The Interactional Community: Emergent Fields of Collective Agency*

Social interaction is generally regarded as elemental to the notion of community. Within the broader discourse on community, the field‐interactional perspective is distinctive in its explicit focus on emergent social processes and community change dynamics. Wilkinson (1970) extended Kaufman’s (1959) early work on the interactional approach through an application of the social field concept to community action. In doing so, Wilkinson (1991) outlined several key linkages between social–symbolic interaction and community agency. Despite these promising beginnings, only a modicum of research has examined the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of the interactional conception of community. This article explores the symbolic‐interactionist tenets undergirding the field‐interactional approach, most notably Mead’s (1934, 1938) discussion of generalized social attitudes and Blumer’s (1969a, 1969b) work on joint or collective action.     

Microstructures of economic action: talk,interaction and the bottom line

This paper contributes to an expanding body of research that has analysed the interactional foundations of economic activity, and price determination, by quantifying the financial implications of different micro‐interactional practices. Drawing on video recordings of naturalistic interaction the paper analyses a simple consumer choice, whether to pay one of two prices, the lower ‘standard’ price (£8.00) or the higher ‘gift aid’ (£8.80) price, to enter an arts institution. Utilizing resources from conversation analysis, the paper analyses different ways of posing this choice. It describes how, as interactional constraints tighten, standard prices become less socially desirable and customers increasingly ‘volunteer’ to pay the higher price. The paper contributes to sociological understandings of economic activity, demonstrating how simple one‐off choices, and prices, are accountably responsive to micro‐interactional structures.     

Connecting Practical Doings to Cultural Meanings: Exploring the Work of Moral Mediators in Human Service Organizations

This study illuminates the work of moral mediators, which I define as organizational actors who work to strategically monitor, maintain, and manage the moral identity of others. My layered, organizational, narrative analysis of the mentoring organization Big Brothers Big Sisters draws on two types of data: client stories featured on the national website and ten in‐depth interviews with case managers at a local agency. My analysis demonstrates how case managers employ an emotional labor technique of drama dilution, or work done to add ambiguity to public storytelling in ways that leave more space for variations of deservingness, success, and morality. This article emphasizes the paradoxical nature of public organizational narratives and highlights the need for continued exploration of day‐to‐day work in conjunction with organizational structure and cultural values and beliefs.     

We are strong and we are resilient: Career experiences of women engineers

With the purpose of breaking down socially derived, implicit assumptions regarding women and highlighting their resilience and strength within organizations, this study focused upon career experiences of women engineers. Findings indicated women constantly navigated gendered social and organizational norms to develop their careers. We found them to employ three distinct coping strategies, conforming to play by the rules, negotiating to play around the rules and defying to establish own rules. The ways in which participants arrived at and enacted on these coping strategies is illustrative of their strength, forethought and self‐directedness. All participants demonstrated high self‐concept and the ability to learn and adapt. The study allowed us to acknowledge prevalence of gendered norms and expectations, while also highlighting women's strength in navigating their careers. We hope that the study is able to illuminate persistence of male perspective in the literature and promote a perspective of women as strong and resilient professionals.     

Participation Structures as a Mediational Means: Learning Balinese Gamelan in the United States Through Intent Participation,Mediated Discourse,and Distributed Cognition

Participation has presented a complex unit of analysis for interactional sociolinguistics. In this study I add another dimension to participation by considering recent theories related to sociocultural activity theory—mediated discourse analysis and distributed cognition. Drawing on examples from maguru panggul, the traditional pedagogy of Balinese Gamelan music, I argue that participation structures are a mediational means that enable students to augment their learning. Focusing on two participation structures that involve keen observation and listening-in, I also consider how intent participation is a part of these participation structures and maguru panggul pedagogy. What emerges is an understanding of how participation structures used as mediational means can have an effect on the division of cognitive labor within a classroom.     

Doing gender,modestly: Conceptualizing workplace experiences of Pakistani women doctors

Using the theoretical framework of inequality regimes, this article offers a reconceptualization of purdah as it is practised, lived and experienced by women doctors of Pakistan. Based on an ethnographic study of Pakistani women doctors, this research indicates that practising purdah in the workplace is perceived as doing femininity within the hegemonic masculine workplace culture of Pakistan. In Pakistani organizations, individual and institutionalized practices of purdah create a gendered substructure which marginalizes women doctors by dictating the norms of conduct, international ethics, organization of physical space and work allocation. Patriarchal interpretations of religious doctrines of modesty provide legitimacy to the existence of these inequality regimes. Based on this, the article argues for a system‐level theorization of purdah that accounts for both individual and institutional norms of veil. Such conceptualization contributes to our understanding of how religion intersects with gender, class and race to create complex systemic inequities in organizational structure.     

IMMIGRANT NETWORKS AND THE TAKE‐UP OF DISABILITY PROGRAMS: EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES

We examine the role of ethnic networks in disability program take‐up among working‐age immigrants in the United States. Controlling for country of origin and area of residence fixed effects, immigrants residing amid a large number of co‐ethnics are more likely to receive disability payments when their ethnic groups have higher take‐up rates. Differences in satisfying the work history or income and asset requirements of the disability programs explain part of this relationship, but social norms also play an important role. Information sharing appears influential for Supplemental Security Income take‐up but not for Social Security Disability Income. (JEL J61, H55, I18)     

Transmitting Ideals: Constructing Self and Moral Discourse on Loveline

Loveline is a late‐night radio advice show currently airing on progressive rock stations in the United States. Callers present their most intimate troubles to the show's DJ–doctor advice‐giving team, revealing themselves to an audience of faceless millions. I analyze three distinct interactional phases through which Loveline callers and hosts symbolically transform troubled selves: with each problem revealed, each embarrassing joke made, each specific recommendation given, a moral discourse is constructed. Loveline incrementally builds a distinctive way of conceptualizing right and wrong, closely tied to standards of a whole, happy, healthy selfhood. And while the notions of a moral discourse and an ideal self are fundamentally modern, Loveline's distinctive combination of mass‐mediated anonymity, intimate subject matter, satiric tone, and fragmented interaction patterns conveys these modern concepts over the radio waves and into a postmodern world.     

Disorganization,disidentification and ideological fragmentation: Verbal and pictorial evidence from a British business school

Rather than focusing on organizing dimensions of society, one may conceptualize disorganization processes, where ideological values incongruence leads to disidentification and ideological fragmentation. Integrating discourse analysis and critical social psychology, I focus on professional organizations facing ideological, managerialist change to develop a typology of multiple‐identity organizations (MIOs) incorporating various degrees of disorganization, rather than the traditional ideographic–holographic dualism. I then apply a creative, visual method to explore how wider ideological tensions between managerial (utilitarian) and professional (normative) values shape lived experiences in a major British business school. Longitudinal verbal and pictorial discursive analysis shows a cacophony of images competing to construct and deconstruct organizational identity over a decade and a half. The organization tends towards disorganization, but somehow retains a sufficient sense of (multiple) identity to survive, suggesting it is myopic to ignore processes and structures that mark and contribute to the ideological fragmentation of MIOs.     

Correcting Behaviors and Policing Emotions: How Behavioral Infractions Become Feeling‐Rule Violations

This study examines interactions surrounding the transmission, enforcement, and assessment of compliance with feeling rules. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how actors within an organization that prepares low‐income black and Latino students to attend elite boarding schools serve as both emotional socializers, transmitting particular feeling rules, and emotional gatekeepers, enforcing and assessing compliance with those rules. I find that it was the interactional process surrounding rule reminders—rather than differences in students' behavioral infractions or in the feeling rules themselves—that was most consequential in shaping evaluations of students' compliance with the program's feeling rules. Gendered patterns in these interactions often resulted in male students being treated as behaviorally deviant and female students being treated as emotionally deviant.     

The struggle for legitimacy: A study of contingencies and constraints in emergency medicine

This paper explores the organizational structure and the social work world of an emerging medical specialty area, the emergency medicine practitioner. In‐depth interviews were undertaken with a number of physicians practicing emergency medicine in an attempt to come to some understanding of the problems encountered by a new specialty area as it attempts to gain credibility with more traditional and well established specialty areas in medicine.

Key elements that appear to be critical in the struggle for legitimation by emergency room physicians revolve around such issues as income, power, autonomy, the referral system, specialized knowledge and commitment levels of active participants. The nontraditional organizational structure of emergency medicine was also found to be a factor in strained social relationships between emergency room physicians and their peers. This paper also documents the more commonly used interactional strategies employed by emergency room practitioners in their day‐to‐day interactions with physicians practicing in other specialty areas.     

Work Characteristics and Parent‐Child Relationship Quality: The Mediating Role of Temporal Involvement

This study investigated whether the amount and nature of parent‐child time mediated the association between parental work characteristics and parent‐child relationship quality. We based hypotheses on the conflict and enrichment approaches, and we tested a path model using self‐collected data on 1,008 Dutch fathers and 929 Dutch mothers with school‐aged children. Longer working hours and less work engagement were associated with less parent‐child time and longer working hours, more restrictive organizational norms, stress, flexibility, nonstandard hours (mothers only), and work engagement increased the disturbance of parent‐child activities. Less and more disturbed parent‐child activities were, in turn, associated with a lower parent‐child relationship quality. In addition, work engagement and working hours had direct, beneficial effects on parent‐child relationship quality.     

