Radical Interactionism: Going Beyond Mead*

George Herbert Mead argues that human society is comprised of six basic institutions—language, family, economics, religion, polity, and science. I do not believe that he can be criticized for making institutions the cornerstones of a society, but he can definitely be criticized for his explanation of how our basic institutions originate, how these institutions operate in society after their inception, and how they later change, modifying society in the process. The problem with Mead's explanation of these three critical matters is that he based them on his principle of “sociality” rather than on the principle of “domination.” If Mead's principle of sociality is replaced by the principle of domination and his notion of the “generalized other” is replaced by the notion of the “phantom community,” then most of these problems can be largely solved. Thus, in this paper, I will not only point out the key problems in Mead's theory of society, but I will also offer solutions to them based on the notions of domination and the “phantom community.” The end product is a “radical interactionism” that surpasses Mead's original interactionism in identifying the part that both domination and the composite “other” play in every known human society—big and small, and past and present.     

Slippery Concepts, Shifting Context: (National) States and Welfare in the Veit-Wilson/Atherton Debate

The debate between Veit‐Wilson and Atherton raises key conceptual questions for the analysis of welfare states. Veit‐Wilson, in particular, focuses on the important, but strangely neglected question of when and why a state qualifies as a welfare state. Atherton usefully draws attention to historical debates about the legitimate purposes of state welfare policies and worthy recipients of state benefits, particularly in the Anglo‐Saxon countries. His contribution may draw our attention to the shifting meaning of concepts (such as poverty) over time. In this contribution I seek to broaden the debate. First, without underestimating the importance of such criteria, rather than presenting one single (normatively based) “discriminating criterion” defining welfare statehood, I argue that other conceptions of “the welfare state” may be useful as well—so long as analysts are clear and explicit about how they are using the phrase. Second, in the current conjuncture of the perceived “transformation” perhaps even “destruction” of the welfare state, historical and comparative research grounded on clear and explicit concepts is crucial.     

The Flesh and the World: Intercorporeal Body-selves,Ageing and Dancing

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address the role that embodiment, embodied consciousness and what can be termed “extradiscursive” experiences such as body memory and ekstasis as a form of ecstatic experience assume in understanding the body-self of mature dancers. I argue that the body-self of the dancer becomes increasingly intersubjective in maturity through her/his bodily practice, and that this can be understood in terms of the notions of intercorporeity, and of the “flesh” derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. I argue that ways of manifestation of intercorporeity in bodily experience are discursively elusive, drawing on two forms of bodily experience—body memory and ekstasis—and examining experiences narrated by mature dancers who were interviewed in my Ph. D. study on ageing, gender and dancers' bodies. I contend that the experience of ekstasis is the “glue” of a corporeal subjectivity that transforms itself through momentary identification with the world, that calls on the invisible as well as the visible. Body memory also challenges Western dualist conceptions of consciousness and bodily experience, and is more easily aligned with Eastern understandings of consciousness as embodied. Finally, I suggest that the concept of body memory is useful for imbuing the body-subject with a cohesion and authenticity through the body's capacity for nonconscious remembrance of movement through a proprioceptively stored “body history,” which enables the constitution of a coherent body-self in older age.     

Learning How to Listen: Kroncong Music in a Javanese Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider several weeks of music rehearsals that took place in an urban neighborhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. The music “rehearsed” by a group of men is kroncong; an urban folk music incorporating a string band, flute, vocals and sometimes a keyboard that in Indonesia dates to the arrival of the Portuguese and the establishment of urban enclaves of traders and slaves in the sixteenth century along the north coast of Java. The melancholy and other historically anchored sensorial sentiments evoked by the totality of sound and image that comprises the songs, as well as the activities and associations that go into making kroncong music, are referred to as kroncong sensibilia. The discussion of sensibilia follows an analytical path that begins with the poetics of the musical genre and moves on to an examination of the politics of kroncong sensibilia in a particular context of social relations. For the Javanese men of the neighborhood, the making of kroncong music was at one level a nostalgic response to their urban lives. However, perhaps more importantly, making kroncong music was a tactical and strategic act of sound and sentiment, a particularly masculine one, seeking “recognition” within an “aesthetic community” and built world of social relations increasingly organized around and by, if not centered on, women.     

