Cartographies of disease: Maps,mapping, and medicine

Although sociologists regard charisma as a social construct, few studies look at the explicit interactions that create and maintain this type of authority. This article examines one specific, but ubiquitous social interaction between leader and follower – the charismatic touch. The charismatic touch is a semi-formal interaction in which leader and followers exchange mutual recognition through verbal, visual and physical touch. Through touching each other this way, charisma becomes palpable, the bond with followers enlivened and the authority of the leader reconstituted. By analysing photographs from a visual ethnographic study of Diamond Mountain, a Western convert Buddhist community, and images of political leaders culled from mass media, one can observe a dynamic of intimacy and distance in maintaining and performing charisma. As data, visual representations of the charismatic touch capture evidence of its micro-interactional nature and offer a new approach to the field of charisma in the digital age.     

Ritualizing the Routine: Collective Identity Affirmation

Groups use rituals to create and preserve collective identities. Separation of sacred practices from customary activities has long been considered a key property of ritual. However, customary activities form the basis of some ritual celebrations. We explain how a different process of identity creation results: identity affirmation. We find that groups affirm their customary practices on ritual occasions when they intend to celebrate practices already associated with the sacred, and we explain the structure of such rituals using a case study of a university centennial celebration. We argue that attention to variation in ritual casts light on the values and collective identity of groups.     

Die Wirkung organisationaler Rituale – Eine qualitative Interviewstudie

Organizational rituals pose a paradox. They are ubiquitous in business and other organizations; however, they do not fulfill an obvious organizational purpose. Psychological research on ritual suggests that group rituals fulfill important social functions and thereby solve the adaptive problems associated with living in large groups. Prior research on organizational ritual is dominated by case studies that often neglect the ritual participants’ perspective. Thus, in this article we aim at investigating which effects organizational members attribute to organizational rituals and at tapping into the implicit theories concerning the evolution of these effects. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with employees of different organizations from different sectors, holding different positions and employment contracts, the effects of organizational rituals on the individual as well as on the group level will be presented. Results suggest that organizational group rituals are linked above all with positive effects, whereby fostering and establishing group cohesion is the most frequently mentioned effect. The article will conclude with practical implications derived from the study results.     

From Hell to Utopia and Back to Hell: Charismatic Relationships

Weber and most subsequent analysts of charisma have adopted a synchronic standpoint. The author offers a diachronic formulation, delineating the social processes that create, modify, and transform charismatic relationships. A mature charismatic relationship emerges as: (1) consensual definitions of discontents emerge; (2) the identities of leader and followers are established; (3) social encounters (gatherings) are programmed to enhance charismatic acts; (4) new solidarities are established; (5) new consensual definitions of reality are established; and (6) a Utopian future is formulated. The common phenomenon of charismatic relationships transforming into tyrannies is a consequence of the qualities of some of the social processes produced to maintain a charismatic relationship. Representative relationships are an alternative to charismatic and tyrannical ones.     

The Virgin Mary and Revolution in Saint-Domingue: The Charisma of Romaine-la-Prophétesse

Drawing on historical analyses of the role of religion in the Haitian Revolution and on neo-Weberian discussions of charisma, this article offers new insights into the background of Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a religious leader of slave insurrections in Saint-Domingue whose campaign lasted from the summer of 1791 to March of the following year. Worsley and Bourdieu's interactionist model of charismatic authority is used to orient consideration of the Kongolese religious and ideological influences on Romaine's movement and his radically subversive appropriation of the symbol of the Virgin Mary. The article suggests that Romaine-la-Prophétesse may have himself been native Kongolese, while clearly demonstrating that his message drew heavily on Kongolese thought, in which terms is his charismatic authority to be understood.     

Charisma,collectives, and commitment: hybrid authority in radical feminist social movement organizations

The primary goal of this article is to add to the literature on the role of social movement organizations in facilitating movement involvement and activism. Using Weber’s definition of domination and delineation of ideal types of social action as starting points, my specific focus is on those SMOs that exhibit authority that is situated in the whole (collective) and manifests an extra-ordinary (charismatic) hold on the members/followers. I suggest the term ‘collective charisma’ for this hybrid form of organizational authority exhibited in a subgroup of SMOs. Examples from the radical U.S. feminist movement are used to illustrate how this particular organizational form shapes movement commitment, specifically the creation of collective identity, oppositional consciousness, and culture.     

Shaping Perceptions of Sarah Palin’s Charisma: Presentations of Palin in the 2008 Presidential Election

Research has shown that male politicians are often stereotyped as stronger leaders than female politicians. This research, however, has taken a fairly narrow view of leadership. In the business organization literature, a leadership style called charismatic leadership is treated as a multidimensional concept, with feminine and masculine attributes. While scholarship has considered factors that shape perceptions of charisma, it has not looked at the effect of media presentations. This question became especially timely during the 2008 election. Using data from an experiment with voters in Los Angeles County, we show how media presentations impact the feminine and masculine components of Sarah Palin’s charisma. In our analysis, we show that media presentations that highlight stereotypically feminine traits increase perceptions of Palin’s feminine charisma, while those that highlight masculine traits have null effects on perceptions of Palin’s masculine charisma. Partisanship moderates these effects. Moreover, as one might expect, increased perceptions of Palin as a charismatic figure increase positive feelings toward her as a candidate.     

