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This special issue of the journal "Symbolic Interaction" focuses on theory and method in symbolic interactionism. Quality papers were received from several countries and they have provided theoretical commentary and technical information with which to solve methodological problems. In some cases, the authors of the papers were asked to reduce the length of their articles significantly so that eleven articles were included. These articles have been organized under various issues that are common to all social research but are of special interest to interactionists.

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected. to in fuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through "preventive emotion management" but most often they experienced a toss of control, leading some of them to experience "burnout," This paper defines burnout as "occupational emotional deviance" that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willful leaders and mindless masses are governing images in Carlyle's and Nietzsche's romantic conception of political domination. In contrast, the nineteenth century American notion of heroic leadership was inspired by liberal sentiment and drew mainly on classical republican definitions of greatness. These sentiments and definitions supplied the basis for Ralph Waldo Emerson's theory of heroes and hero worship. The first part of this paper shows how the tension between elitist and democratic conceptions of the hero permeated Emerson's early work, and how this tension was finally resolved in his essays on representative men. The second part of the paper deals with Charles Horton Cooley's admiration of Emerson, and the affinity between Emerson's mature ideas and Cooley's studies of genius, emulation, fame, and leadership. Cooley's political sociology, like Emerson's, was based on a profound attachment to democratic principles Cooley also believed, as did Emerson, that these intangible principles only remain secure as long as society emulates the great men who personify them. Building upon Emerson's conception of the heroic figure as a symbol rather than a source of social order and social change, Cooley passed on to later generations of American sociologists a conception of heroic leadership that differs sharply from the romantic visions which prevailed in Europe from Emerson's time to Cooley's own day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the meanings that bootleg recording holds m peoples' lives "Bootlegging" refers to the practice of making unauthorized recordings of live performances Our paper is an interpretive analysis of interviews with bootleg producers and collectors In their accounts, they suggest how their activities offer an extraordinary example of what it means to participate in contemporary popular culture. As bootleggers smuggle tape recorders into concerts, or trade tapes in underground networks, they pursue rare artifacts of popular culture Their stories of bootleg taping, collecting and trading suggest an alternative to depictions of popular culture as merely a process of production and consumption, instead, these accounts demonstrate how some people document their participation in mass cultural events on their own terms and for their own uses. Here, bootlegging is seen as an attempt by people to capture live performances, to collect them as a source of memory and authenticity, and to mediate the events of their lives through means of technological reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of a study in Israel, which found that 28% of secular girls and 63% of religious girls expressed strong hatred toward Arabs (Gal and Maislees 1989), this paper explores the difference in emotional experience between the two groups of girls. Through in-depth interviews, it examines the meaning of national hatred as knowledge produced within a particular cultural discourse. In the case of the religious girls, feelings of hatred are produced through defensive emotion work aimed at securing the position of female religious subjectivity. The experience of the secular girls shows that when no single discourse is afforded privileged status, dissonant forms of knowledge stimulate the transformation of hatred into understanding and taking the role of the other, in both cases, the paper demonstrates the interplay between national discourse (secular and religious), emotional experience (of hatred), and the construction of (women's) subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the position that symbolic interaction can become more relevant to the social issues of modernity and postmodernity by overcoming its traditional tendencies to be apolitical and to focus predominantly on micro aspects of social relations, it considers a serious reading of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as a contribution to this effort. Specifically it sees Habermas' reconstruction of the conception of the individual actor involved in communicating through significant symbols into one consistent with speech act theory and the concepts of speaker and listener as constructive and helpful. The paper also examines Mead's behavioristic theory of attitudes, types of attitudes and taking the attitude of the other(s), and relates it m his logical formulation of rational universals. It suggests that Mead's optimistic image of society and his position on rationality are 'no longer appropriate for discussing social issues in a global society with multiple rationalities. It sees possibilities for reformulation in Habermas' theory because, like Mead's theory, it construes rationality in communicative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to examine the intellectual and biographical reasons why the theorists of the Frankfurt school did not embrace pragmatism, This goal is pursued in four areas: (1) the epistemological area of the debate about subjective and objective "reason"--here