Symbolic Interactionist Tradition Research Articles

Reactionary Exiles. How Conspiracy Theorists Deal with Socio-Technological Exclusion

Due to growing public concerns regarding the consequences of disinformation and conspiracy theories, major tech companies have introduced policies to curtail them on their platforms. Until now, the academic debate has largely focused on whether these punitive policies are effective. In this study, we address the question of how de-platformed ‘conspiracy theorists’ themselves experience and deal with such socio-technological exclusion. Drawing on seminal theories in the symbolic interactionist tradition, we conceptualize conspiracy theories as stigmatized ‘knowledge’ and empirically study the ways that conspiracy theory producers manage their stigma after de-platforming. Particularly, we draw on an analysis of 22 in-depth, qualitative interviews, ethnographic observations with (former) conspiracy YouTubers and a digital ethnography. Our findings demonstrate that YouTubers respond to de-platforming by emphasizing the ‘silver linings’ of their exclusion and by accommodating, bypassing and reframing their ‘stigma’. De-platforming contributes to their legitimacy in the face of their audiences and enables them to carve out space to cultivate a new, stronger form of conspiracy capital and status. This study contributes to the literature on conspiracy theories from a cultural sociological perspective. It advances our understanding of how de-platforming may backfire, strengthening people’s beliefs and standing within their subculture.

Engaging Teams: Missions, Management and Everyday Life

Drawing upon the extended symbolic interactionist tradition, this paper examines management activities in the context of office holders and teams. As researchers, if we wish to fully appreciate management in everyday life, then we must pay particular attention to teams, team creation and teamwork, for it is through people doing things together that organizational life is realized. Specifically, I examine the relevance of performance teams, legacy teams, legislated teams, mission-based teams, and the relevance of secrecy for enacting teams. Encouraging an attentiveness to perspectives and activities of office holders, this paper resists more structural renderings of organizational life and encourages researcher to attend to management in the making.

The Jack-Roller and the Life History Method: Notes on the Chicago School’s Clifford Shaw and Howard Becker’s Humanistic Narrative of Young Male and Female Delinquents in Different Ages

Clifford Shaw’s (1930) The Jack-Roller is a landmark study of naturalism, ethnography and crime. It is the ‘own story’ of Stanley—a young delinquent in Chicago. Shaw’s series of ethnographic studies on delinquency sought to humanize deviance in opposition to pathological understandings of delinquency. The article looks on the representation of crimes committed and punishment received by young male and female delinquents. Shaw’s argument focuses on structural inequalities and poverty as the cause of deviance; as a result, female delinquency was not explained by sexual promiscuity, although he failed to recognize young women’s vulnerabilities. The second edition of The Jack-Roller introduced by Howard Becker (1966, Introduction. The Jack-Roller: A delinquent boy’s own story, pp. v–xviii) redefined Shaw’s study within the symbolic interactionist tradition. From the 1950s, Shaw and Becker disagreed over the writing of the deviant’s ‘own story,’ the control of the narrative and the authorial voice. The article adds to the literature on narrative, female deviance and youth delinquency.

The problem of history in digital activism: Ideological narratives in digital activism literature

The past decades have generated a wealth of literature on digital activism. Even so, the phenomenon has been little historicised. This paper engages in a deconstructionist exercise on historical references in digital activism literature towards exploring implicit meaning-making in a symbolic-interactionist tradition. It identifies four distinct narratives: 1) a technology narrative [activism as technology-driven]; 2) a communications narrative [activism on the basis of communication options]; 3) an online-off-line narrative [activism based on an online-off-line dichotomy]; and 4) an engagement narrative [activism based on its affordances for public engagement]. The paper argues that these narratives contribute to a distinct, polysemic, and paradoxical understanding of digital activism as a phenomenon that is technologically driven (technological determinism), and both distinct to and enmeshed with traditional activism. In doing so, this narrative analysis shows a range of underlying ideological assumptions in digital activism study and conceptualisation, which informs how the phenomenon is understood today.

