ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the methodological challenges when exploring the everyday life and everyday world as well as the institutional processes in this field of services for people in a vulnerable situation. It addresses the general epistemological considerations and challenges focusing on different attempts to get social science to “make a difference in the real world” which is an ambition that unifies the very different attempts to develop an applied sociology. The book discusses the specific characteristics of ethnographic studies when transferred to industrialised countries and used to describe the specific cultural premises and structural conditions of advanced welfare states and urban subcultures. It presents the processes and difficult methodological choices that researchers are facing when getting into contracts aimed at ethnographic descriptions of what is going on and what could be done better.