From armed group to movement: armed struggle and movement formation in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country

In recent decades, social movement scholars have expanded our understanding of ‘terrorism’ by analyzing a particular trajectory, movement to armed group, whereby movement demobilization spurs armed struggle. This article analyzes an alternative trajectory: armed group to movement. Once armed struggle’s limitations become apparent, armed groups often adopt an attritional military strategy suited to their capacities. To securely wage an attritional campaign, groups disembed through the adoption of insular structures, removing them from their milieux and from recruits and resources needed for organizational reproduction. To offset this, armed groups reembed through the development of politico-military movement structures: forming allied aboveground movement organizations; coordinating armed and unarmed activism; and creating a ‘movement’ identity. This offsets disembedding in three ways. First, collective action augments armed groups’ violence by expanding the struggle into new domains. Second, mobilized support provides armed groups political legitimacy, countering the ‘terrorist’ label. Third, aboveground movement organizations assist in recruitment, alliance-formation, public communication, and mobilization, facilitating armed groups’ organizational reproduction. This paper investigates the strategic decision to adopt movement structures by analyzing documents produced by militants linked to the IRA and to rival ETAs, ETA Politico-Military and ETA Military, allowing for the exploration of different aspects of the decision to adopt movement structures. From Irish republican texts, insights into the basic benefits of movement development are gleaned. Basque separatist documents, on the other hand, provide perspectives on the nature of interorganizational centralization and coordination within politico-military movements.     

EQUIPMENT AND STRUCTURES CAPITAL: ACCOUNTING FOR INCOME DIFFERENCES

In this article, I present comparable measures of equipment capital and structures capital stocks for 119 countries. Cross‐country variation in equipment capital‐output ratio is over twice the variation in structures capital and aggregate physical capital. The dispersion in equipment capital has also increased overtime. Using development accounting that incorporates equipment and structures capital, I offer evidence relevant to the debate on the importance of productivity versus factors in accounting for income differences. The new measures of heterogeneous capital reduce the burden on total factor productivity by up to 5%. (JEL O11, O47, E22)     

Creating ethical work climates: A socioeconomic perspective

In this essay, I introduce a theory of ethical work climates and describe how ethical climates can be created in business firms by applying a socioeconomic perspective to the process of organizational design. I begin by discussing moral climate in general—presenting the concept of a moral climate continuum and identifying the positive moral climate as one especially conducive to ethical behavior by agents of the firm. Next, I suggest a process for determining where a firm falls along the continuum by obtaining information about prevailing organizational norms. I then proceed to outline the theory itself, analyzing how management can move a firm from the negative to the positive end of the continuum. In this analysis, I argue that a socioeconomic management perspective provides a particularly strong foundation for establishing positive moral climate. I then propose a strategy for designing key organizational processes to transmit this perspective throughout the firm. The essay concludes with an agenda for future research.     

Discourse marker ‘oh’ as a means for realizing the identity potential of constructed dialogue in interaction1

This research explores how discourse marker oh works with constructed dialogue (quoted speech), identifying a use of oh not discussed in previous research in which it can serve to signal speaker stance towards quoted material. While both discourse markers and constructed dialogue have been widely discussed as identity resources in the discourse analytic and interactional‐sociolinguistic tradition, there has been little work considering how these linguistic features may work together. In this paper, I address this gap by illustrating how Bakhtin's (1984) notions of uni‐directional and vari‐directional double voicing articulate with information display and evaluation functions of oh identified by Schiffrin (1987) , suggesting that oh (when occurring as a preface to constructed dialogue), works both to display and evaluate quoted material for the purposes of identity construction in interaction. Such uses of this discourse marker provide illustration of how footing works together with related concepts of evaluation, positioning, and alignment as part of a process of stancetaking in interaction ( Du Bois 2007 ). Examples are taken from ethnographic interviews collected as part of a larger study of the linguistic style of a community of improv performers in Washington, D.C. focusing primarily on examples contributed by one speaker, Josh.     

Collaborative Music‐Making with Digital Audio Workstations: The “nth Member” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding the Role of Technologies in Audio Composition

This article examines amateur music‐making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music‐making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi‐modal activity through a heuristic device: the “nth member.” Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilizing conversation analytic techniques—“turn‐taking” and “next‐selection”—to capture two key interactional moments.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.