UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF TIME: READING THE INTERACTIONAL TEXT

This article examines the phenomenon of first-time throughness, which speaks to how social events are experienced in real, interactional time. Multiple readings of the made-for-television film Under the Influence (Green 1986), are presented. These readings are used as evidence to support the conclusion that the lived orderlines of everyday life rests on the sense of history that first-time throughness gives to problematic and taken-for-granted interactional experiences. It is argued that contemporary social psychological theory ignores the temporal features of social life.     

The Processes of Social Construction in Talk

Sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to the idea that many aspects of human life are socially constructed. However, there has been far less attention to the concrete interactional processes by which this construction occurs. In particular, scholars have neglected how consensual meaning is constructed in verbal interaction. This article outlines nine generic construction tools used in everyday talk, based on a review and synthesis of past work. These tools fall into three general categories: building blocks, linking devices, and finishing devices. The authors argue that scholars must pay greater attention to the interactional nature of social construction, and discuss three interactional processes that are central to the social construction of meaning in talk: challenge, support, and non‐response. The article presents concrete illustrations of these processes using examples from focus group discussions about gender and violence. These micro‐interactional processes often reproduce, sometimes modify, and (more rarely) resist larger institutions and structures, and thus are indispensable to understanding social life.     

Labeling in Interactional Practice: Applying Labeling Theory to Interactions and Interactional Analysis to Labeling

Labeling theory has long held a rather significant place in sociology generally, and in symbolic interaction more specifically. Yet, in its long history, labeling theorists have seldom considered how interactional contexts mediate the effective application of labels. Similarly, labeling theory, with its focus on deviance, has largely neglected positive instances of labeling. In this article, I consider an instance of labeling in a tutoring session and show how the local interactional context of the application of a label is accomplished such that the label “smarter than you think” is made to stick to the student. In doing so, I demonstrate how labeling theory can be productively extended to consider positive labeling as well as the interactional contexts that mediate these labeling processes. In closing, I propose that this approach could help develop labeling theory into a complex and nuanced theory of the social constitution of human behavior.     

How to Do Things with Prayer Utterances

While the social scientific study of prayer is growing, little work has investigated prayer utterances—or statements where social actors say the term “prayer” or various cognates—in everyday talk. Drawing on insights from ordinary language philosophy, I argue that prayer utterances are performative utterances that help social actors accomplish a variety of actions in social interactions. To illustrate the performative nature of prayer utterances, I describe three types of actions that prayer utterances can accomplish: (1) aligning potentially problematic or questionable conduct with cultural expectations, (2) signaling to others an intense yearning for an object or occurrence on the behalf of oneself or others, and (3) signaling to others authentic feelings of care for another person or group of people. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis.     

“Those people” and troubles talk: Social typing and community construction in senior public housing

Community has developed as an increasingly important research topic in gerontology. As we search for the ever elusive sense of community and social integration among the aged, gerontologists have strangely left aside, for the most part, the interactional formation of community as a phenomenon. How do elders actually achieve this thing in their daily lives? By what interactional mechanisms is it constructed? Using data gathered from an ethnography of a senior public housing complex, I argue that in this particular neighborhood, community is accomplished by residents through “troubles talk.” An important component of this shared talk are social types indigenous to the complex. The act of social typing allows the residents to organize, categorize, and classify each other, providing recognizable and commonly held knowledge of each other, a vital component of community.     

Semiosis,interaction and ethnicity in urban Java1

This paper teases out the interdiscursive relations between local and perduring signs of personhood and their recontextualization in situated talk. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence of the utility of incorporating ethnography, linguistic anthropological work on semiotics and work on face‐to‐face interaction. My empirical focus is on two consecutive men's meetings that occurred in an urban Indonesian milieu. In particular, I draw upon work on semiotic register formation and processes of social identification to flesh out how signs from different temporal‐spatial scales figure in the social identification of a non‐present neighbor as deviant and Chinese. By taking an interactional view I also attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship on such inter‐ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto primarily been historical in nature.     

“Old age” as a social location: Theorizing institutional processes,cultural expectations,and interactional practices

The graying of societies and growing inequality call for increased attention to age relations and their implications for power, status, and constraint in late life. In this paper, I argue old age is a distinct—and devalued—social location that exists amid intersecting relations of inequality. Using an integrative approach, I synthesize selected sociological research on the institutional processes, cultural expectations, and interactional practices underlying the social construction of old age. I then review research in the areas of family care work and employment to illustrate some empirical contexts where age relations intersect with gender, class, race, and ethnicity to structure divergent opportunities and constraints among older people. This paper maps out significant theoretical and substantive signposts in the sociology of old age to build connections across levels of analysis, and to provide a nuanced, comprehensive approach to patterned inequalities in late life.     