the misleading, character of Horkheimer's and Marcuse's writings on pragmatism is demonstrated; (2) the area of political theory--here the tension between the American democratic tradition and a quasi-Marxist functionalism is exposed; (3) the area of social psychology-here the inability of the Frankfurt school to incorporate symbolic interactionism becomes evident; (4) the elitist relationship to American mass culture. The paper ends with brief remarks on Habermas ambivalent position between pragmatism and "Critical Theory" and with a perspective of transcending this ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the interpretive dynamics of official inquiries. Beginning with an ideal-typical sketch of congressional investigations, the discussion traces a portrayal of public problems by a committee of the House of Representatives. This leads to the analysis of a hearing in which committee factions struggled to define an Air Force administrator as a "whistleblower" or a "renegade." The hearing is understood as a "certification ceremony" that rhetorically transformed staff, discoveries into allegedly definitive evidence, it is concluded that the paper's conceptual approach can be applied to diverse inquiries that combine documentary research with interrogation of witnesses to generate authoritative findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social constructionists now study emotions, they neglect what emotion feels like and how it is experienced. This paper argues that social constructionists can and should study how private and social experience are fused in felt emotions. Resurrecting introspection (conscious awareness of awareness or self-examination) as a systematic sociological technique will allow social constructionists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as welt as socially shared cognitions. Examining introspection as a sociological process, this paper argues that introspection can generate interpretive materials from self and others useful for understanding the lived experience of emotions, Findings from four studies--one, self-introspective, and the other three, interactive introspective examinations with co-investigators--provide information about the subjective part of emotion. They demonstrate the advantages of introspection in dewing with the complex, ambiguous, and processual nature of emotional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a study which compares the gender identities of battered women and non-battered women using a Battered Woman Scale (BWS). Most of those included in the sample of sheltered women had been beaten for from one to eight years. Their abuse was not an isolated incident, but rather an expression of long term tyrannical relationships. There are strong differences between the two groups of women. First, sheltered women were more likely to be classified as feminine or undifferentiated while the control group women were more likely to be androgynous. Second, sheltered women and control group women differ significantly on those gender role trait ascriptions predicted in the literature and used in this paper in the construction of the BWS. The problematic findings involve the African American women in the study. African American women have a specific set of problems and interactions which differ from white women. Previous work in this field which does not identify the race of the women in the shelters must be read in this light. However, the gender identity negotiation process is similar for white women and African American women and is framed by the generic form of sociation known as tyranny.

This paper explores critically some of the implications of Health Fascism, an emerging movement, as of September 1990, aimed at exercising increasing vigilance and control over what people put into their bodies and what they put their bodies into. Also, this paper offers some reflections about the movement's direction, meaning, and ultimate ends. Just as the Third Reich motored through Europe a piece at a time, Health Nazis are rapidly creating a certain kind of proprietary fascism in the name of health. Just as German National Socialism sought an Aryan social order that would stand for a 1,000 years, the new Health Nazis seek a kind of organic utopia where health, morality and well-being may live undaunted by the resident dangers of life. This paper argues that there is surely nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of either health or virtue. But to equate morality with health as a way of facilitating conformity to certain moral values is, at the same time, to obscure the very moral consequences of such conformity. Both the ends and means of that shared ideology known as healthism are frought with troubling questions about what will have to be done in order to achieve that which is, according to the paper, an unachievable goal.

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of Jelly's began as an assignment in a graduate course in field methods at the University of Chicago, taught by Gerald Suttles, Students studied a variety of settings, among which were neighborhoods hotels, and a church; The author had a corner tavern and liquor store. As the author matured, he loved being out "in the streets." He was independent and free-spirited and did many of the things that Street kids do. By the time he was ten, he had the run of the town. At ten and eleven, he sold papers downtown. At twelve and a half, he set pins at a bowling alley. As he began his fieldwork. The author had no clear idea of where the research would lead or where each possible direction might take him. In part this open-ended approach was a conscious act in part, it was a sensible and natural way to proceed. To be sure, the author had read the classic sociological literature and was familiar with the issues of the day, but for Jelly's social setting. he had no explicit sociological problem or question and, of course, no set answers.