Intensity,moderation, and the pressures of expectation: Calculation and coercion in the street-level practice of welfare conditionality

This article offers a street-level perspective on welfare conditionality as it was practiced in contracted-out UK activation programs between 2008 and 2015. Drawing on observation and in-depth interviews, the article illustrates the ways that behavioral conditionality provided street-level workers with the means to intensify or moderate activation for particular claimants. Responding to arguments about the curtailment of street-level discretion, the article argues that in the particular context of target-driven, work-first, and otherwise highly constrained services, discretion resided in the ability to intensify or moderate conditionality and its coercive potential—in decisions about how, on whom, and to what extent it would be applied. The article argues that attending to this form of discretion provides an alternative frame through which to view the differentiated treatment typically understood as “creaming” and “parking.” In so doing, the article problematizes accounts that draw clear lines between calculative, normative, and dispositional forms of street-level reason and practice. It shows how advisors' responses to the “street-level calculus of choice” were articulated in terms of expectation, where attempts at future-oriented calculation necessarily entailed making other forms of speculative and normative judgement about claimants and their situations. The article thus contributes to an understanding of both the causes and meaning of differentiated treatment in conditional welfare services.     

Ordering tasting in a restaurant: experiencing,socializing, and processing food

Sometimes there are moments in which German speakers will state that something schmeckt gut [tastes good]. Focusing on a family celebration in a restaurant in Austria, the paper considers how in three schmeckt gut moments, participants variously order “tasting” as a process of experiencing, socializing, and processing. It is argued that while it is possible to analyse how a person simultaneously experiences sensual qualities inherent in a particular dish, socializes with others, and processes food, these aspects are not equally relevant for the people involved in the “tasting”. Different modes of ordering “tasting” can exist next to each other such that a “tasting together in difference” takes place. Following from this, this article calls for further investigation into the practical achievement of “tasting together in difference” and the enabling role of care in this process. By shedding light on how tasting is done in practices of dining out in Western Europe, it contributes to a growing set of ethnomethodologically oriented studies on how tasting and taste are done in practice.     

National Identity,Citizenship and Immigration: Putting Identity in Context

In this paper we suggest that there is a need to examine what is meant by “context” in Social Psychology and present an example of how to place identity in its social and institutional context. Taking the case of British naturalisation, the process whereby migrants become citizens, we show that the identity of naturalised citizens is defined by common‐sense ideas about Britishness and by immigration policies. An analysis of policy documents on “earned citizenship” and interviews with naturalised citizens shows that the distinction between “elite” and “non‐elite” migrants is evident in both the “reified” sphere of policy and the “common sense” sphere of everyday identity construction. While social representations embedded in lay experience construct ethno‐cultural similarity and difference, immigration policies engage in an institutionalised positioning process by determining migrants' rights of mobility. These spheres of knowledge and practice are not disconnected as these two levels of “managing otherness” overlap—it is the poorer, less skilled migrants, originating outside the West who epitomise difference (within a consensual sphere) and have less freedom of mobility (within a reified sphere). We show that the context of identity should be understood as simultaneously psychological and political.     

Sing … Then Think: Musical Interventions and Nondeliberative Forms of Practice in Social Work Groups

ABSTRACT

The positive effects of music have been demonstrated worldwide in many fields including social work, psychology, medicine, and education. Musical interventions including music listening, lyric analysis, and singing have also been found effective in group work. This article, guided by Norma Lang’s nondeliberative theory, aims to provide the “why,” “when,” and “how” of incorporating music into social work groups. It also provides the reader with a toolbox of musical interventions and the encouragement to utilize these “artful, actional, and analogic” activities in group work.     

Kurt Lewin's Leadership Studies and His Legacy to Social Psychology: Is There Nothing as Practical as a Good Theory?

