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This paper examines attempts to synthesize three micro-level sociological theories, namely symbolic interaction, exchange theory, and the construction of social reality. The author argues that although these perspectives are not based on totally in- comparable assumptions, previous attempts to synthesize have not been useful in directing the course of research. An alternative to theoretical synthesis, using multiple perspectives, is suggested, and examples of multiple paradigm use are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes two analytical concepts that can be derived from and added to the theory of action. Using these concepts, a systematic exploration of the relationship between the pattern variables and the generalised media is given. A matrix of sanction situations generates four ideal-types of sanction interaction in which actors' orientations are aligned and twelve with misaligned orientations. A link with the joint action of symbolic interactionism is suggested and the use of a more developed concept of interaction recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ethnographic research, this paper explores the experiences of elite women athletes on a Division-I college soccer team. I draw on existing literature in the sociology of sport, sociology of the body, and interactionism to inform my analysis. With this approach, I illustrate the complicated relationship women athletes have with their bodies in relation to physical competition and dominant notions of femininity today. Key reference groups influenced the players’ self-perceptions and encouraged the women to closely monitor their own appearances and actions. While undoubtedly affected by these inter-actions as well as their place in the gender hierarchy, many women athletes subtly resisted notions of idealized bodies and constructed their own meanings about their bodies and experiences. Investigating the day-to-day body awareness and negotiations of women athletes reveals the gendered nuances of sport and the complicated relationship between cultural ideals and female embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of social distance among a sample of immigrants in the process of becoming United States citizens. Using the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, a positive relationship was found between the degree of social distance and the likelihood of becoming a citizen. Social distance also serves as an important indicator of severity of initiation; the findings suggest that severity of initiation had a positive influence on reported satisfaction with life in America for those who became U. S. citizens. For those who did not become citizens, however, social distance had an inverse affect on satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent and extensive review of research concluded that worker age -- viewed both chronologically and in terms of career stage -- was a decisive determinant of work attitudes including turnover intention, i.e., intention to remain in an occupation or to leave it. This paper reports a study of work attitudes among 732 American, British, and Spanish students undergoing training as merchant marine engineering officers. All were of the same age and were at the same point in their careers. Wide differences were shown in terms of attitudes toward the occupation including turnover intention. The single most important variable was the national context in which training was taking place: The Americans exhibited the most negative work attitudes and the higher turnover intention; the Spanish had the most positive attitudes and the lowest turnover intention; the British tended to fall in the middle. Social class origin had some, though irregular, effects. The national differences are explained in terms of the training environments existing in the schools as well as structural features surrounding the merchant marine industry and the organization of training for the occupation in each country. Hence, though age may be a decisive element in work attitudes, this study suggests that the social organization within which age factors are located may determine the scope and forms of its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates upon the emergent social psychology of social endings and explicates how culminating behaviors associated with role conclusions in general and with retirement in particular can contribute to both social and personal order. Now that role careers are typically concluded by design rather than by death, invidious comparisons are being drawn and ending strategies rank-ordered in terms of their desirability. It is hypothesized that some retirements are recognized as being better than others and that our social system is coming to recognize and celebrate those who excel in their role performances until the very end. As illustration, we consider American professional team sports as the cultural totem dramatizing modern work relations and examine how the quality of athlete's career conclusions affect how they are remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a way in which the concepts of alienation and anomic may be related in a single dimension of social experience and offers a refinement and expansion of traditional strain theories of deviance causation. It is argued that both alienated and anomic social actors seek a common goal—a sense of effective interaction with their environment; an experience of personal competence. Anomic persons are those who perceive the demands of primary roles as confusing and beyond their abilities and who respond by seeking to maximize certainty, security, and stability in social interaction. By contrast, alienated individuals are those who experience primary role requirements as simple but stifling and restrictive, bereft of meaningful challenges. These latter persons seek greater freedom and opportunities for creativity and self-expression. The ways in which deviance may emerge as these alienated persons adapt to the perceived discrepancy between their abilities and responsibilities are outlined and illustrated following the adaptive modes suggested by Merton for anomic persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe the shared orientations that are relied on in producing talk that is designed to elicit just that information that the speaker might want to know. If an interactant wants to find out something from a co-interactant, one of the ways of doing so is to directly ask about it. Information-eliciting tellings operate with respect to the participants' orienting to two types of knowables, designated in this paper as type 1 and type 2. Type 1 knowables are those that subject actors as subject actors have rights and obligations to know. For example, ones name, what one is doing, and so on are assumed to be available to a competent subject-actor. Type 2 knowables are those that subject actors are assumed to have access to by virtue of the knowings being occasioned. The recipient's work, as subject-actor, involves finding an event that will fit with and account for that which was reportedly experienced by the prior speaker.

