Search

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]

I performed a qualitative content analysis of 136 college students' food diary reflection papers to examine the accounts used when explaining dietary failures. In addition to common justifications (denials of injury, appeals to higher loyalties, and condemning the condemners) and excuses (denials of responsibility and postponement), diarists referred to their status as a college student and the 'typical college student lifestyle' as the major reason for eating an unhealthy diet. Exploring how students use life stages to neutralize stigma adds a new temporal and context-focused dimension to studies of accounts and provides direction for potential health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on video recordings of coaching sessions in the context of basketball and powerlifting, this paper investigates how the sports coaching process unfolds as situated interactions. The work of sports coaching is pervasively oriented toward teaching athletes the correct forms of motion and play. Correction then is one of the central constitutive practices of sports training sessions. In this paper, we draw on a collection of instances of correction demonstrations from powerlifting and basketball to describe their order. We demonstrate the three phases of these demonstrations: arranging bodies and gaze for visual access, presenting the error visually, and proposing a correction with an embodied demonstration. Findings underscore the management of shared visual access in multi-party correction demonstrations. In demonstrating how multiple bodies may be involved in embodied reenactments of a correctable problem, and demonstrating that it is seeing an error, more than reenactment per se, that is necessary for correction activities, the study extends existing understandings both of sports coaching processes and of instructional correction in embodied activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's conflicts, understood as disagreements involving negative emotional energy, constitute a particularly intense type of social interaction. In this paper, we show that children's conflictual interactions in school differ with regard to interactional dynamics and levels of confrontational tension, which together potentially lead to violence. We discuss how these differences relate to issues of inclusion and exclusion, to levels of interactional resources, and to neighborhood differences. Our conclusions are based on analysis of fieldwork data on children aged five to eight in two Danish schools. The analysis applies Goffman's and Collins's perspectives on interaction rituals and violence and the concept of emotional capital based on Bourdieu's theory of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways people construct and signify deities. Utilizing responses from an ethnographic study as well as analyses of existing studies of religion, we elaborate ways people construct the existence and characteristics of deities by engaging in 'deity work,' which we define as the work people do to give meaning to deities as well as to themselves, others, or social phenomena related to deities. In so doing, we demonstrate how people may accomplish this in many settings by engaging in strategies of identity work including (1) defining, (2) coding, and (3) affirming the meanings of a given deity in social interaction. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding (1) the importance of examining deity work, and (2) some ways a focus on deity work processes may expand existing religious and interactionist studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is universally held among researchers and social critics that a thin ideal dominates current cultural conceptions of what is attractive, especially for women. Using interviews with eighteen women and men, this paper investigates an apparent paradox: how thin people negotiate a landscape where the attention they receive because of their thinness distresses them. Results indicate that thin people are often the target of unwanted comments about their size, comments produce an unpleasant state of self-consciousness, and the expectation of unwanted social interaction will motivate thin individuals to avoid certain social situations. Results are interpreted in terms of thinness being a hypervisible condition that produces a breakdown of norms regarding civil inattention toward thinness and produces the experience of being othered by social perceivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented is which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including social media, book reviews and Internet of Things.

This article analyzes rational decision‐making in court as an emotive‐cognitive process formed in and through social interaction. Current theoretical perspectives have shown how emotion and thought are intertwined in the workings of the human brain but have seldom elaborated on the contextual and structural features of rational‐emotional decision‐making. I propose a model that maps emotional processes and emotional management demands to the temporally extended, stepwise process of rational‐legal decision‐making. I show that (a) the bounded structure of the decision‐making process actualizes different emotive‐cognitive complexes at different stages and (b) the demand for objectivity in rational decision‐making calls for parallel emotional processes and subject positions to remain independent while sustaining social cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a theory of character problems as collective behavior grounded in the empirical case of ministry formation in two Protestant Christian seminaries. An interactionist approach to character begins with some standard theoretical openings that dislodge the evaluative core of character from the putative dispositions that inhere in persons and focus analytical attention on the attribution of character in situations. One of the challenges of pursuing this theoretical strategy is the tendency in interactionism to overemphasize situations as self‐contained sites of continually emergent meaning and action, which would neglect important aspects of character that extend beyond the immediate situation. Recent directions in interactionist theorizing that tie the situations of interaction to small group cultures and temporal coordinations aim to redress this moment‐by‐moment bias, and the inter‐situational dimensions of character attributions offer the empirical purchase to apply, assess, and extend those theoretical projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symbolic interactionist tradition can contribute to advancing sociological studies of cognition by setting dual process models on more solid ground. I draw on Blumer's epistemological statements and the interactionist tradition more broadly to consider how dual process models of cognition could be applied to naturally occurring situations. I suggest that attending to the ways the past and the future are handled and modified within social interaction provides a usable inroad for the sociology of cognition to engage with situational analysis. I identify "resonance" and "iterative reprocessing" as concepts that are suitable to this end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional production of live TV combines real‐time and recorded video into a single broadcast stream. In "live" TV, non‐live "instant replay" footage can help viewers to make sense of what has just happened. This article shows how multi‐person TV production teams assemble timely and relevant instant replays that can be seamlessly combined with real‐time footage during live broadcasts. Detailed interaction analysis demonstrates how this work is dependent on coordinated practices, and how team members achieve this by orienting to narrative concerns across multiple temporalities to produce topically useful instant replays, displaying clip relevance, and help segueing transitions between the ongoing action and replay. We conclude by examining the interrelationships between the sequential flow of visual content, the role of talk in mediating time‐shifted visual alignments, and how members make their work visible and accountable to one another and to their intended audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dramaturgical challenges of doing boundary work for a group of college women living with non‐college women at an overcrowded rental. To regulate tenant conduct and maintain their sense of self‐worth, the college women engaged in defensive othering and constructed their identity as “high‐quality” people on the basis of their characterization of their less‐educated roommates as “low‐quality” people. Their strategy of gaining self‐worth at their roommates' expense violated basic rules of social interaction that require participants to give face to gain face. This study shows that, in addition to weakening group solidarity and reproducing social inequalities, defensive othering also undermines subordinates' effort to gain self‐worth in the co‐presence of other subordinates. A video abstract is available at http://tinyurl.com/yath4o65 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures, hundreds of thousands of volunteers went to New Orleans to help rebuild. Food was quickly used as a way to welcome volunteers, to compensate them for their hard work, to celebrate progress in rebuilding community, and to interact with others. In time, however, the giving and consuming of food was renegotiated. Volunteers coming to New Orleans expected meals representative of New Orleans's foodways. This article looks at the cultural performance of food in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In particular, I analyze the symbolic exchanges of food in what I call performances of reciprocity and performances of solidarity. This study adds to the burgeoning work in symbolic interaction on food, especially as it pertains to progressive spaces of cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The copyright page of "Symbolic Interaction" journal is presented.

