bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Time, Trust and Hazard: Hairdressers' Symbolic Roles
Authors: Eayrs Michele A.
Published: January 2008

Field work on five hairdressers in a small, suburban beauty shop shows that routine hazards provide an organizational justification to establish and maintain processes which create and sustain trust, both with coworkers and clients. The study analyzes data from interviews and weekly observations, and details the types of workers and clients; the hairdressers' roles as caretakers, friends and riskbearers; the necessity of establishing “professional” identities with clients by scheduling appointments; and the construction of shared futures among “regulars.” In the course of observing the symbolic and temporal processes associated with trust, hazards to hairdressers from chemicals, equipment, and procedures are examined, followed by the kinds of risks effecting clients from chemicals, equipment, and hairdressers' technical competence and moral responsibility, as framed by their “honorific” professional roles.
Dreams as Empirical Data: Siblings' Dreams and Fantasies About Their Disabled Sisters and Brothers
Authors: Wunder Delores F.
Published: January 2008

Until recently, most experts in the area of dreams and dream analysis held the view that dreams must be analyzed and worked with by professionals in the area of psychoanalysis or psychology, or by sleep experts. For sociologists, subjective, nonquantifiable topics such as dreams and daydreams were not considered valid areas of inquiry. But these areas can provide a way‐of‐knowing that has not been explored; these nighttime visions can contribute a new source of data about issues that deeply concern people. This article uses dreams and conscious daydreams about disabled brothers and sisters as an example of the type of information that could be gleaned if we used dreams as empirical data. Siblings of disabled individuals, originally recruited for another research project, were queried about their dreams and fantasies of the disabled sister or brother. In the respondents' dreams (both awake and sleeping) a number of themes emerged: issues that came up only when they discussed their dreams. These themes seem connected with the waking reality of having a disabled siblings; they include: (1) previews of anticipated experiences, (2) a desire to be a savior and, consequently, to be respected for rescuing the handicapperl person, (3) a wish to have the handicapper sibling escape from the dilemma of disability, (4) the notion that someone or something (a fairy godmother) will change things, (5) sorrow about the disability or death, and (6) guilt that they were “normal” and the sibling was disabled.
Portents or Confessions: Authoritative Readings of a Dream Text
Authors: Wagner‐Pacifici Robin , Bershady Harold J.
Published: January 2008

As a cultural and historical phenomenon, dreams are universally endowed with significance. Yet, their interpretations have varied widely—in the ascribed “meanings” of dreams and in the ramifications for dreamers. In this article, we examine the social trajectory of a contemporary “dream” that came to light in the context of a police investigation of a murder. We analyze the various institutional codes that refracted this “dream” through their particular vocabularies of motive, agency, and meaning. The case under investigation provides an opportunity to test a working hypothesis about a generalized modern attitude toward dreams; the two aspects of that attitude are that dreams are no longer viewed as revelatory of future events, and that dreams have been privatized. Evidence from this case confounds these expectations and leads us to develop a theory of coexisting institutional paradigms of interpretation of dreams and of the authority structures that compete for interpretive dominance. Our analysis has yielded insights into situational aspects of cultural phenomena.
Nocturnal Omissions: Steps Toward a Sociology of Dreams
Authors: Fine Gary Alan , Leighton Laura Fischer
Published: January 2008

The examination of dreams should properly be a legitimate topic of sociological investigation. We argue that there are four basic principles of dream‐life that suggest that dreams are external to the individual mind and are collective enterprises: 1) dreams are not willed by the individual self; 2) dreams reflect social reality; 3) dreams are public rhetoric; and 4) dreams are collectively interpretable. With the development of sociological approaches that examine topics previously defined as psychological, such as the sociology of emotion and cognition, the seemingly idiosyncratic components of these nocturnal productions should not exclude them from social analysis.
Living On Tortoise Time: Alternative Travel as the Pursuit of Lifestyle
Authors: Neumann Mark
Published: January 2008

