Vicissitudes of the sacred

Conclusions Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, American sociologists have been made increasingly aware, mostly by Marxist and phenomenological critics, of the latent moral or practical implications of what often purports to be objectively impersonal scientific theories. Whereas Goffman's imaginative writing style and intensely personal observational technique never allowed him to be easily placed in the camp of the positivist objectivists, the profound moral issues and assumptions of his work, as Friedson's statement implied, never fully appeared in a clear light either, probably because of Goffman's strategic decision to accommodate his moral insights somewhat to the positivist intellectual milieu of the 1950s. The present analysis reveals, however, that, even more than allowing tacit moral assumptions to operate in the back-ground of his work, Goffman focussed centrally on an investigation of the various levels of moral understanding, a project for which he used the Book of Job as his signpost. Goffman's inquiry, it should be emphasized, was not conducted through an external observation of other people's consciousness but rather by means of an intensely personal reflection upon the governing frames of his own consciousness as it looked out upon the everyday social world. What we have chronicled in this essay is the dramatic evolution of Goffman's own moral consciousness, not the moral understandings of the subjects of his studies, the latter, of course, changing as Goffman's own moral understandings evolved. exact nature and purpose of his moral investigation. As we have seen, an ongoing reference for Goffman's moral inquiry was not a rationalist philosophical treatise, but rather one of the most poetic and profound narratives of the Bible, a work in which the radical mystery and transcendence of the Sacred, beyond all structures of nature, society, and the human ego, are asserted. The symbolic and narrative features of the Job text accord well with its emphasis on the mystery of Being, whose fundamental depth and power could not easily be compressed within the outlines of abstract rationalist propositions. Goffman, likewise, combines a final emphasis on the mystery of Being, beyond all finite frames and fabrications, with a pervasively symbolic and narrative style in his writing. In directing our attention toward the ultimate mystery of Being, of which finite frames provide only a tentative revelation, Goffman mounts an additional critique of Durkheim, not only for naively assuming that sacred representations must always reflect the social rather than the individual inclinations of human nature, but also for assuming that the social dimension of homo duplex alone serves as the ultimate and final reference for sacred forms. Much like contemporary existentialists who emphasize human finitude and the mystery of Being, Goffman uses Job's increasingly open psyche as his basis for understanding that beyond nature, beyond society, and beyond the individual lies a mystery of Being that continually surpasses, indeed itself engenders the ever-changing outlines of these other finite structures of existence. In the end, Goffman is perhaps more mythmaker than moralist, a religious poet who, for an age in which the traditional symbols of Being have been displaced by new cognitive forms, particularly those of science, magically transformed contemporary scientific language into archetypal symbols of the Sacred. Goffman's task was extremely difficult, one that would have strained the intellectual ingenuity and linguistic resources of a less talented man, namely the task of conveying to large numbers of relatively unprepared, deeply preoccupied and increasingly self-absorbed moderns a message about a completely unfashionable, economically useless and essentially ego-threatening mystery. Let us hope the large silence that now exists in his absence will not be filled by words less meaningful than his own.     

Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience

By originating and developing the sociological investigation of human experience, Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman have shifted social phenomena at the edge of awareness to the center of attention, and have legitimated their study for contemporary sociologists. Both Simmel and Goffman describe these subtle social phenomena by distinguishing their perceptual boundaries and crossover elements, pointing out their common features when their statuses differ, and reversing their traditional location in means-end and cause-effect chains. But Durkheim's influence on Goffman's basic conceptions of interaction, individual, and society differentiated his interpretation of these social phenomena from Simmel's. Moreover, Simmel's and Goffman's explanations of these social phenomena evolve in different directions, revealing the antithetical goals toward which spiritual transcendental Simmelians and cynical reductive Goffmanians would lead sociology.     

Normality and Trust in Goffman's Theory of Interaction Order

The article asserts that Goffman's concept of normality comes close to the notion of trust as a protective mechanism that prevents chaos and disorder by providing us with feelings of safety, certainty, and familiarity. Arguing that to account for the tendency of social order to be seen as normal we need to conceptualize trust as the routine background of everyday interaction, the article analyzes Goffman's concepts of normal appearances, stigma, and frames as devices for endowing social order with predictability, reliability, and legibility. For Goffman, normality is a collective achievement, which is possible because of the orderliness of interactional activities, which is—in turn—predicated "on a large base of shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints" (Goffman 1983, American Sociological Review 48:1–53, p. 5 cited here).     