In contrast to conventional models of positively 'becoming' an identity through social interaction, this article explores the inverse, negational process of 'non-becoming,' whereby actors start but do not continue along an identity career trajectory. Through cumulative attrition, interactions and encounters at key moments create an overall pattern of non-progression. Using asexuality as an example, we identify three main trajectory stages of non-awareness, communicative negation and non-consolidation, each involving interactional contingencies. With a wider applicability to other repudiated identities, this model shows how even negational symbolic social objects (non-issues, non-events, and non-identities) are constituted through social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I examine how people in emotionally fraught circumstances strategically structure social interactions in order to protect fragile emotional states. Data come from interviews and observations with 18 families of children being treated for life-threatening conditions at an elite university research hospital. I show how families worked to ward off emotional threats to their ability to maintain hope that their children would recover by preempting and restructuring social interactions with friends and family members and pruning social networks. These efforts allowed families to minimize reciprocal obligations and avoid encountering pessimistic reflected appraisals that might trigger 'emotional shortcuts' leading to states of fear and anxiety. Similar efforts to reconstruct social interactions and social networks may be common among those working to maintain fragile emotional states in a variety of challenging circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important trait of mobile phones is their capacity to superimpose multiple social interactions in time and space. Little research examines how individuals choose between face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions in specific social contexts. Drawing upon focus group interviews with a diverse sample of university students in the United States, we argue that, contrary to a perspective that is popular in theory and journalistic commentary, mobile phone users do not experience the digital and the face-to-face as distinct realms. In deciding where to direct their attention, users enmesh the distant and the present, making moves that are expressive and strategic in their own right that reveal the interest, intimacy and urgency that users place in multiple, coinciding social involvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self-consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes interaction from an intentional, self-reflexive democratic meeting of ordinary citizens-a 'General Assembly' from the 2011 Occupy Movement-to explore two competing theories of democracy: Habermas's democratic deliberation and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. The group's rational ideals and procedures for democratic deliberation approximate those of Habermas's 'ideal speech situation,' but appear limited in their capacity to ensure Habermasian understanding or consensus. Intertwined with these rational procedures are practices best explained in terms of what Goffman called 'face-work'-the ways in which participants maintain a working consensus of mutual acceptance and respect in conversation. These face-work procedures-rather than sincere, rational intentions-help constitute the civility necessary for rational deliberation and participation. Such symbolic valuing of self and other provide interactional grounds for the liberty and equality of agonistic democratic conversation as conceived by Mouffe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labeling theory has long held a rather significant place in sociology generally, and in symbolic interaction more specifically. Yet, in its long history, labeling theorists have seldom considered how interactional contexts mediate the effective application of labels. Similarly, labeling theory, with its focus on deviance, has largely neglected positive instances of labeling. In this article, I consider an instance of labeling in a tutoring session and show how the local interactional context of the application of a label is accomplished such that the label 'smarter than you think' is made to stick to the student. In doing so, I demonstrate how labeling theory can be productively extended to consider positive labeling as well as the interactional contexts that mediate these labeling processes. In closing, I propose that this approach could help develop labeling theory into a complex and nuanced theory of the social constitution of human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In symbolic interaction, a traditional yet unfortunate and unnecessary distinction has been made between basic and applied research. The argument has been made that basic research is intended to generate new knowledge, whereas applied research is intended to apply knowledge to the solution of practical (social and organizational) problems. I will argue that the distinction between basic and applied research in symbolic interaction is outdated and dysfunctional. The masters of symbolic interactionist thought have left us a proud legacy of shaping their scholarly thinking and inquiry in response to and in light of practical issues of the day (e.g., Park and Blumer). Current interactionist work continues this tradition in topical areas such as social justice studies. Applied research, especially in term of evaluation and needs assessment studies, can be designed to serve both basic and applied goals. Symbolic interaction provides three great resources to do this. The first is its orientation to dynamic sensitizing concepts that direct research and ask questions instead of supplying a priori and often impractical answers. The second is its orientation to qualitative methods, and appreciation for the logic of grounded theory. The third is interactionism's overall holistic approach to interfacing with the everyday life world. The primary illustrative case here is the qualitative component of the evaluation of an National Institutes of Health-funded, translational medical research program. The qualitative component has provided interactionist-inspired insights into translational research, such as examining cultural change in medical research in terms of changes in the form and content of formal and informal discourse among scientists; delineating the impact of significant symbols such as 'my lab' on the social organization of science; and appreciating the essence of the self-concept 'scientist' on the increasingly bureaucratic and administrative identities of medical researchers. This component has also contributed to the basic social scientific literature on complex organizations and the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]