Interesting. This plays out alot within communities (or societies or cultures) and I used it a lot when I was teaching in community education. The people who came to the sessions had mainly 'failed' in the school system, in the sense they had not achieved qualifications (nor had they enjoyed school), however, they were in interested in learning, and wanted their lives to be different.

One week, we ran a session called "Dealing with Difficult People". I thought the man focus would be about neighbour and community relationships. However, without exception, it was about relationships with schools and teachers. The session was packed, we didn't have enough chairs, and the supporting playcentre (this was an after school session) was also over-subscribed.

For many people, the value of this session was that they were listened to, they found that they were not alone in their experience and they started to share ideas about how they could do things differently.

There's a lot of work now about cultural competence in public services.

I'm quite interested in anthropology and ethnography, although I was hard-pressed yesterday to explain the difference between those subjects and sociology and social psychology. Could you help?