Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically

Some Uses and Potentials of Qualitative Methods in Planning

Planners use methods borrowed from many disciplines. These are usually modified and adapted to meet planner's needs to acquire and sift through many diverse information sources helpful in dealing with complex problems. The quantitative methods which planners use are well known, well established in practice, and acknowledged by most as tools of the planners' trade. In contrast to this, most planners also use qualitative methods but these are rarely explicitly acknowledged.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68912/2/10.1177_0739456X8600600110.pd

Seeing ourselves: Exploring the social production of criminological knowledge in a qualitative methods course

In comparison with its quantitative counterpart, the teaching of qualitative methods in criminology and criminal justice has been largely neglected. Part of the explanation for this neglect is a widespread recognition that access to appropriate study sites is dangerous and difficult. Student researchers cannot rush the delicate process of penetrating a hidden or deviant population; nor can they magically comprehend the inner workings of the criminal justice bureaucracy to meet course deadlines. During winter semester 1994, the senior author attempted to overcome these problems by assigning advanced honors students to study the social production of criminological knowledge in their own department, using the standard tools of qualitative research: participant observation and interviewing. This article reports on what was learned during the planning and teaching of that course. In doing so, it draws directly on field notes and other materials produced by both the students and the instructor as part of the required research exercise