A team-based QI training programme resulted in a high degree of participants' involvement in QI activities beyond completion of the programme. A majority of team projects showed improvement in project measures, often occurring after completion of the programme.
We extend Fine's (2003) model of `peopled ethnography' for studying small groups to the study of larger social units, including organizations and communities. While studies of small groups often recognize the presence of macro-level social structures, they typically treat these as backdrops to the interaction scene which constrain and enable group life, not as units of analysis in their own right. Yet small groups are embedded in and help constitute larger units of analysis, such as organizations and communities. We argue that studies of these larger social structures can be extended beyond ethnographic observation of the interactions that help comprise them, making peopled ethnography applicable to units of analysis larger than the small group. We offer illustrative examples of organizational and community ethnographies.
We investigate how material poverty functions as a cultural space, specifically addressing when it becomes a strategy, that is, when an individual with cultural and social capital adopts a life of low income in order to form other social identities. We examine two groups that use low income to further other goals but differ in their temporal lens: (1) ''transitional bourgeoisie,'' graduate students and artists who frame their economic deprivation as a temporary means to prospective identities, such as a professorship or success in art; (2) ''embedded activists,'' committed adults rooted in political and religious organizations who see low income as a permanent strategy to bolster their anticonsumerist desires. Relying on 37 in-depth interviews with informants we ask, how do people in strategic poverty construct satisfying lives? What cultural tools and skill-sets do informants draw upon to negotiate their economic circumstances and middle-class backgrounds?
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