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In an earlier study authors described how the physical fitness movement, as embodied in running and jogging, has taken on many trappings of religion. The movement draws on the same symbolic foundations as religion, such as conversion, evangelism, testimonials, disputes over dogma, and sacred texts. It also must construct a vocabulary of motives to justify its activities to members, skeptics, and detractors. This article presents a study on changes in runners' vocabularies of motive. Through the two studies authors have constructed about modern running and fitness, it has become clear that while the movement has taken on many characteristics of religion, it is a religion based on an individual rather than a social ethic. First motivated for health reasons, then spiritualism and then personal appearance, running has culminated in the abandonment of most motives except a simple appeal to the self. Apolitical, uninvolved, non-participants in the usual concerns of social life, runners have found a vocabulary of motives that slows self-indulgence without guilt. While some observers complain that American society has become too much a spectator society engaged in the pursuit of vicarious pleasures, and involvement without commitment, running seems to offer involvement and participation with real commitment. On closer examination, however, it would seem that while the participation is real, and the commitment is also real, it is a commitment to the self alone and to nothing else.

Much of the literature investigating the process of stigmatization has dealt with visible stigmas such as physical handicaps, racial identities, departures from standards of beauty or other apparent deformities. With non-visible stigma, however, a wide range of techniques of information control are possible, for here we have a case in which that which is discredited and that which is merely discreditable are separate, and the person will suffer no stigma unless the audience somehow manages possession of the discreditable information. In this light, we wish to examine the case of venereal disease, for like a prior record of hospitalization for mental illness, the fact that one has had Venereal Disease exists primarily in the form of information and is therefore open to various management techniques. Venereal disease is referred to as a social disease by medical personnel primarily due to the fact that it is contracted through particular types of socio-sexual encounters.

This article presents information related to a nondenominational, incorporated religious organization, the United Christian Evangelistic Association, led by the charismatic Reverend Frederick Eikenrenkoetter, better known as Reverend Ike. The canons of Calvinist theology served as an effective catalyst and justification for the development of capitalist economy. Reverend Ike approaches his audience with what he calls a psychological interpretation of the Bible. From this viewpoint, the Bible becomes a handbook of positive self-awareness. Reverend Ike persuasively and convincingly dramatizes diverse success stories such as the acquisition of money, automobiles, mink coats, jobs and the exorcism of drug addiction, alcoholism and assorted physical ills. Reverend Ike manages to weave appearance and discourse into an impressive rhetoric of success. Money and success as values do not simply exist structurally, but must be continually affirmed through dramatic forms. In places where success has been defined; materially, the creative means of pursuit that have been devised by moral entrepreneurs have been the stuff of which myths and legends are made. Reverend Ike reveres God and money in the same breath.

This article focuses on gift-bearing others. Compliments may be defined as a person's positive evaluations of the following elements of another's front personal appearance, as hair, clothes, make-up, performances behavior, deference, demeanor, accomplishments, personal possessions, as auto, house, equipment. Compliments may be observed in terms of how they are communicated. Compliments vary in terms of intent, reception, and interpretation as they come to be defined in situ. A compliment defined as flattery generally connotes insincerity of the giver. But flattery is different from other compliments only in terms of how it is seen by the recipient. Virtually all of the respondents interpreted the compliment they received as sincere in some degree. The recipient was asked about the identity and relationship with the person who gave the compliment and the nature of the social situation involved. The respondent was asked about his/her reaction to the compliment: was she comfortable, uncomfortable, embarrassed, or concerned about the giver's motives, or under obligation to return the compliment, and related issues.

This article traces some of the assumptions, propositions, and intellectual genesis of the dramaturgical viewpoint of life which has recently gained some prominence in contemporary versions of social psychology. Although sometimes associated almost exclusively with the work of Erving Goffman, the dramaturgical perspective is more precisely traced in its origin to the prolific writings of literary critic Kenneth Burke. In dramaturgical analysis we have perhaps the most comprehensive preoccupation with the problem of meaning of any variety of social science. In the dramaturgical sense, meaning is established only . Actors land audiences, in concert, create meaning, it can derive from no other source but this interactional matrix. This perspective, of course, clashes with most of the positions taken on the problem of meaning in Western philosophical traditions. It is no accident that much of the development and application of the dramaturgical framework has been in studies in social psychiatry and the sociology of mental disorder.