This paper re‐examines Kurt Lewin's classic leadership studies, using them as a concrete example to explore his wider legacy to social psychology. Lewin distinguished between advanced “Galileian” science, which was based on analysing particular examples, and backward “Aristotelian” science, which used statistical analyses. Close examination of the way Lewin wrote about the leadership studies reveals that he used the sort of binary, value‐laden concepts that he criticised as “Aristotelian”. Such concepts, especially those of “democracy” and “autocracy”, affected the way that he analysed the results and the ways that later social scientists have understood, and misunderstood, the studies. It is argued that Lewin's famous motto—“there is nothing as practical as a good theory”—is too simple to fit the tensions between the leadership studies and his own views of what counts as good theory.     

From fun to fraught: marketing to kids and regulating “risky foods” in Canada

ABSTRACT

In an era of industrialized food production, ultra-processed foods, “Big Food” marketing, and growing obesity rates, food has come to be framed as an object of risk – and as an object of regulation. Such reframing has fascinating implications related to issues of responsibility and decision making, especially when it comes to children’s food. This article probes the relationship between representation, regulation and “risky” consumption with respect to children’s food. I examine how child-targeted foods become framed as “risky” and what counts as “risky” food messaging under Health Canada’s commitment to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. Detailing the tension between food as a risk object and food as a child object, I suggest how issues of semantic provisioning and the politics of the unseen work to complicate and destabilize the (seemingly) straightforward process of prohibiting unhealthy food marketing to children.     

Under the Influence: The Interplay among Industry,Publishing, and Drug Regulation

The relationships among academe, publishing, and industry can facilitate commercial bias in how drug efficacy and safety data are obtained, interpreted, and presented to regulatory bodies and prescribers. Through a critique of published and unpublished trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for approval of a new antidepressant, vortioxetine, we present a case study of the “ghost management” of the information delivery process. We argue that currently accepted practices undermine regulatory safeguards aimed at protecting the public from unsafe or ineffective medicines. The economies of influence that may intentionally and unintentionally produce evidence-biased—rather than evidence-based—medicine are identified. This is not a simple story of author financial conflicts of interest, but rather a complex tale of ghost management of the entire process of bringing a drug to market. This case study shows how weak regulatory policies allow for design choices and reporting strategies that can make marginal products look novel, more effective, and safer than they are, and how the selective and imbalanced reporting of clinical trial data in medical journals results in the marketing of expensive “me-too” drugs with questionable risk/benefit profiles. We offer solutions for neutralizing these economies of influence.     

What children want to know about in‐ and out‐groups,and how knowledge affects their intergroup attitudes

One of the key factors contributing to the development of negative attitudes toward out‐groups is lack of knowledge about them. The present study investigated what type of information 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐ year‐old Jewish Israeli children (N = 82) are interested in acquiring about unfamiliar in‐ and out‐group individuals, and how providing children with the requested information affects their intergroup attitudes. Children were shown pictures of individuals from three groups—an in‐group (“Jews”), a “conflict” out‐group (“Arabs”), and a “neutral” out‐group (“Scots”)—and were asked what they would like to know about them. The experimenter responded by either answering all of children's questions, half of the questions, or none. Children's attitudes toward the groups were also assessed. It was found that children asked the most questions in regard to conflict out‐group individuals. Moreover, the older age group asked more questions regarding the psychological characteristics, and fewer questions regarding the social identity, of the conflict out‐group than of the other two groups. Finally, full provision of information improved attitudes toward the groups, especially among 3‐ to 4‐year olds, and especially regarding the conflict out‐group. These findings have implications for understanding the sources of intergroup biases, and for developing interventions to reduce them.     

Agentive Spaces,the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our Lives

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter‐action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)‐subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives.     