TWO CONCEPTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SITUATION:

This article appraises two images of the social situation: Blumer's symbolic interactionism and Goffman's microstructuralism. Blumer stresses the improvisational and consequently unpredictable character of social interaction, while Goffman emphasizes situational determinism along with mutual predictability through self-abnegation. The evaluation of their respective positions is based upon their relative efficacy in the analysis of data drawn from an ethnographic study of jocularity in everyday life. The results indicate more utility for Blumer's than for Goffman's image of the situation.     

Oppositional Consciousness: Its Manifestation and Development. The Case of People with Disabilities*

While resource mobilization theory has advanced our understanding of social movements, two questions require further explanation: (1) How do people come to define their situation as unjust and subject to change through collective action? (2) How is such an “oppositional consciousness” empirically studied? From field research among people with disabilities, I suggest that oppositional consciousness is manifested through the collective actions, symbols, and cultural artifacts constructed by a group. I propose that strong interpersonal ties among group members may not be necessary for an oppositional consciousness to develop. To understand how a dominated group develops an oppositional consciousness, rather than analyzing the strength of its members' social ties, we must examine the context and the nature of these ties: (1) the institutions in which their social interactions typically occur; (2) the socialization process they experience within these institutions; and (3) members' contact with the oppositional ideologies of other dominated groups.     

Sociology and the Prosaic

The sociology of Erving Goffman is examined, including those who influenced his work as well as those influenced by it. Goffman's sociology is examined in terms of focus and scope, theory, and method. As much of his sociology is singular in its presentation, stylistic elements in Goffman's work are also considered.     

Youth politics as multiple processes: how teenagers construct political action in Sweden

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. This paper offers an alternative drawn from a study that sought to empirically explore, and build theory upon, how teenagers construct their political action. Our qualitative study among 10 activists aged between 17 and 19 in a medium-size city in Northern Sweden found that youth constructed their political action as four different processes: moving from consciousness to action, moving from personal experience to shared goals, moving from social activities to political activities, and moving from single to multiple arenas. We integrated these processes in the concept Youth Politics as Multiple Processes. Youth efforts to bring about these processes were not always fruitful because, as their political action gained complexity, youth faced greater constraints for recognizing, addressing and challenging power from age-based exclusion, state-centered definitions of politics, and adult disinterest in youth demands. According to our findings, youth constructed political action based in an approach to power that was not state-centered. We linked our findings to youth politics research and social movement theory that similarly proposed alternative approaches to power.     

Is that all there is? The concept of care and the dialectic of critique

Recognition of the usefulness of critical social analysis for gerontology has been increasing just as a range of new problems, ranging from globalization to the anti-aging movement, are posing fresh questions about ideology, legitimation and inequality for the study of aging. Such problems and questions represent the negative moment of critique in the theory–practice dialectic. As is generally true of critical theory, in critical gerontology it is rare to find research that reflects a positive movement toward emancipatory change. Yet gerontology is one of the fields that offers special opportunities for critiquing the status quo of aging and elders in society, envisioning new possibilities for aging and developing practices that produce positive change. This paper describes the movement of our own thinking and work, away from a primary focus on analysis and critique and toward an embrace of the possibilities of generating and sustaining change in organizational care settings. We argue that principles of critical developmental and social theory can be used to reframe the concept of care, and we describe briefly how the methodology of action research can be applied in efforts to create new opportunities and possibilities in the everyday experience of elders in long-term care. In our work, we are learning how a constructive theory–practice dialectic can be initiated when critical principles are applied to a practical and urgent domain — the domain of interpersonal care within long-term care institutions for elders.     

