A theory of life in the round

Abstract

This study addresses ways in which inmates at the only maximum-security prison for women in Neuse City (in the northeastern United States) redefine their social world in order to survive incarceration. An aim of the project is to engage in theory building in order to examine the experiences of a world that is "lived in the round." A life in the round is a public form of life. It is a lifestyle with an enormous degree of imprecision. Yet, it is this inexactitude that provides an acceptable level of certainty. This way of life sets standards by which one constructs everyday meaning from reality. It is a "takenfor-granted," "business-as-usual" style of being. Relying on ethnographic research and interviews with 80 women at the prison, the findings revealed that a life in the round was sustaining a "normative" existence.

Approaches to socio-cultural barriers to information seeking

“…Different from constraints related to social stigma and cultural taboo, small-world related barriers are confined to certain local communities that are relatively closed to outsiders. Retirement houses (Chatman, 1992) and prisons (Chatman, 1999) exemplify well small-world communities of this kind.…”

“…Drawing on the ideas of Chatman (1991Chatman ( , 1996Chatman ( , 1999, such constraints are referred to as small-world related barriers. Different from constraints related to social stigma and cultural taboo, small-world related barriers are confined to certain local communities that are relatively closed to outsiders.…”

“…Chatman characterized the origins and features of socio-cultural barriers of this type in a series of ethnographic studies focusing on janitors (Chatman, 1991), elderly women in a retirement house (Chatman, 1992) and female prisoners (Chatman, 1999). These investigations showed that small-world related barriers draw on two main criteria stemming from community-specific norms.…”

“…For example, small-world related barriers depicted by Chatman (1991Chatman ( , 1992Chatman ( , 1999 are strongly associated with the pre-Internet information world. Drawing on the ideas of Wellman (2006), we may argue that community has moved from hierarchically arranged, densely knit, and normatively bounded "little-boxes" characterized by Chatman to social networks.…”

Seeking explanation in theory: Reflections on the social practices of organizations that distribute public use microdata files for research purposes

“…Robbin (1984) and Siegel (1981a, 1981b) found that the highly bureaucratic decision making structures of state agencies and perceptions of the external environment strongly influenced decisions that staff made to release or deny access to administrative records containing confidential information. Chatman's (1999) study shows how the walls of a state prison constrain the world view of its women inmates. Organizational hierarchies influenced how information systems were designed and later implemented (Kling & Jewett, 1995;Kling, Kraemer, Allen, Bakos, Gurbaxani, & Elliott, 1996;Napier & Smith, 2000).…”