Spiritual Gatekeepers: Time and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults

This article addresses the process of initiation into the Catholic Church by analyzing in‐depth interviews with parish‐based professional initiation coordinators. The formal title given to this process of initiation by the Church since Vatican II is the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Since the RCIA's promulgation, the Church has hired a host of lay and religious professionals to coordinate its implementation at the parish level. Our analysis focuses on the temporal sequencing and the problem of duration of initiation. The data show that both city and suburban coordinators adapted the Church's mandated length of time for initiation in different ways as they negotiated covenantal and contractual social relations among RCIA participants.     

INFORMATION POOLS AND RACIALIZED NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

The concept of narrative structures is theorized as cultural master frames and is distinguished from the concept of story, which refers to anything reported that contains a plot. Drawing from the literature on African American folklore, the Church's Chicken story was presented to respondents as an instance of conspiracy and contamination narrative structures. Data show that story availability and believability are clearly race-based. The data ground a model of racialized narrative structures in which story content and story believability are conflated. It is argued that believability is not solely a function of storytelling performance and competence insofar as narrative structures prefigure believability. Racialized narrative structures are discussed as one element of the deep racial gulfs in America that co-exist with increases in cross-racial contact and friendship patterns.     

Closed competitive bidding

This paper replaces the competitive bidding models of Friedman and Gates with a more general probabalistic bidding model which resolves the conflict between them. The validity of the model is demonstrated by simulation. Practical difficulties of using the probabalistic approach are discussed and several lines of future research suggested.     

Narratives, community and land use decisions

This article explores the narrative character of community, arguing that communities are intrinsically storied. Narratives are conceptualized as social acts and are thereby of inherent importance to social scientific endeavor. Following Weber, narratives also are seen to be entrenched in institutions and in the political economy of communities. State tourism and land use decisions are suggested as ideographic situations in which such entrenchment is found.     

CONCEPTUAL MODELING AS A TOOLBOX FOR GROUNDED THEORISTS

Conceptual modeling is proposed as a set of analytic procedures that further the grounded theory approach to theory-discovery and development. The compatibility between grounded theory and conceptual modeling is discussed, and data from a short ethnographic study of a hair salon are used to illustrate the roles of conceptual modeling in the early stages of theory discovery. The major focus of conceptual modeling is on three simultaneous, explicit, continuing respecification dialogues: the nature and dimensionalization of concepts, the relative importance of concepts, and the nature of relationships among concepts. We argue that this focus facilitates the discovery and development of conceptually dense theories.     

Narrative Structures and the Catholic Church Closings in Detroit

We distinguish narrative structures as master frames from stories as actual telling of events, and show how they operated in the case of the Catholic church closings in Detroit in the late 1980s. Narrative structures drawn from Detroit industrial history and from reform in the Catholic church were imposed on the actual events constituting the closing process, and powerfully defined the terms of public discussion and debate about the meaning of the closings.     

A Sociological Account of the Persistence of Invalidated Anorexic Identities

Most versions of identity theory have had difficulty explaining the persistence of invalidated identities. Drawing from data on anorexic identity transactions, we identify three dimensions that contribute to understanding this persistence. Two dimensions, size and control, are shown to be the locus of identity invalidation; the third, desirability, is shown to be the locus of validation. Confirmation of one's sense of being desirable, we propose, contributes to anorexics continuing to appropriate identities invalidated by others. We argue that the concepts “master identity,” “fictionalized identity,” and what we term “discordant awareness context” are more useful for theorizing the persistence of invalidated identities, such as anorexia, than those focusing on the degree of consensus over the person as a social object found in conventional identity theory.     

Narrative Structures and the Analysis of Incest

Our approach to the past is informed by the central tenets of both the interactionist and narrative perspectives. Narrative structures are the cultural and structural contexts within which pasts are transacted. Accordingly, when narrative structures change, the storied characters of pasts are changed. We analyze incest and child abuse as a substantive site to illlustrate how the criteria of believability and proper tellings vary by context. We note that the bias of civility in the interactionist understanding of the reframing of pasts does not hold in the case of flashbacks.