Polish low-income mothers: conversions of human, social and cultural capitals through their lifetime

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to identify the human, social and cultural capitals of Polish low-income mothers, and to reconstruct the capitals’ conversion. The research was carried out using the method of (auto)biographical interview rooted in the tradition of symbolic interactionism, while data (autobiographical narratives about life) were collected in two Polish cities as part of the ISOTIS project, using the narrative interview technique developed by Schütze [(2008). Biography analysis on the empirical base of autobiographical narratives: How to analyse autobiographical narrative interviews – part one. European Studies on Inequalities and Social Cohesion, 1, 153–242], which was adapted by the ISOTIS project team. The analysis of women’s autobiographical narratives made it possible to reconstruct the events that were significant to them and the resources that they activated in everyday situations, compensating for the shortage of material capital. Recognition of the sequences of process structures occurring in the biographies revealed the narrators’ attitude to certain phases in their lives and the dominant forms of their activity that influenced their decisions and choices.

Slice of life in a live and wired masquerade: Playful prosumption as identity work and performance in an identity college Bilibili

This article investigates Chinese urban youth’s mediated ‘slice of life’ and playful encounters as part of their identity construction and performance work on Bilibili, one of China’s most influential video-sharing social media sites mediating anime, comics, games and novels. Using a mix-method approach of digital ethnography, participant observation, interviews and data visualisation, this article examines fans’ hermeneutic practices through anime, comic, game and novel prosumption, exemplified by danmaku: ‘bullet screen’, barrage-like comments overlaid on videos. This article argues that Bilibili works as an ‘identity college’ for fans to perform various roles and explore their hybrid identities in a social-hermeneutic engagement process. In particular, the function of anonymous danmaku comments will be closely analysed as it offers a quasi-real-time engagement experience for fans and helps shape fans’ social self. Following a symbolic interactionist tradition, Mead’s ‘generalised other’ and Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are contextualised in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu where fans’ identity performance is regarded as masquerade. Departing from the moral panic rhetoric that Generation Z is ‘amused to death’, becoming ‘infantile and animalised’, or even enslaved by their desires and capable only of ‘cold intimacies’, the findings of this explorative study present a more complex understanding of Chinese youth’s identity work through participatory social media use and networked fandom.

Cognition in Situations

The symbolic interactionist tradition can contribute to advancing sociological studies of cognition by setting dual process models on more solid ground. I draw on Blumer's epistemological statements and the interactionist tradition more broadly to consider how dual process models of cognition could be applied to naturally occurring situations. I suggest that attending to the ways the past and the future are handled and modified within social interaction provides a usable inroad for the sociology of cognition to engage with situational analysis. I identify “resonance” and “iterative reprocessing” as concepts that are suitable to this end.

A Critical Realist Reflection on the Power Threat Meaning Framework

A critical realist reflection on the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) is offered. By way of introduction, critical realism is discussed in relation to varieties of constructivism. It is aligned with earlier forms linked to the symbolic interactionist tradition but not with more recent postmodern forms. This positioning is explained before moving onto a shared agenda of anti-positivism, which in part, explicitly or implicitly, underpinned the collective stance of those writing the PTMF. In particular, epistemic and ontic fallacies associated with psychiatric positivism are explained and a case is made to reinstate the value dimension to mental health work. That case has been evaded by the specious claim of positivism to separate facts from values. Not only should the moral context of patient conduct be addressed but so too the role of psychiatry in society, particularly in relation to coercive social control.

An Ideology of Client-Oriented Service: Institutional and Commonality-Based Foundations

The relevance of studying ideological foundations of service is determined by the significance of service in the system of social relations at the level of social commonalities interactions. An institutional regulation of the interaction between subjects of service requires exploring ways of institutional and commonality–based development of the participants’ social ties: consumers, representatives of the business community of the servicing sector and state agencies. Institutional characteristics of service disclose its links to social processes and reveal the problems of social interactions between different community subjects. A sociological approach allows for identifying opportunities for shaping sustainable service interaction of social commonalities. The study aims to explore institutional and commonality-based foundations of the ideology of service – the necessity to create an organizational model of service capable of extending the boundaries of client-orientation in service interactions is actualized. Based on the tradition of symbolic interactionism, commonality-driven, institutional, functional, and system approaches in sociology conditions for forming the social balance of the interests of service subjects at commonality-based and institutional levels of interaction were found. A commonality approach complemented by the theory of marketing made it possible to characterize the nature of the social impact of each service subject on the substance and forms of interaction. The social context of shaping relationships between interacting commonalities is characterized from the perspective of an institutional approach. The ideology of client-orientedness is able to overcome institutional controversies, provide stability in the social space of service practices. The focus of servicing business on the satisfaction of consumer needs defines the advantageous position of the consumer in market relations of service communality-based triad. Collaboration between entrepreneurs and the authorities is targeted to the provision of a fulfilling life of the citizens- the consumer within the framework of state policy and business efforts in the servicing sector of the economy.

