Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

Considering Alternate Sources of Role Identity: Childless Parents and Their Animal “Kids”

Identity theory posits that role identity is negotiated between human social actors and is based in broader cultural expectations about how particular statuses should be performed. I argue that the formation of role identity in actors can also occur in relationship to nonhuman actors, if they are perceived as minded. Depending on context and human perception, identity can be formed as a result of interaction and developing “theory of mind” with nonhuman animals, directly implicating the animal. Using in‐depth interviews of childless and childfree companion animal owners, I demonstrate the existence of a parent identity in childless participants that would not otherwise be present were it not for interaction with the animal “child.” This identity is confirmed in participant narratives describing substantial behavioral output aligned with the U.S. cultural ideal of “parent.” Likewise, I find that significant others provide external support for the enactment of this role identity, allowing participants to verify self‐in‐situation. Overall, my analysis emphasizes the importance of considering nonhuman sources as occupying counterstatus positions in the formation of role identity while highlighting how these relationships affect interaction in the childfree and childless home, thus expanding scholarly understanding about both identity formation and emerging family types.     

Not all luck is created equal: Sources of income inequality and willingness to redistribute

Despite steadily rising inequality in the US over the last few decades, demand for increasing tax rates and redistribution has not increased. A growing literature argues that one reason for this is that people might perceive inequality to be fair. This literature has documented that Americans tend to perceive economic inequality stemming from merit as being fair and inequality stemming from luck as unfair. However, “lucky breaks” in the real world do not necessarily come from a lottery or random chance but from the actions of the government favoring a “lucky” few. People might be more willing to redistribute if it compensates those negatively affected by government action. Using an online experiment we show that luck stemming from the action of a government-like actor influences individuals’ desire to redistribute earnings making them more likely to favor redistribution than in instances where inequality is caused by merit or by random luck.     

The lesbian dyad

Little is known regarding how respondents interpret terms that are commonly used in sexual behavior surveys. The present study assessed the impact of four factors on respondents’ judgments of whether the hypothetical actors “Jim” and “Susie “ would consider a particular behavior that they had engaged in to be “sex.” The four factors were respondent's gender, actor's gender, type of act (vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse), and who achieved orgasm (neither, Jim only, Susie only, or both). Two hundred twenty‐three undergraduates (22.2 ± 2.2 years; 65% female) were asked to read 16 scenarios featuring Jim and Susie and to judge whether each actor would consider the described behavior to be sex. Results indicated that vaginal and anal intercourse were considered sex under most circumstances. Whether oral intercourse was labeled as sex depended on the gender and viewpoint of the actor, and whether orgasm occurred. Findings suggest that items in sexual behavior surveys need to be clearly delineated to avoid subjective interpretations by respondents.     

The primacy of mediated action in sociocultural studies

After a brief overview of the reasons for using “sociocultural,” as opposed to “cultural‐historical,” “sociohistorical,” or some other term, it is argued that an adequate account of the agenda for sociocultural research must be grounded in the notion of “mediated action.” Drawing on the writings of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others it is argued that mediated action must be understood as involving an irreducible tension between the mediational means provided by the sociocultural setting, on the one hand, and the unique, contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions, on the other. In this view, any attempt to reduce the basic unit of analysis of mediated action to the mediational means or to the individual in isolation is misguided. It is suggested that by using mediated action as a unit of analysis the human sciences will be in a better position to address some of today's most pressing social issues.     

Structural holes and bridging in two-mode networks

Social networks are often structured in such a way that there are gaps, or “structural holes,” between regions. Some actors are in the position to bridge or span these gaps, giving rise to individual advantages relating to brokerage, gatekeeping, access to non-redundant contacts, and control over network flows. The most widely used measures of a given actor’s bridging potential gauge the extent to which that actor is directly connected to others who are otherwise not well connected to each other. Unfortunately, the measures that have been developed to identify structural holes cannot be adapted directly to two-mode networks, like individual-to-organization networks. In two-mode networks, direct contacts cannot be directly connected to each other by definition, making the calculation of redundancy, effective size, and constraint impossible with conventional one-mode methods. We therefore describe a new framework for the measurement of bridging in two-mode networks that hinges on the mathematical concept of the intersection of sets. An actor in a given node class (“ego”) has bridging potential to the extent that s/he is connected to actors in the opposite node class that have unique profiles of connections to actors in ego’s own node class. We review the relevant literature pertaining to structural holes in two-mode networks, and we compare our primary bridging measure (effective size) to measures of bridging that result when using one-mode projections of two-mode data. We demonstrate the results of applying our approach to empirical data on the organizational affiliations of elites in a large U.S. city.     

