Michael Agar

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, College Park

Sensemaking is the social act of assigning meaning to ambiguous events. It is recognized as a means to achieve high reliability. We sought to assess sensemaking in daily patient care through examining how inpatient teams round and discuss patients. Our purpose was to assess the association between inpatient physician team sensemaking and hospitaliz...

IMPORTANCEImproving inpatient care delivery has historically focused on improving individual components of the system. Applying the complexity science framework to clinical systems highlights the important role of relationships among providers in influencing system function and clinical outcomes.OBJECTIVE To understand whether inpatient medical phy...

This article gives Michael Agar’s email responses to two questions put by Gavin Melles: ‘What are your thoughts on the advantages and dangers of developments in applied anthropology for ethnographic and anthropology practice?’ and ‘What are your impressions of the potential and actual use of ethnography in design?’ The responses open further questi...

Recent work suggests that local water governance is in part a function of histories of human responses to water crises. In this article, a specific example is described to develop that argument, namely, the effort to control flooding caused by urban development in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1950s and 1960s. The description of this single case...

This paper presents compositional models of culture for conversational agents that are embedded in a training system for cross-cultural competency. Our models are implemented as ontologies of statements in common logic, with culture-specific and culture-general components. We compare the compositional framework to a finite-state system, in terms of...

Health care improvement efforts often focus on changing the behavior of individuals while the interdependencies among individuals are overlooked. The application of complex adaptive systems approach to studying healthcare delivery changes the focus of improvement efforts from the individual to the relationships and interdependencies among individua...

Social science research is central to creating computer-mediated systems that teach cross-cultural competencies. In the HCSB CultureCom project, which uses formal microsocial models to improve artificially intelligent software agents, ethnographic and sociolinguistic research refined the formal model and produced annotated, decision-branching dialo...

Explosive population growth and increasing demand for rural homes and lifestyles fueled exurbanization and urbanization in the western USA over the past decades. Using National Land Cover Data we analyzed land fragmentation trends from 1992 to 2001 in five southwestern cities associated with Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. We observed t...

This study examines the process of discharge and treatment reentry for six participants who entered treatment voluntarily but were administratively discharged from methadone treatment programs. The participants completed semistructured interviews at treatment entry and at four, eight and 12 months post-treatment entry. Grounded theory methodology w...

The tension between “etic” and “emic,” between outsider and insider descriptions of language and culture, has been a leitmotif of anthropology since its beginning. This article revisits Goodenough’s original discussion of emic and etic as a bridge into translation studies, emphasizing recent anthropological and sociological contributions. Translati...

Ethnography plays a partial role in organizational development in ways that call out for a kind of ‘‘tale of the field’’ that represents what Geertz calls a ‘‘blurred genre.’’ It is blurred by a mixture of ethnographic epistemology based on abductive logic and context/meaning questions, together with ideas from organizational intervention from work...

This study examined the uses of diverted methadone and buprenorphine among opiate-addicted individuals recruited from new admissions to methadone programs and from out-of-treatment individuals recruited from the streets. Self-report data regarding diversion were obtained from surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews. Approximately 16% (n...

Life history data as discourse are examined, and recent perspectives from psychology, linguistics and anthropology are applied to the narrative. Each perspective illuminates some portion of the text, including its overall structure, the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and the narrator who produced it. Attention to complex ethnograp...

Longer retention in drug abuse treatment is associated with better patient outcomes, and research indicates the first 12 months of methadone treatment are critical to patient success. Nevertheless, large-scale multisite longitudinal studies over the past three decades indicate that the majority of patients drop out during the first year of methadon...

Ongoing work with two heroin epidemics in Baltimore produced a "trend theory," a way to explain illicit drug use tends. In this article, the case of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s is analyzed to challenge the theory. Two of the key parameters of the theory - the drug production system and the linking networks - apply directly and generate...

Attitudes and beliefs about drug abuse treatment have long been known to shape response to that treatment. Two major pharmacological alternatives are available for opioid dependence: methadone, which has been available for the past 40 years, and buprenorphine, a recently introduced medication. This mixed-methods study examined the attitudes of opio...

Both heroin-addicted individuals and methadone maintenance patients are likely to face untreated opioid withdrawal while incarcerated. Limited research exists concerning the withdrawal experiences of addicted inmates and their impact on individuals' attitudes and plans concerning drug abuse treatment. In the present study, 53 opioid dependent adult...

Gender differences were explored among 355 in- and out-of-treatment opioid-addicted adults in Baltimore. Addiction Severity Index and other variables were compared among: 1) in-treatment women vs. out-of-treatment women; 2) out-of-treatment: women vs. men; and, 3) in-treatment: women vs. men. Analysis indicated that in-treatment and out-of-treatmen...

