Search

The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being “offered” by offenders and then “evaluated” by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's conflicts, understood as disagreements involving negative emotional energy, constitute a particularly intense type of social interaction. In this paper, we show that children's conflictual interactions in school differ with regard to interactional dynamics and levels of confrontational tension, which together potentially lead to violence. We discuss how these differences relate to issues of inclusion and exclusion, to levels of interactional resources, and to neighborhood differences. Our conclusions are based on analysis of fieldwork data on children aged five to eight in two Danish schools. The analysis applies Goffman's and Collins's perspectives on interaction rituals and violence and the concept of emotional capital based on Bourdieu's theory of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on video recordings of coaching sessions in the context of basketball and powerlifting, this paper investigates how the sports coaching process unfolds as situated interactions. The work of sports coaching is pervasively oriented toward teaching athletes the correct forms of motion and play. Correction then is one of the central constitutive practices of sports training sessions. In this paper, we draw on a collection of instances of correction demonstrations from powerlifting and basketball to describe their order. We demonstrate the three phases of these demonstrations: arranging bodies and gaze for visual access, presenting the error visually, and proposing a correction with an embodied demonstration. Findings underscore the management of shared visual access in multi-party correction demonstrations. In demonstrating how multiple bodies may be involved in embodied reenactments of a correctable problem, and demonstrating that it is seeing an error, more than reenactment per se, that is necessary for correction activities, the study extends existing understandings both of sports coaching processes and of instructional correction in embodied activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I performed a qualitative content analysis of 136 college students' food diary reflection papers to examine the accounts used when explaining dietary failures. In addition to common justifications (denials of injury, appeals to higher loyalties, and condemning the condemners) and excuses (denials of responsibility and postponement), diarists referred to their status as a college student and the 'typical college student lifestyle' as the major reason for eating an unhealthy diet. Exploring how students use life stages to neutralize stigma adds a new temporal and context-focused dimension to studies of accounts and provides direction for potential health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways people construct and signify deities. Utilizing responses from an ethnographic study as well as analyses of existing studies of religion, we elaborate ways people construct the existence and characteristics of deities by engaging in 'deity work,' which we define as the work people do to give meaning to deities as well as to themselves, others, or social phenomena related to deities. In so doing, we demonstrate how people may accomplish this in many settings by engaging in strategies of identity work including (1) defining, (2) coding, and (3) affirming the meanings of a given deity in social interaction. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding (1) the importance of examining deity work, and (2) some ways a focus on deity work processes may expand existing religious and interactionist studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of the journal "Symbolic Interaction" focuses on theory and method in symbolic interactionism. Quality papers were received from several countries and they have provided theoretical commentary and technical information with which to solve methodological problems. In some cases, the authors of the papers were asked to reduce the length of their articles significantly so that eleven articles were included. These articles have been organized under various issues that are common to all social research but are of special interest to interactionists.

