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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 attempts to make explicit the process and strategies by which one urban setting (a freeway coffee shop) attempts to guide, influence, and direct the interpretations of passersby. In this way, we might begin to see how urban settings and organizations construct and manage impressions which facilitate the codification schemes of urbanites. Finally, the approach suggested in this paper is one which will hopefully contribute to the broader study of urban social organization. The data were collected through informal conversations, unstructured interviews, and participant observation. [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]

Presents an introduction to the December 1998 issue of the journal "Symbolic Interaction."

This paper argues that symbolic interactionists must recognize the necessity to not overgeneralize their data and to accurately reflect the natural environment of "Indianness" when investigating the empirical reality of the American "Indian's" social world. Data pertaining to the self-esteem of Arapahoe and Shos hone adolescents living on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation are discussed as a case in point. Arapahoe and Shoshone youth attending integrated high schools, as a racial and numerical minority, were found to have relatively high levels of self-esteem. The implications of this finding are reviewed. [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]

This paper conceptualizes eroticism as emotional experience. I use the Renaissance Faire to illustrate the construction of asexual eroticism along three dimensions: the carnal experience of Faire, its focus on physicality, and intimations of increased interpersonal access. This approach forefronts the complexity of eroticism and situates the erotic squarely in the sociology of emotion, providing a model for understanding a range of emotional, embodied, and nonsexual charges as erotic. More broadly, the analysis seeks to contribute to the study of all emotion as embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

The first part of the paper delineates grounds for doubting that enhancing performances are as pervasive as the self-presentational literature suggests. Then, the notion of structural ambivalence is used to demonstrate that there is considerable "leeway" in role taking, especially in the case of humorous or playful behavior. Extending this analysis, it is argued that self-mockery constitutes an important aspect of the presentation of self. The remaining sections of the paper seek to define, illustrate and explore the functions of various types of self-mockery. Above all, it is suggested that self-mockery serves to increase the positive emotional sentiments among participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revolves around the informational aspect of social relationships, attempting to identify the fundamental social patterning of personal information and to establish the basic conceptual framework necessary for analyzing this topic from a sociological perspective. The paper explores the major parameters of personal reformation (amount, scope, and depth), relating them to sociological variables such as social distance, social power, privacy, and intimacy. It then examines the "information preserve," a quasi-spatial territory of the self, discussing various forms of defending It (such as discretion, concealment, and fabrication), as well as ways in which it is protected by others (with a particular emphasis on confidentiality and tact). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data derived from a field study of victory celebrations, this paper suggests a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior Existing theories of crowd behavior are either contradicted by the field data or do not adequately account for the heterogeneity of activity observed, for the interaction between the various categories of participants, or for the shifts in the behavior of the participants and the resultant change in the character of the celebrations Subsequent analysis indicates that the victory crowds are best understood from a dramaturgical standpoint. Several theoretical, conceptual, and research implications of a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior are suggested and discussed. The paper concludes with an expanded conception of crowd behavior, one which emphasizes its spatial and temporal as well as interactional dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the association of the Chicago tradition of sociology with the name of sociologist George Herbert Mead. Despite his symbolic importance to the tradition developed at the University of Chicago, Mead's thought had only a partial and indirect impact on how Chicago sociology was actually done. The authors in the article proposes to indicate how Mead shared the same general problem with the actual founders of Chicago sociology, how his particular approach and conclusions differed from theirs and how these differences ramified his view of social science. They also shall suggest how Mead's basic argument was picked up in fragmentary form by the sociologists themselves, and what neglected aspects of Mead's arguments might still be of value to the Chicago sociological tradition, or at least help those interested in its potentials to raise leading questions about its basic arguments. In the concluding section of this paper, they suggest a number of questions which their interpretation of Mead's social theory raises for sociology.