Social meanings and cultural definitions attached to illness, disability, and aging have a powerful influence on the development and operations of medical care as well as the social, behavioral, and therapeutic processes occurring within these settings. Specialized care environments designed to meet the needs of what some would argue is a dramatically increasing population worldwide, those with Alzheimer's disease, have been dominated by a medical model of care where treatment of disease has primacy over person. In contrast to the medical model, the Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) at Starrmount (pseudonym) Alzheimer's Unit have socially constructed an alternative to the medical model of care through what I argue is the use of language and a process of "naming and reframing." In this "different world," as the CNAs call the world of the Unit, the resident is depicted as a socially responsive actor with a surviving self that is to be treated with respect. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, this paper examines the CNAs' construction and use of a "language of openings"--that is, the language arising out of the lifeworld of the residents--as the counterpoint to the "language of limits" of the medical model. Spoken everywhere but nowhere inscribed as "official" knowledge, this "little language," as the CNAs speak of it, is the fundamental medium for social interaction in the Alzheimer's Unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze how the call-taker in a taped 911 call came to doubt a caller who was reporting a genuine emergency. Using conversation analysis, we show how the caller's actions in the unfolding context of the call did not successfully support his claims to be a caller with legitimate trouble to report. We show how the participants' experience of the call as it unfolded differed from the media's depictions of the call. The call-taker's doubt was not an intrapersonal phenomenon but was constructed by both participants throughout the call. One of the major factors in this construction was the unsuccessful claims-making techniques used by the caller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on identity suggests that a critical factor in identity concerns presentation or the behaviors actors perform in order to convince others of their identity. Yet identity also involves the attributions others make on the basis of these behaviors. In this paper, I argue that all acts do not fare equally in the process of attribution. Rather, individuals making attributions engage in a process of mental weighing as a way to determine which acts "count" toward identity and to what extent. While various components of the act contribute to its social weight--its presence or absence, markedness, frequency, context, and the manner in which it is performed--the lens through which the attributer views the act also influences the weighing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the concerns in recent work on the sociology of emotions is the link between emotions and social bonding. A version of this issue has also been discussed in research on disasters, with the focus being on how the crisis leads to the cohesion essential to recovery and rebuilding. This paper provides an analysis of a Ike and its aftermath and shows how central emotions are to understanding the social psychology of the event. Most important here is the fact that, when identifying themselves as fire victims, those affected by the disaster assumed that they experienced the same profound emotions at the same time. This emotional simultaneity led Ike victims to emphasize their bonds to one another and heighten their boundaries with non victims. In turn, this led to their providing social support, comparative experiences, and practical assistance to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how 23 primarily upper-middle-class high school seniors anticipated identity changes as they prepared to leave home for college. The transition from high school to college is a period of "liminality" during which students are structurally in between old and new statuses. We discuss how students anticipated change, planned to affirm certain of their identities, imagined creating new identities, and contemplated discovering unanticipated identities. Such interpret We effort must be understood in the context of the ambivalence they felt about leaving home and achieving independence. The data also provoke discussion of how social class membership might be implicated in people's ability to control identity change as they move through the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An investigation was made of the joking that occurs during meetings of a club which gathers weekly to practice public speaking. In this setting, humor is expected as part of a good speaking performance. It is assumed that the use of humor can establish rapport with an audience and aid in persuasion. This paper describes how such joking must be managed to avoid both a potential disintegration of the club's focused gathering and an undermining of the face-work involved in doing public speaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper explores race and gender variations in the processes of exiting a "drug-addict role" and in creating a "recovering-addict role" within the ideological constraints of 12-Step programs. Our method is qualitative and features in-depth interviewing with 45 currently abstinent drug addicts from the 12-Step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A) and Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.) in the Washington, D. C., Metropolitan Area as well as a residential and out-patient treatment program in mid-Michigan. Our respondents' exit processes typically began with doubts about the drug addict role followed by an often long and dynamic period of seeking alternatives to it without giving up drugs and alcohol completely. In some cases, however, participation in a new role initiated doubts about an existing one. Contrary to extant research, turning points or epiphanic moments in existing roles were not always identified. Most importantly, however, we found many differences by race and gender in what comprised the exit process. Gender socialization, cultural diversity, and the history of race relations in the United States help to explain this diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our earlier studies of Hurricane Andrew focused on the destruction of everyday life during the crisis itself and the reconstruction of a taken-for- granted world during the recovery period; this paper examines the significance of gender in these processes. The abrupt loss of taken-for-granted reality occasioned by the storm involved only a slight and momentary disruption of gender roles. The resilience of these roles can be understood only if gender is seen as a property of social organization that shapes not only interactional