Consumption in the Korean Wedding Ritual: Wedding Ritual Values, Consumer Needs, and Expenditures

Recently, consumer researchers have been interested in rituals that concisely express the consumption system in a culture. This article studies the Korean wedding ritual. The particular focus is on consumer values, needs, and expenditures related to Korean weddings. Research hypotheses were developed by analyzing the consumption phenomena in a sociocultural context and using focus groups and in-depth interviews. The author suggests that hedonic values relating to wedding rituals influence conspicuous and female-focused consumption. Implications of the study and further consumption research issues are discussed.     

The Function of Acculturation and Collective Self-Esteem on Prejudicial Attitudes among Vietnamese American Young Adults

ABSTRACT

This study examined the influence of collective self-esteem and acculturation on prejudicial attitudes in a sample of Vietnamese American young adults. A total of 122 college students from a public university in Southern California were given the Collective Self-Esteem Scale, the Vietnamese Acculturation Scale, and the Quick Discrimination Index. Results suggest that students who were more involved in U.S. culture and had both higher public collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief that their cultural groups were perceived positively by others) and higher private collective self-esteem (i.e., the individuals' private evaluation about their cultural groups) tended to have fewer prejudicial attitudes. Interestingly, results also reveal that students who were more involved in Vietnamese culture and had higher membership collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief in how well they perform in their cultural groups) tended to have more prejudicial attitudes. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

The Emotional Basis of Charisma*

Charisma is commonly thought of as an extraordinary personal characteristic. In contrast, this paper proposes that charisma is a product of emotional interaction between charismatic leaders and their followers. More specifically, charisma is argued to spring from charismatic leaders' use of emotion rules to redefine both objective and subjective aspects of their followers' realities. Through modeling emotion charismatics first gain legitimacy; then they propose changes in the social order and redefine the emotions necessary for such changes to occur. An analytical model of the emergence of charisma based on the evoking, revoking, and refraining of emotion rules is developed. To tentatively illustrate its utility the model is applied to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The implications of this analysis of emotional interaction for the study of social change are discussed.     

“ZA DUSHA”: AN INTERPRETATION OF FUNERAL PRACTICES IN MACEDONIA*

Anthropologists and sociologists have generally approached an understanding of funeral rituals in terms of their psychological or social consequences. Such functional analyses have typically depended on regarding ritual behaviors as learned reponses that symbolically create or affirm the society's organizational “rules”. An alternative or supplemental approach is the view that ritual behavior, and thus ritual content, results from purposive interactions between individuals determined by their interpretations of the ritual's interactive situation. An elaboration of this view is offered in an examination of funeral practices in the developing city of Skopje in Yugoslav Macedonia where the many commemoratives for the dead typically result in great costs of time, money and effort. Variations and changes in funeral rituals are related to different strategies of adjustment to the city, and, in particular, to the creation and maintenance of relationships within a network of specific others that is essential to urban adaptation. Ritual is also described as providing a means of social boundary maintenance, in addition to the creation of these social networks, thus limiting obligations and claims on resources.     

The Power of Demonstrations

People take to the streets for several reasons. Advancing their demands to the authorities is an obvious one. Establishing communication channels among participants and thus helping to buttress a collective identity is another, latent one. Both combined express the power of protest. In what follows, I focus on the group-integrative function of protest. First, I conceptualize the notion of ritual and import it to the field of collective action. Then, I illustrate my argument by analyzing the extraordinary level of protest in the Basque Country. Mass protest rituals performed by a radical nationalist actor allow its participants to visualize themselves in movement and thus create and reinforce enduring bonds of solidarity. Occasionally, the argument about the relevance of a ritualized physical gathering might be extended to other revolutionary movements which push and threaten to transcend the limits of the system, be it because they substantially alter its morphology, because they challenge its foundational values, or both. Owing to the generalized disapproval these groups engender in wider society, revolutionary movements are in greater need of preserving group boundaries. Protest rituals are an important, sometimes essential, way of accomplishing such a task.     

Ritual,Change and Psychotherapy

Symptomatic behavior often appears or is initially perceived during transitional stages in the life cycle when changes in behavior and relationships are culturally appropriate. Symptomatic behavior legitimates lack of change in the relationships of the symptomatic individual and those in his or her social context. By this it provides a pseudo-solution to the universal problem of dependency and autonomy (Sluzki & Vernon, 1971), which must be solved by individuals in every society. Many non-Western societies have rites of passage (van Gennep, 1960) to ritualistically mark significant transition. The performance of these rituals helps individuals change their position in the social context while at the same time validating the context. Rites of passage are characterized by paradoxical communications. The paradoxical structure of these rituals will be described and implications for the use of ritual in family therapy will be suggested using a case example as illustration.     

