“Just a Typical Teenager”: The Social Ecology of “Normal Adolescence”—Insights from Diabetes Care

In Western society “normal adolescence” is understood to be a biologically driven phase characterized by emotional turmoil and irrational behavior. Despite being discredited within academic literature this discourse persists both in formal theory and everyday use. Drawing on the case of diabetes care, I argue that the discourse of “normal adolescence” derives its power from its value as a vocabulary of motive through which to navigate the contradictions inherent in the social order at this stage of the life‐course. While helping us to comprehend sociologically the ecological niche in which “normal adolescence” is sustained, this analysis raises questions about the persistence of this discourse for social action.     

'For the sake of the deer': land, local government and the hunt

Political activism by local government is a well known phenomenon in Britain. Less known are the interests affected. In this study, Somerset council's decision to ban hunting clashed with the long standing activities of the Quantock Staghounds. My discussion focuses on the conflict between hunt and council as a conflict of governance in which land rights provided both terrain and techniques of struggle. For the hunt, land rights functioned as a foundational basis for the hunt's authority and legitimacy. For Somerset, their decision to attack hunting through land ownership not only reveals the complex relationship between land and rural state governance, but also placed Somerset's own authority in jeopardy as the courts declared they could not ban hunting on moral grounds. Somerset's land rights were construed by the courts as dependent on pursuing management objectives. Similarly, the hunt's political credibility was also dependent on demonstrating their role in deer management. The paper concludes with the problems of discursively fusing management and governance.     

“We Became Sceptics”: Fear and Media Hype in General Public Narrative on the Advent of Pandemic Influenza

In this article, we examine the apparent resistance of publics to messages regarding pandemic influenza. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was addressed through media: governments used print, broadcast, and digital media to advise publics to enact hygiene practices and comply with social isolation; news media took up the pandemic as a lead story. Publics, however, rated the pandemic as not serious, even before it was widely known that it was mild for most. This problem is presently constructed as complacency: where individuals are seen to lack appropriate motivation to avoid risk. We combine perspectives on media reflexivity on the part of audiences with general public interviews and focus groups in Australia and the UK, to offer an alternative explanation for complacency. Publics endorse public health advice, but are skeptical of pandemic risk communication. They exhibit critical awareness of outbreak narrative and concomitant emotions, such as fear, which are coded into media stories. We, therefore, challenge the view that publics are complacent. Instead, governments must navigate an emerging terrain of ramified and critical media consumption to shape effective risk communication in time of global health emergency.     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.