Moral aspects are closely related to psychiatric assessment. Personality disorders, especially, form a morally loaded category, as the diagnostic process involves questioning behaviors that go against social norms. Consequently, being interviewed about these matters may be face‐threatening for the patients. However, the study of the role of morality in psychiatric face‐to‐face interactions has been scarce. This paper explores how the patients and nurses orient themselves to moral matters during personality disorder interviews in two Finnish psychiatric outpatient clinics. This article uses Erving Goffman's frame theory to differentiate how different orientations come into play during the interviews. Conversation analysis forms the methodological basis for the work. In personality disorder interviews, it is possible to observe information‐gathering, moral, and everyday interaction frames. The nurses have different approaches in receiving the patients' moral considerations. They may maintain a rather neutral approach, but there are also cases of both challenging tones and more supportive and affiliating responses. Making visible how moral themes are discussed in real life enables a nuanced evaluation of psychiatric practices.

This article offers a cultural cognitive theory of sexual violence: a Zerubavelian reading of its classificatory, attentional, perceptual, semiotic, mnemonic, and temporal dimensions. It maps the asymmetric syntactic contrasts between the cultural trifecta of “Victim‐Survivors,” “Victimizers,” and the hitherto unnamed, taken‐for‐granted “Unvictims,” arguing that those who experience sexual violence are marked in contrast to both those who victimize and those who have never been victimized. Suggesting that one need not be the actor of a marked act to be marked by it, a victimizing person's marked act crystallizes as a marked identity for the person they victimize, a process I call “semiotic ricochet.” Extending critiques of the victimhood‐survivorship frame, this article argues that the “rigid‐minded,” binary classificatory scheme of “Victim” or “Survivor” reifies, universalizes, derivatizes, and temporally displaces its attributed. It proposes hyphenating, encasing in scare quotes, and capitalizing the identity category of “Victim‐Survivor,” as well as referring to individuals as “those who experience sexual violence.” Using the Zerubavelian theoretico‐methodological practice of “concept‐driven” sociology, it identifies the “Victim‐Survivor” as merely one specific instantiation of the generic social type the “Damaged Good,” alongside other identities derived from marked non‐acts such as placement in foster care or undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer.

This paper represents a sociological approach to autism spectrum disorder that critiques the terms neurodiverse and it obverse, neurotypical, because they promote a cognitive approach that mystifies what is actual and real about human activity in everyday life. It is in dynamic interactional practices rather than putative cognitive states that human diversity is manifest or observable. The empirical part of the paper, following Bleuler, defines and examines “autistic talk” as a turning away from the ordinary social world or commonsense “reality,” and engaging self‐oriented practices and orientations. However, the range of participants who produce such talk is not confined to those on the putative autism spectrum. Rather, that range encompasses the entire human span. If so, then a question is raised about what autism is as a “condition,” which term individualizes social difficulties rather than appreciating that they are always about diverse social actions‐in‐interaction.

Sociologists have demonstrated that people use music to construct meaning in numerous specific contexts, groups, and subcultures. This article expands such work by examining how people draw on music to construct identities in daily life beyond any specific setting. Drawing on four years of participant observation and twenty‐five in‐depth interviews, findings demonstrate three mechanisms of identity‐work as people use music in public to (1) define who they are, (2) explain how they feel because of who they are, and (3) narrate where they have been in their lives that made them who they are. These findings demonstrate how people use music in daily life to construct identities, and the theoretical potential of such exploration for sociological and music studies of public life.

Through an innovative interspecies analysis, this article explores narratives surrounding the medical treatment of humans and pet animals at the end of life among U.K. veterinary surgeons, medical practitioners, and members of the public. Contrasting the care options open to pet owners with those available to human patients, and through a thematic focus on treatments and medicines, euthanasia, and palliation, this article pays close attention to the ways that practitioners and members of the public make sense of—and express ideas about—interspecies family kinship at the end of life. We highlight the utility of interactionist approaches for understanding microsocial human‐animal kinship ties and argue that health policy and practice during end‐of‐life care should better reflect the lived reality of the multispecies family. In so doing, we highlight the significance and complexities of interspecies conversations for the development of contemporary end‐of‐life care debates.

In this article, I present three strategies for building cultural and historical analyses that are driven by broadly relevant social themes rather than particular cases. Each of these strategies represents a different way to approach “concept‐driven sociology,” focusing the researcher on robust and deep‐seated social and cultural forces that underly and shape various actions, events, and experiences occurring at different times and places. Such a thematic analysis requires bringing together multiple cases that illustrate a common social phenomenon despite their substantive differences, while also highlighting those differences and interpreting each case to reinforce the analysis of the general theme at hand. After discussing the relevance of form, process, and culture to thematic analysis, I draw on previous and ongoing research to outline three strategies: (1) formal analytic abstraction, (2) the configuration of analytic subtypes from a master theme, and (3) transcendent historical analysis. While thematic analysis involves illustrating how several otherwise different cases cohere around a common theme, and thus highlighting important similarities among them, I conclude by discussing why we must also take deep analytic dives into the cases we study in order to enhance our understanding of the theme that ties them together.

Why do affluent people drive used cars, elite chefs praise basic ingredients, and upper‐middle couples arrange backyard weddings? What makes senior professors feel comfortable dressing down and allows men to bring their kids into the office? This article takes a formal sociological approach to explore the cultural phenomenon of “Status Downplay”—a paradoxical type of status display, where more social status is signaled through a subtraction of status symbols. The trans‐contextual analysis of diverse manifestations of status downplay uncovers the inverted cultural presumptions of “doing” and “being” and the hierarchical classifications underlying such parodical presentation of self. The proposed semiotic model articulates the social privilege of unmarked actors' performative flexibility: the social license of those considered “normals” to deviate from the performative norm. Under this asymmetrical structure, status underdoings are revealed as markers of cultural dominance.

In this article, I theorize invasion as a sociocognitive phenomenon grounded in conceptual relations between the social statuses of “in” and “out.” Pulling invasion out of its ordinary and historically physical context, I explore how people share similar ways of envisioning invasions across a wide variety of domains in social life. To demonstrate this, I employ the qualitative concept‐driven comparative method of trans‐level analysis, tracing common mental models of invasion in the cases of the body, the home, and the nation‐state. Drawing from a sample of 42 in‐depth interviews as well as discourse and policy materials, I find that people envision invasion to take four basic forms: entry and existence, contamination, theft, and domination. Offering the concept of invasion subversion, I explore the highly contestable nature of invasions and the semiotic strategies of marking and unmarking that people leverage to challenge and reinforce arrangements between “in” and “out.” Ultimately, I show that invasions foreground social order and make visible the tacit rules of inclusion and exclusion that shape it. This study advances and extends the study of inclusion and exclusion to cognitive sociological terrain.