This article is an enthnographic account of an alternative bus tour through the American Southwest with the Green Tortoise travel company. In a narrative reconstruction which integrates participant‐observation fieldnotes and recollections from other tour participants, I describe and analyze how a leisure journey provides a context for experimenting with alternative forms of social organization. As a mode of alternative travel, the Green Tortoise tour self‐consciously situates itself in opposition to the organizing structures typically associated with more conventional forms of mass tourism. The tour described here is modeled on an idealized image of community that emphasizes a notion of resistance to mass tourism through performance, symbol, and spectacle, and centers around the pursuit of lifestyle and identity.
Boredom: Where the Future Isn't
Authors: Brissett Dennis , Snow Robert P.
Published: January 2008

This article examines the experience and meaning of boredom in modern society. Boredom is understood as an experience of a lack of momentum or flow in a person's life. Boredom is conceptualized as an interactional phenomenon that is inextricably connected to social rhythm. The communication of boredom is examined with respect to its consequences in self and motive presentation. The article also describes those features of contemporary American life that appear to facilitate the experience and communication of boredom.
Shame, Peer, and Oscillating Frames in DWI Conviction: Extending Goffman's Sociological Landscape
Authors: Gonzales Phillip B.
Published: January 2008

Goffman argues that “the interaction order” is a substantive domain autonomous from formal social organization. His scholarship generally analyzes the interaction order in its autonomous workings but neglects the areas in which it is legally regulated. Analyzing the case of legal detention and conviction for the offense of driving while intoxicated (DWI), the article illustrates and extends Goffman's paradigm. A DWI conviction is the result of the legal system's response to distortion at the level of the interaction order. Conviction creates new interactive frames. The interaction order resists the official moral definition of DWI.
A Little Pain Never Hurt Anyone: Athletic Career Socialization and the Normalization of Sports Injury
Authors: Curry Timothy Jon
Published: January 2008

How do pain and risk of injury come to be accepted as a normal part of an athlete's role‐identity? Through an examination of the career history of Sam, an amateur wrestler, the normalization of injury is seen as a traditional form of role socialization. Sam learned to define pain and injury as a routine part of his sports career by observing and interacting with a variety of significant others. As he progressed into higher levels of competition, he encountered successful athletes and coaches who had endured considerable pain and injury in their own careers. Sam eventually gained acceptance from these elite athletes and became a role model for others through conformity to a demanding sports ethic, but he suffered progressively more serious injuries. Sam's career not only reveals the socialization processes that normalize sports injury, it also demonstrates how sports participation can become a significant health risk.
Marginalizing the Self: A Study of Citizenship, Color, and Ethnoracial Identity in American Society
Authors: Lyman Stanford M.
Published: January 2008

From 1870 to 1952, naturalization legislation in the United States of America restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity” or “African descent.” Individuals categorized as “members of the Mongolian race” or as of neither “free white” nor “African descent or nativity” were excluded from membership in the American political community and designated “aliens ineligible for citizenship in the United States.” Examination of the appellate and Supreme Court adjudications of these matters reveals a juridical rhetoric that functioned to marginalize all those declared ineligible for civic status. Although the reasoning process employed by the courts was not dissimilar from that arising whenever individual disparate aggregates must be classified according to a limited set of categories, in the situations under study, it produced and legitimated an invidious hierarchy of peoples, a race‐prejudicial sense of vertical group position, and a fundamental departure from the universalistic and individualistic claims that defended America as a thoroughgoing civil society.
Deceptive Practices in Managing a Family Member with Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Blum Nancy S.
Published: January 2008

Deception in the Alzheimer family shares characteristics with deception in a variety of other settings, in that it becomes routinized and contextualized. However, deception in the Alzheimer family is utilized toward the end of informal social control rather than primarily for information control. A key differentiating feature of the Alzheimer context is the gradually diminishing mental capacity and awareness of the person with the disease. This four‐year longitudinal study, involving participant observation of a caregivers' support group and in‐depth interviews of its members, examines how deceptive practices are learned; the various forms such practices take, including two‐party deception and collusion with others; and conflict posed for the caregiver between treating the family member with dignity and coping with the daily ordeal of managing in the home.
Privileging Fieldwork Over Interviews: Consequences for Identity and Practice
Authors: Kleinman Sherryl , Stenross Barbara , McMahon Martha
Published: January 2008

