Mutual Interests,Different Lenses: Current Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction

As reflective thinkers, symbolic interactionists may well be curious about the organ with which we think. Leading neuroscientists are quite aware that a working brain depends on other brains. This article considers selected neuroscience approaches to topics traditionally addressed by symbolic interactionists including some confirmations, refinements, and challenges from current neuroscience. Confirmations support features of Mead's “objective reality of perspectives” and a relational epistemology, the inevitability of ad hoc “accounts,” self‐consciousness as behavioral control, and “self unity” as constantly re‐created illusion. Divergence between neuroscience and symbolic interaction mainly involves new evidence for the importance of unconscious cognition, emotion, and memory in shaping human behavior. The rooting of cognitive and perceptual processes in motor activity challenges the extremes of the “linguistic turn.” Refinement involves reasons for attending to the embodied salience of thoughts produced by “somatic markers” rather than mere content.     

About Steaks Liking to be Eaten: The Conflicting Views of Symbolic Interactions and Talcott Parsons Concerning the Nature of Relations Between Persons and Nonhuman Objects

Reasoning on the basis of the nature of a series of characteristics of social systems, Talcott Parsons asserted that relations of persons with others are interactional, but that their relations with what he called nonsocial objects-physical and cultural objects-are other than interactional. Logical as well as common sense considerations show that persons do interact both with categories of objects. Symbolic interactionists hold that interaction of persons with nonhuman objects-their designation of what Parsons called nonsocial objects-occurs during the course of the persons taking the roles of such objects internally with presumed mutuality, that is thinking about them, and interpreting them as one or another of three different kinds of signs. In the symbolic interactionist perspective, the overarching background of all interaction is the active self mediating reflexively between the persons and whatever kinds of objects with which they are involved.     

Sketching as Autoethnographic Practice

This article is an “autoethnographic sketch” that “draws out” substantive observations about the “sketchy” character of concepts such as identity, theory, self, and society. Using vignettes from my experiences as an art student, post‐structuralist theory, and symbolic interaction, I render a brief sketch of how autoethnography and other representations of self can be conveyed in a layered process. The materials in each vignette may not seem to be consistent with or related to the other layers, but as each layer is superimposed on the others, an image or impression emerges from the whole. By presenting these materials in this way, the format or metaphor of sketching offers autoethnographers the possibility of doing analysis and evocation, while leaving open other interpretive possibilities. Artificial closure is not imposed on the final product. I also briefly sketch how self and society exist sous rature and in différance to each other, thus making autoethnographic sketching a useful tool for symbolic interactionists and other observers of society.     

Symbolic Interaction Theory and Architecture

Architectural sociology is receiving renewed attention but still remains a neglected area of investigation. As a major theoretical perspective within sociology, symbolic interaction helps us understand how the designed physical environment and the self are intertwined, with one potentially influencing and finding expression in the other; how architecture contains and communicates our shared symbols; and how we assign agency to some of our designed physical environment, which then invites in a different kind of self‐reflection. This article discusses numerous instances of symbolic interaction theory–architecture connections, with applied examples showing how symbolic interactionists and architects can collaborate on projects to the benefit of each, and to the benefit of humanity.     

Aesthetes in the marketplace: Collectors in the gun business

Marketplaces can provide settings for the appreciation of beauty and the creation of community. The author examines how gun collectors who buy and sell guns continue to see themselves as aesthetes rather than dealers. Gun collector-dealers turn economic encounters at commercial gun shows into occasions for teaching others the symbolic uses of guns — as artifacts, curios, andobjets d'art. Economic relations can produce aesthetic value even when the objects exchanged are conventionally defined as symbols of violence and not beauty.     

What Can Interactionism Contribute to the Study of Inequality? The Case of Marriage and Beyond

The equality/inequality dichotomy is a central concept in sociology and in the study of marriage. Almost all researchers, though, use their own preconceived definitions and measurement strategies to identify equal and unequal states of affairs. An alternative approach, one that better accords with interactionist principles, is to privilege people's interpretations of equality over analysts' Drawing on interviews with individuals who define their own marriages as equal or unequal, I compare people's stories about marital equality with scholars' depictions. While some narratives resonate (in part) with the themes propounded by scholars, others do not. If people's experiences of equality and inequality are to be taken seriously, then it is important to listen to what they have to say on the subject, as well as to how they say it. This is the distinctive contribution symbolic interactionists can make to the study of inequality.     

INTERPRETING THE SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS: CAN THERE BE A “TRUE” MEANING OF MEAD?