Proses Komunikasi Instruksional dalam Pembelajaran Vokasional

The purpose of this study was to see how the instructional communication process in vocational learning in SMK 1 Kota Bengkulu. This type of research is qualitative research with a tradition of symbolic interactionism. So, with this method the researcher obtains a description of the research based on the experience of the subject itself. Data collection techniques used were observation and in-depth interviews. The data analysis technique uses qualitative data analysis. The results of this study are instructional communication applied in teaching vocational students is verbal and non verbal communication. Verbal communication in the form of simple words. Non-verbal communication is carried out in the form of body movements. In addition, interpersonal communication was also found. Conclusion, the instructional communication process applied in teaching vocational students at SMKN 1 Kota Bengkulu is verbal and non verbal communication.
 Keywords: instructional, learning, vocational communication.

Whither the Internal Conversation?

The internal conversation has a venerable place in the symbolic interactionist tradition but has been the focus of little empirical research by interactionists. After reviewing selected research on the internal conversation (most by noninteractionist sociologists or nonsociologists), we argue that interactionists ought to conduct research of our own to examine claims we have been making and to better understand social life. We propose some worthy areas and avenues of investigation.

Cooperative Accounts: Avoiding Conflict and Repairing Social Relations

The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being “offered” by offenders and then “evaluated” by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition.

Engaging the Student Role

Working within the symbolic interactionist tradition, this article presents an ethnographic research agenda for studying the ways that “people engage roles as students.” Using an ethnographic study of two Protestant Christian seminaries as an illustrative case, I consider the ways the student role may be conceptualized and studied as ethnographic instances of “education in the making.” This includes the matters of people (a) entering into the student role, (b) attending to instruction, (c) being assessed, (d) sustaining efforts, (e) attending to one’s peers, (f) encountering difficulties, (g) experiencing failure and termination, and (h) pursuing subsequent studies. I concentrate on establishing the fundamental elements of theory and methods that can focus research and comparative analyses on the activities that constitute the student role.

On the Theory Contiguous to the world. Qualitative studies in search of the continuity between the life practice and the sociological theory

The paper defends the thesis that qualitative studies significantly contribute to the development and increase of the adequacy of the sociological theory. Questioning the assumption of the embedded, a-theoretical character of qualitative studies, I refer to the tradition of symbolic interactionism, social phenomenology and discourse theory in order to demonstrate that – contrary to this assumption – such studies constitute a response to the critical deconstruction of the sociological, objectivist theory. This is a constructive response which allows us to identify the reality and fit it in the analytical schemata in the process of its coming into being. Thanks to the emphasis on the narrativity, on the lack of transparence of an individual and on the precision of the report, qualitative studies provide us with reliable material which closely reflects the world it examines.

Diversity in mind: Towards a differentiated understanding of migrants’ recreational practices in urban forests

This paper presents results of a study investigating the relationship between migration and recreation in urban forests in two German cities. Research in this field is growing in Europe, yet in certain countries, such as Germany, it remains underdeveloped. Until now, it has revealed ambiguities and diverging results. Furthermore, it has been the subject of criticism and calls for more differentiation between and within migrant groups, as well as for more reflection on the categorisation of “migrant” or “ethnic group”. This paper builds on these claims and aims to shed new light on forest recreation and ethnicity through a context-sensitive research approach in the tradition of symbolic interactionism. It draws upon the analysis of 42 qualitative interviews conducted with people with a Turkish, Russian-German and no migration background. The analysis leads to the construction of five narratives, each of them regrouping respondents who share a similar perspective on a specific theme. The narratives show how personal life context and its interlinkages with migration influence the individual's perspectives on and uses of urban forest. They also show how lifestyle and gender shape recreational practices independently from migration background. Beyond the focus on individual experience, collective recreational practices attributed to some groups are expressed in the narratives. This paper addresses the social aspect of leisure and discusses how forest recreation affects the social construction of groups such as migrant groups.

