service BI tools. The democratisation and flexibility of these instruments put into discussion two core and somewhat controversial functions of accounting: data integration and personalised reporting.

The project – AskingBristol – uses university students to connect third sector organizations with particular “asks” to organizations which might be able to respond with “offers”. The authors describe the task of the experiment as being an attempt to embed students and their universities within the cities that they are based in, but are often not really very connected to.

This reflective report on practice describes an initiative aimed at producing a piece of “social infrastructure”. Written by the four people involved, the authors theorize and evaluate what we have done so far and what we hope to do in future.

Over two phases, it has had some success, and we think represents a concrete approach to thinking about how “civic” ideas might gain traction within universities. Using ideas about social networks, boundary objects and infrastructure the authors explore the opportunities and problems of such a project, stressing that it allows co-ordination between a wide variety of people and organizations that do not necessarily share common interests.

This is one “experiment”, in one city, but it demonstrates the possibilities of getting “civic” universities engaged with local third sector organizations.

If it became a piece of social infrastructure, such a project could embed ideas about “civic”, “impact”, “engagement” and so on into the routines of the city and the university.

Though Asking Bristol cannot solve the problems of the city, it shows that we can transfer resources, time, skills and space to where they are needed.

The authors do not think anything like this has been attempted before, and hope that sharing it will stimulate some comparisons, and perhaps some dissemination of the idea.

Anselm is perhaps best known for creating the grounded theory method with Barney G. Glaser. The Discovery of Grounded Theory was a cutting-edge book that fueled the qualitative revolution. I agree – strongly – with Norm Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994, p. ix) that a qualitative revolution has taken place in the United States. The Discovery book arrived on the sociological scene at just the right time. Quantitative research had become systematic and quantitative researchers saw their work as “scientific.” The worship of a narrow conception of science abounded. By the time Anselm studied at Chicago, qualitative scholars had moved from life histories to case studies and established a rich ethnographic tradition that shaped Chicago School sociology in the 1940s. Yet, by the time Barney and Anselm wrote The Discovery of Grounded Theory in 1967, quantification was becoming entrenched as “the” sociological method. The ethnographic tradition was losing ground.