Ethnographic Research: A Reader

Media Reviews

Ethnographic Research: A Reader edited by Stephanie Taylor. Sage Publications in association with The Open University, London, 2002, 288 pages, £55Æ00 (hardback), ISBN 0 761 97392 3. This reader accompanies an ethnography course offered by the Open University Masters programme in Social Sciences and is a compilation of 10 papers previously published in either edited collections or journals. The papers report on ethnographic research undertaken across a range of academic disciplines for example policing, gender, employment, culture and health. The book therefore covers a breadth of topics and as a result of this broad approach it is unlikely to find a place at the heart of ethnographic texts on health-related book shelves. The book is organized into five parts, each one containing two papers. Part 1: At Society’s Margins consists of two papers exploring the experiences of drug-taking in inner city areas (in New York and Australia) from the perspective of both the users and the police. The two papers in Part 2: Gendered Identities, present two UK studies exploring the way in which social and cultural identities are constructed, in a group of teenage girls and a group of young black men. Part 3 discusses Workplace Practices and consists of two papers located in Mexico and the United States of America that explored workplace practices in an export plant and the interactions and processes employed by pilots in a simulated airline cockpit. Part 4: The Consumption of Cultural Products presents two papers, one on tourism at the Taj Mahal and one on the way in which young people in the Lebanon respond to imported and local television programmes. It is Part 5: Working to Provide Medical Services which has some potential relevance to nurses, midwives, health visitors and other allied health

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professionals, although even here the application is rather specialist. The two papers in this section, previously published in Sociology of Health and Illness, report on two studies, one located in Wales and the other in Paris. The first paper explores from a sociological perspective the use of humour in health care settings, in particular its use by social workers and nurses in a community mental health team in Wales. The second paper set in a Paris teaching hospital, explores the processes involved in categorizing patients in the emergency department. It can be seen therefore that the reader is eclectic in nature. Although it may have relevance as an accompaniment to a Masters course, its breadth rather than depth of subject will limit its wider appeal. It is doubtful that the first eight chapters will be of any direct relevance to even the most ethnographic-minded health care worker or student. Furthermore, due to the specialist nature of the two healthrelated chapters, it is uncertain that the book will have much appeal in the health arena. Jan Draper Royal College of Nursing Institute, UK The Sociology and Politics of Health: A Reader edited by Michael Purdy and David Banks. Routledge, London, 2001, 288 pages, £17Æ99, ISBN 0 415 23319 4 (paperback), £55Æ00 (hardback) ISBN 0 415 23318 6. Academic publishers are increasingly focusing on publishing books that will be used as textbooks or set books for further and higher education courses. This book is designed as a source book or reader on political and sociological issues in health care for students undertaking health studies, nursing or other health professional courses. Apart from the introductory sections by the editors all the material in the book has previ-

ously been published elsewhere. The utility of such a collection needs to be judged in terms of the nature of the material selected and its accessibility and utility for its target audience. While the reader claims to cover both the sociology and politics of health, its politics selection includes nine extracts which focus on the development of ideology and policy. While some of these extracts make interesting reading, for example those taken from Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, they do not provide insight into the political and policy process. For example there is no analysis of how political ideology shapes health care provision nor on the role of the media or of pressure groups. The majority of the extracts (21) cover the sociology of health and include social stratification and health, professionalism and health and experiencing health and illness. While these extracts cover a range of issues, it was not entirely clear how and why they were selected. A range of newly emerging issues in health care related to sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases, identity, innovative technologies, new genetics, risk assessment and management were not addressed by these extracts. The average undergraduate students should have no difficulty in reading most of the extracts in this book and such reading will enhance their understanding of the social factors which influence the construction and management of health and health care. However there are some areas in which more contextualization and explanation by the editors would have been helpful. Within some of the extracts there are theoretical ideas, for example, the extract by Bartley and her colleagues uses Marxist analysis albeit rather crudely, and several of the extracts draw on the work of Foucault most notably Johnson’s extract on governmentality and the professions. I suspect that most Ó 2002 Blackwell Science Ltd