Robert M Emerson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3604128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert M Emerson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert M |
| FAMILY NAME | Emerson |
| SIGNATURE | EMERSON R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2508 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home
When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic c…
Judging Delinquents: Context and Process in Juvenile Court
Juvenile court has elicited the interest and criticism of lawyers, social workers, and criminologists, but less attention from sociologists. This book adds to growing sociological literature on the operations of legal institutions. It describes some critical aspects of the functioning of the juvenile court, an institution charged with judging and treating delinquents. To this end, it analyzes the nature of the court operation, the handling of del…
L’expérience des problèmes publics
L'analyse des problèmes sociaux est l'ordinaire des sciences sociales. Pour rendre compte de leur constitution, celles-ci ont souvent recours à un argument constructiviste. Les enquêtes présentées dans ce volume proposent une approche alternative, inspirée du pragmatisme de John Dewey. Les problèmes sociaux n'y sont pas envisagés comme de simples « constructions sociales et historiques ». Ils procèdent de dynamiques de problématisation et de publ…
Melvin Pollner and Ethnomethodology
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Second Edition
From Normal Conflict to Normative Deviance: The Micro-Politics of Trouble in Close Relationships
When people experience trouble in their relations with others, they may come to define the problem in nonjudgmental ways as a conflict to be resolved or in moralistic terms as a product of the other's deviant intentions or character. Empirical materials on troubles among college roommates reveal an initial preference for the former, with the latter typically emerging if and when initial response efforts fail and the trouble escalates. These findi…
Prendre des notes de terrain
À première vue, il semblerait que l’enquête sur les significations des membres ne soit pas fondamentalement une affaire d’écriture, mais d’activité sur le terrain – liée aux questions que l’on pose et aux positions que l’on prend pour se mettre à l’écoute et observer les activités d’autrui. Les significations des membres ne sont cependant pas des objets immaculés que l’on « découvrirait », tout simplement. Ces significations sont plutôt le résult…
L’engagement ethnographique
Observer, participer, comprendre, décrire sont les étapes clés du travail de l'ethnographe. Elles ont donné lieu à de véritables controverses, d'autant plus intenses que s'est accru l'engagement du chercheur dans la cité. Présentant des textes récents, mais déjà classiques, L'engagement ethnographique se lit comme une anthologie de réflexions sur le travail de terrain. Du terrain aux comptes rendus de situations sociales, l'ethnographie est, plus…
Ethnography, interaction and ordinary trouble
■ With the increased popularity and spread of sociological ethnography, one of the core elements of classic Chicago-style fieldwork - an abiding commitment to examine ongoing social interaction - has sometimes slipped from sight. One fruitful way of increasing sensitivity to and insights into interactional processes is to look at ordinary, small troubles, the often fleeting moments of upset and disruption that arise routinely in many interactions…
Responding to Roommate Troubles: Reconsidering Informal Dyadic Control
Existing analyses of informal control within dyadic relations neglect the nonpenal responses that characterize many such control efforts, and they give minimal attention to the interactional and interpretive processes that characterize such responses. And while dispute transformation provides a well-developed model of the development of dyadic disputes, this model is limited in prespecifying "injury" as the starting point for these processes and …
Reflections on the study of informal social control
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
Cross-Cultural Interviewing
Representation, Responsibility and Reliability in Participant-Observation
Institutional Ethnography
Ethnomethodology and Ethnography
Participant Observation and Fieldnotes
Contemporary Field Research: Perspectives and Formulations, 2d Ed
On Being Stalked
Over the past decade “stalking” has emerged as a new social problem. Some reported cases of stalking involve efforts to extract vengeance from another right from the start; others ultimately come to center around vengeful threats and violence. But the dynamic characteristic of most cases of what ultimately come to be recognized as stalking involves efforts to establish (or re-establish) a relationship in the face of the other's resistance. This p…
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
In this book, three leading scholars develop a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice about how to write useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, both cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes as examples, they illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies, and show how transforming direct obse…
Capital Trials and Representations of Violence
Sociolegal research focused on equal protection and the death penalty faces an impasse as the result of recent Supreme Court decisions limiting the admissability of social science research in general and of aggregate data on bias in the application of capital punishment in particular. This impasse, however, provides an opportunity to renew investigation and analysis of the deeper meaning and implications of the death penalty in contemporary socie…
Case Processing and Interorganizational Knowledge: Detecting the 'Real Reasons' for Referrals
Research on referrals in social control decision-making has focused on referral sources and outcomes, neglecting actual processes of making and accepting referrals. This article highlights referral processes by analyzing receiving agents' use of interorganizational knowledge of the decision-making tendencies and concerns of sending agents to assess the meaning and import of referrals. Such interorganizational knowledge includes both general backg…
Plea Bargaining
On the Uses of Members' Responses to Researchers' Accounts
Ethnographic field research has oscillated between suspicion and celebration of members' representations of social reality. The emergence of phenomenologically oriented approaches in the social sciences has resulted in a shift toward the latter position. Indeed, the member's voice has been endowed with such authority that some have suggested that members' responses to a researcher's description comprise a significant measure of the description's …