The Past in the Present. Lessons on Semiotics of History from George H. Mead and Boris A. Uspensky

This article examines the parallels between George H. Mead's theory of time and Boris A. Uspensky's semiotics of history, looking for implications relevant to the symbolic interactionist theory of historical processes. It suggests that Mead's theory of time and theory of communication hold important implications for semiotic analysis of the historical dimension of sociocultural phenomena. A further aim is to link the symbolic interactionist tradition of the Chicago school with the Tartu school and its semiotics of history. This would fuel the further development of both theoretical orientations.

Teacher Careers and Inhabited Institutions: Sense‐Making and Arsenals of Teaching Practice in Educational Institutions

This article advances emerging scholarship that emphasizes the benefits to new institutional theories of organizational functioning offered by empirical research rooted in the tradition of symbolic interactionism. I present evidence from in‐depth interviews with teachers from three high schools to show how individuals' perspectives about pursuing institutional goals are filtered through their accumulated experience working within those institutions. Findings show teachers develop what I call “arsenals of teaching practice” as they accumulate work experience, and this process creates a key source of difference by career stage among teachers that shapes their instructional decisions. I discuss implications for understanding the relationship between policy and practice, and extend existing theory of inhabited institutions by identifying a key way that people's sense‐making through experience drives institutional functioning.

‘I don’t think there’s much of a rational mind in a drug addict when they are in the thick of it’: towards an embodied analysis of recovering heroin users

Much of the sociological literature on recovery from heroin use has been located within the symbolic interactionist tradition and has revealed the salience of identity for the recovery process, and has focused upon actors' cognitions. By contrast, less attention has been paid to former users' bodies. The aim of this paper therefore is to focus upon the embodied aspects of recovery from heroin use. To this end, we deploy the notions of bodily 'dys-appearance' and 'habitual action' as sensitising concepts to undertake an analysis of data generated by 40 qualitative interviews carried out with 21 men and 19 women who are overcoming their addiction to heroin in England. Analytically, we distinguish between using bodies and recovering bodies. In the case of the former, 'habitual action' is relatively urgent and routinised; in the case of the latter, however, habitual action is more difficult to maintain because the bodily dys-appearances associated with the transition from heroin use are relatively more multifaceted and unfamiliar. The body techniques associated with embodied reproduction of using and recovering bodies can be pre-cognitive, easily overlooked and yet, embedded as they are in mundane, everyday activities, they constitute a crucial part of the process of recovery from heroin.

The Search for Meaning: Revisiting Herbert Blumer’s Interpretation of G.H. Mead

Herbert Blumer’s interpretation of George Herbert Mead’s work has set the intellectual foundation for the symbolic interactionist tradition. However, the adequacy of this interpretation has been challenged, leading to a series of highly charged debates in the 1970s–80s. This article reflects back on these debates, and reconsiders the contrast between the Blumerian and Meadian epistemologies from a contemporary perspective. It is demonstrated that while Mead’s work is able to adapt to and contribute to emerging challenges to dualism in contemporary interpretive theory, Blumer’s root epistemological position fails in this regard, and creates an inconsistent framework for social reality.

Influence and canonical supremacy: An analysis of how George Herbert Mead demoted Charles Horton Cooley in the sociological canon

This analysis assesses the factors underlying Charles Horton Cooley's place in the sociological canon as they relate to George Herbert Mead's puzzling diatribe-echoed in secondary accounts-against Cooley's social psychology and view of the self published scarcely a year after his death. The illocutionary act of publishing his critique stands as an effort to project the image of Mead's intellectual self and enhance his standing among sociologists within and outside the orbit of the University of Chicago. It expressed Mead's ambivalence toward his precursor Cooley, whose influence he never fully acknowledged. In addition, it typifies the contending fractal distinctions of the scientifically discursive versus literary styles of Mead and Cooley, who both founded the interpretive sociological tradition. The contrasting styles and attitudes toward writing of the two figures are discussed, and their implications for the problems of scale that have stymied the symbolic interactionist tradition are explored.