“You don’t have to say straight out …”: Directed Impression Management at Victim–Offender Mediation Pre-meetings

Based on a study of two mediation centers in Sweden, this research shows how mediators encourage victim and offender impression management, regarding looks, attitudes, and speech. It shows how they supervise the emotion work of participants, preparing them for mediation encounters. The author investigates how mediators try to create a “balanced” interaction (e.g., preventing expressed prejudices or irresponsible attitudes between the parties). The mediation meeting is seen as an institutionalized interaction with a particular desired outcome. The suggested impression management can be seen as a corrective strategy, implying social control. This article aims to present new ways to understand the mediation process from a micro-sociological and dramaturgical viewpoint. Even if the encounter between offenders and victims is seen as the essence of restorative justice practices, analyses of the process are rare and needed. This process-based approach offers new insights for research in the fields of social science and restorative justice.     

Using Dramaturgy to Better Understand Contemporary Western Tattoos

Spurred on by increasing participation rates, scholarship on tattoos in Western societies has increased noticeably in recent decades. Often focusing on members of the middle class, scholars have assumed that the increasing number of people with tattoos is evidence of mainstream acceptance. In the following article, I critically evaluate claims of tattoo's new mainstream status. Rather than being embraced by the mainstream and power elite, studies and legal proceedings show that tattoos and piercings are only tolerated to a certain degree. I suggest that applying Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach to contemporary tattoos provides a more complete understanding of tattoo's cultural location. It also allows the focus of the discussion to move beyond the individual attributes and motivations of tattoo wearers and onto the social interactions surrounding them. Moreover, a dramaturgical analysis of tattoos shows the need to properly differentiate between tattoos that are always visible and those that can be concealed. I end by offering a conceptualization of visible tattoos for future sociological research.     

Overcoming Uncertainty: Agency,Stance, and the Rise of Collective Action in Times of Crisis

This article examines how grassroots actors initiate and engage in collective action to transcend dramatic situations of large-scale societal crisis. Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, the concepts of stance and stance-taking are presented to reveal how individuals collectively exert their agency during episodes of macrostructural instability and uncertainty. Stance is defined as the agentive and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors to navigate and overcome moments of social rupture. Stance-taking is the situational ensemble of discursive, organizational, and dramaturgical practice through which stances are developed and deployed. Analysis of the social construction of stance promotes multidimensional understandings of how social movements intensify and expand under conditions of crisis. To illustrate the analytical purchase of these concepts, the study describes the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass public protests in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the height of a national crisis in 2001.     

VICTORY CELEBRATIONS AS THEATER: A DRAMATURGICAL APPROACH TO CROWD BEHAVIOR*

Drawing on data derived from a field study of victory celebrations, this paper suggests a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior. Existing theories of crowd behavior are either contradicted by the field data or do not adequately account for the heterogeneity of activity observed, for the interaction between the various categories of participants, or for the shifts in the behavior of the participants and the resultant change in the character of the celebrations. Subsequent analysis indicates that the victory crowds are best understood from a dramaturgical standpoint. Several theoretical, conceptual, and research implications of a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior are suggested and discussed. The paper concludes with an expanded conception of crowd behavior, one which emphasizes its spatial and temporal as well as interactional dimensions.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

Recalcitrance,compliance and the presentation of self: Exploring the concept of organisational misbehaviour in an English local authority child protection service

This article examines how social workers reinterpreted certain legal requirements to meet their organisation's performance targets. Using an ethnographic approach, I combine organisational misbehaviour theory and Goffmanesque conceptions of dramaturgy to explore the regional activity of one team in a statutory agency. I argue that singly neither misbehaviour theory nor dramaturgical performances account for our understanding of why workers respond differently to organisational changes in a neo-liberalist environment. This study differs from current literature by shifting emphasis away from workers either resisting or conforming with organisational directives on to the ways in which individuals and collectives devise methods which instead give the appearance of co-operation. I demonstrate how workers disguised their resistance in an attempt to achieve potentially unachievable objectives and in turn avoid disciplinary action. I conclude by suggesting that applying Goffman to studies of organisation can advance scholars' understanding of how certain individuals respond to change and might come to be defined as loyal and compliant. This approach can also encourage discussions relating to the concept of recalcitrance and whether it is developed, and enforced, by those in powerful positions on the basis of their own desire to be well regarded by others.     

Queers,Bodies and Postmodern Sexualities: A Note on Revisiting the “Sexual” in Symbolic Interactionism

This article reflects on the linkage between developments in symbolic interactionist theory over the past thirty years and the sociological study of the social construction of sexualities. After some personal reflections on the development of the theory, four main themes are highlighted: the links to postmodernism and queer theory; the paths to new research styles; some internal problems with the theory; and the need to reinstall the importance of the body. The article concludes that symbolic interactionism remains a major approach to the study of sexuality.     

Psychiatric Disorder Dramaturgically Considered*

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the empirical applicability of conceptualizing mental illness as dramaturgic incompetence and a corresponding attempt to operationalize dramaturgical thought. It was found that dramaturgic incompetence and subsidiary components were strongly associated with degree of psychiatric disturbance and general diagnosis as determined by psychiatric staff. It also was found that attainment of psychiatric identities proceeded through a series of stages consisting of performative incompetence, empathic incompetence, motive incompetence, meaning loss, and identity loss. This sequence was particularly evident in cases of psychosis.     