A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Social Support on the Psychological Adjustment of Divorced Mothers

Social support has been frequently hypothesized as a significant moderating influence on the adverse consequences of marital disruption. This exploratory longitudinal study examined the impact of social support on the psychological adjustment of divorced mothers. Divorced mothers provided social network information and psychological adjustment profiles at two months and six months following divorce. Results indicate that there were major changes in the structural and interactional characteristics of the participants' social networks over time. Some types of social support were related to well-being and several structural and interactional characteristics of the social network were related to adjustment.     

Respect,equality, and power: A social psychological perspective

In this article I outline a principled social psychological approach to respect. As a first definitional approximation, I suggest that respect for someone involves the willingness to include that person as a factor in the psychological equation underlying self-regulation. I then review and discuss the fairly recent, but thriving, career of the notion of respect in social psychological research, with particular emphasis on intragroup respect. Next, I turn to conceptual specification and purification necessary for a principled approach to respect and discuss promising efforts to identify the critical social psychological principle or active ingredient of respect. In particular, I make out a case for an equality-based conception of respect in which recognition as an equal plays a central role. The final section examines further theoretical and practical implications of this conception including its relation and relevance to issues of social power. Bernd Simon (Dipl.-Psych., Dr. habil.) is Professor of Social Psychology and Evaluation Research and one of the Directors of the Institute of Psychology at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (Germany). He studied psychology, sociology and philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (England). In his research, Bernd Simon investigates inter-and intragroup processes, with particular emphasis on issues of identity, power, politicization and respect. He is author/co-author of a number of research articles in international journals and books, including Identity in Modern Society (Blackwell Publishing).     

Mothering,Guilt and Shame

Even as research continues to explore mothering experiences and social psychologists consider the costs of guilt and shame, few empirical works have examined the relationships among mothering, guilt and shame. The idea that guilt and shame are necessary components of mothering is widespread. A few sources take seriously the emotions of guilt and shame nor has considerable thought been given to the social nature of guilt and shame. Rather than accept a purely psychological explanation of guilt and shame, I investigate the institutional and interactional dynamics that fuel women’s drives to perform as ‘the good mother’. In particular, I explore the ‘good mothering’ ideology that places mothers at risk of guilt and shame and then two social and institutional spaces where guilt and shame are likely to be prevalent.     

Prayer and Charitable Behavior

Abstract

I propose a theoretical framework to understand how prayer influences charitable volunteering and financial giving. Drawing on work from symbolic interaction and cognitive psychology, I argue that individuals’ concepts of divine others become more cognitively accessible during the act of prayer. Because most people attribute the characteristics of omniscience and the desire for humans to help others to divine others, people are more likely to help known and unknown others the more cognitively accessible divine other concepts are to them. This lead to the prediction that frequency of prayer will be positively and linearly association with the frequency of volunteering, frequency of giving money to charity, and amount of money given to charity in a year. Using data from the General Social Survey, I find evidence for my argument. Frequency of prayer is positively and linearly associated with these charitable behaviors, even after controlling for other religiosity and sociodemographic variables.     

Inequality as an Explanation for Obesity in the United States

Over the past several decades, there has been a sharp increase in obesity across all population groups in the United States. In fact, the United States has one of the highest rates of obesity compared to other countries throughout the world. Obesity has become a national public health concern because it is related to a number of negative health, social, psychological, and economic outcomes. It is particularly concerning because racial/ethnic minorities and populations with the least education and highest poverty rates bear the largest burden of obesity. In addition, disparities in obesity tend to be gendered, with women experiencing the largest disparities in obesity by income, education, and race/ethnicity. In this review, I describe how social inequality is linked to obesity in the United States. I highlight elements of disadvantage at the individual‐, family‐, school‐, and neighborhood‐level that are linked to energy intake and expenditure, which are directly related to obesity, and draw from evidence and theories from multiple fields of the social and medical sciences. I also highlight the important role stress may play in linking disadvantage to obesity, particularly for women. I argue that understanding the complex mechanisms and processes that link social inequality to obesity requires multidisciplinary and multilevel frameworks.     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

The Cultural Context of Cognition: What the Implicit Association Test Tells Us About How Culture Works1

This article employs evidence from a literature within social psychology on the malleability of scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure that is widely used to assess implicit attitudes, and other implicit cognition measures, to provide a theoretical framework for incorporating implicit processes into sociological accounts of culture. Studies from this literature demonstrate the fundamentally contextual and interactional nature of implicit cognition; that is, how the cultural environment shapes the activation of cognitive associations. Understanding how culture works to influence behavior requires attention to the interaction between the cultural environment—including symbols and media, place, situations, and networks—and cognitive representations. Using this theoretical framework, I discuss how evidence from the sociology of culture regarding the nature of this cultural environment can inform our understanding of culture in action.     

