Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen—individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges—at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.     

Marginal Players? The Third Sector and Employability Services for Migrants,Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Literature in the field of employability and the third sector has focused upon the impact of marketisation on third sector...     

Culture,parenting, and language: Respeto in Latine mother–child interactions

The cultural value of respeto (respect) is central to Latine parenting. Yet, how respeto manifests in the interactions of Latine parents and their young children remains unexamined. Low‐income Mexican immigrant Spanish‐speaking mothers and their 2.5‐year‐old toddlers (N = 128) were video‐recorded during play (M_age = 30.2 months, SD = 0.52), and two culturally informed items of respeto were coded: parent calm authority and child affiliative obedience. Respeto related to standard ratings of mother and child interactions (e.g., maternal sensitivity and child engagement) but also captured unique features of parent–child interactions. Respeto related to mothers' and toddlers' language production and discourse during the interaction, and explained unique variance in language variables above standard ratings of mother–child interaction. This is the first effort to document a culturally salient aspect of dyadic interaction in Mexican immigrant mothers and young children and to show that respeto relates to language use during mother–child interactions.     

Using Social Media to Change the Narrative Around Chronic Illness

Chronic illness is a prevalent issue for many individuals. Various theoretical approaches have been employed in the psychotherapeutic treatment of chronic illness and the effects it has on the individual with the illness. These approaches frequently overlook the strengths of the person living with the illness as well as fail to address aspects of modern life such as social media use of the client and the influence it holds for those living with a chronic illness. This paper proposes the application of narrative therapy and social media use as a narrative therapeutic technique when treating those who suffer from chronic illness. A clinical vignette is used to illustrate possible applications of therapeutic techniques in conjunction with therapist-directed social media use. Implications for clinical practice and limitations are discussed.     

Opportunities and challenges for industrial statisticians

The last 20 years have seen significant advances in the use of statistical methodology in industry, with applications in new product design and development, optimization and control of manufacturing processes, and in the service industries. The field of industrial statistics has emerged as an important branch of statistical science that focuses on this application environment. Yet as applications of statistics in industry have expanded, creating many new opportunities for the modern industrial statistician, many new challenges have arisen. Some of these challenges are technical, while others have managerial and organizational aspects. There are also important concerns pertaining to training and education. This presentation focuses on some of these issues, and identifies some potential solutions.     

Infants' lexical comprehension and lexical anticipation abilities are closely linked in early language development

Theories across cognitive domains propose that anticipating upcoming sensory input supports information processing. In line with this view, prior findings indicate that adults and children anticipate upcoming words during real-time language processing, via such processes as prediction and priming. However, it is unclear if anticipatory processes are strictly an outcome of prior language development or are more entwined with language learning and development. We operationalized this theoretical question as whether developmental emergence of comprehension of lexical items occurs before or concurrently with the anticipation of these lexical items. To this end, we tested infants of ages 12, 15, 18, and 24 months (N = 67) on their abilities to comprehend and anticipate familiar nouns. In an eye-tracking task, infants viewed pairs of images and heard sentences with either informative words (e.g., eat) that allowed them to anticipate an upcoming noun (e.g., cookie), or uninformative words (e.g., see). Findings indicated that infants' comprehension and anticipation abilities are closely linked over developmental time and within individuals. Importantly, we do not find evidence for lexical comprehension in the absence of lexical anticipation. Thus, anticipatory processes are present early in infants' second year, suggesting they are a part of language development rather than solely an outcome of it.