Qualitative sociologists typically privilege fieldwork over interviews. What happens to fieldworkers who now ask questions but no longer hang out? What about those who rely exclusively on intensive interviewing while participant observation remains the standard? The authors examine the negative consequences of privileging fieldwork for identity and practice, the unique contributions of in‐depth interviewing, and the differences in the tales that fieldworkers and interviewers tell. An inclusive identity anchored to the analytical assumptions fieldworkers and interviewers share would increase qualitative researchers' confidence and lead them to do better work.
Sarcasm and Interactional Politics
Authors: Ducharme Lori J.
Published: January 2008

In this article, I discuss some of the ways in which sarcasm may be used to accomplish interactional politics, and, in light of these observations, suggest a more appropriate conceptualization of both the overlaps between and the polarity of sarcasm and humor. First, I draw upon observations of routine interaction to illustrate some of the forms that sarcastic transactions may take: social control, declaration of allegiance, establishing social solidarity and social distance, venting frustration, and humorous aggression. I then suggest the analytical utility of regrouping these same observations according to their instrumental and expressive functions in interaction. Finally, I argue that sarcasm and humor, though structurally similar, have different implications for interactional politics. I propose a continuum model which better conceptualizes the relationship between these two communicative resources.
Cultural Studies in Sociology
Authors: Dickens David R.
Published: January 2008

Cultural Studies as Critical Theory, by Ben Agger.

Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies, by Norman K. Denzin.
Doppelganger: Twins' Disruption of the Assumptions of Constancy and Uniqueness of Self in Everyday Life
Authors: Sadri Mahmoud , Sadri Ahmad
Published: January 2008

The ubiquitous presence of the assumptions of constancy and uniqueness of self in everyday life renders them virtually undetectable. A radical disruption of these assumptions through an experiment involving identical twins lays bare the varieties of “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” rationalizations and convictions concerning the performer and the audience that protect the above dual assumptions of social cognition and communication.
Problematic Bodies: Past, Present, and Future
Authors: Olesen Virginia L.
Published: January 2008

Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time, by Kathy Charmaz.

At The Will of The Body: Reflections on Illness, by Arthur W. Frank.

The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner.
Becoming Irish: Personal Identity Construction among First‐generation Irish Immigrants
Authors: Field Stefanie J.
Published: January 2008

This article elaborates the attempts by Irish immigrants to meet the contradiction between social and self‐definitions initiated by their confrontation with a problematic social identity. Selectively interpreting their situation, the immigrants create and present personal identities reflecting self‐definitions by engaging the identity construction strategies of exclusivity, pragmatic identification, or autonomy. Challenging their social placement generates swings toward affiliations with others who similarly interpret and act on the environment. The construction of personal identities thus provides insight into people's struggles to maintain a positive sense of self in problematic situations and the social worlds and others with whom they identify. Shared outlooks, moreover, relate to the importance attributed to ethnicity as a relevant factor in interactions. In contrast to analyses that treat ethnic identity as an ascribed constant, the view developed here argues that ethnic identity is emergent and involves within‐group variations.
Videology: Video‐Games as Postmodern Sites/Sights of Ideological Reproduction
Authors: Gottschalk Simon
Published: January 2008

As new technologies, video‐games are becoming increasingly popular among today's pre‐teens and teenagers. Relying on systematic observation of videogames found in public arcades, participation in them, and engagement with the relevant literature, I explore eight central assumptions of “videology”: the ideology which organizes these games. While suggesting that these assumptions articulate and exaggerate problematic ideological themes, I also explore the relationship between videology and a postmodern culture or moment.
Negotiating Clothing Identities on the Sales Floor
Authors: Peretz Henri
Published: January 2008

How do salespeople negotiate “clothing identities” with customers? To answer this question, I conducted fieldwork in the women's departments of several luxury goods stores in Paris that sell ready‐to‐wear clothes. In this negotiating context of personalized service, lower‐status individuals (salespersons) propose new identities to higher‐status consumers. This comparison of how saleswomen and gay salesmen negotiate clothing identities with women customers examines both their identification with the customers and the role‐playing involved. The sales area as a “backstage” permits the “expertise” of the sales staff to mitigate the status differences and gives gay male sales staff latitude in their interactions with female clients. Through a construction of clothing identity from articles from the store, saleswomen present an image of possibilities to customers. Playing the role of personal audience, gay salesmen use their ambiguous gender identity to sell clothing.
Gender and Perceptions of Interruption as Intrusive Talk: An Experimental Analysis and Reply to Criticism
Authors: Orcutt James D. , Mennella Diane L.
Published: January 2008

