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This paper draws on extant literature to identify five dimensions that are deployed by a wide range of social groups to claim and achieve authenticity in variety of social settings: being honest or real, forgoing external rewards or compensation, coming from or living in the right place or time, embodying or participating in something, and consuming correctly. We then demonstrate the utility of these five dimensions of authenticity in action by applying them to two different qualitative studies of countercultural Christians. Our analysis of these data shows that different communities have different understandings of what makes one authentic, but the five dimensions that we outline in this article make comparisons across different groups possible. [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]

In this case study, we bring together literatures on identity and culture to examine the boundary work taking place within the United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI), a historically conservative denomination with a fundamentalist orientation toward Christian belief and practice. Our findings demonstrate that boundaries are subject to deviation—and even intentional alteration—at the local level. We introduce the concept of "self‐effacing boundary work" to describe a strategy that deemphasizes exclusionary group practices and beliefs while simultaneously seeking to retain a unique group identity. Organizational leaders and idioculture play key roles in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is social etiquette performed when offline interpersonal interactions are mediated online? Sixty semi‐structured interviews with WeChat users, China's most popular social media platform, show that the app's technical designs facilitated a set of online etiquette rules which reproduced those of acquaintance communities. Three dimensions of social etiquette rules were considered and observed: respect, elegance, and tidiness. Users honored the face of others and avoided causing others to lose face, often presented a positive but restrained self‐image, and strived to preserve the tidiness of the online public space by avoiding the sharing of and exposing others to "negative energy." A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/2tG40y8J11E. [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]

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]

The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life after Bourdieu Edited by Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson (Routledge, 2018) In an environment where education, culture, and the arts are valued in increasingly instrumental terms, Bourdieu's sociological critique of how taste transforms social hierarchy into cultural capital still offers a vital theoretical framework for arts scholars, professionals, and practitioners. These "bourgeois practices of taste" fixate on uselessness and universalize "nobility" to the upper middle classes, including Bourdieu's own class fraction as a sociologist. The three empirical accounts of museum visitors' tastemaking practices here, however, suggest a radical disjunct between museum professionals' and museum visitors' analyses of taste. [Extracted from the article]

During the heyday of modernist sociology, two theories emerged within symbolic interaction, each attempting to refine and extend aspects of Mead's framework: Affect Control Theory and Identity Theory. The similarities between these two different theories have led to confusion as well as speculation about their continuance as separate theories. We trace the development of both, contrast their foci and contributions, and outline paradigmatic changes that may reconcile some differences. In addition, we highlight the growing potential for interface with processual symbolic interactionist work, and the possible benefits for all such "faces" of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the value of techniques of neutralization in understanding how people involved in marginal to widely deviant behaviors perform identity work. Based on 33 in-depth interviews with older adult gamblers, we show how techniques of neutralization are used to align personal and social identities. We describe the techniques of neutralizations our participants use along a continuum of gambling involvement, showing how techniques differ in variety and content and are contingent on larger narratives about appropriate behaviors, identities, and selves operating in contemporary society. Our research helps to refine sociologists' understandings of relationships between levels of involvement in deviant behaviors and identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants ( IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of 'collaborative cultivation' to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of 'concerted cultivation' reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish 'bridges' between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child-rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type ( ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust-related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions become translated into resistant commemorative performance where serious humor deconstructs the binaries of life/death and past/present. We consider the implications of the ST's self-referential closure to interaction, and the transformative potential of the alignment of cultural entrepreneurs' personal memory with collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When are identity dilemmas-when people possess identities that conflict with one another and both are potentially stigmatizing-most likely to occur? Are they the result of generic social processes? A review of some of the extant research on 'identity work' suggests that historical 'misalignments' of culture and stratification, which we refer to as 'lag,' create the greatest potential for stigma and the reproduction of inequalities. Lag is exacerbated by complex, intersecting axes of hierarchy, and amplified as symbolic environments globalize and subcultures multiply. Articulating culture and structure reveals how power plays out in interaction, and highlights the omnipresence of struggles for treatment as 'fully human.' We consider whether 'alignment' is even possible when multiple dimensions of social location intertwine, compete, and collide. Following Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock (1996), we argue that 'subcultural' or collective identity work that brings new meanings into dominant cultural narratives may offer the greatest hope, but in the interim all coping strategies are costly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the change in Turkish domestic space through modernization and, in particular, the artifact of lace, as a nonchanging object in Turkish home in its relationship with the 'traditional' and the 'modern' domestic settings. Thereby it investigates how traditional and modern settings are defined in Turkish society and, this leads to a further analysis of the modernization process in Turkey within the scope of Turkish house and its domestic settings. The aim of the article is to analyze lace as an agent, which is an actant of the change in domestic settings, to read the connection between the daily life of people and social lives of artifacts. Therefore, examining the dialogue of lace with traditional and modern domestic settings provides to deconstruct the network of the artifact, the house and the individual during the modernization process that Turkish society has been through. The theoretical perspective of the article relies on a material-semiotic approach with an emphasis on Latour's Actor-Network Theory and, the methodology of the article is based on ethnography: It includes observations and semi-structured interviews conducted with people from different social environments focusing on the meaning and the use of lace in domestic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socialization is one of the defining concepts of symbolic interactionism. This essay redirects attention to that area by reviewing the works of Spencer E. Cahill, William A. Corsaro, and Norman K. Denzin, three scholars who have had little attention paid to their work on childhood socialization. Under the rubrics of (a) stages: automatic or contingent?, (b) play and games, (c) peer groups and cultures, (d) gender identity, and (e) public behavior, it is argued that these scholars have advanced symbolic interaction theory on childhood socialization by featuring the constructive, communal, and collective aspects of socialization. A summary of similarities and differences among these authors is made, especially noting Corsaro's conceptualization of "interpretive reproduction." A critique focuses on some inadequacies in their work along with suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical explanation of fashion change is offered, drawing upon symbolic-interactionist insights on fashion and appearance, and developing macro-micro connections between cultural ambivalence and the negotiation of meaning as inspired by symbolic ambiguity in appearances. The postmodern condition, connected with advanced capitalism, spawns cultural ambivalence and a plethora of clothing styles that emerge, in part, to clarify and lend expression to ambivalence, A broad variety of do thing styles, however, coupled with tendencies toward production of self, contribute to a high degree of ambiguity in individually constructed appearances, the meaning of which must then be collectively negotiated in social interaction. Failure of clothing styles to resolve cultural ambivalence results in fashion change in an on-going dialectic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]