Migrant encounters with neo-colonial masculinity: producing European sovereignty through emotions

The EU/European political community’s reaction to irregular migrants is ambivalent. On the one hand, migrants are produced as people to be pitied, rescued, and saved. On the other hand, they are feared, despised, and left to die. The article explores this ambivalence from a gender perspective and asks how sovereign masculinities are produced through emotional performances in the politics of migration control and management. It will be argued that emotions such as fear, disgust, and compassion are performed in the biopolitical security governance of irregular migration by producing a “socially abject” life as its object. This is a life that is to be killed, despised, and saved. Encounters between the irregular migrant and a European border security actor constitute a neo-colonial masculinity. During the moment of the encounter with the other’s life, sovereignty is produced through emotional performances of border security actors. The discussion concludes with illustrations of how racialized bodies and lives are produced as objects of fear, disgust, and compassion through European neo-colonial masculinity. The article speaks to the debates in the literature on masculinities in global politics, emotions and politics, and critical border studies.     

Coordinated Action in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft

In tandem with the technological advancement of immersive virtual environments, digital games have evolved into complex social worlds where people play collaboratively to achieve individual‐ and group‐oriented goals. The massively multiplayer online games genre has received international attention for the large numbers of users that commit a significant amount of time and effort to online play. Play styles within such game worlds are diverse, but “raiding” is generally considered among gamers and scholars alike to be the most challenging form of collaborative play. Like other forms of social activity, raiding is predicated on players' abilities to successfully coordinate individual lines of action. Yet the vast majority of raiders are not physically copresent during their collaborative efforts. Using Couch's theory of coordinated action as an interpretive frame, we explore the computer‐mediated process of raiding in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft by analyzing ethnographic data and audio/visual recordings of gameplay. Our study expands Couch's theory of coordinated action in two ways. First, we demonstrate how individuals and groups simultaneously engage in multiple forms of coordinated activity (e.g., conflict and cooperation). Second, we reveal two semiotic layers of coordinated action—the “subject‐subject” (i.e., intersubjective) layer that is facilitated through the game's user interface, and the “subject‐object” layer that comprises players' interactions with the user interface itself. Our study thus considers the potential of Couch's theory for the study of computer‐mediated communication and nonhumans in interaction.     

Evaluating heterogeneous brokerage: New conceptual and methodological approaches and their application to multi-level environmental governance networks

We present two new approaches for assessing the relative contributions of different types of actors to heterogeneous brokerage in networks. These approaches distinguish between the tendency of certain types of actors to (1) mediate between dissimilar actors (heterogeneous brokerage “activity”), and (2) be the sole mediators between dissimilar actors (“exclusivity”). We present methods for implementing these approaches, using baseline models of tie formation and node removal, respectively. To illustrate the value of both approaches, independently and in combination, we apply them to evaluate horizontal and vertical heterogeneous brokerage in two environmental governance networks. Our analysis reveals certain types of actors with high heterogeneous brokerage activity but low exclusivity (and vice versa), which has important implications for governance processes and outcomes. Likewise, results show many similarities across the evaluated networks, but also some notable differences, suggesting that the incentives and constraints for heterogeneous brokerage vary not only by actor type, but also by network-level contextual differences.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

Nonviolent Action from a Social-psychological Perspective*

A social-psychological perspective, used in the analysis of three cases of nonviolent direct action, combines the “exchange theory” of Homans and the two and three dimensional approaches for the analysis of interpersonal behavior suggested by Leary and Bales. The three dimensions are: dominance-submission, positive-negative, and goal, oriented-deviant. Once the behavior of a nonviolent actor has been identified in this three dimensional space, the expected behavior of his opponent can be predicted.     

Die Anderen als sozialer Kontext. Zur Bedeutung strategischer Interaktion

An action is defined as “strategic” when the consequences of ego’s action depend on the action of alter. Situations of strategic interaction are numerous in daily life, business, and politics. Pioneers like Erving Goffman or Raymond Boudon recognized the importance of strategic interaction in sociological analysis long ago. Other peoples’ opportunities of actions form ego’s strategic context. The dynamics of the impact of the strategic context on ego’s action can be modeled and analyzed by means of game theory. We will discuss three examples of strategic interaction models: “Diffusion of responsibility”, Boudon’s “logic of relative frustration”, and the problem of social exchange and trust. We demonstrate the effects of the strategic context on the opportunities and beliefs of actors. In contrast to non-strategic rational choice theory, beliefs and opportunities are not assumed as exogenous. The analysis of the strategic context contributes to a better understanding of the micro-level effects and the macro-level implications. However, the strict rationality requirements of game models are often violated. In these situations, evolutionary models based on principles of learning and adaptions are more adequate than models based on assumptions of strict rationality.     