After listening to an audio‐recorded conversation between a man and a woman, student‐judges rated the number of interruptions and relative amount of talk initiated by each speaker. Different versions of this scripted conversation, which was recorded by two teams of actors, varied: (1) the presence or absence of simultaneous speech, (2) the gender of the speaker initiating simultaneous speech, and (3) the affective context of the conversation. Both men and women judges significantly overestimated the talkativeness of a woman who interrupted a man in an otherwise cooperative conversation. The findings indicate that commonsense conceptions of interruption correspond to those of conversation analysts, and suggest that women's interruptions of men are perceived as particularly intrusive violations of conversational rights.
The Importance of Authenticity for Self and Society
Authors: Erickson Rebecca J.
Published: January 2008

The transition from industrial to postindustrial society and from modern to postmodern culture has led to increased interest in authenticity. Such interest is widespread not only among those studying changes in social structure and culture but also among those who adhere to the social psychological tenet that self reflects society, and society, the self. In this article, I specify how issues of authenticity have become a pervasive part of our culture, our institutions, and our individual selves. Building on both Rosenberg and Turner, I conceptualize authenticity in terms of a commitment to self‐values. The relevance of this conceptualization is illustrated, first by demonstrating its implications for identity theory and second through its implicit use by others writing about the contemporary experience of being oneself. I conclude with a discussion of how this approach to authenticity may be used by social scientists to better conceptualize self in a way that explicitly incorporates the cultural implications of today's postindustrial society.
Codependency and Recovery: Gender, Self, and Emotions in Popular Self‐Help
Authors: Irvine Leslie J.
Published: January 2008

Popular contemporary rhetoric of the self advocates knowing the needs of the self and reaching a balance between self and other. As a consequence of economic dependence on men, women have emotional obligations that make meeting these goals unlikely. The recently identified condition called codependency addresses the tensions underlying this situation. Recovering from codependency serves as an aligning action that accounts for past behavior using the quasi‐medical rhetoric of addiction. The sick role then allows for small amounts of deviance from female gender role norms in that it permits women to exercise some self‐determination in the allocation of their time and emotions. Although critics have ignored the possibility, codependency can provide a tool of resistance for those who have few resources to challenge the status quo.
In Dispraise of Justice
Authors: Johnson John M.
Published: January 2008

Ancient and modern theories of justice are analyzed for the purpose of beginning to develop a new theory which is consistent with the symbolic interaction research tradition and the lived experiences of interactionists. The Reflexive Theory of Justice emphasizes lived emotions, meaningful interpretations, social process, the reality of gender and other structured categories of interpretation, the primacy of pragmatic context, and the personal nature of justice. Justice is an inevitable and ongoing struggle for each individual life.
Narrative Structures and the Analysis of Incest
Authors: Evans Wendy J. , Maines David R.
Published: January 2008

Our approach to the past is informed by the central tenets of both the interactionist and narrative perspectives. Narrative structures are the cultural and structural contexts within which pasts are transacted. Accordingly, when narrative structures change, the storied characters of pasts are changed. We analyze incest and child abuse as a substantive site to illlustrate how the criteria of believability and proper tellings vary by context. We note that the bias of civility in the interactionist understanding of the reframing of pasts does not hold in the case of flashbacks.
Strategy, Technology, and Social Processes With in Professional Cultures: A Negotiated Order, Ethnographic Perspective
Authors: Fischer Michael J. , Dirsmith Mark W.
Published: January 2008

