Neil Stephens

Collecting data from elites and ultra elites: telephone and face-to-face interviews with macroeconomists

This article explores the authors experiences of conducting both face-to-face and telephone interviews with elite and ultra-elite respondents. It draws upon the authors PhD research that uses a Sociology of Scientific Knowledge perspective to understand the social construction of macroeconomics. The article demonstrates how this perspective, and contributions from broader methodological texts, shaped the evolving research practice. The author reflects upon the distance between themselves as a relatively novice researcher and the high status position of the elite and ultra-elite respondents. This is followed with a discussion of several practical issues that arose from the research experience that would usefully inform the work of any researcher considering utilising telephone interviews. The article concludes that telephone interviewing with elite and ultra-elite respondents is both a productive and valid research option.

Up on the Roof: The Embodied Habitus of Diasporic Capoeira

The majority of the popular martial arts in Britain are of South East Asian origin. One exception is the Brazilian dance and martial art capoeira, which has grown in popularity in the UK over the past twenty years at the same time as it has become a global phenomenon. Brazilian teachers have spread across the globe to create what the article calls diasporic capoeira.The ethnographic research reported here focuses on how Brazilian capoeira teachers in the UK create and sustain a habitus for their students using a contrastive rhetoric. Teachers in the UK routinely stress the similarities and differences between the habitus of capoeira in Brazil and its habitus in the UK. Variations in the habitus of capoeira in the UK, at the individual and the institutional level are explored drawing upon the ethnographic data on capoeira groups, teachers and students.

Balancing the Berimbau Embodied Ethnographic Understanding

This article is an unusual reflexive text. It has two authors, two voices, two embodied experiences, and two sociological biographies in dialogue. The empirical focus is capoeira, but the ethnographic experience is common to many cultural forms. Capoeira is the Brazilian dance and martial art, done to the music of the berimbau. Classes are offered in many European countries, as well as in North America. Two sociologists, one a practitioner, the other a sedentary observer, collaborate to study what attracts students outside Brazil to capoeira, how it is taught to non-Brazilians, and how the classes and social events are enacted and understood. The dualities of the collaborative and contrastive engagements are explored in this article, which focuses on how to do fieldwork on an embodied skill. Physical activity, musical apprenticeship, and a multilingual environment are all made problematic in their collaborative reflections.

The UK Stem Cell Bank: Securing the Past, Validating the Present, Protecting the Future1

Abstract In 2004 the United Kingdom opened the worlds first stem cell bank. The UK Stem Cell Bank takes donations of ethically approved stem cell lines, tests them, grows larger stocks, and re-distributes the material internationally. As such the Bank has an important guardianship role in the international movement of human embryonic stem cell lines. It also enacts a particular future vision of stem cell science. Its strategies involve a complex temporal interplay: securing accounts of the past (both technical and social), while validating the regulatory legitimacy of the present. We analyse the centrality of trust, social networks, and wider public legitimacy in the Banks work. It is important to recognize the ways in which the Bank makes these social relationships visible, and in some cases durable, through their embodiment in documentary form. These practices are essential to the Banks particular vision of the future of stem cell science.

The UK Stem Cell Bank as performative architecture

Since November 2006 the UK Stem Cell Bank has made human embryonic stem cell lines available for international distribution. As the first Bank of its type in the world it has an important role in the movement and guardianship of stem cell material. In this paper we discuss the flows of people and biological material through the very building itself. By taking issues of space seriously we make explicit a number of arrangements that are central to the Banks performance of sterile and legitimate practice. We begin by reporting ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Bank over a three year period. Then we develop Nigel Thirfts concept of performative architecture on a micro-sociological level. Drawing these together provides fertile ground for an analysis of the pollution beliefs and associated ritualistic practices operated at the Bank, and how this links to the Banks wider symbolic representation. This focus on flows offers further opportunity to discuss how technical standards at the Bank allow for both stability and fluidity while maintaining symbolic legitimacy. By highlighting paradoxes within these practices we make explicit the nuances within the Banks metaphorical vision of sterility.

Documenting the doable and doing the documented: Bridging strategies at the UK Stem Cell Bank

We explore the local negotiation of regulatory practice at the UK Stem Cell Bank, the first Bank of its type in the world. Basing our empirical work on a detailed analysis of one aspect of the Bank’s regulatory commitment – the completion of the Cell Line Information form – we make visible the necessary judgements and labour involved in interpreting and operationalizing externally imposed regulation. The discussion opens by detailing the problems encountered when the Bank completes the form: reconciling a bureaucratic system of accountability with craft-like laboratory skills involving multiple kinds of tacit knowledge. We follow this by explicating the emergent ‘bridging strategies’ pursued by the Bank to address these issues, highlighting their reliance upon the formation of trust and social networks. The closing discussion emphasizes the contingent assembly of regulatory practices that emerge in the local setting.

‘I'm your teacher, I'm Brazilian!’ Authenticity and authority in European capoeira

Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art is now globalised and taught widely outside Brazil. Instruction is provided by Brazilians who are living in self-imposed exile from their homeland. The authentic capoeira that such teachers provide is a major attraction for non-Brazilian students. However, there is little research available on the motivations and strategies of overseas capoeira instructors. Building on a long term ethnographic study, this paper showcases the goals and strategies of one successful Brazilian teacher, from the Beribazu Group of Capoeira, working in the UK. This teacher reflects upon his four interlocking aims for his students and the strategies for achieving them. They should develop social cohesion, appreciate Brazilian culture, play good capoeira and learn to move their bodies acrobatically, flexibly and beautifully. Two sociologists embed the teachers perspective on his work in an analytic framework derived from Bourdieu.

Closing the regulatory regress: GMP accreditation in stem cell laboratories

Contemporary biomedical research is conducted amidst regimes of national and transnational regulation. Regulation, like rules generally, cannot specify all the practicalities of their application. Regulations for biomedical research impose considerable constraints on laboratories and others. In principle, there is a never-ending regress whereby scientists have to provide increasingly more guarantees that protocols have been followed, standards reached and maintained, and rules adhered to. In practice, regulatory regress is not the actual outcome, as actors find ways of establishing closure for all practical purposes. Based on ethnographic case studies of two sites of biomedical work--the UK Stem Cell Bank and an anonymous laboratory working with primary human foetal material--this article documents the possibility of regulatory regress and strategies aimed at its closure.

‘They start to get malicia’: teaching tacit and technical knowledge

The sociological study of education involves focusing upon teaching and learning, upon explicit instruction and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge and skills that are essential if learners are to become enculturated into a new habitus. Sociological insight into these processes can come from research on conventional educational settings, but is greater when unfamiliar, settings are studied. This paper focuses upon a pedagogic setting of an unconventional kind – a martial art, capoeira.

The first bite: Imaginaries, promotional publics and the laboratory grown burger

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.