New Article: ““Only Going to Get Worse”: Narrative Magnifications and Emotion Work among Rural Frontline Responders in the Opioid Epidemic” by Christian Vaccaro and team https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.534 cc @sociologylens #sssi

The study of narrative sociology can be used to understand how rural first responders magnify aspects of their collective stories about the opioid crisis to deflect emotional frustrations they experience. Based on 31 interviews with frontline responders in four rural counties in Appalachia, we find that responders portray themselves as capable protagonists up against hamstringing policies, opioid using clients as “their worst,” and their management of crises as a Sisyphean task. In constructing stories in this way, rural frontline responders temper frustration, and consequently sympathy, that contributes to a unique logic of care and control. This storytelling protects responders against traumas from their efforts, yet likely impedes trusting relationships with clients.

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: J.L. Johnson ““Meet Them Where They Are”: Attentional Processes in Social Movement Listening” https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.535 #sssi #sociology #socialmovements @sociologylens

We have just published J. L. Johnson’s article “”‘Meet Them Where They Are’: Attentional Processes in Social Movement Listening”. Johnson draws on Goffman’s Frame Analysis an Zerubavel’s sociology of attention to examine social movement communication as attempts to change hearts and minds by changing definitions of social problems.

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “Repetition Acknowledgment Prefaces” by David R. Gibson https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.531 #sssi #emca #Goffman @sociologylens

We have just published David R. Gibson’s article “Repetition Acknowledgment Prefaces” on Early View of Symbolic Interaction. In his article, Gibson examines the production of utterances like “I was just telling John” prior to the repetition of a story or topic in conversation. He calls these utterances “repetition acknowledgment prefaces”. For his paper he draws on Goffman’s work and his inspection of carefully documented empirical episodes.

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New book review: Jonas Bååth on ‘Taking the Floor’ by Daniel Beunza (@danielbeunza) #economicsociology #sssi #management @sociologylens @cassbusiness https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.532

In his review entitled “Why Economic Management Models Do Not Foster Morals” Jonas Bååth discusses Daniel Beunza’s recent publication of “Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room” an ethnography of interaction in trading rooms on Wall Street. Beunza pursues the question “what are the effects of economic models on morality in financial organizations?” that Bååth nicely picks up on in his critical review of the book. Bååth also reflects on the relevance of the book to recent concerns in economic sociology, in particular related to “the dynamics of the performativity of economic knowledge and the social and moral orders embedding markets, including but not limited to financial ones”, concerns that have been of long-standing interest to interactionists.

SSSI Members can download the review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “Enacting Gustatory Pleasure on Behalf of Another: The Multimodal Coordination of Infant Tasting Practices” by Sally Wiggins and Leelo Keevallik #sssi #emca #senses https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.527 @sociologylens

Taste is often considered to be subjective. In their detailed analysis of child-carer interaction Sally Wiggins and Leelo Keevallik demonstrate how people enact “gustatory pleasure on behalf of anther”. Their article entitled “Enacting Gustatory Pleasure on Behalf of Another: The Multimodal Coordination of Infant Tasting Practices” that has just been published will be published as part of a Special Issue on “The Senses in Social Interaction“.

SSSI Members can download the review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Review: Celeste Vaughan Curington on ‘Tacit Racism’ by Anne W. Rawls and Waverly Duck #sssi #emca https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.530 @sociologylens

In her review of Anne W. Rawls and Waverly Duck’s ‘Tacit Racism’ Celeste Vaughn Curington describes the book as “an interesting and thought‐provoking read.” And she suggested that “[a]s a text to introduce students to the array of interactional dynamics of white supremacy, and the ways that Whites from various backgrounds are complicit in these practices, it is a success.”