Reclothing the Emperor: The Swimming Pool as a Negotiated Order

This article examines the unspoken rules, routines, and rituals of the swimming pool, using ideas from negotiated order theory, Foucault, Goffman's dramaturgical theory, and symbolic interactionism. It identifies three sets of social norms: respect for personal space, respect for individuals' disciplinary regimes, and the desexualization of encounters. I show how these rules are (normally) followed or (occasionally) breached through various rituals, and examine the consequences for interaction order. The tale of “The Emperor's New Clothes” is used analogously to explain why actors cannot consciously attend to their precarious construction of reality, yet remain poised to defend it.     

COMMODORE PERRY AND THE JAPANESE: A STUDY IN THE DRAMATURGY OF POWER

A study of face-to-face interactions between Commodore Perry and his subordinates on the one hand, and Japanese on the other, reveals that Perry consistently displayed power in a well-calculated manner in order to make the Japanese open the country. The Japanese were completely manipulated by him, and they yielded to his demand and opened the country. The American and Japanese documents of the time are analyzed in terms of Goffman's dramaturgical approach. Symbolic interactionism can be a useful approach in understanding international relations or social change.     

The rediscovery of child neglect

The article is a discussion of the construction of child neglect in a child and family social work team in the UK, based on ethnographic research in the social work office. Two influential and contrasting professional discourses on neglect are identified, and it is suggested that the dominant construction of neglect in the team studied is maternal failure to adequately service children's bodies. This construction is discussed in relation to some relevant theoretical insights and in the context of trends in contemporary child protection work.     

Don't be cheeky': Requests, directives and being a child

The study described in this article collected naturalistic data from six children aged eight to nine talking with their relatives and friends. The article focuses on directives and requests used by the children and their interlocutors in informal conversations. It proposes that – as previous research has found – some requests and directives are distinctive because of the children's social status as children , but also suggests that, since 'being a child' is a relational and socially negotiated role, its significance varies across different interactions.     

Why the paradigm of work–family conflict is no longer sustainable: Towards more empowering social imaginaries to understand women's identities

The paradigm of work–family conflict is challenged by the fluid realities of the actual world. Through an innovative phenomenographic study of women's understanding of their lives, we show that the social imaginary of work–family conflict assumes that vulnerability is a constitutive reality for women. Consequently, with respect to the perspectives through which women are invited to make sense of their lives, the metaphor of conflict enforces a worldview based on traditional gender roles. Organizational policies that rely heavily on a social imaginary of work–family conflict may prove ineffective. On the one hand, they ignore the diversity of morphologies and vocabularies used by women today to understand themselves in relation to their family and workplace. On the other, work–family conflict arises as a product of policy measures and bureaucratic practices rather than as an experiential reality. Policy statements on work–family conflict have a performative character: they communicate a message about women's social status and identity. Therefore, effective organizational policies should integrate vocabularies and assumptions that make women aware of themselves in a confident manner by relying on social imaginaries that encourage agency and empowered participation in the world.     

The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction

The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologies allow the selfie to be distributed to a wide audience in close to real time. Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s approach to the study of face-to-face social interaction, this article presents a discussion of the production and consumption of the selfie. We draw upon Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, to explore how the ‘presentation of self’ occurs in the context of a selfie. Next, we consider how the selfie as a form of visual communication holds critical implications for mediated life online as individuals go about doing privacy. We conclude by reflecting on the role of the selfie and its impact on the boundaries between public and private domains in contemporary social life.     

The Impact of Social Capital on Men's Mental Health from the Perspective of Social Support Theory

This study examines the effects of social capital as it affects men's mental health in the context of work–family balance. Multivariate analyses of data from National Family Research of Japan 2008 have revealed the following. First, the social capital that men receive from their spouses was found to have a direct effect on their distress. The effect of social capital from family other than a spouse does not have a direct effect on men's mental health. Second, only social capital from a spouse was observed to provide a buffering effect. This result implies that, in contemporary Japan, social capital derived from the spouse functions satisfactorily as a bulwark to mitigate the negative effects that the experience of role conflict between work and family has on men's mental health. Finally, the study examines the effect of social capital with reference to social support theory. Subsequent research might usefully focus on varieties of social capital other than those covered in the current study, which will leverage the unique potential of social capital by examining techniques and units of analysis.     

Family concepts—a social pedagogic approach to understanding family development and working with families

Drawing upon insights from family research, this article argues that in modern Western societies the reflection of individual notions of family as well as the development of concepts of a fulfilling everyday family life has turned into a recurrent challenge throughout the life course, a challenge particularly relevant during family transitions. Professionals in the field of social work with families are increasingly faced with the task of supporting such processes of reflection and development. At the same time, there is little knowledge about how these processes look like. Building upon results of a pilot study and merging recent theoretical developments in family research with the (German) tradition of social pedagogy, a conceptual framework to study family concepts theoretically and empirically is developed. The potential as well as the limitations of this research approach are discussed drawing upon a case example taken from an ongoing longitudinal study. This study aims at revealing family concept-related processes of informal learning and thus provides an understanding of family development from a social pedagogic point of view. Finally, an outline will be given of how this research could contribute to develop an intervention method standing in the tradition of social pedagogy.