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You Don't Have To Have A High School Education To Work Here : An Ethnography Of A Chainstore, Caroline Yvonne Princehouse

Dissertations and Theses

This ethnography is a study of the cultural scene at one store of a chain of twenty-eight retail "discount department stores"--the Bi Mart Company, a subsidiary of the Pay 'n Save Corporation. It is an exercise of an ethnographic method developed by James Spradley that is used to uncover and describe the cultural grammar of acquired knowledge which Bi Mart employees use to define and interpret their situation and to generate and understand their work. The method is based on the assumption that culture is best learned and best described (as much as possible) from the "native" point of view.