expectations and pressures, but also cultural and institutional processes, as well as bodily experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactionist analyses of social organization stimulate examination of how social situations and collective activity are shaped. Meta-power, the creation and control of distal situations, and organization as a structuration of meta-power are used as tools for exploring the shaping of situations Five meta-power processes are presented: strategic agency, rules and conventions, structuring situations. Culture construction, and empowering delegates. These processes illustrate how situations are created or altered. This paper offers a view of social organization that emphasizes relations among situations, linkages between consequences and conditions, and networks of collective activity across space and time. The conclusion calls for additional research to make more explicit the nature of social organization and its social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes reactions by regular patrons of a family restaurant to an armed robbery that occurred within its premises. One of the victims, the restaurant's co-manager, and these regulars participated in the construction of a narrative in order to restore their normal involvement within the community and to incorporate the profound disturbance of a robbery into the patrons' and manager's shared pasts. We discuss two different types of regulars who view this particular restaurant as a sacred place. In this context, we discuss particular discourse, appearance, and touch codes that support perceptions of the restaurant as sacred. To conclude, we discuss how regulars and management resolved this profound disturbance to establish shared histories in regard to the robbery and to restore communal relations within this restaurant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the author's description of the organizational transition in the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) in terms of his thinking, involvement and biography. I had not known Carl Couch while at Iowa but had met him during a visit in 1968. Our encounter definitely was not love at first sight but in organizing a session for the 1973 Midwest Sociological Society meetings, I was impressed and intrigued by the work of one of his students, Marion Weiland. My personal background also had a strong influence on my perspective about dogma and true believers. I grew in a family that was merging of a Latvian Jewish immigrant mother and a Mississippi-born Southern Baptist father who met in the political movement activities of the late 1920s in New York. The proposal made by Couch was a form of organizational genius because it not only avoided dangerously formal public choices between sets of founders but also because it opened up the process to the entire membership and newcomers. Another part of the transitional process involved the choice of a second editor for the journal. I believe I was chosen because I was more of an insider, a known quality to the committee. My intentions were to use the double-vision to strengthen the perspective and to expand the dialogue by making outsiders more aware of recent developments and research.

Equality is described in the literature as a prerequisite to satisfying close relations, but research has not seriously grappled with how a sense of equality is created or how inequalities might be overcome. This paper uses an interactionist perspective to explore how individuals maintain or repair a close social bond when a perceived difference in status is defined to be problematic. In 176 essays, respondents described a situation where a status inequality disrupted a close relationship, the strategies one or both of the participants used to maintain the bond, and how effective the strategies were. Analytic induction yielded four basic strategy types: (a) accept the status inequality, (b) avoid the situation which fosters feelings of inequality; (c) alter the inequality by redefining or concretely mitigating it and (d) acknowledge and discuss the problematic situation. Findings from previous research on facework, embarrassment, and shame are integrated into this typology, and Implications are drawn for symbolic interactionist theory and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the life and work of Everett Hughes. I discuss the similarities and differences between his writings and those of Robert Park; I describe his biographical influences and the use he made of marginality; I consider the relevance of his professional commitments for contemporary sociology and his unique vision of sociology's mission. I conclude by calling for renewed interest in his concepts and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rituals provide public solutions to some types of life crises, or change. There are crises which beset the individual in modern society which are not easily addressed by public ritual. The present paper observes such a life crisis and identifies conscious rites performed by individuals. These rites are called, "personal definitional rites", and take place in situations demanding identity changes. Newly acquired identity is performed ritually in an attempt to elicit recognition of a new social state. Thirty-six patients clinically defined as obese underwent gastric reduction surgery. Patients were interviewed after having lost excess weight in order to understand the social results of the dramatic change in appearance. Patients described various "rites" they used to complete their conversion from fat to thin. These rites are compared to rites of transition and definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an approach to the study of human mentality. The basic thesis of this approach is that it is a mistake to think that language and other symbolic systems are just to refer or describe psychological entities and processes that already exist or that have already occurred. The science of psychology in general could be defined as the study of the acquisition, use, and grounding of skills of all kinds, in particular, for the purposes of this paper, those employed in the joint accomplishment of conversational acts. This article proposes to concentrate on those psychological phenomena which are produced in the course of symbolic interactions, that is, in the joint production of conversation in the broadest sense. Through the uses of language in conversation, this article argues that such entities as selves, memories, etc., and such states as emotions are produced, brought into being, and exist only as properties of conversation. This article claims that these conversational interchanges are the very psychological processes. Selves, attitudes, motives, memories, genders, emotions and so on have all been demonstrated to be discursive productions, attributes of conversations rather than mental entities existing in some mysterious realm of their own.