Reflection and Reflexity in Ethnographic Fieldwork
Four Ways to Improve the Craft of Fieldwork
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Second Edition
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
In this book, three leading scholars develop a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice about how to write useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, both cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes as examples, they illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies, and show how transforming direct obse…
The Micro-Politics of Trouble
Journal Article The Micro-Politics of Trouble Get access Robert M. Emerson, Robert M. Emerson University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Sheldon L. Messinger Sheldon L. Messinger University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 25, Issue 2, 1 December 1977, Pages 121–134, https://doi.…
Holistic Effects in Social Control Decision-Making
Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making-case sets, caseloads, and collections of c…
L’engagement ethnographique
Observer, participer, comprendre, décrire sont les étapes clés du travail de l'ethnographe. Elles ont donné lieu à de véritables controverses, d'autant plus intenses que s'est accru l'engagement du chercheur dans la cité. Présentant des textes récents, mais déjà classiques, L'engagement ethnographique se lit comme une anthologie de réflexions sur le travail de terrain. Du terrain aux comptes rendus de situations sociales, l'ethnographie est, plus…
Dirty Work Designations: Their Features and Consequences in a Psychiatric Setting
This paper explores the origin and consequences of a community mental health team's designation of some of its encounters with clients as “shit work.” First, the paper considers the perspective through which team members reviewed and characterized their performance. “Shit work” characterizations emerged when team members felt not only unable to do something for clients in a therapeutic sense, but compelled to do something to them in a coercive se…
Judging Delinquents: Context and Process in Juvenile Court
Juvenile court has elicited the interest and criticism of lawyers, social workers, and criminologists, but less attention from sociologists. This book adds to growing sociological literature on the operations of legal institutions. It describes some critical aspects of the functioning of the juvenile court, an institution charged with judging and treating delinquents. To this end, it analyzes the nature of the court operation, the handling of del…
On Last Resorts
In a variety of social control settings, the use of extreme sanctions is held to be appropriate only as a last resort. This paper examines the nature, occasions, and accomplishment of such last-resort responses. Last resorts characteristically claim that there is no alternative but to invoke some dubiously valued sanction, a claim advanced against the backdrop of the "normal remedies" customarily used in a particular setting. Requested last resor…
Case Processing and Interorganizational Knowledge: Detecting the 'Real Reasons' for Referrals
Research on referrals in social control decision-making has focused on referral sources and outcomes, neglecting actual processes of making and accepting referrals. This article highlights referral processes by analyzing receiving agents' use of interorganizational knowledge of the decision-making tendencies and concerns of sending agents to assess the meaning and import of referrals. Such interorganizational knowledge includes both general backg…
Observational Field Work
The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather as reciprocally constructing phenomena. Despite this ...Read More
Ethnography, interaction and ordinary trouble
■ With the increased popularity and spread of sociological ethnography, one of the core elements of classic Chicago-style fieldwork - an abiding commitment to examine ongoing social interaction - has sometimes slipped from sight. One fruitful way of increasing sensitivity to and insights into interactional processes is to look at ordinary, small troubles, the often fleeting moments of upset and disruption that arise routinely in many interactions…
Responding to Roommate Troubles: Reconsidering Informal Dyadic Control
Existing analyses of informal control within dyadic relations neglect the nonpenal responses that characterize many such control efforts, and they give minimal attention to the interactional and interpretive processes that characterize such responses. And while dispute transformation provides a well-developed model of the development of dyadic disputes, this model is limited in prespecifying "injury" as the starting point for these processes and …
Four Ways to Improve the Craft of Fieldwork
From Normal Conflict to Normative Deviance: The Micro-Politics of Trouble in Close Relationships
When people experience trouble in their relations with others, they may come to define the problem in nonjudgmental ways as a conflict to be resolved or in moralistic terms as a product of the other's deviant intentions or character. Empirical materials on troubles among college roommates reveal an initial preference for the former, with the latter typically emerging if and when initial response efforts fail and the trouble escalates. These findi…
On Being Stalked
Over the past decade “stalking” has emerged as a new social problem. Some reported cases of stalking involve efforts to extract vengeance from another right from the start; others ultimately come to center around vengeful threats and violence. But the dynamic characteristic of most cases of what ultimately come to be recognized as stalking involves efforts to establish (or re-establish) a relationship in the face of the other's resistance. This p…
On the Uses of Members' Responses to Researchers' Accounts
Ethnographic field research has oscillated between suspicion and celebration of members' representations of social reality. The emergence of phenomenologically oriented approaches in the social sciences has resulted in a shift toward the latter position. Indeed, the member's voice has been endowed with such authority that some have suggested that members' responses to a researcher's description comprise a significant measure of the description's …
Economics and Enterprise in Board and Care Homes for the Mentally Ill
The Micropolitics of Trouble in a Psychiatric Board and Care Facility
This article examines a variety of micropolitical processes characteristic of a psychiatric board and care facility. Within the relatively "loose" organizational structure, troubles and their subsequent handling by staff become particularly critical determinants of resident fates. Staff understandings of and response to resident troubles are shaped by the nature and level of staff support and by the distinctive institutional reputations residents…
Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home
When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic c…
Melvin Pollner and Ethnomethodology
Reflection and Reflexity in Ethnographic Fieldwork
Reflections on the study of informal social control
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
Capital Trials and Representations of Violence
Sociolegal research focused on equal protection and the death penalty faces an impasse as the result of recent Supreme Court decisions limiting the admissability of social science research in general and of aggregate data on bias in the application of capital punishment in particular. This impasse, however, provides an opportunity to renew investigation and analysis of the deeper meaning and implications of the death penalty in contemporary socie…
Trouble and the Politics of Contemporary Social Control Institutions
Dirty Work Designations: Their Features and Consequences in a Psychiatric Setting
This paper explores the origin and consequences of a community mental health team's designation of some of its encounters with clients as “shit work.” First, the paper considers the perspective through which team members reviewed and characterized their performance. “Shit work” characterizations emerged when team members felt not only unable to do something for clients in a therapeutic sense, but compelled to do something to them in a coercive se…
The Micro-Politics of Trouble
Journal Article The Micro-Politics of Trouble Get access Robert M. Emerson, Robert M. Emerson University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Sheldon L. Messinger Sheldon L. Messinger University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 25, Issue 2, 1 December 1977, Pages 121–134, https://doi.…
Policies and Practices of Psychiatric Case Selection
This paper describes the factors affecting how psychiatric emergency teams (PET teams) evaluate and responded to, legitimated or discounted, the calls of community members. Such calls were processed on two distinct levels-the psychiatric and the practical. PET teams had a variety of policies and procedures for assessing the psychiatric "seriousness" of a case. On many occasions, however, the psychiatric ordering would be subordinated to organizat…
Predicting Dangerousness: The Social Construction of Psychiatric Reality
Economics and Enterprise in Board and Care Homes for the Mentally Ill
Observational Field Work
The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather as reciprocally constructing phenomena. Despite this ...Read More
On Last Resorts
In a variety of social control settings, the use of extreme sanctions is held to be appropriate only as a last resort. This paper examines the nature, occasions, and accomplishment of such last-resort responses. Last resorts characteristically claim that there is no alternative but to invoke some dubiously valued sanction, a claim advanced against the backdrop of the "normal remedies" customarily used in a particular setting. Requested last resor…
Holistic Effects in Social Control Decision-Making
Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making-case sets, caseloads, and collections of c…
The Micropolitics of Trouble in a Psychiatric Board and Care Facility
This article examines a variety of micropolitical processes characteristic of a psychiatric board and care facility. Within the relatively "loose" organizational structure, troubles and their subsequent handling by staff become particularly critical determinants of resident fates. Staff understandings of and response to resident troubles are shaped by the nature and level of staff support and by the distinctive institutional reputations residents…
Trouble and the Politics of Contemporary Social Control Institutions
New Ethnographies
The Protection of Children: State Intervention and Family Life (Book)
Reflection and Reflexity in Ethnographic Fieldwork
Four Ways to Improve the Craft of Fieldwork
Plea Bargaining
On the Uses of Members' Responses to Researchers' Accounts
Ethnographic field research has oscillated between suspicion and celebration of members' representations of social reality. The emergence of phenomenologically oriented approaches in the social sciences has resulted in a shift toward the latter position. Indeed, the member's voice has been endowed with such authority that some have suggested that members' responses to a researcher's description comprise a significant measure of the description's …
Case Processing and Interorganizational Knowledge: Detecting the 'Real Reasons' for Referrals
Research on referrals in social control decision-making has focused on referral sources and outcomes, neglecting actual processes of making and accepting referrals. This article highlights referral processes by analyzing receiving agents' use of interorganizational knowledge of the decision-making tendencies and concerns of sending agents to assess the meaning and import of referrals. Such interorganizational knowledge includes both general backg…
Capital Trials and Representations of Violence
Sociolegal research focused on equal protection and the death penalty faces an impasse as the result of recent Supreme Court decisions limiting the admissability of social science research in general and of aggregate data on bias in the application of capital punishment in particular. This impasse, however, provides an opportunity to renew investigation and analysis of the deeper meaning and implications of the death penalty in contemporary socie…
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
In this book, three leading scholars develop a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice about how to write useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, both cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes as examples, they illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies, and show how transforming direct obse…
On Being Stalked
Over the past decade “stalking” has emerged as a new social problem. Some reported cases of stalking involve efforts to extract vengeance from another right from the start; others ultimately come to center around vengeful threats and violence. But the dynamic characteristic of most cases of what ultimately come to be recognized as stalking involves efforts to establish (or re-establish) a relationship in the face of the other's resistance. This p…
Ethnomethodology and Ethnography
Participant Observation and Fieldnotes
Contemporary Field Research: Perspectives and Formulations, 2d Ed
Representation, Responsibility and Reliability in Participant-Observation
Institutional Ethnography
Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Psychiatry (7 works)