Although it is a prominent feature of modern experience, driving has received little attention from sociologists. Yet social interaction between motorists is an integral part of the traffic situation. This paper explores its bases and some of its typical dynamics. Other sociologically relevant aspects of driving are delineated and the issue of how driving may influence modern culture is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the relations between adolescents and adults. Although the generalizations of the paper are most apposite to middle-class American adolescents and adults, because the conflicts they refer to are pervasive they may be applied with qualification to other classes as well. Human learning is distinguished from that of other species by its cross-generational character. This cross-generational pattern of learning is apparently most effective for transmitting and acquiring the skills required of a human adult. At the same time, it requires the construction of social relationships which confront members of generations who, by their definition, have different knowledge of the world and different interests in it. In analyzing alternative methods for resolving these conflicts, the essay focuses on the functions of the permissive school in relieving the inter-generational conflicts and containing larger social conflicts.

This article focuses on the book "Stigma," by Erving Goffman emphasizes the relative nature of stigma in the society. The term stigma denotes a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype. His book tends to focus on absolute and/or major stigmas rather than dealing with more subtle forms of spoiled identity, and more particularly the truly contextual nature of the stigmatizing process to which he alludes. Being superior to others is as problematic and pathological as being inferior. Both sorts of persons are marginal to the social system. Goffman's framework suggests that the reason notions of stigma or deviance even come into play at all is because the goal of most social interaction is presumed to be its smooth running. There are numerous psychological and sociological studies on drinking which concur with the view that excessive drinking and alcoholism in particular pose a serious social problem.

This manuscript lays the groundwork for considering racial threat as a collective emotion. Although sociologists regularly study racial threat, a disconnect exists between Blumer's theoretical framework (1958) and modern empirical measurement. Research has largely measured racial threat as perceptions of competition or increases in racism. Neither, however, squarely fits the symbolic interactionist framework that Blumer championed. This manuscript frames racial threat as an affective group response that is generated through sustained interaction with social groups and group representations. After showing how Blumer's threat conceptualization fits the parameters of a collective emotion, I demonstrate how quantitative measurement and experimental research design can be used to capture threat as Blumer outlines it. Then, using factor analyses and regression, I illustrate that collective threat is distinct from other collective emotions and operates according to Blumer's theoretical predictions. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of how ongoing attempts to measure collective threat and the evolution of racism in the United States highlight the continued relevance of Blumer's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors argue that temporality is a significant dimension of social activity. The paper reviews the phenomenological experience of temporality, ways of conceptualizing time, and ways in which temporality may shape interpretation, and illustrates these themes through an empirical study in which approximately 80 subjects read and responded to one of two short stories. Themes of temporality were explored in the interview transcripts through references to temporal themes, temporality as an influence on causal and trait attributions, temporal chains, and other forms of interpretive cycles, as well as ways in which temporality is involved in the definition of other and "possible others." On the basis of these patterns, we conclude that time is a crucial factor in shaping interpretations of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being victimized can lead one to discover heretofore neglected elements of the social life-world. Discovery in vivid form of one's vulnerability to death reveals the pervasive importance of hopefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on ways in which specific features of the scientific enterprise interact with social patterns of sex differentiation and stratification to introduce sex differentiation into the scientific community. The study of sex differences in science has become a quasi-specialty. Instead, it has depended primarily on more general theories developed to explain sex differences among academics or other professionals. Some scientific roles for instance, teacher and apprentice, project director and research associate-involve partners of unequal status. In contrast, the collegial role implies an egalitarian, symmetrical relationship between scientific researchers. Other aspects of the collegial role have developed in response to the structure and needs of the scientific enterprise. The size and the complexity of modern science make it impossible for scientists to monitor all developments in their field, so they rely on colleagues to call to their attention references or results that they may have missed. Similarly, the high degree of specialization encourages scientists to draw upon colleagues for technical assistance, occasional instruction, and collaboration.

