Understanding Everyday Life: Generic Social Processes and the Pursuit of Transcontextuality

This paper joins earlier interactionist projects in advocating for an analytical attentiveness to generic social process (GSP). This dynamic form of theorizing is indebted to the thought of Herbert Blumer and the extended phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. Rather centrally, the study of GSPs draws upon the foundational concepts of duration, intersubjectivity, and the self. Such concepts have contributed to some of symbolic interactionism's most enduring, empirically grounded and theoretically robust work. Drawing on a series of ethnographic research projects, this paper offers a research agenda for engaging GSPs transcontextually. Specifically, I argue for extending the study of GSPs through the examination of management in everyday life, the creation of subcultural value, and the social construction of doubt.     

“He's Doing Fine”: Hope Work and Emotional Threat Management Among Families of Seriously Ill Children

In this study, I examine how people in emotionally fraught circumstances strategically structure social interactions in order to protect fragile emotional states. Data come from interviews and observations with 18 families of children being treated for life‐threatening conditions at an elite university research hospital. I show how families worked to ward off emotional threats to their ability to maintain hope that their children would recover by preempting and restructuring social interactions with friends and family members and pruning social networks. These efforts allowed families to minimize reciprocal obligations and avoid encountering pessimistic reflected appraisals that might trigger “emotional shortcuts” leading to states of fear and anxiety. Similar efforts to reconstruct social interactions and social networks may be common among those working to maintain fragile emotional states in a variety of challenging circumstances.     

Generic Processes in Aligning the Multiple Bases of Identity: The Case of Becoming a Ministry Student

Identity theory distinguishes three bases of identity—role, group, and person—but studies have typically focused on one identity at a time. The interrelationship among the multiple bases of identity remains understudied. This study examines the multiple bases of identity individuals engage on their way to becoming ministry students. The results reveal the advantage of examining the multiple bases of identity as subcultural processes, the utility of qualitative research for expanding the empirical scope of identity theory, and the possibility of employing structural symbolic interactionist concepts within a processual symbolic interactionist agenda.     

Introduction: The Senses in Social Interaction

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles.     

Divided and Drifting: Interactionism and the Neglect of Social Organizational Analyses in Organization Studies

The analysis of organizational phenomena within interactionism has become bifurcated between social organizational analyses and organizational ethnographies. This division has had the effect of allowing organizational ethnographies to more readily contribute to organization studies while marginalizing studies of social organization. The historical conditioning of this development and current evidence for this case is demonstrated through an analysis of the existing literature from the past thirteen years of interactionist organizational research. To end the continued neglect of social organizational analyses in the interdisciplinary field of organization studies the article concludes by suggesting a number of possible inspirations for promoting future research.     

Responding to the Mental Health and Grief Concerns of Homeless HIV-Infected Gay Men

Summary

Aging, homeless HIV-infected gay men confront multiple bereavement and mental health issues. Needs assessment interviews with this population in the streets of New York City facilitate the initial review and provision of clinically and culturally appropriate service delivery strategies for these disenfranchised gay men to access bereavement support and mental health care systems.     

The Presentation of Dead Selves in Everyday Life: Obituaries and Impression Management

This study draws on obituary content and meanings to extend Goffman's explication of the vagaries of face‐to‐face interactions to situations where people pursue goals without corporeal copresence of actor and audience. Data for the study was collected in Kumasi, the capital city of the Asante people of Ghana, West Africa. My analysis suggests that obituaries embody self‐presentation strategies that include star crafting, social risk management, and mobilization of external resources. I conclude that obituaries are cultural texts that appropriate social symbols to facilitate the presentation of the dead as part of the bereaved's identity projects. My specific observations about obituaries hint at more general reflections on self‐presentation strategies that may be extended to other aspects of social life. They also raise questions for future research.     

Running the Gauntlet: Women's Use of Emotion Management Techniques in the Abortion Experience

Women who have abortions are caught in the crossfire of a heated ideological battle. The prochoice contention is that most women feel relieved after terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The antiabortion camp asserts killing an unborn child psychologically scars the mother. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with forty women who have terminated a pregnancy, this study examines how the clashing emotion culture of abortion politics shapes women's feelings about abortion. Findings indicate that women use behavioral and cognitive techniques in an attempt to transform unpleasant physiological reactions, inappropriate expressive gestures, and problematic emotional labels. As they run the gauntlet, women also strategically dodge or deliberately approach hazardous situational cues (e.g., abortion debate rhetoric and demonstrators, pictures of fetal development and the ultrasound, and babies and pregnant women) to achieve a feeling state that is consistent with their ideology.     

The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence the development of a virtual imagination.     

The identity curation game: digital inequality,identity work,and emotion management

ABSTRACT

The research examines an understudied facet of digital inequality: how digital inequality impacts identity work and emotion management. The analysis reveals how unequal access to digital resources shapes how well youths are able to play what I call the identity curation game. Digital resources determine youths’ ability to succeed in this game that is governed by three implicit rules: (1) constantly update or be sidelined, (2) engage in constant reciprocated identity-affirming interactions, and (3) maintain a strategy of vigilance to remove traces of failed identity performances. This article draws on Symbolic Interactionism and pays particular attention to Hochschild’s theory of emotion management. Drawing on these frameworks, the findings reveal how under-resourced youths experience connectivity gaps that disrupt their ability to play the identity curation game, as well as the resulting emotional consequences. Under-resourced youths manage distinctive negative emotions arising from connectivity gaps that hinder their digital identity work, as well as engaging in distinct kinds of suppressive work to police their own emotions including longing, envy, shame, frustration, and stigmatization. In making these linkages, the research reveals the cascading effects of digital inequality among youths where constant connectivity is the sine qua non of social inclusion.     