Although research has examined the corruptive influences of undercover drug operations on agents (Girodo 1991b; Manning and Reddlinger 1977, 1978), it has not examined the processes by which these influences can be neutralized. In this paper, I address, these neutralization processes through a typology of routine and nonroutine drug-use evasion tactics. Routine tactics involve excuses based on greed, business constraints, and role obligations (occupational, legal, arid interpersonal). Nonroutine tactics involve two components; reverse accusation and simulation. Discussion focuses on excuses where I provide a dramaturgical interpretation that accentuates their deceptive and fraudulent nature, unlike traditional interpretations (e.g., Scott and Lyman 1968) which highlight their role as a reparative technique and aligning action (Margolin 1990). Data were drawn from ethnographic interviews with 35 light undercover narcotics agents located in a moderate-sized midwestern municipality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As advertisements for escaped slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show, structurally vulnerable individuals experience status transformation which is governed by larger collective forces as well as by intentional states of the individuals involved. When the status transformation is, in addition, culturally unanticipated, construction of such accounts can be seen to be emergent from interaction across a variety of levels within the society of the times. Far from sustaining the, moral careers of the vulnerable they establish destructive trajectories for them. Runaway advertisements allow Us to examine the role of contradictory background expectancies in the production of the threatened identity associated with this status transformation. This paper elaborates the patterning of motives in the colonial Virginia community as it dealt with social change, individual rights and scions of appropriateness in handling runaway slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines visual representations of African Americans on postcards from 1893 to World War I Caricatures of African Americans found on these popular cultural artifacts frequently employ the visual metaphor of other-as-beast. To map the discursive features of this form of racist ideology, attention is paid to the iconographic and linguistic strategies employed to depict African Americans as physically, intellectually, and temperamentally distinct and inferior. While no oppositional readings to this racist discourse were located in the flipside messages of the senders, resistance was located in the contemporaneous popular culture of African Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habermas critical theory stands or falls on the unity of procedural reason. When Stephen Toulmin raised the problem of reason being differentiated by functions and purposes within each field of argumentation, whether law, medicine, science, or politics, Habermas' response was both weak. and vague. This paper proposes how Habermas may concede Toulmin's point, and yet demonstrate that it does not ultimately challenge the unity of procedural reason that grounds his critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critical, interpretative reading of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film, The Conversation. Started in 1966 and finished in 1974, the film's history spans the Vietnam War years, the shattering revelations of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandals. This is a political text. It remain ominous in its devastating statements about the unchecked new communication technologies which threaten to destroy our democratic heritage by eroding our fundamental civil liberties concerning the right to privacy. Clearly influenced by Antonioni's Blow-Up, The Conversation demonstrates that technological process can only detect, it cannot comprehend, or feel, or form moral judgments. It produces a pornographic ecstasy of communication in which the invisible becomes visible, and nothing is any longer secret or sacred. Like David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Coppola's film enters reality through the ear, through the sounds of the human conversation, itself an acoustic mirror which permits the speaker to function at the same time as listener to the sounds of their own and the other's voice. A story about auditory and visual surveillance and what the listener should not hear, The Conversation moves quickly. The next sequence of scenes take the viewer to the annual surveillance convention, a national meeting of the nation's top wiretappers and security men. Like Blow-Up, which also have their murders, The Conversation leaves the protagonist-investigator without proof of his secret, guilty knowledge. The voyeur has heard and seen the truth, but his tapes are now gone, and what he has heard and seen no longer exists. His technology turns against him. The legendary wiretapper has been bugged by someone even better than he is. Coppola's subversive effects involve more than just saying the technologies of listening are evil.

