Interactionism,Social Organization,and Social Processes: Looking Back and Moving Ahead

With its roots in American pragmatism, symbolic interactionism has created a distinctive perspective and produced numerous important contributions and now offers significant prospects for the future. In this article, I review my intellectual journey with this perspective over forty years. This journey was initiated within the American society, sociology, and symbolic interaction of circa 1960. I note many of the contributions made by interactionists since that time, with particular focus on those who have contributed to the study of social organization and social process. I offer an agenda for the future based on currently underdeveloped areas that have potential. These are inequality orders, institutional analysis, collective action across space and time, and the integration of temporal and spatial orders. The article concludes with calls for further efforts at cross‐perspective dialogues, more attention to feminist scholars, and an elaborated critical pragmatism.     

Looking Back: The Experiences of Four Midwest Families After Receiving Foreclosure Counseling Services

The Great Recession produced significant job loss, which precipitated housing instability and the need for foreclosure prevention services for some households. To help meet the needs of struggling homeowners, housing counseling agencies provided education and assistance to offer support. However, after services ended and housing outcomes were identified, families returned to their daily life. Little is known about the experiences and needs of households during and after receiving housing counseling services. This qualitative, in-depth, phenomenological assessment gives voice to the experience of housing instability for families 3 years after initially receiving services from an agency in one economically challenged, urban, Midwestern community. The findings from this study highlight the experience of four Midwestern families, through the use of Seidman’s (Interviewing as qualitative research, 4th edn. Teachers College Press, New York, 2012) three stage interview design, in which the researchers conducted three distinct interviews with each of four participants and two interviews with former housing counselors from the same agency. The findings reveal four key supportive factors that emerged for participants. They include: the importance of faith, family, positivity, and income supports.     

Greedy Media: Army Families,Embedded Reporting,and War in Iraq

Abstract

Embedded reporting in Operation Iraqi Freedom provided real-time coverage of soldiers in war that was viewed and read by publics around the globe. Most constituents, such as the military, media, and the larger U. S. public perceived this coverage as positive; however, live television coverage had an intense and uncalculated impact on some U.S. Army wives and others on a military post at the individual, community, and institutional levels. This study provides a qualitative perspective on U.S. Army wives (N = 23) and their children on a military post whose soldiers deployed in the earliest phase of the war in Iraq in 2003. Live coverage created three types of viewing for Army wives and their children—compulsive, controlled, and constrained—and hastened use of other types of communication media. Live coverage also contributed to the expansion of the traditional definition of the military family and extended the reach of the Family Readiness Groups and the role of the Rear Detachment Command. We argue for an extension of Mady Segal's “greedy institution” application to the military family to include the mass media—specifically live television coverage of war.     

Social Science and the Study of Media and Religion: Going Forward by Looking Backward

In 2001, Christian aid workers were arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan on charges of proselytizing. A year later, Baptist hospital workers were gunned down in Yemen. In one case, the country was an enemy of the United States; in the other, the country was an ally. The way in which the proselytizing and the national government was portrayed changed from one set of news coverage to the other, suggesting that political interests, not religious ones, drive this coverage.     

Families and Museums:

No abstract available for this article.     

Instant Families:

This study focused on "instant families": i.e., marriages between never married men and divorced women who had at least one pre-adolescent child from a former marriage.¹ Based on in-depth interviews with 16 couples, adjustment to remarriage was found to involve the issue of dependence, independence, and interdependence. Consistent with grounded theory, the findings are presented in 15 propositions which can be utilized as the basic hypotheses for future research on these families.     

Banking on Families: How Families Generate and Distribute Social Capital

Before we can determine the relevance of social capital to the sociology of family and kinship, we must fill the gaps in our theoretical knowledge. For example, we still do not know how couples, parents, children, and groups generate, accumulate, manage, and deploy social capital. Neither do we know the consequences of social capital for the welfare of families and their individual members. To investigate these areas, we must replace the makeshift measures currently in use with measures that do not confuse social capital with the presumed consequences of access to same. With this attention to theoretical elaboration and careful measurement, we will discover whether the idea of social capital is fruitful or merely decorative.     

Dual-Career Families:

No abstract available for this article.     

Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives

This introduction to a special issue of the journal explores not only the role of memory and narratives in understanding gender and transnational families, but suggests how such families use and understand their memories to construct coherent narratives of the self and kin. In common with renewed thinking about the multifaceted nature of migration, the complexities of the process, and the continuing dialogue that migration establishes between the old and the new, the past and the present, those who engage with oral history/life story methods are increasingly aware that such data provide a ‘value added’ to rich empirical detail. These methods reveal the use of memory and its role in the continuing emotional adjustments in which most transnational experience is embroiled. They show how the multi‐layering of memory, language and narratives are indicators of the ways in which culture shapes recall and recounting. Families themselves become sites of belonging, part of the imaginary unity through which a transnational family may seek its identity. Equally, oral histories can tease out ways in which gender differences impact on, or are impacted by, transnational lives. The introduction situates the subsequent articles within a brief overview of oral history and migration.     

Rural Families and Health Care:

No abstract available for this article.     

How Families Learn:

No abstract available for this article.