Chess Playing as Strategic Activity

This article takes an interactionist perspective and explores how people engage in strategic activity in the context of a chess game. Based on participant observation in the chess community and interviews with twenty amateur chess players, it examines the most relevant issues to players as they form their lines of action during play. It considers the following dimensions: incorporation of routine activity and style, role taking, impression management, engrossment, and composure. By examining these dimensions, we can gain an understanding of strategic activity as a generic social process. Further, drawing connections from strategic activity in chess to other areas of human group life indicates directions for future research.     

The performance advantage of traveling

Many individuals travel between countries as part of their professional routines. How do they perform during those short trips abroad? To begin to answer this question, I analyzed the outcomes of over 5 million chess games played around the world. Importantly, tournament chess provides a clean setting in which location-dependent factors are mostly irrelevant; the audiences are quiet and the referees make hardly any judgments. Controlling for differences in chess skills, I found enhanced performance among players who were competing outside of their home countries. This finding was robust to additional controls such as age, sex, and skill momentum or game practice, and to the inclusion of individual or country fixed effects. This advantage, an approximately 2% increase in game outcome, suggests that traveling has a positive effect on performance.     

Punishment and status in collective action: How status hierarchies foster optimal punishment use

I provide a brief overview of the literature on human cooperation, punishment, and social dilemmas. After reviewing relevant literature, I move on to a series of predictions, intertwining findings on punishment, public goods, and social status. Leaning on Status Characteristics Theory, I explicate how the behavioral expectations that we derive from status positions foster a means of using punishment to secure public goods. Furthermore, I argue that we carry general expectations for high status actors to punish when deemed collectively necessary. Building on this expectation, I articulate how initially status‐homogenous groups can develop status ranks on the basis of punishment behavior, allowing task groups to mimic sanctioning institutions commonly seen in public goods research and everyday life.     

The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation

Can one explain both the resilience of the status quo and the possibility for resistance from a subordinate position? This paper aims to resolve these seemingly incompatible perspectives. By extending Randall Collins's interaction ritual theory, and synthesizing it with Norbert Wiley's model of the self, this paper suggests how the emotional dynamics between people and within the self can explain social inertia as well as the possibility for resistance and change. Diverging from literature on the sociology of emotions that has been concerned with individual emotional processes, this paper considers the collective level in order to explore how movement action is motivated. The emotional dynamics of subordinate positioning that limit women's options in face-to-face interactions are examined, as are the social processes of developing feminist consciousness and a willingness to participate in resistance work. Pointing toward empirical applications, I conclude by suggesting conditions where resistance is likely.     

Experiences from Pagan women: A closer look at croning rituals

In this qualitative study I explore how Pagan women conceptualize aging, more specifically social aging, through the ritual process of being a Pagan and becoming a Crone. The central question of this research revolves around how older women who identify as Pagan experience, understand, and conceptualize their social aging and their role as aging women in American society. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and explore the meaning of aging for women identifying as Pagan. Major emergent themes within the data demonstrate that the croning ritual, a central aspect of Paganism, affirms these women in their process of aging. These women, through the ritual of croning, are able to understand their aging as celebration, maintain a positive sense of self while aging, and reclaim visibility as aging women. These women were able to embed their experiences of aging within a unique and specific cultural framework, a spiritual and foundational framework cultivating a spiritual connection with nature.     

Mechanisms of Organizational Commitment: Adding Frames to Greedy Institution Theory

How do organizations that make significant physical, emotional, and intellectual demands foster commitment and loyalty from voluntary participants? Greedy institution theory (Coser 1974 ) answers this question by identifying structural elements that foster participants' undivided commitment to “greedy” groups, those in which participants' involvement interferes with and takes precedence over their involvement in other social spheres. In this article, I argue for the expansion of greedy institution theory to include frames and framing processes as “greedy” organizational tools that work on the microinteractional level. Using data from an ethnographic study of an intensive program that prepares low‐income students of color to attend elite boarding high schools, I show how the organization's “family” frame mobilized participants and encouraged interpretations and interactions that helped students persist in the program and remain committed to the organization. I argue that turning our attention to frames and framing processes will increase our understanding of the tools organizations use on a microinteractional level to build and repair participants' loyalty and commitment.     

Paddock Rites: Integrative Ritual in the Racing Community*

This paper explores a focal ritual in the community of horseracing known as the paddock. Using data gathered through participant observation, the author interprets the paddock ritual within the context of the racing community and its status hierarchy. The ritual integrates members of the racing community in relation to their social prestige and thus contributes to the social order. The paddock accomplishes this integrative function by according marginal members of the racing community temporary public recognition and acknowledgement of their contributions, both of which mitigate the alienation these individuals routinely experience.     