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]

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]

There are two ways of reading Goffman -as a theorist of trust and ritual accommodation, that is, as a theorist of the interaction order, or as a theorist of deception. I suggest a way of making these two readings compatible, by arguing that Goffman was interested in what I call the "production of credibility." Credibility is the quality of being believable, and this quality is integral to both trust and deception. Viewed in this way, Goffman explored the ways in which people make their actions convincing to other people. Although Coffman's analysis of the interaction order did not need a theory of the self, his work actually contains two quite different theories of the self: one linked to role analysis, one to his analysis of mental illness. I argue for the latter at the expense of the former. I conclude that Coffman both initiated substantive work about the interaction order and contributed to a synthesis of a theory of the interaction order and a theory of the self. [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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

Focusing on the interaction of children with other children in day care centers, this paper examines the various ways in which children take the role of the other toward oneself. Using a sample of sixty-two children aged two to four. data was provided from a field work study involving intensive participant observation. Within a Meadian perspective, a model of negotiating meaning emerged with four characteristic stances of children's involvement in the process of taking children into account. Each stance is outlined using field work examples. The overall result is the provision of a continuum of interaction which documents the basic ways m which individuals move from the realm of private understandings to public or shared objects of attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the labelling process in neuro-psychiatric medicine from an ethnomethodological perspective. From such a perspective, the social activity of conversation and not the interpretive application of knowledge is the contextual origin of diagnostic meaning. The characterization, turning up signs, was introduced to call attention to the work of making signs sensually accessible within the clinical encounter. The starting point in this approach was the lived-situation inhabited by doctor and patient during a clinical encounter; a situation faced by a physician who embarks upon a search for clinical signs. The physician's work in the clinical encounter was not simply a matter of observing and interpreting signs. In many cases the initial appearance of the patient did not give away definite indications of disorder. Such indications were elicited and extracted from within the clinical interaction. Interactional procedures provided both means and impediments to the discovery and delimitation of clinical signs. Interaction, in large part, made up the actual labor of diagnosis as an occasion for exertion, discipline, success, and ambiguity. The picture of diagnosis that emerges is that of a disciplined limitation on conversation which attempts to redirect and redefine the patient's alternatives for speaking.