G.H. Mead (1934) offers a set of stages of development which describes how infants transform into mindful and self-reflexive social beings through social interaction. He does not, however, provide any parallel set of stages in the development of emotionality. This paper attempts to extend Mead's model by specifying seven stages in emotional development which are interdependent with Mead's stages of development of mind and self. These stages specify how individuals learn to share emotions with others, and learn to identify and interpret their own and others' emotional selves. Fundamental to this analysis is that self development and emotional development are inextricably linked. A framework is offered for the analysis of emotions that (1) recognizes emotions as processual; (2) notes the hierarchial relations among emotions; and (3) presumes that cognition and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The framework illustrates its utility by answering the question, "How does an infant transform from a being who experiences sensations into a being who experiences emotions?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory and research suggest that, while embarrassment may be intrinsic to social interaction, its expression is taboo. Embarrassment is seen as reflecting social incompetence. As such, members make routine attempts to repress embarrassment in the self and to deny embarrassment to self and others. I call this the taboo--repression-denial hypothesis. However, despite attempts at repression and denial, members reveal embarrassment in a variety of ways, including verbally, paralinguistically/vocally and facially/bodily. This paper is an initial investigation of emotion denial in verbal discourse. Through an analysis of embarrassment talk and non-embarrassment talk, I discover six features of the verbal context of references to embarrassment which aid in the disguise and denial of feeling: (1) verbal mitigation; (2) a link between references to embarrassment and mitigation; (3) verbal projection; (4) a link between use of "ya know," embarrassment references, and mitigation; (5) a link between use of "I don't know," embarrassment references, and mitigation; and (6) a link between references to embarrassment and laughter. Findings indicate verbal and nonverbal methods of emotion denial, and provide initial support for the taboo-repression-denial hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until quite recently, questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews and the gathering and interpreting of various documents have been the main kinds of empirical research to be found in French sociology. Observation plays a leading role in none of them, even in the latter. The researchers who use it do not seem convinced of its legitimacy, because what can be expected from systematic observation does not fit the prevailing purpose of developing abstract, general theories. After having sketched out the institutional and intellectual background, this paper examines a few examples of French studies using observation. Most of them fail to clearly distinguish between indirect evidence and direct observation, between meaning as construed by the observer and that experienced by the people observed; they rarely report dated and situated facts (even more seldom behaviors than settings), and they replace the expected analyses of these messing facts with the interpretation of would-be typical or usual facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The totality of Cooley's contribution to self-theory, as reported in most sociology texts and much of the contemporary self literature, is erroneously equated with his concept of the "looking-glass self," in its passive, dependent; and chameleon form. In this paper, we highlight Cooley's own qualifications to the looking-glass self, which properly place this popular concept in the context of Cooley's broader and more assertive view of self-concept formation. These qualifications include Cooley's emphasis on selectivity and Interpretation in the process of reflected appraisals, his writings on core values and the continuity of character, and his discussion of efficacious action and appropriative activity in the early formation of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper social pasts are considered to be foundations of everyday interpersonal life, including everyday situated action. We distinguish social paste from culture by noting that the former involves recognition of specific joint acts and social placements while the latter involves recognition of ties to acts and placements in general. We further distinguish shared pasts--which refer to specific and previous joint acts or social placements that interactors constructed together--from common pasts--which refer to specific and previous joint acts or social placements that interactors constructed with others. We assess the Importance of using either common or shared paste in the course of completing and simplifying complex and everyday transactions so as to create an appearance of routineness in relation 10 constructing these acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the charismatic authority of its Founder' Director, the ideology, and formal social structure of a holistic therapeutic community for schizophrenics, this paper examines the process of reality construction in an alternative therapeutic milieu. Data was provided from a field work study involving intensive participant observation over a two year period and open-ended interviews. Within a phenomenological perspective, therapeutic work is viewed as a cognitive activity that not only redefines and transforms the meanings of everyday life but also one that in the process of redefining produces a peculiar cognitive style--a specific tension of consciousness--through a specific epochs. By virtue of this sustained bracket and a self-consciously created culture the therapeutic community is seen as constructing its own version of reality and a peculiar social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper formulates an overlooked type of "transverse Interaction" between symbol users and the physical environment Understanding this type leads to recognition of objects constructed as environmental others. Other is a key concept within the interactionist tradition, but emphasis has been on the social life process rather than the physical world that is there. Parallel with the Generalized Social Other is a Generalized Environmental Other, These considerations emphasize naturalistic meanings as a central concern for interactionists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on participant observation in a male-dominated blue-collar job to understand how the concepts of "masculinity and femininity are re-created through coworker Interactions on the shopfloor and the effect of this on women. Men typecast women in these fobs as either feminine or unfeminine and treated them differently, but in both cases, women's presence was useful for defining--and "m the case of sex- role appropriate women--enforcing masculinity. Such treatment isolated women from the on-going work culture and constrained them to certain behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the importance of the concept of mesostructure for understanding how families create and enact a gendered division of labor. The work of symbolic interactionists, especially those using the negotiated order perspective, is used to examine linkages and processes of articulation between, the public and private worlds. Mesostructure provides a conceptual device for examining how men and women merge their respective activities within the context of social constraints. Six interlinked concepts developed by Hall (1987)--collective activity, network, conventions-practices, resources-power, processuality-temporality, and grounding--form the foundation for a mesostructural analysis of family division of labor These concepts are used to explicate the interaction of structure and process in gender division of labor In families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the essay "A Behavioral Examination of Mead's View of Role-Taking" by Ernest G. Rigney Jr. and Richard L. Smith. For the most part, Rigney and Smith simply report their procedures and results without explicitly resorting to that peculiar form of evangelism. Nonetheless, this is deceptive because the conduct of their research and the manner in which it is reported assumes the social behaviorist program. By disregarding the ambiguity in Mead's writings, the authors implicitly champion the dogma that everyone else has a distorted understanding of Mead. The paper is written in a presumptuous, proprietary tone which tacitly usurps Mead's work. No mention is made of antecedent debate over how to interpret his writings. By writing in style that admits no alternatives, Rigney and Smith are free to misrepresent Mead as an unalloyed behaviorist. This is ironic since a mindless concentration on overt behavior is exactly what Mead found so objectionable in the orientation of J. B. Watson. Rigney and Smith defined the self as a behavioral response to gestures as directed towards others in interaction. Role-taking is said to occur when the subject makes the same physical movement he or she wishes to call out of an experimental confederate. This operationalization has no relevance for most episodes of social interaction.

This is an analysis of the social context of normal police lies. We define lies, as speech acts which the speaker knows are misleading or false, are intended to deceive, and where evidence to the contrary is known to the observer. Lies are relative to a moral context, and what an audience will accept. Lies include excuses, which deny full responsibility" for an act but acknowledge its immorality, and justifications, which accept responsibility but deny" blame-worthiness. Police learn to lie and to carefully distinguish normal (or acceptable) lies from unacceptable lies, suggesting that lies are a part of a negotiated occupational order. We show how and why some types of lies are rewarded by police using ethnographic data from an 18 month field study of a large urban force. Lies can be of little issue, or become troublesome. We report and analyze two kinds of troublesome lies case lies, recognized stories an officer utilizes in a courtroom or on paper to facilitate the conviction of a suspect, and cover stories, lies an officer tells in court, to supervisors, and on the job with the aim of providing a verbal shield or mitigation in the event of discipline. Both excuses and justifications are woven together in these vignettes. An example of a refusal to lie is used to Illustrate some of the limits on lying as well organizational factors in lying. Some implications for official lying are also noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the essay written by Randall Collins about George Herbert Mead's sociological theory of mind. The elaborative theory of Mead's publication block by Collins is quite speculative. Dozens of alternative hypothesis could be presented. Mead appears to have been a poor writer at the beginning of his career, though he improved. In a 1910 article, he admitted that his 1903 paper was developed obscurely and ineffectually. It is not uncommon for poor writers to dislike writing and avoid it. However, the elaborate interpretation of Mead's publication block by Collins led him to conclude that Mead was a passive, dutiful member of the pragmatic school. In various places, Collins asserts that Mead's theory had a number of idealist vestiges or was even a secularized version of idealism. However, Mead was very critical of idealism and he advocated the scientific method because it is the only method that allows the complete escape from idealistic thinking. Collins claimed that Mead attempted to present a theoretical system without mechanism. Although Mead was critical of Newtonian types of theories that attempted to explain everything in terms of mechanism, he did not claim that mechanisms were unimportant. His unified theory recognized both mechanism and process.