Despite the proven effectiveness of methadone treatment, the majority of heroin-dependent individuals are out-of-treatment. Twenty-six opioid-dependent adults who met the criteria for methadone maintenance who were neither seeking methadone treatment at the time of study enrollment, nor had participated in such treatment during the past 12 months,...

Locating and recruiting out-of-treatment drug-dependent individuals for inclusion in research studies are important and challenging tasks. Targeted sampling, a technique to reach such populations, has been described in the substance abuse literature. However, this literature has generally lacked a recent detailed account of the procedures for plann...

This study compared the characteristics of opioid-addicted adults seeking (n = 169) and not seeking (n = 74) methadone treatment in Baltimore, Maryland. Participants entering treatment were recruited from six methadone treatment programs, while out-of-treatment participants were recruited from the streets using targeted sampling methods. Measures i...

while back I received a phone call from an anthropologist at a military training center. They'd discovered my book Language Shock and wanted me to be part of a conference on language and culture. Several colleagues from my Washington DC days were also invited, specialists in intercultural communication from academia and from consulting firms. I sai...

The debate over what counts as a "real" ethnography continues and even accelerates with growing interest in this alternative approach to the mainstream of social research. As part of a "Thematic School" sponsored by the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the author was asked to consider the question. This a...

Many contemporary HIV prevention interventions targeting injection drug users (IDUs) have been implemented using Harm Reduction as a theoretical framework. Among drug-using individuals, however, the abstinence-based "getting clean" models espoused by Narcotics Anonymous and other widely adopted approaches to drug treatment are often more readily ac...

This is a written version of a lecture delivered at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Eduction at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The original series of lectures can be viewed at http://www.education.ucsb.edu/thematicschool/. In this “culture” lecture, the author explores the difficulties in using the concept in contemporary research with...

Detailed analysis of transcripts is a time-honored practice among linguistic ethnographers. In contemporary research, however, interactions among global forces distant from ethnographic sites are critical for analysis and explanation, as is the fact that multiple sites must be covered. Ethnographers' interests, pragmatic relevance, and persona...

Terms like 'narrative' and 'story' are pretty con- fusing for a person who grew up in linguistic anthropology, where both have been used in a variety of ways for a century or so. The author tries to clarify the terms with the following steps. First, investor Peter Lynch's popular use of 'story' serves as an informal and accessible ex- ample to narr...

This article means to introduce complexity science, more specifically agent-based models, to an anthropological audience. It does so by laying out a research problem that has concerned the author for some time-how can illicit drug epidemics be explained? Traditional social research is simply not adequate to the task. After introducing the newer fra...

This chapter ethnographically documents “lessons learned” in an evaluation of a tuberculosis program, focusing on linguistic rich points gathered from interviews and conversations with program staff.

After a century in the shadows, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) has recently become the subject of increasing attention. It is suggested here, expanding on observations made by anthropologist Gregory Bateson some years ago, that Wallace's cybernetics-like ...

This article evaluates past work on heroin and crack cocaine epidemics by comparing it with the increase in Ecstasy use in the late 1990s. First of all, the authors make the case that there was, in fact, a dramatic increase in Ecstasy use in the late 1990s. Following that is a review of the rise and fall of several different Ecstasy scenes beginnin...

Qualitative researchers often face a dilemma. They are asked to apply their knowledge to problems without adequate time or support to conduct projects that meet traditional academic standards of research design and methodology. Should qualitative researchers pitch in and get involved or keep their distance? What can they hope to accomplish, if anyt...

The link between agent-based models and social research is a foundational concern of this journal. In this article, the anthropological concept of 'emic' or 'insider's view' is used to foreground the value of learning what differences make a difference to actual human agents before building a model of those agents and their world. The author's Netl...

At first glance, substance abuse treatment outcomes appear fairly easy to measure. Typical outcome measures include successful program completion, reduced drug use and illegal activity, and improved employment or school status. However, ethnographic examination of an adolescent treatment program shows that traditional outcome measures may differ fr...

This article is based on an invited keynote lecture to the Qualitative Health Research meetings in Banff, Alberta, in April 2002 and so is written in an informal style. The author begins with problems in traditional epidemiology, with its focus on the case record and the epidemiological triad of host, agent, and environment. The idea of a person-in...

In this tongue-in-cheek commentary the author takes a serious look at the problem of translating ethnographic conclusions into simple functions as a means to the end of building an agent-based simulation in the Netlogo language. Specifically, the goal is to take the simple fact that stories about illicit drugs have a lot to do with whether or not t...

