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This paper presents partial findings from a larger study looking at how young heterosexual people negotiate sexual encounters. In this project I found that young people display a variety of different styles when negotiating sexual encounters. In delineating these different styles, I focus on the degree of agency (how much influence the subject exerts within an interaction to sway the outcome of events) evidenced. There is a discernable difference between those who actively negotiate sexual interactions and those who passively succumb to them. Of the 83 subjects in this qualitative study conducted in Northern California, approximately one fourth demonstrate considerable agency in their participation in sexual encounters, a full half choose not to act agentically and approximately one fourth of the participants demonstrate a shift between styles over several encounters in their sexual biographies. In this paper I examine the latter group, those subjects who transition from one sexual style to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mandated arrest of individuals involved in domestic violence incidents has become a key governmental policy solution to the problem of domestic violence. Accumulating evidence suggests, however, that there are unintended effects of the policy and its implementation?including several ?undesirable? arrest outcomes such as dual arrests (when both parties are arrested), retaliatory arrest (when the perpetrator has his/her partner wrongfully arrested) and the failure to make an arrest. To understand these problems in-depth interviews and focus groups were conducted respectively with women who called a legal assistance helpline for problems with mandatory arrest, and criminal justice professionals and domestic violence advocates. Using a phenomenological theoretical perspective, this paper focuses on one particular negative effect of mandatory arrest: that women who experience undesirable arrest outcomes have their social construction of these events challenged by the police. It is argued that this challenge is consequential for a women?s identities. This paper examines 1) the identity dilemmas that women face as a result of their police interactions; 2) the conventions of warrant that women employ to justify their social construction of these events; and 3) the accounts that women offer for why their perspective on events was not recognized by police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of the meaning of parenting as described by parents who have adopted children out of the foster care system. The parenting role is divided into three levels, beginning with the executive duties of availability, monitoring, problem solving and management. The means of parenting are authority and communication, and the end of parenting is to produce an independent adult through teaching and taking care of the child physically and emotionally. The implications of this model for symbolic interactionist family theory is discussed, as is the social construction of parents as the primary causal agents in their children’s lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Blumer?s writings on the relationship between movies and sex ? including a ?private monograph? that has only recently resurfaced ? represent politically provocative and historically important studies, works that make up a substantial portion of Blumer?s early sociological output. These works, however, have largely receded from the view of American sociologists concerned with Blumer?s methodology and theoretical perspective. Yet their reconsideration, as I will attempt to demonstrate, can shed new light on his early sociological practice, and particularly on the seeming disconnect between his practical and theoretical invocations of scientific authority. By reading the material on the movies and sex alongside Blumer?s more polished and theoretically interesting publications, we can see how his later and more developed figuration of sociological authority amounted to an implicit repudiation of his earlier sociological practice. The insights of such a consideration, however, need not be limited to a reassessment of Blumer?s own sociological trajectory. Bearing in mind both their historical and political context, we can see in Blumer?s studies of the movies a set of more general tensions bound up in the relationship between empirical investigations and cultural authority, social science and public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not Available [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The received wisdom among welfare state scholars is that policy feedbacks render social insurance programs durable. Yet, in the case of Detroit's municipal bankruptcy, a voting majority of retired city workers accepted a settlement that asked them to waive key legal protections, formally accept gutted medical benefits, trimmed pension benefits, and a new public-private pension financing mechanism. This article synthesizes interactionist theories of loss to introduce the concept of "collective cooling." I argue that collective cooling helps to establish the limits of policy feedbacks by explaining how a group of retirees' collective self-understandings were adjusted from that of contractual citizens to charitable dependents. Key components of this process included: 1 Adjusting group members' understandings of how they were perceived by powerful others and 2. Adjusting the loss from one that reflected poorly on members to one that did not. Implications are discussed for how people accept unexpected economic losses, especially those imposed by a trusted institution such as an employer or government organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "human nature" has gained little usage in the discipline of sociology, which has usually viewed different ways of being human as rooted in cultural and social arrangements. Labeling any particular attitude, belief or behavior as constituting "human nature" would appear to be, from a sociological perspective, an act of privileging some social constructions over others. This is the perspective we take in our study of how "human nature" is used in everyday discourse. For our study we will use a qualitative mobile data collection strategy by enlisting several hundred students in an introductory sociology course as field workers to record instances of "human nature" and "naturally" (used in ways that seem to refer to human nature) they witness over the course of two months. We will then use grounded theory techniques to analyze the data. The current study seeks to address the following questions: (1) under what contextual realities do the need for utilizing the concept of human nature arise; (2) why in everyday interaction do individuals use the concept; and (3) what are the power dynamics involved in the meanings and usage of human nature? We will also discuss the implications of our findings for such issues as (1) micro-inequalities, (2) vocabularies of motive, and (3) whether sociologists should attempt to reclaim the concept of "human nature." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research draws on ethnography and interview data to show how the body is a basis for communication between women and horses. Because humans cannot "speak" horse and horses do not use verbal language as a means of communication, together they must create a system of communication within a medium that they both can understand. The language of the horse works through the body such that horses must use their bodies to communicate their subjective presence. Given that humans cannot convey intentions to horses through spoken language, they too must use their bodies to generate a communication style to which the horse can respond - Through the language of the body, the human and the horse can begin to recognize each other's subjective presence. One way for the human to learn the subjective presence of the horse is to pay close attention to the bodily gestures of the horse to understand if the horse is scared, angry, willing, happy, approachable and so on. The human must also be keenly aware of his or her own bodily gestures with the knowledge that horses understand their subjective presence through the medium of the body. Achieving intersubjectivity between the human and horse is crucial for the safety of both the horse and the human. It also becomes the foundation for a positive working relationship between the two, because once the human and the horse share intersubjectivity they can work together to accomplish complex activities in joint alignment. Further, this style of communication, or this mutual language between horse body and human body fosters a deeper emotional connection and supports the growth of a meaningful relationship between horse and human. In terms of the sociology of the body, this research raises important questions about the body as symbolic interaction and suggests the possibility of symbolic interaction on a non-discursive basis, and asks how as sociologists do we study communication with another species, or communication that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically there has been an imposition of mysticism around the creative processes of music based in the notion of autonomy, "both of music and the individuals involved in its practice from wider social and cultural processes" (Shepherd, 1992, p. 128). This is eminently true in the case of the compositional process, "the core or very close to the core of what we may refer to…as the musician's knowledge of music" (Seeger, 1969, p. 231). Drawing on extant historical, contemporary, psychological, educational and sociological research, as well as interviews carried out by the author, a two-fold argument will be presented arguing that the process of composition, while often an individualistic activity, is a social process. Using Bourdieu's habitus and Becker's art worlds it will be argued that composer's operate within a compositional habitus. Following from Durkheim's notion of society and the mind it will be shown that the very act of composing involves social interaction; consideration of the 'other'. Finally, with a view to Weber it will be proposed that musicology and sociology, despite the current divide (see Martin, 2006, pp. 13-31), can meet in a discourse over the text when it is considered a social product. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]