SSSI Members can download the review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “Sensing the Bike: Creating a Collaborative Understanding of a Multi‐Sensorial Experience in MotoGP Racing” by Francesca Astrid Salvadori and Giampietro Gobo https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.529 #sssi #emca #senses #interaction #video #ethnomethodology cc @sociologylens

Symbolic Interaction has just published another paper that will contribute to the Special Issue on ‘The Senses in Social Interaction‘. In “Sensing the Bike: Creating a Collaborative Unerstanding of a Multi-Sensorial Experience in MotoGP Racing” Francesca Astrid Salvadori and Giampietro Gobo examine video-recordings of the interaction between motorcycle racing drivers and their managers in which the drivers provide accounts of how they experience their bike’s performance. The authors reveal how the manager and the driver collaborate, through everyday gestures and language, to create a shared understanding of the bike’s mechanical issues and disambiguate the driver’s accounts of the bike’s performance. 

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “Performance of Agency in Real‐Life Encounters: Turning Unequal Power and Structural Constraint into Collaboration” by Nanna Mik‐Meyer (@mikmeyer) and Mark Haugaard #sssi #structure #power @sociologylens https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.528

We have just published Nanna Mik-Meyer’s and Mark Haugaard’s article “Performance of Agency in Real‐Life Encounters: Turning Unequal Power and Structural Constraint into Collaboration” on Early View of Symbolic interaction. Through their analysis of video-recorded placement meetings in homeless shelters the authors found that participants’ agency is the outcome of both collaboration and resistance. To avoid interaction that fails to empower, social actors engage in “repair work” and face‐saving practices

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

Review of Meyer, Streeck and Jordan (eds.) ‘Intercorporeality: Emergent Socialities in Interaction’ by Donald Everhart (@donaever) #sssi #emca https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.523 cc @sociologylens

Reviewing edited collections can be a tough task as such volumes often contain a large number of engaging individual chapters whilst the relationship between the contributions is not always clear. Donald Everhart has thankfully taken on to review “Intercorporeality: Emergent Socialities in Interaction” edited by Christian Meyer, Juergen Streeck and J. Scott Jordan. Everhart states that “this is that rare kind of collection that is worth reading in its entirety as it makes a cohesive argument throughout. Scholars of embodied interaction, and social interaction in general, should pay close attention to how the editors of and contributors to this volume have worked towards an integrated framework.”

SSSI Members can download the review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

Book review of Gary A Fine’s book “Players and Pawns” by Taylor Price #TheQueensGambit #sssi

Many of the readers here who are currently glued to their screens watching ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ might also be interested in Gary Alan Fine’s (2015) book “Players and Pawns: How Chess builds Community and Culture”. In 2017, Professor Fine’s book was reviewed by Taylor Price.

The review can be accessed HERE

Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI): New Website #sssi

The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction has a new website. Please click HERE or on the image below to visit the site.

New Special Issue: ‘Special Issue:Celebrating and Interrogating the Blumerian Legacy’ #sssi #sociology #Blumer @sociologylens

Special Issue – Vol. 43 No. 4

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

An Embattled Yet Enduring Influence: Introduction to a Special Issue on Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism

• Jacqueline Low
• Gary Bowden
• Pages: 575-596

ARTICLES

The Spirit of Blumer’s Method as a Guide to Sociological Discovery

• Michael Schwalbe
• Pages: 597-614

 

Understanding Everyday Life: Generic Social Processes and the Pursuit of Transcontextuality

• Scott Grills
• Pages: 615-636

 

Open Access

Digitalization as “an Agent of Social Change” in a Supermarket Chain: Applying Blumer’s Theory of Industrialization in Contemporary Society

• Dirk vom Lehn
• Pages: 637-656

 

Character Problems as Collective Behavior

• Arthur McLuhan
• Pages: 657-691

 

Cognition in Situations

• Taylor Price
• Pages: 692-720

 

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

• Matthew J. Cousineau
• Pages: 721-738

 

REVIEW ESSAY

Leave Half the Honey: Two Books about Our Debt to Insects

• Leslie Irvine
• Pages: 739-750

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Reflections on Interactionist Institutional Orders

