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This mixed-methods study examines how political leaders mobilize collective intentionality during the COVID-19 pandemic in nine US States, and how collective intentionality differs across republican and democratic administrations. The results of our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that i) political leaders establish collective intentionality by emphasizing unity, vulnerability, action, and community boundaries; ii) political leaders’ call to collective action clashes with the inaction required by health guidelines; iii) social inequalities received little attention across all states compared to other themes; iv) collective intentionality in democratic administrations is linked to individuals’ agency and actions, suggesting a bottom-up approach. Conversely, in republican administrations individuals’ contributions are downplayed compared to work and state-level action, indicating a top-down approach. This study demonstrates the theoretical and empirical value of collective intentionality in sociological research, and contributes to a better understanding of leadership and prosociality in times of crisis.

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Difficulties distinguishing the ethnographic object and the ethnographer's analysis can pose a challenge to the conduct and dissemination of ethnographic work. The close distance between ethnographic observation and the ethnographer's interpretation elides the boundary between considerations of theory and method. In his book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, Reed describes interpretivism as an epistemological approach aimed at harnessing the potential of social explanations developed in ethnography's interstitial position – the space between theory and social reality. This issue of Ethnographyc provides a forum for ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions and working in different empirical areas to reflect upon on the value and limitations of interpretivism in ethnography.

I lay out a scheme for understanding immigrant incorporation as social solidarity achieved through the application of widely shared meanings, categories of perception, moral distinctions and manners of speech pertaining to social membership. The inclusion of immigrants is accomplished through the symbolic construction of community boundaries that include newcomers, the reification of symbolic distinctions in identifiable practices, and the censure and exclusion of problematic elements of diversity. This cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation draws upon Alexander's work on the multicultural mode of incorporation in the civil sphere, Bakhtin's thinking regarding centripetal and centrifugal forces in language, and Foucault's conception of discipline. Empirical material from Sweden and the United States supports the theory.

Since the 1990s, parent funding of American public schools has increased. Past research offers three explanations of this phenomenon: 1. the economic explanation maintaining that parents contribute in order to supplement lagging public investments in education; 2. the opportunity hoarding explanation arguing parents contribute to secure educational advantages for their children; and 3. the civic engagement and social capital explanation that sees parent fundraising as an element of parents’ democratic participation in schools. This article considers the efficacy of these explanations in the case of parent fundraising in a Manhattan elementary school I call PSX. Applied to data collected through ethnographic research among PSX parents, the existing explanations provide an incomplete understanding of parent fundraising because they focus on the intentions and motivations of parents. A normative-institutional perspective provides additional explanatory leverage. Educational policy and normative expectations link parental fundraising and school quality. The money supplied by parents is an easy-to-read measure of a good school, and, by association, good parents. Parents give and give more because that is what they are asked to do.