The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction,coupling, and change reconsidered

This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces—both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a meso-approach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory.

     

Do 8‐Month‐Old Infants Consider Situational Constraints When Interpreting Others’ Gaze as Goal‐Directed Action?

Some actions of agents are ambiguous in terms of goal‐directedness to young infants. If given reasons why an agent performed these ambiguous actions, would infants then be able to perceive the actions as goal‐directed? Prior results show that infants younger than 12 months can not encode the relationship between a human agent’s looking behavior and the target of her gaze as goal‐directed. In the present experiments, 8‐month‐olds responded in ways suggesting that they interpreted an agent’s action of looking at object‐A as opposed to object‐B as evidence for her goal directed toward object‐A, if her looking action was rational given certain situational constraints: a barrier separated her from the objects or her hands were occupied. Therefore, the infants seem to consider situational constraints when attributing goals to agents’ otherwise ambiguous actions; they seem to realize that within such constraints, these actions are efficient ways for agents to achieve goals.     

Emergent Objects,Developing Practices: Human‐Nonhuman Interactions in a Reiki Training

Over the last three decades, sociologists have expanded the scope of sociological analysis to include nonhuman objects. We build on these works to address the role of nonhuman, nonphysical objects in social interaction. Through participant observation at a Reiki training course, we examine how students learned to identify, experience, and meaningfully interact with Reiki energy, a nonhuman, nonphysical object. We show how Reiki energy emerged as a significant interactant through the following processes: participants in the class historicized Reiki; they defined the capacities and consequences of Reiki; and they learned to detect Reiki energy's apparent presence in their bodies. We then show how Reiki energy resisted the initial definitions and expectations of it, leading participants to redefine the energy's qualities and develop new practices to accommodate its emerging capacities. These findings support theoretical claims about humans' ability to “do mind” for nonhuman objects and the temporally emergent qualities of material agency.     

Do face-to-face interactions support 6-month-olds' understanding of the communicative function of speech?

Infants by 6 months recognize that speech communicates information between third parties. We investigated whether 6-month-olds always expect speech to communicate or whether they also consider social features of communication, like how interlocutors engage with one another. A small sample of infants watched an actor (the Speaker) choose one of two objects to play with (the target). When the Speaker could no longer reach her target object, she turned to a new actor (the Listener) and said a nonsense word. During speech, the actors were either face-to-face, the Speaker was facing away from the Listener, or the reverse. When the actors had been face-to-face, infants looked longer when the Listener selected the non-target object compared to the target. Infants looked equally regardless of what the Listener chose when either actor had been disengaged. Area-of-interest gaze coding suggests that infants were similarly interested in the interaction across conditions, but their pattern of attention to Speaker and Listener differed when the Listener was disengaged during speech. Although these experiments should be replicated with a larger sample, the findings provide initial evidence that 6-month-olds do not expect speech alone to communicate, but also attend to the social context in which speech is produced.     

Social Relativity: The Motion of Groups and Actors*

The bulk of sociological theory is based on a notion of “state”: mechanical-organic solidarity, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, folk-urban, and so forth. We propose a theory that social systems consist of actors and groups in constant motion. Further, we propose that the duality of actor and society generate a system that can be understood by using the concepts of complementarity, indeterminacy and the principle of relativity. Such a system is defined and the issue of social change is addressed. Basically, change is defined as an alteration in the motion of actors relative to the motion of groups. As the number of groups increases relative to the number of actors, the velocity of actors increases and the velocity of groups decreases. The increasing disparity of these velocities indicates greater social change.     

How to Do Things with Prayer Utterances

While the social scientific study of prayer is growing, little work has investigated prayer utterances—or statements where social actors say the term “prayer” or various cognates—in everyday talk. Drawing on insights from ordinary language philosophy, I argue that prayer utterances are performative utterances that help social actors accomplish a variety of actions in social interactions. To illustrate the performative nature of prayer utterances, I describe three types of actions that prayer utterances can accomplish: (1) aligning potentially problematic or questionable conduct with cultural expectations, (2) signaling to others an intense yearning for an object or occurrence on the behalf of oneself or others, and (3) signaling to others authentic feelings of care for another person or group of people. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis.     

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.