In this study, we suggest that the difficulty in defining, locating, and measuring social capital is at core a philosophical confusion of language, and not just a consequence of excessively wide application. The term "capital" refers to resources for investment. Financial capital consists of specific quantities of assets. Human capital, a metaphorical extension of financial capital, also consists of specific quantities of assets, in the form of skills or credentials. However, social capital, a third metaphorical construction, does not consist of resources that are held by individuals or by groups but of processes of social interaction leading to constructive outcomes. Therefore, we argue, social capital is not located at any one level of analysis: it emerges across levels of analysis. The confusion over the meaning of this term, then, is a consequence of a metaphorical confusion of a substantive quantity (capital) and a process that takes place through stages (embedded, goal-directed social relations). Locating and defining social capital is further complicated by the variability, contextuality, and conditionality of the process. Stages of social relations that lead to constructive outcomes for one group of people or in one situation may not lead to constructive outcomes for another group or in another situation. To illustrate empirically how social capital may be thought of as a process consisting of stages and to demonstrate why the concept is inherently problematic, we employ data from the 1995 interviews of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). These data enable us to examine connections among the stages of the social capital process found in the literature and to look at predictors of academic achievement, a central topic in research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article challenges the typical simplistic assumptions of consistency between words and deeds. By employing the literature on motives in sociology and communication, the authors consider the means by which actors construct consistency and inconsistency in social interaction. Most social science data collection involves asking questions of respondents in an attempt to measure attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral intentions. The point of collecting such data is typically to understand, predict, or modify behavior. People frequently express attitudes and later defy them. Sometimes they notice the discrepancy and define it as inconsistent, while other times they do not. The authors in the article contend that consistency is a complex concept which must be studied through a situated approach. The research shows how others can be a force which acts to create consistency through anticipated calls for accountability. It is suggested that consistency and inconsistency are the products of attempts to hold self or others accountable. It is only when individuals have a particular stake in the behavior in question that the issue of consistency arises.

The article explores social and human capital theory in application to status attainment research using a sample of low-income youth from rural Appalachian families. Important comparisons involve the relative influences of human capital and family of origin social capital variables on the educational and occupational attainment of youth from low-income, rural backgrounds. Data for this study were acquired from a subsample of White youths that was part of the Southern Regional Research Projects, a ten-year longitudinal investigation of the status attainment and family circumstances of low-income rural youth. Surveys of a purposive sample of youths were conducted during the fifth and sixth grades, eleventh and twelfth grades, and during young adulthood when the subjects were approximately twenty-one to twenty-two years of age. Path analysis was used to test the model because of its application to issues involving linear relationships, the presumed causal ordering of variables, and the need to determine the direct and indirect effects of predictor variables upon criterion variables. The results confirmed some of the social interaction hypotheses but demonstrated even greater support for individual human and family social capital variables in explaining young adult attainment outcomes. Support was provided for the inclusion of family-based social capital variables as a means of gaining a broader understanding of youth attainment.

Communication literature traditionally divides interaction into two forms mass media and interpersonal communication. These ideal types are unquestionably useful heuristic tools. Yet their conceptual utility is often undermined when researchers place them at opposite ends of a linear, historical transformation in which mass media technology is believed to supplant interpersonal communication and the locations in which it occurs. Tis article abandons the polar, historical relationship in favor of a communication dialectic that recognizes the synthesis of ideal types into composite forms of interaction. Embedded technology demonstrates the dialectic by exploring how electronic media fixed within a physical location can combine with the interpersonal communication taking place there to enhance group interaction. The resulting hybrid defies the assumption the assumption that mass media simply displace interpersonal interaction, pointing instead to a dialectic relationship in which ideal types continually challenge and transform one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macrolevel analyses of the influence of different communication technologies are more difficult to test and apply than the results of focused studies of particular media messages. Nevertheless. "medium theory" is tif potentially great significance because it outlines how media, rather than functioning simply as channels for conveying information between two or more social environments, are themselves social contexts that foster certain forms of interaction and social context that foster certain forms of interaction and social identities. This article uses a medium-theory perspective to address one variable related to "technological communities"-the changing boundaries between "them" and "us." The ways in which oral, print, and electronic modes of communication each foster a different balance between strangers and "familiars" are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frederick L. Bates' career has been characterized by a single quest, the creation of an internally consistent theoretical model through which sociologists can conceptualize and analyze social structure from the simplest group structures to complex networks of groups and organizations. The basic elements of this model of social structure are examined and the model's theoretical foundations, assumptions and applications are discussed. Included are perspectives on structural modeling, self-referential systems theory and the concepts of social structure, social organization, culture, norms, and society as a non-system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some of sociologist Neil J. Smelser's recollections of the intellectual and personal dialogues that transpired in his episodes of collaboration with sociologist Talcott Parsons. Reviewing these reflections, Smelser notes a kind of evolution in Parson's and his collaboration from an initial period of closeness in a clearly dominant-subordinate relationship to a period of establishing independence and finally to a more frankly competitive, more nearly equal relationship. To consider these simply as qualitatively different phases, however, would be erroneous, because in fact they developed in the context of a continuing base of intellectual respect and friendship. Smelser first encountered Parsons in 1949, when he was a freshman at Harvard University while Parsons was already a senior professor and Chairman of the Social Relations Department. The occasion was a series of three lectures Parsons gave in Social Relations 1B, the second half of the year-long freshman course offered primarily by Gordon Allport and George Homans. In lectures delivered in the spring of 1949, Parsons made an effort to spell out his current thinking on the major functional problems in society, and the social institutions that it developed in confronting these problems.

