REVISITING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ELDER MODELERS AND THEIR PROTÉGÉS

Abstract

This memoir is a series of reflections on the universal social processes of modeling. In the 1970s when I completed a dissertation under the supervision of Anselm Strauss, I wrote about relationships between elder role models and their proteges, describing modeling processes in a secondary qualitative analysis of ethnographies on more than one hundred societies . Then I discovered that when modeling is understood and enacted by mentors in a conscious way, the processes are part of the interactional work that is essential for social reproduction. In this article I reflect on Strauss's role as a mentor to his students to illustrate modern relationships between a role model and a protege in academic settings. 1 revisit modeling processes both to honor Anselm Strauss and to link my work on societies to Strauss's work on professional socialization. Modeling is a feature of explicit socialization usually between mentors and proteges across a range of settings and contexts. Socialization entails processes of teaching and learning, while modeling adds processes of protecting and creating shared values, clinging to and competing for control of what is important to a group of people, and certifying the fitness of future cohorts. Some modeling processes are formalized in ritual, while others are negotiated. When modeling is understood and enacted by mentors in a conscious way, the processes are part of the interactional work that is essential for social reproduction. From 1974 to 1978 I had the privilege of experiencing the modeling process in academia with my mentor, Anselm Strauss, while I simultaneously discovered1 how modeling progressed in societies (Maxwell 1979). Now I am revisiting modeling relationships in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives , in honor of Anselm Strauss. A quarter century ago I was a doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Anselm Strauss served as my dissertation advisor. Unlike most of Strauss's students, my dissertation was based on content analysis of more than one hundred ethnographies about groups who lived on every continent. What the ethnographies had in common was that most were about nonindustrial * Direct all correspondence to: Eleanor Krassen Covan, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 601 S. College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403-3297; e-mail : covan@uncwil.edu. Sociological Perspectives, Volume 43, Number 4, pages S7-S20. Copyright © 2000 by Pacific Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.