What is it like to have lived with bulimia for most of your life? To have a mother who is retarded? To fight a health insurance company in order to survive breast cancer? This title tackles questions such as these. It demonstrates how ethnographic data can be converted into memorable experiences that readers can use in the classroom.

This text provides a foundational understanding of the writing process associated with innovative forms of ethnographic writing. It offers advice, examples, and exercises for every step in the ethnographic writng process, including field observations, notes, narrative development, and editing.

It is always difficult to know how to write up research, and as academics and postgraduates alike come under increasing pressure to improve rates of publication a text like this one is essential reading for all researchers. The book discusses all aspects of translating research into writing, including: * getting started and keeping going * putting into words what you want to say * ways of organizing your work * coping with problems, blockages and sustaining morale *style and format *editing your writing *writing alone and writing in a team *approaching problems and getting published. This book will be of use to students, researchers and writers concerned with getting their research written and having it published.

What are the relationships between the self and fieldwork? How do personal, emotional and identity issues impact upon working in the field? This book argues that ethnographers, and others involved in fieldwork, should be aware of how fieldwork research and ethnographic writing construct, reproduce and implicate selves, relationships and personal identities. All too often research methods texts remain relatively silent about the ways in which fieldwork affects us and we affect the field. The book attempts to synthesize accounts of the personal experience of ethnography. In doing so, the author makes sense of the process of fieldwork research as a set of practical, intellectual and emotional accomplishments. The book is thematically arranged, and illustrated with a wide range of empirical material.

Rather than being a how-to book, this volume examines the ideas and practices of qualitative research in terms of their applicability for an understanding and explanation of the place of qualitative research in the social sciences.

In recent years announcements of the birth of business anthropology have ricocheted around the globe. The first major reference work on this field, the Handbook of Anthropology in Business is a creative production of more than 60 international scholar-practitioners working in universities and corporate settings from high tech to health care. Offering broad coverage of theory and practice around the world, chapters demonstrate the vibrant tensions and innovation that emerge in intersections between anthropology and business and between corporate worlds and the lives of individual scholar-practitioners. Breaking from standard attempts to define scholarly fields as products of fixed consensus, the authors reveal an evolving mosaic of engagement and innovation, offering a paradigm for understanding anthropology in business for years to come.

This work includes a foreword by lynne Maher. Head of Innovation Practice, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, University Of Warwick, Coventry. "Experience Based Design" (EBD) is a new way of bringing about improvements in healthcare services by being user-focussed. Facilities, healthcare professionals, carers, family and friends are all involved in the patient experience and systems and policies need to adapt to take this into consideration. By exploring the underlying concepts, methods and practices of EBD, this exciting guide offers a unique approach to healthcare customer satisfaction. It offers recommendations for the future and many interesting points for discussion. It will be of great interest to health and social care management, particularly directors of service improvement in hospitals and directors of nursing, health and social care policy makers and shapers, and quality improvement and organisational development specialists in healthcare. Patient groups and national organisations, too will find the book inspirational. 'Experience based design-you cannot do without it. Read this book and it will change the way you think about providing health services for ever.' - Lynne Maher.

This original and authoritative exploration of ethnographic writing comes from one of the world′s leading academics in the field, Paul Atkinson. The third book in his seminal quartet on ethnographic research, it provides thoughtful, reflective guidance on a crucial skill that is often difficult to master. Informed throughout by extracts from Paul’s own writing, this book explores and examines a broad range of types and genres of ethnographic writing, from fieldnotes and ‘confessions’, to conventional ‘realist’ writing and more. Whilst highlighting the possibilities and implications of ethnographic text, this valuable resource will help those conducting ethnographic research select and adopt the most appropriate approach for their study.

[The author] ... weaves both methodological advice and her own personal stories into an intriguing narrative about a fictional graduate course she instructs. In it, readers learn about her students and their projects and understand the wide array of topics and strategies that fall under the label autoethnography. Through [her] interactions with her students, readers are given useful strategies for conducting a study, including the need for introspection, the struggles of the budding ethnographic writer, the practical problems in explaining results of this method to outsiders, and the moral and ethical issues that are raised in this intimate form of research.

How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process. In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses into personal creativity reveal not only the processes by which theory and ethnography come, in particular cases, to be represented on the page but also supply examples that students may follow or adapt.