When Death Becomes the end of an Analytic Treatment: Necessary Parameters

This paper is based on a social worker psychoanalysts work with an analysand, who during the course of an analysis, was diagnosed with advanced and inoperable lung cancer. The paper explores: changes in the analytic frame; countertransference responses; and how the analyst worked with her patient until the very end. Working with the dying patient may offer perspective on how we think about and approach the termination phase in other psychoanalytic work as well.     

The Production of Popular Music as a Confidence Game: The Case of the Chicago Blues

In this article I argue that the production of live music shares many formal properties with that of confidence games: specifically, (1) a set of structural relationships in which operators, ropers, insiders, shills and marks are enmeshed, (2) the deployment of carefully planned strategies of deception, and (3) a pattern of success owed in part to the moral and financial motivations of insiders, the willingness of the state to assist in the enterprise, and the desire among victims to be swayed by the production. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in some of Chicago's most popular blues clubs, I examine these three components of live music production qua confidence game. I also briefly discuss how one group of participants—local blues musicians—reacts to their own performances as musicians/confidence artists. Finally, I conclude by exploring the broader implications this case suggests regarding other types of live music production.     

The Flayed and Exquisite Self of Travelers: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self‐consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work.     

Development and Initial Validation of the Children's Sadness Management Scale

Although sadness in children is a normal and transient experience, research has not investigated how children manage sadness. Understanding normative sadness management has important implications for helping children who exhibit maladaptive forms of emotional expression. The Children's Sadness Management Scale (CSMS) was developed to assess children's inhibition, dysregulated-expression, and coping with sadness experience and expression. Using multiple informants, reliability and validity were established based on a community sample of 227 fourth- and fifth-grade children's self-report, maternal report (N = 171), and peer ratings of behavior (N = 227). A three-factor solution was supported with strong internal consistency for the Inhibition scale and moderately strong internal consistency for the Emotion Regulation Coping and Dysregulated-Expression scales. Findings indicate that the CSMS provides a reliable and valid measure of normative sadness management.     

The Money Taboo: Its Effects in Everyday Life and in the Practice of Psychotherapy

A cultural taboo regarding discussion of money affects psychotherapists as well as the lay public. As a result, the psychological literature regarding money is sparse while issues relating to money are seldom addressed in our training, our self analyses, or the treatment of our patients. This article cites some of the literature that does exist, discusses the reasons for and effects of the money taboo, provides a psychological definition of money, and offers some case material that should help to focus thinking about money through the lens of psychodynamic, object relations, and self psychological theories.     

Outspoken Objects and Unspoken Myths: The Semiotics of Object-Mediated Communication

This interactionist study draws on the semiotics of Peirce and Barthes to theorize object-mediated communication, a nonverbal interpersonal technique in which individuals signal new information by using and orienting themselves to symbolically endowed material objects. Examining the case of door-mediated communication, it proposes that objects lie symbolically dormant until their deeper collective significance is activated through their use in interaction. The article expands the scope of interactionist inquiry on human–nonhuman relations by moving beyond the dominant scholarly focus on identity. The semiotic approach foregrounds a distinct human–object phenomenon, a novel category of nonverbal communication, and important meaning-making dynamics.     

特大城市社会管理的难点和对策——以上海市为例

本文考察了在以信访案件急剧上升为标志的社会矛盾凸显期中,大城市特别是特大城市社会管理中存在的难点,通过对难点的考察和分析,提出了相应的对策和思路。     

Identity Management of the Dead: Contests in the Construction of Murdered Children

Presenting data gathered from fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with families of homicide victims, this study explores “postmortem identity‐contests” faced by families who have experienced the homicide of a child or other family member. Interview data from families on their interaction with police, funeral home directors, and other institutional officials suggest that the construction of postmortem identities is commonly a process of contestation filled with competing identity‐claims. The findings reveal that as families resist “oppressive othering” by the state and other institutional actors, they develop various accounts and strategies in “selfing” and sanctifying the identity of the dead.     

“Not Getting Any Because of Jesus”: The Centrality of Desire Management to the Identity Work of Gay,Celibate Christians

Drawing from semistructured interviews with gay, celibate Christians or “Side B” individuals, I explore the emotion of desire. I specifically attend to these questions: How do Side Bs interpret and communicate feeling rules connected to desire? How do these individuals manage desire? How might feeling rules and conceptualizations of this feeling serve as an important source of boundary heightening? Finally, how might shared feeling rules create connection with others who do not identify as Side B? By attending to these questions, I illustrate the relationship between the conceptualization of an emotion and a set of feeling rules and emotion management strategies. I also highlight how such rules and strategies can serve as a source of boundary heightening, or alternatively, as a bridge between seemingly disparate groups.