As an element of formal organizational structure, strategy has arisen as an icon of an increasingly organization‐based society, while the application of technology to perform organizational functions has become an accepted aspect of contemporary life. Combined, strategy and technology suggest organizational orderliness, rationality, and efficiency. A variety of literatures has recognized the symbolic role of strategy and technology, as well as professional endeavor, in legitimating organizational functioning and change, wherein the vested political interests of an organization's strategic apex may be veiled by a rhetoric of objectivity and professionalism. However, this literature has remained largely theoretical in nature. An ethnographic field study of the Big 6 public accounting firms examined the interpenetration of strategy, technology, and internal social processes. It found, for example, that audit technologies were developed and unilaterally implemented by the strategic apex of the firms to achieve such stated objectives as enhancing auditor “efficiency.” However, the implemented technologies were frequently resisted, transformed, and redirected to serve the ends of the operating core, or practitioner subculture, of the firms. Thus, strategy, technology, and social process are seen as interpenetrated within the active political‐social milieu that is public accounting.
An Ethnography of an AIDS Hospice: Toward a Theory of Organizational Pastiche
Authors: Kotarba Joseph A. , Hurt Darlene
Published: January 2008

This article describes everyday life at a hospice that provides terminal, residential care to persons with AIDS. Data were gathered over 12 months of participant observation and a series of formal interviews. The hospice is a nonprofit organization that receives most of its financial support from local community churches and agencies. The philosophy of the hospice is common to its genre—that is, care for dying patients should be holistic, personal, and palliative. The hospice staff largely adheres to this philosophy yet also organizes its everyday activities to meet the practical needs of everyone involved. Some of the more interesting staff practices include the use of touch for healing and communicating, and stress management techniques. The essence of everyday life in the hospice, though, is the relationship between the staff member and the resident. The study identifies three types of relationships—caring, pastoral, and intimate. The conclusion focuses on the value of integrating traditional interactionist ethnography and postmodernist social theory for conducting qualitative research on emerging health care phenomena like the AIDS hospice. The concept of organizational pastiche is offered to interpret the distinctive ways health care organizations specializing in HIV/AIDS care must adapt to the unprecedented cultural and biological features of the epidemic.
Divers' Accounts of Normal Risk
Authors: Hunt Jennifer C.
Published: January 2008

This research examines how deep sea divers learn to expand notions of risk to include practices that violate formal training and may increase vulnerability to injury. Cultural constructions of “normal” or acceptable risk are learned in interaction with experienced divers who define the rules of membership and provide accounts that excuse or justify participation in high risk activities. The research explores how novice divers learn to distinguish categories of formal, normal, and excessive risk as they expand their risk involvement and attempt to achieve membership in the deep diving subculture. The study concludes with a discussion of risk normalization in everyday life and other leisure and occupational subcultures.
Role Transitions, Objects, and Identity
Authors: Silver Ira
Published: January 2008

Most research on role transitions, following a tradition pioneered by van Gennep, regards these major turning points in the life course primarily as times when people move between different sets of social networks. While these studies acknowledge that rites of passage occur within particular physical spaces in which material objects are present, the importance of such objects has received little attention. I explore one particular role transition—moving away to college—and illustrate that objects play a central role in how students construct their identities. Students at “Midwestern” University make strategic choices about which objects to leave at home as anchors of prior identities and which ones to bring to school as markers of new identities. Moreover, I suggest that the meanings of these two categories of objects differ by gender. I argue that this case opens up the possibility that objects play a much more central part in role transitions than social scientists have acknowledged. This study also challenges existing assumptions about different processes of identity formation. Therefore, it engenders the need for additional research about how people reinterpret objects during role transitions, and about the different meanings that objects may have for the constructions of masculinity and femininity.
National Hatred, Female Subjectivity, and the Boundaries of Cultural Discourse
Authors: Yanay Niza
Published: January 2008

In light of a study in Israel, which found that 28% of secular girls and 63% of religious girls expressed strong hatred toward Arabs (Cal 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.
From “Swinging Hard” to “Rocking Out”: Classification of Style and the Creation of Identity in the World of Drumming
Authors: Curran Geoffrey M.
Published: January 2008

This article takes a social constructionist approach to the study of a seldom considered subculture—the “world” of drumming. I describe this subculture from both the “etic” and “emic” perspectives, showing how drummers and drumming are perceived and experienced by the musicians themselves (insiders) as well as the “outside” public. The main focus is on the drummers' intersubjective “mental maps” of their world, specifically exploring how they create musical and personal identities by adhering to a rigid classification scheme surrounding “styles” of drumming. I demonstrate how drummers use drumming equipment, personal appearance, education, and “purist” attitudes to separate styles of drumming and to construct distinct social selves. Of special interest is how drummers are cognitively socialized into “thought communities” which teach and reinforce attitudinal and behavioral norms. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities of applying my analytical framework to other worlds of music and art, as well as some forms of occupational and avocational specialization.
Talking Feelings: The Collaborative Construction of Emotion in Talk Between Close Relational Partners
Authors: Staske Shirley A.
Published: January 2008

