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Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces "concept‐driven sociology," a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can "distill" generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a "generic sociology" that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal "parallels" across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Editor's Introduction It gives me particular pleasure to publish this review of a major but neglected figure in the recent history of symbolic interactionism. I only heard Jack Douglas speak once, when he gave a plenary address to the British Sociological Association annual conference in Lancaster in the mid-1980s. The audience treated him quite disgracefully on that occasion. Douglas made two subtle points about the need for sociologists to take contemporary research in primate ethology more seriously and to reconsider spontaneous order theories in social science. His listeners assumed that he was talking about the crasser forms of sociobiology and praising the laissez-faire ideologies of Thatcherism, and booed him off the stage. I declined to renew my membership to the BSA for about ten years after this episode. I only rejoined when I became a department chair and it was important to be engaged with the professional association, whatever my personal views. John Johnson's paper reminds us of Douglas's important and challenging legacy of ideas, and of the support and inspiration that he gave to a whole generation of outstanding scholars. Robert Dingwall Jack Douglas published 26 books and many articles between 1967 and 1989, and by his intellectual charisma influenced a productive cohort of young scholars who have produced over 70 books and 700 articles and chapters since the 1970s. He combined phenomenology, existentialism, and naturalistic field work to create an approach he termed Existential Sociology, also the title of a 1977 anthology. His thinking has undergone significant changes during the course of a long intellectual career. Following his 1992 retirement, the development of the internet and new technologies of communication afforded Jack a 'second life' with a transdisciplinary intellectual community outside of the university environment. This paper briefly summarizes a small part of his life and intellectual project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy is an increasingly popular term in the public sphere and in academia. Although the common belief is that empathy is a 'psychological' topic, sociologists have made important contributions to this conversation. The goal of this article is to provide a theoretical effort in advancing the sociology of empathy. In the first part of the paper, I review classical and contemporary statements on empathy. I identify Charles H. Cooley as an important precursor of the sociology of empathy, and discuss how contemporary interactionists have further developed this notion. Based on these previous insights, I next propose a preliminary framework for the study of the social construction of empathy. This framework is presented in two steps. First, I introduce a vocabulary based on interpretivist concepts: empathy frames, empathy rules, and empathy performances. Next, I coin the idea of empathy paths. I theorize three ideal-typical empathy paths: self-transcendent, therapeutic, and instrumental. Throughout this presentation, I use empirical cases to illustrate the applicability of this framework. In the conclusion, I show how sociologists can inform public understandings of the meaning of empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory paper addresses the intersection of character and social structure by looking at the childhood and youth of Erving Goffman. Drawing from historical and contemporary documents, I reconstruct the social world of Canada between WWI and WWII and Goffman's place in it, identify Goffman's social position as an outsider, and document his early familiarity with dramaturgy. The argument is made that Goffman's formative years illuminate his interest in stigma, showing how stigmatizing circumstances can discredit claims to identity, and suggesting how impression management helps mitigate the discrepancy between a person's real life circumstances and prevailing cultural ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a series of papers on sociologist and author Erving Goffman from the online Erving Goffman Archives published within the issue.