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.     

Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era

The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face‐to‐face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text‐based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook‐based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I identify three key interaction conditions: fluidity between digital and physical, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks. I argue that social actors accomplish the ideal‐authentic balance through self‐triangulation, presenting a coherent image in multiple arenas and through multiple media. I differentiate between two degrees of triangulation: networked logic and preemptive action.     

The Importance of “Empty Gestures” in Recovery: Being Human Together

What do clients/patients want or value from their encounters with healthcare providers? Based on ethnographic research conducted with individuals suffering from drug addiction and mental health issues, this article argues that clients/patients treasure “everyday” or “human” interaction with medical staff. Everydayness is accomplished through three generic social processes: **co‐silence, inclusion in back‐stage activity, and physical dramatizations of authenticity. These processes and other ordinary interactional strategies for “being human together” should be seen as vital tools for recovery.     

School Bullying as a Collective Action: Stigma Processes and Identity Struggling

The aim of this study was to investigate the collective action of bullying and its stigma processes and influences on identities. In accordance with interactionism, identity is a social process, constructed and reconstructed in everyday social interactions. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in four school classes, investigating six bullying cases. Grounded theory methods were used to explore and analyse data. Co‐constructing differentness was found to be a core process in bullying. Bullying often appeared to function like a self‐serving and socially inclusive ritual in which the bullies co‐constructed the ‘normal us’. Loss of belonging, self‐deprecation and identity struggling followed closely upon the sense of becoming socially discredited. Victims were trapped in the collective action. The findings highlight the significance of addressing peer cultures and the social psychology of everyday school life in anti‐bullying policies and practices.     

Institutional Bases of Identity Construction and Reproduction: The Case of Underground Coal Mining

In this article I use institutional theory to illustrate the process of identity formation and reproduction in the context of a male‐dominated work environment. Based on a case study of an underground colliery in Nova Scotia, Canada, I will illustrate the functioning of powerful institutions in two distinct senses. First, social obligations rooted in a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1989) dictated appropriate behaviours for miners in their roles as underground miners and patriarchs. Second, internalized understandings of reality rooted in a ‘logic of orthodoxy’ (Scott, 1995) formed a set of constitutive rules to which miners adhered because it was inconceivable to do otherwise. I use a microinstitutional perspective (Zucker, 1991) that highlights the constraints embedded in many work contexts that serve to tacitly yet powerfully regularize behaviours in problematic ways. Social and historical conditions are therefore incorporated into this analysis as constitutive forces that are a product of human action. This manner of theorizing gender is consistent with Connell’s (1987) ‘theory of practice’ that seeks to understand social structure by focusing on what people actually do, the way human agency shapes history, and how practice itself is necessary for institutions to maintain their hegemony and resist change.     

The Interactive Relationship Between Class Identity and the College Experience: The Case of Lower Income Students

To probe the role that college context plays in influencing the class-based aspects of identity for lower income students, we interviewed 30 lower income students, 15 from an elite college and 15 from a state college. Significant disparities of wealth between students at the elite college heightened awareness of class, and led to feelings of intimidation, discomfort, inadequacy, deficiency, exclusion, and powerlessness among lower income students, feelings that were less prevalent among state college students. Students at both colleges acquired new forms of cultural capital and coped with class-based discontinuities between who they were before college and who they were becoming, but these issues became heightened for the elite college students.     

The Interface of Racial Identity Development with Identity Complexity in Clinical Social Work Student Practitioners

This paper examines the influence that one's racial identity development plays in the overall professional identity development of clinical social work student practitioners. The author discusses race, as a construct, in a post-modern world. Utilizing Saari's (1993, 2000) discussion of identity complexity, the paper demonstrates how the ability to dialogue about issues of race, in a complex and multi-faceted way, is reflective of evolution in one's racial identity development. To further one's identity development, the importance of a dialogical mode of interaction (Bahktin, 1986, 1993) is emphasized.     

Symbolic Violence and Collective Identity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Ethics of Resistance

Social movement researchers have only recently begun to make use of the rich explanatory leverage offered by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. The normative implications of his framework remain almost entirely undeveloped. This paper seeks to redress these shortcomings by applying central concepts from Bourdieu's work—symbolic violence and his realist philosophy of science—to social movement analysis. Using North American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer collective identities to illustrate this application, the paper advocates shifting analysis of collective identities from models based on negotiation to one based on domination and advocates treatment of social movement organizations as sites of justice amenable to normative evaluation and critique.     

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.     

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 Politics and Poetics of Spaces and Places: Mapping the Multiple Geographies of Identity in a Cultural Posthuman Era

As transcendent technologies, information communication technologies (ICTs) exist beyond the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as race, gender, and class, as well as operating outside traditional binary oppositions such as good/bad, love/hate, and rational/irrational. While a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains a necessary prerequisite of interaction with virtual systems, a vast collection of technological applications now exhibit some degree of agency as they interact with humans and their environment. This development has enormous consequences for human life, human flourishing, and social organisation, raising significant ethical concerns relevant to public and policy debates. It is, therefore, pertinent to explore key epistemological questions relating to the radical and accelerated remapping of the limits of what it now means to be human. While this article does not purport to offer a pragmatic solution, it constitutes an interdisciplinary conceptual platform from which to consider the nature of the evolving human-nonhuman-machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity, civilisation, and other forms of social organisation in the modern hypermediated world. It is suggested that, by reflecting on the various representations of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology from the perspective of the arts and humanities, it may be possible to isolate those important questions which relate to subjectivity, ethics, community, and social transformation in order to prepare the groundwork for a comprehensive and critical theory of technology.     

城市化中失地农民空间感知与身份认同——以西安城乡结合部被动失地农民为例

以西安4个代表性的城乡结合部为个案,透视城市化进程失地农民的空间感知与身份认同的关系,发现失地农民身份认同危机主要是城乡结合部空间失序所导致的,重构失地农民的身份认同,关键在于调整城乡结合部的社会空间秩序。     

The Role of Criminal Social Identity in the Relationship between Criminal Friends and Criminal Thinking Style within a Sample of Recidivistic Prisoners

Previous research suggests a direct relationship between criminal friends and criminal thinking style; however, social identity theory proposes that identity mediates the impact of social group members on development of thinking styles. This research project is the first attempt to empirically test the mediating role of criminal social identity in the development of criminal thinking styles within a recidivistic prison sample (N = 312). The structural equation model of criminal thinking style presented and tested in this study supports the central predictions of social identity theory, with findings demonstrating an indirect effect of antisocial friend associations on criminal thinking through in-group affect and in-group ties with criminal in-group members that reflect two of three dimensions of the measure of criminal social identity applied in the current study. Further implications in relation to theory and previous studies are discussed.     

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.     

Integrating Religious and Sexual Identities: The Case of Religious Homosexual Men in Singapore

Abstract

The sexual and religious ecosystem in Singapore represents an intricate interplay of factors that religious homosexuals navigate to attain a well-adjusted personal identity. A qualitative research project was conducted to understand how Christian and Muslim homosexual men in Singapore integrate their religious and sexual identities. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine religious homosexuals to elicit responses on their dual-identity experience, and coping strategies. Narrative analysis revealed three themes (and a number of subthemes): (1) Intrapersonal factors (a personal journey, knowledge seeking, reinterpreting belief system, redemption by good deeds, and love prevails over sin), (2) Interpersonal factors (segregating social circles, involvement in the gay community, role models, and social support), and (3) Sociopolitical factors (state and societal tolerance of homosexuals, and homosexual events). Interestingly, the participants assigned positive attributes to being both religious and homosexual, and reported that embodying both identities was enriching than if they had possessed just one of the two identities. This suggests that integrating positive psychological frameworks (e.g., stress-related growth) to existing ones may provide a more holistic account of identity integration among religious homosexuals.     

The Liminal Effects of Social Movements: Red Guards and the Transformation of Identity

Social movements transform participants' identities. Why they do so is an unresolved puzzle. I argue that for participants, social movements are liminal phenomena characterized by varying degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. As such, the transformative power of social movements depends on their degree of liminality. Those that approximate most to the pure type of the liminal offer to the participants high degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. They transform identities most powerfully. In the 1960s, China's Red Guards experienced a profoundly liminal movement. As a result, an age-cohort that was coming of age began to recreate itself. The personal transformations of the Red Guards would persistently bear on Chinese politics and society up to the 1989 Chinese student movement.     

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.     

The importance of group identity processes in involvement in social movement organizations: the case of Attac France and Germany

This research evaluates the relative and absolute importance of group identity processes in an individual's decision to become and remain active in a social movement organization (SMO). Mainly through interview research with the members of Attac Germany and France, I discover that the presence of a comfortable and communicative group atmosphere is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for movement activity. Individuals are primarily involved in SMOs because they want to change policy and public opinion or to give meaning to their lives. However, this does not imply that the activists devalue communal bonds and a welcoming group atmosphere. Rather, they take both as a prerequisite for engagement. Yet, rifts and atmospheric disruptions can be a sufficient cause for which people leave an organization. In particular, those members who seek policy change are quick to desert a group once it is shattered by internal disharmony.     

Sustaining and Strengthening a Macro Identity: The Association of Macro Practice Social Work

Macro practice focuses on community-level interventions, such as management, organizing, research, and policy advocacy. Despite social work's deep roots in this type of work, macro practice and macro practitioners often practice without support or connections with other macro practitioners, and are underrepresented in the profession. In 2006, a group of social workers, including academics and practitioners, formed the Association of Macro Practice Social Work (AMPSW). AMPSW works to strengthen the professional identity of macro practitioners, elevate the status of macro social workers, and address common concerns within the social work profession.     

Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.