Oppositional Consciousness: Its Manifestation and Development. The Case of People with Disabilities*

While resource mobilization theory has advanced our understanding of social movements, two questions require further explanation: (1) How do people come to define their situation as unjust and subject to change through collective action? (2) How is such an “oppositional consciousness” empirically studied? From field research among people with disabilities, I suggest that oppositional consciousness is manifested through the collective actions, symbols, and cultural artifacts constructed by a group. I propose that strong interpersonal ties among group members may not be necessary for an oppositional consciousness to develop. To understand how a dominated group develops an oppositional consciousness, rather than analyzing the strength of its members' social ties, we must examine the context and the nature of these ties: (1) the institutions in which their social interactions typically occur; (2) the socialization process they experience within these institutions; and (3) members' contact with the oppositional ideologies of other dominated groups.     

Corporate social advocacy or social issues management? Examining state flagship universities’ responses to the killing of George Floyd

Colleges and universities are social institutions often called on to speak about socio-political issues (e.g., racism). Critics have suggested that when responding to instances of racism on their campuses, institutional leaders often ignore the racist acts and harm caused and focus their discourse on diversity and inclusion. Considering this critique, this study examined how state flagship universities in the United States (U.S.) responded to the killing of George Floyd through the lenses of social issues management and corporate social advocacy (CSA). Through my critical thematic analysis of all 50 U.S. state flagship universities’ initial public statements, I forward three key findings: (1) institutions constructed Floyd’s killing as an example of racism; (2) through their statements institutions localized the issue by focusing on their values or centering marginalized community members’ experiences; and (3) the majority of institutional responses functioned to reinforce the individualistic logics of whiteness. Based on these findings, I argue that to advance research on organizational communication about social issues, CSA should be considered beyond overt statements for or against issues and suggest that as organizations discuss socio-political issues their communication may reinforce hegemonic ideologies and create paradoxes for their marginalized publics. I conclude by proposing an approach to social issues management that could be used by organizations seeking to promote social justice.     

The identity curation game: digital inequality,identity work,and emotion management

ABSTRACT

The research examines an understudied facet of digital inequality: how digital inequality impacts identity work and emotion management. The analysis reveals how unequal access to digital resources shapes how well youths are able to play what I call the identity curation game. Digital resources determine youths’ ability to succeed in this game that is governed by three implicit rules: (1) constantly update or be sidelined, (2) engage in constant reciprocated identity-affirming interactions, and (3) maintain a strategy of vigilance to remove traces of failed identity performances. This article draws on Symbolic Interactionism and pays particular attention to Hochschild’s theory of emotion management. Drawing on these frameworks, the findings reveal how under-resourced youths experience connectivity gaps that disrupt their ability to play the identity curation game, as well as the resulting emotional consequences. Under-resourced youths manage distinctive negative emotions arising from connectivity gaps that hinder their digital identity work, as well as engaging in distinct kinds of suppressive work to police their own emotions including longing, envy, shame, frustration, and stigmatization. In making these linkages, the research reveals the cascading effects of digital inequality among youths where constant connectivity is the sine qua non of social inclusion.     

Place,gender and power in transnational Sikh marriages

In this article I explore the importance of place during transnational marriages and in particular during wedding rituals. The rituals described are two Sikh weddings taking place in East Africa and the Punjab respectively. Highlighting the importance of status and hierarchy during wedding events, the ethnography focuses on how transnationalism is experienced as a generator of status as well as a potential risk to status. Through an account in the article of ritual practices in transnational marriages and households, I underline place as a significant factor in gender relations during wedding events.     

BECAUSE IT'S FREE POKER! A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF FREE TEXAS HOLD'EM POKER TOURNAMENTS

The game of poker has dramatically increased in popularity in America over the past decade, and includes a new trend in poker in which tournaments are played with no monetary wagering. These “free” poker tournaments are the primary focus of this project. Our interest in these free poker tournaments was twofold: first, we wished to identify what would motivate a person to play poker when there is no profit motive; second, we wanted to learn how the social dynamics of the game itself may or may not change when monetary risk is not present. Through covert participant observation of free poker tournaments at four different locations we were able to discover three main motivations among the players: sharpening skills for later cash games, sociability, and gaining the status of a “regular player.” We also discovered that the tenor and tempo of the game tended to vary not as a function of the location, but rather because of the social class of the players. We offer several hypotheses to guide future research endeavors in this area.     

Trails of involvement: Evidence for local games

Game theory seeks solutions that would eliminate the need to actually play games and hence cannot explain why some games are played out, often with skills that are widely admired and emulated. This paper makes the conditions required to play (rather than solve) a game its starting point and focuses on the local skills that underlie the ensuing involvement. Data from tournament chess reveals that highly-skilled players are the best at sustaining involvement, yet also the best at terminating the game when the outcome becomes apparent, suggesting that involvement should stand alongside rationality as divergent ideals in social action. This bifurcation in skill can produce cooperation in the midst of conflict, or vice versa, and hence send local actions in the opposite direction of stated global goals.     

Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen—individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges—at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.     

IRANIAN WOMEN AND FOOTBALL

The paper examines football as a site of social contestation for Iranian women. The recent political controversy regarding women's attendance at football matches is indicative of this social conflict. I start by contextualizing this episode within a feminist framework of analysis. I then look at the development of Iranian women's participation in football as rioters, fans, players, referees, coaches, sports-writers and administrators of the game. Examples of women footballers from other cultures are provided in order to foreground commonalities and differences. Finally, I demonstrate how this movement is catalysng both Iranian feminism and the wider working-class social movement confronting the mullah-bourgeoisie.     

Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.     

Racial inquiries: law and the political visibility of racism in the Air India inquiry

ABSTRACT

Critical race scholarship has effectively documented how the legal institutions of liberal democratic states figure as both mechanisms of systemic racism and avenues of redress against these forms of power. This article offers new insights into the racial effects of these legal institutions by examining the epistemic dynamics of a Canadian public inquiry that was tasked with investigating why state institutions failed to prevent and successfully prosecute the bombings of two Air India flights, which investigators attributed to Sikh nationalist groups operating in Canada. Through a discourse analysis of documents generated during the inquiry, I track how its complex epistemic dynamics precluded recognition of the racial effects of Canadian state institutions. Approaching the inquiry as an instrument of juridical knowledge production and mechanism of political accountability, this article tracks the contingent processes through which liberal epistemologies of race are validated by state actors to extend race’s systemic conditions of existence.     

Resistance,Ritual Purification and Mediation: Tracing a Dayak Community's Sixteen-Year Search for Justice in East Kalimantan

In recent discussions on access to justice in Indonesia, little work has been done that illuminates the processes of conflict which inevitably arise in attempts to obtain justice based on informal actions and results, rather than on recourse to institutions. While many scholars and donor agencies tend to create the impression that non-institutional processes of justice-seeking are entirely unpredictable or ungoverned by regularities, in this article I seek to fill this gap by exploring patterns of conflict in East Kalimantan that are associated with Amartya Sen's realisation approach to justice-seeking. I will look into a conflict between a group of Dayak villagers and an oil palm company in East Kalimantan which started sixteen years ago with the establishment of three oil palm estates on customary land, causing complex changes to local people's lives as well as several injustices. The villagers pursued a variety of strategies to gain redress, which I describe as active resistance, ritual purification and mediation. In the analysis I draw upon Turner's concept of social dramas. I show that considering the long-lasting conflict in East Kalimantan as social drama helps to refine socio-legal approaches to conflict and access to justice as processual. The article will contribute to models of justice-seeking that can be associated with Amartya Sen's model of justice as realisational.     

Short White Coats: Knowledge,Identity, and Status Negotiations of First‐Year Medical Students

This paper investigates the meanings medical students invest in their white coats and how these meanings shape students' strategic use of the white coat as a status symbol. During a four‐year ethnography of medical education, I found that the white coat signified knowledgeability and was used to assert status. In interactions students policed their own and each other's status displays, a process I identify as an instance of status management in medical training. An analysis of the meanings and conventional uses of the short white coat increases our understanding of how novice trainees negotiate their place in a new social order.     

Caught on camera,posted online: mediated moralities,visual politics and the case of urban ‘drought-shaming’

The ‘shaming’ of subjects caught on camera, engaging in socially transgressive acts of varying kinds, has become a familiar occurrence and locus of ambivalent possibility in contemporary public culture. In this article, I theorise the socio-moral complexities and visual politics of ostensibly civic forms of online shaming through an in-depth analysis of a single case: urban ‘drought-shaming’ in California (2014–2015). Drawing on interpretive methods of social analysis and anchored by the classical sociological tradition, I highlight the role of images, especially the circulation of still photographs taken and posted by ordinary members, in the emerging problematisation of excessive water use at the centre of this case. Understood as a vital and diminishing resource within an interconnected and interdependent social order, water was made sacred; it was prohibited from being handled in mundane or carelessly reckless ways during the drought. A state-of-emergency came to be constituted (also) as a moral drama. The language and practices constitutive of drought-shaming, I argue, contributed to a popular sociological imagination of water use whose critical dimensions transcend the specificities of this case. To highlight its ritual structure within the context of a viable and organically solidaristic collective order, I compare online civic shaming with the ‘status degradation ceremony’, as theorised by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s. Comparable in that it constitutes a new form of public denunciation with socially integrative and renewing possibilities, there are also differences that shed light onto some of the new and defining elements of public shaming in a digitally convergent, visually mediated, and (more) participatory media-sphere. Finally, revealing significant overlap and collaboration between social, news, and tabloid media in the social production of mediated shaming today, this study is located at the border of visual sociology and a critical sociology of visual representation in contemporary mediated society.