Symbolic Interaction and Transformation of Class Structure: The Case of China

So far, research on the shaping and change of class stratification has remained a territory for Marxist and Weberian scholars and, to a lesser degree, for functionalist scholars. The outcome in the explanatory domain is the production of a tremendous amount of knowledge concerning the relevance of structural conditions and power. Unfortunately, however, the significance of meaning as an independent explanatory variable has been neglected. This article attempts to tackle the neglected dimension empirically, using a revised macro‐level symbolic interactionist approach. Its objectives are twofold: to reveal the crucial impact of meaning on the radical change of class structure in the context of China's economic reform and to demonstrate the potential of symbolic interactionism for studying macro‐level sociological phenomena such as class stratification.     

The Interaction of Grievances and Structures in Social Movement Analysis: The Case of JUST*

Drawing upon insights from the social movement literature as well as leadership experience in a successful social movement organization, this paper suggests aspects of a framework for integrating traditional and contemporary approaches. The case history of JUST (Johnstowners United to Stop anoiuci Tragedy) is used to illustrate the interaction of grievances and structures in the career of a social movement organization. In addition to helping fill a lacuna in the literature on the internal dynamics of such organizations, this analysis also demonstrates the importance of the nature of the grievance as well as the target group's structural entrenchment. The paper focuses upon a relatively anomalous case for U.S. social movement organizations: an SMO which was successful despite displacement goals. The final section of the paper includes a summary diagram of the factors involved in JUSTs successful protest effort as well as broader generalizations suggesting the conditions under which grievances or infrastructures are more salient in explaining social movement phenomena.     

The Therapist's Imagination of Self in Relation to Clients: Beginning Ideas on the Flexibility of Empathic Imagination

The therapist's capacity to imagine is one specific part of the endeavour of empathy which lies at the heart of the processes of the therapeutic relationship. This article offers beginning ideas about the significance of therapist's imagination of self in relation to her/his clients in the task of trying to understand their experience. In seeking to ‘understand’ the experience of others, the therapist is able to move between an imagination of sameness/identification with the client/s, and an imagination of difference/‘foreignness’. The family therapy orientation of curiosity and ‘not‐knowing’ relies on the imagination of self as different to our clients; more traditional understandings of empathic connection rely more heavily on the imagination of sameness/identification with clients. This article argues that flexibility in the therapist's use of self in moving between these positions allows an expanded capacity for therapeutic connectedness. These ideas have special valence in the practice territories of impasse and intercultural therapy.     

The Collaboration as Empowerment Claim: The Case of Visual Social Research

This article uses the case of visually based collaborative social science research to explore the problem of inequality between researchers and research subjects in social science research. This dilemma is ever present for social scientists researching topics where the research subject represents a group experiencing social exclusion. The paper uses the claim of those social scientists that argue that collaboration between researchers and research subjects can diminish the inequality problem by empowering research subjects. Through this interrogation of the “collaboration as empowerment claim,” as an ideal type construction the paper argues that (i) it pays insufficient attention to the knowledge frameworks and incentive structures around which research projects are carried out and disseminated, (ii) it does not interrogate the fact that the claim of empowerment as outcome is made by those in the researcher role, and (iii) it does not explicitly document the research subject's own assessment of a collaboration/empowerment link. The paper moves beyond the insights drawn from the visual case to point to their implications for other areas in which collaboration research is claimed as a means to empower research subjects and by implication to diminish researcher/research subject inequalities.     

The Power of Imagination in Transnational Mobilities

At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the “global South” are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement.     

Women as Workers and as Carers under Communism and After: The Case of Bulgaria

This paper reviews the work-family policy of Bulgaria before and after the transition. Before the transition the family policy was one of earner–carer where women were given support to combine work-force participation with childcare and men were at least encouraged to help with carework. After the transition women's access to help with carework became so limited that the family policy, by default, became one of dual earner, but with extremely high levels of unemployment. A survey of 349 women by the Varna Employment Office indicates how devastating the loss of employment was during the transition. Today policies that support family caregiving still exist on paper but are not enforced. This is due, in part, to the lack of organized broad-based women's groups. Such organizations would be necessary for women to effectively claim the rights and entitlements to caregiving support. But there is continuing pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others to eliminate any state support for caregiving.     

The Interaction of Structural Variables and Discretion in Individual Outcomes: The Case of Length of Stay for Mental Patients

There is a long history or debate concerning the relative effects of external variables and individual discretion on individual outcomes. Yet, few attempts have been made to specify their cumulative effects on individual outcomes. Using length of stay in mental hospitals as our outcome measure, and type of commitment as our discretion measure, results from regression analyses indicate that discretionary and external variables (i.e., positions in the social structure) interact. Under conditions of low discretion, status resources have much stronger effects on length of stay than they do under conditions of high discretion. We conclude that external factors and discretionary variables can and should be included in the analysis of social action.     