The Private Life of Public Ritual: Interaction, Sociality and Codification in a Jewish Orthodox Congregation

This article develops an account of the relationship between codification, interactional achievements and forms of sociality in the context of religious worship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Jewish Orthodox community in Los Angeles, I argue that an important part of what makes public worship situations compelling is how they interactionally highlight individual participants’ lives, creating pressures to engage in predictable forms of sociality. This argument is then developed in two contexts: (a) “information gaps” encoded in the structure of daily Orthodox prayer, and; (b) the religious requirement to pray with a quorum of ten adult men. Through these examples I argue that codified aspects of public ritual give rise to variations that participants may understand to highlight individual lives. In many situations, public worship is compelling precisely because it actually individualizes participation. As these interactions are predicated on a codified structure, they provide “institutional fingerprints” for the construction of specific patterns of sociality. An appreciation of this aspect of public worship provides grounds for a broad comparative agenda, focusing on the relationship between codification, interactional patterns and forms of sociality within, and beyond, religious contexts.     

Normative Accountability: How the Medical Model Influences Transgender Identities and Experiences

The medicalization of gender variance is a key force in transgender people's experiences of embodiment, identity, and community. While most directly dictating experiences of diagnosis and medical classification, it is important to acknowledge that the effects of medicalization are widespread across social contexts and institutions. I explore the medical model of transgender identity, with special attention to its current diagnostic classification, in order to highlight how transgender people's interactional experiences of gender are shaped by medical authority. I review literature that highlights the operation of the medical model as a normative accountability structure in its influence across multiple institutions of social life including health and healthcare, transgender community groups, and legal classification.     

Negotiating conflict within the constraints of social hierarchies in Korean American discourse

This paper provides an interactional account of conflict negotiation strategies in Korean American discourse. With specific attention to the sociolinguistic phenomenon of codeswitching among Korean Americans, I argue that speaking Korean at particular moments evokes ideologies of social hierarchy that serve to mitigate potential conflicts. The Korean social ideology of relative status has a major influence on how bilingual Korean Americans interact with one another, regardless of whether they are using Korean or English. The use of codeswitching, among other mitigating strategies in discourse, serves to instantiate these hierarchical relationships and introduces particular social norms that guide the observable actions used in navigating meaning and social relations. The data analyzed here show how the evocation of Korean social ideologies may serve as an identifiable characteristic of Korean American discourse.     

A Sociological Overview of Cortisol as a Biomarker of Response to the Social Environment

Cortisol is a stress hormone that is reactive to social stress and thus should be of use to sociologists interested in understanding specific processes related to the broad category of “threats to the social self”. In this paper I use cortisol as a case study to explore the utility of biomarkers for elucidating the relationship between the social environment and human biology. I focus on cortisol because it is a stress hormone that reacts in particular to social stress, and therefore could be of special interest to sociologists. I first discuss the relationship between the social environment and cortisol response. Then I briefly review sociological literature that uses cortisol as a measure. Finally, I provide an overview of how to use cortisol in research projects. This overview addresses some of the basic questions that are typically asked by social scientists who are considering taking cortisol measures in their own work.     

Accounts of False Memory Syndrome: Parents, “Retractors,” and the Role of Institutions in Account Making

There have been two traditions of research under the concept of accounts. One tradition, the social interactionist, has focused on the interactional use of accounts by individuals to neutralize negative evaluations of questionable acts or their consequences and restore social equilibrium. The second tradition, the social psychological, has focused on the autobiographical and explanatory use of accounts to create and organize meaning for troubling or stressful life events. In both traditions, scholars have been almost exclusively concerned with the individual-level functions of accounts. Analyzing the institutional origins of false memory syndrome and the retractor account episodes in which it is used, I argue for the expansion of accounts research to include the role of institutions and collective actors in the production of new account frameworks. Further, I argue that the conceptualizations of accounts in the two traditions of research can be effectively combined in a way that is sociologically stronger than either alone.     

The challenges of new biopsychosocialities: hearing voices,trauma, epigenetics and mediated perception

This chapter considers the promise of epigenetics in the context of the phenomenon of voice hearing and the question of how to account for the links between voice hearing, trauma and abuse. The chapter explores the epistemic spaces and controversies, which surround the calls for a more psychosocial approach to be incorporated into the more molecular focus of epigenetics. This includes the vexed question of how to invent and work with models of psychological processes, which are processual, indeterminate and contiguous with the biological, social, technical, material and immaterial. These challenges are posed for sociologists, psychosocial researchers and molecular biologists, who when theorizing psychological processes, are often trapped by an individual/social dualism or bifurcation between nature and culture. The chapter explores evidence from the Hearing Voices Movement to draw out the issues at stake for addressing biosocial matters.