This paper examines and critiques the manner in which one strand of attribution theory has addressed the relationship between role performances and person perception. An interactionist approach is formulated as an alternative, and an experiment is designed to test Its viability. The experiment supports our hypothesis that the reformational value of "in-role" performances is similar to the informational value of "out-of-role" performances, and that neither type of performance is consistently more reformative than the other Further, it is suggested that the reformational value of role performances is not adequately explained by the in-role/out-of-role dichotomy The interactionist conception of role, combined with a notion of informal role types, provides a more accurate understanding of role performance and person perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic interactionism has been criticized for having an astructural bias. This paper presents a response to that criticism by examining the ontological stance contained in Mead's social behaviorism and contrasting it with the ontological stance of symbolic interactionism's chief architect, Herbert Blumer. Mead's social behaviorism is shown to be a nondualist philosophy of conduct based solidly on conceptions of the human community and of individual conduct as organized on the basis of social acts--a view not shared by Blumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the relationship between group membership and identity has been central to symbolic interaction. This paper describes one instance of problematic identity, that experienced by members of the newly established academic discipline of general practice. By outlining their dilemma as 'marginal men" to both service doctors and other academics within the medical faculty, attention is focussed upon the strained intraprofessional relationships when core tasks--in this case teaching and service work--are allocated very different values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional ecology has been criticized because of its failure to link ecological factors to microscopic social variables. That criticism has led to increasing interest in, but only limited theoretical development toward, an egocentric approach The paper attempts to develop a rudimentary theory of micro ecology It presumes that two elemental macro ecological variables, density and segregation, have significance for human interaction. These elemental factors set the probability for choice behavior in the city To demonstrate this point a set of logically interrelated propositions is constructed. This theoretical structure is then used to develop a taxonomy of social areas that summarize the distinctive differences in the urban experience of sub area residents of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes J Habermas's theory of "universal pragmatics" and examines the extent to which Habermas's ideal speech community is predicted upon a specific type of relationship between the individual and society. The ability of the theory of universal pragmatics to overcome the form of domination institutionalized by modern societies is questioned, and the argument is made that Habermas's radical program of emancipation is vitiated (1) by Habermas's conflation of "transcendental" and "situationally engaged" enlightenment and (2) by Habermas's inability to reintegrate practical-emancipatory and technical forms of reason Habermas's idea of "communicative competence" replicates, rather than displaces, the "modern" solution to the problem of the relationship between the individual and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines variation in the valuation of art works in a community art museum. It often is assumed that art objects collected and displayed by museums are treated as highly valued if not sacred objects. Research at a community art museum indicates that the value of art works varies. Frontstage at the museum, art works are treated with care by museum workers. Backstage, they may be destroyed, misplaced, lost. or stolen. In addition, when not engaged in playing the conventional role of museum visitor, visitors to the museum may disregard and even mistreat art objects. Data are based on observations and interviews conducted over a two-year period in a medium-sized community art museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a contradiction between theory and method in status attainment research. The authors argue that the Meadian social psychology adopted by the status attainment researchers is incompatible with causal modeling which they use as their principal analytic tool, because Mead's ideas are inconsistent with any method which assumes unidirectional causality. A symbolic interactionist interpretation of the process of status attainment is offered in place of the causal interpretation. The symbolic interactionist interpretation removes the contradiction between theory and method and is, in addition, shown to be compatible with current sociological knowledge of the process of education. Finally, it is argued that the symbolic interactionist interpretation is also compatible with American political language, while the causal interpretation is not, and that therefore the adoption of the symbolic interactionist interpretation would permit the findings of status attainment research to speak to the question of the degree of equality of opportunity in American society as that question is asked in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contribution that interactionist approaches may make to the study and understanding of social policy based on a discussion of: (1) the general orientation of the interactionist line on inquiry and the general assumptions which the theoretical stance makes about the character of the world. (2) the problems that are of primary interest to those who work within this perspective, and (3) the methodological and technical aspects of this approach. Fruitful foci for basic and applied research from the interactionist perspective include (1) boy, policy is constructed through negotiation within a structural context. (2) the multiple interpretations of policy intent and implementation, (3) the experience and meaning of social "problems" for those who are the intended objects of the social policies, and (4) the consequences of policies for the social order. Some of the major properties of the social policy context (uncertainty, decentralization, and political pluralism) are explored for their relevance to social policy analysis. Finally, we discuss the contribution of an institutional-contextual- social worlds approach as a macro-micro bridging mechanism in social policy studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The newcomers' situation necessarily involves change and a variety of adjustment processes, in this situation the self may come into question and become an object of conscious reflection and definition. This paper focuses on the processes of change and continuity in the newcomer's self concept during the first year after moving to a new locale. Data are drawn from a broader longitudinal study of 30 newcomer families in an Australian city and are interpreted from a symbolic interactionist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1930s, jury deliberation has been studied only through questionnaire or interview, or experimental methods. This paper uses a participant observer approach to the study of deliberations in six juries. Juries were found to be concerned both with the issues in the trial and with the intersection of their own and the trial participants' biographies. Their deliberations included assessments of the moral character of the criminal participants, the competence of the attorneys and judges, both from within the context of jurors' own life experiences. The imagery of the "good juror," the interactions with fellow jurors, and the extra jury everyday life contingencies brought to the jury room also influenced deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author in this article suggests that "naturalistic investigation" is the antithesis of symbolic interactionism and that experimental research is in principle, and potentially in practice, the epitome of symbolic interaction principles. Most symbolic interactionists have eschewed experimental research as the antithesis of the proper mode of investigating human behavior. Instead there has been longstanding advocacy of what has come to be called "naturalistic investigation." Symbol manupulating human beings construct and interdependently sustain the interpretations and responses which establish the order of things. Laboratory and field experiments which focus upon human behavior are no more artificial or less "natural" than the observation of human behavior in situ. Symbolic interaction theory claims that human beings construct and order the social world, that they control and are controlled by the behaviors of others. Symbolic interactionists should do no less than to recognize this fundamental premise and to put it into practice in their scholarly investigations of human behavior.

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]

This section introduces the articles featured in the March 1983 issue of Symbolic Interaction. Symbolic interaction often has been derided as astructural, unable to deal with social organization. The articles in the said issue were the result of a call for papers on Symbolic Interaction and Social Organization. No attempt was made to narrow the section beyond that. As a result, the papers are quite diverse in theory, method, and scope. One obvious similarity of the Mast paper and the Weiss/Faulkner paper is that they both examine art worlds, but there the similarity ends. Mast is interested in the micro-structure of television production--how technical considerations generate methods of acting and directing; Weiss and Faulkner are interested in the macro-structure of the Hollywood film industry and how the structure reflects the entrepreneurial needs of individuals and organizations as seen from a collective action perspective. Both papers argue that the structure of collaboration is constrained by the production needs of the art world. The other two papers are theoretical. Wood and Wardell extend the social behavioristic critique of symbolic interactionism, by asking how Blumer's perspective on social organization differs from that of George H. Mead. Fine and Kleinman work in a more traditional interactionist perspective. They suggest that the concept of the social network might prove to be both a valuable sensitizing concept for interactionists and also an empirical set of relationships that more adequately represents the real world than does the concept of the small group.

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]