Not ‘one of us’: understanding how non-engaged youth feel about politics and political leadership

The modern election campaign is a well-oiled machine. Campaigns are won by the smallest of margins. Strategists provide incentives for specific market segments, and potential voters are identified well before the writ is dropped. However, few questions are asked in those same war rooms when certain groups stay home – namely young people. Young people are largely ignored at election time, and in turn, those under 30 ignore elections. Drawing on 20 focus groups conducted in Canada in 2014, this paper compares politically engaged and less engaged communities of young people to learn how they feel about politics and political leaders. This effort builds a better understanding of why some communities of young people are less interested and engaged in politics which is vital to our understanding of turnout decline among youth, as it is these communities of young people who have almost entirely tuned out of political affairs.     

Kuznets’s Inverted U-Curve Hypothesis: The Rise,Demise, and Continued Relevance of a Socioeconomic Law

This paper provides a historical analysis of the changing significance of the most influential statement ever made on inequality and development—Simon Kuznets’s “inverted U-curve hypothesis.” The shifting interpretations and appropriations of the hypothesis over time—from its status as a speculative supposition in 1955, to its rise and fall as a reified socioeconomic law, to its contested standing in the social sciences today—demonstrate how Kuznets’s arguments, originally advanced under more limited conditions, became transformed into overarching theoretical, empirical, and political constructions. This history suggests that even empirically grounded and testable social science models are contingent on the broader social and political contexts in which they are produced and negotiated.     

Religious Culture and Political Action

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion and democratic life by a small group of social movement scholars trained also in the sociology of religion. In examining religion's democratic impact, an explicitly cultural analysis inspired by the new approach to political culture developed by historical sociologists and cultural analysts of democracy is used to show the power of this approach and to provide a fuller theoretical account of how cultural dynamics shape political outcomes. The article examines religious institutions as generators of religious culture, presents a theoretical model of how religious cultural elements are incorporated into social movements and so shape their internal political cultures, and discusses how this in turn shapes their impact in the public realm. This model is then applied to a key site of democratic struggle: four efforts to promote social justice among low-income urban residents of the United States, including the most widespread such effort—faith-based community organizing.     

Intertextual evaluation, conflicting evaluative criteria, and the controversy over native American burial remains

A persisting difficulty in evaluation research is the dilemma posed by multiple and conflicting, yet equally valid, criteria with which to evaluate public policies. Which criterion do you choose—efficiency, equity, political feasibility, cost-effectiveness, or something else? One way out of the dilemma is intertextual evaluation. Based on the work of semiotician and post-structuralist Michael Riffaterre, the key is to search for the intertext (a metacriterion) that renders the multiple criteria no longer conflicting for the evaluation in question. A case study illustrates how intertextual evaluation works and how it differs from conventional evaluation.     

The socioeconomic institutions of organizing: Origin, emergence, and reproduction

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of a theory of (organizing) institutions primarily relevant for capitalistic market Economics, a theory which significantly improves our general ability to describe, explain and predict organized or organizational action. Six basic institutions—or infrastructures for human (interaction (the market, the corporation, the (social) movement, the association, the circle and the clan)—are deduced, defined and also finally put together in the form of a repertoire of ideal types. Moreover, two meta-institutions (the state, the anarchy) are added to this initial repertoire of six institutions to allow for the introduction of what could be regarded—at least from some premises—as a more general (i.e., societal) level.     

Exit or Voice? The Recent Drivers of Kosovar Out‐migration

A remarkable out‐migration from Kosovo occurred after the winter 2014/15, raising urgent questions about its underlying drivers and implications for both Kosovo and the destination countries. This article aims at providing a better understanding of key migration triggers and some particularities of the phenomenon. We link our empirically found migration drivers to Hirschman's ( 1970 ) famous exit, voice or loyalty scheme by asking in how far the exit must be understood as the explicit alternative to voicing dissatisfaction with the current situation in the country. According to our results, the recent Kosovar out‐migration is a clear response to weak governance and thus goes beyond the widespread ‘migration‐cum‐remittances’ livelihood practice. In this sense it could be interpreted as a revolt against the political system. With view to policy implications for destination countries, we point at legal travel and migration opportunities as the better solution to channel both voice and exit.     