• David L. Altheide
• Pages: 751-755

 

Beyond the Looking Glass, into the Web

• Michael Dellwing
• Pages: 756-760

 

Exploring the Work of Stories Is Critical to Understanding a Complex World

• Christian Vaccaro
• Pages: 761-763

 

On Nothing as Something: Mourning, Grief, Loss, Lack, and Cultural Values

• I. (Hans) Bakker
• Pages: 764-766

 

Teaching Symbolic Interactionism

• E. Sumerau
• Pages: 767-769

 

The Contradictions of Community Courts

• Erin Reinisch
• Pages: 770-772

 

The Practice of Misrepresentation: On Hammersley’s Straw Man Criticism of Ethnomethodology

• Neil Jenkings
• Pages: 773-776

Book Review: Jessica Robles on “Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language, and Body” edited by Asta Cekaite and Lorenza Mondada #sssi #senses #emca cc @sociologylens https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/symb.524

In her review of the volume “Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language, and Body” edited by Asta Cekaite and Lorenza Mondada Jessica S. Robles writes that “[D]rawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the following 12 chapters feature original research by outstanding leading scholars in the field of interactional research. Using the visual materials of video‐recorded data, these chapters explore how touch is coordinated in time and extended sequentially, how it interfaces with activity, its multi‐modal production, the use of the body and its movement as a whole, and the various shapes and forms that touch takes.”

SSSI Members can download the review essay by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

Book Review: David M. Merolla on “Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra‐Orthodox Judaism” by Schneur Zalman Newfield #sssi #religion cc @sociologylens

In his review of Schneur Zalman Newfield’s “Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra‐Orthodox Judaism” David M. Merolla discusses how Newfield as an “exiter” explores “How do individuals who grow up in unconventional, insular religious groups re‐create their lives after leaving these communities? [and] How does their upbringing and formative experiences continue to shape their identities and lives after leaving?” Merolla highlights Newfield’s careful analysis of the accounts that “exiters” give for their leaving of the community they grew up in.

SSSI Members can download the review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

Review Essay: Robert Wade Kenny on “Charisma” by Randall Collins #sssi #SocialTheory https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.526 @sociologylens

Robert Wade Kenny has written a splendid essay about Randall Collins’ recent book “Charisma”, a book that in Kenny’s words “is a 700‐page volume masquerading as a 100‐page monograph”.

SSSI Members can download the review essay by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “Making Time: Pausing to Coordinate Video Instructions and Practical Tasks” by Sylvaine Truncer, Oskar Lindwall and Barry Brown #sssi #technology #media https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.516 cc @sociologylens

In Symbolic Interaction, we have a long standing interest in information technology. Save for the regular publication of articles and book reviews related to interactionism and technology, about 18 months ago our journal published a thematic issues on “Technology, the Internet and Social Media“. Sylvaine Truncer, Oskar Lindwa;; and Barry Brown’s article “Making Time: Pausing to Coordinate Video Instructions and Practical Tasks” continues this line of research. In their article the authors explore how people experience and make time with interactive media.

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article: “The Feeling of Enlightenment: Managing Emotions through Yoga and Prayer” by Erin F. Johnston https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.521 #sssi #emotions @sociologylens

Erin F. Johnston’s article “The Feeling of Enlightenment: Managing Emotions through Yoga and Prayer” contributes to debates in Symbolic Interaction that are concerned with emotions. Johnston is particularly interested in how two spiritual communities—a Catholic prayer house and an Integral Yoga studio—shape the emotional lives of their members. 