This article reports findings from recent investigations into emotional talk between close relational partners. These findings are based upon 44 half‐hour videotaped and transcribed conversations of interactants discussing an emotionally influential issue. It was found that interactants' emotional experiences were interactively constructed through (1) downgrading and upgrading emotional expressions, and (2) developing characteristics of the situation seen to have produced the emotion so as to justify it. These collaborative constructions of emotional experience were found to be guided by a complicated system of constraints which takes into account both the great utility of emotional attributions in the construction of selves and relationships and their likelihood of survival in the interactional environment. Face‐to‐face interaction with close relational partners was, therefore, seen to play a significant role in the social construction of human emotion.
Managing the Emotions of Others
Authors: Thoits Peggy A.
Published: January 2008

Although research has focused on how individuals manage their own emotions, little attention has been paid to how individuals manage the emotions of other people. Here, I describe several techniques of interpersonal emotion‐management, drawing from observations of a psychodrama‐based encounter group which deliberately manipulated its members' feelings. Analysis reveals a number of strategies (e.g., group enactments, provocations, comforting) which, when used sequentially, produced first emotional loss of control in the individual and then positive emotion. Group solidarity was sometimes affected by these interpersonal emotion‐management techniques as well. Some techniques may be similar to those used in military training and cult group recruitment, although further research attention is needed in these arenas. Other settings in which members play upon the emotions of others should be examined to identify other interpersonal techniques and the sequencing of strategies which produce desired individual and group outcomes.
High School Reunions and the Management of Identity
Authors: Vinitzky‐Seroussi Vered , Zussman Robert
Published: January 2008

Organized around an intersection of the past with the present, high school reunions confront those who attend with discontinuities in their own lives as well as the lives of others. Based on observations of and interviews with attendees at five reunions, we argue, contrary to many claims about the contemporary segmentation of the self, that reunion goers are able to construct accounts of coherent lives by reference to “true selves” independent of appearances. Although reunion attendees may attempt to manage impressions by controlling information about themselves, these efforts are limited by attendees efforts to sustain convictions of their own integrity. These convictions, however, also depend on accounts, albeit accounts directed inward. Moreover, the maintenance of this conviction depends on the successful “neutralization” of others' judgments.
The Myth of Silent Authorship: Self, Substance, and Style in Ethnographic Writing
Authors: Charmaz Kathy , Mitchell Richard G.
Published: January 2008

Voice, the animus of storytelling, the author's presence in written works, concerns both sides of the modernist fence. Authors are urged to restrain and regulate their voices in deference to disciplinary expectations. We advocate developing an audible writer's voice that reflects our empirical experiences. Voice ranges from the evocative to the analytic and varies according to: (a) the freshness of the inquiry, (b) relationships with respondents, and (c) the place of the studied phenomena in larger systems of meaning and practice. Two different examples of our writing illustrate how fieldwork influenced the emergence of evocative and analytic voices.
On Postmodernism, Pragmatism, and Plasterers: Some Interactionist Thoughts and Queries
Authors: Maines David R.
Published: January 2008

Postmodernism is assessed as inherently flawed and largely irrelevant to interactionist work. It is suggested that the stage approach used by postmodernists, in which they define themselves as representing the next, superior stage after modernism, be replaced with a lineage approach in order to assess the possible merits of postmodernism. It is argued that such an approach would reveal postmodernism as a weak approximation of interactionist and pragmatist thought.
Traveling With the Ball Club: A Code of Conduct for Wives Only
Authors: Ortiz Steven M.
Published: January 2008

When they accompany their husbands on road trips, the wives of major league baseball players must follow an unwritten code of conduct, a code socially constructed and enforced by men. This code is reflected in the way wives and ballplayers interact on airplanes and buses, and most strikingly, in the requirement that wives stay out of hotel bars where the team is staying. These interactions within a code reflecting female conformity to male dominance, and preserving male privileges, provide a lens through which we can inspect gender inequity and marital inequity, including what can fairly be called institutionalized adultery.

