Resorts have become important to American society and its economy; one in eight Americans is now employed by the tourism industry. Yet despite the ubiquity of hotels, little has been written about those who labor there. Drawing on eight years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the renowned ethnographers Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler reveal the occupational culture and lifestyles of workers at five luxury Hawaiian resorts.These resorts employ a workforce that is diverse in gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Hawaiian resort workers, like those in nearly all resorts,...

There are a range of possible roles that can be played by ethnographers in field research, from the detached observer to the the fully-fledged participant. The choice of role will affect the type of information available to the researcher and the kind of ethnography written. The authors discuss the problems and advantages at each level of involvement and give examples of modern ethnographic studies.

"Peer Power" explodes existing myths about children's friendships, power and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents: popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders...

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013

2013 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the Midwest Sociological Society Honorable Mention for the Charles H. Cooley Award for Outstanding Book from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction

Cutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically...

Packed with the most recent and relevant articles in the field, CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEVIANCE: SOCIAL POWER, CONTEXT, AND INTERACTION, Eighth Edition, shows readers how to apply the concepts and theories of deviance to the world around them. The book's current, comprehensive coverage includes both theoretical analyses and ethnographic illustrations of how deviance is socially constructed, organized, and managed. Seasoned authors and award-winning professors, Patricia Adler and Peter Adler cover a wide variety of deviant acts-challenging readers to see the diversity and pervasiveness of deviance...