The article studies George Herbert Mead's theory on the sociology of the mind. Mead published very little during his lifetime, and his reputation rests almost entirely on proselytizing by his students, on transcriptions of his lectures and on posthumous publication of unpublished papers. The way Mead expressed himself tells something about his position in the intellectual field, and it reveals a fundamental tension in his creative stance. John Dewey commented that "while mister Mead was an original thinker, he had no sense of being original. Or if he had such a feeling he kept it under." Mead was fundamentally a philosopher. Virtually all his important publications are in philosophy journals, or addresses to philosophical associations. The U.S. philosophy during Mead's career was undergoing two important transformations, that is the emergence of psychology and the resettling of the place of religion. His career was intimately connected with both. Mead admired the scientific and secular movements, and wished to defend a world consisting entirely of nature rather than spirit. At the same time, he had enough exposure to idealism to react against a mechanistic materialism, a reduction of the world to physics, of the sort that he saw among militant atheists. What has made Mead relevant for sociology is the fact that he elaborated a social theory of mind, but his concern was not to contribute to sociology but to bolstering pragmatism at a vulnerable point. Its seeming inability to account for scientific knowledge of the natural world. Pragmatism made most sense when dealing with issues of ethics and of the social world.

In this study we attempted to develop a classification of the strategies students employ to manage self-impressions after grades have been awarded and examination papers returned. These encounters between students are of three types, first, when students who have scored a top grade in this exam (Aces) encounter other students who received a low or even failing grade (Bombers); second, when Aces encounter other Aces, and, third, when Bombers encounter other Bombers. The impression management strategies employed in these encounters are constrained by well-known rules of modesty in regard to one's own achievements and considerateness for lesser achieving peers, dictated by the particular encounter type described above. These rules are spelled out and an attempt made to generalize the findings to a wider universe of interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents George Herbert Mead's work on emotions from the perspective of social behaviorism and compares it with the modern behavioral analysis of emotions. The two positions are strikingly similar. The main difference between modern behaviorism and Mead's social behaviorism is that contemporary behaviorists have access to a larger empirical data base and more refined theoretical models than Mead had. The modern behavioral analysis of emotions confirms most of Mead's basic observations and expands upon them. Empirically oriented symbolic interactionists who identify with Mead's social behaviorism can benefit by drawing upon the extensive behavioral research and theories developed in the decades since Mead worked. In fact, there is an enormous potential for developing productive research and theory at the interface between Mead's social behaviorism and modern behaviorism in the study of emotions and most other social psychological topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charisma is commonly thought of as an extraordinary personal characteristic. In contrast, this paper proposes that charisma is a product of emotional interaction between charismatic leaders and their followers. More specifically, charisma is argued to spring from charismatic leaders' use of emotion rules to redefine both objective and subjective aspects of their followers' realities. Through modeling emotion charismatics first gain legitimacy; then they propose changes in the social order and redefine the emotions necessary for such changes to occur. An analytical model of the emergence of charisma based on the evoking, revoking, and refraining of emotion rules is developed. To tentatively illustrate its utility the model is applied to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The implications of this analysis of emotional interaction for the study of social change are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to develop a new concept of transverse interaction within an interactionist framework. Transverse interaction is the interaction of living things with the natural environment. This article contends that human-environment interaction is necessarily symbolic, a product of social interaction, and that new concepts are not necessary to capture that phenomenon. Natural meaning may be a contradiction in terms. Professor Weigert's paper on transverse interaction lies in the personal struggle so dramatically illustrated in his argument. His is the dilemma of a scholar who has emphasized the symbolic and constructed aspects of reality who must now come to terms with obdurate reality. He is to be commended for attempting the task. Weigert is a symbolic interactionist pleading for focus on the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environment. The view that humans have transcended the limits of biology through technology is naive and shortsighted. The extremelty limited time that humans have been using advanced technology has resulted in disturbing, perhaps catastrophic, change to every aspect of the natural environment. As human beings, we are still part of the natural environment and our interaction with that environment will our future or determine whether we have any future at all.