Revisiting demand,politicization and externalization in authoritarian political regimes: policy advisory system in Russian practices

ABSTRACT

This study contributes to debate on three related questions in Policy Advisory System research. Is the Policy Advisory System concept applicable in countries other than developed democracies? How does it function in a state-centred authoritarian regime? How does the authoritarian environment affect tendencies such as “politicization” and “externalization”? These questions are addressed using materials on the current Russian governance structure and advisory practices, focusing on two broadly defined “governance subsystems” in the Presidential Administration of Russia, “Political Bloc” and “Economic Bloc”, both acting as regular customers for advisory communities. One finding is the phenomenon of “Dual Demand” from the same centre of power—“stability” for “Political Bloc” and “innovation” for “Economic Bloc”—which contributed to creation of two different clusters of policy advisory agencies with different statuses. Other findings include transformation of “politicization” to policy control mechanisms and attempted “externalization” turning into the reverse—“internalization”—bringing independent advisory organizations under the supervision of government structures.     

Let’s Rework Our Approach with “Angry Young People”

This commentary by Social Work with Groups Editorial Advisory Board member Dr. Katrina Skewes McFerran is reprinted here with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution. Dr. McFerran, a music therapist, offers a reflection in the aftermath of a mass murder and suicide by a young person in Munich, Germany in July 2016. She states that “many youth services rely on government funding that demands “evidence” in order to justify spending from limited budgets.” She goes on to ask, “How do you prove that by establishing a meaningful connection with an angry young man you have stopped a mass shooting?”     

Social Representations Theory: A Progressive Research Programme for Social Psychology

The study “Psychoanalysis—its image and its public” intimates that common sense is increasingly informed by science. But common sense asserts its autonomy and, in turn, may affect the trajectory of science. This is a process that leads to many differentiations—in common sense, in scientific innovation and in political and regulatory structures. Bauer and Gaskell's toblerone model of triangles of mediation provided a distillation of their reading of “La Psychanalyse.” Here it was argued that representations are multi‐modal phenomena necessitating the use of multiple methodologies (comparative and longitudinal; qualitative and quantitative). In this paper we briefly summarise these arguments and elaborate ways in which social representation theory can be considered a progressive research programme. “Progressive” because as the theory has developed it has extended the range and depth of its conceptual basis; it provides a new synthesis for the social scientific understanding of the phenomena of common sense and of representation; it acts as an antidote to the reductionism of public opinion and, finally, it is a stimulus to depart from disciplinary silos. However, there remain unresolved issues: how to segment the relevant social milieus and how to close the feedback loop from common sense to science?     

Unbending the mind: or, commercialized leisure and the rhetoric of eighteenth-century diversion

This essay opens by asking why the formative period in the “commercialization of leisure” in England (c. 1690–1760) happens also to be the period during which intrusion, obstruction, and interruption first began to thrive as conspicuous rhetorical techniques in commercial literature. The essay answers this question through a series of close readings that reveal the complex reciprocity between what I call “cultural diversion” and “discursive diversion,” between those social amusements which provide relief from the serious concerns of daily life and those linguistic and textual devices which characteristically disrupt so much of the discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century—devices such as extravagant metaphors, rows of asterisked ellipses, and, most pervasively, digressions. Where modern discussion of such devices has tended to rely on the critical touch-stone of “self-consciousness,” this essay restores disruptive rhetoric to what I see as its original cultural context by demonstrating how frequently self-conscious authors associate the form and function of devices like digression with London’s “Reigning Diversions.”     

Animated Spaces

ABSTRACT

Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts people's everyday lives. Yet, again, the “white cube” complicates curators' and exhibition designers' efforts to go beyond traditional materials—blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs—to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. This article will examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. It will also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition. It will conclude with specific recommendations for ascertaining the limitations and affordances of—and critically negotiating between—the exhibition space, the exhibition's publics, and exhibition modes and media.     

Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

By focusing on the unique velocity and over‐stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time‐pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel's account of boredom by showing how—in the frenzy of modern life—it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us. Furthermore, this emotional indifference invariably pushes us towards more excessive and risky behavior, towards, what I call, “extreme aeshesia.” Insofar as novel experiences quickly become routine in the technological age, it appears that only extreme sensations and experiences can break the spell of boredom, allowing us to momentarily feel strongly for something.