Imagining The Sociological Imagination: the biographical context of a sociological classic

Charles Wright Mills's arguments in The Sociological Imagination are very popular and this paper focuses on the biographical context in which his programmatic statements were occasioned. This breaks new ground by locating The Sociological Imagination and earlier programmatic statements in the professional and personal travails that motivated them. This approach is adopted in order to display the intersection between biography and sociology in Mills's life and career, a feature that he made a central part of sociology's promise. The paper utilizes this approach to reflect on the reasons why The Sociological Imagination became so popular and was able to transcend Mills's general unpopularity at the time of his death; and as part of the explanation of why the dismissal of the book on its publication contrasts with the contemporary view, enabling it to transpose successfully to a time significantly different than at its writing.     

Adult Adoptees as Partners and Parents: The Joint Task of Revisiting the Adoption History

Adoption is unanimously considered a lifelong process, but adulthood and parenthood are life cycle stages that up to now have been explored only marginally. The principal aim of the present study is twofold: first, to analyze whether and how parenthood might lead the adoptee and his/her partner to reinterpret the adoption history and, second, to verify whether the attitudes of the two partners concerning adoption are similar or complementary. Thirty-four couples consisting of one adopted and one non-adopted partner, now parents, were interviewed and a graphic instrument, the Double Moon Test, was administered. Results revealed that most couples showed a shared attitude in valorizing both the origin background and the adoptive family. However, in a number of cases a divergent position emerged, highlighting the crucial role of the non-adopted partner in encouraging the adoptee to revisit his/her adoption history. Overall, the practical relevance of the research findings is discussed and future direction of research are suggested.     

Gender Equality as Institutional Work: The Case of the Church of Sweden

Institutional theory predicts that organizations respond to external changes in their environment to be able to safeguard their long‐term viability. One of the most significant institutional changes in the last century has been the entry of women into both labour markets and professions; however, an extensive literature reports that gender inequality and various forms of sexism still structure and influence the everyday work of organizations. Drawing on the recent literature on institutional work, the article reports on a study of how the Church of Sweden has managed to relatively successfully institutionalize female ministers as legitimate and widely respected members of the professional category of ministers ordained by the Church. Female ministers believe they are, by and large, respected in the Church, but suggest that gender remains an issue as women are at times expected to embody certain interests and have to answer some questions that their male colleagues may have been spared. The findings describe institutional work as an ongoing process with no fixed end‐point, stressing agency as the distributed and collective capacity to question established beliefs and norms.     

Legitimacy as Property and Process: The Case of an Irish LGBT Organization

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study provides insight into the changing normative judgements of civil society organizations over time through the...     

The Routinization of Social Movement Organizations: China as a Deviant Case*

This paper has two purposes: (1) to show how previous work in complex organizations, social movements and political development converges to predict routinization of successful social movement organizations, and (2) to explore the Chinese experiment in organization as a deviant case for the “law” of routinization. First, theories from three substantive areas are shown to predict routinization of social movement organizations. Next, an alternative model of organization, the Maoist model, is presented. Then, recent social history of China is examined to see if the model has been implemented. Lastly, several generalizations about the routinization process are drawn from the Chinese case.     

The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity

The purpose of this article is to document the collective nature of gender performance and sexual pursuit, activities typically associated with individual rather than group behavior. Drawing on narrative accounts, I analyze how young heterosexual male students employ the power of collective rituals of homosociality to perform sexual competence and masculine identity by “girl hunting” in the context of urban nightlife. These rituals are designed to reinforce dominant sexual myths and expectations of masculine behavior, boost confidence in one's performance of masculinity and heterosexual power, and assist in the performance of masculinity in the presence of women. This analysis illustrates how contemporary courtship rituals operate as collective strategies of impression management that men perform not only for women but for other men. In doing so, interaction rituals associated with the girl hunt reproduce structures of inequality within as well as across the socially constructed gender divide between women and men.     

居住分异与社会分层的相互作用研究——以上海为例

通过对上海开埠以来居住空间的发展变迁与居住空间的获取机制进行梳理,提出居住空间的获取中存在准入机制、基本收获与附加收获等相互作用的因素,说明居住空间分异一直是社会分层情况的体现,而在今天,居住分异反过来加深了社会的分层,原因在于准入机制与附加收获之间形成了封闭的联系,即主要的准入机制包括支付能力与户籍所有,都直接或间接受到作为附加收获的教育资源的获取的影响,因此未来的城市规划与城市政策制定的核心问题之一在于在教育资源较为匮乏的情况下保障个人平等获取教育资源的权利。     

Symbolic Interaction as Music: The Esthetic Constitution of Meaning,Self, and Society

Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another metaphor: life as music. Viewing selfhood and symbolic interaction as music sensitizes us to observe and understand an important but much too neglected dimension of social life: the esthetic. Drawing from the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the authors argue that the realm of the esthetic should not be confined to museums and art galleries, for the intentional perception of beauty constitutes the very foundation of individuals' embodied experiences of their lifeworlds. From within our metaphor of life as music we conceptualize beauty as the diverse rhythms, melodies, and harmonies contributing to the constitution of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity.