What is qualitative research? If we look for a precise definition of qualitative research, and specifically for one that addresses its distinctive feature of being “qualitative,” the literature is meager. In this article we systematically search, identify and analyze a sample of 89 sources using or attempting to define the term “qualitative.” Then, drawing on ideas we find scattered across existing work, and based on Becker’s classic study of marijuana consumption, we formulate and illustrate a definition that tries to capture its core elements. We define qualitative research as an iterative process in which improved understanding to the scientific community is achieved by making new significant distinctions resulting from getting closer to the phenomenon studied. This formulation is developed as a tool to help improve research designs while stressing that a qualitative dimension is present in quantitative work as well. Additionally, it can facilitate teaching, communication between researchers, diminish the gap between qualitative and quantitative researchers, help to address critiques of qualitative methods, and be used as a standard of evaluation of qualitative research.

Markets have sometimes been described as vastly different from and even opposite to formal organizations. But markets and organizations share a similarity as well. Both are organized-by the use of decisions on membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions or hierarchy. Market organization creates differences among markets, and specific dynamics, which can be explained by the actions and interactions of market organizers: profiteers, 'others', sellers and buyers. The concept of market organization is an analytical tool, which can be used for analysing why and how markets are created, why they get their specific form and how they change.

This paper introduces the philosophical foundation and practical application of empirical phenomenology in social research. The approach of empirical phenomenology builds upon the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the sociologist Alfred Schütz, but considers how their more philosophical and theoretical insights can be used in empirical research. It aims at being practically useful for anyone doing qualitative studies and concerned about safeguarding the perspective of those studied. The main idea of empirical phenomenology is that scientific explanation must be grounded in the first-order construction of the actors; that is, in their own meanings. These constructions are then related to the secondorder constructions of the scientist. In this paper, empirical phenomenology is considered in the light of phenomenological philosophy. The paper includes an explication of the approach, which is summarized in seven steps through which the researcher is guided, and considers its implications for qualitative methods such as interviewing and participant observation.

The purpose of this theoretical article is to contribute to the analysis of knowledge and valuation in markets. In every market actors must know how to value its products. The analytical point of departure is the distinction between two ideal types of markets that are mutually exclusive, status and standard. In a status market, valuation is a function of the status rank orders or identities of the actors on both sides of the market, which is more entrenched than the value of what is traded in the market. In a market characterized by a standard, the situation is reversed; the scale of value is more entrenched than the rankings of actors in the market. In a status market actors need to know about the other actors involved as there is no scale of value for evaluating the items traded in the market independently of its buyers and sellers. In a standard market it is more important to know how to meet the standard in relation to which all items traded are valued. The article includes empirical examples and four testable hypotheses.Economic sociology has largely neglected the issue of knowledge. There is a discussion on the so-called knowledge economy (e.g., Powell and Snellman 2004) that is connected to what Bell (1973) wrote on knowledge (Frank and Meyer 2007: 293-296). These and other works qualify labor as a factor of production by adding knowledge as its central component. The knowledge-economy discussion focuses on, for example, work organization, technology, and the role of patents. Fewer studies address the role of knowledge in the economy (but see Barry and Slater 2005;Hayek 1945), though there is of course much to say on this topic at a general level (Steiner 2005).Economists have written on forms of knowledge in the economy (e.g., Geanakoplos 1992), and on information and knowledge in markets (Akerlof 1970). Akerlof showed that markets might not emerge if it is difficult to determine the underlying quality of the items traded while only one side of the market (typically the seller) has information about the items. This is an example of