We always talk about the unwritten rule book of being a baseball wife. We have our own rules. There's these unwritten rules that you do and you don't do. That's why everybody thinks that every wife should have to go into the minor league system, and not straight into the big leagues.

—Marsha
Responding to a Traumatic Event: Restoring Shared Pasts Within a Small Community
Authors: Katovich Michael A. , Hintz Robert A.
Published: January 2008

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.
Meta‐Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action
Authors: Hall Peter M.
Published: January 2008

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.
The Normalization of Problematic Emotion in Conversations Between Close Relational Partners: interpersonal Emotion Work
Authors: Staske Shirley A.
Published: January 2008

This paper is based upon recent investigations into emotional talk between close relational partners. Analysis of conversations between romantic partners, same‐sex friends, and cross‐sex friends (which were videotaped and transcribed) illustrates conversants’ interactive work to “normalize” emotional experiences which are seen to be problematic. This was accomplished with the use of both direct strategies, which define the experience as a product of the ordinary human world, and indirect strategies, which included partner‐matching of the experience and the linking of the problematic emotion to larger, positive individual or relational processes.
Exiting the Drug‐Addict Role: Variations by Race and Gender
Authors: Anderson Tammy L. , Bondi Lynn
Published: January 2008

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.
Back to Normal: Gender and Disaster
Authors: Alway Joan , Belgrave Linda Liska , Smith Kenneth J.
Published: January 2008

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.
Too Much Fun: Toys as Social Problems and the Interpretation of Culture
Authors: Best Joel
Published: January 2008

Toys are a frequent subject of contemporary claims concerning social problems. Rooted in our culture's longstanding ambivalence regarding leisure and its concerns about children's vulnerability, claims about troublesome toys also reflect anxiety about children's increased susceptibility to non‐familial influences, their growing access to toys, and an expanded toy industry, as well as an active social movement sector. Typically, these claims argue that toys represent undesirable values, and that children who play with the toys acquire those values. Parallel arguments may be found in claims regarding other forms of popular and material culture. Interactionists should be wary of making or accepting these claims, because rather than treating children's play as a topic (or empirical study, such claims locate meaning in objects, rather than actors.
Prison Gang Members' Tattoos as Identity Work: The Visual Communication of Moral Careers
Authors: Phelan Michael P. , Hunt Scott A.
Published: January 2008

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how symbolic self‐completion and moral careers are identity work by examining prison gang tattoos. Data were derived from one author's six‐year full‐member participation as a correctional officer in the California prison system. We examine tattoos specific to members of the Nuestra Familia, a California‐based prison gang. Tattoos make an individual's self‐definition more complete by visually communicating gang membership, status, rank, and personal accomplishments; they reflect a person's past career accomplishments and possible future career objectives. To analyze the moral careers communicated by these tattoos, we identify and elaborate upon five distinct phases in a prison gang moral career: pre‐initiate, initiate, member, veteran, and superior. The article concludes with discussion of the importance of incorporating symbolic self‐completion into an identity work perspective and consideration of some implications for future research on gang tattoos in particular and identity construction more generally.
When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management
Authors: Copp Martha
Published: January 2008

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 infuse 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 loss 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.
Negotiations, Work Objects, and the Unborn Patient: The Interactional Scaffolding of Fetal Surgery
Authors: Casper Monica J.
Published: January 2008

This article examines the interactional scaffolding of fetal surgery, an emergent medical specialty focused on the unborn patient. Drawing on work in symbolic interaction, especially that of Mead and Strauss, the article focuses on the social organization of work in a Fetal Treatment Unit at an urban teaching hospital. The major types of interactions among participants are cooperation and conflict, illustrating the many differences among actors in this social world and their need to work together to successfully build their specialty. Differences discussed in this article center on the work object in fetal surgery (who is considered the patient?), criteria for patient selection, and definitions of disease and treatment. Actors must continually negotiate these and other differences as they create the social order of fetal surgery in a politicized context, both locally at Capital Hospital and for the specialty more generally.
Text and Temporality: Patterned‐Cyclical and Ordinary‐Linear Forms of Time‐Consciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro‐Australian Life‐Historical Interviews
Authors: TenHouten Warren D.
Published: January 2008

