Fieldwork Evidence Research Articles

Power Systems in Four Gwynedd Slate Quarries

The slate industry of Gwynedd dominated world production of roofing slates and of architectural slabs in the 19th century, but the economics of the early 20th century were far less favourable. Many individual quarries attempted to introduce more cost-effective technology, with mixed results. The following article analyses documentary sources and field-work evidence in order to examine the way in which four quarries made use of a variety of different power sources and methods of power transmission in the years 1898 to 1934, and concludes that the industry continued to be technically innovative in many respects but that the old and the new could be seen working alongside each other and the results of installing new machinery did not ensure long-term prosperity.

Public action and its limits: re-examining the politics of hunger alleviation in eastern India

This study examines the role of ‘public action’ within a democratic political framework in placing pressure on government to implement effective policy to alleviate hunger. Drawing on fieldwork evidence conducted by the author in the highly publicised Kalahandi and Naupada districts of western Orissa, the article questions the extent to which public action through India's liberal democratic framework has translated into government commitment to improve the quality of its relief and welfare administration. It suggests that successive governments in Orissa have adopted a range of alternative strategies, both within and outside the sphere of parliamentary electoral politics, to maintain electoral support and to offset public criticism before they have acted to improve administration of food security support. In doing so, it argues for the need to broaden the focus of debates surrounding the relationship between public action and hunger alleviation.

Accommodating Negative Client Perceptions: A Process of Neutralization

Fieldwork evidence and interview data are used to demonstrate that indigent criminal defendants believe legal representation provided by public defenders is inferior to privately retained counsel. While acknowledging this pejorative image, public defenders tend to trivialize client perceptions. Techniques of neutralization are used to describe the accommodation patterns utilized by public defenders to cope with this negative image. Findings are discussed in relation to these neutralization techniques.

CRIME, LOCALITIES AND THE MULTI-AGENCY APPROACH

The 'multi-agency' approach to crime prevention has received considerable attention in recent years. This paper examines both theoretical and practical aspects of multi-agency work, in the light of research conducted over two years in a small number of neighbourhoods in inner London and a Lancashire town. Two contrasting forms of conventional understanding of the multi-agency approach—the 'benevolent as against the 'conspiratorial' thesis—are examined, and each found inadequate. Building on the evidence of research fieldwork, the paper strives for a more socially nuanced understanding which is alive to the complexities of locality-based crime prevention initiatives and of the power differentials running between different state agencies, as well as to the competing sectional interests within existing communities. Multi-agency strategies can undoubtedly have an impact on the lives of people within a locality, but these are not always the outcomes that are intended. This paper offers a preliminary attempt to conceptualise a perspective on the 'multi-agency' approach as it can be seen to operate in a specific number of localities, paying particular attention to the role of the local state. It is based on two years of fieldwork in four localities, three in inner London and one in a northern town, Milltown, which was undertaken as part of an ESRC funded project 'Crime, Community and the Inter-Agency Dimension'.1 The broad argument is that, at base, there is a fundamental set of conflicts between the state agencies we have focused on in our research, namely, the police, social services and the probation service.2 This structural conflict is either exaggerated or mediated by our other clear finding that there are structured power relations between the state agencies. In other words, in locally based crime prevention initiatives, some agencies are consistently more powerful than others. These two propositions form a framework for our arguments in the second part of the paper, which uses fieldwork examples to illustrate how, through multi-agency approaches to crime prevention and crime control, state 1 The paper was originally presented by Alice Sampson to the British Criminology Conference at the University of Sheffield, July 1987. It is based upon a collaborative research project between the University of Lancaster and Middlesex Polytechnic, funded by ESRC grant number EO 6250035. The research team wish to record their thanks to John Friend, who acted as management science consultant to the project. All the localities mentioned in the paper are identified by pseudonyms. 2 The focus of our research was originally state agencies within the criminal justice system, although this was necessarily broadened out during the course of the fieldwork, particularly in view of the prominent role of local authority housing departments in estate-based crime prevention initiatives. The research methodology involved interviews of agency personnel, together with extensive observational studies of police consultative committees, community forums, etc.

Persistence or Change? Conflicting Interpretations of Peripheral Minorities

In studies of the relationship between peripheral ethnic minority groups and the larger society in industrialised societies, it is commonly assumed that the minority is in the process of assimilation or is becoming economically dependent, A number of theoretical arguments on the nature of change are reviewed. The case of Gypsy communities in Europe and North America is used to demonstrate the inappropriateness of theories that predict a transformation of the minority group's culture—a picture of continuity and persistence appears more reasonable in the light of historical and fieldwork evidence.

A Home for the Disabled: Marginality and Reality

The participant-observer study of a Cheshire Home which is described in this article was intended to bring some fieldwork evidence to bear on currently popular speculations in the field of the sociology of knowledge. These speculations are best known through the writing of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which draws heavily on the work of Alfred Schutz. The reality of everyday life, it is said, is massively taken for granted and presents itself as not in need of further analysis: it rests on 'typifications' which make patterns of social intercourse easy and unselfconscious and so constitute the social structure. But sub-universes of meaning (such as Schutz examined in his study of Don Quixotel) are not only possible but today highly probable: counter-realities are the home of counter-identities.2 Schutz had written off 'attentional modification' which converts what is taken for granted into something deeply problematical;3 Berger and Luckmann talk about 'a more complex distribution of knowledge' that occurs when bastards, lepers, idiots and cripples congregate in durable groups and establish counter-worlds with their own institutionalized clusters of counter-identities. New 'plausibility structures' are established for counter definitions of reality.4 The taken-forgrantedness of everyday reality is apparently less massive and far more fragile than one had supposed; and in Berger's later writings it is highly precarious. Modern man lives in 'discrepant worlds of meaning' and is 'peculiarly unfinished' and conversion-prone.5 Berger's sociology of knowledge draws heavily on notions of socialization (and resocialization) which are derived from Goffman's studies of institutional life and from a too simple interpretation of G. H. Mead.6 (Mead, of course, knew that the self is a social system in which I interacts with me. It does not collapse nearly as readily as Berger imagines when familiar social props are withdrawn.) I therefore examined a Cheshire Home as a marginal world which perhaps gave a base for a counter reality and a cluster of counter identities by focusing on processes of resocialization. I looked for evidence of resocialization on the one hand as stages in a 'moral career', on the other as a process of shedding old typifications and conceptual categories and acquiring new ones. In view of the great weight given by Berger and Luckmann to