Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of the relevance of images to the displine of psychology, then it proceeds to a definition of some of the key terms of the book: public images, visual culture, visual/language distinctions, and the researcher’s viewing position.

The conclusion examines more contemporary versions of anthropology’s dominant current of antiformalism. Tracing this pattern across diverse approaches – embodiment, assemblage thinking, infrastructure – it reveals how a certain sort of Wittgensteinian antiformalism has become orthodox. While scholarship focussed on form exists, it remains largely subordinate to an implicit picture that finds ethnographic facts ‘unanalysable, specific, indefinable’. By contextualzing this stance, the conclusion suggests holding commitments – formalist or antiformalist – more lightly in order to recover explanatory power without sacrificing reflexivity.

Transitions research has gained traction in sustainability studies for its systemic approach to environmental challenges. A central tenet is that the persistence of these challenges can be attributed to ‘system failures’, and that system innovation is needed, i.e. a multitude of innovations that co-evolve into system-wide transformations. However, many contrasting views of ‘systems’ and ‘systemic frameworks’ are seemingly always clamouring for attention, whilst it is not always clear what they’re referring to. Taking a reflexive methodology approach, this chapter addresses recurring questions: Transforming ‘systems’: Which? How? Whose? Why? Whither? Whence? For instance, is transitioning the ‘mobility system’ a matter of electrification or of unlearning car dependency? In transitioning the ‘energy system’, is importation of rare minerals a central part or an externality? The chapter presents a methodological overview of systems analysis in transitions research. It brings out how transitions research has developed a fine sense of Critical Systems Thinking. On the other hand, it also shows the need for further methodological reflection on the study of transitioning ‘systems’.

This chapter argues that reflexivity - an introspective process in which researchers turn their engagement into an object of research - is essential to sustainability transitions research (STR). Reflexivity in STR encompasses not only the non-neutrality of its normative categories, such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘radical’, but also its descriptive categories, including ‘regime’ and ‘system’. This inherent social embeddedness, or ‘engagedness’, positions transition researchers with both an inescapable responsibility and a unique opportunity to shape their engagement reflexively. Reflexivity, which is relevant at every stage of STR, is illustrated in terms of research orientation, role and positionality. It highlights that much of reflexivity lies in the question of how - and with what kind of awareness - you are personally doing what you are doing. As a transition researcher, you are in a comparatively powerful societal position. Your choices matter and make a difference in the world.

This chapter focuses on the county level of analysis. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in the county seat, it studies the Jinyun County’s response to the 19th Party Congress and state’s further elaboration upon the Rural Revitalization Strategy. It highlights how a ’xiangchou plan’, concocted in summer 2018, culminated in a five-year developmental strategy: ’Jinyun’s Xiangchou Industries to Enrich the People’. Interviews highlight the county’s ambitions to coin the term “Xiangchou Industries” and to make it a national model for revitalization, replicable and adaptable by small towns and villages nationwide. The usage of xiangchou as the means and model for rural revival highlights the potency of feelings such as ‘homesickness’ embedded in xiangchou, and it reminds us how the countryside is central to the imagining of this ‘hometown.’ This Chapter also discusses the application of the ’hometown ethnography’ as method and explores the ’hometown’ as a topic for ethnographic study.

The epilogue provides a reflection on the experience of writing this book and it uses an anecdote surrounding the construction of a pond in Heyang village as a way to provide an update on the changes and developments in village life since the primary research for this book was conducted in 2017-2022.

This chapter outlines the basic principles of qualitative research in the context of mental health. We begin by discussing the philosophy of reality and knowledge production, demonstrating how these discussions filter through to every aspect of qualitative research. We then explain the fundamental elements of qualitative research, including how to formulate a research question, different methodological approaches, the application of qualitative methods in clinical trials, data collection, sampling, and analysis. This chapter also focuses on how qualitative research can make a change, providing unique insights on how to influence policy and engage government. We devote a substantial part of the chapter to research ethics and reflexivity, summarising not only basic bioethical principles, but thinking about ethics from an anti-colonial perspective. We end the chapter by exploring what constitutes high quality qualitative research, laying out some guiding principles and practices for promoting quality. Our aim with this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account of qualitative research, rather to offer guidance and inspiration to fledgling researchers who would like to find out more.

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this, made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) that are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. This coursebook on ethnography in IB is the first of its kind, offering students, academics, and executives a way to study, understand, reduce uncertainty about, and make the most of the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts.

This chapter focuses on the emancipatory sociology developed by the Algerian scholar Abdelmalek Sayad (1933–1998). Sayad’s pathbreaking theory on immigration is progressively acknowledged today. However, we know less about the anticolonial roots of his innovative approach. From the Algerian liberation war against the French Empire to neoliberalism, Sayad’s social thought led to an anticolonial theory of domination and resistance. The chapter shows how Sayad dealt with political concerns scientifically and how his anticolonial engagements challenged conventional ways of doing science. It traces four components of his anticolonial thought: the understanding of the logics of empire; the paths toward decolonization; the epistemic grounds for a social revolution within postcolonial regimes; and the mechanisms that reconfigure the colonized condition into the immigrant experience. Discussing these aspects of Sayad’s social thought against the imperial episteme in the academic and political fields, this chapter proposes to restore the grounds of an anticolonial sociology.

Chapter 1 establishes the primary intrigue surrounding professional speechwriters and other sorts of invisibilized language workers: namely, the complication of an author who is never animator nor principal of their labor (Goffman 1981). Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: language in institutional and professional contexts; language work and wordsmiths; metadiscourse; and reflexivity and semiotic ideologies. This framework serves to address not only the ways in which workplace communication both establishes and contests particular communities of practice but also how larger issues related to metalinguistic awareness and political economy are implicated in these processes. Next, Mapes briefly maps the history of speechwriting as well as the relatively scant scholarly engagement with practitioners. She then turns to the specifics of her project, documenting the details of her data collection, method, and analytical process. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, as well as an explanation of the three primary rhetorical strategies (invisibility, craft, and virtue) which arise in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work.

The coda demonstrates the ongoing significance of the landscape of genius for contemporary environmentalism by interpreting how Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond has been invoked in response to climate change. It uses extensive research into the psychology, sociology, and politics of climate change in order to assess what effects those invocations are likely to have and to suggest how scholars and activists can engage with Thoreau most impactfully in relation to the issue. More broadly, the coda also theorizes a new relational approach to the environmental humanities, which draws on recent developments in posthumanism, actor–network theory, systems theory, Anthropocene scholarship, and other environmental theory to explore how systems of culture intersect with and impact various other systems: social, political, economic, ecological, geochemical, etc. This method has many similarities to Traditional Ecological Knowledge. It conceptualizes knowledge as fundamentally relational and performative and redefines the humanities as a form of self-reflexive ethical agency, through which we can comprehend and (re)balance our various relations.

This chapter seeks to place/locate Boulez relative to the literary history (especially French) of his time, particularly his formative years of the 1940s, which was still the heyday of Artaud and the Surrealists. The writers important to Boulez included not only poets like Char and Mallarmé, but also novelists, Proust chief among them. Boulez was interested in structural aspects of the modern novel: open or circular (nonlinear) form, the fragment and reflexivity, all of which he found in Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Musil. The Third Piano Sonata is one of Boulez’ most literary works, modelled on the labyrinth he found in works like Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’, or the circularity of Finnegans Wake. Recent studies of Boulez’s sketches show his work proliferating organically and in an open-ended way, as did Proust’s or Kafka’s novels. Other literary aspects might include spatial form, Joyce’s medievalism or Proust’s symbolist aesthetic.