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The Chicago School of Sociology heralded a new age: that of the rise and establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in the US. It also spurred on an intellectual tradition in ethnography that focuses on a wide array of methodological tools and empirical data with a focus on the specificity of place that continues to live on in contemporary urban sociology. Yet, its traditions have also been extensively criticized. Burawoy (2000) is one preeminent scholar, who has denounced the Chicago School as being parochial, ahistorical, and decontextualized from the national and international processes that shape cities. Instead, he calls for a move toward “global ethnography,” one that focuses on “global processes, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al., 2000). Increasingly, US urban sociologists study research sites that are located outside the US and pay attention to how global actors and/or transnational connections influence US dynamics. Given this trend, what, if any lessons can global and urban sociologists take away from the Chicago School? In this chapter, I highlight three such lessons: (1) the global is central to city life; (2) rooting our work in the specificities of place helps extend and build theory; and (3) the School still provides useful conceptual and methodological tools to study the global. In doing so, I argue that scholars should recognize the plurality of approaches to global ethnography and how each approach can further our understanding of how the global shapes social life.

This article presents a theoretical and empirical discussion of the way in which computer technologies (the internet) influence the production of sexuality, sexual fantasies, and specific sexual behaviors. This discussion is based on the case study of an Israeli website for sexual encounters, which its users say has brought out (or enabled) a specific sexuality that would not have emerged were it not for the new technology. This article focuses on a particular population from among the sites users: married men who surf the site to find men with whom to have one-off sexual encounters, and who report a positive experience of “life in the closet.” A total of 34 men were interviewed, 6 face-to-face and 28 in online interviews. The findings include three main accounts: (1) most of the interviewees said that the new technology (the website) enabled them to invent a new existential category, that of “married straight men who sometimes have sexual encounters with other men.” This category is seen as enabling a new sexuality, or a sexuality that would not have been enacted were it not for the internet; (2) the interviewees spoke of how “life in the closet,” and in particular entering and exiting it (which was called a “zigzag sexuality” or the “revolving doors of the closet”), creates an experience of a vital sexuality that fits in with their marriage to a woman and their life as a “straight” man; (3) many interviewees explained how the technology enabled them to keep their sexuality secret, where the secrecy itself was said to create a unique sexual desire. The discussion section shows how the new technology enables individuals to invent a new sexuality, to enact unique sexual fantasies, and to maintain an alternative self, or alternative components of their concept of self.

Purpose – Disability-related politics and discourse in developed countries seldom includes the voices of disabled people from immigrant ethnic communities. Attending to the experiences of people with disabilities among immigrant communities is particularly salient when considering questions about community participation and citizenship in the context of immigrant-receiving societies such as the USA. This chapter aims to shed light on this topic by examining the narratives of refugees with disabilities resettled in the USA.

Methodology – A global ethnography framework was used to collect narrative data from eight Cambodian and seven Somali refugees with disabilities through observations, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and social network surveys. Additionally semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 service providers/key experts. Data were analyzed using grounded theory techniques.

Findings – Data from the study revealed that the Cambodian and Somali participants were distinct in terms of their access to sources of support and community and in their experiences of community participation barriers. Depending on their respective circumstances, they engaged in various tactics and strategies to negotiate these barriers and to create new networks of support and advocacy.

Limitations – The study sample was purposively selected and therefore findings represent only the views and experiences of the participants precluding any claims about generalizability. Furthermore, owing to the cross-cultural nature of this research there is a possibility that certain linguistic and cultural nuances were missed during data collection and analysis.

Implications – Findings suggest a need to recognize and support heterogeneous disability experiences and diverse expressions of “disability activism” enacted in individually, contextually, and culturally preferred ways in order to draw disabled people from diverse groups into the broader disability community in the USA.

