Pêcheur-côtier de Sant-Sébastien (Pays Basque), ouvrier chef de métier dans le systeme du travail sans engagements, d' aprés les renseignements recueillis sur les lieux en 1856

Describe la situación de los miembros de una familia en Donostia-San Sebastián, la organización industrial, el lugar, la religión y la moral, las costumbres, la organización social.This text describes the situation of the members of a family in Donostia - San Sebastián, the industrial organization, the place, religion and morals, the mores and the social organization

Staying on topic: doing research between improvisation and systematisation

Doing scientific research is, in theory, a systematic and well-organised enterprise. Field works are planned, interview guides are prepared, participants are selected. And, if the job was done well, data is collected, analysed, interpreted in a proper, clean, scientific manner. In reality, however, things often go astray: field works get cancelled, interviews get side-tracked and participants drop out. The investigation of human lives, as it turns out, cannot do away with the messiness of human lives. In such cases, researchers must adapt to the new situation and yet to stay on topic: in one word, they need to improvise. How, then, does research remain scientific? In this chapter, I will argue that it is not planning, organisation or control that make good academic work, and that it is often in the unexpected that the most interesting results emerge. What matters, however, is what is done afterwards; how hunches and surprises are turned into systematic investigations, analyses and interpretations. This argument will be illustrated with the story of an ‘impromptu’ fieldwork in Brussels and its unpredictable consequences; or, rather, how staying on topic requires one to systematically stray away from it

Warren Sun and Frederick C. Teiwes, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform: Initial Steps Toward a New Chinese Countryside 1976–1981,

This work on the “Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform” constitutes another masterstroke by Warren Sun and Frederick Teiwes in the Chinese studies arena. As the authors themselves pointedly note, foreign observers have had the misguided tendency to swallow the Chinese Communist Party shibboleth that depicts the reform process as a relatively linear and consensual process and assigns all credit for the success of economic reforms to Deng Xiaoping following a so-called ideological and political s..