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This paper reconceptualizes "individualism" as a discursive strategy of action through which everyday Americans attempt to manage the cultural dilemma of engaging in externally imposed social obligations within a broader individualistic culture. While classic formulations have treated individualism as a strong cultural force directing actors toward voluntaristic and privatized lives, my analysis--grounded in an inductive analysis of 17 qualitative studies of religious Americans--finds individualism working primarily as a discursive strategy, through which actors frame their participation in activities influenced by external authority and communal obligation in ways that emphasize their own agency and autonomy. This revised conceptualization suggests that American individualism may not be as "deep" or powerful as is often assumed. More generally, it offers a novel approach for conceptualizing and further studying the dynamic relationship between broadly "national" and more local and communal cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to evaluate two competing models of multicultural integration in stratified societies: the "multiple publics" model of Nancy Fraser and the "fragmented public sphere" model of Jeffrey Alexander. Fraser and Alexander disagree on whether or not claims to a general "common good" or "common humanity" are democratically legitimate in light of systemic inequality. Fraser rejects the idea that cultural integration can be democratic in conditions of social inequality, while Alexander accepts it and tries to explain how it may be realized. In order to address this debate, I analyze the cultural foundations of the female-led, maternally themed social movements of nineteenth-century America. The language of these movements supports Alexander's position over Fraser's, though it also suggests that Alexander is mistaken in the specifics of his cultural theory of a general and democratic "common good." While Alexander's model of integration is structured uniquely by what he and Philip Smith have called "the discourse of civil society," the evidence suggests a distinctly alternative, equally democratic code at play in this case, which I have labeled a discourse of affection and compassion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses holy New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrowfocus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of interaction between Americans who self-identify as Black and White that reveals underlying expectations with regard to conversation that differ between the two groups. These differences seem not to have much to do with class or gender, but rather vary largely according to self-identification by "race." The argument of this paper will be that the social phenomena of "race" are constructed at the level of interaction whenever Americans self-identified as Black and White speak to one another. This is because the Interaction Order expectations with regard to both self and community vary between the two groups. Because the "language games" and conversational "preferences" practiced by the two groups are responsive to different Interaction Orders, the "working consensus "is substantially different, and as a consequence, conversational "moves" are not recognizably the same. It will be argued that a great deal of institutional discrimination against African Americans can be traced to this source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the important conceptual debates between different approaches to class analysis can be interpreted as reflecting different ways of linking temporality to class structure, In particular, processual concepts of class can be viewed as linking class to the past whereas structural concepts link class to the future. This contrast in the temporality of class concepts in turn is grounded in distinct intuitions about why class is explanatory of social conflict and social change. Processural approaches to class see its explanatory power as deriving from the way meanings and identities are linked to class via a history of experiences: structural approaches, in contrast, emphasize the linkage between class and perceived interests via the objective possibilities facing people in different class locations. This paper tries to integrate these two temporalities by exploring the ways in which trajectories of class experience intersect structures of objective possibility in shaping different dimensions of class consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]