Anthropologists now routinely use global factors to describe and explain meanings and practices uncovered in specific ethnographic sites. In our efforts to explain illicit drug epidemics, we participate in this shift, since changes in a system of illicit drug production and distribution are always a part of the story. In the case study presented he...

The law enforcement and treatment policies of the Nixon administration are often credited with ending the epidemic of heroin addiction that rose in America's cities in the 1960s. In this article it is argued that although the interventions did in fact cause a major change in heroin distribution and use, the epidemic did not end in any simple way. T...

In this invited commentary, the author takes a biographical look at the role of ethnography and qualitative research over the last thirty-five years in the drug field in the US. From the perspective of this particular “life history”, at least, one sees how growing acceptance, greater participation, and increasing complexity of this “other” research...

Illicit drug epidemics are infamous for their unexpected arrival and their speed of onset. Based on ethnographic work with youthful heroin experimenters in the Baltimore metropolitan area, an explanation was constructed based on circulating stories of drug reputation. An agent-based model was built in SWARM to evaluate the explanation with good and...

In the drug field the fundamental epidemiological question-why illicit drug use, here, now, among these people-has still not been adequately answered. Drawing on the work of colleagues in medical anthropology, we attempt to move closer to an answer by developing a "trend theory." In this article we analyze a single case: the increase in heroin use...

In a recent article in this journal, the author explored complexity theory as a potential resource for anthropological research, using ongoing research on heroin trends as the example. In this article, the research on trends among a sample of youth in Baltimore County is again used. A preliminary computer simulation of the research results is repor...

Trend theory is an effort to integrate histories of populations and distribution systems to explain the key epidemiological question: why do these people in this place at this time experience a rapid increase in heroin use? The theory grew out of work on heroin trends in the Baltimore metropolitan area, specifically on epidemics among urban African...

As part of a project to explain heroin use trends, a concept of "open marginality" is created to highlight how different groups impacted by heroin epidemics have a common historical experience. A reading of the history of epidemics in the U.S., together with the authors' work on two epidemics in the Baltimore region, demonstrate the diversity of gr...

Buprenorphine is being introduced as a new treatment drug for narcotics addiction in the United States. The authors were asked by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct a field trial to determine if buprenorphine might play a role in street markets. Because no street use of the drug existed in the United States, the authors used three sour...

As part of a larger study on heroin trends in the city of Baltimore, the authors examined articles in the general circulation newspaper that serves the city and surrounding suburbs. Using computer archives, articles from 1992 to 1998 were searched for mentions of heroin. A method of analysis was developed that focused on the flow of articles throug...

Trends in heroin or other substance use are typically monitored by quantitative epidemiological indicators. Recently the Baltimore metropolitan area has seen an increase in heroin use among suburban youth. In this article media and interviewee perceptions of the timing of this trend are compared to several different indicators. In general, the indi...

Complexity theory, developed primarily at the Santa Fe Institute in the 1980s, attracts increasing attention from social researchers. Complexity departs from the tradition of static linear models to focus on nonlinear dynamic systems, difficult to predict, with emergent properties not reducible to their elements. The author is currently working on...

This article summarizes a keynote lecture presented to the Advances in Qualitative Methods conference. The core problem is the following: A variety of research approaches are now summarized under the term qualitative, yet it is not clear what such approaches have in common. Four characteristics are offered that describe a prototype for what are her...

It was with great personal interest that I read Palmer's impressive new book. I'm reminded that, a few years back, I listened to George Lakoff give a lecture at the University of Maryland. During it, he criticized cultural anthropologists for not paying enough attention to current work in cognitive linguistics. It occurred to me then that one...

The field of heroin addiction research has never had a reliable figure for the size of the average heroin habit. Four ethnographers were asked to conduct research in three U.S. cities to explore this question. While they were able to calculate averages that fit well with a standard pharmacology reference, they found the high variance around the est...

This article offers an overview of ethnographic research. First, an example from a "traditional" ethnography is presented to make explicit some key aspects of the research process and the underlying logic of ethnography's "abductive" epistemology. Next, ethnography is contrasted and compared with the "received view" (deductive, quantitative) to sho...

Collaboration between ethnography and epidemiology has a long and noble history, longer and nobler than most people realize. This article presents the argument that the growing interest in ethnography is, in fact, a way to reestablish nineteenth century epidemiology's concern with host and environment. Ethnography features meaning and context in wa...

Ethnography is a topic of more conversations than it ever has been before. Outside of anthropology numerous agencies, disciplines, corporations, and communities experiment with the idea of ethnographic research. Even in the current political environment, talk of "local" and "community" suggest that interest in ethnographic expertise won't disappear...