Many sociologists have tried in vain to find the “true” meaning of the classic works in the discipline. An interactionist perspective suggests that this search is not a valid one for sociologists, especially symbolic interactionists. Although there can be no “true” meaning, some authors use conventions of writing that make their work more or less clear. Using Mead's Mind, Self and Society as an example, we discuss the dimensions of clarity. We then argue that the sociological classics should be read to (I) simulate new theories and research (pragmatic analysis), (2) determine how sociologists have used that classic to support or refute particular theories or perspectives (rhetorical analysis), and (3) provide information about the sociological concerns of the author and his/her contemporaries (historical analysis).     

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.     

Sociology,narrative, and the quality versus quantity debate (Goethe versus Newton): Can computer-assisted story grammars help us understand the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922)?

At the heart of this article is a structural approach to narrative, based on the work of Propp, Labov, van Dijk, Halliday, and others. The article highlights the structural features of narrative—basically, the organization of the genre around the semantic template actor-action-actor (syntactically rendered as subject-verb-object but where, in narrative, the subject is typically a social actor and the verb a social action) and the modifiers of each element of this triplet, such as time and space of action—and shows how to implement this structure in a computer environment and how to use this methodological tool in socio-historical research (namely, the rise of Italian fascism, 1919–22). But, taking a cue from Halliday’s cover jacket of his An Introduction to Functional Grammar, with its representation of a color circle, the paper takes the reader on an intellectual journey from Newton to Goethe—and the quality versus quantity debate—to Goethe and Propp, to end, back home, with Simmel and Weber.     

The hispanic writings of C. Wright Mills: A study in social psychology

The purpose of this article is to conduct a social-psychological analysis of C. Wright Mills and his “Hispanic writings.” I demonstrate how Mills's social-psychological theoretical framework, as articulated in Character and Social Structure, is attendant in his comments on Latinos and Latin America—a population and geopolitical region for which he seemed to have a compelling if somewhat distant fascination. I conclude with a synopsis and appraisal of: (1) Mills's personal perceptions of Latinos; (2) the social structural factors that impacted on the four Latino groups, and (3) the personality traits of Latinos as Mills saw them.     

Interaction Ritual Chains and the Mobilization of Conscientious Consumers

Markets for “socially responsible” products are comprised of activists who lead protests, organize boycotts, and promote the consumption of these goods. However, the ultimate success of these movements is dependent upon the support of a large number of consumers whose self-professed values often contradict with their own purchasing patterns. Consumer support of socially responsible products cannot be explained by consumer culture theories, which privilege identity, attitudes, and behavior, or mass consumption theories, which emphasize location and advertising’s influence on consumption patterns. These perspectives are informative but unable to explain why some consumers will only buy socially responsible products while others with similar value systems possess much more contradictory consumption patterns. I extend Collin’s theory of “Interaction Ritual chains” to show that rituals and emotions—more than identity or coercive advertising—explain how ethical consumers are mobilized. I show how face-to-face interactions between consumers and producers produce solidarity and motivate support for the Fair Trade movement. This paper employs a micro-sociological approach to contribute to studies of ethical consumption in three notable ways: 1) it emphasizes the importance of “contexts” and is able to explain contradictions in consumer behavior; 2), it contributes to our understanding of “brand communities” by describing the micro-sociological processes that both help to build these communities and create value within the products that organize these groups; and 3) it offers the potential to develop a predictive model for the purchasing patterns of consumers.     

NETWORK AND MEANING: AN INTERACTIONIST APPROACH TO STRUCTURE*

Social network is a concept interactionists might use to link individual behavior to the larger social system. A symbolic interactionist formulation of network would: 1) approximate the original, anthropological usage better than the current structural conception does, 2) offer symbolic interactionists a unit of social organization better suited to their perspective than the small group, and 3) allow symbolic interactionists to deal with “macro” sociological concerns. Network is conceived of as a set of relationships which people imbue with meaning and use for personal or collective purposes. By emphasizing subjective meaning and the investigation of multi-purpose and weak ties, the interactionist formulation provides theoretical insights into those aspects of society which “structural” approaches overlook.     

Four Paths to Spirit at Work: Journeys of Personal Meaning,Fulfillment, Well‐Being,and Transcendence Through Work

Spirit at work involves profound feelings of well‐being, a belief that one's work makes a contribution, a sense of connection to others and common purpose, an awareness of a connection to something larger than self, and a sense of perfection and transcendence. This exploratory qualitative study revealed 4 paths leading to spirit at work: the always there path, which had a continuous nature; the coming together path, which resembled a growing and integrative journey; the transformative events path, which was in response to an awakening or crisis; and the contextually sensitive path, which was dependent on the work environment. Implications for career counseling are discussed.     

