Jeffrey Michael Clair

This paper reports on discursive justifications of homeless service institutions in the USA, illustrating a conceptualization of service founded on economic logics of industry and the marketplace. Emerging from ethnographic data, we found that homeless service administrators utilized economic logics of justification to legitimize the exclusion of the street homeless by framing delivery within western notions of fair exchange and efficient production. When these logics are used exclusively to frame justifiable criteria for receiving services, certain people are empowered to participate in social welfare institutions, while others are disfranchised. We conclude that addressing gaps in service requires legitimizing varied administrative models, which, although underpinned by different, perhaps even oppositional, justifications, will engender a service sector responsive to the diversity of the homeless population.

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data.

In my review of African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity, edited by Lawrence Prograis, Jr., and Edmund D. Pellegrino (Jan. 10 issue),¹ I failed to cite passages from Lynn Smitherman's review of the same book, published in the October 24–31 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, ² and to acknowledge my reliance on her review for help in identifying core themes.

In this collection of essays, the contributions are written by practitioners, researchers, and theorists. Each was challenged to provide his or her “epistemic stance” and “internal perspective” in answering the question, “Is there a distinctive African-American cultural perspective on bioethics?” This topic is not new — the current book arose from an attempt that was made 16 years ago to lay an empirical foundation for African-American bioethics through a conference and book entitled African-American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics (H.E. Flack and E.D. Pellegrino, eds. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992). The dialogue is continued here in an attempt to determine whether the changing sociodemographic landscape has moved perspectives on culture, race, identity, and bioethics.