Nationalism, Charisma, and Plebiscitary Leadership: The Problem of Democratization in Max Weber's Political Sociology

Max Weber has typically been regarded as a central thinker in the liberal tradition of social analysis. At the same time, critics have long noted how his democratic commitments were compromised by his nationalism. Drawing on existing criticism, I discuss the importance of charismatic leadership in Weber's thought and its implications for his understanding of the process of democratization. Reconstructing core concepts in Weber's political thought, I analyze how Weber's concept of plebiscitarian leadership unites charismatic domination with nationalism and skepticism concerning effective democratic politics. I show how Weber's concept of plebiscitarian rule grew from deeply held political values and his engagement with German politics. I then generate propositions regarding the problem of democratization in regime transitions and apply them to contemporary charismatic leaders and ethno-nationalist mobilization in post-Communist transitions. I argue that as much as it anticipates the central dilemma of charismatic solutions to political crisis, Weber's thought favors nationalist and plebiscitarian responses to democratization that have been largely discredited by historical experience.     

Creativity,brands, and the ritual process: Confrontation and resolution in advertising agencies

The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols and that rituals mediate tension inherent in two forces, stability and change, which define the brand and the advertising collaboration. The article offers an analytical perspective on creativity and a new perspective on rituals and ritual symbols.     

Mediatized Ritual – Expanding the Field in the Study of Media and Ritual

The purpose of the article Mediatized ritual – Expanding the field in the study of media and ritual is to identify the key debates in present‐day scholarship on media and ritual and bring them into dialogue with current theorizing on the mediatization of society and culture. The article consists of three parts. The first presents a short outline of the study of media and ritual in modern life. The second discusses the idea of mediatized ritual as an evolving concept in the field. The third provides an empirical illustration of the mediatization of ritual by applying the concept to the analysis of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). In conclusion, it is argued that to study mediatized rituals in today's society is to face the theoretical and empirical challenge of engaging the two social realms of ritual and media in a close interplay. This intellectual venture changes our understanding not only of rituals and media (what they are and what they do) but also of society. This said, to study mediatized rituals is, in fact, to study society in action.     

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment,intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.     

STRATEGIC RITUALIZATION AND ETHNICITY: ATYPOLOGY AND ANALYSIS OF RITUAL ENACTMENTS IN AN ITALIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

This investigation utilizes a theoretical framework that focuses on ritual enactments to examine the ways members of an Italian American community in southeastern Oklahoma use social rituals to achieve different outcomes. Several methodological strategies (especially interviews and historical analysis) are utilized to document how individuals within this ethnic community have, for over the last century, employed numerous rituals to, among other things, express their ethnicity, create community ties, enhance personal gain, and survive. Building upon the theory of structural ritualization, the concept of strategic ritualization is employed and expanded upon to examine this issue. A typology of three types of strategic ritualization is presented and defined: ritual legitimators, ritual entrepreneurs, and ritual sponsors. This conceptualization represents the first elaboration of structural ritualization theory addressing this topic. In focusing on this little studied ethnic community, the importance of ritualized practices and their strategicuse throughout society are emphasized. The relation of this research to broader concerns dealing with the social constructionist approach to ethnicity and the intersection of decision-making, culture, and structure are briefly highlighted and directions for future theory development and research are indicated.     

Soviet Communism and Weberian Sociology

Abstract The first section of this article gives a short outline of Weber's view on socialism, communism and the Russian Revolution. It is argued that Soviet communism is neither traditional nor neotraditional, neither charismatic in the sense of the genuine, personal charisma of its leaders, nor rational in the sense of a maximum of formal rationality. It is suggested that another Weberian category, one which until now has received only limited attention - the charisma of reason - overcomes several of the difficulties in which previous analyses have got entangled.     

American Criminology Meets Collins: Global Theory of Intellectual Change and a Policy‐Oriented Field1

Ideas from Randall Collins’s Sociology of Philosophies are applied to U.S. criminology, a policy‐oriented field and one case of differentiation out of a fragmented sociological discipline. Building on previous quantitative work, in‐depth interviews with eight prominent scholars provide the empirical material. As in philosophy, vertical network ties are important. Yet, they may take different forms, with consequences for the shape of horizontal networks and the nature of scholarship. Comparable to philosophy, horizontal network ties provide social capital and opportunities for interaction rituals that generate collective effervescence and emotional energy. Further, the nature of these interactions is dependent on the changing institutional environment in which they are embedded. Such institutional settings, themselves affected by changes in the political economy, also provide material resources, constituting dependencies that produce mediated effects and, in this policy‐oriented field, also direct effects on the nature of scholarship.