This paper takes the position that symbolic interaction can become more relevant to the social issues of modernity and postmodernity by overcoming its traditional tendencies to be apolitical and to focus predominantly on micro aspects of social relations, it considers a serious reading of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as a contribution to this effort. Specifically it sees Habermas' reconstruction of the conception of the individual actor involved in communicating through significant symbols into one consistent with speech act theory and the concepts of speaker and listener as constructive and helpful. The paper also examines Mead's behavioristic theory of attitudes, types of attitudes and taking the attitude of the other(s), and relates it m his logical formulation of rational universals. It suggests that Mead's optimistic image of society and his position on rationality are 'no longer appropriate for discussing social issues in a global society with multiple rationalities. It sees possibilities for reformulation in Habermas' theory because, like Mead's theory, it construes rationality in communicative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the interpretive dynamics of official inquiries. Beginning with an ideal-typical sketch of congressional investigations, the discussion traces a portrayal of public problems by a committee of the House of Representatives. This leads to the analysis of a hearing in which committee factions struggled to define an Air Force administrator as a "whistleblower" or a "renegade." The hearing is understood as a "certification ceremony" that rhetorically transformed staff, discoveries into allegedly definitive evidence, it is concluded that the paper's conceptual approach can be applied to diverse inquiries that combine documentary research with interrogation of witnesses to generate authoritative findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is universally held among researchers and social critics that a thin ideal dominates current cultural conceptions of what is attractive, especially for women. Using interviews with eighteen women and men, this paper investigates an apparent paradox: how thin people negotiate a landscape where the attention they receive because of their thinness distresses them. Results indicate that thin people are often the target of unwanted comments about their size, comments produce an unpleasant state of self-consciousness, and the expectation of unwanted social interaction will motivate thin individuals to avoid certain social situations. Results are interpreted in terms of thinness being a hypervisible condition that produces a breakdown of norms regarding civil inattention toward thinness and produces the experience of being othered by social perceivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualizes eroticism as emotional experience. I use the Renaissance Faire to illustrate the construction of asexual eroticism along three dimensions: the carnal experience of Faire, its focus on physicality, and intimations of increased interpersonal access. This approach forefronts the complexity of eroticism and situates the erotic squarely in the sociology of emotion, providing a model for understanding a range of emotional, embodied, and nonsexual charges as erotic. More broadly, the analysis seeks to contribute to the study of all emotion as embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social meanings and cultural definitions attached to illness, disability, and aging have a powerful influence on the development and operations of medical care as well as the social, behavioral, and therapeutic processes occurring within these settings. Specialized care environments designed to meet the needs of what some would argue is a dramatically increasing population worldwide, those with Alzheimer's disease, have been dominated by a medical model of care where treatment of disease has primacy over person. In contrast to the medical model, the Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) at Starrmount (pseudonym) Alzheimer's Unit have socially constructed an alternative to the medical model of care through what I argue is the use of language and a process of "naming and reframing." In this "different world," as the CNAs call the world of the Unit, the resident is depicted as a socially responsive actor with a surviving self that is to be treated with respect. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, this paper examines the CNAs' construction and use of a "language of openings"--that is, the language arising out of the lifeworld of the residents--as the counterpoint to the "language of limits" of the medical model. Spoken everywhere but nowhere inscribed as "official" knowledge, this "little language," as the CNAs speak of it, is the fundamental medium for social interaction in the Alzheimer's Unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our earlier studies of Hurricane Andrew focused on the destruction of everyday life during the crisis itself and the reconstruction of a taken-for- granted world during the recovery period; this paper examines the significance of gender in these processes. The abrupt loss of taken-for-granted reality occasioned by the storm involved only a slight and momentary disruption of gender roles. The resilience of these roles can be understood only if gender is seen as a property of social organization that shapes not only interactional expectations and pressures, but also cultural and institutional processes, as well as bodily experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactionist analyses of social organization stimulate examination of how social situations and collective activity are shaped. Meta-power, the creation and control of distal situations, and organization as a structuration of meta-power are used as tools for exploring the shaping of situations Five meta-power processes are presented: strategic agency, rules and conventions, structuring situations. Culture construction, and empowering delegates. These processes illustrate how situations are created or altered. This paper offers a view of social organization that emphasizes relations among situations, linkages between consequences and conditions, and networks of collective activity across space and time. The conclusion calls for additional research to make more explicit the nature of social organization and its social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the author's description of the organizational transition in the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) in terms of his thinking, involvement and biography. I had not known Carl Couch while at Iowa but had met him during a visit in 1968. Our encounter definitely was not love at first sight but in organizing a session for the 1973 Midwest Sociological Society meetings, I was impressed and intrigued by the work of one of his students, Marion Weiland. My personal background also had a strong influence on my perspective about dogma and true believers. I grew in a family that was merging of a Latvian Jewish immigrant mother and a Mississippi-born Southern Baptist father who met in the political movement activities of the late 1920s in New York. The proposal made by Couch was a form of organizational genius because it not only avoided dangerously formal public choices between sets of founders but also because it opened up the process to the entire membership and newcomers. Another part of the transitional process involved the choice of a second editor for the journal. I believe I was chosen because I was more of an insider, a known quality to the committee. My intentions were to use the double-vision to strengthen the perspective and to expand the dialogue by making outsiders more aware of recent developments and research.

Although research has examined the corruptive influences of undercover drug operations on agents (Girodo 1991b; Manning and Reddlinger 1977, 1978), it has not examined the processes by which these influences can be neutralized. In this paper, I address, these neutralization processes through a typology of routine and nonroutine drug-use evasion tactics. Routine tactics involve excuses based on greed, business constraints, and role obligations (occupational, legal, arid interpersonal). Nonroutine tactics involve two components; reverse accusation and simulation. Discussion focuses on excuses where I provide a dramaturgical interpretation that accentuates their deceptive and fraudulent nature, unlike traditional interpretations (e.g., Scott and Lyman 1968) which highlight their role as a reparative technique and aligning action (Margolin 1990). Data were drawn from ethnographic interviews with 35 light undercover narcotics agents located in a moderate-sized midwestern municipality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

