This collection brings together leading scholars to explore the 'doing' and 'making' of identities. Drawing on the highly innovative ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme, the chapters take core social actions – such as performing, excluding, mixing, bonding – and demonstrate how social practices and identities unfold together.
In this completely revised edition of one of the foundational texts of network sociology, Harrison White refines and enlarges his groundbreaking theory of how social structure and culture emerge from the chaos and uncertainty of social life. Incorporating new contributions from a group of young sociologists and many fascinating and novel case studies, Identity and Control is the only major book of social theory that links social structure with the lived experience of individuals, providing a rich perspective on the kinds of social formations that develop in the process. Going beyond traditional sociological dichotomies such as agency/structure, individual/society, or micro/macro, Identity and Control presents a toolbox of concepts that will be useful to a wide range of social scientists, as well as those working in public policy, management, or associational life and, beyond, to any reader who is interested in understanding the dynamics of social life.
"Absolutely essential reading for those wanting to understand the recent ′turn′ to affect. Offering an extensive analysis of all the perspectives available, including the psycho, neuro, bio and social, Margie Wetherell treads a magisterial path through the radically different offerings, one that illuminates key ideas and will save the uninitiated wandering down many pointless avenues. A path-setting book." - Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths In recent years there has been a huge surge of interest in affect and emotion. Scholars want to discover how people are moved, and understand embodied social action, feelings and passions. How do social formations ′grab′ people? How do roller coasters of contempt, patriotism, hate and euphoria power public life? A new social science understanding of affect and emotion is long overdue and Margaret Wetherell′s voice is timely, providing a coherent and pragmatic text. It will be invaluable reading for those interested in this fascinating field across the social and behavioural sciences.
Mental Health and Wellbeing is a timely new book that explores these increasingly important subjects from an intercultural perspective. This is essential reading for anyone studying or working in mental health at this time of unprecedented levels of human migration and when mutual understanding of diverse cultural perspectives is of vital importance.
Academics across the globe are being urged by universities and research councils to do research that impacts the world beyond academia. Yet to date there has been very little reflection amongst scholars and practitioners in these fields concerning the relationship between the theoretical and engaged practices that emerge through such forms of scholarship. Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. This collection advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary scholarship.
Public Relations and Social Theory: Key Figures, Concepts and Developments broadens the theoretical scope of public relations studies by applying the work of a group of prominent social theorists to make sense of the practice. The volume focuses on the work of key social theorists, including Max Weber, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Robert Putnam, Erving Goffman, Peter L. Berger, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bruno Latour, Dorothy Smith, Zygmunt Bauman, Harrison White, John W. Meyer, Luc Boltanski and Chantal Mouffe. Each chapter is devoted to an individual theorist, providing an overview of that theorist’s key concepts and contributions, and exploring how these can be applied to public relations as a practice. Each chapter also includes a box giving a short and concise presentation of the theorist, along with recommendation of key works and secondary literature.
This book examines the interactional management of emotionality in second language autobiographical interview research. Advancing a discursive constructionist approach, it offers a timely methodological and reflexive perspective that brings into focus the dynamic and dilemmatic aspects of interviewee and interviewer identities and experiences, and it makes visible the often unexpected and unseen consequences for the research project and beyond. The author weaves together critical discussion and empirical analysis based on longitudinal, narrative-based research with adult immigrants from Southeast Asia living in the US and Canada. This interdisciplinary book will be compelling reading for students, researchers, and others interested in emotion, narrative, discourse, identity, interaction, interviews, and qualitative research.
"This paper aims at contributing to a reflection about the legacy of Harold Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the study of action as methodic (the term is used here in line with the sense of ethnomethodology), i.e. ordered, accountable, recognizable, and reproducible. Both approaches seek to describe the members' (term favored in ethnomethodology) or coparticipants' (term favored in conversation analysis) production, recognition, and reproduction of actions understood as locally situated social achievements. Within this framework, the chapter discusses two key dimensions of methodically produced actions - their situatedness and orderliness - and attempts to show the importance of considering both of them together. This discussion is developed in relation to a more recent trend in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, based on the use of video materials documenting naturally occurring social interactions, permitting the fine-grained scrutinity of the multimodal details of action. Multimodal analysis generates new insights into both the situated and the ordered dimensions of the organization of social action"--
The concept of identity is one of the most important ideas the social sciences have investigated in recent years, yet no introductory textbooks are available to those who want to gain a sense of this burgeoning field. The first of its kind, this text provides an introduction to the scientific study of identity formation, with a focus on youth development. The analyses of the problems and prospects faced by contemporary young people in forming identities are placed in the context of societies that themselves are in transition, further complicating identity formation and the interrelated processes of self development and moral-ethical reasoning. In order to sort through what is now a vast literature on the various aspects of human identity, this book introduces the Simplified Identity Formation Theory. This theory cuts through much of the academic jargon that limits the accessibility of this promising field, and builds an understanding of human identity from first principles. This book is optimized for students and instructors, featuring several useful pedagogical tools and a robust series of online resources: Primer format: the text synthesizes the vast and disparate literature that has characterized the field of Identity Studies, with a focus on identity formation during the transition to adulthood; theory and research is discussed in plain, non-technical language, using the author’s new Simplified Identity Formation Theory. In-text pedagogy: to enhance student engagement, box insert and in-text examples from current events, popular culture, and social media are incorporated throughout the text; key terms are in bold in each chapter and combined in a glossary at the end of the text. Online resources for instructors: A robust set of resources that, when combined with the text, provides a complete blueprint for designing an identity course; resources include PowerPoint Presentations, test bank, sample syllabi, and instructor manuals for both face-to-face and online courses that include weekly written assignment questions and discussion-forum questions along with essay topic ideas and grading rubrics. Online resources for students: a student manual, flashcards, practice quizzes, and exercises with video links.
This volume focuses on advances in research methodology in an interdisciplinary field framed by discourses of identity and interculturality. It includes a range of qualitative studies: studies of interaction, narrative studies, conversation analysis, ethnographic studies, postcolonial studies and critical discourse studies, and emphasizes the role of discourse and power in all studies of identity and interculturality. The volume particularly focuses on critical reflexivity in every stage of research, including reflections on theoretical concepts (such as ‘identity’ and ‘interculturality’) and their relationship with methodology and analytical practice, reflections on researcher identity and subjectivity, reflections on local and global contexts of research, and reflections on language choice and linguacultural aspects of data generation, analysis and communication.