It is argued that autobiographical texts, such as life‐historical interviews, provide the richest possible source of information about a person's temporality and a culture's historical past. It is proposed that time‐consciousness can be inferred from such texts. To this end, ethnographic and other studies of Australian Aboriginal time‐consciousness were used to construct a seven‐part model of patterned‐cyclical time‐consciousness. Turning these seven attributes of patterned‐cyclical time‐consciousness into their opposites yields seven features of one‐dimensional, ordinary‐linear time‐consciousness, thereby establishing a structured temporal polarity. A lexical‐level, content‐analytic methodology, Neurocognitive Hierarchical Categorization Analysis (NHCA), is introduced, in which folk‐concepts of time from Roget's International Thesaurus were used to construct wordlist indicators for 9 of the 14 definitional components. Then, using NHCA for a comparative analysis of texts consisting of life‐historical interviews, earlier results of an empirical study were briefly re‐presented. Australian Aborigines, compared to Euro‐Australian controls, used a significantly smaller proportion of words for an index of ordinary‐linear time but a higher proportion of words for an index of patterned‐cyclical time, indicating a time‐consciousness that is primarily patterned‐cyclical rather than linear. Females were less linear and more patterned‐cyclical than males in both cultures. These cross‐cultural results contribute predictive validity to the proposed polarity of time‐consciousness. Implications for the culture‐and‐cognition paradox and its resolution in dual‐brain theory are addressed.
A Test of Symbolic Interactionist Predictions About Emotions in Imagined Situations
Authors: Heise David R. , Weir Brian
Published: January 2008

From the perspective of symbolic interactionism, inner experiences—including emotions—are shaped culturally as individuals formulate events in words, and individual experiences are shaped socially as others contribute to the verbal formulation of one's experiences. Understanding cultural shaping and social negotiation of emotions requires understanding how emotion attributions arise from linguistic framings of events, and Affect Control Theory (ACT) offers a model of emotions that addresses this issue. We report tests of ACT predictions of emotions in 128 events against self‐reported emotions of respondents imagining themselves in such situations. ACT predictions are found to correlate with self‐reported emotions. Thus, empirical results validate ACT's postulate that emotions emerge from the personal impression that is generated in an event, along with the difference between that impression and the person's identity. In the conclusion, we discuss how the ACT formulation can enlighten interpretations of social negotiations regarding emotions.
Creating Relational Ties in Talk: The Collaborative Construction of Relational Jealousy
Authors: Staske Shirley A.
Published: January 2008

This study furthers recent investigations into emotional talk between close relational partners by exploring the collaborative construction of one particular type of emotional experience: relational jealousy. Conversation analytic methods were used to investigate a data base comprised of 44 half‐hour conversations between male friends, female friends, cross‐sex friends, and romantic partners. It was found that both romantic partners and friends constructed relational jealousy as a powerful “negative” emotional experience and, when constructed in this fashion, the content of the construction concerned the negative influence this experience can have on both relational partners and their relationship. The structure of negative constructions of this emotion often included use of the past tense, qualifiers, and normalization strategies to address the face and relationship concerns created by claiming for oneself or attributing to one's partner such an experience. It was also found that partners who shared a romantic attachment sometimes constructed relational jealousy as a “positive” experience and the structure and content of these positive constructions differs markedly from the negative ones. Finally, relational jealousy was found to be a useful resource in romantic partners’ construction of their unique relational bond and in their negotiation of the rights, obligations, and rules entailed by that particular type of relationship.
Making and Facing Danger: Constructing Strong Character on the River
Authors: Jonas Lilian M.
Published: January 2008

River guides are those individuals given the extraordinary task of delivering their passengers from the dangers and chaos of white‐water rivers. After engaging in what Coffman would call fateful action, river guides emerge with perceived strong character. However, before river guides can achieve such an elevated identity, they must first manage the passengers' view of the rapids as dangerous. In this article, I discuss the various techniques river guides use to construct and enhance danger on the river, how facing such danger is used to demonstrate strong character, and its relevance as a basis for authority in a leisure setting.