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

Free Access (14 October – 31 October 2020) to ‘most cited’ papers in Symbolic Interaction in 2018/19 #sssi #sociology #freeaccess cc @sociologylens

Title	Lead Author	Pub Year	Vol:Iss
Agency-without-choice: the visual rhetorics of long-acting reversible contraception promotion	GRZANKA, P	2018	41:3
Escort clients’ sexual scripts and constructions of intimacy in commodified sexual relationships	JONES, Z	2018	41:4
Helpers “here on the front lines”: welfare-to-work managers’ moral identity work	TAYLOR, T	2018	41:1
Learning from the religious experiences of bi plus + people	MATHERS, L	2019	42:2
Couch revisited: a theoretical treatment of the information-technological media of imgur, reddit, and twitter	JULIEN, C	2019	42:1 (SI)
Displaying gender: transgender people’s strategies in everyday life	MARQUES, A	2019	42:2
Activating controlling images in the racialized interaction order: black middle-class interactions and the creativity of racist action	MEGHJI, A	2019	42:2
Narrative methods for differential diagnosis in a case of autism	TUROWETZ, J	2018	41:3
Stigmatized identities: too muslim to be american, too american to be muslim	CASEY, P	2018	41:1
Social network challenges to reducing consumption: the problem of gift giving	LORENZEN, J	2018	41:2
Deservingness, deadbeat dads, and responsible fatherhood: child support policy and rhetorical conceptualizations of poverty, welfare, and the family	BATTLE, B	2018	41:4
Playing the interrogation game: rapport, coercion, and confessions in police interrogations	DAVID, G	2018	41:1
Short white coats: knowledge, identity, and status negotiations of first-year medical students	VINSON, A	2019	42:3
Interactionism in the twenty-first century: a letter on being-in-a-meaningful-world	FINE, G	2019	42:3
Professional socialization as embedded elaborations: experience, institutions, and professional culture throughout teacher careers	EVERITT, J	2019	42:4 (SI)
Tip work: examining the relational dynamics of tipping beyond the service counter	WILSON, E	2019	42:4 (SI)
Virgins, terrorists, and ten children: immigrants’ humorous play with ethnic stereotypes in bonding with danes in the workplace	ESHOLDT, H	2019	42:4 (SI)
Co-present conversation as “socialized trance”: talk, involvement obligations, and smart-phone disruption	WALSH, M	2019	42:1 (SI)
Audience design and context discrepancy: how online debates lead to opinion polarization	TIAN, X	2019	42:2 (SI)
Two faces of self and emotion in symbolic interactionism: from process to structure and culture-and back	FRANCIS, L	2019	42:2

Chris Land’s Review of Michael Ian Borer’s ‘Vegas Brews’ #sssi #taste #senses cc @sociologylens https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.512

To wet your appetite for the forthcoming Special Issue we have just published Chris Land’s review of Michael Ian Borer’s book “Vegas Brews: Craft Beer and the Birth of a Local Scene”. Land writes “[P]erhaps the greatest contribution of Borer’s book, … is his ambition to replace a sociology of taste with an embodied sociology of tasting. Positioning his analysis against Bourdieu’s conception of taste as distinction, Borer writes that,“Taste isn’t merely a disembodied and decontextualized marker of difference or social status … taste is performed together, and tasting is the binding activity”.

SSSI Members can download the book review by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.

New Article for the Special Issue on ‘Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism’ – Arthur McLuhan “Character Problems as Collective Behavior” https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.520 #sssi #sociology #character cc @sociologylens

Another article as contribution to the Special Issue on ‘Blumerian Symbolic Interactionism’ edited by Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden has been published on Early View of Symbolic Interaction. In ‘Character Problems as Collective Behavior’ Arthur McLuhan argues that interactionism often “overemphasizes situations as self‐contained sites of continually emergent meaning and action” while neglecting “important aspects of character that extend beyond the immediate situation”. His article adds to recent discussions in sociology that “redress this moment‐by‐moment bias, and the inter‐situational dimensions of character attributions”.

SSSI Members can download the article by clicking the image below or HERE. To join SSSI and subscribe to Symbolic Interaction from $35 (£30) please click HERE.