Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF STRANGERS I have come to realize that I have long term interests in the "sociology of the stranger".  After Thirty years of combing through the texts of Simmel, Park, Schutz, Goffman, Bauman, Parker, Lofland, Sennett I want to organize my thought and observations. Of course, much of my work stems from Erving Goffman's Behavior in Public Places and his notion of "civil inattention".  I am also interested in queuing and territorial behavior in public places.  For years I have studied "breaches" to the norm of "civil inattention" and published a piece in the Ventura Star some decade ago on that topic.. A lot of new young scholars are developing interesting perspectives that I hope to  highlight in "Doing Modernity".  I have contemplated assembling a course reader. Today I am highlighting the work of Brian Lande, an ethnomethodologically oriented scholar on stranger encounters. "...

LIVING IN THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS: PARKER PALMER AND THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. May we no longer step blindly past the stranger who huddles in the cold outside the door! May I no longer pretend not to see the woman with massively disheveled hair crawling out of her wheelchair to sleep in a door well. Let no one continue to walk past the elderly Latino man riddled with dazed confusion begging for food in front of grocery store, because they are in such a hurry to grab their lunch. To live in the city is to live in the presence of strangers. For those of us living in cities, passing strangers on busy streets is unremarkable. We rush to our next appointments, preoccupied with our own thoughts, navigating through crowded sidewalks. On “autopilot,” we don't even think about our many brief encounters with unknown others in public spaces. This past week, I had the opportunity to hear Parker J. Palmer, a fellow sociologist and...

I was very fortunate to have Professor John Heritage as one of my teachers when he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1980s, just after he published Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology and before UCLA scooped him up. In this article Heritage is at his best--theoretically brilliant while grounded in the details of the real world.  And on top of it all, John is the nicest guy--humble and lovable to the core! Enjoy! http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/heritage/Site/Publications_files/CA_as_SOCIAL_THEORY.pdf

Doing gender, doing categorisation: Recent developments in language and gender research Elizabeth H. Stokoe Introduction In this paper, I consider the potential of membership categorisation analysis, an empirical tool in ethnomethodological inquiry, for language and gender researchers. To date, there has been no sustained attempt to incorporate this kind of approach into gender and language work. It is virtually ignored in feminist sociolinguistics, where the majority of research gets done and is seldom considered in overviews of the field (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003; Weatherall, 2002). However, I argue that MCA is a valuable method for examining the practical occasioning and construction of gender in discourse. To support this position, I begin by tracking the history and development of ethnomethodological approaches to gender and their practical translations. I argue that the ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constituted in people’s situated categorisation...

] ERSON A. (2005) Journal of Advanced Nursing 52(5), 554–560 The value of integrating interpretive research approaches in the exposition of healthcare context  Aim. This paper discusses the use of a nested set of methodologies (dramaturgy, ethnomethodology and ethnography) to characterize and interpret the settings, practices and interactions inherent in the healthcare environment. The aim is to explain how a set of methodologies can help make sense of research data in the clinical setting. Background. Despite the recognition of the importance of the context of care there has been limited debate about the use and value of research methods and meth- odologies and how they can be best applied to the healthcare context. Discussion Using dramaturgy the physical and social scene can clearly be estab- lished, to enable insight into ‘how the scene is contrived’. The ethnomethodological approach assists in the examination of taken-for-granted assumptions inherent in the interactio...

(Re-written  May 2025) ALIENATION AND EXCLUSION IN MODERNITY For Rev. Jon Lemmond “And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine.” —Mark 5:12 This essay reflects on what it means to live at the margins of modern society. It is a meditation on alienation and exclusion—not only as structural processes but as existential conditions. I offer here only a beginning, a few scattered thoughts stitched together with the hope of making some sense of the dislocation so many experience in the contemporary world. Emile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding figures, recognized early on that modern life brought with it a profound transformation in the glue that holds society together. In traditional societies, what he called mechanical solidarity bound people through sameness—shared norms, religious beliefs, kinship ties. A village or tribe was unified by likeness and conformity. But modernity, shaped by urbanization and industrialization, ushered in organic solidarity : a ...

Stephen Crook (1950-2002) was a prominent figure in Australian sociology, a social theorist, and a past president of the Australian Sociological Association.  I first learned of his work through his extensive writings on reflexivity, anti-foundationalism, environmentalism, everyday life and postmodernism.  Check out this great tribute to this fine scholar! http://www.tasa.org.au/docs/public/2004/170804%20Everyday%20Life%20of%20a%20Significant%20Sociologist.pdf

Everyday Sociology Blog Home Archives About the Site About the Authors Video Subscribe February 17, 2012 Everyday Sociology Talk: What is Hook-Up Culture? Karen Sternheimer interviews Lisa Wade, co-founder of  Soc Images , about her research on “hook-up culture.” For more videos, visit http://www.youtube.com/nortonsoc Posted by W. W. Norton on February 17, 2012 at 01:26 PM   | Permalink   |   Comments (0)   |   TrackBack (0) February 16, 2012 Testing "Stereotype Threat" Theory By Sally Raskoff Have you heard that gender affects math skills? There are many studies and reports that document the different achievements of men and women in math. This phenomenon can be explained in a number of ways, but one recent study attempted to analyze one specific theory. Geary and Stoet’s study, soon to be published in the journal  Review of General Psychology , assesses whether or not the “stereo...