Adopting a two-sited approach, this paper examines frames deployed by a network of organizations by developing the concept of the transnational field. The transnational field is the geo-specific field within which the movement organizations are encompassed which can explain the differential power across ties in a transnational network. It enables analyzing whether frames at the local and transnational level are similar, remain as is or are altered within a field which is mediated by the power dynamics embedded in the political-economic-cultural relationships between countries. Using qualitative data, this study of ties between movement organizations in the Amazonian region of Ecuador (local level) and organizations in the United States (transnational level) provides evidence for empirical and narrative fidelity of frames at both ends of the network. The two-sited approach enriches the understanding of resistance to globalization by prioritizing the perspective of indigenous peoples in the Global South highlighting the North–South power dynamic. Departing from common assumptions about the power of US-based groups in the choice of frames deployed, the analysis show that ties between organizations in a transnational network are complex as they rely on each other for resources and information. We discuss the conditions under which local frames are deployed or redefined at the transnational level.

Workplace temporalities are being reshaped under globalization. Some scholars argue that work time is becoming more flexible, de-territorializing, and even disappearing. I provide an alternative picture of what is happening to work time by focusing on the customer service call center industry in India. Through case studies of three firms, and interviews with 80 employees, managers, and officials, I show how this industry involves a “reversal” of work time in which organizations and their employees shift their schedules entirely to the night. Rather than liberation from time, workers experience a hyper-management, rigidification, and re-territorialization of temporalities. This temporal order pervades both the physical and virtual tasks of the job, and has consequences for workers’ health, families, future careers, and the wider community of New Delhi. I argue that this trend is prompted by capital mobility within the information economy, expansion of the service sector, and global inequalities of time, and is reflective of an emerging stratification of employment temporalities across lines of the Global North and South.

In a paper written for a theory development forum (Calás & Smircich, 1999) we insisted that the postmodern moment, in its association with poststructuralist analyses, brought much of value to organization and management studies. At the time we observed that although such a moment may have already passed, its traces continued to be seen and expressed in several important intellectual developments. In particular, we identified poststructuralist feminist theories, postcolonial theory, actor-network theory, and narrative approaches to theory as productive heirs of the postmodern moment in organization and management studies.

Three main claims have generally been made regarding the beneficial impact of increased global integration on local women's movements. First, increased global integration is said to create opportunities for local movements to participate in international conferences and partnerships with international organizations (Gray, Kittilson, & Sandholtz, 2006; Sassen, 1998, pp. 96–97). Second, it is said to help local movements participate in transnational networks that work together on global issues such as trafficking or domestic violence and are able to exert pressure both on transnational organizations such as the UN and the European Union and on national states to adopt policies that support norms of equality for women (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Moghadam, 2000). Third, it is argued that both these forms of cross-border contact create opportunities for learning feminist framing strategies that focus on gender equality and freedom of choice and are superior to local forms of activism that are organized around motherhood or “parochial” identities (Sassen, 1998).

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce interviewing as an exploratory research approach for understanding the lived experiences of individuals and groups in sports and physical cultural contexts. The author draws on her own research with snowboarders to illustrate some of the standard and unique issues related to conducting interviews as part of ethnographic fieldwork.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter begins with a brief history of the development of qualitative interviews and their various uses in sport studies. The author then provides a description of her use of ‘postmodern-inspired’ interviews as part of a broader ethnographic study of snowboarding culture. Following this, she adopts an alternative representational approach to illustrate some of the practical, ethical, political and embodied issues for reflexive researchers working in the critical paradigm and conducting interviews in sport and physical cultural fields.

Findings – The chapter illustrates the value of a postmodern approach to interviewing that recognises the interview as more than textual, and gives greater consideration to the affective, sensuous, relational, embodied and socio-spatial dimensions of each interview event.

Research limitations/implications – The chapter examines the strengths and limitations of qualitative interviewing, with particular attention to the potential and perils of interviewing in the sports field.

Originality/value – The chapter provides a succinct introduction to the use of interviewing in sport and physical culture, and makes an innovative contribution by focusing on ethnographic interviews.