Sex work and the construction of intimacies: meanings and work pragmatics in rural Malawi

This article focuses on Malawian sex workers’ understandings of exchange and intimacy, showing how multiple historically emergent categories and specific work pragmatics produce specific patterns of relational meanings. As we show, sex workers make sense of their relationships with clients through two categories. The first is sex work; the second is the chibwenzi, an intimate premarital relational category that emerged from pre-colonial transformations in courtship practices. These categories, in turn, are also shaped differently in different work settings. We use narratives from in-depth interviews with 45 sex workers and bar managers in southern Malawi to describe how the everyday pragmatics of two forms of sex work—performed by “bargirls” and “freelancers”—foster distinct understandings of relationships between them and men they have sex with. Bargirls, who work and live in bars, blurred the boundaries between “regulars” and chibwenzi; freelancers, who are not tethered to a specific work environment, often subverted the meanings of the chibwenzi, presenting these relationships as both intimate and emotionally distant. Through this comparison, we thus refine an approach to the study of the intimacy-exchange nexus, and use it to capture the complexities of gender relations in post-colonial Malawi.     

Ambivalence and Control: State Action Against the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan

Models that purport to explain the interplay between dissidents and the state generally assert, either explicitly or implicitly, that the path from state interests to action to outcomes is a linear one. Using the case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina, I argue that state efforts to exert social control upon a perceived threat are shaped by a range of internal and external contingencies. In particular, I undertake a comparative analysis of two state agencies to demonstrate how a particular mechanism—ambivalence, here conceptualized as the relational consequence of a mismatch between organizational culture and organizational goals—leads to distinct, and sometimes heterogeneous, actions and outcomes not directly traceable to organizational mandates. Findings lend insight into how endogenous organizational processes shape contentious political outcomes in potentially divergent ways.     

Self and Society in Popular Social Criticism 1920–1980

Since the tumult of the 1960s, sociologists and cultural historians have suggested that a “new sensibility” has become more prominent in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies. In most accounts, the core of the change is an increase in expressive individualism, popularly justified by discourse very much indebted to the language of academic and clinical psychology. Among symbolic interactionists, Ralph Turner's proposal that there has been a shift from “institutional” to “impulsive” anchorage of the self has been the single most influential contribution to this debate. Turner's analysis is placed in the larger context of his work and considered in the light of changes in social criticism and the rhetoric of self in popular “conduct-of-life” literature published between 1920 and 1980. Three relatively distinct waves of social criticism are found in that literature during that period, with each one more firmly based on individualistic and psychologistic views of self and society than its predecessor.     

Theoretical and political perspectives of American sociologists in the 1990s

This study investigated the theoretical allegiances of a national sample of 168 sociologists. Conflict theory and Marxism, symbolic interactionism, functionalism, and eclecticism were the approaches most widely adhered to by our respondents. Nonetheless, the respondents claimed allegiance to a wide range of perspectives, suggesting that contemporary sociology is, as long suspected, highly fragmented theoretically. A special concern of the study was to determine the degree to which sociologists identify biological factors as important determinants of social behavior. The respondents were highly antibiological in outlook, with more than half attributing only 15 percent or less of the variation in 12 dimensions of social behavior to biological causes. We also explored the degree to which four variables—age, gender, institutional affiliation, and political outlook—were correlated with the respondents’ theoretical preferences and the importance they gave to biological causation. Political outlook was the best predictor of the respondents’ theoretical outlooks, followed fairly closely by age. Institutional affiliation was a weak predictor of theoretical outlook, and gender was completely unrelated to theory choice and perception of the importance of biological causation. where he specailizes in social theory and comparative macrosociology. He is the author ofMacrosociology: An Introduction to Human Societies (Harper Collins, 2nd ed., 1991) andSocial Evolutionism: A Critical History (Basil Blackwell, 1990). He is currently working on a sequel to the latter of these. Lee Ellis is professor of sociology at Minot State University. He is the author ofTheories of Rape (Hemisphere, 1989) and of two forthcoming works,Research Methods in the Social Sciences (Wm. C. Brown, 1993) and the two-volume seriesSocial Stratification and Socioeconomic Inequality (Praeger, 1993).     

Cooperative Accounts: Avoiding Conflict and Repairing Social Relations

The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being “offered” by offenders and then “evaluated” by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition.     

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.     

The Person Behind The Word: Mead's Theory Of Universals And A Shift Of Focus In Symbolic Interactionism

Careful consideration of Mead's theory of universals proves to be a corrective to a number of tendencies evident in the work of at least some influential contemporary symbolic interactionists. Mead avoids any realistic hypostatization of separate universals (“meanings,” “forms,” or “essences” while at the same time eschewing nominalistic and conventionalistic views of language. His principle of the objective reality of perspectives (1932:161-175) allows him to grant objective reality to universal characteristics of concrete objects, but entails neither hypostatization nor idealization of the universal. In addition to contravening nominalism and conventionalism, Mead's theory of universals provides a perspective from which the reality of the self, and the importance of intentional action for the development of a firmly felt sense of self and autonomy, can both be affirmed. Far from being an illusion or mer.e symbolic construct, the self is seen to be an objectively real universal within the perspective of social action.