Emotions in context: Revolutionary accelerators,hope, moral outrage,and other emotions in the making of Nicaragua's revolution

Building on the social movement/revolutions and recent social movement emotions literature and using interviews and oral history from revolutionary Nicaragua, I make a case for recognizing the significance of emotions when studying revolutions. The essay aims for a contextual understanding of the role of emotions in the making of revolution during the insurrectionary period in Nicaragua. These are examined from the vantage point of revolutionary accelerators the conflictual event-contexts from which revolutionary actors emerge. Through the historical analysis of testimonies associated with a number of politically significant events that changed the course of political dynamics in 1970s Nicaragua, the piece illustrates: (1) how events function as generators of revolutionary action and (2) how event-related emotions such as anger and fear, but primarily moral outrage and hope, contribute to a transformation in consciousness that leads potential participants to define their circumstances as needing their revolutionary involvement. It also attempts to demonstrate how the latter two emotions—moral outrage and hope—are dominant under different event-contexts. Lastly, the relationships between these emotions and how these are connected to revolutionary accelerators are similarly explored.     

Toward a Sociology of the Person

This paper proposes a sociology of the person that focuses upon the socially defined, publicly visible beings of intersubjective experience. I argue that the sociology of the person proposed by Durkheim and Mauss is more accurately described as a sociology of institutions of the person and neglects both folk or ethnopsychologies of personhood and the interactional production of persons. I draw upon the work of Goffman to develop a sociology of the person concerned with means, processes, and relations of person production. I also propose that the work of Goffman, Foucault, and others provides insights into the contemporary technology of person production and into how its control and use affects relations of person production. I conclude with a brief outline of the theoretical connections among institutions of the person, folk psychologies, the social constitution of the person, and the prospect of a distinctively sociological psychology.     

The airplane passenger: Protection of self in an encapsulated group

Data from participant observation and unstructured interviews demonstrate that being a passenger on commercial airplanes leads to membership in an “encapsulated group.” Encapsulated groups are collectivities of individuals who voluntarily or involuntarily share physical but not necessarily social closeness for the purpose of attaining some goal or reaching some destination. Encapsulated groups flow through “people pipelines,” a network of social and physical channels for processing human beings in contemporary urban society, especially in bureaucratic organizations. The role of airplane passenger is analyzed to demonstrate how individuals defend self-integrity in the encapsulated group. The passenger enactment process and the encapsulated group are shown to manifest several characteristics of total institutions (Goffman, 1961a). The author expresses appreciation to Ralph Turner, John Lofland, John Irwin, Erving Goffman, Garry Shirts, Charles Bonjean, James McKie, Irwin Lieb, Susan Zurcher, Marianne Hopper, Michael Wood, Mary Elizabeth Bender and Carolyn Lindsey for their helpful observations and comments. The preparation of this paper was facilitated by a small grant from The University of Texas Research Institute.     

Political considerations of studying tax compliance

Given the recent interest of the Internal Revenue Service in having academic social scientists do research on the problem of tax noncompliance, it is important to consider the political and administrative context in which such research would occur. While the IRS offers a tremendous opportunity in the form of data and expertise, its tax enforcement mission and political environment play an important role in shaping the research agenda. Specifically, the academic social scientists, wishing to avail themselves of the opportunity, must be able to demonstrate the practical application of their research, something that researchers of the so-called “underground economy” did not do. Moreover, the research must not perpetuate the notion that the ability or efficiency of the IRS to enforce the tax laws is being widely eroded. The criminal deterrence doctrine is an area of basic research having particular interest to the IRS. There is a discussion of how research on the deterrence of tax crime might develop. He has done research for the IRS and presently is studying the untaxed economy.     

What’s Wrong with Us? Sexual Misconduct and the Discipline of Political Science

ABSTRACT

Sexual misconduct matters not only when it is perpetuated by political actors in political institutions. It matters wherever it happens and whomever it happens to, because it is, at its base, political. Politics is fundamentally about power: who gets what, when, and how. As political scientists it should be at the heart of what we study, but it isn’t. Our discipline creates artificial (and somewhat arbitrary) boundaries about which studies of politics count as meaningful research and which do not. We discourage research that explores more expansive notions of how politics is practiced in broader society. As academics we have the luxury of speaking out. I argue here that political scientists ought to embrace an expansive definition of politics to address the real questions of power, its abuse in our society and in our profession.