This article focuses on the type of breach that occurs as a result of what may be called "street remark," a comment in public taking place between the unacquainted. unacquainted. The occasion of concern here is the male to female street remark. But before treating this kind of street remark specifically, we should examine other occasions for street remarks in order to appreciate the context in which the male-to-female street remark occurs. The act of walking past another person in a public place often involves features that are not breaches of civil inattention but constitute mere markers of the act. In addition to the mechanical signals that another persons passing, there is a group of physiological signals that are usually considered as occurring involuntarily or without awareness. Another class of the man-made markers of passage is differentiated from the previous class in that these markers are often contrived in nature.

This article examines some aspects of the game called "Button Button Who's Got the Button," which is played by children around five to ten years old. There's a set of people sitting in a row; might be on a sidewalk somewhere. There's one person who is called It, and they walk down the row with a button concealed in their hand and they engage in possibly passing it to each person in the row, with their hands held in such a way as to keep the button concealed. Once a cycle is completed, the person who is it having possibly passed the button to each person, then the others try to guess who has it. When the guess is correct play ends and they begin again. Now the physical properties of the passed object are important; that is, a button is not an incidental phenomenon. It is very small and thin, and can then be passed in such a way that when players can see that someone has the button, other people don't see the button. So there is a notion of observability which involves something like "seeing that they know they have the button."

This article seeks to demonstrate in what ways spatial relationships in small face-to-face gatherings are a function of the immediate setting. The spatial-orientational arrangements arise because they create the conditions within which participants can effectively exchange the glances, gestures, and words out of which conversations are constructed. A comparison of the actual patterns adopted in any given encounter will quickly reveal, however, that they follow no fixed form. There is variation in the shapes of such gatherings, as well as variation in the distances between participants. The concept of the F-formation can best be defined after people have considered the way in which the behavior of an individual relates to the surrounding space. Individuals engaged in solitary activities use the space available to them in a very non random, selective fashion. Given the concept of a transactional segment, it becomes easier to define the concept of an F-formation.

This article focuses on a study of how people talk about their troubles. Participants to a conversation in which troubles are reported are engaged in proposing that some event or situation is both a problematic departure from the course of ordinary events that warrants special treatment and is manageable in such a way that it need not drastically interfere with their familiar, everyday activities. Further, the downgraded conventional response can provide that, should there be a trouble, the actual telling of it will be negotiable. Another sort of negotiation that may be involved has to do with whose trouble it is and, thus, how it will be talked about. The possibilities raised in the forgoing considerations will now be brought to bear on a single, extended interchange that will be examined segment by segment. This article focuses on one device with which this dual aspect of "troubles-talk" is present: the "trouble-premonitory" response to inquiry.

This article focuses on the behaviorizing methods and event of everyday life. The nature of the gulp and the relationship between the two orders must be clarified in the interest of a potentially unified study of social interaction. The methodogenic ontology of behavioristic operationalism has no place in the primary experiences of everyday life. When the data field of face-to-face interaction is formulated through behaviorizing methods, a new order of events is produced that stands over and against the order of events of everyday life. The methodogenic ontology of behavioristic operationalism has no place for the primary experiences of everyday life. Perhaps nowhere is the incompatibility between behavior. The prominence of behavioristic operationalism in academic psychology and biology has all but silenced descriptions and analyses of the world as it is known with one's subjects, be they animal or human.

Longabaugh's category system for coding interpersonal behavior in mother-child dyads as social exchange is revised for use in small group analysis by using a more comprehensive set of content categories based on Parsonian functional (AGIL) theory. The notation for exchange analysis is illustrated with an extract from a group psychotherapy session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a social analysis written with a full consciousness of the interventionary consequences of social analysis. Among the perplexing features of this time is that, on the one hand, there is the so-called "crisis of legitimacy" affecting all the major institutions of American society, while, on the other hand, no coherent political force exists capable of standing for a credible alternative. In postwar America, a national political consolidation was achieved in behalf of global hegemony, state capitalism, the "warfare-welfare" state, big business-big labor collaboration. The new movements cracked the postwar consolidation, forced attention to needs that had been denied or thwarted by the postwar system, ended the possibility of a permanently smooth society. Power is mastery over history. If change occurs in social life as a result of forces beyond human intention or control, then, in this case, power is absent.

An analysis of the social organization of time, done through the main institutions and processes that govern the temporal regulation of social life, namely timetables and scheduling. The conventional basis of our standard time orientation is discussed along with the social order underlying regular patterns relating to the fundamental temporal features of social events (duration, sequence, timing, tempo), and issues concerning scheduling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Action theory's substantive image of social organization, theory building strategy, and methodological tenets are compared with those of interactionism. Despite polemics to the contrary, action and interaction concepts denote a similar image of social organization and personality. As is argued, the principle difference between the two perspectives revolves around the issue of the most appropriate theory building and methodological strategy. The ontological implications of this fact are examined and found not to justify the continued partitioning of social theory into antagonistic metaphysical camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]