G.H. Mead (1934) offers a set of stages of development which describes how infants transform into mindful and self-reflexive social beings through social interaction. He does not, however, provide any parallel set of stages in the development of emotionality. This paper attempts to extend Mead's model by specifying seven stages in emotional development which are interdependent with Mead's stages of development of mind and self. These stages specify how individuals learn to share emotions with others, and learn to identify and interpret their own and others' emotional selves. Fundamental to this analysis is that self development and emotional development are inextricably linked. A framework is offered for the analysis of emotions that (1) recognizes emotions as processual; (2) notes the hierarchial relations among emotions; and (3) presumes that cognition and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The framework illustrates its utility by answering the question, "How does an infant transform from a being who experiences sensations into a being who experiences emotions?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory and research suggest that, while embarrassment may be intrinsic to social interaction, its expression is taboo. Embarrassment is seen as reflecting social incompetence. As such, members make routine attempts to repress embarrassment in the self and to deny embarrassment to self and others. I call this the taboo--repression-denial hypothesis. However, despite attempts at repression and denial, members reveal embarrassment in a variety of ways, including verbally, paralinguistically/vocally and facially/bodily. This paper is an initial investigation of emotion denial in verbal discourse. Through an analysis of embarrassment talk and non-embarrassment talk, I discover six features of the verbal context of references to embarrassment which aid in the disguise and denial of feeling: (1) verbal mitigation; (2) a link between references to embarrassment and mitigation; (3) verbal projection; (4) a link between use of "ya know," embarrassment references, and mitigation; (5) a link between use of "I don't know," embarrassment references, and mitigation; and (6) a link between references to embarrassment and laughter. Findings indicate verbal and nonverbal methods of emotion denial, and provide initial support for the taboo-repression-denial hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper formulates an overlooked type of "transverse Interaction" between symbol users and the physical environment Understanding this type leads to recognition of objects constructed as environmental others. Other is a key concept within the interactionist tradition, but emphasis has been on the social life process rather than the physical world that is there. Parallel with the Generalized Social Other is a Generalized Environmental Other, These considerations emphasize naturalistic meanings as a central concern for interactionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the essay "A Behavioral Examination of Mead's View of Role-Taking" by Ernest G. Rigney Jr. and Richard L. Smith. For the most part, Rigney and Smith simply report their procedures and results without explicitly resorting to that peculiar form of evangelism. Nonetheless, this is deceptive because the conduct of their research and the manner in which it is reported assumes the social behaviorist program. By disregarding the ambiguity in Mead's writings, the authors implicitly champion the dogma that everyone else has a distorted understanding of Mead. The paper is written in a presumptuous, proprietary tone which tacitly usurps Mead's work. No mention is made of antecedent debate over how to interpret his writings. By writing in style that admits no alternatives, Rigney and Smith are free to misrepresent Mead as an unalloyed behaviorist. This is ironic since a mindless concentration on overt behavior is exactly what Mead found so objectionable in the orientation of J. B. Watson. Rigney and Smith defined the self as a behavioral response to gestures as directed towards others in interaction. Role-taking is said to occur when the subject makes the same physical movement he or she wishes to call out of an experimental confederate. This operationalization has no relevance for most episodes of social interaction.

This article seeks to develop a new concept of transverse interaction within an interactionist framework. Transverse interaction is the interaction of living things with the natural environment. This article contends that human-environment interaction is necessarily symbolic, a product of social interaction, and that new concepts are not necessary to capture that phenomenon. Natural meaning may be a contradiction in terms. Professor Weigert's paper on transverse interaction lies in the personal struggle so dramatically illustrated in his argument. His is the dilemma of a scholar who has emphasized the symbolic and constructed aspects of reality who must now come to terms with obdurate reality. He is to be commended for attempting the task. Weigert is a symbolic interactionist pleading for focus on the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environment. The view that humans have transcended the limits of biology through technology is naive and shortsighted. The extremelty limited time that humans have been using advanced technology has resulted in disturbing, perhaps catastrophic, change to every aspect of the natural environment. As human beings, we are still part of the natural environment and our interaction with that environment will our future or determine whether we have any future at all.

This article focuses on the message of the outgoing editor of the U.S. journal Symbolic Interaction. The outgoing editor mentioned several individuals who made significant contributions to the journal. Spencer Cahill, Patricia Clough, Stan Saxton, and Leon Warshay were willing and skilled Associated editors who gave their time, expertise, advice and solid concern for the Journal. Three graduates students helped the editor with the daily chores of filing, xeroxing, mailing and in general keeping the Journal organized and on schedule. They are Jeff Ulmer, Mimi Rogers and Mike McCallion. Nina Duprey, the production Editor, was the person in charge of the Journal, seeing to it that manuscripts got copy edited, page proofs mailed out on time, and generally overseeing the entire production process. Bill Cody, the Journals Manager, was critical in moving the Journal to its quarterly status and its new format. Nina and Bill not only displayed professionalism in their work, but they were just plain fun to talk to. Finally, there are the scores of reviewers, too numerous to mention, and the authors of papers, both accepted and rejected, who provided the essential intellectual stuff on which scholarly journals thrive.