This article reports the experiences of an anthropologist who suddenly found himself in the role of intercultural communicator. Specifically, the author worked in Mexico City on a new Mexican-American joint venture and mediated between Mexican and American partners, customers, and government officials. Based on that experience, the article evaluate...

Based on the bilingualism literature, the author's recent experiences in Austrian German, and a discourse analysis perspective, a way of looking at biculturalism is hammered together to enable an understanding of how adult L2 acquisition proceeds in more and less cultural ways. (Bilingualism, biculturalism, discourse, ethnography, Whorf) How to Ci...

A discourse‐analytic approach to media is attempted that draws on Habermas (1976), critical linguistics, and reader response. The approach is applied to a newspaper essay on poverty. The analysis of the essay, together with reader response data, show that the text fails in its purpose, which is to argue that categories of gender and ethnicity shoul...

A general framework for ethnographic research is used to integrate detailed discourse investigations with broader ethnographic goals, with particular attention to the study of modern state institutions. Two examples of political media interviews are used, one with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim and the other with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Par...

Some of the more ill-behaved vagaries of free-flowing conversation may seem to call into question the possibility of formal treatments of coherence in conversation. However, in this paper we show that the notions of planning and local coherence from artificial intelligence work in discourse interpretation make such treatments possible. Four fragmen...

Ethnography as a research process is notoriously difficult to articulate. In the anthropological literature, there are descriptions of its mystique, awkward mixtures of detachment and involvement, and efforts to refine elusive concepts like "participant observation." Because of its emergent nature, and its emphasis on the apprehension of pattern in...

Policy and the processes that go into i t s formulation and implementation are constituted by language. In this article, a linguistic and ethnographic approach to the study of "themes" is applied to the transcripts of some oral arguments by independent truckers at the Interstate Commerce Commission. The results show a portion of the underlying logi...

In this article a general language for the characterization of ethnographic research is suggested. Drawing on interpretive philosophy, especially the work of Gadamer and Schutz, a core process of ethnography is described that emphasizes the resolution of problems in understanding across tradition boundaries. Concepts from recent work in knowledge r...

Outlines an attempt to use artificial intelligence formalisms as a formal language of description for the complex conversational behavior that occurs in ethnographic interviews. Discusses three kinds of coherence and uses them to analyze the text of an interview. (FL)

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The author draws on a variety of long- and short-term experiences in applied anthropology to characterize some of the differences between academic and non-academic research contexts. The differences are illustrated with two examples of consulting on drug projects; one involving Indian drug programs, the other, a four city study of PCP use. The conc...

Abstract Discourse,is both ,about ,the ,world ,and ,an accomplishment,in the ,world. ,This fact has led to two approaches to the study of discourse ,In artificial intelligence, one investigating "text plans*', the other "world plans". By analyzing a fragment,of a ,narrative ,in which ,both ,kinds ,of plans figure importantly, we explore the relatio...

EDITOR'S NOTE: As the previous article suggested, critics as well as practitioners of ethnographic research have observed that researchers tend to overrely on informants, and as a comsequence they may overemphasize those data which support a favored imagery rather than reporting counterinstances which challenge that imagery or indicate possible var...

Cognitive anthropology centers on the ethnographic investigation of conceptual structures through the analysis of language. Yet there has not been much work on those areas of the conceptual structure that are so pervasive, so basic, that they pervade numerous areas of daily life. Using the traditional anthropological notion of “theme,” an attempt i...

A successful patient in a New York City methadone program, H described a time in the late 1930s and 1940s in New York when heroin was attacked by law enforcement and interrupted by the World War. His description of the period, presented in this paper, offered as an historical footnote to the general notion of the adaptive stengths of the streets. I...

Methadone maintenance as a treatment for narcotic addiction has , had a relatively brief but stormy history. Emerging from the pioneering work of Dole and Nyswander, it rapidly moved from an experimental treatment program to today's most frequently employed treatment technique. Although methadone maintenance is widely accepted as a treatment modali...

This paper reviews a recent RedfishGroup project for the City of Santa Fe Fire and Police Department integrating wildfire simulation and agent-based modeling of traffic dynamics. Visualizations of the evacuation dynamics were used to communicate with citizens dangers faced during evacuations and to explore when shelter-in-place is a reasonable alte...

Based on ethnographic work with youth in Baltimore County, an agent -based model was developed to test the finding that circulation of narratives explained the rise and fall of heroin epidemic incidence curves. This paper features the use of Design of Experiments to evaluate the parameters in that model. Results of the analysis suggest the drug epi...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Anthropology)--University of California, Berkeley, Sept. 1971. Includes bibliography. Microfilm. s