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This article explores the paradox of shy performativity, whereby people who identify as shy in everyday life can nevertheless give confident displays on stage. Professional performing artists’ accounts reveal that this is both enabled and complicated by transformations in consciousness concerning the Meadian social self. While taking on a fictional persona can provide liberating opportunities for the transcendent subject ‘I’, the critically self-doubting ‘Me’ reappears at certain moments, such as stage fright, transitions in and out of character, and disruptions of a scene’s dramatic frame. Managing the shifting boundaries between contrivance and reality creates ontological dangers, the brave pursuit of which presents a thrilling challenge for the shy performer. Symbolic Interactionist and dramaturgical theories are therefore applied alongside concepts of edgework and flow to analyse shy performance art as voluntary risk-taking action.

Conversation is one of the most fundamental of all human activities. While most people take this form of interaction for granted, people who stammer often approach it with fear and trepidation. This article identifies stammering as a distinctly social event and highlights the relative neglect of the issue within the discipline of sociology. Drawing upon the work of George Mead and Erving Goffman we suggest that a distinctly sociological approach offers specific insights into stammering as an effect of social interaction.We argue that the strategies that people who stammer employ when passing and covering and the accounting practices that all individuals use in social interaction to define the difference between stammered and non-stammered speech are of sociological interest insofar as they provide valuable insights into the interaction of self and society, the tenuous distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and the conceptual boundaries of disability.

In contemporary Western societies, shyness appears to be an increasingly common experience, and yet its sociological relevance has been overlooked. Within psychology, the condition has been seen as an individual pathology, and there has been little attempt to relate this to the wider cultural context. The argument of this article is that shyness can be interpreted as both a privately felt state of mind and a publicly recognized social role. I revisit Mead’s conception of the self as an inner conversation between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’, arguing that the shy actor perceives themselves as relatively unskilled in interaction by comparison to a ‘Competent Other’. It is then suggested that it is normal for people to drift into isolated episodes of shyness as primary deviance, but that in some cases the reactions of others can lead to a career of secondary deviance. However, while a display of shyness may be normalized in certain situations, in others it can pose a more serious or enduring threat to the residual rules of interaction.This motivates the non-shy majority to defend their normative assumptions by casting moral blame upon the individual, and reframes the ‘problem’ outside of society.

This article presents a theorization of the induction and patterns of behaviour of the sport supporter along a social and moral career path. I argue that too often theorizations of contemporary sport supporters have relied upon restrictive and rigid typologies or dichotomies based upon excessively subjective codes of authenticity. I suggest that what is required is a return to the Chicagoan concept of status passage and career, married with an understanding of the fluidity and temporality of many contemporary `communities'. Specifically, here I apply this model to the case of supporters of the British ice hockey team the Manchester Storm, but suggest that this theorization could be applied to many other supporter, enthusiast or fan `communities'.

The public/private distinction has been an important, generative but relatively unexplicated and unstable background assumption in sociological thinking. This paper describes some of the significances of this dualism in the context of a contemporary anxiety about the public sphere and a turn to the private, the subjective and the individual, not least for sociology. Popular and materialistic meanings of `the private' are distinguished from possible sociological analytical uses. The increasing sociological interest in various forms of subjectivity is taken to be one characteristic version of the private within the current public/private dualism. A range of well-known formative sociological theorising is described, which provides implicit versions of the relation between the private and the public. These are a resource for rethinking what the private might now refer to in sociology. Three dimensions of the sociological private are proposed - intimate relationships, the self and the unconscious - as marking the sociological terrain of the private now and as directions for research. It is sugguested that the hitherto secondary quality of the private within a sociology which has traditionally privileged the public realm may now be changing and that discourses of the private are affecting the public agenda.

Recent attempts to develop symbolic interactionist methodologies have sought to treat the interview as an object of sociological enquiry as well as a research instrument. But their accounts in terms of interactional rules and presentation of selves are primarily concerned with reactions to interviews, and the display of the interview setting in talk is treated as a resource rather than as a topic for investigation. Since such a reliance on the availability of phenomena is also a feature of the `natural attitude', lay and sociological usages of the interview share striking similarities. More specifically, both employ the documentary method of interpretation and, in order to claim a correspondence between their accounts and some external reality, use remedies to counter misunderstandings. On the basis of tapes of selection interviews, the paper examines the competences and policies routinely adopted to provide for the contexting of talk as interview talk. Given that talk serves to display its setting (this is its reflexive character), talk becomes interview talk as members' managed accomplishment of a knowable context.

ed from any kind of wider integument. Symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists, in particular, have no explicit conceptualization of the supra-situational, of social structure or culture, as societal phenomena, even less of inter-societal cross-cultural or world-systemic relations the proper macrocontext, rather than the 'nation-state'.8 In dealing with the internal ordering of society, familiar intermediate categories like 'institution', 'class', 'level', 'domain', 'primary' and 'secondary' notions widely used by 'members' are not conceptualized explicitly, though they are often smuggled in because life has a habit of spilling over the edges of inadequate theoretical boxes. Nor is there any workedout temporal framework: development, history, and evolution become nonproblems, because history has to be the history of some substantive entity, such as a society, and evolution the evolution of types of society in successive epochs . To work with a social theory that mirabile dietu has no concept of society as an entity (however much we need to avoid 'systems' theory assumptions that underplay internal inconsistency and overemphasize the liminality of external boundaries) makes it impossible to produce a sociology which can answer to most of the major problems of understanding social life. Only a decade after Homans had had to argue for bringing men back into sociology, we have to plead for bringing society back in. This is by no means to denigrate whole modes of doing sociology. Anyone who fails to respond to the fine-grained and sensitive illumination of the everyday and the interpersonal provided by Erving GofFman would be a poor human being as well as a poor intellectual, for to read him is to experience a deepening of perception. It has been a mind-stretching experience for a whole generation whom he has taught, like Brecht, to look at the familiar in new ways, and the exotic as common human practice. Yet the exploration of the devices people use to manipulate others in face-toface encounters, to present images of themselves, to detect meanings informing others' behaviour in clues and cues provided or given off, is, in the end, to work within the confines of formal sociology. The usual riposte to that kind of criticism is to assert that relations are between men, and that it is only alienated thinking that persuades us, fetishistically, that we have relations with reified 'things' or 'forces'. A second, more substantive, riposte is that this kind of analysis can, with equal effectiveness, be applied to 'high level' groups, and that the Cabinet or the Politbureau is, after all, simply a small group. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.104 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 05:57:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms