Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25

STUDTES IN SYMBOLIC I~E~ACTION VOLUME 25 STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY NORMAN K. DENZIN Institute of Commu...

Author: Norman K. Denzin

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STUDTES IN SYMBOLIC I~E~ACTION VOLUME 25

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY

NORMAN K. DENZIN Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA M~AG~G

EDITOR

RUOYUN BAI Institute of Communications Research, University of IZlinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

JACK BRATICH HEIDI BRUSH MARK NIMKOFF Institute of Co~~m~nicat~o~s Research, U~iversi~ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

2002

JAI An Imprint of Elsevier Science Amsterdam - London - New York - Oxford - Paris - Shannon - Tokyo

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS David L. Altheide

School of Justice Studies Arizona State University, USA

Sylvia J. Ansay

Department of Sociology University of Florida, USA

Arthur P. Bochner

Department of Communication University of South Florida, USA

James W. Carey

School of Journalism Columbia University, USA

Shing-Ling S. Chen

Department of Communication Studies University of Northern Iowa, USA

Clifford G. Christians

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Norman K. Denzin

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Carolyn Ellis

Department of Communication University of South Florida, USA

Luigi Esposito

Department of Sociology University of Miami, USA

Kate Follett

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Elizabeth Gill

Department of Sociology Randolph-Macon College, USA

Todd A. Hechtman

Department of Sociology Eastern Washington University, USA ix

X

Robert A. Hintz

Foundation II, Inc.

Mark D. Johns

Department of Communication/Linguistics Luther College, Iowa, USA

CaYenne Kaha

Department of Rhetoric and Communication Hamilton College, NY, USA

Michael A. Katovich

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice Texas Christian University, USA

Boyd Littrell

Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

Stephen Lyng

Department of Sociology and Anthropology Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

Dan E. Miller

Department of Sociology University of Dayton, USA

John W. Murphy

Department of Sociology University of Miami, USA

Ken Plummer

Department of Sociology University of Essex, U.K.

Gideon Sjoberg

Department of Sociology University of Texas at Austin, USA

Mary E. Weems

Cleveland State University, USA

Norma Williams

Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Texas at Arlington, USA

Joel D. Wolfe

Department of Political Science University of Cincinnati, USA

Margaret Young

Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois, USA

LIST OF REFEREES

Fay Yokomizo Akindes

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn

Thomas M. Alexander

Peter J. Kivisto

Art Bochner

Cheris Kramarae

Diem-My Bui

Ralph LaRossa

Spencer Cahill

Boyd Littrell

Leonard Cain

David R. Maines

Norman K. Denzin

E. Doyle McCarthy

David R. Dickens

James B. McKee

Dwight Fee

Joshua Meyrowitz

Alice Filmer

Ronald J. Pelias

Susan Finley

Joy Pierce

Michael Flaherty

Miles Richardson

Andrea Fontana

Andree F. Sjoberg

David S. Fott

Louise Spence

David D. Franks

Charles Springwood

Jaber Gubrium

Lance Strate

Peter M. Hall

Jules Wanderer

Jean Halley

S. Craig Watkins

Todd A. Hechtman

Mary Weems

Emily Noelle Ignacio

Norbert Wiley

Michael A. Katovich

xi

RENEWING THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTION IN THE N E W MILLENNIUM Shing-Ling S. Chen

The word, "renewing," in the title should not suggest that the New Iowa School, represented by the works of Carl Couch and his students is in a stage of decline, as a matter of fact, members of the School remain active in conference presentation (Miller, 2001; Katovich & Bums, 2001) and academic publication (Miller, Katovich & Saxton, 1997). However, several recent situations have occurred that call for a consideration and reflection of the past achievement and future development of the School. One situation was the loss of key members of the New Iowa School in recent years - Carl Couch in 1994, and Stanley Saxton in 1999 - which caused many to wonder about the continuation and future development of the school. Another situation is the context of the millennium. As a historical milestone, the millennium naturally calls for a reflection on the past and a projection for the future. The third situation that prompted the discussion was the establishment of Carl Couch Center for Social and Intemet Research (CCCSIR) on September 15, 2000. The establishment of the Carl Couch Center, a non-profit organization promoting the scholarship that is inspired by Carl Couch's works, also presents a need to examine the development of the School and plan future projects. Based on these three situations, scholars in communication and sociology gathered at the annual convention of National Communication Association in Seattle in November, 2000, in a panel entitled, "Renewing the New Iowa School Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 3--4. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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SHING-LING S. CHEN

of Symbolic Interaction in the New Millennium: A n Engaged Dialogue of Communication and Sociology," to discuss the past achievement and future development of the School. Panel participants included Bruce E. Gronbeck, Norman K. Denzin, Laurel T. Hetherington, Michael Katovich, Dan Miller, Mary E. Rohlfing, Carlos G. Aleman, Melissa W. Aleman, and Randall Reese. The following two articles serve to capture some of the nuances presented in the discussion, and elaborate on the insights discussed in the panel.

REFERENCES Katovich, M., & Burns, R. (2001). "Let's take a vote": Another time through "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" and the myth of democratic participation. Paper presented in the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Anaheim, California, August 19-20. Miller, D. (2001). Time, work, agency, and self-actualization: Customizing temporal experience. Paper presented in the Couch Stone Symposium, University of Miami, February 23-25. Miller, D., Katovich, M., & Saxton, S. (1997). Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (ed.), Supplement 3. London, England: JAI Press Inc.

EMPIRICISM ON THE PRAIRIE: FOUR WAVES OF THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL Michael A. Katovich, Dan E. Miller and Robert A. Hintz

INTRODUCTION In this paper we describe Carl Couch's new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction as consisting of four distinct waves of empiricist studies of social interaction. The succession of waves suggest an evolution of empiricism on the Iowa prairie - waves of grain rather than waves of water. We characterize the first wave, beginning in the late 1960s, as a trial and error period that incorporated andio-visual technology and changed the empiricist program of the new Iowa School. During this time, a new Iowa School distanced itself from the preceding School established by Manford Knhn (see Kuhn & McPartland, 1954). During the mid- to late-1970s a second wave emerged that called for conceptual precision, and provided a method to generate and articulate basic generic processes that defined the social act. At this time, the new Iowa School further distanced itself from the ethnographic tradition established within Chicago School circles. By the late 1970s and early 1980s a third wave emerged that politicized the new Iowa School's efforts to connect micro social processes with macrosociological forms of association. We conclude by suggesting that a fourth wave, established in the late 1980s and 1990s and continuing on after Couch's Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 5-23. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

death, has re-integrated the mission of the new Iowa School with the honored legacy established by Blumer and his Chicago School. While each wave marks distinct themes in regard to generating and analyzing data, each characteristically connects Couch's empiricism with G. H. Mead's (1929, 1932) theory of emergence and temporality. Taking all waves together, the new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction maintains that all coordinated social behavior occur in, over, across, and even "through" time. That is, the new Iowa School interactionists view social action as having direction, that interactors can interpret and share, and as having direction that can be referenced in terms of what has occurred and what might occur based on what is happening now. The foundations of this orientation to time and temporality exist in conjunction with a commitment to observing how two or more people begin, maintain, and complete any act in any social context; and how the acts created can be comparable to other acts that are begun, maintained, and ended in varieties of social contexts (see Hintz & Couch, 1975).

THE FIRST WAVE: ESTABLISHING A SENSE OF TIME AND PLACE Manford Kuhn's Iowa School of symbolic interactionism became a pragmatic and empiricist-based science of the self that involved shared understandings between researchers. The researchers would understand the specific and general intentions of any study in particular, and the new Iowa School mission as a whole. After he returned to the University of Iowa in the 1960s, Couch wished to re-build the community established by Kuhn and create a new Iowa School. As did Kuhn, Couch attempted to provide a recipe for data generation and analysis techniques. Also, Couch wanted to retain one of the key methodological premises of Kuhn's legacy - the study of universal variables from a stable standpoint (Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). He and Kuhn agreed with Mead's (1936) version of modem science as a research science that required a stable standpoint in regard to the production, observation, and responses to interaction that other researchers could corroborate (see McPhail, 1979). During the first wave, Blumer's (1969) version of symbolic interactionism had become, for all practical purposes, the going concern within symbolic interactionism. Much more in tune with the idealism and romanticism of the 1960s, Blumer's vision provided a social science of opportunity, keying in on the resourcefulness of everyday interactors who knew their ways around the universes they inhabited. Blnmer's romanticism was a direct extension of the pragmatic vision of human actors who could indeed be useful

Empiricism on the Prairie: Four Waves of the New-Iowa School

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informants in regard to their own actions and behaviors. His rhetoric appealed to a variety of thinkers who had become disillusioned with the conventional wisdom of structural functionalism, which held that human beings are the least likely to be able to indicate anything but the surface structural meaning of their acts. Blumer regarded the interactors as not only self indicating and reflexive, but self analytical and cognizant of the deeper structures of their talk, activity, and intentions. Despite Couch's great admiration for Kuhn he saw in Blumer's writings a way to distance himself from the Twenty Statements Test (TST) that Kuhn used to measure the self. Although such measures provided point-in-space stability, the point-in-time quality of the data was too static for Couch. In line with Blumer, Couch accorded humans with substantial powers of determinacy, especially in regard to how social actors used social pasts to create and project shared futures (e.g. Maines et al., 1983). Couch agreed with Blumer that human selves should be studied in the process of becoming, but Couch did not see this as an idealistic or romantic enterprise. Instead, he sought to understand audio-visual technologies in order to record and analyze precise interactional processes. Such technologies would maintain Kuhn's point-in-space standpoint, but would also incorporate Blumer's call to study human life across time enough to make the new Iowa School distinct. Couch also appreciated Blumer's emphasis on the study of social processes rather than on the study of the self, per se. By studying processes, researchers could observe the consequences that interactors created as they organized "lines" of action so as to form joint acts (Blumer, 1969, p. 5). Blumer's emphasis on processes brought to bear Mead' s view of temporality, which included an understanding of the social act as encased by interactors within a specious present. Using audio-visual technologies, Couch envisioned a social behaviorism that would provide a refined view of temporality in the context of emergence and uncertainty. Utilizing a point-in-space, across time approach the first wave of the new Iowa School envisioned a science of interpersonal discourse that could explain human interaction across varieties of social settings. For Blumer, understanding discourse meant studying social processes, especially those experienced by the human being in situ. One of the key departures that Blumer and Chicago School interactionists made from structural-functionalist sociology involved using across-time and across-space methodologies (Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). Chicago School interactionists stressed getting involved in the lived experiences of subjects, documenting their day-to-day encounters as constructed in real time and places (see Becker & Geer, 1957). Providing vivid accounts of how individuals navigated their circumstances and how they created

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

and interpreted the circumstances within which they navigated provided a rich legacy of interacfional drama in thickly peopled and thickly described environments (Geertz, 1974; Strauss, 1978). Drawing on Blumer for inspiration, Couch took on the role of a critic during the first wave. For one thing, he attempted to persuade other interacfionists that the famous division between Iowa and Chicago schools (as articulated by Meltzer & Petras, 1970) was passe, and even wrongheaded (see Buban, 1986). He emphasized that controlled conditions in the laboratory, used to make step-by-step observations of people who solved problems together, could allow for the very same empirical approach supported by devotees of Blumer, especially those advocating analytical induction (see Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). Also, analogous to Blumer's criticisms of sociological formulations that did not take the interactive dimension of social life into account, Couch saw most social psychology as a promise unkept. Most publications in outlets such as Sociometry (later renamed Social Psychology Quarterly), failed to treat human behavior as complex and variable; attenuated the creative powers of human interpretation; did not recognize how reality changes when two or more people adjust to present and forthcoming lines of action; and did not provide a cybernetic explanation of how human beings engage in self corrective action that can enable social objectives (see Couch, Katovich & Miller, 1988, pp. 263-267). Couch drew on Blumer's famous criticism of how many static minded sociologists misconstrued the variable (as ungrounded in interaction) and instead saw the quest for universal variables as grounded in social interaction and social relationships. Couch described these variables as metaphorical dimensions of human association, in terms of what people need to do in conjunction with each other if they are going to accomplish a social objective. Couch respected Blumer's staunch criticism of sociology in general, but he saw the necessity of different vocabularies to study social processes (Couch, 1987). Couch appreciated across time and space methodologies and used many Chicago School-based interactional concepts to identify the elements and dimensions of basic interaction processes (Couch, 1970). Couch's reluctance to adopt the Chicago way, however, was based on what he considered to be an over-appreciation of the uniqueness of situational life (Couch, 1995). He decided to distance the first wave from Blumer by challenging this anthropological standard of unique human variability and set out to "quest for universals" (see Turner, 1956). This first wave of empiricism could be geared toward detecting, isolating, and articulating universal properties of social processes. Such universality required attention to how the on-going present emerged on the basis of past experiences and shared anticipation of forthcoming experiences.

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Couch's search for generic, universal variables became correlated with an empiricist-based science in the age of electronic technologies. He viewed the interactionist legacy as the foundation for the discovery of law-like processes, generated by humans, and analyzed by knowledgeable pragmatists who understood human selves in accord with how Mead (1934) and Cooley (1902, 1918) defined it. Taking Mead's outlook on science as the means to understanding human complexity, Couch attempted to create an empiricist-based symbolic interaction that originated from the organized conduct of human beings who interpreted, anticipated, and adjusted to each other's overt behavior. Providing detail about across-time data served a necessary purpose for empiricism, but Couch deemed that selecting a static place to observe temporal alignments was the only way to observe how present centered experiences become fused with past and future experiences (Couch, 1989). His insistence on adopting stable places to observe ongoing temporal processes involved three rationalizations. First, systematic inquiry requires consistent situated observations. Second, consistency of observations necessitates a stable place for observations of generic processes that can reflect "conceptually dense, and integrated theory of social life" (Couch, 1995, p. 231). Third, consistency of observations and stability of place allow researchers to generate re-searchable data via andio-visual recordings. The recordings enable physically stable observations of "across time" social processes. Couch insisted that the discovery of generic processes could not be made unless researchers fixed the camera on interactors who constructed ongoing temporal transactions. The fire that burned in Couch and that others recognized whenever he spoke or wrote stayed alive because of his commitment to studying human action from a point of view that remained the same. Researchers either stand still, or provide an extension of themselves that stands still (e.g. the andiovisual camera) in order to observe a real interacting group. Further, and drawing again upon Mead's view of the social act as a root metaphor of human life, Couch viewed the laboratory as a legitimate place to study human activity as processual, systematic, and pragmatic. By turning to the laboratory, Couch relied on Kuhn's view (1964) that an innovative social psychology begins with the generation and analysis of universal variables. Any such generation and analysis requires systematic attention to data that human beings help produce in controlled environments. Researchers acquire such data while occupying a stable standpoint and dedicating themselves to methodical, thorough, and standardized observations. In effect, Couch set out to create both a physical place for research and a metaphorical community of pragmatists who believed in Mead's notion that scientific understandings of human action could liberate researchers and everyday interactors (Katovich, 1998; McPhail & Rexroat, 1981; Molseed, 1995).

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

Beginning with some trial and error laboratory studies (the Crib 101 studies), Couch and his early students, most notably Stan Saxton, "pretty much groped around in the dark," as Couch later recalled. But such groping became rationalized as an attempt to create a bridge between what social actors did on the spot (emergent, constructed interaction) and how they could maintain the relationships created for them by researchers (social structure). The fusion of acting on the spot in conjunction with loosely defined scripts and general descriptions of how to relate served as the grounds for analyzing how people in relationships could adapt to and change such relationships over time (see Miller & Hintz, 1997). Couch's first wave called for a reappraisal of Mead's (1938) layered definition of the social act that could be documented, re-searched, and examined in precise detail. He predicted that bringing Mead into the electronic audio-visual age would establish the new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction as a paradigm of thought that would influence any researcher interested in Mead's perspective. Just as Kuhn believed in the 1950s that a systematic study of the self would replace speculation of the human potential to define and analyze the extent to which it is anchored in institutions (see Hickman & Kuhn, 1956), so Couch believed that a systematic study of the act would enable researchers and interactors to theorize about all behavior in social contexts. Couch's vision to fuse across-time and point-in-space measures and methods did not resonate well in the social scientific community. Most point-in-space sociologists seemed content with survey research and establishing increasingly sophisticated quantitative techniques to manage data. Most interactionists remained content with Blumer's processual view of human life and proud of the subsequent and various studies of real people in real situations engaging in real processes that talented observers described in great detail. In this context, Couch's efforts to convince his interactionist colleagues that the laboratory was a legitimate place for testing Mead's theories of social action were largely ignored. The bias against the laboratory as a place void of "real action" remained strong within interactionist circles. In retrospect, given the popularity of Chicago School observers such as Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss, and Norman Denzin to name a few, and of course, owing to the vast admiration of Erving Goffman throughout sociology, Couch's timing could not be considered auspicious. Interactionists during the late 1960s could ask two reasonable rhetorical questions in regard to Couch's efforts: Why reduce a richly textured life going on in the real world to a manufactured world in the laboratory; and how would observation of contrived social action be a better alternative than observation of the real thing in real

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time? Despite Couch's eagerness to answer these questions, the first wave of empiricism on the prairie did not produce much of lasting value, especially in regard to laboratory studies. One of the obstacles Couch confronted had to do with his own past and the reputation he acquired as one of Kuhn's students and as a student of collective behavior. His most notable contributions at this time either involved his assessment of dimensions of association (see Couch, 1970) or his appreciation of Kuhn's (TST) (see Spitzer, Couch & Stratton, 1971). Often, at regional and national meetings, Couch would tell students that the TST was a "dead end" and "a waste of time." While speaking from the heart, Couch did not seem to be a true player among interactionists. Severed from his past, and unable to persuade other interactionists of his future vision, Couch was temporarily a man without a program.

ENTER THE YOUNG: THE SECOND W A V E OF THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL During the 1970s a critical mass of graduate students entered the Graduate Program at the University of Iowa and began to challenge existing paradigms of thought in quantitative and qualitative methods, and in micro and macro studies of societal and social patterns. Drawing from a wide range of research results and theoretical standpoints, including interactionism, ethnomethodology, Goffman's (1963, 1971) dramaturgy, and pragmatics of communication (Watzlawic, Beavin & Jackson, 1967), Iowa graduate students ushered in a new form of empiricism that challenged the traditionally inductive and deductive orientations, the positivistic and humanistic standpoints, and the ethnographic/processual and survey/static views of how society was possible. Couch heralded the second wave of empiricism as a new paradigm of thought within sociology (Couch, Saxton & Katovich, 1986). The wave entailed the precise coding and examination of specific generic concepts that would become the building blocks of all situated social action. Drawing from the aforementioned postulates, Couch and his students replicated some of the features of classic helping behavior studies to observe how two or more people, as Couch always liked to say, "moved through the door together." The study of "Openings" (see Miller, Hintz & Couch, 1975) emerged as the "breakthrough" upon which his paradigm of thought would be built. The "Openings" research became the centerpiece for an edited book of various studies written by Couch and his students (see Couch & Hintz, 1975). The studies ranged from opening an act, to creating solidarity among role-playing groups, to establishing emergent norms in problem-solving situations, to closing acts. The book, written in a hard boiled prose, and stripping down interaction

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

to basic behaviors and response sequences, departed from the romantic and idealistic tone established by Herbert Blumer. However plain, and void of the clarion-like call that characterized Blumer's prose, the book established the new Iowa School as part of "an age of Inquiry" (Kuhn, 1964). Couch viewed the study of openings as emblematic of how empiricism on the prairie would be conducted. Specifically, Miller, Hintz and Couch employed point-in-space technologies in order to detect, describe, and define (technically) across-time concepts generated by interactors who fit together lines of action. Characterized as "elements," the generic concepts identified by the authors provided a foundation for all subsequent new Iowa School studies of interactional sequences. The openings study also became an occasion to conceptualize social processes as structured (Buban, 1986; Couch, Katovich & Buban, 1994). This conceptualization grounded the study of interaction in specific concePts that treated the social act as a cybernetic enterprise. It also created a narrative for the social act, with beginnings, middles, and ends that interactors created, maintained, and experienced. While the symbolism of the act remained important, the structure of the interaction, rather than the multiplicity of possible meanings, became the central focus within the second wave of new Iowa School studies. Couch was not timid in his descriptions of his own and his students' accomplishments. Some interactionists applauded Couch's pioneer spirit. Even so, other sociologists, including some interactionists, responded with skepticism and hostility. Despite a few other journal publications in The Sociological Quarterly and Symbolic Interaction the new Iowa School of symbolic interaction was seen either as a misguided effort to incorporate across-time observations in a laboratory or as a betrayal of the interactionist ethos to study real people doing "unscripted things" in real places. Despite a lack of full acceptance, Couch became convinced that he had founded a brand of empiricism that would be useful and that was not being practiced anywhere but on the prairie. Spurred on by his faith in his self-defined paradigm, he and his second wave of graduate students began to grapple with issues of ontology. The second wave of empiricists were aware of Weber's view of orientation and Durkheim's insistence on systematic inquiry. They appreciated these ancestors but diverged from their programs. Another founding father, August Comte, became instrumental for another reason. Couch viewed Blumer's (1969) "society is symbolic interaction" metaphor as based on Comte's principle of complexity. As Giddens (1977) has noted, Comte viewed human structures to become more complex as they became more specific in purpose. The more vague the purpose, the simpler the activities taking place in regard to the purpose. Couch took this a step further to note that as individuals move

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from acting independently (vaguely social) to interdependently (sharply defined social), social complexity emerges. How interactors manage such social complexity becomes the basis for answering how is society possible. As with most interactionists, Couch and his second wave students were unsatisfied with the structural-functional answer to the possibility of society. Couch even expressed dissatisfaction with Blumer's answer. To Couch, Blumer's focus on self indication and understanding another's orientation, corresponded to Weber's perspective. While it did point attention to symbolic processes, or what objects individuals conceptualized as relevant to time and space and how they go about conceptualizing such objects, Blumer seemed content to leave interactors with their symbolic processes, taking for granted that they will unite their lines of action and get things done. To Couch, analysis of the social act, as mead described it, necessitates the full examination of interaction processes as problematic. Couch intended to break through the vast forest of sensitizing concepts to identify definitive concepts that had universal application to dyads and triads. Rejecting Max Weber's famous notion of orientation and the capacity to understand an orientation, Couch and his students decided that the key to establishing a unique brand of interaction would be to interpret Mead's formulation of the social act as essentially dyadic. Reality, as understood within the new Iowa School, pertained to a dyad as a whole, rather than to two distinct individuals oriented to each other. As Goffman (1983) would later ask sociologists to do, the second wave of new Iowa School interactionists set about to create a moving picture of human order, born from emergent human conduct. Couch in effect replaced the postulates of Kuhn's interest in a science of the self (see Zurcher, 1979) with his own postulates concerning the science of a social act. First, Couch argued that the social act emerges in symbolic interaction with others, and makes up its own unique context for forthcoming activity. Second, Couch maintained that all human associations involve the construction of an act that can help humans maintain these associations. Third, Couch insisted that two or more people must be engaged in symbolic interaction order for social conduct to occur. Fourth, social acts performed by two or more people can be systematically coded. The directness and literal insistence on "two or more" to constitute that which is social allowed new Iowa School interactionists to avoid psychologistic explanations (what motivates, what are the attitudes, and what are the personalities). But it also allowed Couch to challenge one of Blumer's linchpins that defined the Chicago School of symbolic interaction. Just as a dyad is real, so is the social object real. The reality of an object is not confined to how an individual perceives and acts toward it, but as how two people, in concert, act toward and define it as they complete a social act.

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

The second wave of the new Iowa School integrated Blumer and Kuhn (Couch, Saxton & Katovich, 1986) in order to specify complex interactional processes that could be viewed and re-viewed second, third, fourth, and fifth times through - and even more, if necessary. Maintaining a metaphorical singular place to view and re-view allowed the new Iowa School researchers to conceptualize the social act as a hierarchical structure, but also as a hierarchical structure that moves across time.

GETTING GLOBAL: THE F O R M A T I O N OF A THIRD W A V E By the late 1970s, most of Couch's second wave of graduate students had moved on to other Colleges and Universities. Most went into Departments where they were the only symbolic interactionists, and where they were asked to teach traditional sociological courses. Changing politics at the University of Iowa itself had led to the dominance of perspectives that were not compatible with interacfionism in general, and Couch's prairie empiricism in particular. Once again, Carl Couch appeared to be a man without a program. Even though Couch felt isolated he still set out to make clear that the new Iowa School was not one that contradicted the Chicago School interactionists' self as dynamic agent nor the mission of sociology to examine human action against the backdrop of social, political, and institutionalized patterns (Mills, 1959). As mentioned, during the second wave Couch began to engage in focused inquiry into varieties of situated acts - ranging from the highly specific acts of opening and closing interactions (see Hintz & Miller, 1997), to the more general relationships between representatives and constituents. By the late 1970s, with a legacy of studies to draw from, Couch would enter a third wave of empiricism that would merge the study of specific processes with dynamics involving political relationships. Starting with equal cooperation, the third wave of the new Iowa School would eventually attempt to explore more asymmetrical and unequal forms involving conflict, authority, and negotiations. With regard to equal relationships the third wave new Iowa School recognized social acts as meaningful in the response to them. Coding the social became governed by the simple premise that any initiation needed to be followed by a response in order for an act to be considered analyzable. The initiation-response sequences became the methodological basis of the new Iowa School and the theoretical basis of a key assumption of this school - the complexity of human coordination is the foundation upon which any society is built and maintained.

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However, with regard to unequal and potentially conflictual relationships, the third wave dramatized the unfairness of social life. Influenced by Chicago School interactionists and dramaturgists, Couch paid attention to how representatives of institutions rationalized their so called social systems and, by doing so, created a duaiity between those having institutional leverage and those who have not. Drawing on Howard Becker's distinction between the societal labeled and unlabeled and Goffman's dramaturgical view of deviants as lacking the power to activate and validate identities alternative to those that stigmatize them, Couch incorporated the processes associated with symmetrical and asymmetrical interactions. In so doing, he oversaw the new Iowa School as creating provocative stages (Katovich, 1984) whereby participants created sequences of interactional moments that either facilitated equilateral transactions or dramatized the tensions underlaying superordinate-subordinate exchanges. The third wave did not replace the first two waves, but built on the legacies that each of the previous waves established. Couch's reliance on audio-visual technology, his insistence on occupying a stable location to observe across-time data, and his adherence to a group (vs. individualistic) centered ontology allowed him to merge Mead's emphasis on process with Simmel's (1950) emphasis on f o r m s o f social interaction. The significance of this merger opened the laboratory to a variety of studies that worked as metaphors for broader social concerns. Interactors would assume identities of interviewer and interviewee and create a negotiated order; they would build "tinker toy" models and participate in the construction of authority relationships; they would elect representatives who would negotiate with role-playing Deans' of Colleges and participate in democratic and autocratic decision making. All specific social processes could be generalized to resemble the social forms that provide structure to our everyday lives. During the third wave, Couch and a new cadre of students who had arrived during the late 1970s created studies that adhered to principle of complexity (Holland, 1998). This principle holds that from basic social forms (symmetrical or asymmetrical) unlimited and emergent content emerge. In turn, the content of interactors' talk and activities creates emergent social structures (Hintz & Miller, 1997). Such structures appear as conditions by which past action becomes useful and future action becomes imagined. In the context of an interview, for instance, a future boss and a prospective worker rely on the basic asymmetric form of the encounter to project real and imagined possibilities for their shared future. In so doing, while the form becomes validated, a structure of interrelating emerges. The boss and worker are free to create various agreements as to how boundaries will be maintained,

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

how tasks will be completed, and what outcomes or rewards will be available. They do so in a step-by-step sequence. While other bosses and workers may differ in terms of establishing boundaries, rewards, and tasks, the sequences that resemble each other become the basis on which analysis proceeds. Couch predicted that given the same general conditions, sequences of past and forthcoming activity would be patterned, even if the exact content associated with the sequences varied. The third wave of the new Iowa School began to systematically assess a theory of Iowa School methodology, and specifically, to make statements about the importance of the researcher-subject relationships (see Katovich, 1984). Many interactionists criticized Couch for his insistence on watching and analyzing subjects in the laboratory. The interactionists claimed that laboratory role-playing studies would stifle creativity and transform spontaneous behavior into scripted responses to instructions. By setting out to answer these criticisms, the third wave students discovered that broad parameters and general instructions of role enactments actually freed interactors to "role their own," as it were. Researchers, acting as producers, created just enough structure and left enough "free space" for subjects to act in accordance with general instructions and to improvise specific initiationresponse sequences. One instructive role-playing scenario established during the second wave, became the basis for how the third wave of new Iowa School researchers would view the laboratory and its connection to external interaction processes and patterns. The Representative-Constituent Study (heretofore referred to as RCS) involved three person groups of subjects who agreed to take on partisan interests and elect a representative to negotiate with a shill, posing as a Dean of Students. By electing a representative, the partisan group divided itself into representative-constituent components, with one person being the representative and two taking on the identities of constituents. The study had several built-in conditions, but the most useful one, as far as the second wave of students were concerned, involved constituent access to a source of information independent of a representative versus no such access whereby constituents were entirely dependent on the representative in regard to the representative's negotiation with the Dean of Students. Another built-in condition "stacked the deck" against the representative. The Dean was thoroughly coached by a positioned skill and was put in a position to bargain and negotiate in a much more sophisticated manner than any on the spot representative would be in. The typical end result was that the representative did not get what he (all males were used in this study) or his constituents hoped for or expected.

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17

One of the main questions guiding analysis of the study was how would the solidarity of the partisan triad be maintained in the face of defeat? The key study that third wave students found useful in conjunction with this question, and that had yet to be analyzed, involved friends who played the roles of partisan group members (Katovich, Weiland & Couch, 1981). Friends, having shared histories outside of the laboratory experiences, could draw upon such histories to produce complex talk and meanings that were not easily detectable, even with repeated re-viewing on audio-visual tape. But the analysis of partisan groups composed of friends provided an oppomanity for third wave new Iowa School interactionists to view and re-view how people with shared histories could incorporate their own agendas in conjunction with the agendas suggested to them by the researchers and positioners. The study had obvious risks. Most notably a "reverse demand characteristic" dynamic loomed as a distinct possibility. Whereas Orne (1962) predicted compliance to researchers' agendas in order to make themselves into "good subjects," friends could build off each others' playfulness to disrupt the study, or transform it from a serious laboratory study into a "theater of the absurd." But instead of absurdity, the friends combined informal talk, playfulness, candor, and comfortable exchanges (apparently disregarding the microphone and camera) to create lively and dramatic open awareness contexts (see Glaser & Strauss, 1964). Four noteworthy processes associated with this study served as a basis for subsequent third wave research and for making such research global in its appeal to non-Iowa interactionists. First, this RCS study of friends showed that the laboratory could indeed be a provocative stage for the construction and maintenance of volatile, yet purposive political acts (Sehested & Couch, 1986). The partisan friends, playing the roles of underdogs, created plans of action that allowed them to imagine themselves in opposition to a person occupying a legitimate place in the institution. In this light, as Fine (1992) noted later, the recognition by Iowa and Chicago school interactionists that institutional interaction could be seen as a dynamic process rather than as static outcomes provided interactionists with clues as to how people constructed and maintained asymmetric transactions. Second, the friends' interaction contradicted a key interactionist assumption that interaction in a laboratory environment denied emergence - or at least, denied emergent transactions as valid specimens to be analyzed. Termed "naturalism in the lab" (see Katovich, Saxton & Powell, 1986; Molseed, 1994), the new Iowa School created its own version of "Reality TV" by allowing subjects to act in ways that they see fit and to produce emergent outcomes. The RCS friends participated in their planning with a combination of joie de vivre

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

and competitive fire. They created plans of attack that the researchers and positioners did not anticipate, and they set out to, as one put it, "beat those bastards!" The friends infused resolute discourse and fantasy in their plans to elect a representative and to instruct the representative how to behave with the shill. Their creativity allowed for emergent variables to be coded and incorporated into the analysis of forthcoming sequences. They created the conditions for emergent stimuli and emergent consequences of this stimuli. One of the key emergent variables, the belief in their invincibility and underestimating the shill, became a key theme in regard to subsequent attempts to restore solidarity after experiencing unexpected defeat. Third, this particular RCS study became linked to a post Marxist orientation, drawing on Michels study of oligarchy and linking it to observable interaction processes generated in the laboratory. By demonstrating that representatives and constituents could better reconstruct solidary relations when constituents had access to an independent source of information, the third wave keyed on issues of democratic unity and the fate of open awareness contexts in political organizations (see Pestello & Saxton, 2000). This issue would serve as the groundwork for subsequent statements about autocratic relationships (Miller, Weiland & Couch, 1978), negotiations (Sink & Couch, 1986), and accountable relationships between superordinates and subordinates (Lutfiyya & Miller, 1986). Fourth, this particular RCS established discourse on the micro-macro connection, which had become a popular buzz phrase in the 1980s. The third wave fused the methodology of analytic induction (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) with a value added theory of elemental interaction (Loftand, 1970; Collins, 1981) to connect face-to-face talk with social forms of cooperation, conflict, competition, negotiated realities, and solidarity. In effect, the third wave of the new Iowa School set about to describe a mesostructure in the laboratory (Maines, 1985) that linked across-time microsocial acts with point-in-space macrosocial forms. The new Iowa School's version of the micro-macro connection provided analysis of obdurate worlds in controlled settings with attention to how people put hypothetical plans of action into pragmatic lines of action. CONCLUSION:

TAKING

IT TO THE STREETS

We have described three waves of empiricism on the prairie. One last fourth wave of the new Iowa School focuses on an ethnographic dimension of systematic research. Concepts and standpoints refined in the lab find application to the real life in real time worlds so esteemed by members of the Chicago School. This wave keyed on dramatic and everyday acts from taking leave of others (Leichty, 1986) to establishing moods in therapeutic encounters (Hardesty,

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19

1986) to falling in love (Katovich, 1997). It maintained its social and political consciousness to describe selling tactics as a systematic form of con artistry (Katovich & Diamond, 1986), democratic participation in bars where assignments of regular and non-regular identities become everyday and negotiated realities (Katovich & Reese, 1987), risk-taking behavior among working class employees in "dead-end" occupations (Kinkade & Katovich, 1997), and reintegration into a community after the experience of a traumatic event (Katovich & Hintz, 1997). The fourth wave also explored evocative discourse and being in time, again infusing political and social consciousness with emotional relationships. Seckman and Couch (1989) used the format of laboratory derived concepts to describe the elements and structure of sarcasm constructed by bosses and workers. Diekema (1991) employed new Iowa School concepts to distinguish being alone from loneliness as Simmelian social forms. Saxton and Katovich (1984) described how rich and healthy relationships can be maintained in everyday life, drawing ion the concepts of accountability and democratic planning in open awareness contexts from the third wave of studies. Another notable development occurred when researchers outside of the new Iowa School incorporated concepts and perspectives to inform their own writing. Descriptions of how social pasts become used in criminal courts (Ulmer, 1995) and in foster care (Power & Eheart, 2000) relied explicitly on third wave empiricist views of temporality and social pasts. Similarly, Maines and McCallion (2000) used the new Iowa School's emphasis on democratic planning and participation to discuss the impact of Church closings in urban neighborhoods. The aforementioned not only showed the utility of the new Iowa School's perspective, but also extended the fusion of micro processes and macro social structures. In closing, we propose an agenda that can carry on this fourth wave. When making sense of social worlds and providing abstract descriptions of their generic processes, what can new Iowa School interactionists accomplish as they study everyday life? Three things stand out from others. First, interactionists have taken Mead's revolutionary theory of time and temporality most seriously, and remain in the unique position to discuss social change and stability from a dynamic and cybernetic perspective. Explicit interactionist statements related to time and temporality provide the discipline with a greater range and depth of understanding of how emergent social processes relate to extant social contexts than the more conventional and functionalist interpretations have. Second, interactionists' have also found clear applications for Mead's cybernetic theory of action, ranging from the examinations of how dyads and triads interact in particular settings to how collectivities interact across settings.

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MICHAEL A. KATOVICH, DAN E. MILLER AND ROBERT A. HINTZ

With profound transformations related to political overhauls to interpersonal dynamics emerging across the world, interactionists occupy a privileged position to begin the "quest for universals" that apply to micro and macro sociological domains. Indeed, the ongoing quest to bridge micro and macro can be accomplished by and through the systematic examination of the social act, and how social acts become enveloped in other social acts. Third, the familiar interactionist focus on how selves and identities become activated and validated within social contexts can contribute to age old considerations of authentic identities and real selves. In this light, interactionism can locate itself between relevant psychological, dramaturgical, philosophical, anthropological, and political standpoints as it develops a key to understanding the universal processes of presenting selves and announcing identities - or getting socially and politically situated. Bringing the new Iowa School's formidable arsenal of concepts and sensibilities into issues of what constitutes authentic interaction and what constitutes a good opening as well as a good closing, can allow interactionists to take on moral questions as well as social and political ones.

REFERENCES Becker, H. S., & Geer. B. (1957). ParticipantObservationand Interviewing.Human Organization 16: 28-32. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Buban, S. L. (1986). Studying Social Processes: The Chicago and Iowa Schools Revisited. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 25--40). Greenwich,CT: JAI Press. Collins, R. (1981). On the Microfoundationsof Macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology, 86, 894-1014. Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and Social Order. New York: Schribner's. Cooley, C. H. (1918). Social Process. New York: Schribner's. Couch, C. J. (1995). Oh What Webs Those Phantoms Spin. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 229-245. Couch, C. J. (1987). Researching Social Processes in the Laboratory. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. J. (1970). Dimensionsof Associationin CollectiveBehavior Episodes. Sociometry, 33, 457-471. Couch, C. J., Katovich M. A., & Buban. V. S. (1994). Beyond Blumer and Kuhn: Researching and StudyingAcross-TimeData Through the use of Point-in-SpaceLaboratory Procedures. In: L. Reynolds & B. Herrman (Eds), Symbolic Interaction: An Introduction to Social Psychology (pp. 121-140). Dix Hills, NJ: General Hall Press. Conch, C. J., KatovichM. A., &. Miller, V. (1988). The SorrowfulTale of Small Groups Research. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 10: 258-279. Conch, C. J., Saxton, S. L., & Katovich. M. A. (1986). Introduction.In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. xvi-xxv). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

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Couch, C. J., & ttintz, R. A. (Eds) (1975). Constructing Social Life. Champaign, IL: Stipes. Diekema, D. (1991). Televangelism and the Mediated Charismatic Relationship. The Social Science Journal, 28, 143-162. Fine, G. A. (1992). Agency, Structure, and Comparative Contexts: Toward a Symbolic Interactionism. Symbolic Interaction, 15, 367-374. Geertz, C. (1974). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Harper & Row. Giddens, A. (1977). Studies in Social and Political Theory. New York: Basic Books. Glaser, B. J., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Glaser, B. J., & Strauss, A. L. (1964). Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction. American Sociological Review, 29, 669~679. Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places. New York: The Free Press. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Harper & Row. Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1-17. Hardesty, M. (1986). Plans and Mood: A Study in Therapeutic Relationships. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 209-229). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Hickman, C. A., & Kuhn, M. H. (1956). Individuals, Groups, and Economic Behavior. New York: Dryden Press. Hintz, R. A., Jr., & Miller. D. E. (1995). Openings Revisited: The Foundations of Social Interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 355-369. Hintz, R., & Couch, C. J. (1975). Time, Intention, and Social Behavior. In: C. J. Couch & R. Hintz (Eds), Constructing Social Life (pp. 26-45). Champaign, IL: Stipes. Holland, J. H. (1998). Emergence: From Chaos To Order. Reading, MA: Perseus. Katovich, M. A. (1997). Extending Couch's View of Romance: Intimacy, Social Relationships, and Social Forms. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. 149-164). Greenwich, CT: JAI Katovich, M. A. (1984). Symbolic Interactionism and Experimentation: the Laboratory as Provocative Stage. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 5, 49~7. Katovich, M. A., & Hintz, R. A., Jr. (1997). Responding to a Traumatic Event: Restoring Shared Pasts Within a Small Community. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 275-290. Katovich, M. A., & Reese, W. A. III. (1987). The Regular: Full Time Identities and Memberships in an Urban Bar. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16, 308-343. Katovich, M. A., & Diamond, R. (1986). Selling Time: Situated Transactions in a Non Institutional Environment. The Sociological Quarterly, 27, 253-271. Katovich, M. A., Saxton S. L., & Powell, J. (1986). Natttralism in the Laboratory. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 79-88). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Katovich, M. A., Weiland, M., & Couch, C. J. (1981). Access to Information and Internal Structures of Partisan Groups: Some Notes on the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The Sociological Quarterly, 22, 431-455. Kinkade, P. T., & Katovich, M. A. (1997). The Driver: Adaptations and Identities in the Urban Worlds of Pizza Delivery Employees. The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 25(4), 421-448. Kuhn, M. H. (1964). Major Trends in Symbolic Interaction in the Past Twenty-Five Years. The Sociological Quarterly, 5, 61-84. Kuhn, M. H., & McPartland, T. S. (1954). An Empirical Investigation of Self-attitudes. American Sociological Review, 19, 68-76.

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Leichty, M. (1986). Social Closings. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 231-248). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Lofland, J. (1970). Interactionist Imagery and Analytic Interruptus. In: T. Shibutani (Ed.), Human Nature and Collective Behavior (pp. 35-45). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Lutfiyya, M. N., & Miller, D. E. (1986). Disjunctures and the Process oflnterpersonal Accounting. In: C. J. Couch, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 131-147). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Maines, D. R. (1985). In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 267-279. Maines, D. R., Sugrue, N., & Katovich, M. A. (1983). The Sociological Import of George Herbert Mead's Theory of the Past. American Sociological Review, 48, 161-173. Maines, D. R., & McCallion, M. (2000). Urban Inequalityand the Possibilities of Church Based Intervention. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 23, 41-52. Mead, G. H. (1929). The Nature of the Past. In: J. Coss (Ed.), Essays in Honor of J. Dewey (pp. 235-242). New York: Henry Holt. Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1936). Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1938). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McPhail, C. (1979). Experimental Research is Convergent With Symbolic Interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 2, 89-94. McPhail, C., & Rexroat, C. (1980). Mead vs. Blumer: The Divergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism. American Sociological Review, 44, 449-467. Meltzer, B. M., & Petras, J. (1970). The Chicago and Iowa Schools of Symbolic Interactionism. In: T. Shibntani (Ed.), Human Nature and Collective Behavior (pp. 3-17). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Miller, D. E., & Hintz, R. A., Jr. (1997). The Structure of Social Interaction. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. 87-108). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Miller, D. E., Katovich, M. A., & Saxton, S. L (1997). Introduction. In: D. E. Miller, M. A. Katovich & S. L. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. ix-xii). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Miller, D. E., Weiland. M. W., & Couch, C. J. (1978). Tyranny. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1, 267-288. Miller, D. E., Hintz. R. A., Jr., & Couch, C. J. (1975). The Elements and Structure of Openings. The Sociological Quarterly, 16, 479-499. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford. Molseed, M. J. (1994). Naturalistic Observation in the Laboratory. Symbolic Interaction, 17, 239-252. Molseed, M. J. (1995). In: Loco Parentis: An Elaboration of the Parental Relationship Form. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 341-354. Orne, M. T. (1962). On the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications. American Psychologist, 17, 776-783. Pestello, F., & Saxton, S. L. (2000). Renewing the Promise of Pragmatism: Toward a Sociology of Difference. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 23, 9-29. Power, M. B., & Eheart, B. K. (2000). From Foster Care to Fostering Care: The Need For Community. The Sociological Quarterly, 41, 85-102.

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Saxton, S. L., & Katovich, M. A. (1984). Rich and Healthy Relationships: A Sociological Essay. In: P. Voyandoff, S. L. Saxton & A. Lukowski (Eds), The Changing Family (pp. 81-94). Chicago: Loyola University Press. Seckman, M., & Couch, C. J. (1989). Jocularity, Sarcasm, and Relationships: An Empirical Study. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18, 327-344. Sehested, G., & Couch, C. J. (1986). The Problem of Authoritarianism in Laboratory Research. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxt0n & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 61-78). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. K. Wolff (trans.). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Sink, B. B., & Couch, C. J. (1986). The Construction of Interpersonal Negotiations. In: C. J. Couch, S. L. Saxton & M. A. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (pp. 149-165). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Spitzer, S. P., Couch C. J., & Stratton, J. (1971). The Assessment of Self. Iowa City, IA: Sernoll Press. Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Josey Press. Turner, R. (1953). The Quest for Universals in Sociological Research. American Sociological Review, 24, 605-611. Ulmer, J. T. (1995). The Organization and Consequences of Social Pasts in Criminal Courts. The Sociological Quarterly, 36, 5874i05. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J., & Jackson, D. D. (1967). The Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: W. W. Norton. Zurcher, L. (1977). The Mutable Self. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage.

EMPIRICISM IN CYBERSPACE: THE NEW IOWA SCHOOL GOES ONLINE Shing-Ling S. Chen and Mark D. Johns

INTRODUCTION One of the significant contributions of Carl Couch's scholarship, aside from the qualitative laboratory approach that established Couch and his students as the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction, is Couch's research of information technologies in which he formulated a formal approach to examine media of communication. To reflect on the past achievement and forecast the future development of the New Iowa School, in this discussion the authors will demonstrate the importance of Couch's formal sociology of communication media in the context of the evolution of mass communication research. By considering the pitfalls of past mass communication research, the insights of Couch's formal approach are illuminated, and the validity of applying Couch's approach in studying the new media is confirmed. To further extrapolate on the validity of Couch's formal approach to study social interaction and relationships in cyberspace, an examination of the connections between Couch's principles of laboratory research and the environments for research in cyberspace is conducted. In addition, to illustrate the application of Couch's formal approach in studying social relationships in cyberspace, two studies are reported. A study of cyberspace as public spheres (Johns, 2001) serves to demonstrate study of the impacts of the Intemet on social relationships, whereas

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a study of eBay as a virtual marketplace (Goto Chang &Chen, 2000) serves to illustrate the social molding of Internet technology. Directions for future research on cyberspace are suggested at the end of the discussion. FORMAL

SOCIOLOGY

OF COMMUNICATION

MEDIA Carl Couch successfully incorporated Georg Simmel's (1964) formal sociology, George Mead's (1934) discussion of social processes, and Harold Innis' (1951) and Marshall McLuhan's (1964) Medium Theory to formulate a formal approach for the study of information technologies (Couch, 1984, 1989a; Chen, 1997). Couch's formal approach has yielded significant scholarship in the study of media of communication (Couch, 1989b, 1996; Couch & Chen, 1988; SI, 1995). Couch adopted Simmel's belief that the central focus of investigation is social interaction, and not individuals. Couch maintained that researchers should focus their attention on describing and articulating the forms of social interaction, not on the behavior of individuals. In addition, influenced by Innis' and McLuhan's writings, Couch also emphasized the examination of technological formats and how they impact social relationships. Innis, for example, held that every medium of communication carries with it inherent "biases" which make it more suited either for transmitting information over space or preserving information across time. McLuhan, on the other hand, asserted the impact of technological properties on medium users' perceptual experience. However, unlike other researchers who adopted Innis' and McLuhan's approach that centralized the medium of communication and were often characterized as "technological determinists," Couch saw the mutual interface between technological formats and social forms. Couch indicated that "media per se do not produce or maintain social relationships" (Couch, 1990, p. 112). Rather, Couch insightfully articulated the interactive relationship between technological properties and social structures, as he delineated in several analyses of how information technologies shaped, and were shaped by, social structures (Couch, 1990, 1996). What enabled Couch to detect the reciprocal relationships between social forms and technological formats was Mead's processual view of communication. Mead's processual view dictates the observation of communication across time, not taking a static one-point-in time standpoint. That is, the uses and impacts of a medium need to be examined in the process of social interaction in order to see the interface between a medium and the social s~ucture. Taking a processual view, Couch was able to examine how social forms molded the technological formats,

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and in turn, how social forms were structured by technological properties (Chen, 1997). Couch's formal approach is critical to media researchers, as it offers a tool to centralize the technological formats in the examination of the impact of media of communication on human interaction. His approach offered a more comprehensive means than what Innis and McLuhan had provided, as Couch inserted a human agency in the formulation which repelled the "technological determinism" criticism (Chen, 1995). Couch's comprehensive approach, that takes into account both technological formats and human agency, is crucial to mass communication research, as most communication researchers still do not recognize the importance of studying technological formats, and often quickly dismiss the analysis of technological formats as technologically deterministic. Uninformed by Couch's formal approach, communication researchers are dominated by an interest in studying media content, rather than media format. However, as the following discussion will show, the study of media content often generates a tentative and superficial outcome that does not address what is unique to the medium and audience experience. Studying the Electronic Media as Print

Although the study of media content does have its merit, the failure to consider the media format has been a critical flaw in communication research. Researchers cast the same questions that have been used to study the print media in their examination of the electronic media, and pose the same inqueries that have been used to study the electronic media to study the Internet. Being "medium blind," media researchers fail to see the impact of technological formats in the phenomena studied. By studying the television in the same way newspapers are studied, researchers failed to see what was intrinsic to the audience experience when using the television. Early television research examined the referential effect of the technology without knowing the full potential of television was in its evocative function. During the 1920s the motion picture industry thrust into the lives of the people in the United States. From 1929 to 1932 the Payne Fund Studies, a series of thirteen studies on various aspects of the influence of the movies on children, examined the effects of the exposure to the themes and messages of the films, the acquisition of information, and attitude and behavioral change (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The questions asked exhibited an emphasis on studying the films as print, in terms of the concern with the themes and messages, learning referential information, and the anticipated changes in attitudes and behavior. Instead researchers would have learned more by

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viewing the films as a form of electronic media having the emotive properties (Couch, 1996). In the 1940s, the U.S. Army, in an effort t o prepare the new recruits for World War II, made a series of seven films which was titled Why We Fight (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). These films were seen by thousands of Americans as they trained for war. A series of experiments were also conducted, aimed at assessing the degree to which exposure to the films resulted in changes in the recruits. The changes that the researchers were looking for were mainly the acquisition of factual information about the war, and modification in recruits' opinions. Again, the research questions cast with regard to the films were associated with the referential function more appropriate to the print media (Meyrowitz, 1985; Couch, 1996). The referential bias of studying the electronic media continued in the study of the effects of the television. In 1972, the Surgeon General released a report on the effects of televised violence on children, based on the findings of 23 research projects (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The focus of attention was the perceived causal relationship between TV and adolescent aggression. Researchers were concerned with the referential content of TV violence on learning and modeling on the part of the young audience. A tentative conclusion drawn was that the viewing of violent entertainment increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Researchers tried to make causal inference from data gathered in experimental and survey research. However, not all social scientists agreed with the conclusion. The studies on which the report was based were severely criticized. One of the criticisms was aimed at how the research question was cast, namely, studying the immediate learning effect of TV violence: Does exposure to violence lead children to specific acts of aggression? Some questioned whether TV may have indirect or long-term impact. In 1982, another report by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was published in which the question of TV violence and audience aggression was revisited. The report was published with an assumption that there was a positive relationship between televised violence and aggression, however, not all of the analyses on which this report was based supported the assumption (Lowery & DeFleur, 1988). The TV violence controversy continued. As one examines the TV violence controversy, obvious questions are: Are we asking the right questions? Are we missing something when the TV is studied in the same way (using the same research questions) as the study of newspapers (Shaw & McCombs, 1977), comic books (Thrasher, 1949), or leaflets (DeFleur & Larsen, 1948)? One of the reasons why the study of TV violence is often inconclusive can be attributed to the invalid research questions addressed. It seems that TV researchers were still guided by the

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concerns of the researchers of the print media - that is, the acquisition of referential information as a guide for subsequent behavior. Studies of the uses of newspapers established that the use of the medium assisted the acquisition of information about one's environment (the weather, domestic affairs, entertainment and consumer information), and how readers would often structure their behavior in accordance with the information gathered from reading the newspapers. The same referential concern dominated the TV research - how the audience acquired information from violent TV programs to structure their subsequent violent acts, regardless of the distinction of formal features between the newspaper and the television. TV researchers seemed to be long asking print based questions of an electronic medium. An invalid question contributes to the fact that TV violence research is often inconclusive, and TV violence remains a controversy. To properly address questions that are intrinsic to the formal properties of the electronic media, Couch argued that we need to attend to the evocative feature of the recording and broadcasting systems of the electronic media. Couch (1996) noted how audiovisual recordings are more evocative than written descriptions, and how films and videos are produced to intensify the emotive experiences of the audience. Couch brought our attention to the study of recordings and how they provide sensations that require little effort from listeners and viewers. In addition, Couch also called attention to study the broadcast media and how they favor the dissemination of evocative, ephemeral and dynamic symbols. "Increases in the prevalence of those types of symbols is conducive to the development of emotionality, change, and fluidity and the dilution of rationality, tradition, and rigidity" (Couch, 1996, p. 192). Although Couch did not advocate the split between the form and the content or the elimination of studying media content, he insisted on studying technological formats and how they have altered the formats of media content. A lesson learned from the era of early electronic media research is that researchers need to ask new questions when studying a new medium, and to fully recognize the distinct formal features of the medium. To do so, researchers need to move away from concentration on the content of the media, and take into account the formal properties that make a medium unique. Researching the Internet as TV

There seems to be a tendency among Internet researchers to study the Internet like the television - using questions investigating the impact of television on their study of the Internet. The tendency is evident, for example, in the works by researchers who study the uses and gratification of the Internet (Kaye, 1998;

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Stafford & Stafford, 1998). Uses and gratification research (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974) was deeply rooted in the research of the television effects. More specifically, this line of research grew out of a theoretical perspective that recognized the categorical differences in the media experiences of various audiences. Uses and Gratification (U&G) as an area of research made a major contribution to the field of mass communication by discovering the different audience experiences in using the television and radio. Challenging the mechanistic view that television and radio generate a uniform and powerful impact on the audience, U&G research provided needed insights into the different experiences of various groups of "couch potatoes." Nevertheless, questions which are suitable for studying "passive media" the television and radio - may not be fruitful for investigating an "interactive medium" - such as the Internet. Casting the same questions (used in TV research) for the Internet, we run the risk of missing the substance of Internet users' experience. When researchers study the Internet as the TV, the formal features that make the Internet unique from the TV are overlooked, and their impacts are unknown. What we gain as a result is an incomplete understanding of Internet use. U&G researchers (Kaye, 1998; Stafford & Stafford, 1998) informed us that learning is a salient benefit of Internet use, followed by passing time, and entertainment with the use of entertainment and sports web sites. E-mail correspondence is also another feature of the experience of the Internet. Although the U&G research contributed to our understanding of the different uses of the Internet, it fell short of taking into account the fact that the Internet, as an interactive medium, contributed to changes in social relationships due to this interactivity. All we seem to know is what a user does when he/she goes online, however, what happens after one goes online, the substantive changes of social relationships, is unknown. The picture provided by U&G research is "a user and a computer," which is incomplete in that it does not take into account interactivity. The picture of "a user and a medium" is valid with research of television and radio, but with research of the Internet a more accurate pictorial depiction should be "a user, a computer, and another user/institution/group," and the question to ask is "what are they doing with their computers?" instead of "what is one user doing with a computer?" Questions used to study the "couch potatoes" are simply inadequate to capture the activities and experiences of "online surfers." Therefore, Couch's focus on the formal examination of social interactions, and his simultaneous sensitivity to the environment for interaction which shapes, and is in turn shaped by various media technologies, offers a fresh approach

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to the study of mediated communication (Couch, 1989a, 1990, 1996). This approach overcomes the limitations of previous research orientations because it allows the formal features of each medium to be considered as integral to the communication process. The above discussion serves to pinpoint a common practice among communication researchers to study a new medium in the way an old medium was studied, the consequences of failing to recognize the formal features of a new medium, and studying a new medium using questions which were germane to the old medium. The authors would argue for the use of Couch's formal approach in studying the media of communication. Only by recognizing the formal characteristics that are intrinsic to the medium, can a researcher cast valid questions and capture the opportunities to provide an accurate and thorough understanding of the impact of any given medium. To echo Marshall McLuhan's well known statement, "the medium is the message," the authors would argue that "the medium is the research question."

L A B O R A T O R Y AND C Y B E R S P A C E To study social processes and relationships in a laboratory setting utilizing audiovisual recording is not only an approach that distinguishes the New Iowa School from other academic perspectives, but also a set-up that embodies all the sociological principles that Carl Couch advocated. In many ways, cyberspace presents a similar environment for the employment of those sociological principles which Couch believed to be fundamental to construct a sound understanding of social relationships. In this section, the authors will articulate the similarities of the laboratory setting and the online environment in terms of applying sociological principles to study social relationships. Magnified Setting and Filtered Environment

Couch (1987) advocated the use of the laboratory as it eliminates extraneous factors, and brings the research phenomena into focus. The laboratory as a controlled setting eliminates the interferences of unrelated factors that complicate the phenomena under examination. "The removal of extraneous factors facilitates the systematic examination of those events deemed critical for acquiring greater understanding of phenomena under examination" (Couch, 1987, p. 4). The laboratory setting "magnifies selected features of social life" (Katovich, 1984, p. 55), and highlights the phenomena under investigation. "When properly used, the laboratory is a provocative stage that elicits vibrant social processes" (Couch, 1987, p. 4).

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Cyberspace, although not a laboratory, offers a filtered environment where users focus their attention on certain topics. The topics (which include issues or events) serve as the shared foci for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dispersed users. Generally only topic-related issues are discussed. Users are "flamed" (i.e. receiving e-mail containing severe criticism or personal attack) when they ask questions unrelated to the ongoing "threads" (topics of discussions) or the purpose of the groups. It is noted that users of an actor's fan club flamed a user who posed a question about the presidential election (Petonito, 2001). Netiquette suggests that one should always "lurk" (reading without posting) before casting questions to an online discussion group, to ensure the adequacy of one's question. Therefore, efforts are made and safeguards are established to ensure having focused discussions online. The focused discussions, or the threads, are similar to the highlighted interaction featured in the laboratory, where the researchers see the interaction/communication in which they are interested brought to focus, and other extraneous factors are eliminated. While the controlled setting of the laboratory is imposed by the researcher, the filtered online environment is constructed among users themselves.

Artificial and Virtual Contexts An important principle that Couch advocated in his laboratory approach is to treat participants as intelligent agents who are able to anticipate, access each other's intention, and act with intentionality. This emphasis on the reflexive thinking and willful acts of participants distinguishes Couch's approach from traditional laboratory research where human subjects were only allowed to respond to stimuli, and not to interact. Based on this conception of participants, Couch instructed laboratory researchers to establish a context, assign identities, and provide a social objective for participants to interact in the laboratory. The context established is artificial in the way that it is created by the researcher to elicit the kind of social relationship under examination, and constructed using verbal instructions. The context created is the one that participants would accept at least for the duration of the laboratory research as authentic, and would use it to organize their action. "The subjects are asked to suspend their disbelief and consider the researcher's environment on his terms" (Katovich, 1984, p. 51). Internet users also suspend their disbelief when interacting with other users online. First of all, Internet users exercise reflexive thinking and willful acts when going online. Unlike some mass media of communication - television or radio - that call for passive consumption, Interuet usage requires active

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selection and participation. Therefore, online activities, even just browsing websites, requires constant reflexive decision making. Online users are similar to laboratory participants in the way that they are given the opportunity to anticipate (when expecting a response to one's post), access each other's intention (when reading others' posts), and act with intentionality (when composing their messages). In addition, cyberspace chat rooms, newsgroups, and mailing lists, aside from their textual presentation on the computer screen, really do not have a physical form in the corporeal environment. They are virtual environments for interaction. When interacting online, users accept the virtual environments as real and authentic, and produce social interaction that exhibits genuine emotions and substantive human experiences. Although the communication online produces genuine emotions and substantive experiences, the environment and process of communication is virtual in the sense that users are dispersed mad composing their communication in solitude (in case of textual presentations). Therefore, the context of participating in an online forum of discussion requires users to suspend their disbelief, accepting typing on the computer in solitude as a communal act. Assigned and Assumed Identities

In the laboratory, Couch instructed researchers to assign participants identities congruent to the context established. Couch also advised that it is desirable to assign identities that are consistent or compatible with participants' everyday identities. Individuals who align themselves with the management are assigned to play the managers, whereas people who are sympathetic to labor are assigned to play union leaders, in a research of workplace negotiation. The advantages of doing so include allowing participants to become more firmly situated in the context created, and also to have a better vocabulary for the enactment of identities assigned (Couch, 1987). In cyberspace, users do not have identities assigned to them, rather, they are free to assume any identity or identities as they wish. There is abundant literature discussing the freedom of assuming multiple identities online (Rheingold, 1993; Baym, 1995). When assuming a pseudo identity online, one organizes one's act based on one's conception of how that identity would act, and, in turn, experiences how others act toward that pseudo identity that one assumes. It is noted that a man can assume the identity of a woman, act toward others as a woman, and feel the experience of being a woman when others act toward him as a woman. It is also noted that a man who acts as a woman tends to be more feminine than other women online, as he organizes his act based

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on an understanding of stereotypical female characters often found in the popular culture (Kendall, 1998). Therefore, in the laboratory, the identities of participants are assigned, and usually are one identity per context, whereas in the online environment, participants are free to assume identities of choice and may assume multiple identities in one context. Whether the identities are assigned or freely assumed, laboratory participants and online users alike organize their exchanges with others based on their understanding of the identities and the context where they were situated. In the laboratory setting, a social objective, which is congruent to the context and identities assigned, is specified by the researcher that serves as the goal for the participants as they coordinate their interaction. Although the social objective serves as a focus of interaction, it does not guarantee a successful accomplishment of the goal at the end of a laboratory session. The open-ended outcome is also apparent in online interaction where the topic of discussion may serve as the shared focus, and users engage in exchanges with an assumption to reach a consensus. That consensus may not always be established at the end of the exchanges.

Processes and Sequences A distinct advantage of using audio-visual recording to study social interaction in the laboratory, according to Couch, is the ability of researchers to study social processes with precision. To study social processes requires researchers to describe the sequence of social acts. "At the minimum, it requires noting the sequential order of social events and specifying their formal qualities as well as their quantity" (Couch, 1987, p. 137). Couch also noted the importance of making across time observations of social phenomena in order to specify their sequential order. It is understood that field research, unaided by audio-visual technologies, can produce descriptions of social relationships. However, Couch observed that field notes, although rich in details, may lack the comprehensiveness and the precision that are captured in the laboratory research reports. Couch stated that there is a general lack of attention to sequential order by naturalistic observers in their reports. "Such [field] observations seldom are complete and accurate enough to allow for the precise specification of the sequential order of the construction of the elements of sociation that constitute various forms of social action and social relationships" (Couch, 1987, p. 153). The recording and play-back capacities of the video recording allow laboratory researchers to obtain a complete record of data, and examine the data over and over again to specify the sequences of social acts with precision.

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To be able to specify the sequential order of social acts requires the researchers to prepare the data for analysis-transcribing the video recordings. "Audio-visual recordings of social encounters contain so much data that it is usually impossible to complete an analysis of them by simply viewing and listening to the recordings" (Couch, 1987, p. 73). Couch noted that it is necessary to make transcriptions from the recordings before an analysis can be performed. "Transcribing the tapes is time consuming, but allows for a more complete and thorough analysis of the data" (Couch, 1987, p. 73). While laboratory researchers labor themselves to transcribe the video recordings for analysis, researchers of cyber-interaction already have their data prepared for analysis. After some ethical considerations are addressed (Shaft, 2000), online researchers could easily download the online correspondencewhich resembles a complete set of transcribed data - for analysis, no hassle of transcribing. The logs of online correspondence thus lend themselves to be analyzed for social processes with precision of sequential order. By pointing out the similarities between the laboratory setting and the online environment, the above discussion attempts to establish that cyberspace exhibits characteristics to generate fruitful analyses of social processes and relationships utilizing Couch's principles of formal sociology which he specified in his laboratory research. It is thus believed that Couch's approach, which has yielded a significant amount of scholarship in studying social processes and relationships offline both in the laboratory (Miller, Hintz & Couch, 1975) and in the field (Leichty, 1986; Hardesty, 1986), also demonstrates great utilities to study online processes and relationships. To further demonstrate the application of Couch's formal approach of media of communication, and his sociological principles in studying online interaction, two studies will be reported. To illustrate the study of technological shaping of social relationships, a study of newsgroup interaction (Johns, 2001) is reported, and another study of online bidding (Goto, Chang &Chen, 2000) is reported to demonstrate the study of social shaping of technology. These two studies serve to advance Couch's argument of studying the interactive relationship between social forms and technological formats.

CYBERSPACE AS PUBLIC SPHERES? In a study to investigate the formal features of social relationships in cyberspace Mark Johns examined the correspondence in three newsgroups over a period of five years (Johns, 2001). The entry of the research was an examination of the formal characteristics of computer-mediated communication

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(CMC). According to Johns, CMC is participatory, different from its mass mediated predecessors which prescribed a passive role for their users. Also, Internet users generally act alone and can freely participate or leave an online conversation. In addition, CMC offers the opportunity to take on multiple identities due to the lack of visual cues. The text-based communication on CMC also allows users to be more thoughtful and articulate when presenting their views than impromptu speech in the face-to-face situation. The above mentioned formal features of CMC impact on the forms of communication taking place and the social relationships online. First of all, Johns reported that the formal features of CMC generated a form of communication that is unique to lntemet users, for which he coined the term, "secondary literacy." This term is inspired by Walter Ong's term, "secondary orality," which denotes the form of oral communication prevalent in the electronic media. According to Ong (1982), secondary orality differentiates from "primary orality" which was utilized in the pre-literate era. Primary orality is an oral technology used in a face-to-face context. Secondary orality is an oral form that is utilized in a post-literacy/print era, that bears the imprints of literacy/print. Secondary orality, such as the dialogues in a television show, although delivered orally in a seemingly face-to-face situation, bears the characteristics of precision and standardization common to literacy and print. Secondary literacy, on the other hand, characterizes the textual form of communication online. It is a form of literate/textual communication, and yet, bears the imprints of the oral form. The text found in the online correspondence shows that text was used to mainly represent oral speech, as if the writer was "speaking" discursively. Online writers write for the ear, not for the eye, although the messages are received through the eye. Secondary literacy is evident in the use of emoticons, acronyms, informal words, and colloquial sentences in CMC. Secondly, the formal features of CMC also foster the establishment of shared foci and shared pasts among the users. When a message that has been previously posted in a newsgroup is responded to, a thread of communication is created. The threads demonstrate the presence of shared foci in cyberspace. Individuals who participate in thread construction thus have shared pasts. According to Johns, most of the threads are relatively short-lived, lasting only two or three days, involving two or three users. Some threads are long-winded and complicated, lasting over a long period of time (e.g. several weeks or months), involving many users. The threads represent a delayed conversation. However, users who are separated by space and time are able to construct a shared past with the use of CMC. The shared focus or the shared past created in online correspondence bears the precision associated with the use of print. The responding, quoting, and dissecting features of online correspondence make

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it possible for individuals to be precise about the point made, as well as accountable of their statements. In addition, the freedom of "surfing" the environment and the opportunities to take on multiple identities provide a sense of anonymity and impact on the social relationships generated online. For one thing, users generally are suspicious of others' claimed identities. In addition, anonymity allows for an egalitarian participation in online discussions. Traditional social distinctions and economic classes have much less significance to the relationships constructed online. Anonymity also prompts users to be honest and straightforward in stating their views. Users feel free to make statements which they would not make in a face-to-face context, without any concern of consequences. An outcome of honest and straightforward expression is that many users are often obscene and emotional. The ability to freely participate and withdraw from online discussions and the anonymity provided foster an online social organization that has a limited future. Although users may frequent some sites or newsgroups, there is no guarantee that they will come back the next day. Without knowing a user's identity in the corporeal environment, there is no assurance that users are what they claim, or that users will do what they say they will. The online relationships always remain fluid without any offline communication where identities can be confirmed and accountability of action can be established. The above discussion serves to demonstrate the use of Carl Couch's formal analysis in studying social relationships in cyberspace by showing the utility of centralizing the formal features of online technologies as an entry to investigating online relationships. Couch's formal approach helps capture the nuances of online relationships, and identify the forms of relatedness made possible by the use of a technology.

eBAY AS A VIRTUAL M A R K E T P L A C E To illustrate the social shaping of a communication technology, the following report details how Internet technology is used to facilitate auction and bidding online. Online auction and bidding embody two social forms-exchange and competition. The discussion serves to demonstrate that the uses and impacts of a technology are shaped by the social relationships, exchange and competition, that encase the technology. In a study of how the Internet was used to facilitate and advance auction and bidding (Goto, Chang & C h e n , 2000), the authors examined the activities that took place on eBay, an online auction site that allows individuals who have items for sale to put them up for bidding, and individual buyers to participate

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in bidding. In the study, the authors show how auction and bidding activities were pervasive and intensified by the use of the Internet technology. Data of the study were generated from in-depth interviews of veteran eBay users. The study shows that users utilize the online technology to construct eBay as a variety shop, a discount store, as well as a competitive arena. First of all, eBay users utilized various Interuet features and constructed eBay as a variety shop that provides a wide variety of goods, as well as a convenient and informed shopping experience. The capacities of the Internet to itemize, categorize, and search were utilized to provide an inventory of items for sale, which can be accessed by typing in a keyword search. In addition, the discursive feature of the textual presentation on CMC, accompanied by capacities to link with other online sites and to have visual presentations, were used to provide both textual information, visual demonstration, and other online links to assist in informed decision making. Indexing and itemization were created to make it easy for potential shoppers to look for items in which they were interested in a speedy fashion, simply by typing in the names of the items. The computer search would quickly present a list of the items that the users were searching for and show how many were for sale, what the current highest bids were, and how many bids had been placed. The information presented is systematic, which resembles the inventory list in traditional stores. Furthermore, text-based computer mediated communication is used to allow sellers to present descriptive information about their items for sale. By reading these descriptions, buyers are informed about the details of the products. Some sellers even provide links to other online information sources that have more in-depth discussions or evaluations of the items for sale. To facilitate buyers' understanding and enhance their trust in the descriptions provided, many sellers provide pictures of the items for sale. A visitor to eBay would often be stunned by the variety of items that others have placed for sale. The experience of browsing through the list of items for sale is a pleasant journey for many. One respondent stated, "You can find anything, it was captivating and it keeps you looking for little hidden things from your past." Another stated, "Sometimes I just go on there (eBay), just to see what's on there, but I have to tell myself that I don't need anything on there. Otherwise, I will get caught up in it, and that's not good." Respondents enjoy eBay not only for the variety of goods offered, but also for the low prices and great savings. The participatory and interactive features of CMC were fully utilized to allow anyone who had an item for sale to be able to post their item on eBay, and allow anyone who was interested in

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the item to place a bid. Dispersed buyers and sellers utilize the Internet to extend their interest in exchange as they congregate, post items for sale, make bids, and complete transactions via the Internet. Posting items for sale and bidding are all accomplished in the comfort of one's own home. Computer networks are used to create convenient home selling and shopping experiences. Items for sale are generally pre-owned products with a price lower than the retail price. The perceived remarkable savings induces buyers to visit eBay. One stated, "It saves the hassle of shopping around looking for the best deal in town. On eBay, you know you will always get the best deal, you are not ever going to pay the wholesale even, or retail for that matter." Another stated, "The least amount I saved by shopping on eBay is 50%, I usually saved 50% or more, which is awesome." Many echoed the savings and low prices, especially for electronics on eBay. As one said, "The first thing that I bid on was a Nintendo 64 game, because Nintendo games were so outrageously priced in the stores as high as $50 a piece. The starting bidding price was $5 or $10, so I was like Geeeeese!!" Bidding on eBay is a complex reflexive act. The bidder has to take into account the item, and his/her own budget. Adding to that complex reflexive act is the competition against other bidders. Bidders across the country utilize the Internet to have three shared foci (the item for sale, the current highest bid, and his/her own budget), and engage in the competition of bidding. A competitive mode generates hatred and aggression toward other bidders. A respondent reported, "Especially if you have one person bidding against you, you sort of get this hatred for them - Oh, that jerk, he is trying to outbid me. I will show him, I will go up $50, instead of $25, this time." Another respondent stated, "It sounds stupid, but I wasn't going to let just one bid get me. I am a competitive person anyway, so, I didn't want somebody whom I had never seen get that product. I want to win. I want to get the product, I don't care, I just want this." Features of the Internet were utilized by eBay users to engage in the competition of bidding, eBay users utilize the instant update of the computer technology to check the current standing of the competition, and respond with higher bids if necessary. As the time approaches the closing of the bidding, the intensity of emotions and frequency of checking increase. One respondent reported, "I had to rearrange my schedule for that day when the sale was ending so that I could make sure that I was by my e-mail, just in case anything changed, I could quickly go to the site and re-bid." One complained that the instant update simply was not fast enough due to the intensity of the competition, as he stated,

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One time I was winning an auction. At the ending moment of the auction, I counted it down from three minutes. It didn't have a continuous clock, you have to reload your page to see how much time left, so, I keep reloading my page so it kept updating the time as the count down would go, I would do it every five seconds. Sometimes the computer screen did not update as fast as an anxious person would like it to. The Internet is utilized by dispersed bidders across the country to focus their attention on the same bid at the same time and to compete with one another in real time. The fact that there is someone out there (i.e. outside of one's immediate corporeal environment) engaging in competition with oneself via the Intemet is a fascinating phenomenon to some eBay users, as one reported, "One time I made a bid five minutes before it was over, and I was sure that nobody was going to be on the computer that was going to outbid me. But, somebody was. Somebody somewhere else in this country or world was on there at the same time. It was weird." With the use of the Internet, eBay users engage in bidding competition with one another. The experience of winning a bid is victorious. One respondent stated, When I won the bid, I kind of had a sense of victory because your user name goes on the screen as who the highest bidder is. Your name goes there. It's exciting. It shows that you are triumphant, and you got what you wanted there. It is a good feeling that you can out-smart your competitors, and now you can get the product. It's a sense of success. In sum, the above study of eBay demonstrates how social relationships of exchange and competition structure how the Internet technology is used. Various features of the Internet technology are utilized to extend the exchange between buyers and sellers, and the competition among bidders online. The report illustrates that the Internet does not have pre-determined uses or impacts, rather, is structured by the social relationships that encase the technology. CONCLUSION Clearly, the thinking of Carl Couch provides the foundation for a fruitful approach to the study of mediated interactions, particularly as new media for communication emerge. Not only does the theoretical basis of the New Iowa School provide a conceptual grounding for understanding the relationships between media technologies and those who utilize them for communication, but further, Couch's methodological approach is easily translatable to the virtual laboratory of cyberspace.

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By fusing Simmel's insistence that sociologists must focus on the forms of sociation, with Mead's discussion of temporality, and adding Innis' and McLuhan's sensitivity to the biases of various technological formats, Carl Couch has provided researchers with a conceptual framework which adequately encompasses the full range of variables encountered in mediated communication. This combination of foci centralizes social interaction in the analysis of communication behaviors while acknowledging the role of technological formats in the interaction. Couch's framework maintains the primacy of human agency and avoids the trap of technological determinism, yet fully recognizes and accounts for the influence of the medium of communication in the communicative process. By recognizing technological formats as a constituent element of the process of mediated communication, Couch has overcome the limitations of previous conceptual systems which tie themselves to the biases and characteristics of a particular medium. In addition, Carl Couch has contributed powerfully to the repertoire of available research methodologies for studying mediated communication by delineating the specific attributes of the laboratory as an environment for the study of interaction. Because these attributes of context, identity, and sequential analysis are transferable to a variety of settings - given the appropriate technology - Couch's methodological approach opens the door to a range of possible laboratory environments not previously considered. Not inconsequential among these is the virtual laboratory presented to researchers in the various forms of Computer Mediated Communication. While only two brief examples of the employment of CMC as a laboratory environment are reviewed here - one illustrating the impact of the medium on social interaction, and another demonstrating the shaping of the technological format to fulfill the demands of the interactions taking place - they hopefully serve to point the reader toward additional possibilities for research of this type. As this line of research continues develop, it will become clear that both the conceptual and methodological nucleus of the New Iowa School provides a most excellent foundation on which to build understanding of the new media environment of the twenty-first century.

REFERENCES Baym, N. (1995). The emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. In: S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (pp, 138-163). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chen, S.-L. (1995). Couch, C.: Bridging Sociology and Communication. Symbolic Interaction, 18(3), 323-340.

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Chen, S.-L. (1997). Couch C. and the formal sociology of information technology. In: D. Miller, M. Katovich, & S. Saxton (Eds), Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms (pp. 177-202). Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Supplement 3. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. (1984). Constructing Civilizations. Greenchwich, CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. (1987). Researching Social Processes in the Laboratory. Greenwich. CT: JAI Press. Couch, C. (1989a). From hell to utopia and back to hell. Symbolic Interaction (Fall), 265-279. Couch, C. (1989b). Social Processes and Relationships: A Formal Approach. New York: General Hall. Couch, C. (1990). Mass communication and state structure. Social Science Journal, 27, 111-128. Couch, C. (1996). Information Technologies and Social Orders. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Couch, C., & Chen, S-L. (1988). Orality, literacy and social structures. In: D. Malnes & C. Couch (Eds), Communication and Social Structure (pp. 155-171). Springfield, IL: Charles C, Thomas. DeHeur, M., & Larsen, O. (1948). The Flow oflnformation. New York: Harper and Brothers. Goto, C., Chang, L., &Chen, S-L. (2000). eBay as a virtual marketplace. Unpublished manuscript. Hardesty, M. (1986). Plans and mood: A study in therapeutic relationships. In: C. Couch, S. Saxton & M. Katovich (Eds), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 209-229). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Innis, H. (1951). The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johns, M. (2001). Cyberspace as public spheres? Iowa Journal of Communication, 33(2), forthcoming. Katovich, M. (1984). Symbolic interactionism and experimentation. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 5, 49-67. Katz, E., Blumler, J., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Utilization of mass communication by the individual. In: J. Blumler & E. Katz (Eds), The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratification Research (pp. 19-32). Beverly Hills: Sage. Kaye, G. (1998). Uses and gratification of the World Wide Web: from couch potato to Web potato. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 6, 21-40. Kendall, L. (1998). Meaning and identity in "Cyberspace": The performance of gender, class and race online. Symbolic Interaction, 21(2), 129-153. Leichty, M. (1986). Social closings. In: C. Couch, S. Saxton, and M. Katovich (Eds.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction: The Iowa School (Vol. 1, pp. 231-248). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Lowery, S., & DeFleur, M. (1988). Milestones in Mass Communication Research. New York: Longman. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mead, G. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, D., Hintz, R., & Couch, C. (1975). The elements and structure of openings. The Sociological Quarterly, 16, 479-499. Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen. Petonito, G. (200l). Issues in gaining access to an on-line community. Paper presented in the annual Midwest Sociological Meetings, St. Louis, Missouri. Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Shaft, B. (2000). Beyond netiquette: The ethics of doing naturalistic discourse research on the Internet. In: S. Jones (Ed.), Doing Internet Research (pp. 243-256). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Shaw, D., & McCombs, M. (1977). The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agendasetting Function of the Press. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company. Simmel, G. (1964). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: The Fress Press. Stafford, T., & Stafford, M. (1998). Uses and gratification of the World Wide Web. In: D. Muehling (Ed.), The Proceedings of the 1998 Conference of the American Academy of Advertising (pp. 174--182). Pullman, WA: American Academy of Advertising. Symbolic Interaction, 1995, 18(3)(Fall), Special Issue: Essays in Honor of C. J. Couch. Thrasher, F. (1949). The comics and delinquency: Cause or scapegoat. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 23(1), 195-205.

COCKROACH CULTURE Dan E. Miller

I ' v e had lots of summer jobs. Once I had a one-day gig in a foundry working on the shakeout crew. I got burned twice. As an Iowa Boy I stacked hay seven bales high and I dug postholes. The oddest job came while I was in college when I served as a professional audience in a social psychology study. My undergraduate career was typical for a male in the late 1960s. My life was mostly concerned with peripheral involvements; most required money. I was continually short on cash. Good fortune shone on me one day when a friend who was a graduate student in psychology told me over cheap beers that I could make two dollars an hour for three or four hours of work a day. For this easy money all I had to do was be an audience in a study being conducted in the psychology labs. My job was to be the "social" in a social psychology experiment. This was fine with me. It was steady work for three months and a hell of a lot easier than digging postholes. The next day I met with my friend Rick and the psychologist running the study. Just by being a twenty-one year old male I was qualified for the job. They wanted me to shave and wear a coat and tie - to look professional. I had to be prompt and reliable. They gave me a tour of the laboratory building and the rooms in which the study was being conducted. They ran through the experiment and my role in it. For my part I had little to do and nothing to say. I was a graduate student observer - a "Professional Audience." I wasn't sure how this would look on my resume', but the job was easy. My "presence" in the study was needed only for short periods of time. ! would go into Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 45-48. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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the room, be introduced, and sit there "observing" the subject while he (only undergraduate males in this study) copied random numbers in order as quickly as possible. The psychologists were interested in how a professional audience might facilitate such behavior. With the exception of a few mechanical difficulties the study and my summer went smoothly. I didn't make enough money to move up to premium beer, but I did make enough to pay the rent, buy groceries, and go out on the occasional date. Two years later I was a graduate student in sociology - studying social psychology. One afternoon early in the term I was chatting with some other students and a couple of faculty members about undergraduate research experiences when one of the professors e x c l a i m e d - "Social facilitation! I ' v e got a new book on it. It's really great." He ran to his office, got the book, pointed out a chapter and suggested that we meet in a day or two - to discuss it. I was trapped. How could I refuse? I couldn't, so I read the chapter on Social Facilitation by Robert Zajonc. In this chapter Zajonc reports on the replication of a classic study using cockroaches as research subjects. Already I regretted agreeing to read this chapter. It was dreadful. In the chapter Zajonc discusses how cockroaches have a dominant behavioral trait - they run from the light to darkness. Most students are familiar with this trait - witnessing it every evening when they turn on the kitchen light. In the study the cockroach behavior was measured in a T-maze - a T-shaped box with a light attached t o the single end. One at a time, cockroaches were placed in the maze and then the light was turned on. The cockroaches were timed on how long it took them to move from light to darkness. Once these base-line measurements were made the researchers added complexity. Two cockroaches at a time were studied - to see if the presence of another affected the speed of the dominant response. Then the researchers constructed a sort of peanut gallery populated by a number of cockroaches who were present as on-lookers, but not in the maze itself. Thinking it may not be the actual presence of the cockroaches that affect behavior the researChers boiled down some cockroaches into a paste - a sort of eau d'cockroach - and spread it in the maze. Finally, the researchers put up a metallic tape - to reflect the light and act like a mirror. In each condition the researchers measured the time it took the cockroaches to get into darkness. Something odd and unexpected happened, though. As the researchers progressed through the conditions, they began to discuss the cockroaches as if they were human. The second cockroach was "the other." The cockroaches in the peanut gallery were called an "audience." This tendency was most pronounced in the metallic tape condition. Here, the cockroaches apparently went to the tape and lingered. They were described as self-absorbed, vain, and

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narcissistic. I thought that at any minute one of them would be caught combing his hair. I was having a little difficulty grasping the concept of cockroach vanity, but I kept at it and finished the article. In the conclusion the author generalized from his findings to similar patterns of behavior in humans. Unfortunately, the replication was not altogether successful. A number of results were not replicated. The author suggested that a different species of cockroach used might be a reason for the failure. I was uneasy with the prospect of a study that could not be replicated, but could then be generalized. Still, I was determined to see it through. Heading off to meet with the professor, I grabbed the book and my notes. Fearing a career in cockroach research I took a deep breath and decided to challenge the study. I laid it all out, the T-maze, the peanut gallery, the eau d'cockroach, the vanity, and the fact that while the researcher could not generalize across species of cockroach he had no qualms about generalizing across the entire animal kingdom. At the end of my presentation I blurted out, "As Hemingway suggested, I have developed a shit detector, and this is shit! !" By that time the professor was laughing out loud. Out in the hallway I heard more laughter. Two other professors entered the office chuckling. "I told you he would take it seriously and that he would get it." Apparently, I had passed a test. As we all stood in that office laughing at my feeble attempt at being the earnest graduate student I realized that my experience in the psychology experiment was similar to that of the cockroaches. That study two years earlier had set up a Kafkaesque environment where humanity was brutally assaulted by bureaucratic and professional constraints. As a professional audience I had actually played the role of cockroach. As a cockroach, but unlike Zajonc's cockroaches, I had no vanity, no goals, and no intelligent response. I was ean d'other - the boiled-down essence of social in accordance with the principles of social facilitation theory. As an audience I did not move, talk, show interest, or display emotion. I was detached to the point that my only involvement in the situation was a non-responsive physical presence. I was present but not available. In the world of these social psychologists, social situations are only marginally social. The manifold dimensions of social situations are not incorporated. Others don't talk, think, or act. Rather, they are reduced to the absurdity of mere presence. There is no true co-presence, no mutuality, no sociability, no conflict, no cooperation, no parallel and no reciprocal alignment in these worlds. Interaction is too messy; it must be minimized. These are not the worlds occupied by most humans. The worlds of social facilitation theorists can be found in prisons, psychology research laboratories,

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and mental hospitals - places where humans are reduced to their mere presence. This was not how it was to be at the Center for Research in Interpersonal Behavior (the CRIB Lab) at the University of Iowa. Here in 1969 the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction was transformed from one constrained by paper and pencil tests and measures of self to one dedicated to isolating and understanding elementary social processes. Carl Couch, his associates, and his students developed a laboratory that allowed for the systematic study of social interaction. Incorporated into the laboratory was video-recording technology that was used to record and analyze the forms of interaction under scrutiny. Over the years the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction would conduct dozens of these studies in all the ways ignored by the social facilitation theorists. Never were the data compromised or collapsed. The participants in the studies were never reduced to primary traits or mere presence. For me in those few days Carl Couch and Frank Kohout had initiated a sequence in a learning act - an act far more complex than receiving positive reinforcement for a proper response. I was given a prop, a role, and a purpose in a social act. How I chose to use the prop, develop the role, and what perspective I chose in relation to the purpose of the act was up to me. The act called for the association of two related experiences - as a professional audience and as a cockroach in a social psychology experiment. Also, in projecting the completion of the learning act the professors anticipated knowledge of Kafka, a predilection to challenging perceived authority, an incipient reinterpretation of my own history, and a critical reading of the study from an interactionist perspective. The collective laughter at my expense cemented an act of solidarity that still holds today. That afternoon the four of us went out to drink some beer. It was premium beer.

EXPANDING THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRAGMATISM AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: A TRIBUTE TO GIDEON SJOBERG Elizabeth Gill

In January of 1998 I was approached by the late Stanley Saxton who suggested that a session honoring Gideon Sjoberg and his relationship to symbolic interactionism would be a timely addition to the program of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in San Francisco later that year, He invited me to join him in organizing the session which came to be titled "Gideon Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No." However, it should be noted that several significant alterations have since been made in the agenda of the 1998 session. First, after realizing .that Gideon's general scholarly agenda with respect to pragmatism and symbolic interactionism had never been surveyed in one place, Stan and I decided to invite him to outline his views. He generously agreed. The resultant biographical account also provides a social context within which to interpret the essays included herein. Sadly, with Stan's unexpected death, further changes were required. Stan had intended to elaborate upon his introductory comments at San Francisco in which he would portray Gideon as Simmel's "stranger." Finally, it became evident that the papers do considerably more than address the question whether Gideon is a symbolic interactionist. "Expanding the Possibilities of Pragmatism and Symbolic Interaction" reflects the intentions of the authors and the contents of this collection.

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I will comment briefly on some of the common themes that run through Gideon's work and are echoed, expanded upon, and modified in the following essays. First is the theme of the social mind, which is the foundation of Gideon's intellectual agenda and is touched upon in every item in the collection. Gideon has been one of the few sociologists to emphasize the importance of the social mind rather than the social self. His focus on the social mind serves to animate the human actor by acknowledging reflectivity in the process of activity. The advantages that arise by focusing on the social mind, rather than the social self, are articulated in the contributions of Norma Williams, Elizabeth Gill, and Boyd LittreU. Williams argues that the social mind, with its reflective consciousness, is central to the process of taking the roles of multiple others and the need to engage in the making of new inclusionary roles, thus improving understanding among persons from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Ultimately, her reliance on Mead and Dewey opens up the possibility of an elaboration of a social order based on cultural diversity. My own contribution examines the centrality of the social mind in creatively carving out space within large-scale organizations and in reshaping the constraints placed upon their activities. Sjoberg's proactive agent, who is bound by the constraints within the organizational context but capable of reflectively interpreting and reinterpreting the rules, provides the basis for my analysis of the volunteer within the medical setting. LittreU' s piece touches on the centrality of the social mind for Sjoberg's distinctive methodological position - a matter to which I return below. Another recurrent theme throughout Gideon's work, elaborated in the essays herein, is the need for incorporating the issue of organizations into the interactionist agenda. Gideon's emphasis on the social mind enables him to sketch out an alternative orientation regarding the relationship between large-scale organizations and human agents, one that acknowledges the complex relationship between the two. As for my own research, I find the hospice volunteer to be more proactive with respect to structure than Weber and symbolic interactionists have acknowledged, but, by the same token, more influenced by the constraining and creative possibilities of organizations than the pragmatists and Jurgen Habermas wish to concede. Gideon's alternative Meadian framework allows for the capability of the human agent to reflectively use and manipulate the social structure. In a methodological vein, Lyng's analysis of counterinductive methods, growing out of Sjoberg's emphasis on countersystem analysis, allows us to examine structural patterns that lie beyond traditional SI inquiry. The third theme played out in these essays, and the driving force behind Gideon's body of work, is the importance of the "moral dimension" as a

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sociological issue. Gideon argues that a pragmatist conception of human nature, based on the reflectivity of the social mind, is an essential feature of humanness and central to the human rights project. Williams's call for the recognition of difference through the process of role taking and the need to construct new inclusionary roles specifies some of Gideon's agenda with regard to similarities and differences among participants in a democratic social order. Lyng examines the use of the logic of counterinductive analysis in order to gain a greater understanding of the self, thus lending support to Sjoberg's belief that countersystem analysis is implicit in the search for new moral categories that are part of the human fights project. The final theme focuses on methodology, which is intimately related to the other three. This finds expression in all four papers but most explicitly in the contributions of Lyng and Littrell. Littrell defines Gideon as a methodologist a student of methods - who has resisted the standardization of the positivist orientation and fashioned a conception of objectivity that calls for comparing dissimilar perspectives and experiences. Littrell's analysis emphasizes Gideon's search for a form of objectivity that acknowledges a "multiplicity of standpoints" within the context of sustaining intellectual pluralism. Lyng elaborates on the concept of countersystem analysis and advocates the use of what he terms counterinductive analysis for the explication of the self. Ultimately the use of countersystem analysis can add a critical and emancipatory component to symbolic interactionist reasoning. Taken as a whole, the essays set forth a set of theoretical and methodological principles that expand upon the creative possibilities of the pragmatist and symbolic interactionist tradition with regard to such issues as democracy, social justice, and human fights and provide new clues for explicating the complex interrelationship between proactive human agents and organizations. In conclusion, it was the wish of the late Stan Saxton and the session contributors that a "home" be found for the papers that emerged from the session. We are grateful to Studies in Symbolic Interaction for generously providing such a forum.

MY MOVE INTO SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND PRAGMATISM Gideon Sjoberg

Two main themes anchor this adumbrated autobiographical account of how I came to incorporate key tenets of symbolic interaction and pragmatism into my sociological worldview. First, in recent years I have been asked on several occasions: "How did you come to adopt core elements of symbolic interaction and pragmatism?" Second, there is a related matter: How have symbolic interactionism and pragmatism come to fit into my own scholarly pursuits? My commitment to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism can not be culled from my early training at the University of New Mexico and Washington State University, nor is this perspective reflected in my early writings. In effect, I am a latecomer to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism, and this has had considerable bearing on my particular intellectual activities. It is true that my early publications on the city involved a direct engagement with the Chicago School, and my early publications on methods and methodology incorporated selected concepts of the Chicago School. Moreover, when I arrived at Texas over a half-century ago, I often heard it said that the University was an outpost of Chicago (and its pragmatism). In a sense this was the case, since David Miller, a philosopher and premier student of George Herbert Mead, was a presence on campus, and the economist Clarence Ayres, a Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 55-73. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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Deweyan instrumentalist of sorts, was highly influential. Moreover, sociologists such as Warner E. Gettys and Carl Rosenquist identified with the Chicago School, although neither espoused, in any explicit way, a symbolic interactionist or pragmatist perspective. Although this setting perhaps indirectly affected me, my encounters with selected individuals can be more readily remembered and documented. For me the turning point was the arrival in Texas of Richard Colvard in the late 1950s. He was completing his doctoral dissertation at UC (Berkeley), and was seeking to bridge the gap between the organizational theorizing of Philip Selznick and the symbolic interactionism advanced by Herbert Blumer; both scholars served on his dissertation committee. The problem with which Colvard grappled - the interrelationship of agency and social organization - became my own a number of years later. It was my extended conversations with him that led me to delve seriously into works associated with symbolic interactiouism, and through these conversations I became more consciously reflective about employing my everyday experiences as a foundation for my larger sociological endeavors. This move into symbolic interaction, initiated by my interaction with Dick, was reinforced by the arrival of Ted Vaughan as a graduate student in the early 1960s. He had developed, largely on his own, a commitment to Mead. We had countless discussions about the state of sociology and then collaborated on various projects for a number of years. (It should be noted that Ted never took a course from me, nor could I serve on his dissertation committee, a situation briefly explained below.) In addition to Colvard and Vanghan, Buford Farris and Richard Brymer, with whom I worked as a consultant at the Wesley Community Centers in San Antonio, pulled me in the direction of SI, for Brymer, as a result of his doctoral training at Michigan State, was steeped in Mead. Much later such distinguished scholars as Louis Zurcher and David Snow were my colleagues at Texas, and they reinforced my commitment to SI and to pragmatism. Still, my personal encounters and my readings were part of a larger social context at the University of Texas. In the late 1950s I began a period of "political exile" which resulted from the replacement of the old guard, who were in the process of retiring, by a new guard brought in from the outside. For about five or six years I was pointedly excluded from offering any graduate courses or serving on theses or dissertation committees, and my salary was essentially frozen. I could not then and can not now interpret my own interaction with other members of the department and students without taking account of the larger organizational context in which my activities were embedded and shaped. Overlapping in time with this exile was the rise of the student movement at Texas. My own longstanding proclivity to question the

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social and cultural order was propelled forward by these students and their challenge to formal authority systems as well as to deeply ingrained life styles. Although I never participated directly in their activities and protests, I talked with them at length in the student union, and a number attended my classes. They called upon me to re-examine some of my sociological presuppositions. Although I do not glamorize the 1960s, it was nonetheless a period of social ferment that significantly affected my sociological worldview in that it made me keenly aware of human agency on the one hand and powerful organizations on the other. For a few years in the late sixties I taught at the City University of New York, and upon returning to UT, I wanted to address a set of problems that differed somewhat from my wide-ranging historical and cross-cultural research on the city and my writings on methodology (or the logic of inquiry). Having edited the book Ethics, Politics, and Social Research (1967) I was committed, in general terms, to doing more in the realm of the sociology of ethics. My emerging premise was that if sociologists are expected to be ethical in their research efforts they should be able to articulate the more general moral principles that guide their actions. In fact, I had by the late sixties come to delve into the sociological implications of genocide, co-authoring an essay (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1970) on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. One of Eichmann's justifications for his actions with regard to genocide was that he was simply obeying superior orders. A few years earlier, I had written (Sjoberg, Brymer & Farris, 1966) on how bureaucracy (or formal organizations) serves to keep the lower class in their place. This research emerged as a spin-off of an NIMH-funded project, for which I was a working consultant, on the nature of gangs among poor Mexican Americans in San Antonio. While I was aware that organizations have a moral component, I was still some intellectual distance from being able to articulate this in a sociologically informed manner. It was within this intellectual mix that symbolic interactionism and pragmatism would emerge as central. What bears repeating is that I was well along in my sociological career before turning to symbolic interactionism and to pragmatism in order to resolve a particular set of sociological problems. Although most SI persons I have known adopted a considerable part of their framework during the course of their graduate studies, that was not my life experience. As my stumbling intellectual activities have unfolded, at least four interrelated facets to symbolic interactionism and pragmatism have come to loom large. One is the concept of the "social mind," a second is the relationship of human agents to organizations, a third is a concern with the sociology of social justice and human rights, and a fourth is an effort to

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grapple with the matter of alternative futures. In elaborating upon these issues, one comes to perceive how they are intertwined with one another. First on the matter of the social mind: although sociologists such as Charles Smith (1982) have explicitly stressed the centrality of this concept, most symbolic interactionists continue to emphasize the social self and downplay the social mind. Yet Mead's best-known work was titled Mind, Self and Society (1934), and Dewey emphasized the role of intelligence among human agents. While readily acknowledging the saliency of the self, I find the social mind to be a more compelling notion. It is the capacity of human beings, in the context of social interaction with others, to become reflective about themselves and the ongoing interaction process - in effect to think about thinking in the process of carrying out action - that is the singularly most defining feature of what it means to be human. A number of advantages accrue from placing priority on the social mind rather than upon the social self. In my studied view, it is through the social mind that the social self comes to be defined. It is through the social mind that human agents reflect upon themselves and engage in dialogues with themselves and with others. It is through the social mind that they come to take the roles of others within various social situations. In the process one's self-concept is reinforced or redefined. It is this reflectivity that distinguishes the social mind from the social self. Additionally, it is through the social mind that social memory comes into play. What we forget and what we remember, both having emerged within interaction contexts, are also shaped by the nature of reflectivity (a process that still awaits careful explication). And it is through the social mind that one can begin to contemplate the manner in which human agents respond to both opportunities and constraints. Although one wing of symbolic interactionism has grappled with societal reactions toward deviance (thereby focusing some attention on the constraints with respect to human action), symbolic interactionists have yet to appreciate how reflectivity can offer human agents, within everyday interaction settings, opportunities to overcome, to by-pass, or to reshape the social constraints upon their activities. In so far as human agents remain rather oblivious to the nature of these constraints it often becomes more difficult to modify or to overcome them. Efforts to cope with social constraints are intertwined with the construction of alternative courses of action, for human agents do more than merely adapt to social situations. By emphasizing the social mind we can focus upon the activities that human agents employ in constructing (or deconstructing) social relationships. For example, for some years I have sought to come to terms with the logics (abduction, classification, analogy, dialectical reasoning, and

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parts/whole reasoning) which are employed in everyday life. With the social mind as paramount we come to appreciate more fully the creative nature of human agents, of how in Deweyan terms human agents manage to link the known to the unknown. In practice Dewey was concerned with the creation of alternative futures (a perspective clarified below) (see Sjoberg, Gill, Littrell & Williams, 1997). In my view, it has been the emphasis upon the social mind that made it possible for Vaughan and myself to begin sketching out an alternative orientation regarding the relationship between organizations and human agents. This problem is one that has haunted sociology since its formation. In general the symbolic interactionists and the pragmatists have sought to resolve the problem through an emphasis on human agents within the context of social interaction. This time-honored response, while meritorious, nonetheless sidesteps, in my judgment, difficult empirical issues, notably the relationship of human agency to organizations, especially large-scale ones. My analysis attempts to meet head on the astructural bias of symbolic interactionism raised by Reynolds and Reynolds (1973) almost three decades ago. Admittedly, since that time various symbolic interactionists (e.g. Denzin, 1978; Farberman, 1975; Hall, 1997) have ventured, at one time or another, into the study of large-scale organizations, but this problem area continues to be marginal to the overall endeavor. In order to clarify my own perspective, I articulate my views regarding Dewey and organizations. Dewey, who among the great pragmatist scholars took account of the larger social setting, seems, in the main, to have intellectually shied away from analyzing the enormous growth of large-scale organizations (such as Standard Oil) at the turn of the last century and how these corporations came to shape the lives of persons in, for instance, a host of communities at that time. Dewey must have been aware of muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell, but his inclination was not to grapple directly with the emergence of large-scale organizations during that era. He did, however, address these issues indirectly when he articulated an alternative response to the New Deal's effort to overcome the Great Depression through the expansion of Federal governmental intervention into wide-ranging spheres of social life. He was intent on sustaining not only participatory democracy, which he associated with the early town meetings in the U.S., but also workers' control over their economic activities within community settings. It is within these decentralized situations that he envisaged citizens as exerting more direct control over their everyday lives. In actuality Dewey had an aversion to any form of "state socialism," and he was intent upon creating an alternative solution to the problems posed by the vast unemployment and social deprivation of the Depression era. In the

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process he came to articulate a "utopia" of sorts (though he would have strongly objected to such a categorization), and he sought to realize his ideal by striving to create a viable third political party in the United States. Admittedly, Dewey seems to have stopped short of explicitly analyzing the emerging arrangements associated with the New Deal - both corporate and state - in so far as these stood at odds with his own vision of how to overcome the deleterious effects of the Great Depression. What sociologists should recognize is that Dewey was advancing a form of "countersystem analysis" (Sjoberg & Cain, 1971). He employed this countersystem to critically evaluate the existing order and was actively engaged in efforts to construct (through the formation of a third party) an alternative to what was being created by the New Deal. Dewey was, in my view, committed to the creation of an "alternative future" in that human agents do more than accommodate or adapt to existing circumstances: they seek to modify or to change them. Indeed, this is an extension of his reasoning regarding the fact that human agents manage to relate, as part of the creative act, the known to the unknown. In keeping with this argument sociologists can be expected not only to describe and analyze the nature of social and cultural life but also to point the way toward the creation of alternative arrangements that are more socially just. It is only by emphasizing the social mind - its reflectivity and its complex social calculations - that we can formulate a strong version of human agency that seeks not only to adapt to the future but also to shape the nature of that future. Although Dewey, Mead, and other pragmatists laid an enduring intellectual foundation on which to build, I find the intellectual turn taken by C. Wright Mills and Jtirgen Habermas to be more compelling in that they draw heavily upon the pragmatist heritage, all the while incorporating into their agenda Weber's preoccupation with the power of large-scale organizations. With respect to Mills (e.g. 1956, 1959), he began his intellectual journey steeped in pragmatism, and then encountered Weber. As I interpret Mills, his writings of the 1950s reflected a tension between his early pragmatist training and some of the central problems posed by Weber, including those of the iron cage. As for Habermas (1987) he seems clearly to have turned to Mead as means of demonstrating how we can transcend Weber's pessimism regarding the inevitability of the iron cage. It is the writings of Mead (along with those of Alfred Schutz) that permit Habermas to distinguish between the system and the life world, and to perceive the relative autonomy of the latter from the former. This leads me to consider, in simplified form, some of my own views regarding the relationship of human agents and organizations, made all the more problematic with the emergence of large-scale organizations on the one hand and

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growing individuation (or individualism) on the other. The topic of large-scale organizations is a decidedly unpopular one in contemporary sociology, as many scholars contend that these organizations have lost their historical significance in the so-called post-Fordist society. However, sociologists must somehow come to terms with the growing centralization of power and control in the corporate sector as a result of massive mergers on a worldwide scale in financial organizations, the mass media, and the systems related to the distribution of social and economic services, all the while recognizing that the decentralization processes associated with outsourcing and the like are essential ingredients of this overall process. Although local activities remain the backbone of any social order (a global one being no exception), there is mounting evidence that the mergers and acquisitions of recent decades have been deeply impacting the daily lives of people on "Main Street." Persons in local settings may not know who dropped them from the payroll of the local branch of a large corporation, and they may be only dimly aware of the officials at corporate headquarters who closed down local operations with no input from the local citizenry. Concomitantly, the local remains of compelling importance, all the while reconstituting itself in light of the larger context which is undergoing fundamental change. Vaughan and I (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1984) began our analysis with human agents and the salience of the social mind and reflectivity. Yet, we were led to the conclusion that organizations have a reality apart from human agents, and while organizations can not exist without human agents, neither can one examine the activities of human agents without comprehending the nature of modem organizations with their hierarchy of authority and division of labor as well as their "social resources." Human agents often come to define their interaction with organizations differently than from interpersonal interaction. The hierarchy of authority and the complex division of labor that characterize modern organizations serve as definers of the social context in which human agents carry out their activities, and the remaking of the context may reshape the nature of particular types of social interaction (see Hall, 1997). My own life history can serve as a rough guide for understanding how organizations have shaped the lived experience of myself and my colleagues at the University of Texas. By way of illustration, my interaction with other faculty members during my five decades at the University has been channeled in complex ways not only by the dramatic expansion in the size of the institution but also by the heightened specialization of knowledge within and among departments, programs, and colleges (a pattern leading to spatial differentiation of activities as well). Whereas I once interacted rather freely with philosophers, economists, historians, and political scientists who were housed in the same building, today the spatial separation of the disciplines and the burgeoning of

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subspecialties within traditional disciplines provide the social and cultural context within which I interact (or am unable to interact) with colleagues. Today, there are major departments such as linguistics that did not exist fifty years ago, and centers that are devoted to the study of racial and ethnic minorities and women were once beyond the pale of what was imaginable in an academic environment. In particular the heightened role of women and race and ethnic minority faculty members has created a university setting that is not only more complex but vastly more informative and challenging. Moreover, the vastly increased communication and mobility in the larger social realm means that some faculty members come to forge closer personal and intellectual links with like-minded colleagues on other campuses than with those down the hall or in adjacent buildings. Looking back over five decades, we can also perceive the growth of a multilayered administrative apparatus (I am unaware of any research university whose organizational structure has been simplified rather than becoming more complex and hierarchical). While sympathetic to Giddens's (1984) thesis that organizations both enable and constrain human action, I am also persuaded that all too little attention has been given to how hierarchical relationships shape everyday interaction experiences within the broader social order, more particularly in university settings. Based on my experience, I would surmise that these new organizational arrangements at large public universities have fostered greater social distance between faculty and, say, undergraduate students, and that members of the faculty, in general, take for granted the manner in which organizational controls (particularly budgetary processes constructed by administrators within and outside the university) shape their workaday interaction with their colleagues. While seeking to reshape these budgetary constraints, faculty members have only limited say in the process. My own participation in faculty politics for almost two decades heightened my awareness of various administrative controls and of how faculty maneuver to by-pass or reconstitute existing hierarchical constraints. While I observed how negotiations between faculty and administrators brought about new organizational arrangements, my experiences also led me to conclude that in a variety of negotiations between administrators and faculty the results are shaped by the asymmetry of power between the two groups. I have also had occasion to observe how faculty respond to rules imposed externally upon the University. For instance, in the 1970s the Texas Coordinating Board, reacting to public clamor for accountability of professors, imposed a complex workload formula upon the faculty. These rules have shaped, directly and indirectly, the interaction of faculty with one another and with students, and they have privileged the University (and Texas A&M) with respect

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to smaller institutions in the State (the University having a more favorable teaching load than its sister institutions). At this point I shift my focus somewhat, for, as noted above, another problem area that I have addressed and that draws upon the pragmatist vantage point is the sociology of morals. While morals are seldom commented upon by symbolic interactionists, we find a brief fragment on ethics at the end of Mind, Self and Society (1934). Dewey, too, was avowedly concerned with moral matters. My interest in the sociology of morals has been closely intertwined with my analysis of organizations. Over time this interrelationship has come into sharper focus in, for example, the analysis of "Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue" (Sjoberg, Vaughan & Williams, 1984). Thus, by my lights, it is not enough to consider the moral accountability of human agents, although the moral obligations of human agents are not to be brushed aside. Empirically we find that organizations themselves pose moral dilemmas which require special consideration. Several illustrations may clarify my reasoning. It is difficult to imagine that, had the Gestapo not been dissolved, democracy in Germany would have been feasible. So too we continue to witness the moral fallout of the Holocaust: recently Swiss banks have had to account for the profits they gained from the gold confiscated by Nazis from Jews during World War II. The very nature of the banking system has been held up to critical scrutiny, and the banks are in a sense paying reparations for what their officials did over a half-century ago. Also, it seems apparent that eliminating the apartheid system in South Africa required the dismantling of a vast organizational (governmental) structure that supported the pattern of rigid racial segregation. So too, in the U.S. the efforts to end the formal discrimination patterns in the South via the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education required the reconstitution of organizational arrangements that were buttressed by a complex legal apparatus. As to the contemporary scene, we might consider issues relating to the activities of tobacco companies in the United States. Over the course of recent decades there have been efforts to address the public health problems resulting from the products sold by tobacco companies. Only recently, however, has any serious headway been made, as rather staggering fines have been levied against these companies. The aforementioned illustrations suggest that in everyday life organizations, not just individuals, are, from time to time, held morally accountable. At the same time, it seems unlikely that fining tobacco corporations, for example, can overcome the problems they pose, for the managers of these corporations have simply turned their attention to cultivating new consumers within the U.S. and, especially, to expanding markets overseas. The moral dilemmas posed by the big tobacco companies have been merely papered over, not resolved. Yet the

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vitality and expansion of democracy rests upon holding these large-scale organizations morally accountable for their practices. The issues have been further heightened by the emergence of multinational corporations whose reach is global in nature, and of transnational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, to note only some of the more prominent of these organizational forms (e.g. Sjoberg, 1999). The moral disciplining of large-scale organizations is no small feat. For one thing, those who command social power in organizations such as these reason and act in ways that are likely to jar the sensibilities of many sociologists, symbolic interactionists included. During the spate of downsizing in the 1970s and afterwards, corporate managers argued that by eliminating entire divisions and the workers associated with them these corporate entities would become more efficient and competitive. This social logic is in keeping with that of military commanders who traditionally have been willing to sacrifice entire divisions so that the broader army can remain relatively "intact," and thus capable of fighting another day. Without doubt, the leaders of contemporary corporate organizations, like military commanders, come to define organizations as more than the sum of their individuals and their interpersonal interactions. These leaders act in accordance with this social logic which, by giving priority to the whole, makes it possible for them to disregard the persons who have been most immediately affected by their decisions. Sociologists committed to pragmatism and symbolic interactionism will need to directly confront this mode of reasoning, as well as the actions and justifications interwoven with this logic, if they are to understand the management of contemporary organizations. They must be prepared to investigate not only what the leaders of these organizations say but also what they do and how, in turn, they employ their logics to justify their decisions. The logics relied upon by the organizational leadership provide us with a foundation for understanding how organizations such as the army or corporations are defined - the whole is defined as having a reality rather distinct from the selected parts (while keeping in mind that some parts are more expendable than others, given the leadership's definition of how these organizations are to be "managed"). In no way am 1 suggesting that particular human agents should not be held morally accountable. Yet holding them accountable does not necessarily lead to the reconstitution of organizational structures. We must at times, so a variety of data indicate, restructure the organizational framework so as to reconstitute the interactions among human agents. To grapple with issues such as genocide and grinding poverty, we must seek to examine the moral foundations on which modern organizations rest and how human agents come to support, and are

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supported by, the organizational apparatus, as well as the social consequences of the activities that result. My sociological commitment to excavating the moral foundations of modem social orders (to formulate the issue in the largest sense possible) encompasses more than organizations in any narrow sense. It is evident, for instance, that Dewey was highly critical of utilitarianism, which he perceived to be a pervasive moral logic in U.S. society. I find it somewhat perplexing that sociologists, in their everyday practices, frequently and uncritically, accept utilitarian logic, with its cost/benefit analysis and its moral imperative of the greatest good for the greatest number. It is a logic that managers in both the corporate and the state sectors rely upon to justify many of their core decisions, and it is a logic that becomes intertwined with the idea of organizational maintenance itself (discussed above). One reason the utilitarian moral orientation is taken for granted is that moral issues are often shunted aside in mainstream sociology. Thus, the Weberians and the positivists, for instance, have forged an unusual alliance with regard to adherence to value neutrality. Talcott Parsons, for instance, acknowledged that moral issues may serve to frame the sociologist's particular realm of inquiry, but after that they are to be set aside. In turn, the positivists, or advocates of the natural science model, assert that social science is to be limited to the investigation of empirical data, and moral or ethical problems are not to be the province of scientific inquiry. There are, admittedly, many variations with regard to the facts versus morals debate, including the perspective of a number of Marxists who typically regard morals as a bourgeois problem. According to them, overthrowing the capitalist system and instituting a socialist system would overcome the concerns being addressed by a bourgeoisie based morality. In the 1960s, I entered the study of morals through an analysis of the place of ethics in social research. Although my approach was largely descriptive in nature, it served to bring to the fore various competing ethical claims in social research. Most sociological researchers have claimed to be ethical in their research endeavors (in the process breaking from the orthodoxy of value neutrality), but they have been reluctant to look closely at the normative premises undergirding their everyday activities. In keeping with this orientation, symbolic interactionists such as Herbert Blumer (and his adherents), for instance, have had little to say, at least directly, about the moral fabric of modem society. Nonetheless, there have been counter currents within the discipline - from Mills to Habermas as well as Pitirim Sorokin, Barrington Moore, and Pierre Bourdieu (the last three scholars falling outside the pragmatist heritage). In recent years, communitarians such as Philip Selznick (who acknowledges his deep and abiding commitment to Dewey) and

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Robert Bellah and feminists such as Dorothy Smith have opened up new-found social space wherein moral issues can be examined sociologically. Although contemporary symbolic interactionists have typically skirted the analysis of moral issues, one wing of the pragmatist heritage has been committed to analyzing the moral dimension of social life. Dewey, in particular, articulates the problem well. As I interpret his reasoning, he recognized a relational bond between facts and morals: they are not the same but are bound to one another through a relational logic. As for my own efforts, I have struggled, during the past three decades, to sustain the moral dimension as an integral feature of sociological inquiry. At the core of my particular efforts lies the role of powerful large-scale organizations in shaping a number of the major moral dilemmas of our time. That is one reason for finding common cause with Mills and Habermas who, in very different ways, have been intent upon salvaging the democratic ideal in face of the organizational onslaught. Democracy is predicated upon moral principles and can only be attained through the active participation of citizens. The problems that Mills and Habermas have articulated - though not their proposed solutions - I have adopted as my own. Although Habermas advances our understanding of democracy by, for instance, contrasting patterns within the lifeworld with those of the system, he has failed, it seems to me, to recognize the fundamental difficulties confronting the lifeworld (and the system) posed by moderu-day social and cultural diversity. While Habermas (1996) has slowly but surely been incorporating the issue of gender into his framework, he has been unable to cope with race and ethnicity and class in his analysis of communicative discourse in the public sphere of the lifeworld. His analysis presupposes a type of homogeneity that is out of step with the realities that characterize contemporary democratic orders such as the United States. Moreover, while Habermas, building upon Mead, recognizes the tensions between the lifeworld and the system, his analysis is less than satisfactory in articulating how in effect communicative rationality comes to be articulated within the ideal speech community (which characterizes the lifewofld). His simplification of the process of communicative rationality bypasses fundamental issues regarding social and cultural diversity. As for Mills, he, too, fails to address the question of social and cultural diversity as this relates to race and ethnicity and gender. And we must go further than he did in addressing problems of organizational accountability, although he clearly championed the need for a democratic critique of large-scale organizations. But to return to outlining more fully my intellectual trajectory. It would perhaps be advantageous to clarify my own usage of the concept of morals. I distinguish between two types of moral systems - that of ethics (with its emphasis upon duties, obligations, and responsibilities) and that of rights (or

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social claims upon the larger community). Ethical systems, as I define them, are those that exist within the community (whether local or national), whereas the rights tradition is characterized by two overlapping strands. The first is the idea of rights as these have emerged within societies (for instance, the Bill of Rights in the U.S.), and the second is the global human fights perspective, which calls for moral claims that transcend particular communities and nation states. More generally, ethical discourse has typically been the province of philosophers, whereas rights discourse, especially human rights discourse, has been elaborated upon by legal and political theorists. Although human rights discourse has a complex historical foundation, it came to the fore after World War II as a result of the Nuremberg trials and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The Nuremberg trials, held immediately after World War II, resulted in the construction of a radically new moral category: "crimes against humanity." This contentious (even heterodox) notion has transcultural or transnational significance that remains to be explored by sociologists. In turn the UN Declaration of Human Rights, however critical one might be of this document, has provided the foundation for a worldwide dialogue regarding human rights and has served as a catalyst for the formation of a body of international law which is not to be ignored. In effect, we have been witnesses to the efforts to construct a new kind of moral doctrine that would be applicable to persons in diverse cultures or societies around the world, although the application of this doctrine would be shaped by local social and cultural circumstances. That this movement to create a more universal moral doctrine may not succeed should be acknowledged, but the foundations of human rights reasoning is nonetheless worthy of careful attention (e.g. Sjoberg, Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1984; Sjoberg, 1996; Sjoberg, Gill & Williams, 2001). Nor should the human fights perspective necessarily be viewed as a threat to many aspects of the ethical systems that exist within communities or societies (although the potential for tensions between the two is ever present). Indeed, the efforts to construct a universal system of human rights can serve as a countersystem - in this instance as a universal set of moral standards that can be employed to evaluate the ethical orientations which emerge within communities or societies. Thus, at the Beijing Conference one group of women came to define women's rights as human rights, a view that has wide-ranging implications for sociology. Moreover, a case can be made that the human rights, rather than the civil rights, doctrine could provide a more enduring foundation for addressing racial and ethnic disparities in U.S. society. The human fights perspective provides a moral grounding for protecting the rights of racial and ethnic minorities that is superior to the doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number, which

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provides little or no protection for minority vantage points. Also, the human rights perspective, unlike the ethicist one, has the potential for overcoming some of the deeply ingrained barriers between the "us" and the "them" or "divergent others." If we are to live with difference, the notion of divergent others must be incorporated into human reflectivity in ways too infrequently addressed by sociologists. Actually, there are two interrelated facets to my more concrete moral stance: one concerns democracy, the second concerns universal human rights. I appear to belong to a small band of sociologists who have sought to address the issue of human rights on a global scale. Although my contributions are very limited, they nonetheless signal a major problem that sociologists must address if they are to deal seriously with the processes of globalization. But how is pragmatism (or symbolic interactionism) relevant for investigating these moral concerns? To the extent that Dewey (and others) have articulated the interface between pragmatism and democracy, this relationship is rather readily grasped. On the other hand, the link between the human rights endeavor and pragmatism (and symbolic interactionism) is likely to seem far more problematic to most sociologists. Thus, I should like to suggest how pragmatism can cast light on the current debate regarding human rights principles. One significant wing of human rights theorizing is concerned with the protection of human dignity (or human status), or what might be termed equal concern and respect for human beings. Efforts since World War II to construct a human rights doctrine have been propelled forward by a perceived need to protect individuals (and groups) from actions by the organizational apparatus of states to obliterate, through genocide and other forms of wanton mass destruction, individuals and groups. What seems required is a moral code that challenges the arbitrary use of not only state but also corporate power if we are attain minimal standards of human dignity within and among societies. It is well to remember that Mead (1964) grappled, in his essay "National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness," with matters relating to eliminating warfare among nations. Within this context Mead (1964, p. 363) wrote, "We must think ourselves in terms of the great community to which we belong." In a general sense, we might regard Mead's essay as a precursor of sorts to the current efforts to construct a morality founded on human rights. Pragmatism is relevant to explicating and justifying the human rights doctrine in several different ways. Thus, if we are to protect human dignity (or human beings as human beings) we are called upon to articulate what it means to be human within a cross-cultural or cross-national framework. In my view, the pragmatist conception of human nature provides the foundation for advancing

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our understanding of human rights. To cast this matter in oversimplified terms, I find social reflectivity to be an essential feature of humanness, and practices that destroy reflecfivity serve to undermine the equal concern and respect that are grounded in a human rights framework. Moreover, and of considerable import, if we expand upon the pragmatist reasoning, we also can direct attention to an alternative conception of "rationality." Such an alternative orientation can be grounded in an extension or modification of some of Mead's (and Dewey's) core arguments. One can, so I contend, conceive of rationality as taking account of an ever increasing variety of perspectives and in the process coming to terms with the similarities and differences among them. This conception of rationality stands at odds with the means-end reasoning on which much of current sociology is grounded. We must be prepared to challenge that taken-for-granted view of social life. This essay is not, however, the venue in which to elaborate upon the principles associated with human rights. In this context I have only hinted as to why a pragmatist conception of human nature opens up new avenues for explicating, as well as serving to justify, a moral foundation grounded in human rights. Now, I have arrived at a point in my discussion where I shall comment briefy upon the essays by Norma Williams, Stephen Lyng, Elizabeth Gill, and Boyd Littrell. Before proceeding, however, I wish to thank the late Stanley Saxton and Elizabeth Gill for organizing the session at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction out of which these papers have emerged. Also, I greatly appreciate Saxton's introductory comments at San Francisco in which he portrayed me as Simmel's "stranger." I regret that his death at a rather early age prevented him from crafting his proposed introduction to these essays. I am deeply gratified that each of the participants has constructed a paper that stands on its own merits. Each paper bears directly upon, yet is independent of, the symposium. The essay by Norma Williams calls to our attention the pressing need to take the role of multiple others if the ideals of democratic participation are to be more fully realized. As a Chicana she has attempted to put into practice the ideals she articulates. Her call for a recognition of difference, while simultaneously seeking through reflective self-consciousness to take the role of those who are different, poses a fundamental challenge for democracy in the 21st century. Of compelling importance is her contention that participants in a democratic social order will need to construct new roles for themselves if they are to learn to act in terms of inclusionary, rather than exclusionary, practices. Second, there is Stephen Lyng's use of countersystem analysis in his discussion of the social self. Lyng has a longstanding interest in this mode of reasoning (a version of the dialectic), and he has pushed it in directions that

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Cain and I never envisaged. In his paper Lyng trains his sociological eye on how we interpret ourselves more clearly, and perhaps more fundamentally, within a framework that emphasizes taking account of divergent others. One extension of his reasoning is that persons gain a more fundamental understanding of self within the social context of difference than they would in a situation of homogeneity. Third is the work of Elizabeth Gill, who has been investigating the activities of hospice volunteers. Her analysis is of far-reaching import as she pushes out the boundaries of the relationship between the lifeworld and the system (or the interrelationship of interpersonal interaction to organizations). It is evident that sociologists studying everyday life have devoted little attention to Habermas's system/lifeworld framework, or more generally the relationship between organizations and interpersonal interaction. Gill's analysis documents how in everyday life hospice volunteers are keenly aware of the organizational setting as they interact not only with the dying patient but with organizational personnel. Indeed, to effectively interact with dying persons, hospice volunteers must proactively and creatively carve out social space for themselves. They seem to have some kind of rough "mental map" or "model" of how the organization functions, one built up from their everyday life experiences. Consequently, they maneuver around, negotiate with, or otherwise circumvent the formally trained personnel who are subject to a variety organizational constraints (in their temporal and spatial activities, their patterns of deference and demeanor, and so on.). By using the pragmatist Hans Joas's idea of creativity as a strategic point of departure, we discover how human agents are capable of reconstituting Weber's iron cage - and in ways that extend well beyond the activities of hospice volunteers. As for the fourth paper, by Boyd Littrell, I am deeply flattered by what he has written about me as a methodologist. Reading about my own work through his eyes, I find my methodological objectives have been defined in a new light: they are far more integrated into my cross-cultural (comparative) investigations and my commitment to a human rights orientation than I had ever imagined. What is worth emphasizing is that Littrell, using my work as a point of departure, has advanced his own distinctive view of methodology. At the same time I agree with Littrell's contention that, as a methodologist, I have sought to salvage some form of "objectivity" (which is not that of the positivists) while championing intellectual pluralism or diversity within sociology and the larger society. In the process I have strongly resisted the social, intellectual, and cultural standardization that "scientism" would impose upon us. Looking at my intellectual endeavors I find that my earlier writings on methodology, based as these were on a revision of Karl Mannheim's

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sociology of knowledge, were not self-consciously anchored in pragmatism. In recent years, however, I have sought to correct this by making it clear that Dewey and Mead permit one to explicate a "reflective methodology" (Sjoberg, 1997). Viewed more generally, I find these papers share some general themes. Although each contributor has her or his own agenda, Williams, Lyng, Gill and Littrell are expanding upon, or elaborating upon, the pragmatist (or symbolic interactionist) heritage. In practice pragmatism has been open to a rather wide range of interpretations, a number of which have not seeped into sociology. With regard to sociology, we find that many members of the early Chicago School linked pragmatism with the work of Georg Simmel. In more recent decades efforts have been undertaken to connect pragmatism with Marx and, even more recently, there has been a concerted effort to integrate postmodemism with pragmatism. While each of these of these endeavors has expanded our understanding of the complex social web in which we live, we will also need to build a bridge, as have Mills and Habermas, in differing ways, between pragmatism and the investigation of large-scale organizations. I remain convinced that pragmatism and symbolic interactionism have a contribution to make to our sociological grasp of the large-scale transnational organizations which are increasingly becoming "visible" to a variety of human agents within national and international communities. Finally, in light of the symposium on "Gideon Sjoberg as Symbolic Interactionist: Yes and No," the question arises as to how I define myself. It is evident that I have been committed (for several decades) to the Mead-Dewey conception of human nature and human agency that is associated with this perspective. Because of this, I view myself as a pragmatist and symbolic interactionist - by no means a typical one, but one nonetheless. At its core pragmatism provides us with a thoroughgoing view of the social nature of human nature, and the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead, more than any other sociological tradition, brings a proactive human agency to the fore. In the process the pragmatists have assuredly emphasized the need to explicate the social practice of everyday life, and they thus have provided us with highly innovative ways of thinking about democracy, social justice, as well as the yetto-be developed, but urgently needed, realm of morals relating to human rights. Nonetheless, we must of necessity face up to the complexities of the interrelationship between individuals and organizations, if for no other reason than that we must devise ways in which to hold powerful organizations socially and morally accountable. A modified form of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism could contribute much to addressing the staggering social and moral issues which confront us all.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Leonard Cain and Boyd Littrell commented upon a much earlier version of this paper. Also, Andree F. Sjoberg provided me with detailed editorial criticisms, thereby helping me to clarify what I intended to say.

REFERENCES Denzin, N. K. (1978). Crime and the American Liquor Industry. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 87-118). Greenwich: JAI Press. Farberman, H. (1975). A Criminogenic Market Structure: The Automobile Industry. Sociological Quarterly, 16, 438-457. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (1987). A Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reasoning. Vol. II. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hall, P. (1997). Meta-Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 397-418. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Mead, G. H. (1964). National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness. In: N. J. Reck (Ed.), Selected Writings of Mead (pp. 355-370). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, J., & Reynolds, L. (1973). Interactionism, Complicity, and the Astructural Bias. Catalyst, 7(Winter), 76-85, Sjoberg, G., Brymer R. A., & Farris, B. (1966). Bureaucracy and the Lower Class. Sociology and Social Research, 50, 325-337. Sjoberg, G. (1967). Ethics, Politics, and Social Research. Cambridge: Schenkman. Sjoberg, G., & Cain, L D. (1971). Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and the Analysis of Social Systems. In: H. Turk & R. L. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Change: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Williams, N. (1984). Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 441-453. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, A. F. (Eds) (1984). Ethics, Values, and Human Rights: 1984 (special issue). Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 311-489. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Littrell, B., & Williams. N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Devey and American Pragmatism. In: N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 73-92). Greenwich: JAI Press. Sjoberg, G. (1996). The Human Rights Challenge to Communitarianism: Formal Organizations and Race and Ethnicity. In: D. Sciulli (Ed.), Macro Socio-Economics From Theory to Activism (pp. 273-297). Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Sjoberg, G. (1997). Reflective Methodology: Foundations of Social Inquiry. In: G. Sjoberg & R. Nett, A Methodology for Social Research: With a New Introductory Essay (pp. i-xliv). Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press.

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Sjoberg, G. (1999). Some Observations on Bureaucratic Capitalism: Knowledge About What and Why? In: J. L. Abu-Lughod (Ed.), Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges (pp. 43-64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., & Williams, N. (2001). A Sociology of Human Rights. Social Problems, 48, 11-47.

Smith, C. (1982). On the Sociology of the Mind. In: P. Secord (Ed.), Explaining Human Behavior. Beverly Hills: Sage. Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, G. (1970). The Social Construction of Legal Doctrine: The Case of Adolf Eichmann. In: J. Douglas (Ed.), Deviance and Respectability (pp. 160-191). New York: Basic Books. Vaughan, T. R., & Sjoberg, G. (1984). The Individual and Bureaucracy: An Alternative Meadian Interpretation. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20, 57-69.

TAKING THE ROLES OF MULTIPLE OTHERS Norma Williams

INTRODUCTION Although symbolic interactionists have greatly advanced our understanding of role taking, they rarely examine the problems of taking the roles of multiple others within diverse cultural settings. Because their focus has been on role taking within rather homogeneous groups, they have tended to neglect the processes of role taking and role making that emerge among race and ethnic groups. Yet, racial and ethnic divisions within the U.S. are increasing in complexity and developing in ways that are not well understood. In this paper I consider some of the issues related to taking the roles of multiple others. In doing so I build on Gideon Sjoberg's emphasis on the social mind rather than the social self. More than any other symbolic interactionist of whom I am aware, he has stressed the importance of the social mind and its reflective consciousness. Earlier I built on Sjoberg's insights in my analysis of role making (Williams, 1990). Now, I seek to broaden my analysis so as to discuss taking the roles of multiple others. Sjoberg's influence appears in other ways as well. For years he has insisted that sociologists should consider problems associated with issues such as human rights and social justice) For me these issues are central to symbolic interactionism. In outlining a range of issues associated with taking the roles of multiple others (especially racial and ethnic minorities), I draw upon my own teaching, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 75-90. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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research, and administrative experience. I have carried out fieldwork on Mexican Americans in Austin, Corpus Christi, and Dallas, and I have taught at a number of colleges and universities in Texas. Moreover, I served as Assistant Vice President for Multicultural Affairs at the University of North Texas. As an administrator, one of my tasks was to create the Center for Cultural Diversity, and I was its first director. As it happened, I carried out these activities at a time when there was considerable racial and ethnic unrest on campus. The problems I encountered are part of my lived experience and relate directly to taking the roles of multiple others. I view Texas as a fortunate research site. Large states such as California and Texas have experienced increasing racial and ethnic diversity, and the Anglo majority, in terms of population, is in the process of becoming a minority. This seems likely to bring about a reconsideration of certain racial and ethnic issues.

ROLE TAKING AND ROLE MAKING In exploring the issue of taking the role of the other, symbolic interactionists often seem to assume that the person with whom one is interacting is like oneself. They therefore assume that the gestures, words, or activities of the participants can be interpreted in somewhat similar ways. However, in many interaction settings problems arise. We know, for instance, that men and women who interact within the same cultural setting tend to experience difficulties in taking one another's roles. Yet, conflicts between middle class women and men are more manageable than the interaction processes that cut across racial and ethnic lines in situations where gender differences are also present. When we consider stratification or social inequality in terms of economic well-being, the problems regarding role taking become even more complex. One of the difficulties facing symbolic interactionists is that Mead's (1934) original work is limited by an emphasis on homogeneity. For example, Mead employed the baseball game as a basis for interpreting how human agents learn to take the roles of others, as well as of the generalized other. However, this illustration oversimplified the community setting in Mead's time, and it does not help us analyze today's complex multicultural interactions. We must give serious attention to the processes relating to prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion, and to situations where minorities experience difficulties gaining access to economic, political, and educational institutions controlled by Anglos. Although concepts such as the generalized other, emphasized by Mead, are relevant for understanding multicultural relations, we

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must look more carefully at the heterogeneity and complexity of relations in contemporary communities when examining social interaction patterns among members of a community. In interpreting multicultural relations I find Sjoberg's interpretation of Mead a good place to begin. Mead (1934, p. 133) defined the mind in social terms, contending that "we must regard m i n d . . , as arising and developing within the social process, within the empirical matrix of social interaction." Also, he described the mind in terms of its reflective intelligence. For me this means that not only can persons carry out inner dialogues with themselves but they can reflect critically upon their own experiences. Human agents can observe both opportunities and constraints within various social situations and also recognize differences between what people say and what they do (Deutscher, 1973), which often is translated into a comparison of ideals with actual experience. Human agents reflect upon these discrepancies, and they can respond so as to remake their roles (role making) and thus more readily achieve some of their ideals. Although some readers may view my emphasis on the social constraints placed on minorities or women (or both) as a move away from symbolic interaction, I believe that would be incorrect. Role making, as I employ the concept, often involves efforts to reconstitute one's social situation and in the process overcome some of the social constraints persons encounter. Many of these constraints result from the fact that discrimination against minorities and women is still widespread in the United States. For instance, Mexican American women do, at times, through their reflectivity, take steps to redefine some of the traditional expectations held by others. In my field research I found that a number of Mexican American women were in the process of creating new roles for themselves within the family and the community, for they were reshaping their more traditional roles within the context of new social circumstances. These women were aware that they were doing things differently than their mothers. However, it was not always possible for all the women to remake their roles; some of them lacked the social resources or experienced severe social constraints by their husbands and members of the community. As far as I can determine, I was the first researcher to employ Ralph Turner's (1962) concept of role making in an effort to interpret actual fieldwork data. It is surprising to see how little attention has been given by scholars to role making, especially in light of the women's movement. One of the main effects of this movement has been the effort by numerous women to remake their roles. In the process they have called on men to do the same so as to achieve greater fairness and equity in the family setting and in the workplace. I see myself as expanding upon the argument of certain feminists. I view role making as

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necessary if persons who differ along class, racial and ethnic, and gender lines are able to interact with one another in ways that are fairer and more egalitarian. RACE

AND ETHNICITY,

GENDER,

AND

CLASS

Symbolic interactionists have had a long tradition of studying race and ethnic relations, from Robert Park to Stanford Lyman and others. However, in my view, Herbert Blumer contributed most substantially to the theory of race relations. I will attempt to build upon this and in the process modify some of his ideas. 2 In his more influential essay on the subject of race relations, Blumer (1958) argued that race relations are founded on an assumption of superiority by members of the dominant group with respect to members of a subordinate group. Blumer (1958, p. 4) stated that one aspect of a "group definition is that it is necessarily concerned with an abstract image of the subordinate group. The subordinate social group is defined as if it were an entity or a whole." He emphasized that racial prejudice (which, when acted upon, results in racial discrimination) is a product of historical circumstances. It seems to me that Blumer was calling upon sociologists to examine the relationship between dominant/subordinate groups (or majority/minority groups) in order to understand the social context within which social interaction among racial and ethnic groups occurs. Yet, instead of simply analyzing Black/white relationships as did Blumer, we need to expand our analysis to include Asian and Hispanics. Both of these groupings, however, include important subdivisions. Furthermore, the dominant and the subordinate groups are divided by class differences, and these should be taken into account when viewing social interaction among racial and ethnic groupings in a community setting. For example, my observations indicate that privileged Anglos tend to interact with privileged Blacks or Hispanics rather differently than they do with economically disadvantaged Anglos and disadvantaged minorities. Nor can we ignore the complex gender divisions within the context of racial and ethnic settings. During the past few decades we have learned about the difficulties that persons encounter when they attempt to take the roles of persons of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds. A common theme is that stereotypes (or false simplifications) shape the interaction between the dominant group (Anglos) and various subordinate racial and ethnic entities. 3 It is reasonable to assume that the dominant group often defines subordinate ones in terms of stereotypes (one aspect of Blumer's abstract image), even though these are defined and redefined in a variety of ways within specific interaction situations.

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In the U.S. racial and ethnic divisions are often associated with cultural differences that create obstacles to meaningful social interaction among members of racial and ethnic groups. In the process various forms of discrimination have emerged that have historically excluded members of certain racial and ethnic groups from participation in community activities. In recent decades, major changes have reduced considerably the more well-defined kinds of exclusion. However, various forms of discrimination persist, not only with respect to Blacks but also with respect to other minority groups such as Hispanics and Asians. Some of the processes of exclusion are indirect and often not readily apparent to persons engaged in social interaction. For example, busing was a few decades ago a widely discussed means for overcoming racial and ethnic divisions among schools in urban settings. However, the efforts to bring racial and ethnic groups into more direct interaction with one another in school settings was blocked by a series of Supreme Court decisions that permitted suburban communities to exclude themselves from participation in busing programs within the city proper. Thus privileged whites could, by moving to the suburbs, avoid busing their children yet deny that they were engaged in may overt form of discrimination. My theme is that the immediate lived experiences of members of different racial and ethnic groups need to be observed within a broader social and cultural context. If we do this, we can more fully understand the nature of majority/ minority social interaction in schools and in the larger community. While emphasizing race and ethnicity when discussing role taking among multiple others, I am aware of the social and economic inequalities within both the majority and the minority sectors. Gender differences are also an important aspect of majority and minority group life. Thus the Mexican American women I have studied have encountered problems that differ from those of Anglo women. It is at times difficult for social scientists to distinguish between the effects of class and the effects of race and ethnicity upon interaction patterns. Members of the privileged sector of society discriminate against the poor, especially economically disadvantaged minorities who are highly segregated within the barrios and ghettos of large urban centers. One of the tasks of symbolic interactionists is to sort out these various patterns in fieldwork situations. With this brief background as a guide, we shall consider changes in the nature of racial and ethnic groupings within the United States in recent decades. THE

CHANGING

NATURE ETHNICITY

OF RACE

AND

As suggested above, race and ethnic relations have been undergoing major changes in the U.S. during recent decades (e.g. Waldinger & Bozorgmehr, 1996),

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and these need to be understood. Sociologists have historically focused upon Black-white relationships. For a number of reasons they must expand their perspective to encompass Hispanics and Asians as well as other groupings. This is not to suggest that the race problem with respect to Blacks has been resolved. But Hispanics and Asians have become increasingly visible, and sometime in this century Hispanics will outnumber Blacks in the United States and thus come to be defined as the nation's largest minority. One of the difficulties in discussing minority groups is that they are often very diverse. Asians include persons of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Iranian heritage, among others. Some came to the U.S. decades ago, whereas others are more recent immigrants. These groups speak languages that are mutually unintelligible, and their different cultural and historical backgrounds mean that they can not be treated as a homogeneous entity when we seek to take the roles of multiple others. As for Hispanics (or Latinos), this social category includes persons who are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Central and South American in origin. The members of these groups have had very diverse historical and cultural experiences. The Cubans, especially those who came during the 1960s, were relatively highly educated, while many Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic group, have been more economically disadvantaged. The dominant group in U.S. society, the Anglos, often have reacted toward these diverse minorities by treating them in a simplistic and standardized manner. Thus, for administrative reasons government agencies typically classify persons as Asian or Hispanic and ignore the significant cultural differences among them. It is not only government agencies that blur the differences among minorities; some social scientists do also. My personal experience serves to illustrate this problem. During the 1980s, after I began discussing my findings on the Mexican American family in Texas, a number of social scientists, both orally and in writing, suggested that I should compare the patterns I found with those in Mexico. Apparently they had no understanding of the fact that the Mexican American ethnic group came into being as a result of military conquest and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and that most Mexican Americans do not identify with Mexico. They have a separate social identity as Mexican Americans. Moreover, a number of the Mexican Americans I studied had ancestors who were in the region prior to the conquest, and they had become socialized, for instance, while attending school in the U.S., into a historical heritage that differs considerably from that acquired by persons who grow up in Mexico. Students acquire different images of who they are. Given this situation, we should not be surprised to learn that some social scientists have little understanding of Mexican Americans.

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INTERACTION BETWEEN MEMBERS OF THE MAJORITY AND MINORITY GROUPS Having outlined some of the changes that have occurred with respect to racial and ethnic groups, I now consider the interaction between the members of majority and minority groups. A good starting point is Judith Rollins's (1985) informative book Between Women. Rollins conducted a field study of the interaction between Black domestics and their white women employers in which she found that the Black domestics had a better understanding of their employers than the latter did of their employees. Rollins uses Goffman's analysis of deference and demeanor to analyze in some detail the asymmetrical patterns of the relationship between women employers and domestics. Rollins (1985, p. 194) writes, "The use of domestics' first names, calling domestics of all ages 'girls,' the encouragement of performance of subservience, demands of spatial d e f e r e n c e . . , all these conventions of domestic servitude have in common the quality of affirming the employer's superiority." Domestics learn to perform, for they are dependent upon their employers for their livelihood. The ability of women employers to hire and fire places domestics in a subservient position, which encourages the latter to express deference through gestures and linguistic cues. In turn, the employer often treats domestics as non-persons. If we examine dominant/subordinate relationships with respect to race and ethnicity in the community setting, we find that a number of the patterns relating to social interaction that Rollins describes are prevalent not only in the workplace but also in public places where persons interact. In addition, when examining majority/minority interactions within the community we must take account of other social patterns that emerge between the members of dominant and subordinate groups. One of these relates to processes of racial and ethnic discrimination and the use of stereotypes (discussed earlier) by members of the dominant group to define social interaction with members of minority groups. These stereotypes not only simplify, in a negative manner, many features and activities of minorities but are also used to justify the reactions of the dominant Anglo group toward racial and ethnic minorities. We should keep in mind Blumer's views that prejudice is defined by the group. Consider certain patterns with respect to schools. Within schools standardized testing has become an important basis for evaluating the performance of students. These standardized tests reflect the dominant Anglo standards (e.g. the vocabulary they employ), and minorities are expected to measure up to them. The inability of minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics to do so is

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then used to justify their exclusion from the ranks of higher education. That standardized tests can be poor predictors of who will succeed or fail in college tends to be ignored, because these tests are defined by members of the more privileged group as measuring "intelligence" in a supposedly objective and scientific manner. Moreover, such persons have the resources to provide their own children with tutors or special classes that help them do well on standardized tests. The fact that this exclusionary process is administrated by testing agencies that are far removed from the lived experience of the minorities means that the latter often find it difficult to understand how this exclusion is being carried out. Given these patterns, it is essential to expand upon Blumer's argument by clarifying the manner in which the dominant group seeks to control social interaction with subordinate groups. By indirectly excluding subordinate groups from universities and colleges, the dominant group creates part of the context in which interaction occurs. Another aspect of exclusion relates to spatial distribution in the community. Where people live affects social interaction. If a family is able to move into a "good" neighborhood the children will not only be able to attend better schools but can interact with persons of privilege in various informal settings. These children thereby acquire through informal interaction linguistic and social skills that will help them succeed within the schools and later in the workplace. Patterns of discrimination and exclusion seem to reinforce class and gender divisions among subordinate racial and ethnic groups. For example, as a result of legislation in the 1990s, welfare mothers are expected to find work. However, some data suggest that white welfare mothers are more likely to get jobs than poor Black women or Latinas. If this pattern continues, poor minority women will be among the most marginalized and excluded members of U.S. society. These women will be the truly disadvantaged. What do these pattems mean? They suggest that the more privileged members of U.S. society construct social arrangements which help to distance them from racial and ethnic minorities. Therefore, in many social situations the privileged are able to avoid direct interaction with minorities, and the processes of exclusion that are created become more difficult for minorities to understand and challenge. In my judgment, symbolic interactionists need to examine these more indirect modes of exclusion if they are to understand the everyday interaction of members of the dominant and subordinate groups. INTERACTION

AMONG

MINORITIES

Symbolic interactionists also need to examine the ongoing interaction patterns among members of different minority groups. This latter realm of study raises

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a number of difficult issues. When studying the interaction of minorities with one another it is easy for social scientists to overlook the fact that how these minorities interact is at least to some degree shaped by the actions of the dominant group. We learned from the riots a few years ago in Los Angeles that significant tensions exist among minority groups. Thus, Blacks reportedly have looted stores owned or managed by Koreans. Earlier in New York City conflicts among minorities surfaced. In a less dramatic way, we find growing tensions between Mexican Americans and Blacks in such cities as Dallas and Houston. One reason for this is the fact that Mexican Americans and Blacks are competing with each other for the limited economic and educational opportunities which are mainly controlled by the privileged white community. The tensions between minorities regarding the schools are not only about the education of children but also about who will occupy some of the higher paying positions. Also, in some instances, certain minority businesses have a stake in the school system, for they have contracts with the schools for construction and maintenance of the school property as well as for the provision of food and services. The schools and their subsidiary services afford elements in the minority communities with economic and social opportunities to gain social and economic advantages. Most of the research conducted on the schools fails to give sufficient attention to the extent to which some minority groups depend upon schools for their economic well-being. As discussed earlier, many members of racial and ethnic minorities are economically disadvantaged and live in the ghettos and barrios of U.S. cities. These are the areas that many privileged researchers tend to avoid. However, we must understand how these minority groups interact with one another from a bottom-up as well as from a top-down point of view. Bourgeois (1996), an anthropologist, has been critical of researchers for their failure to study the lived experience of the truly disadvantaged members of the community. He notes the paucity of ethnographic studies of life in the inner city. His own experience among Puerto Rican youth in New York City suggests that a researcher will encounter physical dangers when studying certain urban subgroups. This makes it more difficult for researchers to take the roles of others whose actions may be at odds with their own middle-class expectations of how people should live. Symbolic interactionists should look carefully at the responses of privileged Anglos to the everyday life of minorities in the inner cities. Although the reactions of the dominant group vary considerably, the actions of some Anglos deserve special attention. It is apparent that a number of privileged whites have been withdrawing farther and farther from contact with minorities. They seem to be abandoning large sectors of the inner city to poor minorities.

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Also, nowadays an important segment of the white community is denying the significance of race and ethnicity and some go so far as to argue that the U.S. is color blind. This seems to be one basis for the Hopwood decision, which undermined affirmative action programs in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and whose impact with respect to other states has been considerable. As noted earlier, Blacks and Hispanics generally score lower on standardized tests than do whites, and if these standardized tests measure intelligence, as the privileged sector claims they do, then economically disadvantaged minorities should not be admitted to college. The privileged sector of the dominant group thus attempts to restrict entry into the educational and occupational systems. At the same time it is increasingly isolating itself from minorities in the central city. In recent decades a rather large number of economically privileged persons in U.S. cities have moved into gated communities thereby cutting themselves off from economically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. DEVELOPING

A CULTURALLY

DIVERSE

SOCIAL O R D E R I have emphasized dominant/subordinate relations among racial and ethnic groups as a prelude for considering cultural diversity (or multiculturalism). 4 In my view, we need to consider the social barriers and constraints upon role making within the context of race and ethnic relations, while taking account of issues of class and gender as well. It is in this context that we need to address the matter of cultural diversity or multiculturalism. How might multicultural ideals become a reality in a society like the United States, which includes so many minority groups? One important step toward achieving a fairer social order will involve persons learning to take the roles of multiple others so as to develop a democratic dialogue and mutual understandings. To accomplish this requires that one engage in some form of role making so as to learn how to take the roles of others who are different from themselves. Many of the critics of a multicultural perspective contend that if democracy is to be maintained we must emphasize common cultural values and beliefs. These scholars and politicians are, however, advocating a version of the assimilationist model in which minorities are expected to adopt the core cultural beliefs of the dominant group, the Anglos (Williams et al., 1995). One of the difficulties with the assimilationist perspective in the U.S. is that it has historically excluded persons such as Blacks, Indians, and Mexican Americans, thus making it more difficult for these groups to adopt the cultural ideals of

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the majority. Therefore, in a number of ways the cultural diversity or multicultural model is more realistic than the assimilationist one. This should become clearer in the 21st century, when Anglos become a minority in actual numbers in large states such as California and Texas. Symbolic interactionists, especially those who emphasize the importance of democracy, should be thinking about alternatives to the assimilationist model, in particular a multicultural one. In this brief essay I can only outline some elements of what a social order based on cultural diversity or multiculturalism might mean and how it might possibly be achieved. One issue needs to be addressed directly. This relates to the current emphasis upon excluding persons who are different. How does one challenge this? One step is to recognize that cultural diversity sustains democratic ideals. Also, some evidence is beginning to accumulate indicating that persons may be better able to further their own social and personal development within a context of cultural diversity. If we partially accept Zurcher's (1997) analysis of the mutable self, we find that individuals who are able to interact with a wide range of persons in a multicultural setting and thus engage in diverse experiences can enhance their conceptions of themselves (and others). Zurcher's perspective suggests that human beings need not be threatened by social and cultural diversity. However, this requires that they be willing and able to recast their roles somewhat so as to more readily take the roles of others who are different. However, learning to live with difference and learning to take the roles of multiple others requires social and cultural support. As we consider various alternative ways to enhance multiculturalism, it is useful to fall back on Dewey and Mead's emphasis on public education. But this kind of education must focus not just on technical knowledge but also on creating a dialogue among all sectors of society. To expand upon the democratic ideal we shall need to create school arrangements that help to sustain cultural diversity. People will need to learn at an early age to celebrate or respect the differences that inhere in a culturally diverse society. They will need to learn, as a result of interaction with others within and outside the classroom, to take the roles of persons who are different from themselves. Inasmuch as Dewey and Mead viewed the mind as social in nature, they came to stress the potential for persons to learn to cope with new circumstances. One can learn from experience, from interacting with multiple others in everyday life. To break down group stereotypes and to come to realize that diverse types of persons exist within racial and ethnic groups, one will need to interact with others in culturally diverse settings. Although neither Dewey nor Mead appears to have discussed cultural diversity or multiculturalism, their theoretical analysis permits us to consider this type of community as a realistic possibility.

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Another element in furthering a democratic order is engagement in critical reflection. To be able to take the roles of multiple others, people need to learn to expect others to challenge them if they believe they are misunderstood. One response would be a critical inner dialogue with oneself in order to align one's own actions with those of others. As we noted, in order to take the roles of persons who are different one must expect to encounter some criticism; this, however, should serve as a reality check as to whether one is imposing one's social and cultural views on others. The patterns of democratic dialogue will need to be reflected within immediate interaction situations. But it may be necessary to remake one's own role if one is to effectively take the roles of others who are different. Another aspect of constructing a more democratic multicultural order concerns the issue of social justice. Sjoberg, for example, has sought in various essays to emphasize the importance of human rights. For me, this means that when we interact with others we must recognize first and foremost that they are fellow human beings. Only then can we begin to think about creating a meaningful democratic order. Respect and concern for persons lie at the heart of a democratically based social order. The most serious forms of social injustice seem to occur when persons lose sight of the principle that others need to be respected for who they are: fellow human beings. Only by respecting others can democratic discussions develop and effective action be taken in behalf of disadvantaged members of a social order. In such a social setting considerable cultural diversity can prevail. FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION IN A COMPLEX CULTURALLY DIVERSE SETTING

AND

I emphasized general principles regarding a multicultural society. I elaborate upon these by considering the place of face-to-face interaction in a culturally diverse social setting. One of my themes is that face-to-face interaction may actually be increasing in social and cultural import, even as secondary groups expand. Public school settings are, once again, my main point of departure, for they are one of the few places in which persons from diverse social backgrounds within a community can be brought together in face-to-face interaction. Although not all interaction in the school setting is of this nature, a good deal is. Relatively small classrooms where learning is most effective have a face-to-face quality to them. Although they are not like family or intimate friendship groups, they call for the recognition of others in the immediate lived experience. Today there is a great deal of discussion about distance learning, and modern technologies are viewed by some politicians and educators as eventually

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replacing the school and the classroom. But what is not understood is that it is through face-to-face interaction, first within the family or family-like groups, and then in other small group settings, that a great deal of social and cultural learning takes place. Certain kinds of learning require intensive social interaction. This is especially true at the early stages of socialization in childhood. It is important, for example, that persons conveying information be able to observe first hand whether children can understand what is being taught and what effect this has in everyday practice. They need to be able to observe practices which reflect the information being disseminated. As children grow older they ask numerous questions, often in the context of face-to-face interaction. At times dialogues emerge in this kind of situation. Although Dewey emphasized the importance of intelligence, few interactionists consider the manner in which persons acquire not only social skills but also the ability to think. Face-to-face interaction permits the focused sort of attention that is necessary for many kinds of learning and for acquiring particular kinds of knowledge and social skills even in the adult years. It is through face-to-face interaction that one learns to cope with others on both a cognitive and an emotional basis. Through this kind of interaction a conception of self comes to be created. Although persons tend to associate with others who are like themselves, that is all the more reason to encourage activities that will bring diverse racial and ethnic groups together in the schools so that they can learn how to interact. This kind of social setting would make it possible for people to come to recognize that racial and ethnic groups are composed of a diverse range of individuals. In these kinds of situations one is likely to develop a notion of a generalized other that is very different from that developed within the context of homogeneity. Furthermore, it is in face-to-face interaction that one can learn to read the wide range of cues that are essential for interaction with persons who are different. Relatively integrated schools provide a setting for sustained face-to-face interaction. The school is one of the few public places in contemporary urban communities in which people who are relatively equal (at least in terms of age) come to interact over a period of time. Although some social segregation will occur within almost any school, we also find that it is within and outside the classroom that one is likely to confront others who are different. It then becomes necessary to develop the social skills to interact with them. Although Goffman (Lemert & Branaman, 1997) emphasized the importance of face-to-face encounters in modem settings, he did not consider how one learns - i.e. by engaging in an inner dialogue - to realign one's views with those of others. Nor did Goffman examine situations in which one learns how to take the roles of others and to cope with these differences in a reasonably democratic and fair manner.

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It is the immediacy of face-to-face interaction that requires some resolution of personal issues; in these situations the emotional aspects of social interaction are also likely to be confronted. Although human agents may often seek to manage face-to-face encounters to their advantage, some features of the "authentic other" will be difficult to ignore, if this interaction is ongoing over time. Certainly, engaging in face-to-face interaction with persons who are different can create tensions and ambiguities that are not typical of more homogeneous situations. However, it seems realistic to assume that most people will learn to cope with these ambiguities, and that some will find in the process a higher degree of social stimulation and self-fulfillment than can be gained elsewhere. CONCLUSIONS

AND IMPLICATIONS

In discussing taking the roles of multiple others, I have, following Sjoberg, given special attention to the importance of the social mind, without excluding an analysis of the self. Also, following Sjoberg, sociologists will need to consider normative as well as empirical issues and thus address such issues as democracy, social justice, and human rights. The increased racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. calls for rethinking our views regarding democracy. In this situation, the principles of symbolic interaction take on special significance, for if a diverse social order is to exist, people will need to learn to interact with one another and take the roles of multiple others. I do not underestimate the problems of moving toward a new form of democracy, one which, however, will be more realistic than any based on an assimilationist model. Taking the role of multiple others poses serious challenges. Ambiguities and tensions often result from complex social interaction situations, but people can learn to manage the resulting difficulties. Thus, I have encountered persons in the course of my teaching, research, and community service who have learned, through their interaction with others who are different, just how to relate to them. In considering how we might improve our understanding among persons from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds, we should not lose sight of the place of the social mind and the human potential for innovation. Because human beings possess a social mind, they have the potential for reaching out so as to achieve much greater inclusiveness than is often assumed. Yet, in seeking to take the roles of others, one often needs to engage in role making. The roles that emerge within one's own group may not be those needed to

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interact in a meaningful way with persons who are different. In addition, some persons need to become active "social brokers" who interpret the meaning of discourse and actions among cultural groups, thereby ensuring that the definition of the situation by minorities is understood by members of the majority. In the process of coping with increased social and cultural complexity, we can not forget the significance of face-to-face interaction. Here one learns how to function within the context of social and cultural diversity. I have emphasized that schools are one of the few settings within communities where persons can learn to interact on a face-to-face basis with persons who differ with respect to their race and ethnic identities. Even if the objective I have outlined is only achieved in part, we will increase the possibility of improving the social circumstances of racial and ethnic minorities. NOTES 1. Sjoberg's views regarding democracy can be found in such essays as Sjoberg (1998) and Sjoberg et al. (1997). Sjoberg has strongly encouraged me to work on race and ethnic relations and symbolic interactionism. 2. For some of Blumer's other essays on racial and ethnic relations, see Lyman and Vidich (1988). 3. While subordinate groups may under some circumstances develop stereotypes of the dominant group, the dominant group can act in terms of the stereotypes they hold of subordinate groups. The latter can not do the same. 4. The concepts of cultural diversity or multiculturalism (terms I use synonymously) stand in contrast to the assimilationist model. The concept of multiculturalism has in particular been highly contested. See e.g. Gordon and Newfield (1996).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Andr6e F. Sjoberg for her detailed editorial suggestions. Also, ! wish to thank the reviewers of this manuscript for their constructive criticisms.

REFERENCES Blumer, H. (1958). Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review, /(Spring), 3-7. Bourgeois, P. (1996). Confronting Anthropology, Education, and Inner-City American Apartheid. Anthropologist, 98(Jane), 249-259. Deutscher, I. (1973). What We Say~What We Do: Sentiments. and Acts. Glenview IL: Scott, Foresman.

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Gordon, A., & Newfield, C. (Eds) (1996). Mapping Multicultaralism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (Eds) (1997). The Goffman Reader. Malden MA: Blackwell. Lyman, S., & Viditch, A. (1988). Social Order and Public Philosophy: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Work of Herbert Blumer. Fayetteville AK: University of Arkansas Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rollins, J. (1985). Between Women. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Littrell, B., & Williams, N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Vol. 21, pp. 73-92). Greenwich CT: JAI Press. Sjoberg, G. (1998). Democracy, Science, and Institutionalized Dissent: Toward a Social Justification for Academic Tenure. Sociological Perspectives, 41, 687-721. Turner, R. (1962). Role-Taking: Process Versus Conformity. In: A. M. Rose (Ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes (pp. 20-40). Boston MA: Houghton-Mifflin. Waldinger, R., & Boznrgmehr, M. (Eds) (1996). Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Williams, N. (1990). The Mexican American Family: Tradition and Change. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall. Williams, N. Himmel, K. F., Sjoberg, A. F., & Torrez, D. J. (1995). The Assimilation Model, Family Life, and Race and Ethnicity in the United States: The Case of Minority Welfare Mothers. Journal of Family Issues, 16, 380-405. Zurcher, L. A. (1977). The Mutable Self. Beverly Hills: Sage.

GIDEON SJOBERG AND THE COUNTERSYSTEM METHOD Stephen Lyng

INTRODUCTION In 1971, Gideon Sjoberg and Leonard Cain published a book chapter entitled "Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and the Analysis of Social Systems." I first learned of this chapter as a graduate student at the University of Texas in the late 1970s from a fellow student who knew of my growing interest in dialectical analysis. I had been engaged in an intensive reading of Hegel's key works, as a member of an informal study group, while also exploring Marxian sociology and anarchist thought with another graduate student group. Other more contemporary sources for dialectical approaches at that time included neo-Marxian works such as Bertell Ollman's Alienation and a spate of journal articles on the subject that came and went without much notice in the late 1970s. The work that had the greatest impact on me, however, was a treatise with no explicit connections to the dialectical tradition. This was Paul Feyerabend's outrageous and provocative outline for an anarchist epistemology, introduced in his 1975 book entitled Against Method. Feyerabend's case for epistemological anarchism inspired a group of us who had read and discussed his work to assume new identifies as "radical epistemologists." We used Feyerabend's ideas in many different ways but, for me, the crucial task was to find a way to connect the principle of counterinduction to my dialectical ontology and translate it into a workable method for sociological analysis. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 91-107. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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I first read Sjoberg and Cain's chapter with these concerns in mind. What I found in this work was a conceptual vocabulary and a set of ideas that seemed to offer a way to achieve my goals. This was the pathway that led me to Gideon Sjoberg and a research program that culminated in my own version of the countersystem approach (Lyng, 1990a). I will focus on the idea of countersystem analysis in this paper because I believe that this idea is an important theme in much of Sjoberg's work and a key to understanding his encounter with the symbolic interactionist project. I will begin by discussing the precursors of the 1971 article in Sjoberg's early scholarship and then focus on the ways in which the countersystem idea relates to his more recent research.

THE E V O L U T I O N OF THE C O N C E P T In looking back at Sjoberg's early writings, one first sees evidence of a countersystem strategy at work in his research on the pre-industrial city. What made this work revolutionary is the way it challenged accepted assumptions about the nature of the urban environment. The dominant twentieth century urbanists, Redfield, Wirth, Burgess, Park, and others had constructed theories of urban structure and development based on the key presupposition that the cities of industrial society defined the archetype of all cities. Sjoberg identified the fundamental flaw in this theoretical program by describing the wide-ranging differences between industrial and pre-industrial urban centers. While this move yielded many important insights relevant to the study of cities, it also addressed a more fundamental problem of theory development in general, a common problem related to the reflexive character of the sociological enterprise. As social actors seeking to understand structural patterns that shape our own thought processes, how can we transcend the very "schemata" that render things intelligible to us? Positivist sociology is largely unconcerned with this problem. But Sjoberg had a solution. His strategy in the Preindustrial City was to rely on "analysis through contrast" by locating a reference point outside of his own cultural system for deriving insights about the nature of industrial urban centers. Sjoberg makes explicit reference to this goal when, in the introduction of the Preindustrial City, he argues for the value of the "comparative approach": [K]nowledge of the preindustrial city and of the society that enfolds it - standing as they do in dramatic c o n t r a s t to the modern industrial-urban community and society - illumines these latter, not only in areas where industrial-urbanization is well advanced, but where it is just now emerging (1960, p. 1, emphasis mine).

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And later, he states: Granted that much cross-cultural comparison necessitates 'loose' theories or hypotheses, it has the major advantage of imparting meaning to a complex set of data and serving as a corrective against the ethnocentric bias that inheres in so much intrasocietal research . . . . Nowhere is the need for comparative analysis more apparent than in the study of the city. Many propositions, once widely accepted as true, are coming to be recognized as excessively culture-bound (1960, p. 2).

While Sjoberg made implicit use of the countersystem strategy in the Preindustrial City, we see the first attempt to relate this strategy to problems of theory and methods in his next major work. In a volume co-anthored with Roger Nett entitled A Methodology for Social Research (1968/1997), further development of the countersystem idea can be discerned in discussions of cultural bias in social research. Whether addressing the logic of inquiry, the theory construction process, or the problems of observation, Sjoberg and Nett remain sensitive to how the social scientist's own cultural pre-suppositions impact on the research process. Although they were certainly not original in seeing this as a serious problem for the social sciences, they were among the very few to suggest how we may actually come to terms with it. Drawing on the implicit strategy employed in the Preindustrial City, Sjoberg and Nett explore the possibilities suggested by various dialectical traditions for exploiting the analytical power of contrast: [IJt is by no means easy to become reflectively conscious of one's actions and observations. In addition to carrying on some kind of critical dialogue, a researcher must often be able to remove himself intellectually and emotionally from the immediate social situation, to step back and examine his activities in broader perspective. It is through exposure to a variety of subgroups or cultures that one acquires sensitivity to the nuances of human experience, including one's own political and ethical commitments (1997, p. 172).

Thus, we see in this early stage of Sjoberg's scholarship evidence of his careerlong preoccupation with problems of theory and methods and his first steps towards formulating the idea of countersystem analysis. This idea would be formally introduced ten years after the Preindustrial City in the chapter that Sjoberg wrote with Leonard Cain. As we shall see, this article anticipated many of the insights of Feyerabend and other self-professed "radical epistemologists" he inspired in the middle to late 1970s. The 197l article introduced a methodological/theoretical technique that, in my view, has yet to be fully exploited by symbolic interactionists and sociologists of other theoretical persuasions.

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NATURE

OF COUNTERSYSTEM

ANALYSIS

It is noteworthy that the idea of countersystem analysis was formally introduced as part of a critique of Parsonian sociology. In a critical evaluation of the consensus model, Sjoberg and Cain score Parsons for his inattention to the constraining influence of "negative values" and his neglect of the negation process as a force in social change. The latter issue is the context for their discussion of countersystem analysis. If social change derives, in part, from the ability of social actors to envision alternatives to the existing system, social scientists can support social change agendas by constructing alternative models through the method of analytical negation. In their words, the countersystem, represents the analytical negation of, and logical alternative to, the systemor type of system under examination. It differs from the antisystemmodel in that countersystemis a tool for analysis rather than a weapon for attacking the system. Because actors can adopt an antisystem orientation without necessarilyrecognizingviable alternatives,the conntersystem model invites social scientists to cope rationally and systematicallywith alternatives to existing systems (1971, p. 224). Sjoberg and Cain see several uses for the countersystem model in sociological analysis. First, in a return to the methodological theme of the Preindustrial City, the countersystem can be employed as "an external standard by which to examine a social order" so that cultural bias can be avoided in formulating analytical categories. This use of the countersystem is particularly relevant to the critique of Parsonian theory because the latter employs an analytical strategy that is, in one respect, the direct antithesis of the countersystem approach. Asserting that "Parsons all too frequently in his empirical papers takes the categories of the dominant American system for granted" (1971, p. 225), Sjoberg and Cain point to numerous instances in which Parsons legitimizes existing institutional arrangements by constructing sociological versions of dominant interest group perspectives. It should be added that this result is a consequence of methodological strategy rather than a failure of analytical insight. Parsons' method of "analytical realism" involves the explicit use of dominant cultural categories as a foundation for theoretical concepts. Secondly, countersystems can be used as heuristic devices for predicting and analyzing future social trends, especially trends fueled by dynamic tensions and contradictions within the social order. Elaborating on this theme a quarter century later, Sjoberg (1997, p. xlvii) notes that social scientists all too often miss the mark in predicting the future because they assume that present trends will continue unabated. "Countersystem analysis has the distinct advantage in alerting social scientists to the fact that what exists may not define what will be." By negating aspects of the existing order, the

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countersystem approach highlights potential contradictions within the present system and allows the analyst to identify a range of theoretical possibilities for the future. Perhaps the most important use that Sjoberg and Cain see for countersystem analysis is in the search for alternative solutions to persistent social problems. In fact, most of the original discussion of the countersystem method is devoted to this issue. Parsons' approach to social problems, and most mainstream sociological analyses for that matter, find the solutions to persistent problems in existing institutional arrangements. In addition to legitimizing these arrangements, such an approach ignores the structural basis of many social problems that resist amelioration by prevailing political-economic strategies. Moreover, traditional social problems analysis offers no way to anticipate "new and emergent needs" in a highly dynamic and constantly evolving system. Attention to this latter issue became much more pronounced in later Sjobergian scholarship, especially in his work on human rights (Sjoberg et al., 1984; Sjoberg et al., 1995; Sjoberg, 1996; Sjoberg & Vaughan, 1997). With the brief introduction to the countersystem method in the 1971 chapter, Sjoberg and Cain anticipated some of the most innovative ideas on theory construction to emerge in the last quarter century, although the debate stimulated by these ideas has been largely ignored by sociologists. As noted earlier, Paul Feyerabend's call for epistemological anarchism in the mid-1970s developed a similar countersystem theme by demonstrating how "counterinductive" strategies contribute to paradigmatic shifts in science. Challenging the positivist distinction between abstract theory and the world of empirical "facts," Feyerabend argues that scientists' perceptions of empirical patterns are culturally determined structured by overlapping conceptual systems that arise in earlier historical times and become embedded in the existing culture. He asserts that standard procedures of empirical verification in science serve only to validate theoretical explanations supporting established ideologies and cosmologies. To get beyond the mere validation of institutionalized cosmologies, Feyerabend advocates an approach to theory development that employs the countersystem strategy: How can we analyze the terms in which we habitually express our most simple and straightforward observations, and reveal their p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s ? . . . The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside. W e need an external standard of criticism, we need a set of alternative assumptions or, as these assumptions will be quite general, constituting, as it were, an entire alternative w o r l d . . . (1978, pp. 31-32).

Feyerabend is all-inclusive in designating alternative models that can be used for counterinductive purposes. Virtually any conceptual system can potentially serve as an "external standard of criticism," whether it be invented from whole

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cloth or imported from outside of science, "from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen" (1978, p. 68). Feyerabend offers a radical version of the countersystem strategy but his advocacy of this approach stems from the same epistemological and theoretical concerns that preoccupied Sjoberg and Cain. Thus, the basic problem identified in the 1971 chapter on countersystem analysis is also a core issue for Feyerabend: How can we penetrate the veil of culturally-based perceptions of reality in search of theoretical insights when this involves reflecting back on the very structures and processes that make reflection possible? Each of these theorists recognizes that the interpenetration of theory and facts creates the need for a special method of intellectual discovery, a way to identify the constitutive elements of the culturally determined, and thus culturally relative, world of "objective facts." In both programs, the use of an outside standard to transcend one's own culturebound sense of reality is a critical component of the analytical process. While Sjoberg's views on epistemological and theoretical matters has much in common with some notable intellectual figures in the postwar era, an equally important dimension of his work involves putting the countersystem strategy to work in empirically oriented studies. In an eclectic mix of studies focusing on both structural and interactional issues, Sjoberg has relied on a countersystem logic (sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly) that has given him a rather unique vantage point from which to examine a wide range of problems. I will now discuss some of the important results of Sjoberg's countersystem program.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE BUREAUCRATIC PROCESS Sjoberg managed to combine the pragmatic and analytical uses of countersystem analysis in a number of creative ways in his later work, but the countersystem initiative that I think has been closest to his heart is the effort to introduce a sociological voice into the intellectual discourse on human rights. Seeking, as always, to avoid deep-rooted biases that undermine theory development, Sjoberg adopts a countersystem approach to the problem of moral agency. What emerges from this effort is an outline of a sociologically based theory of human rights - the first such theory ever proposed. Sjoberg and Vaughn (1993, p. 151) state that "For us a morality based on human rights is a countersystem to existing ethicist perspectives. As a counterperspective, a human rights orientation becomes a standard by which we can critically evaluate the limitations of existing ethical traditions, and it provides us with a more viable moral foundation for humankind" (Sjoberg & Vanghn, 1993, p. 151).

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Moral philosophies within the Western tradition, founded in the culture of individualism, assume that only individuals can be moral agents. Sjoberg and Vaughn challenge the individualist assumptions of the dominant moral paradigm by applying the concept of moral agency at both the individual and collective levels. They ask the simple question, "What do we learn about human rights in the modern context if we think of large scale organizations, and not just individuals, as moral agents?" At a point in human history when almost every aspect of economic and social life is dominated by powerful bureaucratic organizations, they invite us to consider whether these organizations should be held morally accountable for their actions? Numerous theoretical implications flow from this countersystem shift in assumptions about human rights and Gideon has devoted much attention to exploring these implications in recent years. His theory of human rights brings into focus moral issues that could not be recognized and addressed by existing moral theories rooted in the individualist paradigm. So, for example, it is possible within this framework to consider organizational decisions leading to the destruction of the environment by toxic wastes, the mass marketing of defective products that take human lives, or the unleashing of nuclear holocaust and biological warfare as moral issues. The shift to organizational accountability for human rights abuses also leads Sjoberg and Vaughn to consider the moral implications of internal bureaucratic structures and processes. While the utilitarian foundations of the dominant ethical perspectives limit our ability to assess the moral consequences of bureaucratic rationalization processes, Sjoberg and Vaughn's sociological framework allows us to see common bureaucratic practices like "social triage" as a moral problem (Sjoberg & Vaughn, 1993, pp. 144-149). Similarly, their approach heightens our moral sensitivity to such issues as bureaucratic hierarchy and blamability, organizational secrecy systems, and problems of intellectual dissent. In the same way that, four decades ago, Gideon highlighted important aspects of the industrial urban environment by contrasting it with the preindustrial city, he has called our attention more recently to previously unexplored moral issues in postindustrial society by contrasting dominant ethical systems with his sociologically based countersystem. In both instances, he has demonstrated the great potential that resides in this unique approach to sociological analysis for dealing with broad structural patterns like the urban environment and bureaucracy. However, the countersystem logic can also be detected in other areas of his work dealing with micro-level processes rather than macro-level structures. I focus now on how the countersystem method articulates with the symbolic interactionist tradition by discussing important connections Gideon has already made in his own work.

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AND THE SOCIAL OF MEANING

In my view, one of the principle strengths of symbolic interactionism is the way in which it informs our understanding of methodological issues in sociological research. For one thing, symbolic interactionism offers a theory of meaning that functions as powerful theoretical justification for the methodological approach preferred by its practitioners - the participant observation method. This method is rooted in the Meadian proposition that meaning is created through symbolically mediated interaction between copresent actors, which is the basis of validity claims for participant observational data. No comparable theory of meaning justifies the validity of survey data. This is certainly a major strength of the participant observation approach and the broader symbolic interactionist project to which it belongs, despite the fact that both of these traditions remain subordinate to survey methods and multivariate modeling in modem sociology. However, while acknowledging this strength, it must also be noted that full potential of symbolic interactionism and participant observation method is, with small exception (Katz, 1999), unrealized in research protocols typically used by its practitioners. What the standard protocols - and even those that advance beyond this standard - lack is a countersystem component. This argument is anticipated in an article that Gideon co-authored with David Snow and Lou Zurcher in 1982 entitled "Interviewing by Comment." While formally dealing with interview methods, Snow, Zurcher and Sjoberg also offer an implicit critique of the standard participant observation and field research approaches. They refer to several forms of distortion that arise in interview situations, ranging from the most overt case of the interviewer's questions "framing" the possible responses by the interviewee, to more subtle forms related to "face saving" efforts by interviewees. The strategy that Snow, Zurcher and Sjoberg endorse for transcending these distorting influences - the "interview by comment" technique - often involves a type of countersystem logic. By offering commentary on shared experiences in the field, researchers can elicit responses from subjects that cannot be explored through the question-and-answer format. This technique can take the researcher beyond empirical "distortions" to an even higher level "discovery process" in theory development when the researcher employs a type of commentary that Snow, Zurcher, and Sjoberg designate as "outrageous statements." Here, the researcher makes comments that, in many cases, purposefully negate the subject's assumed beliefs and values. In responding to this kind of commentary, subjects may

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offer more refined statements of prevailing beliefs and values or they may lead the researcher into areas of implicit or tacit knowledge crucial to the maintenance of group activities. In some instances, outrageous commentary calls forth responses that help to identify taken-for-granted cultural assumptions shared by both subjects and researchers. In discussing the methodological uses of the outrageous comment, Snow, Zurcher, and Sjoberg note the parallel between this strategy and the "breeching" experiments conducted by ethnomethodologists. With the breeching method, the countersytem logic involved in verbally negating cognitive and normative conventions is extended to the behavioral realm. Confronting social actors with verbal and behavioral challenges to the social order highlights the hidden normative structures of everyday interaction. The crucial feature of this method is the contrast the researcher creates between culturally determined patterns of thought and action and alternatives to these structures. The subjects' reaction to these contrasts directs the researcher to cultural conventions that would otherwise remain inaccessible. In this interpretation, ethnomethodology is a research program that shares basic paradigmatic assumptions with symbolic interactionism but differs from the latter in the use of a logic similar to that of counterinductive analysis. Such an approach leads to critical insights in ethnomethodology that are not fostered by most qualitative research conducted under the symbolic interactionist banner. While it is critically important to accurately ascertain the perspective of the actor, researchers must also remain aware of the limitations of the actor' s perspective. We must be careful not to assume that what social actors "know" and can report to researchers must be entirely cognitive in nature. As ethnomethodology clearly reveals and as scholars in other subfields have recently argued, the maintenance of the social order may owe as much to the precognitive dimension as it does to conscious interpretations shared by social actors (Katz, 1999). On another level, researchers must also be concern about the potential ideological biases built into the frames of representation employed by members of the groups they study. The inattention of many symbolic interactionists to how the distribution of power shapes the subject's perspective has been a long-standing criticism of this tradition. The logic of counterinduction can be pushed even further in the quest to transcend deeply embedded cultural constructions that shape the consciousness of actors and researchers alike. In the remaining section of this paper, I will discuss some of the promising developments I see in the use of the countersystem strategy for analyzing the social construction of meaning. What we see in these developments is that Gideon Sjoberg has anticipated, once again, some of the most exciting possibilities.

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We have seen how the "interview-by-comment" and the breeching method reveals the potential of countersystem strategies for getting at deep-rooted presuppositions and normative principles involved in the social construction of meaning. The effectiveness of these techniques for discovering levels of meaning and interaction processes not visible to commonsense consciousness is reflected in the typical emotional and psychological reaction of subjects to these techniques. Ethnomethodologists have described the significant psychological discomfort that breeching experiments cause subjects and have cautioned against indiscriminate use of this technique (Garfinkle, 1963, p. 198; Mehan & Wood, 1975, p. 27). It is often the case that subjects and researchers participating in a breeching experiment experience "anomic terror" - t h e profound sense of anxiety that accompanies social actors' confrontation with the normative or cognitive boundaries of socially constructed reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). This brings us to a body of work and method of inquiry that shares certain affinities with cognitive sociology and the breeching technique. I refer to the poststructuralist perspective of Michel Foucault and his use of the "limit experience." In many respects, Foucault is the social theorist who has been most successful in achieving Sjoberg and Cain's counterinductive goal of "remov[ing] himself intellectually and emotionally from the immediate social situation, to step back and examine his activities in broader perspective" (1997, p. 172, emphasis mine). In a recent book on Foucault, James Miller (1993) explains the methodological significance of "transcendent experiences" in the development of Foucault's ideas. Based on information gathered in interviews with his close associates and an analysis of his writings, Miller documents Foucault's fascination with limit experiences. These involve deliberate efforts to "push mind and body to the break point, hazarding an actual sacrifice of life . .. a voluntary obliteration" (Miller, 1993, p. xx). Drawing on my own conceptualization of this experience as "edgework" (Lyng, 1990b), I would define the "limit" or "edge" in terms of the line between life and death, sanity and insanity, consciousness and unconsciousness, or similar boundary conditions. What is clearly revealed in ethnographic descriptions of a wide range of limit experiences or edgework situations (Lyng, 1990b) is that they are experienced as a counter-reality - an "experiential counter-system," so to speak. Pushing the counterinductive logic to this extreme position may bring instructive issues into relief. For example, in Miller's account, Foucault believed that the only way to truly remove oneself emotionally and intellectually from one's cultural frame

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of experience is by entering the transcendent, counter-reality generated by the limit condition. Foucault looked to the limit experience as an epistemological tool that could, in Miller's (1993, p. xx) words, reveal "how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent." In an extension of the countersystem logic, he sought to discover the cultural imperatives most deeply imbedded in the body and soul of social actors through his own extreme violations of cultural proscriptions and assumptions. He was inspired in this approach by the French biologist and philosopher Georges Canguilhem, who noted that "Norms are recognized.., through infractions. Functions are revealed only by their breakdown. Life arises to the consciousness.., only through maladaptation, failure, and pain" (quoted in Miller, 1993, p. 60). The limit experience thus offered Foucanlt an alternative framework from which to reflect on aspects of cultural system he wished to understand. An explicit reference to the countersystem strategy appears in his opus The Order of Things (1966). Foucanlt calls for a "form of reflection far removed from both Cartesianism and Kantian analysis" that reveals "the being of man in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it"; an "ontology of the unthought" that facilitates the exploration of "somber mechanisms, faceless determinations, [and] a whole landscape of shadow" (quoted in Miller, 1993, p. 50). Such an approach is clearly counterinductive in nature, providing a contrast to cultural formations found at all levels of human experience (the biological, sensory, emotional, and cognitive domains). Foucault's intellectual and personal project involved a life-long attempt to transcend the social reality of a unique time and space in order to see what is normally hidden from the socially determined subject. His limit experience represents a form of countersystem analysis that bridges the gap between micro and macro levels of inquiry. Foucault's work is clearly macro-structural in focus, as reflected in the poststructualist designation often applied to it. But Foucault was also preoccupied with the problem of how the solitary observer can discover the fundamental cultural imperatives that reside in basic desires and emotions, and define the terms of subjective sensation and perception. Thus, for Foucault, to know oneself is to also know the character of macro-structural forces operating in one's social and cultural environment. The centrality of this issue in Foucanlt's work leads Miller to question the "death of the author" thesis that many commentators attribute to Foucanlt. To counter this interpretation of his work, Miller carefully documents how all of Foucault's structural analyses grew out of his fascination with personal experience. Among Foucault's many statements on this subject cited by Miller, perhaps the most explicit reference appears in the last interview before his death.

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Foucault explained that each of his books represented " 'a kind of fragment of an autobiography' that could be approached as a 'field of experience to be studied, mapped out and organized,' by reinserting the previously occluded dimension - of the author putting his 'nature,' and his knowledge, to the test in his 'very existence' " (1993, p. 31). The dialectic of self and society introduces the need for a transcendent method of intellectual discovery, a way for theorists to identify the elements of individual experience they share with others in the culturally constructed space of the "natural" or uniquely "personal." I have suggested that the limit experience, just like the breech, may illuminate ways to get at this taken-for-granted social reality. By moving beyond realms of culturally prescribed knowledge, rules of conduct, sensation, and desire to explore various domains of "alterity," we are confronted with a contrast to what is normally tacitly accepted. As Foucault argues so persuasively, these glossed elements of our experience may serve to maintain the social order more effectively than any other constraining force in human existence. In discussing the limit experience in Foucault's social-cultural studies and its similarity to the breeching and interview-by-comment techniques in interactional studies, it is clear the counterinduction strategy can contribute a deep analytical dimension to the study of socially constructed realities. While most social theorists would not want to embrace Foucault's method and risk their sanity or their lives to achieve deep insights about social reality, the extremity of his approach reflects the difficulty of the problems he wished to address. However, as powerful as this approach and the similar interactional techniques are for penetrating the surface appearances of shared realities, they do not realize the full potential of countersystem analysis. A significant limitation of these counterinductive strategies is that the "contrasting points of reference" in both approaches are limited in scope. They consist of very specific normative infractions in the case of the breech and generalized action patterns in the case of limit experiences or edgework. Thus, the extreme approaches described here illustrate the limitations of a method that does not include "countersystem" analysis, per se, because the breech and limit experience are not models of alternative social systems (although they may derive from alternative systems). In light of these limitations, it must be asked at this point if we've reached a dead end in the search for ways to incorporate countersystem analysis into programs of study tied to symbolic interactionism and cognitive sociology. It appears that some well known scholars affiliated with symbolic interactionism have looked favorably on postmodernism and cultural studies in recent years (Denzin, 1992), perhaps as a way to bring a degree of critical

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awareness to their work that is missing in approaches that privilege the actor's perspective. However, it also appears that many other symbolic interactonists who may be attracted to the critical potential of postmodernist studies are also uncomfortable with other aspects of postmodernism's radical form of constructionism. Another faction has found possibilities for transcending the limitations of symbolic interactionism in returning to the forerunner of this perspective the American pragmatist tradition. Gideon Sjoberg is a member of this latter faction (see Sjoberg et al., 1997), which I believe reflects his understanding of pragmatism's affinity with the countersystem approach. While, at this point, neither Sjoberg nor anyone else has succeeded in connecting countersystem analysis to pragmatist thought in any systematic way, it is possible to briefly sketch how this could be done. Linking the countersystem method with pragmatist ontological and theoretical principles will, in my view, yield a powerful alternative to existing interactionist and post-modernist approaches. A key principle of pragmatism is its focus on breaking down the dualistic oppositions of rationalism. Employing a transactional conception of the relationship between subject and object, pragmatists such as Dewey, Peirce and Mead found little value in the one-sided focus of either the nominalist or objectivist theories of their era. For Mead (1938/1972, p. 65), the unit of existence is the act and human action brings together subject and object in a mutually constitutive process. Reality emerges through collective signifying practices and therefore has human thought and symbols already embedded in it (Shalin, 1993, p. 316). As human agents transact with tile physical and social environment, they construct the objective conditions of their existence. Thus, environmental objects can be understood as "those features that answer to or sustain the particular capacities of the individual to act toward them" (Franks, 1987, p. 13). By rejecting dualism in favor of a transactional conception of the subjectobject relation, pragmatism offers an ontological framework for conceiving of social problems as products of collective signifying practices but products that are objective in nature. This objectivity is manifested as a certain resistance that an obdurate reality offers to human cognition and action (Franks, 1989, p. 169). Perhaps the most significant pragmatist challenge to dualistic thought can be found in the perspective's approach to issues of validity and explanation. A succinct expression of this approach is the pragmatist assertion that truth is "a practically accomplished unity of knowledge and reality" (Shalin, 1992, p. 266). This statement is full of implications for various matters important to sociology but in the space that remains, I will restrict the discussion to one key problem. I will focus on what the pragmatist definition of truth implies about the relationship between "basic" and "applied" research in sociology.

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One of the most enduring features of the division of labor in post-war American sociology is the separation between the development and verification of theoretical models (the domain of "basic research") and the application of this knowledge to the resolution of practical problems (the domain of "applied research"). This separation has been made possible, in part, by the institutionalization of verification procedures that are disconnected from the application of sociological knowledge to the resolution of real world problems. But such a separation was an anathema to the early pragmatists who argued that the verification of ideas can be achieved only through transaction in the material world. Valid ideas are those that lead to efficacious action in the external environment. And when ideas directing action produce unexpected results, the validity of these ideas must be questioned and a reformulation is in order (Lyng & Franks, forthcoming). Hence, in the pragmatist framework, separating basic research from the activities associated with the application of research findings cannot be justified - valid knowledge is produced through the use of systematic procedures for implementing ideas in a practical context. Pragmatism provides a strong theoretical rationale for connecting basic and applied research; but deriving concrete methodological strategies for unifying theory and praxis from this highly abstract system of thought is difficult. Thus, the pragmatist framework offers no guidance for how ideas can be implemented in pragmatic reality-testing and contribute to structural changes in the social order. It is also unclear how ideas and conceptual systems used in pragmatic problem solving are precisely related to the analysis of existing social conditions. These issues can be addressed by identifying a method of analysis that establishes a more detailed logic and procedure for linking basic and applied research - the method of countersystem analysis. The countersystem method pulls together the various strands of theoretical thought discussed here by logically connecting deconstruction and reconstruction as components of a continuous research process. In this framework, the reconstructive dimension serves multiple purposes. First, the construction of alternative social arrangements (reconstructing existing conditions) can be oriented to the goals that typically guide pragmatically-oriented researchers, running the gamut from critical theorists and postmodernists to applied researchers. This part of the research agenda is dedicated to identifying solutions to social problems but it accomplishes this task in a novel way. In order to avoid defining problems and their potential solutions in an ideologically-determined way, a model of alternative social arrangements (a countersystem) is constructed and used as a reference point for identifying social problems within the existing system. This strategy draws on Jurgen Habermas's (1973, p. 22) insight about the use of hypothetical models to ensure the

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objectivity of one's analysis of the existing social order. By defining social problems from the standpoint of a hypothetical system, i.e. identifying the ways in which existing conditions diverge from ideal arrangements, one can negate the influence of the prevailing interest structure in determining what constitutes a social problem. The countersystem also serves as a general template for constructing solutions to the problems identified. In confronting the broad range of alternatives for dealing with a problem, priority can be given to approaches that contribute to social change in the direction of the countersystem ideal. Conducting applied research in this way creates the need for a strong analytical component insofar as social problems are defined through comparative, structural analysis. This is the place where the applied program logically connects to the program for basic research and it is here that we find a second major purpose of the reconstructive dimension. The construction of alternative social models can also fulfill an important function in the development of basic theory. By serving as a systematic contrast to the existing social system, the countersystem can be used as a reference point from which to critically analyze the current system. A (re)constructed social model serves as an essential resource for a deconstructive analysis of prevailing structural imperatives hence, reconstruction and deconstruction are linked as inseparable parts of the research process. CONCLUSIONS This brief and broadly sketched outline of a countersystem approach rooted in the pragmatist ideas of Dewey and Mead falls far short of anything resembling a blueprint for a new theoretical/methodological framework. Moreover, in presenting these ideas here, I do not mean to imply that Sjoberg would necessarily endorse the approach I've outlined. My goal has been to demonstrate one way that countersystem analysis can be connected to ideas associated with the symbolic interactionist and pragmatist traditions, a general goal that I think Gideon has pursued in various ways throughout his career. My hope is that the ideas I ' v e presented here will stimulate others to consider how connecting countersystem analysis to pragmatist thought could provide new ways to resolve some of the enduring problems that have plagued symbolic interacfionism in the past. For example, it is possible that the study of interpretive processes, interaction, self, and society from the standpoint of a true countersystem could help to dissolve the unfortunate division between the micro and macro level analysis. At the same time, employing countersystem models in the analysis of interpretive processes could add an emancipatory and critical component to symbolic interacfionism that has been largely absent in this tradi-

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tion. Addressing these problems is imperative if symbolic interactionism is to remain viable as a research paradigm in the future. In closing, I want to comment on the original organizing theme for this collection of papers: "Gideon Sjoberg as a Symbolic Interactionist: Yes and No." As a scholar who developed a keen appreciation for the power of counterinductive methods early in his career, Gideon has been pushed by the logic of countersystem analysis to work on the margins of established theoretical or methodological traditions. This is because Gideon's dialectical consciousness could never leave him comfortable with any thesis that does not also incorporate its antithesis. So, while his scholarship reflects a long-standing affinity with symbolic interactionism, it also reveals his preoccupation with the broad-based structural imperatives that unfortunately have been of little concern to many members of this field of study. In this sense, his work is a model to all who have the courage to abandon the safety of established traditions in pursuit of the anomic, and sometimes exhilarating, challenges of intellectual edgework. Does his work potentially expand symbolic interactionism? I say yes. Is his work confined by extant symbolic interactionist boundaries? I say no. But should this be the case with any of us? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, in San Francisco, August, 1998. The author gratefully acknowledges David D. Franks for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

REFERENCES Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Denzin, N. (1992). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. Feyerabend, P. (1978). Against method: Outline of and anarchistic theory of knowledge. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1966). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage. Franks, D. D. (1987). Thoughts and Deeds: Toward a Typology of Action for G.H. Mead's Social Behaviorism. Unpublished manuscript. Franks, D. D. (1989). Power and role-taking: a social behaviorist's synthesis of Kemper's power and status model. In: D. D. Franks & E. D. McCarthy (Eds), The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers (pp. 153-177). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, Inc. Garfinlde, H. (1963). A conception of and experiments with "trust" as a condition of concerted

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stable actions. In: O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Motivation and Social Interaction. New York: The Ronald Press Company. Habermas, J. (1973). Theory and Practice. Boston: Beacon. Katz, J. (1999). How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyng, S. (1990a). Holistic Health and Biomedical medicine: A Countersystem Analysis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lyng, S. (1990b). Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4), 851-886. Lyng, S., & Franks, D. D. (Forthcoming). Sociology and the Real World. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Mead, G. H. (1938/1972). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mehan, H., & Wood, H. (1975). The Reality of Ethnomethodology. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Miller, J. (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shalin, D. N. (1992). Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge. American Journal of Sociology, 98(2), 237-279. Shalin, D. N. (1993). Modernity, Postmodemism, and Pragmatist Inquiry: An Introduction. Symbolic Interaction, •6(4), 30-32. Sjoberg, G. (1960). The Preindustrial City. New York: The Free Press. Sjoberg, G. (1996). The Human Rights Challenge to Communitrianism: Formal organizations and race and ethnicity. In: D. Sciulli (Ed.), Macro Socio-Economics: From Theory to Activism (pp. 273-297). New York: M. E. Sharpe. Sjoberg, G. & Cain, L. D. (1971). Negative values, countersystem models, and the analysis of social systems. In: H. Turk & R. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Sjoberg, G., Gill E., Littrell, B., & Williams, N. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 13, 78-92. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Williams, N., & Kuhn, K. E. (1995). Ethics, Human Rights and Sociological Inquiry: Genocide, Politicide and Other Issues of Organizational Power. American Sociologist, 26(1), 8-19. Sjoberg, G., & Nett, R. (1997). A methodology for social research. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (reissued ed.). Sjoberg, G., & Vaughan, T. R. (1993). The ethical foundations of sociology and the necessity for a human rights perspective. In: T. R. Vaughn, G. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (pp. 114-159). Dix Hills: General Hall. Sjoberg, G., Vaughan, T. R., & Williams, N. (1984). Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20(4), 441-453. Snow, D. A., Zurcher, L. A., & Sjoberg, G. (1982). Interviewing by Comment: An Adjunct to the Direct Question. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 285-311.

UNLOCKING THE IRON CAGE: H U M A N AGENCY A N D SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 1 Elizabeth Gill

INTRODUCTION I came to know Gideon Sjoberg and his scholarship by way of my interest in the certainty of death and the uncertainty of dying. It is Sjoberg's underlying concern with the active, reflective human agent that became the basis for my empirical and theoretical attempts to understand the interface between the human agent and large-scale bureaucratic organizations - among dying individuals and families under hospice care, and hospice volunteers embedded within health care organizations. Woven throughout Sjoberg's scholarship is a deep, abiding concern with the salience of bureaucratic organizations and their direct and indirect impact on individuals' life-worlds in particular, and social life in general. His preoccupation with the problems and possibilities associated with Weber's "iron cage of bureaucracy", as articulated in Habermas' distinction between "life-world" and "system," not only inspires his musings about the relationship between the human agent and structure but also pervades a great deal of contemporary sociological inquiry and is the focus of this essay.

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STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Supplementing Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework with Joas' Theory of Creativity, it is my intent to address Habermas' concern with the tension between the social system and the life-world of individuals by empirically specifying the complex relationship between human agency and social organizations. 2 During the course of my investigation of hospice volunteers, I have examined the ability of active, reflective human agents, within the bureaucratic system of hierarchy and complex division of labor, to, both formally and informally, reflectively carve-out space within these organizations, space that allows them to shape the course of events and find substantive meaning. More specifically, I am concerned how hospice volunteers reflectively and creatively "use" and manipulate the medical structure to achieve objectives that are often counter to the expressed goals of the health care organization. Employing Joas' concept of "situated creativity," I focus on the unexpected and novel ways that volunteers may respond to a particular situation by considering the physical possibilities, normative expectations and institutional arrangements that structure the field in which the action takes place (Joas, 1998). 3 Thus, for the purposes of my analysis, creativity becomes a form of action employed by volunteers in response to structural constraints. By considering creativity as an activity, and by empirically specifying the processes by which human agents carve-out communicative space within the organizational context, I hope to develop a modified Habermasian framework that further clarifies Giddens' position on the enabling and constraining possibilities for human agents within large-scale organizations, thereby bridging the gap between the pragmatist tradition and the Weberian heritage. NATURE

OF THE DATA

Through use of Sjoberg and Cain's (1971) countersystem methodology to compare and contrast the hospice way of death to that of the medical model's, I was able to delineate systematically the structural features of the health care system that profoundly impact the dying process. It is precisely these structural realities that the hospice organization seeks to address. The hospice philosophy of care attempts to preserve the dying individual's life-world from system control by carving out a niche for the dying to achieve "a decent and fulfilling human life" until death. My research examines how hospice volunteers, responding reflectively, challenge the taken-for-granted day-to-day routines within health care facilities by devising means to protect and sustain the

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life-worlds of their clients and their associates as well as the life-worlds of themselves, within the structured medical environment. The two primary sources of data for this project were a series of in-depth interviews and participant observation. In addition, I supplemented these materials with a set of open-ended questionnaires. Data for the study were collected over a seven year period from 1992 to 1999. I conducted in-depth interviews with 40 hospice volunteers in two large metropolitan areas in Texas and Virginia. The volunteers I interviewed were disproportionately female (96%) with 88% over age 50. My respondents reflect the composition of the hospice volunteers in these areas. While I asked certain basic questions of all volunteers, the interview guide provided only the general topics for initiating a dialogue with the respondents. I asked questions and made comments so as to engage the respondent in a conversation with respect to how she (or he) adapted to the dying person, family and the medical organizational setting (cf. Snow, Zurcher & Sjoberg, 1982). Concomitantly, prior to and during the formulation of this research project, I became an active hospice volunteer and used these experiences as a cornerstone for my analysis. I found the volunteers to be actively involved not only in patient and family care but also with one another. Volunteers are required to meet on a regular basis every month or two, and they also attend seminars, luncheons and fundraisers. My experience as a patient/family caregiver enabled me to participate as a member of the hospice team consisting of a chaplain, nurse, home-health aide, social worker and occupational therapist. As an active volunteer I was involved in direct care and interaction with the patient and family and with the staff of the medical organization in which these activities are embedded. My participant observation served three distinct functions. First, I gained first-hand experience and knowledge of hospice practice. 1 was able to achieve "empathy" with the volunteers whom I interviewed as well as a better understanding of their responses, and I was able to acquire, through my own observation, an understanding of the demands placed upon the role of the volunteer. It is only through this direct observation that I could come to terms with the vagueness of the role expectations of the volunteer. The inexplicable nature of the role made my participation in the volunteer role invaluable. Second, I gained an understanding of the hospice experience that allowed me to contrast my role (i.e. the volunteer role) with that of other hospice professionals. Third, through my participation in the activities of the hospice organization - e.g. training sessions, conferences and fundraisers - I learned about the activities of volunteers whom I did not interview. I discussed various issues with them at considerable length which added depth to my analysis.

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In addition to my participant observation and in-depth interviews, I also mailed out a set of questionnaires. The questionnaire, which, aside from a few background questions, was open-ended in form, was sent to volunteers chosen randomly from a list of volunteers in the two areas. This enabled me to supplement my original interviews and add depth and diversity to the pool of respondents. I mailed 40 questionnaires to volunteers of which I received 23 completed surveys. The creativity of hospice volunteers served not only to highlight the importance of human agency, but also to dramatize the importance of the bureaucratic structure in shaping their responses to the dying individual. This volunteer perspective proved invaluable primarily due to the fact that volunteers are "in but not o f ' the hospice organization. In order to understand the relationship between the hospice volunteer and the dying individuall it is important to understand the contradictory nature of the volunteer role compared to the roles of medical personnel. Volunteers are not subject to the same professional mandate as the professionals and staff associated with hospice. The nature of each role is defined, to some extent, by the organizational setting with which the caregiver is associated and operates. More specifically, the time and provision of care of a health care provider is generally regulated by routinized procedures based on the needs of the organization rather than the needs of the patient. The volunteer role, unlike the roles of medical and hospice personnel, is not predicated on efficiency. The volunteer is able to address the needs of the patient that are not fulfilled by paid professionals as a result of the specifications mandated by their professional affiliation with medical organizations. Their actions are not constrained by prescribed rules associated with professional caregiving; thus, they typically hold a unique position within the hospice team in relation to the dying individual, the family/caregivers, and the medical organization. Inasmuch as the volunteer role is loosely defined and subject to very few specifications, the volunteer is able to bring to bear certain "tools" that are unavailable to health care professionals within the confines of a medical environment. The tools of listening and touching, luxuries often not afforded to paid professionals, enable the volunteers to bring a unique perspective to bear on the dying process. As a result, my research indicates that the volunteers are self-reflective about the rules and authority that characterize these health care organizations. This reflectivity enables the volunteer to develop a stock of knowledge and set of skills to carve-out space within the organizational context. In order to develop a framework in which to interpret the complex relationship between the human agent and structure, I will outline several key themes, some of which overlap with Sjoberg's concerns with bureaucracy and

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human agency. First, I will briefly describe the "iron cage" and explore several keys that have been tried to liberate human agents from its constraints: namely the pragmatism approach as expressed in Habermas' Theory of Communicative Rationality. Then, selectively drawing upon Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework and Joas' Theory of Creativity, I will explore the possibility of a "marriage of sorts" between the pragmatism tradition and the Weberian heritage - or a modified Habermasian framework - which recognizes the constraining and creative possibilities for human agency within these large-scale organizations. Finally, relying upon my research involving hospice volunteer interpretations of the dying process, I will examine what Hans Joas refers to as "situated creativity" as one possible key to unlocking the iron cage of bureaucracy and articulating the relationship between agency and structure.

WEBER'S "IRON CAGE" AND HABERMAS' ESCAPE As Max Weber (1946) observed, the more the nature of bureaucracy is perfectly developed the more bureaucracy is dehumanized. The more it succeeds in eradicating personal and emotional elements from its daily operations, the closer bureaucracy comes to perfection. Weber coined the phrase "the iron cage of bureaucracy" to describe the loss of freedom, meaning, and respect for human life associated with the success of bureaucratization within a society. The movement away from ritual and community to bureaucratic management and medical treatment of dying patients is logically consistent with broader patterns of social living. Thus the modern image of a dying person connected by tubes and wires to life-sustaining equipment is a logical derivative of America's bureaucratic and technological orientations (Moller, 1996). This image, reflective of an ever increasing percentage of deaths within formal institutional settings, embodies the loss of human dignity and autonomy associated with the powerful large-scale bureaucratic organizations and Weber's "iron cage." These organizations, characterized by a hierarchy of authority, division of labor, and emphasis on standardization and efficiency, have restructured peoples' lives and deaths. Although Weber considered the human actor to be central to much of his work, when it came to his formulation and analysis of the "ideal type" of bureaucracy and bureaucratic organizations, he gave little or no consideration to the human agent. Weber's agent was destined to become enmeshed in the bureaucratic constraints of the "iron cage." His lack of attention to the possibility of agency within bureaucratic organizations runs counter to my findings about the hospice volunteers' actions within large-scale bureaucratic

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organizations. My data indicate that a complete understanding of the interaction order and human agency, without denying the significance and influence of large-scale organizations, requires an examination of the overlapping, yet somewhat independent, spheres of human agency and the organizational structure. Thus, in order to escape the inevitability of the "iron cage," I sought a theoretical framework that could liberate the human agent within the bureaucratic organization while acknowledging the structural realities of the formal organizational context.

SEPARATION OF THE SYSTEM AND THE LIFE-WORLD The major response to Weber's lack of attention to agency has come from Jurgen Habermas. Habermas' objective has been to confront Weber's fear of bureaucracy run amok and provide an escape from Weber's "iron cage" by relying on the pragmatist heritage. 4 Combining a highly abstract interpretation of Weber with the theorizing of George Herbert Mead, Habermas distinguishes between the public/private spheres of an individual's life-world (comprised of both civil society and the family) and the public sphere of the system. The crux of Habermas' worldview is the maintenance of a life-world that is somewhat independent of the processes of bureaucratization or rationalization associated with the system. His conceptualization of society as both a social system and a life-world reduces the pessimism inherent in the Weberian paradox of modernization. Habermas emphasizes that a central characteristic of the life-world is the ideal speech community wherein reasoned argumentation is the basis for achieving consensus. But his formulations break down in such instances as the issue of death and family. For instance, many members of American society die in hospitals under the care of hospice workers. That the concept of argumentation and the ideal speech community should apply to the interaction between a hospice worker and a dying person dramatically reveals Habermas' failure to come to terms with a number of facets of the life-world. More specifically, despite his acknowledgment of the duality of society comprised of both the system and the life-world, Habermas' analysis falls short of acknowledging the interaction that occurs between the two spheres. Habermas seems to assume symmetry in power between the system and the life-world by suggesting that norms, developed and maintained within the life-world, are the link between the life-world and the system. Thus the life-world becomes not only the embodiment of liberation and communicative rationality apart from the system, but also of the development and maintenance of norms. But,

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Habermas' dual conceptualization of society proves to be impractical when applied to the empirical world. He typically views interaction between the two as unidirectional, with the life-world normatively informing the system. He seems to imply that in order to preserve and protect the integrity of the life-world, the system must not intrude upon the normative and communicative boundaries of the life-world. Any such intrusion is viewed by Habermas as pathological resulting in the colonization of life-world structures; thus, like the pragmatists, he never addresses the negotiations that occur between the communicative structures of the system and the life-world and the possibility of system maintenance of the life-world. EFFECTS

OF THE

ORGANIZATION

CONTEXT

UPON

THE L I F E - W O R L D Although the distinction between the life-world and system proves to be invaluable when trying to come to terms with the effects of organizations on human agency, it seems that Habermas is overly optimistic about the integrity of the life-world apart from the system. 5 My data indicate that Habermas' attempts to merge symbolic interactionism and functionalism results in a false dichotomy between the life-world and the institution/system levels of society (Joas, 1993, p. 141). I have found that the system, particularly in relation to death and dying, does have a profound impact upon individual life-worlds. My examination of hospice as an alternative to the systemic management of death and illness illustrates the possibility of negotiation between the system and the life-world that is not necessarily "pathological" in nature. Contrary to what one might expect, if one accepted the Habermasian frame of reference, my research indicates that one of the latent functions of hospice is to mediate between the broader medical system and the individual and family/caregivers. The volunteer role provides a bridge between the system and the life-world. In a sense, the volunteer straddles the boundaries between the two worlds, becoming the link between the long-term facility and/or hospital (i.e. system) and the life-worlds of the dying individual and caregivers. Without this link, hospice principles would not be viable within bureaucratically structured medical settings. The volunteer, if he or she is 'to be effective, often needs to act in the capacity of mediator or arbiter not only between the family and the system but also between the hospice organization and the health care system. Thus, even for analytical purposes, the system cannot be artificially separated from human activities; we must come to recognize the constraining and creative possibilities for human agency within these large-scale organizations. The social constraints imposed by the system must be understood in a dual sense as both

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constituent features of people's reasons and motives as well as part of the "external" set of cultural resources and obstacles to the fulfillment or achievement of objectives (Layder, 1997). Recognizing the fallibility of the system/life-world distinction, Sjoberg has argued that Weber's analysis of bureaucracy, Habermas' system/life-world distinction, and symbolic interactionists' analysis of agency must be modified in order to understand how large-scale organizations function by taking into account the relationship of human agents to bureaucratic organizations. My analysis of hospice volunteers' interpretations of the dying process depends upon the elaboration of this relationship in order to expand the concept of human agency in relation to large-scale organizations.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN AGENCY AND STRUCTURE: THE PRAGMATIST HERITAGE In dealing with the problem of understanding the interaction patterns of hospice workers with the dying persons within the context of the organizational structure of hospitals, I draw upon Gideon Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framwork which has emerged in a set of essays on bureaucracy stretching over more than three decades. My interpretation of these becomes the foundation for my own analysis. In my view, he makes two moves that are important. One, he has for years contended the concept, "social mind," which Mead recognized as emerging in interaction situations, and Dewey's concept, "intelligence," should be given special attention. Sjoberg (1999, p. 49) states: With respect to the nature of human agency, Mead's (and Dewey's) conceptions are far superior to those of Weber. Mead talked not only about the social self but about the social mind (or Dewey's social intelligence); both the self and the mind are products of social interaction. It is because of the social mind that we can think about thinking and carry on conversations with ourselves. The social mind makes possible complex social calculations as well as social memory. Viewed in this manner the human agent comes to be more proactive than generally understood. Second, we find in Sjoberg's writings specifics about the nature of organizational life that one can uncover in Habermas's abstract theorizing. In many ways Sjoberg's concerns with the tensions that exist between human agents and formal bureaucratic organizations parallel Habermas' focus on tensions between the system and the life-world. 6 According to Sjoberg, in order to comprehend the intersection of human agents and bureaucratic organizations, we must understand the ability of human beings, within the organizational context, to use and manipulate social

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structures. 7 Dewey (1985) also recognized the "indispensability of context" for thinking and acting. However, his understanding that action is conditional on the agent's judgment of the situation is limited. By emphasizing experimentation in response to novel situations, the pragmatist tradition denies the structured nature of situations (i.e. institutional arrangements/relations) that are already named and their profound impact on an agent's response to a situation. Sjoberg (1999, p. 50), too, is critical of the pragmatist tradition's lack of attention to the effects of organizations on social behavior: When we place active human agents within a formal organizational context, we find that they interpret and reinterpret rules (or norms). Yet, concomitantly, they are unable to do so in the free-wheeling manner suggested by Mead, Dewey or Blumer? One's position in the organizational hierarchy and in the web of the division of labor structures one's interactions with others and sets boundaries upon the kinds of interpretation that are possible (or even permissible), the kinds of information at one's disposal, and one's knowledge base in general.

A comparison between Dewey's "experimentation" and Sjoberg's "manipulation" suggests that Dewey's agent works outside, or beside, the system; whereas, Sjoberg's agent works within the confines of the system, but often uses it to overcome the system's restrictions. We find that human agents, in this case, hospice volunteers, come to have generalized "mental pictures" or "mental images" of organizations and that these mental constructs guide their interaction with the staff members of the hospital organization. This stock of knowledge is acquired not through professional training but through their experiences outside the hospital setting, and they bring this stock of knowledge to bear as they interact with dying patients, families, nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators. 9 In point of fact, the need to attract and retain a large number of volunteers, coupled with the lack of funding to support in-depth training, means that hospice volunteers are not subject to extensive training. Respondents found the hospice training program to be useful on one level, but as one volunteer stated, "training should be viewed with a measure of common sense." This guarded view of hospice training was reflected in an article authored by an active volunteer grappling with the nature of the volunteer role: . . . (Training programs) do not nor should they be expected to be a cookbook course on how to be the perfect volunteer. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as the perfect volunteer, training courses are designed to introduce volunteers to the hospice concept, give some examples as to what we might do, and help the trainees acquire useful skills. Volunteers who admit that they leave these courses not knowing exactly what it is to be a volunteer are being honest. We draw upon what we learned in our training as we deal with our families so that a volunteer really begins to appreciate the training course only after he or she begins to visit families. As far as I am concerned, it is volunteers' gut level reactions as

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caring and resourcefulhuman begins that make them good volunteers;training, continuing education, and experiencewith hospicefamilies sharpen and mold these reactionsover time (Rich, 1985, p. 41). In order to be an effective member of the hospice team, volunteers must bring their own "stock of knowledge" (Schutz, 1970) to bear on resolving issues. The "gut reaction" mentioned above parallels Sjoberg' s concept of the "social mind." Thus volunteers are informally socialized through experientially and socially acquired knowledge, as well as contact with other volunteers, to be reflective about their position within the bureaucratic structure. For example, volunteers would attend monthly "sharing sessions" to discuss issues and caring strategies. These instances of socialized reflectivity provide the knowledge required by the volunteer to challenge the taken-for-granted practices within the health-care setting and uphold the principles of hospice care. I have found, in the context of my research, that once a terminal patient is institutionalized, the dying patient and family/caregivers abdicate some responsibilities and control to the medical organization. The personalized care that is characteristic of the hospice organization is supplemented and replaced to a certain degree by the staff of the long-term care facility or hospital. The standardization of everyday practices within health care organizations is often taken-for-granted - but it is virtually impossible for the hospice volunteer to ignore the organizational constraints that come to define their activities. The structured medical environment poses several systemic barriers that challenge the volunteers' role performance, constantly reminding them of their marginality and lack of legitimacy within the structured medical setting. Although formal hospice training rarely stresses the potential obstacles volunteers face within a health care setting, experienced volunteers are very much aware of the constraints placed upon them within the organizational structure.

CONSTRAINTS AND CREATIVITY Since most hospice patients, at some point in theft illness while under hospice care, will be placed in a medical facility, the volunteers must be able to operate within an organizational environment that is not designed to accommodate the inefficient, non-professional and unspecified nature of their role. According to the basic standards of hospice care, one of the primary objectives of hospice is to shield the dying individual and family from the routinization and segmentation associated with large-scale bureaucratic organizations such as hospitals and extended care facilities. Thus the greatest challenge facing the volunteer operating within a medical setting is the maintenance of the hospice philosophy of care.

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In order to explain social action within the health care setting, social theorists must develop a conceptual framework that accounts for the complex interaction between the human agent and the structure. Toward this end, Sjoberg's writing can be usefully supplemented with the theorizing of Giddens, who perceives of human agents encountering organizational rules as both enabling and constraining from the perspective of a proactive human agent. While Giddens' analysis alerts us to the enabling/constraining feature of organizational rules, his conceptualizations are too generalized to be helpful in specifying how human agents come to define the enabling and constraining aspects of social structure. We must also incorporate the recent work of Hans Joas, who, writing within a symbolic interactionist, or pragmatist, orientation, emphasizes the creativity of human agents. Joas' concept of "situated creativity" calls upon us to focus on the novel ways in which a human agent may respond to a particular situation, acknowledging the physical possibilities, normative expectations, and institutional arrangements that structure the field in which the action occurs. Joas specifically addresses Habermas' oversight with respect to agents by objecting to the systems side of Habermas and the dualism of what Habermas calls "the uncoupling of system and life-world" (Joas, 1998, pp. 216-220). The concept of situated creativity is akin to Dewey's terms of "reconstruction," and "intelligence," which refer to the process by which an embedded agent redefines a situation in response to obstacles. It also serves as a useful supplement to Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework by highlighting creativity as a form of reflective action: "Anchoring creativity in action allows the pragmatist to conceive of creativity precisely as the liberation of the capacity for new action" (Joas, 1998, p. 133). In my view, Joas' concept of creativity is a product of the social mind (a concept he does not address in a direct manner) and comes sharply to the fore as hospice workers seek to carve-out "social space" (or an aspect of the life-world) for themselves within the hospital setting so that they can meaningfully interact with a dying person. And we find, as we proceed to analyze the data on hospice workers, that the reshaping of organizational contexts may vary considerably from situation to situation and from volunteer to volunteer. I have found that volunteers employ structure creatively by: (1) carving-out social space, (2) combining resources of the organizations in creative ways by soliciting the help of other organizational actors (i.e. sympathetic professionals), and (3) using selective elements of the structure to achieve their objectives. Not only are volunteers creative with respect to the elements of the structure of the facility, but they are also creative in terms of their interaction with the dying individual and their families that are rooted in their understanding and grasp

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of the organizational structure. Based on their image of the organization and their position within it, the strategies employed by volunteers enabled them to operate effectively within the structured medical environment by circumventing certain systemic barriers and constraints. Knowledge of the workings of the health care bureaucracy is so salient that the tenure of those volunteers who do not have some common sense grasp of the organizational arrangements is short-lived. CARVING-OUT

"SOCIAL

SPACE"

The volunteer has no clearly defined role within the health care setting. Even within the hospice organization itself, volunteers are considered to be "gap-fillers" when it comes to caring for a dying individual and the family/ caregivers. In my research, the lack of role specificity associated with the hospice volunteer role dramatizes the slippage between the agency and structurally defined expectations. The volunteer role itself is unique in that it is not characterized and defined by strict guidelines mandated by professional affiliation. In fact, hospice training stresses the tenuousness of role constraints. Each situation is evaluated on its own merit; thus, the volunteer must adapt to a myriad of possibilities and constraints within a given situation. Volunteer responses reflect how the fluidity of the situation affected their role performance within the medical setting: Case 1: My role is a reflection of the situation I am in. Some patients are physically able to do more things than others. Some family members need me and others simply tolerate me. Some facilities are more flexible in the kinds of things that I can do. Case 2: I go slowly into each new situation. I try to be very observant and I listen to assess what my role will be. Now I realize that it will never be the same as any other time. I help in whatever way I can and do what must be done. A majority of the respondents enjoyed the freedom involved in assessing the needs of the patient and family caregivers and bringing the appropriate behavior, as defined by the volunteer, patient, and family caregivers, to bear in a given situation. They had a considerable amount of license or agency in the determination of the behavior with respect to the dying individual, family/ caregivers and health care setting. Despite the fact that there is a considerable amount of freedom and flexibility involved in the volunteer role, there are still certain societal and organizational restrictions that delimit the boundaries of agency. In order to operate effectively within the health care setting volunteers must use their knowledge about constraints to create a buffer, or a "social space," between those in power and those who seek the "good death" for individuals struggling

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to find meaning within the bureaucratic setting. Organizations typically do not spell out rules in a specific sense, and thus leave "spaces" for persons to act on their own. The social space available to the volunteer within the medical setting is space that has been sanctioned by the medical establishment because of its lack of desire to deal with issues of death and dying. Volunteers, aware of the constraints placed upon them and those in their care by the health care organization, must actively acquire this space and make it their own. More specifically, the volunteer must mediate between actors with formalized roles as well as the broader organizational structure in order to carve-out this sanctioned space. In the words of one respondent, "the difference between simply being a volunteer and being a good volunteer is one's ability to make the facility work for, not against, the patient and the family/caregivers."

SYMPATHETIC PROFESSIONALS The volunteer respondents recognized the importance of engaging those within the system in order to preserve the hospice philosophy of care within the health care facility. One strategy utilized by the respondents involved working within the complex division of labor which characterizes the medical setting in order to further interest the staff of these facilities in the care of their patient. Efforts were made by the volunteers to interest key caregivers within these facilities by personalizing their patient/family and elevating them above the "business as usual" or "simply another terminal case" attitudes in the eyes of the staff. Toward this end, respondents stated that they would seek out professionals within these health care facilities (i.e. nursing homes and hospitals) who were sympathetic toward their cause. These "sympathetic professionals" can best be characterized as health care professionals who either have not been well socialized to system rules or who have chosen to challenge these rules in the course of their duties. The volunteer respondents indicated that they would cultivate these relationships by employing such strategies as: (1) professional admiration and/or sympathy for the health care staff and their occupations; (2) individualization and personalization of the patient/family by telling their "story;" or (3) via threats and innuendo about the quality of care that their patient was receiving. The following cases illustrate how the use of these "sympathetic professionals" by the volunteers enabled them to carve-out the "space" required for themselves and the patient/family: One volunteer recalled a frantic mother's reaction to the "atrocious" conditions of a nursing home in which her son had been placed: The woman clung to me like a life preserver. I was a familiar face in a sea of strangers, She was almost inconsolable: "They don't care about my son. They are all on deathwatch

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waiting for him to die. No one here knew him before he was sick. They don't care if he is clean or comfortable, all they want is for him to die. I am terrified that he will die alone, with no one around him that cares." All I could do was promise her (the mother) that I would sit with him while she rested and ate. I assured her that I cared about her son, and that he would not be alone when he died. I also talked to the nursing home staff and persuaded them (i.e. through flattery and empathy for their working conditions) to spend some quality time with mother and son. Some of them were very accommodating, and the mother noticed the difference immediately. This particular case is indicative of m a n y o f the respondents' experiences, particularly in l o n g - t e r m care facilities. A c t i n g in this capacity, the v o l u n t e e r w o u l d attempt, not to change the system, but reach a c o m m o n m i d d l e - g r o u n d b e t w e e n the system and hospice ideals. Respondents typically v i e w e d these situations in terms o f " p e a c e m a k i n g efforts" in the face o f a crisis (death). This often m e a n t extra effort on the part o f the v o l u n t e e r to fill in the gaps of care d e l i v e r e d by the hospital or e x t e n d e d care facility, as w e l l as efforts to further interest the staff in the care of the dying individual: In order to accommodate patient/family wishes, I get to know one or two staff members who are helpful and are willing to often go against nursing home policies in order to fulfill certain patient needs. One case involved taking a patient to a local mail. It was against home policy to remove a patient without a family member's signature. His wife was the designated caregiver, but she was in a mental institution at this time. With a lot of wrangling (i.e. under the pretense of being his daughter in conjunction with a couple of aides who were especially fond of the patient), I was able to take this man to the mall. It was his last outing. T h e s e "sympathetic professionals" enabled the volunteers to c a r v e - o u t a " s p a c e " for t h e m s e l v e s and the patient/family. The a f o r e m e n t i o n e d cases highlight, first, the a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t o f the system by the volunteer; and secondly, the ability of the v o l u n t e e r to e n g a g e those representing the system on their o w n terms, with the v o l u n t e e r ultimately c a r v i n g - o u t space within the organizational structure and shaping the dying process.

KNOWLEDGE/EXPERIENCE A n almost universal difficulty e x p e r i e n c e d by respondents in the institutional setting was one o f legitimacy. S e v e r a l respondents expressed frustration at their inability to c o m m a n d respect within the f o r m a l health care environment. O n e respondent in particular w e n t to great lengths to use her k n o w l e d g e o f the structure to carve-out a " n i c h e " for herself and her patient within an e x t e n d e d care facility:

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From day one, I was treated with suspicion. Almost every time I visited my patient, I had to explain who I was and why I was there. Because of my lack of professional credentials, questions were raised by the staff as to my competency. It became clear that my patient was not receiving the proper care and was in constant pain. I felt like the very principle of hospice care, a pain-free death, was being shunned by the staff. I called in the hospice nurse, who once again explained the concept of administering unscheduled pain killers before pain was experienced. I was then taken to the administrator's office, by the nurse, and introduced as a vital member of the hospice staff. Outwardly, my standing within the organization improved, but I was still regarded as suspect by the staff. A n o t h e r r e s p o n d e n t r e c o u n t e d h e r l i t e r a l a d o p t i o n b y t h e f a m i l y in o r d e r to o p e r a t e e f f e c t i v e l y w i t h i n t h e e x t e n d e d c a r e facility: Every time I visited my patient I spent more time explaining myself and my duties to the staff than I spent actually caring for my patient. Nursing home staffs have a high rate of turnover, as well as flexible shifts; thus I hardly ever visited when there wasn't one or two new nurses' aides, nurses or staff that I did not have to validate my presence to. Eventually I adopted the role of daughter to my patient. Despite the fact that my patient really believed that I was his daughter and his wife also considered me as a family member, I was finally able to spend quality time with my patient. A n o t h e r s t r a t e g y u t i l i z e d b y t h e v o l u n t e e r s w a s to i n d i c a t e to m e d i c a l p e r s o n n e l a certain degree of medical knowledge or experience beyond the volunteer role. S e v e r a l v o l u n t e e r s h a d b e e n h e a l t h c a r e p r o f e s s i o n a l s a n d u t i l i z e d this e x p e r i e n c e to attain a c e r t a i n a m o u n t o f r e s p e c t f r o m m e d i c a l p e r s o n n e l a n d s t a f f within medical settings: This particular nursing home is probably one of the worst in the area. The facility is filthy and the staff treat the patients like animals. Volunteers are generally treated as a nuisance and ignored. One day I walked in and saw the aides throwing my patient around like a sack of potatoes under the auspices of changing his bed. That was the last straw. I informed them that I had been a nurse and that I would report their activities to the proper authorities. Suddenly, I was transformed from nuisance to threat. After that, my patient received special care and respect (at least as far as I knew) and so did I. I have since used this strategy from the outset of my relationship with a particular facility. It is nice to be taken seriously. V o l u n t e e r s s t r e s s e d t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f n o t b e i n g " d u m b " in s i t u a t i o n s in w h i c h y o u a r e a l r e a d y at a d i s a d v a n t a g e as f a r as p r o f e s s i o n a l status. O n e v o l u n t e e r l e a r n s as m u c h a b o u t t h e i l l n e s s o f h e r p a t i e n t s as s h e c a n in o r d e r to p a s s h e r s e l f o f f as a n " e x p e r t " a n d r e c e i v e t h e r e s p e c t a n d p o w e r that g o e s a l o n g w i t h it: Case One: It makes no sense to walk into a situation unprepared. Nurses and doctors already view volunteers as sweet, well-meaning people who probably are unable to do anything else with their lives. Why make the situation worse by playing into that stereotype... I always try to volunteer "smart." I want to have as much information as I can before I walk into a particular setting to meet a particular patient/family and medical personnel. I feel that this

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gives me an advantage with the medical staff... I have already broken their conceptualization of the typical volunteer. Case Two: I read everything I can about my patient's illness ... I have found that this not only helps me deal with my patient, it also allows me to appear to be pretty savvy to the nurses and doctors I have to deal with. I think they are never really sure if I have had medical training or not ... I keep that kind of vague. They respect my knowledge; I like that; it also gives me the opportunity to oversee the care of my patient. In most cases if I complain about the care of one of my patients, I get results. The aforementioned cases dramatize the importance of knowledge, feigned or otherwise, in establishing legitimacy within the health care environment. The hospice nurse as a bridge between the volunteer, health care staff, and dying individual; the mimicking of status as a family member or health care professional; and the use of the inferred knowledge of a retired nurse are illustrative of the volunteers' ability to creatively manipulate the health care professionals and system. On the basis o f m y empirical studies, I do not feel that the traditions of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, or the Habermasian Theory of C o m m u nicative Rationality, have gone far enough in explaining the impact of organizations on interaction. The volunteer experience cannot possibly be explained simply in terms of process or negotiation, for oftentimes the volunteer will simply act without negotiation. Moreover, the volunteers interviewed were very much aware of the constraints they face within the organizational context and where they stand in the pecking order of the bureaucracy in terms o f status and knowledge. Thus the volunteers, because of their unique relationship and marginality to the system and the patient/family life-worlds, were able to develop a reflective stance toward the constraints of the health care setting and use this insight to carve-out communicative space within the organization. This communicative space provides an opportunity for the dying to live out their final days unencumbered by the "iron cage."

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS M y attempt to articulate the relationship between agency and structure expands upon S j o b e r g ' s efforts to understand the ability of human beings to reflectively use and manipulate social structures. By supplementing S j o b e r g ' s Alternative Meadian Framework with Joas' Theory of Creativity, I have sought to bridge the gap between the pragmatist tradition and the W e b e r i a n heritage. The result has been a modified Habermasian framework that recognizes the constraining and creative possibilities for human agents within large-scale organizations.

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I found the hospice volunteer to be more proactive with respect to structure than Weber and the symbolic interactionists have acknowledged; but, by the same token, the volunteer is also more influenced by the constraining and creative possibilities of the organization than the pragmatists and Habermas wish to concede. Sjoberg's acknowledgment of the proactive agent, who is bound by the constraints within the organizational context but capable of reflectively interpreting and reinterpreting the rules, has provided the basis for my analysis of the volunteer within the medical setting. His Alternative Meadian Framework animates the actor with respect to the organizational structure and allows for the possibility of the human agent capable of reflectively using and manipulating the social structure. My research data suggest that hospice stands as a buffer between the family and civil society with hospice as a broker, mediating between the family, and the civil society and broader system. The role of the volunteer challenges some of Habermas' basic principles concerning the relationship between the system and the life-world. As indicated above, the volunteer role often demands that the volunteer act in the capacity of mediator or arbiter not only between the family and the medical system, but also between the hospice organization and the medical system. In Habermasian terms, the volunteer attempts to maintain and buttress up the boundaries of the life-world within a system that threatens to "pathologically" intrude and destroy the life-worlds of the patient and family/caregivers. Respondents often acted to alter either the medical or hospice organization in a way that was more true to the original hospice ideals. Joas' (1998) concept of "situated creativity" enabled me to address the shortcoming of Habermas' system/life-world distinction by examining the human agent's creativity with respect to particular situations, defined by the physical possibilities, normative expectations, and institutional arrangements that structure the dying process. This research provides an empirical illustration of a perennial theoretical problem inherent in Habermas' conceptualization of the life-world and the system. Inasmuch as Habermas' analysis is highly abstract and subject to somewhat differing interpretations, it nonetheless seems evident that he does not grapple with the complex interpenetrations of the system and the life-world and how, if the life-world is to be viable, it is necessary for human agents to actively carve out social space for themselves within the context of organizational structures. My research indicates that hospice workers have to accommodate complex organizational smactures in order to cope with dying patients. And it is reasonable to assume that many spheres of the life-world (or of civil society) require similar creative efforts. The life-world does not simply manifest itself to human agents as a given but requires the active participation by human agents

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in carving out social space for themselves within the context of organizations, be these corporate or state. It is within this "creatively fabricated" sphere of society that human agents are able to sustain communicative rationality and counter the dominant orientation toward instrumental rationality on which organizations are founded. A n d it is through this communicative rationality that human agents can achieve freedom to cope with not only issues such as death, but also with other basic life- world concerns as well. In conclusion, my data indicate that refusal to acknowledge the organizational context sells human agency short. In a sense we discredit the agent's ability to manipulate or challenge the structure based on his/her reflective evaluation of the organizational context. 1° A modified Habermasian framework that incorporates Sjoberg's Alternative Meadian Framework and Joas' concept of Situated Creativity liberates the human agent from the "iron cage." By recognizing the ability of human agents to reflectively evaluate the social constraints placed upon them within the organizational context we open up the possibility for creative activity and unencumbered discourse.

NOTES 1. A form of this paper was presented at the August, 1998, Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, in San Francisco. The late Stanley Saxton and I organized a special session entitled "Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No." 2. Although others have used Habermas extensively in their examination of the life-world (i.e. family and civil society), no one, including Habermas himself, has acknowledged the actual practices used by human agents to develop and sustain social space within the private spheres of family and civil society. 3. Despite the strengths of Joas' position, my research indicates that he is not as clear as he could be that situated creativity assumes agents capable of monitoring the world and then reflexively processing the information received. 4. Symbolic Interaction (1992) had a special issue devoted to Habermas, but his views have not, in my judgment, been incorporated into subsequent SI discourse. Although, as will become evident, I have reservations about some of Habermas' formulations of the life-world, his overall concern with unlocking the iron cage is a major advancement over previous theorizing. 5. Habermas is not alone in his determination to separate out the life-world f r o m the broader system. Bellah explicitly, and other Communitarians, implicitly, reassert the value of an autonomous life-world, but, even Bellah et al. (1991), in their book The Good Society, are reluctant to invoke Habermasian terminology, which acknowledges little if any possibility of system change in response to the life-world. Although Bellah relies heavily on the Habermasian framework in his analysis of the family, he is unwilling to ignore the possibility that, despite the fact that the system is very powerful in relation to the life-world, it cannot be changed.

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6. Sjoberg's views regarding organizational structures differ from those of Strauss and Malnes but seem congruent with the recent wIitings of Peter Hall. Hall (1997) has argued that social organization has strong effects in shaping social action through the creation, construction, and alterations of social situations. 7. Relying on Mead's (1934) concept of the "social mind," Sjoberg conceptualizes a human agent within the formal organizational context who is capable of reflectively interpreting and reacting to the rules of the organization. 8. Blumer (1969) acknowledged the effects of social organizations only so far as they shaped the situation by stressing the stable, orderly, and standardized context of social organizations. Modern-day interactionists who turn their attention to social organizations focus on the dynamic and contingent contexts of social organizations without highlighting the reflexive nature of human agency within these organizations. For example, many symbolic interactionists have studied the negotiative processes within organizations considering the structural conditions as one of a myriad of factors affecting the negotiation process but fail to specify the concrete strategies employed by individuals in response to the boundaries and potential barriers of the structural context (Strauss, 1978, 1982, 1993, 1998; Maines, 1982; Hall, 1987; Fine, 1984; Hall & Spencer-Hall, 1982; Kleinman, 1982; Levy, 1982). 9. A majority of the volunteers in this study joined hospice after the death (or successive deaths) of a loved one. Volunteerism became a result of either frustration over the type of death they had witnessed or in response to having come into contact with hospice during the course of their loved one's terminal illness and death. 10. Leon Warshay (1962) argued that the greater the actors' "breadth of perspective" (which he defined as experience, knowledge and contact with others), the larger their repertoire for action and the greater their ability to be effective problem solvers and role-takers. I would extend Warshay's insights to symbolic interactionism and include the caveat that the breadth of perspective in symbolic interactionism should encompass an understanding of the impact of large-scale organizations on social life and human agency.

REFERENCES Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, R., & Tipton, S. M. (1991). The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dewey, J. (1985). The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 6. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Fine, G. A. (1984). Negotiated Orders and Organizational Cultures: Qualitative Approaches to Organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 10. Flabermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reason, Vol. II. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hall, P. (1997). Meta-Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action. Symbolic Interaction, 20(4), 397-418.

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Hall, P. (1987). Interactionism and the Study of Social Organization. Sociological Quarterly, 28, 1-22. Hall, P., & Spencer-Hall, D. A. (1982). The Social Conditions of Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 328-349. Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleinman, S. (1982). Actors' Conflicting Theories of Negotiation: The Case of a Holistic Health Center. Urban Life, 11, 312-327. Layder, D. (1997). Modern Social Theory: Key Debates and New Directions. London England: UCL Press Limited. Levy, J. (1982). The Staging of Negotiations between Hospice and Medical Institutions. Urban Life, 11,293-311. Maines, D. (1982). In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order. Urban Life, 11, 267-279. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moller, D. W. (1996). Confronting Death: Values, Institutions & Human Mortality. New York: Oxford University Press. Rich, M. (1985). A Personal View of the Volunteer's Role: Expectations and Realities of Hospice Work. American Journal of Hospice Care, (May/June), 41-46. Schutz, A. 1970. Alfred Schutz: On Phenomenology and Social Relations. H. Wagner (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snow, D. A., Zurcher, L. A., & Sjoberg, G. (1982). Interviewing by Comment: An Adjunct to the Direction Question. Qualitative Sociology, 5, 285-411. Strauss, A. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, A. (1982). Interorganizational Negotiations. Urban Life, 11, 350-367. Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sjoberg, G. (1999). Some observations on bureaucratic capitalism: Knowledge about what and why? In: J. L. Abu-Lughod (Ed.), Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges (pp, 43-64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G., & Cain, L. D. (1971). Negative Values, counter system models, and the analysis of social systems. In: H. Turk & R. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Sjoberg, G., Gill, E., Williams, N., & Littrell, B. (1997). The Reemergence of John Dewey and American Pragmatism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 13, 73-92. Sjoberg, G., & Miller, P. J. (1973). Social Research on Bureaucracy: Limitations and Opportunities. Social Problems, 21, 129-143. Sjoberg, G., & Vaughan, T. R. (1993). The bureaucratization of sociology: Its impact on theory and research. In: T. R. Vaughan, G. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (pp. 54-113). Dix Hills: General Hall. Warshay, L. (1962). Breadth of perspective. In: A. M. Rose (Ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach (pp. 148-176). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds). New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1949). The Methodology of the Social Sciences. E. A. Shils & H. A. Finch (Eds). New York: Free Press. Zurcher, L. (1983). Social Roles: Conformity, Conflict, and Creativity. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

GIDEON SJOBERG, METHODOLOGY AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Boyd Littrell

INTRODUCTION This article addresses the nature and importance of Gideon Sjoberg's methodological writing, with an eye to symbolic interaction (SI). His surprisingly large body of methodological work offers food for thought for proponents of other perspectives as well. But the occasion 1 for which part of this paper was originally written, together with the growing importance of pragmatism in Sjoberg's more recent writing makes SI the natural focus of attention. Two main sections follow an initial introduction to Sjoberg's methodological work, which spans nearly fifty years. The first takes up theoretical matters, beginning with what Sjoberg often calls his "'strange' sociology of knowledge perspective." That perspective, crucial for Sjoberg's methodological position, forces him to address the problems of historicism and relativism, which, in turn, drive him to rethink the nature of objectivity in the social sciences. These themes, in my view, drive his methodological concerns. The second main section addresses five recurrent themes of Sjoberg's methodology, which taken together, outline a distinctive approach for sociologists who strive to retain a conception of objectivity while honoring multiple realities or perspectives. The five recurrent themes are: the role of the Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 129-150. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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researcher in a world of multiple realities; the importance of counter-system analyses; the difficulty of selecting units of data and of analysis in a world of multiple realities; the historical importance of the rise of bureaucratic domination; and the importance of moral/political solutions for the problem of facts and values. A concluding section, "Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No" takes up the importance of these issues for both Sjoberg and for SI.

GIDEON SJOBERG AS METHODOLOGIST To my knowledge, no one has written an overview of Sjoberg's methodological writing, though he has written a substantial body of work on the subject. His first article on "descriptive sociology" appeared in 1951. His edited volume Ethics, Politics and Social Research (1967) addressed important methodological concerns, and several prominent sociologists of the time contributed to that volume. Even more directly, a year later, Sjoberg and Nett, (1968) devoted a monograph/textbook to sociological methodology, which Sjoberg re-issued in 1997, with a new and lengthy introduction. Sjoberg joined Feagin and Orum (1991) in an edited volume entitled A Case for the Case Study, to which Sjoberg et al. contributed a 50 page chapter, and part of the 27 page introduction. Between the first and last of these books Sjoberg produced a substantial number of articles with important methodological themes. All in all, Sjoberg has written and/or edited about 25 articles and books that are directly concerned with methodology. In addition, he inserts methodological reflections into other books and articles. And finally, he has taught about methods in one or another seminar at The University of Texas at Austin, since 1950. 2 The amount of written material on methodology and his long history of courses on the subject prompt two related questions. First, if Sjoberg is a methodologist with an extensive list of publications on the subject, why has recognition of his methodological work been slow in coming? And second, in what sense is Sjoberg a methodologist? While answers to these questions have both conceptual and social and historical elements, space limitations preclude a discussion of the social and historical components. Part of the answer to the question about delayed recognition as a methodologist has an ironic twist. Put simply, Sjoberg was famous for The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (Sjoberg, 1960). That volume brought notoriety for its author from several disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, and history. Sjoberg's professional stature benefited from this concern about cities, and his recognition came as an urbanist, not as a methodologist. The second question, "What kind of a methodologist is Sjoberg?" requires more detailed discussion.

Gideon Sjoberg, Methodology and Symbolic Interaction A "STRANGE"

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PERSPECTIVE Sjoberg often prefaces presentations and conversations by referring to his "strange" sociology of knowledge perspective. The "strangeness" to which he refers both acknowledges a debt to Karl Mannheim, and tips off his departure from Mannheim's views. Although diverse sociologists have contributed to the sociology of knowledge, 3 I have begun this section with Mannheim, because Sjoberg (1968, p. 10) himself began by distinguishing his view from Mannheim' s. Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) developed his sociology of knowledge from diverse strands of thought. But the most important of these was Marx's view that knowledge of the everyday world belonged to super-structural features of social and economic life. Because the super-structure, in turn, depended upon a specific mode of production, Mannheim concluded that knowledge was rooted in social and economic life.4 Mannheim took much from Marx, but not everything. For example, in his essay "The Problem of Generations," Mannheim explained that human experience and knowledge was located in time, as well as in class position. Because the youngest living generation experienced very different social and historical conditions from the oldest living generation, they had different perspectives, quite apart from class position. For Mannheim, this guaranteed the existence of a "multiplicity of standpoints" including, but not limited to social class. As did Mannheim, Sjoberg's methodology emphasizes the importance of "multiple standpoints" and realities that are "socially located." Unlike Mannheim, Sjoberg (1968, p. 10), insists that knowledge must be located in relation to diverse social and historical conditions. Initially, this appears to reflect Sjoberg's historical and comparative "bias." But this apparent "bias" is in fact a technique for addressing the problem that bedevils all sociology of knowledge perspectives: relativism. If knowledge can be reduced to its social location or social roots, all knowledge, including that of sociologists, is relative. No single standpoint can claim authority for knowledge. And an inquiry that cannot claim authority, becomes "just another opinion." One can best understand Sjoberg's methodology, by contrasting his solution to the problem of relativism with Mannheim's. Mannheim's solution was °'historicist." One branch of historicism argues that history moves by its own laws. Comte's positivism, Marx's materialism and Hegel's idealism differ in many respects, but they all share the view that the laws of history could be discerned. Mannheim preferred Marx's materialist history, which, for him, plugged the hole of relativism. Mannheim reasoned this way. The

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transformation of modem capitalism, had, as Marx concluded, produced two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. But it had also produced intellectuals who were members of neither class: they were "free" or "unattached." Such a group was caught amid multiple and contradictory concerns. As a practical matter, Mannheim thought, an "unattached" intelligentsia faced one of two resolutions to its experience of multiple contradictions. It could adopt the standpoint of either of the two classes and develop the intellectual problems facing that class. Or they could (Mannheim, 1936, p. 158, my italics) scrutinize "their own social moorings and the quest for fulfillment of their mission as the predestined

advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole." Mannheim plugged the hole of relativism by adopting the latter alternative, and thus he rescued a form of objectivity. He argued that intellectuals, who were partially freed from either antagonistic class, were positioned to examine the situations of both classes. They were, therefore, able to "advocate the intellectual interests of the whole." Objectivity, for Mannheim, consisted in grasping the place of both classes within the larger movement of history. Sjoberg also solves the problem of relativity by reconciling multiple standpoints with objectivity. And Sjoberg, like Mannheim, plugs the hole of relativity with history. But Sjoberg appeals to a very different conception of history. He rejects the determinist interpretation (there are others) of Marx's history, and appeals to a sense of history much nearer to Dewey's pragmatism. In his biography of Dewey, Alan Ryan (1995, p. 39) summarizes Dewey's attitude toward the relationship between knowledge and history: 5 Every philosophical system expressed a particular personality and a particular culture located in a particular time and place. Philosophyanswered to the needs and interests and talents of the author and to the needs and interests and resources of the society in which that author lived .... To see it as the product of a particular culture ... and temperament was not to belittle it... But how can one solve the problem of relativism by, on some views, accepting it? Sjoberg announced his answer (1968, p. 10): We shall use [the sociology of knowledge] ... as a methodological device . .. with this tool the scientist can move beyond his own system to a degree, provided he employs the sociology of knowledge as a mirror in which to examine himself in cultural perspective. He added, "By examining the social forces that impinge upon the social researcher, we can at the very least objectify them and thus bring them to the level of consciousness." I shall return to the metaphor of the mirror below. Sjoberg and Nett, here, redefine the problem of objectivity very differently from Marxism and from positivism. This redefinition of objectivity follows a nearly identical move by Dewey who wrote about philosophical

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systems rather than sociological methodology. Ryan (1995, p. 39) quotes Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy concerning the consequences of this shift: "Instead of disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we have the scene of human clash of social purpose and aspirations." But how does this Deweyian 6 view of history save objectivity from relativity? The answer lies in Sjoberg and Nett's remark that cross-cultural, historical and comparative study serves as a "mirror in which the sociologist can examine himself" (my italics). The metaphor of a cross-cultural mirror provides an important clue. The problem of objectivity does not lie in getting one's observations properly matched up with fixed nature or lawful history. The problem of objectivity lies in gaining clarity and a practical certainty about one's own views, conclusions and claims. If I understand Sjoberg's view, objectivity in this sense can be achieved only by laying one's views down beside the views of others in the cross-cultural mirror, thus gaining an impression of him/herself. Researchers' accomplish objectivity and certainty about their own work only by comparing it with perspectives unlike their own. Here Sjoberg advances a perspective that can be fitted into Mead's (1927) discussion of the "objective reality of perspectives." Mead's discussion has roots in his study of psychology and in philosophical underpinnings that Sjoberg's does not explicitly address. The individualism of Mead's social psychology, and the abstractions of Mead's metaphysics, would, I think, trouble Sjoberg. But a strong similarity between Mead and Sjoberg's conceptions of objectivity must be highlighted. Mead (p. 307) argued, as did Merleau-Ponty (1962), and I think for the same reasons, that "communication, thinking, and substantive meanings" are inextricably "planted" or embodied in nature. Nature, in so far as it can be known, can only be known from some standpoint; and the standpoint is itself part of nature because it exists in a body, at a particular place and at a particular time. Nature, in turn, becomes a fixed reality only in relation to a particular standpoint. On this view the only way to think of "all of nature" is to think of all possible standpoints. As a practical matter, no one can think of all possible standpoints. The practical question to which Mead repeatedly turned was: "How do we become confident of our own standpoint?" His answer was that we take must first take the standpoint of others; from that standpoint we can identify our own. This logical necessity lies at the core of Mead's theory of socialization, but is found elsewhere, as well. In the essay to which I am referring (p. 312). Mead writes simply, "In the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self. It is in addressing himself in the role of an other that his self arises in experience."

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Sjoberg, as did Mead, recognizes that one's own standpoint is rooted in a particular place and time. Like Mead, Sjoberg's methodology seeks objectivity, as clarity and practical certainty, by analyzing the standpoint of the sociological researcher in relation to others. Sjoberg saves objectivity from relativism by throwing the researcher's position into question, and by making the researcher's role in relation to others a matter for analysis. Importantly, Sjoberg does not invoke consensus or scientific convention as the solution to objectivity. As did Mead, Sjoberg recognizes that the researcher's standpoint has equal standing with other standpoints. Researchers see themselves clearly or objectively, by sustaining multiple standpoints and by counterpoising other standpoints with their own. To be sure, objectivity understood in this way, always remains open to revision. But this openness of scientific thought, is the very principle that makes science "science," rather than, for example, "tradition." Science is always open to revision. One should note here that Sjoberg's methodological orientation requires that standpoints of the powerless, the poor and the oppressed must, in principle, be included in order to achieve an objective account of society and social relations. While Dewey and Mead were on the right side of such issues, they did not make them central intellectual concerns. Cornel West (1988), for example, takes the pragmatists to task for ignoring race as a central intellectual problem in America. And Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996) makes a similar point with respect to feminism in her discussion of missing perspectives. In their different ways, West and Seigfried note that Dewey and Mead may have articulated a pluralist and inclusive view of science and history, but they did not make race and gender central intellectual issues. Those are fair criticisms; criticisms that Sjoberg's conception of objectivity insists must be addressed. To summarize: Sjoberg's sociology of knowledge is "strange" if one takes Mannheim's sociology of knowledge as the standard. Sjoberg's begins, as did Mannheim, with the idea of multiple realities or standpoints. But Sjoberg rejects the idea that the relativism threatened multiple realities can be thwarted by the laws of an external and objective history. And Sjoberg surely rejects Mannheim's view that intellectuals are "free" or unattached. Indeed, as intellectuals have become increasingly institutionalized in universities they are not only "attached" to corporations on the law and business side of the campus, and to governmental agencies and contracts everywhere else, they have become the very creatures of these organizations and their interests (Sjoberg & Vaughan, 1993, pp. 59-75). Sjoberg agrees with Mannheim on the central point, that objectivity can be achieved only by describing a multiplicity of standpoints. Sjoberg's sociology of knowledge is strange because he parts company with Mannheim's view of history. Sjoberg's departure ends with a move to Dewey and Mead's

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conception of history as a shifting arrangement of standpoints, in which a, and perhaps the basic methodological problem involves understanding the effects of the researcher's role on research, and in turn, upon knowledge itself. Curiously, The Preindustrial City illustrates the logic of the perspective. A historical and comparative look at cities imposes limits on the kinds of generalizations American, urban sociologists can make. That does not deny, falsify, nor disqualify the importance of the Chicago sociologists. But it forces limits to their claims of generality. The payoff for this limited claim to generality, lies in opening a door to a broader class of generalizations about urban structures and processes. In brief, only by laying the modern industrial city against the pre-industrial city is it possible to isolate the distinctive features of either type. Further, recognition of two distinct types of cities issues an invitation to yet further reflection and broader generalization: what dimensions are presupposed in this typology? Are their others? Such a process of inquiry opens the way to what has been called the "limited universal," which for our purposes has the form, "All of the types of cities we know . . . " and to systems of classification that take the form "Cities may be distinguished on the basis of . . . " To be sure, such science has open horizons, but it nevertheless permits useful generalizations. This is exactly how both Sjoherg and Dewey conceive of science. Dewey (1927, p. 175) argued that the positivist conception of science (one adopted by mid-twentieth century sociologists) had distorted the meaning of science: The glorificationof 'pure' science.., is a rationalization of an escape; it marks a conslruction of an asylumof refuge, a shirking of responsibility.The true purity of knowledgeexists not when it is uncontaminatedby contact with use and service. It is wholly a moral matter, an affair of honesty, impartialityand generous breadth of intent in search and communication. With that observation, Dewey draws this section to a close, and introduces the next one, which takes up five recurrent themes in Sjoberg's methodology. Sjoberg's "strange" sociology of knowledge perspective resolves the problem of relativism by redefining both the meaning of history and the nature of science. These themes fill out his revision of the idea of objectivity, and serve to guide social researchers' inquiries. Other themes might be identified; but these five are crucial to his re-conception of objectivity against a background of the problems of relativism and historicism just discussed.

SJOBERG'S METHODOLOGICAL THEMES Sjoberg's central methodological problem should now be clear. He seeks to devise a conception of objectivity for a world of multiple realities, without

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resorting to historicism or relativism. This problem has given rise to five persistent themes, 7 that address questions about how to achieve such a conception of objectivity. They are: (1) the role of the researcher, (2) the idea of countersystem analysis, (3) the problem of units of data and units of analysis, (4) the historical problem of bureaucratic domination, and (5) the moral and political dimensions of science. Each of these themes is important in its own right. Taken together, however, they elaborate a framework for a kind of objective knowledge that consists of multiple realities. His conception of objectivity, we have seen, involves developing certainty about one's own perspective.

1. Multiple Standpoints, the Role of the Researcher and Objectivity Since at least the mid-1950s Sjoberg (1954-1955) has analyzed the role of the researcher within the research process. Because both the researcher and the object of study are rooted in a specific social situation, inquiry must address the question "What is the position of the researcher with respect to that situation?" This question requires both a conceptual and an empirical answer. The theme appears in several places, but Sjoberg's (1967) edited volume Ethics, Politics and Social Research provides an important example. To the contemporary ear, tuned by diverse bureaucratic controls over research, that title may suggest a volume devoted to political circumspection, the intrusions of review boards, and the like. But that is not the volume's purpose. It offers, instead, an analysis of the role of the researcher. A careful look at the table of contents reveals that contributors are divided into two distinctive roles: "Insiders" and "Outsiders." Contributors in the first category wrote of their own experiences in contested settings of social research; contributors in the latter group commented on the experiences and reports of researchers in contested settings. This organizing division of the book sets up an analysis of the researchers' roles. The analyses presented in each chapter explore the effect of researchers' roles on the kinds of understanding and conclusions they reach. A comparison of contributions by the two categories of researchers reveals quite different concerns. Writing as an insider, Irving Louis Horowitz, for example, reviews his own motives about research that was published as Revolution in Brazil (1964). He is confessional as he observes that the "revolution" he studied was much less democratic than he had originally supposed, and that and his research had been used much differently than he intended. Leonard Cain, an "outsider" examines a research project organized by two sociologists, who recruited others to administer a questionnaire about health-

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related matters. The original two provided instructions that favored healthy respondents from upper income groups. Questions guided respondents toward conservative answers about insurance issues. These biases were not reported in the authors' paper nor in a report they published. The report drew conclusions that supported the American Medical Association's position against federally supported health insurance, and was picked up by The Wall Street Journal. Cain called attention to the shortcomings of the research and its misuses, which had been reported as objective research. One might fairly ask if the organization of this book represents a methodological principle, or if it simply deploys a convenient editorial device? The recurrence of the theme in Sjoberg's work makes clear that he views it as a central methodological problem. In the reissued Methodology, Sjoherg (1997, p. xviii) reflects on Merton's 1972 essay, "Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge," which was published five years after Sjoberg's Ethics book. He includes a chapter written by Williams and (Andree F.) Sjoberg (1993) who revise and modify Merton's ideas, relating them to white feminists and women of color. What about Sjoberg's "mirror" of cross-cultural perspective? Sjoberg (1967, p. xiv) explains that he "hoped to include two additional chapters on the ethical and political problems of research in other societies, but the authors w e r e . . , unable to complete these." Nevertheless, four of the fourteen chapters address research in cross-cultural settings. Sjoberg and Nett (1968) devoted the fourth chapter of the Methodology to "The Researcher and the Social System." Then Sjoberg (1997, p. xxii) reiterates the theme in the reissued edition of that book. Good evidence suggests that the inside/outside distinction illustrates Sjoberg's reflection on the role of the researcher as a methodological principle: a principle that seeks objectivity by looking at different perspectives. Sjoberg's perspective reverses the conception of objectivity set out in standard methods texts. In those texts, objectivity is gained by attempts to remove researchers from the settings of their research by means of standardized stimuli, randomization of respondents, and conventional standards of analysis. No thoughtful researcher would deny the value of such techniques for specific purposes. But Sjoberg denies that one can rest claims of objectivity for sociological research upon such techniques.

2. Countersystem Analysis and Objectivity Sjoberg's second theme is "countersystem analysis." Countersystem analysis also examines the researcher's role. But where the role of the researcher focused the need for multiple standpoints to gain certainty about the researcher's own

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situation, counter system analysis attempts to get outside the researcher's situation or social system. The effort is, ultimately, impossible; but the effort to do so sensitizes researchers to constraints of which they were unaware. "Countersystem models" and "countersystem analysis," thus contribute to objectivity. Sjoberg and Cain's (1971) chapter "Negative Values and Countersystem Models" provides a point of departure. Sjoberg and Cain take up the central theoretical problem of Talcott Parsons' work, the integrative function of values. Sjoberg and Cain (p. 214) observe, "that for any positive value a negative counterpart not only logically exists but is frequently empirically manifested." They argued that Parsons had neglected the importance of such "negative" values for social integration itself. After scuffling with Parsons on his own turf (the problem of order and system integration) Sjoberg and Cain examined the importance of negative values for analyzing social change. They wrote (p. 218) "If the perspective of the actor is accepted as relevant to sociological analysis, then we see no way to analyze change within systems without explicit recognition of negative values." They (p. 219) continue: "Emergent negative values are an essential precondition for undermining faith in traditional action patterns or more generally in the legitimacy of the existing structure. Negative values are thus the mechanism by which doubts about the normative order are raised and the supportive value system are raised and resocialization initiated ... Throughout the chapter, the authors illustrate their analysis of negative values with specific historical illustrations ranging from New Deal programs, to McCarthyism and revolutions. Then, in the concluding section of the article, they (p. 224) reflect on the methodological importance of their work. The countersystemrepresents the analyticalnegationof, and logicalalternative to, the system or type of system under examination. It differs from the antisystem model in that countersystem is a tool for analysis rather than a weapon for attacking the system ... the countersystem model invites social scientists to cope rationally and systematically with alternatives to existing systems. (italics in the original) These remarks illuminate another problem of objectivity. One threat to a sense of certainty about one's findings lies in the recognition that researchers' standpoints form one reality amid multiple realities. But the problem of getting "outside" the standpoints of one's own society is even more difficult than identifying multiple realities within it. How, does one gain a sense of certainty about one's findings while recognizing one's own standpoint is socially and culturally circumscribed?

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Sjoberg and Cain's countersystem analysis serves a specific purpose in shedding light on this question. It helps researchers, who are rooted in the societies they study, to make a partial escape from their own societal categories. "Negative values" and "countersystem models" offer analytical tools to generate alternative perspectives from within one's own social world. By analyzing negative values and by imagining opposite arrangements, or at least by negating existing arrangements within their own society, researchers can take a short step outside their own society. Consider, as an example, Davis and Moore's famous thesis that inequality was functional for a society, though it inflicted pain on some individuals. This pain, in turn overwhelmed some and spurred others to highly skilled positions. In their conclusion, they grasped a truth about modern economies, but not the truth. When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to slow the U.S. economy, it hopes to trade increased unemployment for lowered inflation. When the IMF forces devaluation of world currencies, it does much the same thing. In one respect, the evidence is strong that the world works like this; and this is doubly true from the standpoint of a central banker. But countersystem analysis invites at least two "negative" questions about the central banker's (and Davis and Moore's) standpoint, and it does so from within the same society. First, can one find conditions within one's own society where their thesis does not hold? For example, some people become members of the clergy, professors, nurses or police officers because they care about serving others; and at least some of them devote great effort, imagination, and energy to that end. Or again, can one identify groups of highly paid persons who contribute generously to larger social arrangements? Yet again, do the incomes of professional athletes, movie stars and pop-music celebrities support or undermine Davis and Moore's thesis? The second question asks whether one can imagine societies, or institutions, where Davis and Moore's functional thesis does not operate. Returning to Sjoberg's cross-cultural mirror, can one find different historical examples that run counter to the generalization proposed by Davis and Moore? If one cannot imagine alternative arrangements, and if no such historical examples can be found, one must accept Davis and Moore's thesis, at least until further evidence is in. On the other hand, if counter examples, from within one's society, or if examples from other societies come readily to mind, then Davis and Moore's generalization must be revised. Countersystem analysis includes elements of mental experiments, of social description and of reflection that helps researchers evaluate their own situation. It opens a route of escape from the tyranny of one's own standpoint, and in doing so, offers another possibility for increasing confidence and certainty in

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one's findings. Countersystem analysis thus serves the aim of objectivity by opening a "possible" reality with which to compare the researcher's own findings.

3. Units of Data and of Analysis The need to define and justify units of data and analysis forms a third theme to which Sjoberg repeatedly returns. This theme addresses the fact that social science data are as socially and culturally embedded as are social researchers. The chapter Sjoberg et al. (1991, pp. 36-39) wrote about the basic methodology of case studies offers a point of entry into this discussion. The authors argue that a case study may form a unit of analysis, but that this unit of analysis must itself be analyzed and specified as part of the research process. This requirement, however, cannot rely on conventions, such as a Standard Metropolitan Area.. Such conventional units may specify a unit of analysis, but they can do so only if specific social, historical and cultural boundaries, are specified with respect to different dimensions of research. Sjoberg's commitment to the importance of multiple standpoints forces him to look at units of data and analysis. These units too are embedded in standpoints, and they too must be understood as such. For example, I have always suspected social scientists' easy use of offense-specific crime data. Offense-specific data are "standardized" only if one accepts the legal definition of charged offenses as descriptive of the methods by which those charges are produced. Yet it is hard to imagine a more socially and culturally embedded institution than criminal law and its administration. In cases such as murder, robbery, and rape a more or less standardized definition may be widely agreed upon, even cross-culturally. But recent DNA evidence very strongly suggests that even cases involving the death penalty in the U.S., are far less settled than crime control authorities and politicians want to admit. Death penalty cases seem to reflect culturally-held racial and ethnic biases, among others. But for the vast majority of crimes, even a tenuous agreement is doubtful. For example, U.S. crime control agents think that eating certain mushrooms is a crime. But at least some Native Americans think eating mushrooms is a longstanding part of religious ceremonies. Drug control agents believe that people should be imprisoned for marijuana use. But many physicians and others believe marijuana is a valuable medication for glaucoma and for easing anxiety and nausea in connection with chemotherapy, among other medicinal uses. To assume that convictions for murder, peyote use, or marijuana use reflect a standardized unit of analysis, is possible only after the offense is charged.

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The point is conceptual: what constitutes a conventional unit of analysis risks suppressing all other standpoints that are included in the situation associated with some offense. The problem becomes even worse with crimes that lack particular victims, for example fraudulent medical billing, SEC fraud, or even simple loitering. Very often these crimes can be defined by authorities, only after suspected behavior has occurred. Criminologists who tease theories about offenders' attributes related to infractions, face difficult methodological problems. How does one identify predisposing characteristics of individual offenders, from units of analysis that are defined, often post facto, by interested authorities? Although the example is mine, it illustrates Sjoberg's point: that units of analysis are, "loaded." They are shaped by one's own standpoint, and by the standpoints involved in their production. Sjoberg returns to this theme in1997 (p. xxiii). Following Goulder, he refers to the "loading" of units of analysis as reflecting the "domain assumptions" of the standpoint of the researcher. And he calls (1997, p. xxxiv) for the development of "a theory of data," based on an analysis of assumptions about what constitutes units of data, and the manifestations of data in the real world. Importantly, Sjoberg does not try to rule out particular units of data, including MSA's or offense-specific crime data. His point is just the opposite: that researchers must make explicit the criteria by which any unit of analysis can be "ruled in." One may trace this theme from 1968 to 1997 in the following sources (Sjoberg & Nett, 1968; Vaughan & Sjoberg, pp. 129-159; Vaughan, Sjoberg & Reynolds, p. 23; Feagin, Ornm & Sjoberg, pp. 36-39; Sjoberg, 1997, pp. xxxiv-xxxix, xxxv). Data are "objective" only against a particular horizon of domain assumptions, which are, in turn, embedded in rich social and cultural contexts. Researchers, must recognize this and provide an account of the units of analysis they employ. That, I believe, is what Sjoberg intends when he calls for a theory of data. The three themes just discussed form a set of analytical concerns. In each instance, the role of the researcher, countersystem analysis, units of data and analysis are responses to a tension generated by Sjoberg's two basic methodological commitments: a methodology that recognizes and honors multiple realities or standpoints; and one that remains committed to objectivity. The last two themes are no less prominent in his work, but they are of a different order. They are not analytically implied in his methodology, but that are nevertheless central to it. The first of these involves a particular historical context: the rise of bureaucratic domination and its threat to objectivity. The last of the five themes addresses the importance of moral integrity in science as a feature of objectivity.

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4. Bureaucratic Domination and Social Research The theme of power, especially in the form of bureaucratic domination, has been one of Sjoberg's central concerns since the 1960s. In Ethics, Politics (1967) he examined the effects of bureaucratic power or social research by asking how universities, research institutes, granting agencies and government shaped social research. The chapter submitted by Harold Orlans, writing as an "outsider," from the perspective of one who provides research funds. He warns that "money does not come free"; and he warns about the dangers of "small grants and large purposes." He asks when one should refuse to accept funds from certain programs, and how adjustments arise to cope with the different concerns emanating from the providers of funds those and those who engage in research. Sjoberg thinks of politics in terms of the decisions about power in bureaucratic contexts, more than in terms of conventional state politics, electoral or otherwise. By the next year, in the first edition of Methodology, "bureaucracy" appears in the index with eight sub-topics, and the entry "bureaucratization of research" follows it. Concern with bureaucracy and the bureaucratization of research received half a dozen pages of discussion in the original volume. Bureaucracy serves as a main point in the introduction to the reissued edition. There, he acknowledges that bureaucracy may both facilitate and hinder research. But either way large organizations form a crucial reality for the research process, and, therefore, they form a source of methodological concern. By 1993, Sjoberg and Vaughan (1993, p. 54) devote a chapter to the theme of the bureaucratization and its impact on social research. The importance of the theme is central, as this quotation makes clear. Sociologists, so our reasoning goes, holds a relatively tenuous position in the bureaucratic structures of the United States (and the global context). This has led them to seek legitimacy through increased reliance on techniques, and methods at the expense of theoretical analysis and ideas. But the emphasis on techniques and methods seems destined to undermine the foundations of sociologicalinquiry. The chapter discusses issues for sociological knowledge associated with bureaucratic power at local, societal and global levels. The chapter focuses the methodological problems imposed on sociologists in societies dominated by bureaucratic capitalism. By 1997 (p. xxxviii), Sjoberg poses the problem in a concise form: "contemporary bureaucratic capitalism demands information about a wide array of political and economic activities." He notes the difficulties of access to these data. But, be adds that highly technical data emerge from these organizations, sometimes willy-nilly, sometimes in purposeful ways. The organizational context from which the data emerge have methodological importance. The methodological problem they present lies in determining the

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meaning of the data from the standpoint of their construction, and the uses that are made of them. Bureaucratic power then, shapes researchers' access to data and the nature of the data, itseff. Some data are readily, if not obviously, standardized: for example, the number of full-time employees is straightforward, granting an error term. But other organizational data are not. For example, "profit" is constructed in diverse ways for particular purposes and audiences. Methodologically speaking, the possibility of an objective use of the data requires researchers to interpret data in accord with the domain assumptions that produced them. As I have argued, Sjoberg's methodology is preoccupied with the conception of objectivity. At this juncture in history, bureaucratic domination is the overriding organizational and cultural form of power in modern societies. Because this is true, bureaucracy gives a special cast to the problem of objectivity and for each of the preceding themes. The final theme in Sjoberg's effort to define an idea of objectivity that is consistent with multiple realities runs through all of his work: it is the theme of moral responsibility and this too has to do with objectivity.

5. The Moral Integrity of Science, Objectivity and Methodology Sociology in the mold of a natural science philosophy counterpoises objectivity with moral values. One "measures" objectivity, in part, by the degree to which researchers' work remains free of moral considerations. For Sjoberg, too, values may conflict with objectivity. He is aware, for example, that scientific racism and sexism have long histories. In this example, as in others, the tension between objectivity and value-commitments pose a problem for objectivity that requires investigation and analysis. Values cannot simply be ignored. To acknowledge that value commitments may conflict with objectivity, does not mean that values per se conflict with objectivity. Sjoberg's idea of objectivity recognizes that moral and value issues are bound up in all social situations. Any objective analysis of social situations must therefore, seek to understand its moral and value commitments. But the moral issues are not merely "attributes" of a situation. Moral issues form the links among standpoints, including the standpoint of the researcher. For example, survey researchers must believe that people answer questionnaires in more or less honest ways, even if opinions are fleeting. They must believe that respondents, in turn, believe social researchers deserve to be treated seriously. This moral bond between researchers and the respondents is essential to survey researchers' conceptions of objectivity. Sjoberg (2001) announced this theme in 1967. More recently (1993, p. 114), he returned to it, and in a forthcoming article on human rights, he brings moral issues to a place of central importance.

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A discussion of the sense in which Sjoberg's moral themes are methodological ones will bring this section to a close. One may trace his concern with the moral significance of methodology through three kinds of reflection. The first was articulated in Ethics, Politics and Research, where he challenged positivism on legal and ethical grounds. Sjoberg's point was not that positivism failed to be value-free, after all. His point was that it is impossible for researchers ever to extricate themselves from their own social context and that of others, including the moral and political aspects of it. The only route to objectively characterizing this solution is to have researchers analyze their own moral situations in relation to the subject matter they are studying. Sjoberg's volume makes clear that this is not only a matter for individual researchers, but a matter for the discipline, collectively. Sjoberg and Vaughan's chapter (1993) on "The Ethical Foundations of Sociology," marks his second look at the importance of moral issues. Here Sjoberg begins to rethink different moral traditions, particularly the ethics traditions rooted in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tends to gloss over the problem of persons who do not fit various utilitarian formulae. That tradition may offer some guidance, but it founders on the question of the poor, the powerless, and others who have been sacrificed or marginalized in the name of some larger social good. But if social science is to be objective in Sjoberg's sense, it cannot simply "drop oft" minority standpoints, as the "price of progress" or in the name of optimal utility. Sjoberg and his co-authors, therefore, began to discuss human rights, and his most recent work on the subject (2001) marks a significant shift of attention to this subject. Third, and finally, Sjoberg turned to pragmatism,first to George Herbert Mead, and then to John Dewey as a means for considering the moral implications of sociological thought. One can trace this moral theme in Sjoberg's (1997) call for a "reflective" methodology. For him, reflective methodology grows from the social nature of human existence. This third move closes the circle of his methodology. In the introduction (1997, p. xvii) to the reissued edition of Methodology Sjoberg explained that "reflective" methodology "arises from a modified Median frame of reference." He borrowed from Mead the idea that the human mind is social rather than private. This idea can be found elsewhere, but Sjoberg found it in Mead. The crucial sentences are these: "The social mind's most salient characteristic is the ability to think about thinking. It is[this] conscious selfreflection that sets humans off from other animals." This is taken directly from Mead, and, I think, provides the basis for Sjoberg's belief that objectivity, itself, requires a moral basis: at bottom, researchers must respect the possibility of

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reflection in social interaction. Because the mind is social, all individuality presuppose a wider web of interrelated social life through which consciousness is shaped. Thus, the existence of human consciousness itself presupposes the respect for the interaction and interrelations of diverse standpoints. And if the possibility of consciousness itself rests on social interaction, then methodologies and methods that deny this foundation, or limit it or, worse, threaten its possibility deny humanity itself. For Sjoberg's this moral base serves as the foundation for his conception of objectivity: in principle objectivity means that all social standpoints contribute objective social knowledge. And any social science that undermines or denies this denies its own subject matter. This sense of morality does not enter sociology from a set of pre-conceived or external moral principles. Rather the moral principle depends upon what it means to be human. In this way, Sjoberg's methodology stands on a firm commitment to multiple realities as a precondition to objectivity. Such a sociology would welcome both quantitative and qualitative data so long as they preserved the diverse standpoints of multiple realities. It would make a concerted effort to include the perspectives of minorities, women, and other powerless groups. But not only these. Perhaps even more difficult and urgent at this time is the need for genuine knowledge about the standpoints of powerful people and the organizations they control. A sociology built on Sjoberg's methodological concerns would place description, classification and generalization at the forefront. It would be °'progressive" in the sense that the collective work would build upon itself over time, would be revised, and would accurately portray the change and diversity of human experience. It would be pluralistic, a sociology with ragged edges, in need of constant revision by ever wider inclusion of outsiders. Of course, no one sociologist can carry out such a task. Sociology must be done collectively. And thus Sjoberg's vision of objectivity requires a collective, which is to say a moral community to comprehend the multiplicity of human standpoints. In these ways, sociology must reshape its understanding of the relation between facts and values.

SJOBERG AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: YES AND NO Finally, what about Sjoberg and SI? The title of this section reflects ambivalence, which I expect Sjoberg and some interactionists might share. But "ambivalence," a word drawn from chemistry, refers to the combinatory possibilities of elements. "Ambi-valence" suggests shifting or changing valences. That is a fair characterization of Sjoberg's relation to SI. His early work on cities has little likelihood of bearing directly upon most interactionists. But his methodology has become

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increasingly rooted in pragmatism and in the work of Mead in particular. My purpose here is to outline some areas where Sjoberg's methodology might be "valent" for SI. 1. Pragmatism, Science and Sociology Preceding pages have already linked Sjoberg fundamental concepts about methodology to Dewey's broad view of history. While Dewey was no philosopher of history, he did develop a point of view about it. He recognized history in the specific achievements of representative historical figures. History for him referred to the human experience of intelligence in different places and times, and of cooperative resolutions for shared problems. If my interpretation of Sjoberg's methodology is correct, his view of history resembles Dewey's, in this respect. Second, Dewey was concerned with "science" as a way of thinking, of solving human problems. Again, Dewey did not develop a history of science, but he saw science within the context of historical reality. Further, Dewey was very much concerned with the application of science to human problems, by which he often meant societal ones. Dewey believed that science progressed in the sense that human problem solving had, in some spheres, improved; human beings had much to learn, but that did not take away from what had been accomplished. To say as much does not commit Dewey to a unitary, progressive theory of science, for he held no such a view. Again, Sjoberg shares this view of science with Dewey and with other pragmatists. Dewey always saw science as intertwined with a democratic society, in part for moral reasons. As I have shown, Dewey did not equate science with procedures (though he understood and accepted scientific procedures), but rather with its contribution to "problem solving." In a large measure, for Dewey, that meant inclusion: extending t h e possibilities of a democratic society. In The Public and its Problems Dewey (1927, pp. 143-200) called this intermingling of science and democracy "The Quest for the Great Community." He emphasized inclusiveness as part of what both science and democracy required. Again, Sjoberg's concern to reconcile multiple realities with objectivity by deliberately seeking out different standpoints shares much with Dewey's understanding of the relationship between science and democracy. Third, Sjoberg's has explicitly acknowledged G. H. Mead's influence as central to his own. For example, I believe it has sharpened his vision of human rights as the moral tradition that assured the existence and inclusion of multiple standpoints. Mead's view of mind and consciousness has become an essential part of what Sjoberg means by objectivity in the social sciences. I should probably add that Sjoberg's commitment to human rights is not

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"reducible" to his methodological commitment, but without question, it is essential to it. 2. Recovery a Real World Sociology Mills (1959) blistering attack on "grand theory" and particularly on Parson's functionalism in The Sociological Imagination grew from his commitment to a sociology actively rooted in the history of real human beings. He wrote (1959, p. 33) "The basic cause of grand theory is the initial choice of a level of thinking so general that its practitioners cannot logically get down to observation" (my emphasis). But Mills saved his most withering invective for "grand empiricists." Of the then important voting studies, for example, he wrote (p. 52) "The thinness of the results is matched only by the elaboration of the methods and the care employed"; then added (p. 55) " . . . they are possessed by methodological inhibition. All of which m e a n s . . , that in these studies the details are piled up with insufficient attention to form; indeed, often there is no form except that provided by typesetters and bookbinders." In one sense, Mills attacked grand theory and abstracted empiricism for the same reason: for their withdrawal from lived worlds. Mills drew this crucial theme, in part, from SI. Sjoberg's methodology (1968, 84ff) explicitly drew on Mills calls for an involvement in the diversity of standpoints with a distinctive conception of science, including one that provided for generalization and inclusiveness. More than any tradition in sociology, SI has sustained concern with description and the analysis of diverse groups of living people. And SI tends to suffer the weaknesses of this strength, so far as generalization from its findings is concerned. It has been criticized for failing to generalize its findings. The criticism is largely misguided. But Sjoberg's methodology offers one route, not the only one to be sure, but a route to generalization for interactionist studies. For example, several interactionists over many years have studied marginal groups. These studies range from the Loflands' doomsday cult, through the Heyl's studies of prostitution, to Snow and Andersen's study of homeless people. To my knowledge, interactionists have not often tried to develop generalizations about marginal people from their own literature. These generalizations grounded in the descriptive work of the original studies would be limited, but important ones. Such an effort would achieve two ends. It would contribute to the integration of knowledge on interactionist terms. It would also help to sustain the real world sociology that interactionists have always championed against abstract empiricism and grand theory. Sjoberg's methodological writing offers useful possibilities along these lines, possibilities that make a virtue of interactionist literature and thought.

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3. Rethinking the Dichotomization of Methods The distinction between methodology and methods has been reduced into a distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods. That dichotomy has it uses, but I think it has become counter-productive. Ironically, this is so in part because of interactionists' success in legitimizing qualitative methods. Yet, no one can begin to understand the complexities of large organizations without relying on quantitative data. I developed this theme in connection with Sjoberg's theme of bureaucracy. But such quantitative data different greatly from those taught in standard sociological courses on methods and statistics. They involve description and analysis of how quantitative data are assembled, organized and deployed. A brief summary will bring this article to an end. Sjoberg, though most famous for his work on cities, has produced a large body of methodological writing. He has outlined a distinctive methodological position, one that has become increasingly explicit about its debt to pragmatism, particularly to Dewey and Mead. He is committed both to the existence of multiple realities or standpoints on one hand, and to objectivity on the other. This has produced a basic tension that has driven him to redefine objectivity for the social sciences. In response to this tension, Sjoberg has re-thought objectivity and social science as well. He offers a means for the integration of sociological work, as one might hope for a science. On his view technical certainty in social science gives way to humanity, to diversity and to plurality. It is no less objective for that fact. Of the several sociological traditions and practices that have emerged in the last century, SI is the one with which Sjoberg's methodology shares the closest intellectual similarities. I have sketched three broad areas where SI and Sjoberg's methodology might begin useful conversations-might be co-valent, and certainly others exist. Does this make Sjoberg an interactionist? Well, yes, and no - an unsatisfactory answer, perhaps, especially after so many pages. But a better answer can be had only after many other intellectual interactions have taken place. NOTES 1. Part of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, in San Francisco, in August, 1998. The session entitled "Sjoberg and Symbolic Interaction: Yes and No," was organized by the late Stanley Saxton and by Beth Gill. 2. A personal letter from Leonard Cain, one of Sjoberg's students refers to a Methods Seminar, in which Cain was a student in the Spring of 1950. Cain reports that "four or five" students from that seminar contributed many years later to the book Ethics, Politics

and Social Research. 3. I am aware that the comparison with Mannheim leaves untouched many other conceptions and discussions of the sociology of knowledge. Jeff Coulter (1989), for

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example, has proposed a "new" sociology of knowledge that has grown out of ethnomethodology. Long before Coulter, Curtis and Petras (1970) organized a very useful anthology that suggested quite different contributors to this point of view. To engage the diverse views in the Curtis and Petras volume, or Coulter's work would take us far afield. A comparison with Mannhiem helps to highlight Sjoberg's position and that is my purpose, not a survey of the sociology of knowledge. 4. While the origins of the sociology of knowledge began with Marx, many quite different traditions in the social sciences, history, and philosophy would have to sorted out. The volume Curtis and Petras (1970) edited illustrates the diversity of contributors to this perspective. Berger and Luckmann's (1967) book, especially the footnotes provide a glimpse into the history of the perspective. In addition the entry by Werner Stark (1967, pp. 475-478) in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy under the "sociology of knowledge" traces the importance of the perspective for philosophy. 5. For a brief review of Dewey's related views about history see: Reconstruction in Philosophy pp. 200-213; The Public and Its Problems, pp. 161 ft. 6. This linking of Sjoberg with Dewey serves two purposes. It clarifies his methodology and it illuminates Sjoberg's links to pragmatisim and SI. It is clear that in a central part of his methodology Sjoberg was thinking like Dewey even if he did not, or could not, quote him in 1968. Indeed, he used a Deweyian commonplace (1968, p. 11) "That knowledge is to be preferred to ignorance," as his basic assumption. 7. Sjoberg has other methodological themes that are important to his idea of objectivity. Among these are the importance of racial and ethnic minorities and gender as distinctive social and cultural standpoints. He has been interested in different "logic'sin-use" both among researchers and among those they research. I believe these can be fitted into the framework set forth here, but that would require another and a more speculative article. The five I address here, have been quite fully developed in Sjoberg's methodological work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Leonard Cain and Richard Colvard read an early version of this manuscript. They provided valuable comments, advice and checks on historical information. While any errors are my responsibility, their close attention to an earlier manuscript greatly improved this one. Two anonymous reviewers posed important questions. One dealt with George Herbert Mead; the other with feminist writing about pragmatism. I comment on both of these matters, though the reviewers might have well have preferred a more detailed discussion. To have done so would have greatly expanded an already long article.

REFERENCES Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Coulter, J. (1989). Mind in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Curtis, J., & Petras, J. W. (1970). The Sociology Knowledge: A Reader. New York: Praeger. Dewey, J. (1927). The Public and It Problems. Denver, CO: Alan Swallow. Dewey, J. (1959). Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press. Feagin, J., Orum, A. M., & Sjoberg, G. (Eds) (1991). A Case for the Case Study. Chapel Hill, N.C. The University of North Carolina Press. Giddens, A. (1987). Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. Horowitz, I..L. (1964). Revolution in Brazil: Politics and Society in a Developing Nation. New York: E.P. Dutton. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace and World. Mead, G. H. (1927). The Objective Reality of Perspectives. In: A. J. Reck (1964). Mead: Selected Writings (pp. 306-319). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mills, C. W. (1961). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press. Ryan, A. (1995). John Dewey. New York: W. W. Norton. Co. Siegfried, C. H. (1996). Pragmatism and Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G. (1954-1955). A Questionnaire on Questionnaires. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 18, 423-427. Sjoberg, G. (1960). The Preindustrial City. New York: The Free Press. Sjnberg, G. (1967). Ethics, Politics and Research. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. Sjoberg, G., & Nett (1968). A Methodology for Social Research. New York: Harper and Row. Sjoberg, G. (1997). Introduction. A Methodology for Social Research. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Sjoberg, G., & Cain, L. (1971). Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and The Analysis of Social Systems. In: H. Turk & R. Simpson (Eds), Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans (pp. 212-229). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Sjoberg, G., Williams, N., Vaughan T. R., & Sjoberg, A. F. (1991). The Case Study Approach in Social Research: Basic Methodological Issues. In: J. Feagin, T. Omm & G. Sjoberg (Eds), The Case for the Case Study (pp. 27-79). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sjoberg, G., & Vaughan, T. R. (1993). A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology. Dix Hills, NJ: General Hall. Sjoberg, G., Gil, E., & Williams, N. (2001, forthcoming). A Sociology of Human Rights. Social Problems. Stark, W. (1967). Sociology of Knowledge. In: P. Edwards (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (VoL 7, pp. 475-478). Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press. West, C. (1989). The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM: NCA SPOTLIGHT ON THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF NORMAN DENZIN Shing-Ling S. Chen In Spring, 1987, driving back from University of Illinois after attending a successful Stone Symposium of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI), organized by Professor Norman Denzin, Carl Couch told me that Denzin was the brightest man under the sun. I asked him in what way. Couch said, "Just the sheer brain power, he has enough for three scholars." I was stunned not by such a compliment of Denzin, but by a compliment coming from a man who thought of himself as the best sociologist walking. In the past thirty years, we witnessed a scholar who produced an amount of scholarship, equivalent to that of three scholars', if not more. We saw a researcher who mastered areas of studies, equivalent to those covered by three researchers, if not more. One of the unique contributions of Denzin's scholarship is not only the depth but also the breadth of his research. We saw him march from social psychology to interpretive ethnography, and symbolic interactionism to cultural studies with ease, as if these fields shared common vocabularies and were operating with the same kind of worldviews. To most academians, the gap between descriptive/analytical and interpretive/expressive is an unbridgeable chasm. While most academians find comfort in a few similar

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theories and a specific research method, Denzin is constantly exploring new territories both in theories and methods, and calling us to move forward, to ask new questions, consider new theories, and try out new methods. He did all these with action and a great passion. Unlike most scholars with his status who generally wait to be invited to speak, and work on their own books, Denzin works in trenches-organizing sessions in conferences and editing journals. By doing so, Denzin seeks to provide visibility to a specific line of research, and publication outlets for scholars doing this type of work. He nurtures ideas and scholars. Academic research to Denzin is not simply a career or an endeavor, it is a continuous love affair - a love affair with ideas. In his published works and conference presentations, time and time again, we saw him give his very best and he gives it all. He is selfless. However, like many great lovers in history, he suffered infidelity. No one area of study seems to be able to hold his interest long enough before he moves on to a new territory. The track record shows that Denzin dazzled in symbolic interactionism, semiotics, cultural studies, postmodernism . . . etc., a diverse record that is still evolving. Maneuvering among these fields should not give an impression that Denzin has a short attention span, rather, he is continuously expanding the scholarly repertiore and searching for new machineries for academic research. Denzin's work is interdisciplinary as he integrates scholarship. Denzin believes that integrated scholarship enhances researchers' ability to serve social justice and seek civic transformation. There are not without resistance or doubt of Denzin's effort. To many, the transition from the study of social interaction to the research of cultural codes is an unpleasant and confusing paradigm shift. The unpleasantness is similar to "trying to savor a meal in our favorite restaurant while listening to a lecture about the strange foods eaten by members of other cultures" (Meyrowitz, 1993, p. 65), and the confusion is "akin to an unsettling discovery that a loved one whom we thought we were taking care of nicely has a whole set of problems that we did not know about and have developed no strategies for addressing" (Meyrowitz, 1993, p. 65). Consequently, researchers who study the social and those who research the cultural generally talk past each other, if they talk to each other at all. Instead of trying to understand and listen to each other, most become defensive and paradigmatic. At the 2000 Annual Convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) in Seattle, Washington, sociology and communication scholars congregated to pay tribute to Denzin's works, in a "Spotlight Session," entitled, "Cultural Studies and Symbolic Interacionism: Norman Denzin's Contributions to Communication and Sociological Inquiries." The "Spotlight

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Session" is designed to feature the works of distinguished scholars of symbolic interactionism who have contributed significantly to the study of communication, and promote dialogues and engagement among researchers in communication and sociology. Given the interdisciplinary nature of Denzin's scholarship, the session provided an excellent opportunity for scholars to reflect on, engage with, and debate about Denzin's works. Four distinguished scholars in communication and sociology contributed papers to the session. James Carey tackles the issue of integrating symbolic interactionism and cultural studies with an examination of Denzin's effort to reconcile these two fields of studies. Carey argues that to formulate an interactionist cultural studies, one has to fill the space between symbolic and interaction with the analysis of communication and culture. Carey argues that Chicago Sociology offers resources to integrate, reconcile, and expand both symbolic interactoinism and cultural studies. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner present their conversation with Denzin on various issues which include the transition from sociology to communication, qualitative research and interpretive writing, as well as Denzin's career development and relationships with colleagues. The conversation offers an authentic account of Denzin's description of his life and career, in which the readers are able to gain a thorough understanding of the development of interpretive social science. Clifford Christians draws our attention to Denzin's commitment to ethics of social science research, feminist communitarianism. Christians demonstrates Denzin's views that research should be rooted in community as well as participant centered, and the goal of social science research is interpretive sufficiency. According to Christians, Denzin's contribution in ethics is clearly marked by providing an alternative approach from the utilitarian rationalism. David Altheide extrapolates on Denzin' s interpretive work in cinema, pointing out Denzin's unique integration of cinema with culture, discourse and consciousness. Altheide argues that Denzin's cinema studies provide a new paradigm and a new methodology with an aim to understand social life. By examining Denzin's in-depth interpretive readings of films, Altheide demonstrates how Denzin crusades for social justice. These four papers serve as catalyst to initiate ongoing discussions and debates on the reconciliation of symbolic interactionism and cultural studies, both on the levels of theory construction, and methodological development. There is a tremendous amount of interest among scholars to engage in such a dialogue and debate. When this "Spotlight Session" was presented in the 2000 NCA Convention, it was attended by more than 100 participants, crowded in a conference room. Denzin's scholarship was greatly appreciated, as he received a

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standing ovation from the audience. Although the reconciliation and integration of symbolic interactionism and cultural studies, may not be an easy task, it surely is a worthwhile endeavor. The discussions inspired by these papers will at least allow readers to find out how the findings of one field relate to the other, or how these areas of studies contribute to a larger corpus o f knowledge about the self, the society, and the media.

REFERENCE Meyrowitz, J. (1993). Images of media: Hidden ferment - and harmony - in the field. Journal of Communication, 4(3), 55-67.

REFLECTIONS ON MEDIA MEANINGS IN DENZIN'S WORK David L. Altheide

"... the postmodern voyeur sees what others cannot, or will not, see." Professor Norman K. Denzin is the most prolific and important social science proponent of postmodern cultural analysis. His cogent views about the cultural condition, modes of analysis, and prescriptions for a science of humanity are rife with creative insights. Many of these involve mass media productions and content, as well as presentation genres and styles. His analysis of many of these works and production machinery has been done as a prophetic voyeur rather than as a mere priest, who serves the wounded, so to speak. It is this look at voyeurism that I wish to address. My remarks about Professor Denzin's contributions are intended to clarify some major images and claims in his work, particularly several collections (Denzin, 1991a, b, 1995). My brief comments are informed by many of his publications (Denzin, 1978, 1991a, b, 1993, 1994, 1995). I wish to make several points. First, Denzin is a media theorist because his interpretive model is grounded in the assumption that mass media images and formats are the most significant pervasive social influence. While most of his interpretive work involves cinema, it is the unique integration of cinema with culture, discourse, and consciousness that is compelling. Second, his project is to destroy the "coherent self' by pointing out how the sense-making infrastructure no longer permits this. Third, a major contribution is the reflexive mediated methodology

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behind his conceptual innovations, including using the VCR. Movie meanings may not be as disparate as the images and meanings vis-h-vis other media, e.g. television, and especially popular music, but the examination will be revealing. Fourth, Professor Denzin's work suggest that he has invented a new media genre: a recta-movie, so to speak, and he is a recta-producer. The basic job description could be: to understand major themes and messages in popular movies, locate theft origin and referential context, and see their relevance for your own life. But there is more. Norman Denzin is a critical communication ecologist. He integrates insights from an Existential Sociology with a popular culture analysis that sets dialecticians dancing. His work is important for social scientists and communication scholars because he provides a new paradigm for understanding social life. He is a media theorist because his work begins with a central role for the mass media. (CS) p. 210, "The media, the core structure in the American consciousness industry, have become arbiters of everyday manners, morals and justice." He doesn't merely treat it as a "variable," as a "contributor," as a feature of the socio-economic environment, but rather, media, and particularly the rise of the visual, is central to all aspects of social life. His paradigm involves the most important "air" and "earth" of the postmodern era: the mass media and their multiple influences. His methodology reflects habits of a disciplined perspective that is not yet institutionalized, but it echoes off crumbling scholarly walls. There is film and media studies, there is content analysis, rhetoric, cultural studies, and the sociology of language. He shows us how to understand a film, or rather, how to be aware of why some films make sense. Not given to general statements that are unsupported, multiple materials are analyzed and meticulously displayed to provide evidence to the readers. Why does he do this, what does he want? The project is straightforward: CS p. 9 "My goal is to unmask the voyeur." This complex analysis of evocative visuals is presented to us referentially, in linear form, as articles and chapters. Can we do justice to cinema by writing about it? Can we capture visually evocative formats in linear, usually referential, modes? We must, given that the academic and intellectual modes of discourse are referential and usually linear. This mixture of media formats and content is complex enough, but it is given another wrinkle when we cross media. So, for example, here I am doing an oral (and written) analysis of Denzin's written analysis of a visual medium, the cinema! Somehow the format and content gets convoluted. But let's continue our analysis of Denzin's analysis. Let's see the movies in our heads. I once had a student tell me that he did not do the extra assignment, but had he done so, it would have been good! That is, he could "see the movie,"

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so to speak, and he wanted me to see it. For Norm Denzin, this is not too complex. He might say that the rise of the visual in social life overtook social life, infiltrated it, taught it to speak in pictures and images that came from entertaining communication formats. The cinema - and Denzin really knows movies! - provides the empirical materials to simultaneously clarify his thesis that society watches itself creating and critiquing itself. The actual has been derived from imitations or resistance to the cinematic gaze. It's counterpart, the virtual, seems refreshing and "interesting" mainly because it is another side of the voyeur's visual world. This perspective helps make sense of the students' moral tale that I noted above. Denzin takes a personal view of movies and other cultural products. He is concerned with showing how these are relevant for individual lives, and particularly how social context shapes individuals' behavior, expectations, awareness, and reflexive principles or codes for understanding their place in the "show." (CS) p. 265, "The postmodern mediated self . . . finds its moral solidarity in those narrative tales that circulate in the cinematic culture." Denzin's task is to understand the dynamic between action, character, and self, while also cautioning against accepting inauthentic renderings of self. Denzin lives in a world where identity - or how we are known to others - prevails, but he would prefer a world where s e l f - especially the expressive self - has more of a place. This world cannot occur visually, but must first be discursively inscribed as a constructed world, built on a visual architecture that does not permit multiple views of the order of things. The problem he cautions us about is that the cinematic order is visual and this, he argues, carries a lot of baggage. Seeing occurs after a completed project, but the process of focusing is where the action is, where the emotional energy of self-creation exists, where freedom resides. Movie scenarios can, on occasion, help this, but even that image is harnessed by video logic, or the casting of multiple dimensions in two dimensions. The cinema didn't give us ample freedom for temporal order; spatial meanings prevailed, seen narratives overcame imagined ones, and even efforts to make films about imagination succumbed to the visual format. So, we're watching the idea work its way out in a visual form that has little time for temporality. Much of Denzin's work with media is to explicate the relationship between action, character and self. His analyses of two movies, "Blue Velvet" and "Rain Man" show the way. In Blue Velvet (1986), a controversial film of sexuality, violence, and nostalgia, Denzin simultaneously discusses the film and the film maker, David Lynch. The juxtapositions in the film are compounded by another dimension of film production techniques and perspectives, as Denzin suggests that he sees what Lynch does not; Lynch merely uses some of the symbols and

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arranges them in scenarios consistent with a story line and a cultural script of, for example, an appropriate past for targeting nostalgia, an image of desecrated women that resonates a producer's notion of what could be. But it is the mix of genres and messages in the movie that is the "problem"; it doesn't fit easily, but here it is, being presented, talked about by film critics. And then (five years later) by Denzin. The artist has spoken. The critics have spoken. And Denzin is about to speak: This is where we glimpse the "big picture" Denzin is offering to us: "More than the future is looked into. It is the everyday that has become the subject matter of these postmodem nostalgic films. Small town, anytown, USA is no longer safe. The fantasies of the past have become the realities in the present. These realities are now everywhere" p. 79. It is as though the symbols and meanings in the movie were there, and essentially correct, but they were not correct enough, in a large enough context. The audiences, including the critics, could not have done their "audience stuff" or their "critic work" without being grounded in a broader cultural context that was defined by some of the symbols and images. Denzin repositions them in a historical account of modem life. The movie was okay, it was correct, but not correct enough, Denzin seems to say. It is at this point that he changes roles from being a voyeur to a prophet, the big picture. The work continues through other films. Denzin finds the producers' formulae, deconstructs the message and the formula, and then reassembles it again. And again. One reading that this illustrates this process is "Rain Man in Las Vegas: Where is the Action for the Postmodem Man?" (SI, 1993). Rain Man (1988) is, according to Denzin, a nostalgia film about two brothers who find one another during a trip to Las Vegas, and reclaim a lost self between them. "Charlie and Raymond are doubles, each mirrors a side of the postmodem self that is absent in the other. At one level, Raymond is the media-centered Baudrillard self; the person who relates to reality through the third-order simulacrum of television . . . eats junk food with tooth picks, drinks orange juice from little cardboard boxes with plastic s t r a w s . . . " (p. 67). He is autistic. "Charlie is a high roller, unflappable at one moment, a hysteric the next, moving from one crisis to another, always in danger of losing everything except his postmodern manner, the smooth-talking pose. A pure Babbitt named after Sinclair Lewis's protagonist, Charlie represents crass capitalism materialistic values . . . . He hates television, is completely out of touch with the world around him for his financial dealings, has no sense of history . . . " (p. 68). A few things warrant emphasis. So Raymond is about TV, but due to his autism, his self is problematic; he is display, dramaturgy, capable of mimicking. And then there is Charlie, not TV prone, but oriented to conspicuous consump-

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tion, selfish and uncertain. How they get together and understand their mutual history and awareness of how their identities have been set in events beyond their own making is all played out in Las Vegas, a town of action, where character can be constructed and projected within the format of the "big medium," the game in context in history in late capitalism. If this were all, there would be no big news. After all, hadn't Erving Goffman explained action in "Where the Action Is?," credited to his experience living and working in Las Vegas? Isn't it the audience and presentation of self that governs the sustainable reality? Denzin demurs. No, actually he disagrees: It is not the ritualistic dramaturgy of Goffman that is the key, he informs us, but the quest for meaning in emergent and problematic situations, as actors confront contradictions that are not well enough understood to have mastered key parts. Oh, there is character apparent, but this happens in the space between roles and scripted images; they are trying to make sense out of what is going on, what they've done, are doing, and are uncertain about what to do next. This is where we see Denzin shaping a new role as analyst. His world isn't a sociology of the absurd in which the world is essentially without meaning. Rather, life seems absurd because it is tough to accomplish it the way it should be, but how it should be remains unclear, and just when you think you've got it, one sees that it is not that way at all, that there is another realm of contingencies, or mere performances. For Denzin, the characters are reaching for something that is not available; they may opt for a performance, but they see it as shallow, inauthentic, not satisfying. He sees the postmodern self, something other than character is determined at gambling tables; "It isn't action, but sense-making experience." For Denzin, the postmodern self shouldn't be satisfied with identity wrapped up with audiences who may validate a performance; the audiences are not solid enough; nothing is. The message in Rain Man is to break out of the linguistic codes that commodify experience. The neon self is inauthentic; it is public and civility; The expressive self is better, a key to salvation; this tension is played out in the media (p. 74). The irony is that the expressive self is increasingly a feature of evocative entertainment oriented formats. As we have moved to a visual culture wherein even music (e.g. MTV) underwent profound changes with visual formats, it is a good academic bet to examine the visual. Recall that most students today were born after MTV! But there are different kinds of visuals, even though many of these are being folded together within an expanding ecology of communication. I certainly do not claim that his analyses would not hold up to other media, but that does remain an important question. While other media are referred to as features of popular culture, or as part of the "visual" emphasis, (e.g. television), the depth interpretive

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readings focus on films. There are several theoretical reasons for this, as well as a few practical ones. Key theoretical and conceptual reasons include the focus on cultural logics as defined and addressed by numerous postmodern theorists, e.g. Baudrillard. For example, the preface of Images of Postmodern Society (IPS) quotes Baudrillard, "the cinema and TV are America's reality," in supporting Denzin's general view that "this society only knows itself through the reflections that flow from the camera's eye . . . " Adapting Baudrillard's thesis that "members of the contemporary world are voyeurs adrift in a sea of symbols," he argues that "They know and see themselves through cinema and television" (p. vii). The media images captured by Denzin are consistent with his overall thesis that the postmodern world is characterized by the cultivation of conspicuous consumption, identified by Hollywood genres stressing money, sex, love and intimacy, crimes of violence, passion and greed, race and its repression. "Gone are the highest ideals of humanity, including freedom, self-respect, open dialogue and honesty" (p. 149). Denzin is crusading for social justice, but first we have to see what it doesn't look like, we have to imagine possibilities without the constitutive edges, similar to Bergson's ticking clock, where the space traversed indicates what is there

Fig 1. Fear and the Voyeuristic Self.

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now. Denzin's rendition of the cultural studies model helps make sense of the stresses that "human beings are never fully present to themselves, or others, except through a process of deferral and delay, and hence never fixed in its representations or meanings . . . . It suggests that presence and lived experience can never be fully captured because language will not allow this to occur. Hence experience can only be given in texts (interviews, field notes, life stories, films and so on) which are themselves indirect representations of what they purport to represent." It proposes to deconstruct these practices so as to reveal how they keep in place a politically repressive picture of the social that is out of touch with the world as it is lived and experienced" (p. 153). Denzin's analysis pushes us into new methodological and conceptual territory. A few queries may help us catch up and clarify this troubling relationship between media formats and specific content in general, and variations between particular media. While the remainder of IPS offers numerous insights and analyses from which I will draw more below, television is not dealt with, except as another visual medium. I stress this because TV differs in several ways from cinema, ranging from technology (e.g. 35 mm, audio enhancement, etc.), and particularly the audiences. Even though many movies are "really" made with a TV release in mind, and do wind up in viewers' living rooms in prime time, the advertising and anticipation of such movies is informed by their initial release as movies, with established stars, etc. Moreover, movies are made with an eye to what cannot be so easily shown and sold to TV audiences due to censorship, technology - e s p e c i a l l y special effects (e.g. wide screen, Dolby sound systems, etc.), and distribution "issues". It is also apparent that the audiences for TV and movies are different. For example, with a few exceptions, teenagers do not watch a lot of TV, but they do frequent movies, which in turn are made increasingly with the "ever younger audience" in mind, especially when this audience now has millions of dollars in discretionary income. Thus, the last few years have seen an increase in semi-horror-comedic films involving insects, aliens, and other space monsters. Popular music may also hold more variation in visual cultural themes than Denzin suggests. Technological changes in radio, CD' s, internet and web based broadcasting (narrow casting!), have increased culture tastes and options. Add to this mix the diverse marketing of radio franchises that appeal to numerous small audiences, and you have a range of preferences and content. For example, Top 40 formats used to be the place where romance and womenrelying-on-men-for-validation was heard; this is less common today, but the genre has been corralled in rural images of country-western music, where, for example, alienation ("I Don't Know Whether to Kill Myself of Just Go

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Bowling," "Take this Job and Shove It"), gender deification ("Don't Take the Girl"), and numerous messages of cultural resistance are presented. Youth music, particularly hip-hop and rap, are not easily mingled with visual media. Numerous studies have noted that rap, for example, is the "news of the streets," containing the most politically incorrect messages about ethnic and race relations, gender equality, consumer culture, drug use, government, and authority. I raise these issues not as critiques but as other research areas for expanded study of the major ingredients found in Denzin's expansive cupboard. A practical consideration in the study of cinema is that they are readily available on videotape. The critical ingredient in this mix is the advent of the video recorder/player (VCR) that has, perhaps, done more to transform images into textual analysis than any change since photography. Playing with visuals is now child's play, but the careful systematic analysis offered by Denzin is limited to a wealth of experience and theoretical grounding in books, but also a massive array of popular culture. For example, TV receivers now have the capability to view two or more images at once. We can anticipate movies being made with duel images. What would it look like to see Rain Main and Blue Velvet together, and would we be able to see their connections? CONCLUSION Denzin is a meta-movie producer. Denzin sees media for content and examples that are correct and vivid, but are also incomplete. Denzin uses media to understand what media can't teach, but can be seen there, can be explicated there. He uses scenarios to create his own enactment, bring his own story, selectively illustrate concepts, and script a movie finish as but an episode in a stage of broader theoretical endeavors. He sees the crush of the expressive self in favor of the public self. The tension is apparent in numerous productions as writers and artists trained in social science and varieties of reflexive analysis can locate their work and experience within cultural and symbol systems. They can show part of their assumptions at work, but even the modes of display are tied to a cultural foundation that is less explicated, a foundation that resonates dominant identities and capital. As a meta-movie producer, he is a teacher. He offers a perspective consistent with new technologies that permit us to view movies over time, in various sequences, and to even "write our own conclusions." There is another point about VCRs and other media that should be stressed. Increasingly, we experience films through various technologies; we can buy them, order them on demand, collect them, look at video analyses of videos, composites of

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individual and mixed genres, etc. Video receivers can show two or more images at once. As audience members "catch up" to this capacity, the mode of analysis offered by Denzin may seem even more relevant. He provides a method to make sense of all the movies and scenarios, to sort out underlying themes, and to recognize reflexivity. Of course, like all master narratives it is reflective of an expanding ecology of communication that challenges notions of self with new creations, new possibilities, and increasingly, this relies on new technologies. Ironically, while his vision is not a sociology of the absurd, his method is: He proclaims that the diverse meanings being presented in fihn really do make sense and can be coherently understood in the framework of our lives and our futures. The quest for the master narrative continues and is being played out as producers and writers, then audiencesas-producers learn about this master narrative, fold it in, and offer yet another sequel to the unfolding dynamic between action, character, and self. Some producer, that Denzin!

REFERENCES Altheide, D. L. (1995). An Ecology of Communication: Cultural Formats of Control. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Grnyter. Denzin, N. K. (1978). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. Denzin, N. K. (1991a). Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in America Cinema. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Denzin, N. K. (1991b). Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Denzin, N, K. (1993). Rain Man in Las Vegas. Symbolic Interaction, 16, 65-78. Denzin, N. K. (1995). The Cinematic Society: The Voyeurs Gaze. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Handbook of Qualitative Methodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Douglas, J. D., & Johnson, J. M. (1977). Existential Sociology. Cambridge [Eng.]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

N O R M A N DENZIN'S FEMINIST COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS Clifford G. Christians

INTRODUCTION Norman Denzin has been interested in ethics throughout his career. In the very first year (1970) that he began publishing seriously, he edited one book called The Values of Social Science and included a major chapter on the "Ethics and Politics of Research" in the first edition of his Aldine book, The Research Act. His epistemology contradicts the Enlightenment fact-value dichotomy and the dualism of theory and practice. Values are centered in the interpretive process, and already in these books Norm faces the implications for the researcher, the discipline of sociology, and for society-at-large. In both accounts politics and ethics are symmetrical. He calls social scientists to be critics and activists. "Criticism [should be] carried over into meaningful and alternative social action programs. Activities can range from involvement in protest movements, to strikes, political proposals, to petitions and fundralsing" (The Values of Social Science, p. 18). While insisting that "the empirical character of science must be reasserted" (p. 15) so that sociologists are fully informed, Norm wants pay-off for society as a whole. Sociology should provide an essential perspective for any society which alms to be rational and orderly, free of prejudice and injustice .... Sociologistshave tended (until quite recently) to shy away from politically explosive or socially relevant' issues .... A broadly based humanistic perspective is needed in the social sciences today. Such a perspective will

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necessarily challenge accepted doctrines and taken-for-granted ideology. It will examine both policy makers and the persons most directly affected by their policy. It will call into question institutional arrangements that go against or deny the fight of individual(s) to lead [their] lives as [they] see fit within society's broad arenas. When racism, prejudice and social justices are uncovered they will be openly reported and alternatives will be stressed and analyzed (pp. 11-12). The social sciences must stop avoiding the fact that their practitioners belong to a social order larger than the discipline itself. Unless they recognize the political, ideological and moral components of their own conduct they are never going to be capable of operating systematically in the social world. It is schizophrenic to believe that a profession cannot take political stances against a war. If they can debate and plead for more funds from the government on the one hand, and accept money for applied research on the other, they can certainly take a moral stance against human atrocities. All are value decisions, all are moral acts. None is more or less moral than the other. It is a mistake to think otherwise (p. 13). Theory and intimate knowledge of social knowledge should merge . . . . Deep knowledge of social affairs and a firm grasp of social theory, most especially an understanding that things may not be as they appear, can offer fundamental insights into the social order (pp. 14-15). T h e n in The Research Act (Ch. 13), ethical issues are developed explicitly and c o m p r e h e n s i v e l y - protecting a n o n y m i t y and privacy, i n f o r m e d consent, data rights in an organizational setting, research sponsored b y the Department of Defense, the intrusiveness of participant observers, promises made to subjects, embellishment, disguising intentions and misinterpreting the researchers' identity, and the appropriateness of methodologies. These issues are set within the intellectual context of ethical absolutism and relativism, philosophical idealism, and the nature of h u m a n s studying humans. Ethics, in fact, is the framing chapter in each edition of The Research Act over two decades. A n d social ethics is the rationale for N o r m ' s lifelong preoccupation with social issues such as alcoholism, race, gender, work, and institutional structures. Ethics is highlighted in both editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research. A n d it permeates the b o o k he is n o w completing o n H o l l y w o o d and the c i n e m a of racial violence where he fashions a black aesthetic and e m p o w e r m e n t ethic for a c i n e m a of racial resistance, and c i n e m a as an ethically accountable counter-hegemonic art form. For over three decades, while confronting the cognitive issues, he refuses to ignore their moral implications.

FEMINIST COMMUNITARIANISM D e n z i n ' s sustained and dramatic c o m m i t m e n t to ethics is developed systematically in his Interpretive Ethnography (1997) as feminist c o m m u n i t a r i a n i s m . This is his label for the normative model (pp. 2 7 4 - 2 8 7 ) that can best organize

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our "ethnographic practices for the 21st century." Feminist communitarianism engages my reflection here. Through this ethical theory I affirm the magnitude of Norm's contribution to the ethics of social science research and involve him in interpreting its logic and rationale. 1 Feminist communitarianism presumes that the community is ontologically and axiologically prior to persons. Human identity is constituted through the social realm. We are born into a sociocultural universe where values, moral commitments, and existential meanings are negotiated dialogically. For communitarians, the liberalism of John Locke and John Stuart Mill confuses an aggregate of individual pursuits with the common good. Moral agents need a context of social commitments and community ties for assessing what is valuable. What is worth preserving as a good cannot be determined by moral agents in isolation; it can be ascertained only within specific social situations where human identity is nurtured. Morally appropriate action intends community. Common moral values are intrinsic to a community's ongoing existence and identity. Therefore, the mission of social science research is enabling community life to prosper. The aim is not fulsome data per se, but community transformation. Research is intended to be collaborative in its design and participatory in its execution. Rather than ethics codes in the files of academic offices and research reports prepared for clients, the participants themselves are given a forum to activate the polls mutually. The substantive conceptions of the good that drive the researcher's problems reflect those of the community rather than the expertise of funding agencies and professors. In the feminist communitarian model, participants have a say in how the research should be done and a hand in actually conducting it, including a voice "in deciding which problems should be studied, what methods should be used to study them, whether the findings are valid or acceptable, and how the findings are to be used or implemented" (Root, 1993, p. 245). This research is rooted in "community, shared governance . . . and neighborliness." Given its cooperative mutuality, it serves "the community in which it is carried out, rather than the community of knowledge producers and policymakers" (Lincoln, 1995, pp. 280, 287; see also Denzin, 1997, p. 275). It finds its genius in the maxim that "persons are arbitrators of their own presence in the world" (Denzin, 1989, p. 81). For feminist communitarians, humans have the discursive power "to articulate situated moral rules that are grounded in local community and group understanding." Moral reasoning goes forward because people are "able to share one another's point of view in the social situation." Reciprocal care and understanding, rooted in emotional experience and not in formal consensus, are

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the basis on which moral discourse is possible (Denzin, 1997, p. 277; see also Denzin, 1984, p. 145). Multiple moral and social spaces exist within the local community, and "every moral act is a contingent accomplishment" measured against the ideals of a universal respect for the dignity of every human being regardless of gender, age, race, or religion (Denzin, 1997, p. 274). Through a moral order those social values are resisted that divide and exclude. Within a feminist communitarian model, the mission of social science research is interpretive sufficiency. This paradigm seeks to open up the social world in all its dynamic dimensions. The thick notion of sufficiency supplants the thinness of the technical, exterior, and statistically precise received view. Rather than reducing social issues to financial and administrative problems for politicians, social science research enables people to come to terms with their everyday experience themselves. Interpretive sufficiency means taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural complexity (Denzin, 1989, pp. 81, 77). Ethnographic accounts "should possess that amount of depth, detail, emotionality, nuance, and coherence that will permit a critical consciousness to be formed by the reader. Such texts should also exhibit representational adequacy, including the absence of racial, class, and gender stereotyping" (Denzin, 1997, p. 238). Within communal formations are multiple spaces that exist as ongoing constructions of everyday life. Research narratives reflect a community's multiple voices. The flourishing of particular cultures and citizen groups is the substantive goal to which feminist communitarianism is committed. The interacting self and others are empowered to action. People gain their own voice and collaborate in transforming their culture. Research is not the transmission of specialized data, but a catalyst for critical consciousness: By articulating feminist relational ethics within communitarian democratic theory, Norm integrates ethics and politics in 1997 as he has done from the beginning. In the process he insures that communitarian political theory is saved from itself. Amitai Etzioni invokes communitarian democracy in terms of neo-conservative practical politics. However, the more complex philosophical communitarianism of Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Carole Pateman insists on resistance to the status quo. 2 Invigorating the communitarian model with a feminist perspective orients it toward critique, multivocal representation of the marginalized, and social transformation. The result is a dialogic ethics that resituates the communitarian legacy, and in fact, given Norm's own social constructivism, moves beyond it. Following Daryl Koehn's Rethinking Feminist Ethics, the relational axis is not empathy,

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nurturance and care, but the dialogic in its deepest sense. In dialogic ethics, the public needs information that gives them "a good reason to adopt a course of action . . . . A reason to act is a non-arbitrary, thought-satisfying determination supporting one course of action over another" (Koehn, 1998, p. 106). Rather than proffering expert opinion, social science facilitates ongoing discussions so people can explore what opinions are sound and what practical knowledge is superior (Koehn, 1998, p. 113). The purpose is to foster an ethically reflective community equipped to assess institutions and policies, and to transform them as necessary. Since we are not isolated individuals but communal beings who create organizations and social structures, people must know the historical background and underlying issues. The question is not merely the personal decisions of executives but enabling the assessment of institutions and policies. ETHICAL

RATIONALISM

In mainstream social science, on the rare occasions when morality and professional standards are taken into account, ethical rationalism has served as the prevailing paradigm. Consistent with professional ethics generally, ethics in mainstream social science has presumed that rationality defines all legitimate claims about moral obligations, so that the truth of those claims can be settled by formal examination of their logical structure. The general trend in serious-minded professional ethics entails an ethical rationalism that requires autonomous moral agents to apply rules consistently, formally, and self-consciously to every choice. Making rational processes explicit has combined with the ancient Western emphasis on the universality of reason to create basic rules of morality that everyone is obliged to follow and against which all counterclaims about moral obligations can be measured. This modernist ethics of reason is harassed from every side these days, and we need an entirely new paradigm. A post-Newtonian age no longer supports a metaphysical claim that good and evil or right and wrong are formal properties that exist in abstraction (cf. Bauman, 1993). Theories of truth that depend on a simple correspondence between true statements and reality have lost their authority. Nor have they been able to address the complicated issues adequately. Dramatic technological innovation and the negative side of market-driven global commerce have buried educational enterprises that seek to facilitate democratic life. A historical review points to the need for an entirely new model of ethics. Rather than searching for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, or accepting moral relativism uncritically, ethical theory should rest on a complex

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view of moral judgments as integrating facts, principles, and feelings in terms of human wholeness. Ethics should be inscribed in our worldviews, which themselves are simultaneously embedded culturally and factually. Habermas' discourse ethics is one prominent attempt to start over intellectually. He replaces Kant's formal system - his universalizability criterion of noncontradiction - with a communication community representing their common interests. He develops a procedural model of moral argumentation in which justification is tied to reasoned agreement among those subject to the norms in question. Habermas understands language to be an agent of culture and social organization. Discourses are symbolic forms through which we think, argue, persuade, display convictions and establish our identities. Narratives contain in a nutshell the meaning of our theories and beliefs. Therefore, the overriding question is whether our myriad linguistic forms allow everyone's interests a representative hearing. Is the moral consciousness of the community's members reflected in our practical discourse? Competing normative claims can be fairly adjudicated in the public sphere under ideal speech conditions such as reciprocity and openness. Habermas' critical theory contradicts the individualistic democratic politics presumed by traditional approaches to professional ethics. Moral consciousness must be nurtured instead under conditions of instrumental technocracy and institutional power that stifle autonomous action in the public arena. But is social ethics thereby home free, repositioned through Habermas for intellectual leadership as the 21st century dawns? Indeed, cutting through our political assumptions is a major corrective, but still insufficient. In the well-known critique of Nancy Fraser (1992, 1997), for example, Habermas' public sphere is an abstraction which is not deeply holistic, gender inclusive or culturally constituted. It presumes a private-public dichotomy, with the nurturing of human intimacy constrained within the private domain. And given Habermas' insistence that public discourse "conform to generalizable interests," the potential ethnocentrism of his public sphere remains an ongoing concern. How can he ensure that the interests of marginalized subcultures "will become a part of generalizable interests" (Cooper, 1991, p. 34)? Insisting in discourse ethics on full and open discussion does not itself guarantee that those without political power can interpret their own needs and position themselves in their own terms (Cooper, 1991, p. 40). Moreover, Foucault (1984) opposes both liberal democratic presumptions and Habermas' critical theory by questioning the very existence of autonomous citizens who may engage in rational discourse. Thoughtful selfreflexivity is impossible for Foucault without emancipation from the prevailing regime of oppressive practices. From his perspective, we ought to

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struggle against the economic and ideological state violence that constitute us as moral subjects. Norm constructs his normative approach to social science research out of a second alternative to realist utilitarianism. The feminist communitarian ethics that he develops and applies makes a radical break with the individual autonomy and rationalist presumptions of utilitarian rationalism. Contrary to the utilitarian dualism between individuals and society, we are presumed to know ourselves primarily as whole beings in relation (cf. Sandel, 1998). The social sphere is conceived as a mosaic of particular communities, a pluralism of ethnic identities and worldviews intersecting to form social bonds. Instead of the transmission of plentiful data, social science research facilitates conununity. The goal of research becomes civic transformation. A revitalized citizenship is seen as the social scientist's aim - not merely readers and audiences provided with information, but morally literate persons. The received view characteristically supposes that raw intelligence is democracy's lifeline. Social science is said to advance society's interests by feeding our individual capacity to reason and make decisions. However, from the perspective of a feminist communitarian ethics, the information function is too static and narrow. Getting one's head straight does not automatically generate intelligent social action. The question is what we need to improve society and how such transformation can be accomplished. Along these lines, an ethics of dialogue enriched by feminism establishes the way public communication ought to be organized to realize the social and political ideals of democratic life. The strategic direction for social science research ethics at present is a dialogic ethics of feminism and communitarianism. This normative model avoids the conundrums facing Habermas, and it provides a radical alternative to utilitarian rationalism. COMMUNITIES

AS MORAL

ENTITIES

Norm's feminist social ethics presumes that communities are moral entities. My question is whether he has come to peace intellectually with that presumption, and if so, how he defends it conceptually without philosophical foundationalism. In the liberal democracy entailed by utilitarian rationalism, language is the marrow of community. Our indispensable relations as human beings are linguistic ones, not moral bonds. Therefore, in libertarian liberalism, unfettered information must be guaranteed by the First Amendment. In egalitarian democracy, we enter the ongoing conversations of public life and negotiate the human

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order through language. We are constituted as selves antecedently, that is, in advance of our engagement with others. People are considered distinct from their ends; a sense of community describes a possible aim of individuated selves but is not constitutive of their identity. Political community is "a system of cooperation between mutually disinterested individuals" (Mulhall & Swift, 1996, p. 56). Citizen decision-making is thus understood as instrumental rationality determining the various goods and options available and their consequences in terms of personal preferences. On the other hand, in Norm's feminist dialogic perspective, agency is not established in isolation from history and culture. In Charles Taylor's terms, our sense of the good is woven into our lives as an unfolding story. An orientation toward the good and a concern for life's narrative unity are mutually implicating. "Because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story" (Taylor, 1984, pp. 51-52). Claims to individual, asocial and ahistorical rights cannot exist independently of communally shared conceptions of the good (Taylor, 1984, p. 89). As Robert Adams (1993, p. 93) concludes, "Every society must, and therefore will, have a shared morality; but . . . a shared ethical theory is not required for a common morality . . . . No comprehensive ethical theory . . . is likely to meet with general agreement in any modern society that permits free inquiry." The killing of and violent assault on human beings may be generally condemned, while disagreements rage at the same time over capital punishment, euthanasia, and justified warfare. All things being equal, societies are predisposed against lying while debating exceptions and theorizing the nature and parameters of deception. Moral duty is nurtured by the demands of social linkage and not produced by theory. However, though the core of a society's common morality is pretheoretical agreement, ethical theory is not useless or marginal in shaping the common good. Societies speak with divided voices and often in error. "What counts as common morality, indeed, is not only imprecise but v a r i a b l e . . , and a difficult practical problem" (Adams, 1993, p. 96). Ethical theory is primarily an effort to articulate moral obligation within the fallible and irresolute voices of everyday life. However, generally accepted theories are not necessary for common goods to prosper. Instead of expecting more theoretical coherence than history warrants in constitutional democracies, we can approximate consensus on issues and settle disputes within democratic institutions through a common morality. There may be more persuasive ways of arguing for communities as moral entities than Taylor's communitarian perspective, and Norm may prefer his own

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formulation. However, the invigorating question is the validity of the common values without which social order is impossible. Among contending norms as they emerge in everyday dialogue, some empower us to a common citizenship and others do not. By what standards do we affirm the former and reject the latter? If our research agenda and political action are value driven, how do we validate those epiphanal moments in our communal life that provide us a vision of who we are and inspire us morally? When rational agents take responsibility for their actions, is this delusion, an archaic survivor from a pre-scientific age, or a constituent part of a metaphysics of human being? In other words, how are moral claims warrantable? Our dialogic encounters construct and deconstruct; they open authenticity and entrench the status quo. On what grounds in a public arena do we agree on the difference? In Norm's dialogic tradition, what emancipatory struggles are morally acceptable when the starting point is not a fixed human nature or ontological aprioras? For George Edward Moore, ought statements cannot be derived from is statements because the former refer to abstract values while the latter correspond to natural phenomena; they exist in different realms. If all persons are said to desire happiness as an end, we conclude fallaciously that the happiness of particular persons is goodness itself. To claim that something is good because most people identify it as good involves the contradiction of asserting a prescriptive claim from an experiential base. Defining pleasure as good in itself is merely to say that pleasure is pleasurable. What exists experimentally in a natural setting cannot itself yield normative guidelines. The nature and logic of values is a genuine dilemma in the dialogic tradition. Contrary to Descartes, knowledge is context-dependent. Cultures are symbolic productions that organize the human domain and are therefore ipso facto evaluative. Societies are embodiments of institutions, practices and structures that those in control consider legitimate. Language is a medium of domination and power. Validity claims are presupposed in all communicative acts. How can we, then, appeal to the sacredness of human life without declaring it nonnegotiable? But what privileges unmitigated human dignity in the face of anarchy or a more benign equivocation? Should we choose a process of human mutuality, rather than social goods such as justice and reciprocity, why is mutuality more than personal preference? Without prima facie norms, history indicates that praxis is vitiated by arbitrariness. Politics is the axis of Norm's feminist dialogic ethics; therefore, resolving the status of values has particular urgency for him. Given the sophistication of his pathbreaking work on research and social relations, his resolution of the values conundrum is of decisive importance in the history of ideas.

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NOTES 1. The summary o f feminist communitarian ethics presented below is elaborated with more extensive citations in Christians (2000, pp. 142-149). 2. While communitarian is a useful label for distinguishing these theorists from rightsoriented liberalism, it obscures their fundamental difference collectively from the political m o v e m e n t s by that name on both sides o f the Atlantic. As Mulhall and Swift (1996) put it: Amital Etzoni, whose book The Spirit of Community contains a communitarian platform to which individuals are invited to subscribe, occasionally draws upon the ideas of ... the philosophical communitarians,but it is difficult to find anything more than vague and general connections to the kind of programme he has in mind... So far as we are aware, none of [the] communitarian theorists has signed up to Etzoni's programme (p. xiv). Micheal Sandel (1998) insists that the "fundamental question is whether the right is prior to the good." H e complains that the argument has often been refind toward individual liberty versus the values o f the community or will o f the majority. Insofar as communitarianism b e c o m e s "another name for majoritarianism . . . it is not a view I would defend" (p. x). Denzins model could be labelled appropriately "feminist dialogic ethics" to avoid misunderstanding, but his emphatic political emphasis argues for direct connections to the philosophical communitarians.

REFERENCES Adams, R. M. (1993). Religious Ethics in a Pluralistic Society. In: G. Outka & J. P. Reeder (Eds), Prospects for a Common Morality (pp. 93-113). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Christians, C. G. (2000). Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed., pp. 133-155). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cooper, M. (1991). Ethical Dimensions of Political Advocacy from a Postmodern Perspective. In: R. E. Denton (Ed.), Ethical Dimensions of Political Communication (pp. 23-47). New York: Praeger. Denzin, N. K. (Ed.) (1970). The Values of Social Science. Chicago: Adine. Denzin, N. K. (1970). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. Chicago: Aldine. McGraw Hill, 1978 (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall, 1989 (3rd ed.). Denzin, N. K. (1984). On Understanding Emotion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Denzin, N. K. (1989). Interpretive Biography. Newbnry Park, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K., & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds) (2000). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Foucanlt, M. (1984). On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress; Politics and Ethics: An Interview. In: P. Rabinow (Ed.), C. Porter (Trans.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 340-380). New York: Pantheon.

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Fraser, N. (1993). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In: B. Robbins (Ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (pp. 1-32). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (1997). Justus Interruptus. New York: Routledge. Koehn, D. (1998). Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy. New York: Routledge. Lincoln, Y. S. (1995.) Emerging Criteria for Quality in Qualitative and Interpretive Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 1, 275-289. Mulhall, S., & Swift, A. (1996). Liberals and Communitarians (2nd ed.). Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Root, M. (1993). Philosophy of Social Science: The Methods, Ideals, and Politics of Social Inquiry. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Sandel, M. (1998). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (2nd ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (1984). Sources of the Self" The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

SYMBOLIC INTERACTION IN RETROSPECT: A CONVERSATION WITH NORMAN DENZIN Carolyn Ellis, Arthur P. Bochner, and Norman K. Denzin

INTRODUCTION In November 2001, Shing-Ling Chen organized a panel at the National Communication Association convention entitled "Cultural Studies and Symbolic Interactionism: Norman Denzin's Contributions to Communication and Sociological Inquiries" to honor Norman Denzin and to discuss his work. In lieu of a traditional paper, we chose to interview Norman at the conference and show a taped segment of our conversation at the session the next day. We wanted the audience to hear what Norman had to say about his life and work rather than to hear our interpretation of Norman. The videotaping provided a way to obtain longer and more complex stories from Norman than we would be able to get had we interviewed him during our allotted few minutes on the panel. This strategy also encouraged Norman to speak at length about these matters. Below we present a longer version of our discussion, substantially edited and rearranged for coherence and readability. Additionally, Norman had the opportunity to edit and clarify his responses. After greeting us in our hotel room, Norman removes his olive green, weather resistant jacket and black nylon pants, and unbuckles his Birkenstocks. He takes Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 179~198. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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a seat, appearing comfortable in his familiar tan safari shorts and short-sleeved cotton shirt. Art: Norman, we'd like this to be an interactive conversation about your career and issues relating to the development of interpretive social science. We're grateful to have known you for, in my case, the last ten years. Carolyn: Close to fifteen years for me. Art: I first read your work when I was a graduate student back in 1970 and then met you twenty years later. Carolyn: You and I actually met in 1987 at the SSSI Stone Symposium you held in Illinois, though I had read your work prior to then.

GRADUATE SCHOOL AND BEYOND Art: When I was looking over your rrsum6 in preparation for this interview, I remembered being impacted in graduate school by an article you published on semiotics. At the time, I thought you had to be at least 40. Then looking at your rrsumr, I discovered you got your Ph.D. when you were 25. So when you wrote that article, you were the same age as I was when I read it. How did you manage to get a Ph.D. at 25? What do you remember about your experience as a student that might provide a context for the rest of your experience and your career? Norm: As an undergraduate at Iowa, I'd been impacted by Manford Kuhn. Manford was a very charismatic professor and took his teaching very seriously. He taught undergraduates his perspective of symbolic interaction. In the first course I had from him, we used the Lindesmith and Strauss social psychology text, which introduced me to Mead and Cooley and the tradition of symbolic interaction. When I applied to graduate school, I had to choose between going to Wisconsin and Iowa; Wisconsin because Mills had gone there and Iowa because of Kuhn. This was in the early 1960s and the federal government was funding national programs in mental health research. Kuhn got a grant to fund five graduate students for five years and to bring in two faculty. I got one of those fellowships, which freed me up to go to school full time without teaching. Thus I was able to complete my course work in two years. I'd gotten my undergraduate degree in three years because I went to summer school. In those days you just went to school. I often laugh and say I entered school when I was five and I've never left. I just love the institution of education. So fifty years later I ' m still in it. I became Kuhn's assistant when I arrived at Iowa, though he became ill and died during my first semester. I was defined as Manford's last student, though

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that really wasn't the case because I didn't finish with him. But I was his last assistant. So, I got identified as someone in the tradition, but who was kind of young. A second thing that impacted me happened in Kuhn's seminar. One day we were meeting at his home. H e ' d had a heart attack and couldn't come to campus. Manford said, 'You can tell by somebody's eyes whether they have the drive and the will, whether they have the desire to be a symbolic interactionist'. I think everyone in the room thought he was speaking to them, and I was sure he was speaking to me. I hoped he thought I was one of those people, because I sure felt that way. I felt he had passed on this commitment, this passion. I think that's what all of us have confronted at some point: someone who had a passion that we identified with. We can imagine ourselves picking that up and bringing it to ourselves. So that's what happened to me. I was able to go right along then and finish up in that short time and be impacted by Kuhn's vision. An: Then you went to Illinois and never left. [Norman nods.] And the job at Illinois? Norman: That was interesting. George McCall had recruited me to Illinois. We had gone to grade school together in this little town near Iowa City. Then we met again when I started graduate school and he had come back to Iowa from Harvard as a new faculty member in Kuhn's program. We connected and did a little research together. There was an opening at Illinois, and he asked me if I would be interested. I said of course. In those days you didn't even apply for jobs. They just invited me to send my materials, and I was hired before the fall semester was over. Art: How big was your department? Norman: It was quite large, about 25 people. And some of the well known theorists were there: Lou Schneider, Harry Johnson, Daniel Glaser, Joe Gusfield, and Bernit Farber. It was a strong department. Art: So that was an exciting intellectual place? Norman: It was an exciting intellectual place and kind of intimidating for a young Ph.D. Art: Intimidating in what sense? Norman: That these were senior faculty and who was I? They were quite Germanic in their orientation and quite professorial, which we still were in those days. That tradition was still alive. Art: Professorial. Meaning? Norman: Suits and ties. [All three laugh, as Art and Carolyn glance at Norman's attire.]

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Art: Was it high pressure? Norman: There was some pressure, but I didn't feel a great deal of that. I think being identified as a symbolic interactionist was quite important to my identity. Art: What was one of the most important experiences during that period that impacted your work? Norman: I started The Research Act as soon as I got there. Getting that done quickly gave me a foothold and that was pretty important. Art: Were there any women in the department? Norman: Rita Simon was quarter time. She had come from Chicago about 10 years earlier and she was one of only a few women faculty on campus. She was split among four units, the Institute of Communication and the Law School being two of them.

FROM

SOCIOLOGY

TO

COMMUNICATION

Art: I ' v e been thinking about your recent move to the Institute of Communication. You and Carolyn have this move to communication in common and it seems you have drifted away from sociology or at least orthodox sociology as a primary identification. I think that move might be of special interest to people in communication who are always questioning whether communication is a discipline and its connection to other disciplines. What motivated you to move to communication and how do you understand the connections between communication and sociology? Norman: At Illinois, the Institute of Communication is organized in terms of the field of communications, which is conceptualized as an interdisciplinary formation but not a discipline. The faculty there are all connected in some way through a discipline to the Institute. My connection from sociology to the Institute was quite logical. But the space that the Institute made available was really one around cultural studies. The cultural studies approach is interdisciplinary and critical of existing boundaries between formations. At Illinois, because of political and disciplinary developments in sociology, the opportunity arose for a number of faculty to move to other programs. Communications was the most receptive and a logical move for me since I had a connection to the Institute for probably 20 years as a zero time member, which means I served on committees, voted, and so on, but didn't have a formal appointment there. Through the efforts of Cliff Christians, Kim Rotzell, and others, my connection was formalized as a regular appointment. A lot of politics happened that led to leaving sociology behind. But in a sense you don't leave sociology, the perspective, behind. Rather I left the department of sociology behind.

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Similar to what I perceive to be Carolyn's experience, I kept the discipline of sociology. You always see the world in terms of this kind of twisted sociological framework that we have. [Carolyn nods enthusiastically and all three share laughter.] But not in terms of the institutional framework of sociology, which at Illinois had gotten quite closed off and narrow. Art: So you can be a sociologist in a Communication department? Norman: Yes, in a way that I couldn't be a sociologist in my Sociology department. I could answer to the calling of C. Wright Mills and the sociological imagination as well as the critical cultural studies perspective and be thoroughly interpretive and critical in the Institute. That was marginalized in my particular Sociology department and in the larger discipline of sociology as well. There's this interesting interplay that can happen in an interdisciplinary program. You can realize the potential of your identity in a place that isn't connected to your discipline. Carolyn, I suspect you had this same experience. Carolyn: Oh, yes. I felt I could do the sociology I wanted to do in a Communication program. I found much more openness and more flexibility in the Communication department at the University of South Florida and in communication more widely. I feel like I fit in communication. And, for the most part, I kept doing what I had been doing in Sociology. [Norman nods his head in agreement.] Art: What do you think is so threatening to orthodox sociology about what you do? Norman: In my particular institutional locus, there was a clear threat perceived from anything that was not in the narrow, traditional, structural positivist vein. Any sociology outside that paradigm was regarded as non-scientific, journalistic, or non-sociological. Why that particular configuration of people in that department found this so threatening is an interesting question and has a long institutional history. Art: Do you think that department is representative of sociology? Norman: I think it's representative of mainstream sociology. [Carolyn nods in agreement.] Norman: If you look at how mainstream sociology has taken up the field of communications or, in a more narrow sense, cultural studies, it has tended to marginalize those formations. When the Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler volume on cultural studies came out, Jeff Alexander and others roundly criticized it in a review in Contemporary Sociology. It was treated as if it didn't belong within the discourse of sociology. That was paradigmatic of the sociological approach. Keep cultural studies outside: it is political, Marxist, and doesn't pay homage to Durkheim and Weber. Sociologists thought they already knew what the cultural was all about.

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Carolyn: In communication, I ' v e found that the rhetoric and the performance traditions mean that there isn't quite the same kind of science-not science split that there's been in sociology. There's always been a home for humanities orientations. So coming into communication, I felt that I didn't have to go through that kind of proving myself - that I did real science. It was okay to do humanities-oriented research. Enough people accepted that as legitimate. And then for me there was qualitative methods, which makes a lot of connections among the traditions in communication. The qualitative approach was just waiting to be developed further and that's where I ' v e found my home in communication, in the Ethnography Division. Norman: Yes, qualitative was a natural for communications. That's been the strength of the field of communication. It has a foot in both formations, humanities and social science. The humanities base in Illinois is very strong through literature, English, rhetoric, linguistics, and so on. Art: It's somewhat ironic in communication that the humanities base was there first. When I finished my Ph.D., the empiricists were trying to get into mainstream communication departments and if they hired one quantitative person, that person was the token empiricist who got into what was considered a humanities program. This was largely propelled by the post World War II interest in propaganda and persuasion. That was the foothold for the new empiricism, as I understood it in mainstream communication departments, though not the institutes and Annenberg. Norman: [Nodding in agreement] That behavioral model. Art: Right. We never heard the word social science. It was always behavioral science. Norman: That's the kind of fight Jim Carey was trying to confront in these early essays on cultural studies. He didn't want to let the behaviorists take over the field. He tried to mark a space for cultural studies. Art: Are you at all hopeful about mainstream sociology with regard to qualitative research? Norman: Various areas in the Sociology department at Illinois are reworking themselves now. Some have become comparative, historical, and qualitative in the last four or five years. I think that's hopeful. But at the larger level of the discipline, I still don't see the kind of openness we experience as a matter of course in communications. Art: This reminds me of a very important symbolic moment Carolyn and I had recently with regard to her sociological background. We had run out of space in our house for books. [Carolyn laughs heartily when she realizes what Art is going to tell.] We have this room with built in wall to wall book s h e l v e s . . . Carolyn: And floor to ceiling.

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Art: [nodding] It's our journal library basically with all the communication journals since I was a graduate student and all of sociology Carolyn: From back in the 1950s - I inherited Gene Weinstein's collection when he died. Norman: Half a century of social science. Art: We had to decide which journals had tO go. We just couldn't keep them all. Carolyn: [interrupts] Even before that I had started canceling subscriptions. Social Forces went first. Then ASR went next. I continued receiving AJS until about a year ago and then I canceled that one. Okay, now we're up to this latest move a couple months ago. Norman: It's like our library each year. They have to make an assessment each year of what they're going to renew or add to their collection. Carolyn: Yes, and from the time we moved into our house in 1992, ASR and Social Forces were stacked on the top shelves where, if we wanted one, we had to climb up on a ladder to reach it. So with this latest move, I just said, 'Okay, I ' m ready for them all to go now'. We gave away all of ASR, Social Forces, even AJS and Social Psychology Quarterly. Norman: That opened up a lot of space. [The three of them laugh.] Carolyn: It did indeed. And you know, I felt a heaviness go out of that room. Norman: When I became editor of The Sociological Quarterly, I decided I had as a matter of course to reeducate myself as a general sociologist. So I subscribed to all the ASA journals. I hadn't done that for years because I had confined my reading of sociology to the symbolic interactionists and to AJS somewhat. So to go back and reconfront that system of discourse once more over an eight-year period was both enlightening and depressing. Just to see how far I ' d moved from it and how little it really spoke to me. So to let loose of it wasn't really to let loose of anything except in a symbolic sense. Then when we left Lincoln Hall and moved to Gregory this summer and moved the journals fully over into the Institute, we didn't take any of the mainstream sociology journals with us. Instead we eventually gave them away to third world libraries. Carolyn: That makes me want to tell one more personal story. When I first moved to communication, I remember picking up one of Art's communication journals that had come in the mail that day. Leafing through it, I had a moment of sadness and grief. I felt I didn't identity with the rhetorical tradition or persuasion or performance, at that time. I thought, 'Oh, what have I done? Do I really belong here'? Then I looked through the stack of mail, and here's the annual conference program from ASA. I grabbed it greedily, seeking to reconnect with my old identity, I think. After looking through it - economy and society, mathe-

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matical sociology, rational choice, stratification, mobility, labor markets, and so on - , I couldn't help but say to myself, 'Wait a minute, it's not as though I ' m connected to everything here either. Why am I mourning having lost something that I was not that absorbed in anyway? That made me laugh, and was a turning point in feeling that I now could make a home in communication. CONNECTING

SYMBOLIC INTERACTION COMMUNICATION

AND

Art: In the first communication theory class I took as a graduate student in 1969, four weeks of the semester were spent reading Goffman, Blumer, Mead, and Cooley about self and communication. This had a tremendous impact on me and was the most interesting work that I was reading. Sadly, I couldn't find these symbolic interacfionists in the rest of my department or in my field, though there were a few little pockets. Norman: Burke and so forth. Art: Yes. Then when I was working on my dissertation, I had a fellowship and my supervisor didn't have anything for me to do. So he said, 'Go to the journals in the library and start at the As and go to the Zs. For every journal make a note card. Then indicate every relevant journal that publishes something relevant to communication. Note the editor, what kind of work they publish, and so on.' That's when I discovered the relatively new journal, Symbolic Interaction, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Norman: The journal would have been about two years old then. Carolyn: What role do you think the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction has played in your life and career? And in communication? Norman: SSSI was a kind of loyal opposition in social psychology and sociology. Now both of you have been instrumental, along with Shing-Ling Chen and others, in bringing the Society into communication. People like Bruce Gronbeck have collaborated with Couch's students and that's been an important inroad for allowing the Society to get a foothold there. I think it's ironic that the theoretical formation of symbolic interaction appears in all of the cannons; in sociology textbooks there is always a theoretical chapter on symbolic interaction as if it were one of the formations that had to be dealt with from Mead and Blamer, Cooley, and so on. But the implications of that for the larger discipline are never really taken up. So symbolic interaction gets recognized but in this sort of doting or ritualistic way. What do you think? Carolyn: I'd like to say something about what SSSI means to me personally to see if it resonates with you or if you have had a different experience. The move from sociology to communication was a hard move for me. I identified

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strongly as a sociologist and it took me a while to imagine not being in a Sociology department. But the pull from communication and what we could do in particular in the Communication department at USF was real seductive. Additionally, the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction provided a joint home. There I could be both a sociologist and a communication scholar at the same time. Through SSSI, I was able to take my "sociology home" with me when I left the Sociology department. You moved away from the American Sociological Association earlier. But I was still very involved in ASA when I moved to communication, especially in the Emotions Section. At first I held tightly to that connection, thinking that I needed it to continue being seen (and seeing myself) as a sociologist. Then, just as I ' v e let go of mainstream sociology journals, I ' v e also gradually let go of my connection with ASA over the past five years, though I still attend the meetings. Part of the reason I can let go of it is that I have the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and most of the sociologists that I have contact with (and most I want to have contact with) are in that Society. So I haven't left them. Does SSSI provide the same thing for you that it does for me? Norman: I think it does. I had so many close friends in the Society. Carl especially and others and they passed away. That's a loss that's been hard to replace. There also was a point that I symbolically connected to the Society, but I felt that what I was doing wasn't what many of the people in the Society were doing. Then I routinely began to organize sessions at meetings, such as the cultural studies sessions, which would appear in the program and presenters would do performances and autoethnographic texts and so on. People would come listen to them but that really wasn't regarded as what symbolic interactionists were doing. It was just something that Denzin and that group were doing. Art: Except they were the most crowded sessions. Norman: They were popular. Carolyn: Yes. Standing room only. Art: We appeal to the voyeurism of traditional sociologists. Norman: (Smiling) Right. You guys were involved in them and Laurel and others. So there was this sort of comfortable but uncomfortable feeling. As a symbolic interactionist, you always want to be on the outside. The Society allows us to do that. We can even be outside that thing we created and be comfortable there. Carolyn: That's right. I like that. I once had an argument with David Maines about which one of us was most marginal. And we both wanted to be seen as tile most marginal. [Norman chuckles.]

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Art: One worry that I've had about the Society is that we aren't getting enough new members. In fact, I thought that communication could be one place to build a greater liaison to young people. What are your thoughts about that? What happens next? Norman: I think there's a larger group of persons in communications for whom SSSI is a natural home. For example, there's the social interaction group, the language group, even the performance group. Then there's the panel that I was on at noon today, entitled "Renewing the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction in the New Millennium: An Engaged Dialogue of Communication and Sociology." It was organized by students at Boise State who worked with Bruce Gronbeck at Iowa, and who were influenced by Couch. Actually that's a large group of four generations of people now who've been influenced by Couch, and many of them are in communications. So, I think your idea of continuing this communication initiative in the Society is really quite important. I think we have a home for them, and they have a home for us. I think in sociology it'll continue to be a struggle, because departments don't have that many symbolic interactionists teaching and it's harder for students to identify with the perspective. While in communications, there's quite an openness on a number of different levels at which the interactionist tradition still operates: dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, conversations analysis, the Iowa school - whatever that means -, political economy, interaction and identity. There are those traditional areas, then there are the other area of cultural studies, critique and feminism and other -isms that aren't traditionally connected to symbolic interactionism, but they should be in that space. The other thought I have - and I go back and forth on this - regards human agency. Depending on where you are in your project, if you think we have to have a theory of the human agent and of agency and of mind in order to do the work that we do - and on one level I think we do have to have that - then some version of pragmatism and of Mead and of interactionism is the model we have to use. This model needs a lot of work to make it operate the way it should. But that notion of the actor and of interaction is I think really fundamental. And nobody else has replaced it. I don't think it can be replaced. It could be supplemented by many other points of view, but there is a bedrock notion here about language and identity and self that you have to work through. So, there's always going to be a space for people to work through this tradition of pragmatism. Where Carl and I would differ is that I felt that a lot had happened since Mead and Simmel died. I felt we couldn't just do a formal sociology of social interaction any more. You had to do something more. It's that something more that's exciting, I think.

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EPIPHANIES, TURNING POINTS, AND PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS Art: One of the recurring themes in your writings over the past 20 years is the idea of the epiphany, an experience that leaves a tremendous mark on a person's life. Can you recall how you began thinking about epiphanies and how that whole idea evolved in your work? Norman: It really came together in 1983 or 1984 when I was doing On Understanding Emotions. I was reading Sartre and Lacan on language and the self and Sartre's whole treatment of the person and his notion of emotion. I tried to work through some of those phenomenological notions from Merleau-Ponty to Husserl to Heidegger's notion of being. I started Interpretive Interactionism right after I finished the emotions book. I had already written the first essay for that in 1981. Sartre starts the three volume project on the biography of Flanbert with a question, 'Where do you start with a man who wrote over the course of his whole life?' He answers, 'You start with a moment that left a mark on his life'. With Flaubert it was that moment when he entered language, because Flaubert didn't speak until he was six. So, Flaubert's entrance into language was a moment that marked him for life. That idea then worked into my perspective of dealing with moments that left marks on people's lives. As I was laying out the definition of interpretive interactionism, I wanted this perspective to be different from everyday life sociology and ethnomethodology, which looked at the taken for granted, and from traditional symbolic interaction, which looked at identity, and from dramaturgy and psychoanalysis. I wanted to narrow the perspective to make it existentially central to the moments that made a difference. So that's how I came to try and navigate that space. Then you find the notion of the epiphany everywhere once you start to see it. It's in Joyce, for example, and I took quite a bit from Joyce's The Dubliners. Art: In our work, we see a connection between what we write about and who we are. Given your interest in epiphanies, are there particular moments that left a mark on you that you can share with us? Are there any significant biographical moments particularly in relation to your life and your academic work? Norman: The moment with Kuhn when I was sure he was looking at me was one. And there are others that I wrote around and about in the emotions book. I was going through some issues in my life that brought the notion of the turning point in front of me. Strauss had written about the turning point in Mirrors and Masks in 1959 and I took some of that from him-and used it in the emotions book and in the two books on the alcoholic self.

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Art: Speaking of turning points, when did you meet Carl Couch? Norman: Carl served on my dissertation committee and we formed a friendship immediately. Art: You had a special relationship with Carl. Readers would be interested in how that emerged. Tell us more about how you two first met and hit it off. Also would you talk a bit about the kind of intellectual banter that was so characteristic between the two of you? Norman: I met Carl when he came to Iowa in 1965. I was just finishing up my graduate work and he wasn't in the department full time yet. He had a research appointment in the medical school. But he came on my dissertation at the very end and he was present in the final defense. We got aquainted after that, though I think there had been some contact before that through the connection back to Manford Kuhn. We both had fights with standard epistemology and standard sociology. He helped me sharpen my arguments. And we just stayed good friends even after I left Iowa and went to Illinois and then to Berkeley for a couple of years. After that, I came back to Illinois and we renewed the friendship. I got pretty active in the Midwest Sociological Society; then I worked to get Carl involved. I had served on the board of directors and other committees and was president. I put Carl's name forward for President. So, we reconnected that way. Then Carl invited me and my wife and stepson up to his place in Montana in 1987. We debated over and over whether we should do this. We'd never done a vacation like this before. What will it do to the friendship, I wondered. Anyway, we went and fell in love with Montana. Carl took us trout fishing and that thickened the relationship and we knew we would spend summers from then on with them in Montana. But that's jumping forward. Going back, in the late 1970s when we formed the Society, Carl and I were quite close then. He was at Iowa and I was in Illinois and I had the second SSSI symposium and he had the first or maybe it was the third. Carl and I, along with Greg Stone, Harvey Farberman, David Maines, and some others, were the original group that fought to create the Society and break from the ASA. Carl and I used to room together at these conferences and stay up all night drinking Jack Daniel's and smoking and arguing and fighting and . . . Carolyn: Playing poker. Norman: Yeah, Carolyn, you got into those poker games later. Carl and I were deeply bonded over this struggle to establish this intellectual perspective and then to keep the Society alive and to get a journal going. We worked to see to it that people came forward as editors in the sequence that they should and to support them. We both were committed to wanting to

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make a difference in the way this thing was going to be done after we had moved on. Art: How did you and Carl differ in terms of your academic perspectives? Norman: Well, we had a real difference intellectually, but Carl was one of the best readers I had. I mean he would criticize. We could disagree on ideas and he would help you clarify your writing and make yourself more clear. He might not agree with you, but he would push you to get your arguments clear. He felt that I had made a profound error in going as far in interpretive and cultural studies and postmodem theory as I had. He thought that was a major mistake. In one of the last conversations we had, he lamented that. I had given him the Handbook of Qualitative Research, and he wasn't really aware of those literatures. Many symbolic interacfionists weren't aware of those literatures. It was disappointing to feel that I had invested so much in this project and the very Society that had helped nurture me had itself not stayed current with those arguments. So the Handbook became symbolic almost of this wall between Carl and me at one level; at another level, interpersonally, there was no distance. Carolyn: How did Carl respond to the Handbook? Norman: 'Oh, god,' he said, scratching his head. " I don't know what all this stuff means'. Carolyn: What intrigues me is that when I sent you one of my introspection papers - an epiphanic moment for me - you sent it to Carl and he was a reviewer. He loved it. And that was a pretty far out paper. Norman: Right, it was pretty far out. Art: But you made it sound like science. Carolyn: Yes, I did. There are a lot of mainstream social scientists who actually liked that work because it was argued in a traditional way. Many of them haven't liked anything else I did after that Norman: Right. Right. You went through all the arguments for it and against it. Yeah, yeah. He was one of the readers for that. Carolyn: When I came to your Stone Symposium for the first time, Carl was the chair of my panel. He scared me to death with his booming voice. He yelled at me, 'You only have ten minutes.' And I had prepared for fifteen, but I was scared to take them. [All three laugh.] Ok, talk a little bit about how the two of you loved to do this bantering in public which appeared pretty confrontational to people who didn't know you. I think they thought the two of you were going to go at it. Art: Male academic discourse. Norman: Yeah. Yeah, right. [Again, laughter] Carolyn: I have to say I miss that exchange now. Could you talk a little about how it developed and what it meant?

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Norman: Well, I think it was truly sincere on both our parts. We each brought passion to it. We both felt the other could be doing better than he was and we weren't afraid to say that. You know, he'd call you a dumb SOB or what have you . . . Carolyn: He'd call you a 'dumb shit'. Norman: Yes. And I ' d say, 'You haven't read anything in 15 years so yon aren't allowed to say anything. So just be quiet.' Carolyn: So it was sincere on one level and not another? Norman: Yeah right. Art: Ever think people in the audience got the wrong impression? Norman: I think they probably did, yeah. Art: That you two guys didn't really like each other? Norman: But I think pretty soon people sort of knew that this was Denzin and Couch doing their thing. Art: Yeah, it became ritualistic. Norman: Then we'd hug each other afterwards and be on the same panel sometimes. Art: The other thing about that was that you were going through these changes and Carl wasn't keeping up with that... Carolyn: Or he was going through his own changes. Norman: Right.

C H A N G I N G THE W O R L D WITH R E S E A R C H Art: I ' v e heard you say on more than one occasion that our work has to do more than just understand the world. You have said that our work ought to contribute to changing it. Do you still hold to that? Norman: I still hold to that. That's the bottom line. Art: What, then, do you have in mind as the agenda and the curriculum for social science and the socialization of social scientists? In most places, if not all places, we don't have a curriculum that was designed to encourage that project, do we? Norman: No. Well, they do in education and in social work. They're in the business of changing the world or dealing with the world's problems on the level of evaluation and assessment, and trying to make it better at some level. Art: It's interesting that you mention those two examples which traditionally have been thought of within the academy, at least within the social sciences, as lesser disciplines. Norman: Right. But they, along with journalism, are the three disciplines that deal with praxis and changing the world, or representing the world critically. I

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think we have to work back through a whole complicated literature that works with Freire and empowerment and dialogical arguments concerning community in the formation of texts and critical consciousness that can help people raise their consciousness in ways that lead to action in the world. That's one way we should move, I think. TEACHING

STUDENTS:

CULTURAL

STUDIES

AND

INTERPRETIVE STUDIES CONNECTED Norman: Another way is in our work with students. In my classes at Illinois, theory passes through the eye of a needle. You have to pass through a complicated set of formations so that the work that we write then is drenched in theory. But once you do the writing, theory is imbedded in the writing in a way that doesn't call attention to itself. The writing is then meant to be the space where theory connects with experience. The critical scholar should be able to write this way as well as write critical essays and other kinds of work. Art: What obstacles do you see in terms of educating students to do that? Norman: You have to have a lot of things in place. We have an interdisciplinary program in cultural studies and interpretive research at Illinois that tries to work between departments and colleges. We encourage cultural studies work at the theoretical level and the interpretive level. We're still putting that program in place, but now students can become certified within the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. I think this is one space where that can happen. But you need a pretty sophisticated apparatus, one that can take people through theory in a really sophisticated way and another that can take them through qualitative research, interpretive writing, and first person textuality. And you've got to have a group willing to work at both levels. Carolyn: To bring it together. Art: Not only willing, but able. Are those somewhat different competencies? Norman: Yeah, I think so. Different muscles to flex. Carolyn: Yeah. Norman: And different fears. If I write this way, can I write that way. If I can write this way does this mean I'll get tenure? So we are starting a new journal called Cultural Studies ~ Critical Methodologies to look at the intersection between these two types of writing. We want to make a space for that and broaden the space for this new kind of discourse already out there. I ' m excited about that, but there are risks involved. Carolyn: What are they? Norman: That students will feel they'll get marked if they write this way or their work doesn't show enough theoretical sophistication. It's hard work to

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write that way. You both write that way. You both know how hard it is. [Carolyn and Art nod.] But I think that is where the future is, or at least one version of the future that I'd like to see us continue to do at Illinois and elsewhere instead of doing the old kind of writing or the old kind of interpretation. I want to attract a new cohort of students who have this commitment also. I ' m reminded now of one of the differences between Carl and me. Carl believed he had the answer. Art: And it was? Norman: That this paradigm of his was it. He believed in dictating to students how they should study and write. He believed they should implement this paradigm and he kept sending them back to the revisions until they got it right. I don't believe in working that way. I don't believe I have the answer. I don't believe there is an answer. I believe there is only a method, a way of making the world visible, informed by a critical political consciousness. But there isn't a particular way that it has to be rendered in advance. It's harder to work with people when you don't have an answer for them to follow. We have an approach for them to follow. That's the excitement of cultural studies as a formation. It doesn't have an answer. It has a way of critically bringing the world into play. Carolyn: My approach is much more like yours. I try to give students a space where they can play and develop their own construction of how they put it all together. I will be there to say, 'Here are some things you might take into consideration,' for the first draft anyway. But then I want to see what they have to offer the world. What is their contribution going to look like? Norman: Only you can write this; only you can say this in your voice. That's how I feel. Carolyn: Yes, yes. And that scares students. Because they don't know if they're getting it right. Norman: Yeah. Exactly. Carolyn: And they don't know if they're doing what you want them to do. Will they get an A? Norman: That's the challenge. Your last questions. Where do we go next? It seems to me we just try to keep that space open and keep that conversation expanding.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND INTERPRETIVE STUDIES: RESOLVING TENSIONS Art: What comes to mind as you speak about your project and your teaching agenda is how we bring together the political agenda of social and cultural

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transformation with the hermeneutic project psychologist Mark Freeman calls 'poetic psychology', and that I lump under narrative inquiry. Often there's some tension between the political and the poetic, literary side of cultural studies. Carolyn: So we're both on the same side, but then we clash sometimes. That's our experience, especially in our department. Norman: The poetic and the political? [Carolyn nods.] Norman: In what ways? Carolyn: In my experience, the political side often doesn't see the kind of work I do as being political. They call it self-absorbed and don't view it as advocating social change. I think it is political, of course. But many of the people who are oriented toward politics tend to be very abstract and theoretically minded. So if I ' m not using that discourse, there is a sense that I ' m not being theoretically sophisticated which is . . . Art: Not sufficiently analytical, Carolyn: Which is what you were talking about before, Norman. And I sometimes feel that people who are using political discourse have forgotten the people they're speaking for. Too often, they fail to include people's voices and don't really talk about the people. Sometimes they don't even talk to people. Norman: That's exactly where the conflict can arise. In my class this last semester, we worked through the black aesthetic of the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We tried to connect that to critical race theory and to the interpretive turn in qualitative inquiry. We wanted to learn from critical race theory and the black arts movement how to more critically infuse the interpretive project. We wanted to be more overtly conscious of what we're trying to do when we engage in this kind of interpretive practice, with a political and emancipatory agenda in mind. In the black arts movement, they were creating what they called propaganda art to change the world, to challenge the structures of racial oppression. And that was poetry, dance, theater, and literature. I ' m drawn back again and again to those writings and to that moment when there was a critical consciousness that erased the distinction between politics and poetry. Because of course the politics had to be poetic and poetry had to be political. That's what we want now and it has to be that way. We need to articulate how our project can happen without calling attention to itself as being overtly political or being poetic in a way that loses the ability to move us. Those are hard bars to jump over. Carolyn: They are. But I see you as a critical person in connecting these worlds and helping them talk to each other. You've had a strong role in all of that.

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Norman: That's what I've tried to do with Qualitative Inquiry and now I want to take this to another level with the new journal. We're also going to six issues a year of Qualitative Inquiry, with designated space in each issue for poetry and literary ethnography. Art: That's very exciting. Norman: Yeah. This is exactly where I see this happening and this comes back to the political economy of the academy and people claiming ownership over both the means of production and the journals and having some control over the language of production, i.e. how we define what we're doing. And some control over what gets published and what gets circulated, and then publishing peer reviewed work at the highest level that will lead to persons getting tenure and appointments so that we can mentor a new group of scholars who will be the next generation who will do this. Carolyn: Yes. Exactly. That's one exciting aspect about our department. We have students who are coming out who are doing poetics and they're only a little nervous about finding jobs. And they're all finding jobs. You can just see it start to happen. If you go to the sessions here at NCA, you'll see that the ethnography, autoethnography, and performance sessions often are filled to capacity. And many of those sessions were organized by people other than us or our students. There are performance people doing ethnographic performance, and ethnographers doing performative ethnography. A large group of us are asking the same questions. ADVICE

TO YOUNG

ACADEMICS

Art: What advice would you offer young professors? Or graduate students who are just beginning their academic lives? Norman: The advice I give is a story I ' v e been telling students for a long time. Years ago I had a student who was a wonderful ethnographer. H e ' d been a journalist and he did a traditional symbolic interaction dissertation. When he worked with me, he said, 'Norman, I want to be a symbolic interactionist.' Then he went off and got a job, and published, and then received tenure. About 15 years later he wrote me, 'Norm, I ' v e been really busy and I haven't kept up with the literature. I want to be a symbolic interactionist. What should I read?' I was at a loss as to what to tell him to do. H e ' d let symbolic interaction go for 15 years and now he wanted to pick it up again. It was too late. My advice to students is if this is what burns in your soul, this is what you do all the time. You don't pick it up and then put it down and pick it up again. If you have this passion, you will succeed. And you will be recognized for this and departments will look for you and you will get appointments and you will get

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published. I know the two of you give the same advice to your students. And it works. Carolyn: Yeah, if you feel passionate about your work and do good work, then you're going to get a job and you're going to be published and you're going to get all those things. Norman: People will read you and study you. So you have to listen to your heart. You can't play this off like this student did until you get tenure, and expect to come back into it. Art: Or take the other tack, which is: I ' m going to find out what kind of research they want me to do, so that I will be successful. Where is your passion? What's your own life story? For most of us, the bottom-line is that we have a deep connection to what we study. Norman: You two have been pivotal in showing people how to access those experiences and write about them. How to make them accessible so others can learn from them. You've been real pivotal in creating this next cohort of people. Carolyn and Art: So have you, Norman.

R E A D I N G DENZIN'S ATTIRE Carolyn: You spoke earlier about how professorial everyone was in the early days at Illinois, meaning partly that they wore suits and ties. I just wonder how you got from that to this? [She points to his shorts, short sleeved short, and bare feet. They all laugh.] Art: Could you get tenure if you wore shorts? [Laughter] Carolyn: The burning question that I suspect everybody has is, "Why do you dress this way and what does it mean to you?" Norman: You wear the world loosely, as a loose garment. [Laughter] Carolyn: You wear this outfit all the time, even in places where I ' m freezing. Right now, I have on three layers, including fleece, and I have my down jacket with me. Norman: I have another outer outfit I put on, when I go outside. Ok. I find these rooms at conferences warm and often back in Illinois my office is sweltering in the winter. I just try to stay comfortable. Carolyn: So it's not a statement of any kind? Norman: No. No. Art: But then how is it read? Norman: I don't know how it's read. [More laughter. Norman stands, slides on his jogging pants, jacket, buckles his Birkenstocks, and hangs his black leather book bag on his shoulder, ready as always to encounter any inclement weather outside.]

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Shing-Ling Chert for organizing this panel and Pam Secklin for videotaping the session.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM" NOTES IN CRITIQUE AND TRIBUTE TO NORMAN DENZIN James W. Carey

INTRODUCTION Over the course of three decades Norman Denzin has produced a distinguished body of scholarship, powerfully diverse in subject matter and empirical focus, theoretically rich while continuously evolving, and, for all those changes, bearing remarkable continuities of method and outlook. His is one of the most important achievements of contemporary social science in the United States. While among the most distinguished practitioners of symbolic interactionism, he has become increasingly restive and frustrated by that intellectual tradition and sought to invigorate it by drawing upon cultural studies along with Continental and postmodern streams of social theory. In this essay I want to comment on one small portion of this rich corpus, concentrating on his attempt to reconcile, to cite both the title and objective of the book in question, Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies (1992). (All page citations are from this volume.) As the surest way to honor someone is to take his work seriously, I wish to critically engage Denzin's attempted reconciliation and to emphasize some of its shortcomings as well as its successes.

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He suggests early on in that study (p. xiii) that I may have gone a bridge too far in a tribute to symbolic interactionism by quoting me, accurately, as saying: Cultural studies on an American terrain has been given its most powerful expression by John Dewey and in the tradition of symbolic interactionism,which developed out ofAmerican pragmatism generally. It was Dewey's student, Robert Park, who provided the most powerful analysis of mass culture.., that was adapted to the circumstances of the country ... Denzin goes on to say (p. xiv) that contrary to my assertion, he will argue that "symbolic interactionists have failed to produce an American version of cultural studies." I have no quarrel with that assessment, though I do think he underestimates the achievements of the first generation of interactionists. But Denzin is certainly correct; it is as if the wish in my head was father to the thought in my sentence. Wanting a tradition within which to work, I invented m y own take on symbolic interactionism and invested it with more than was warranted. Still, I had good reasons for doing so and, therefore, I want to continue the conversation with Norman Denzin via a free-range interpretation of the implications of the claim that I was making in the above quotation and contrasting it with his somewhat different appropriation of the same tradition.

In Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies, Denzin attempts to enrich or extend the interactionist tradition, to do what I said had already been done, in two different and somewhat contradictory ways. First, he annexes to symbolic interactionism work done here and abroad under the more contemporary labels of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and discourse theory. Second, and perhaps more importantly, he attempts to fill out from within an undeveloped space within symbolic interaction - precisely the space between symbolic and interaction - via the analysis of communication and culture. The disciplinary mainstream of sociology does not have, in his view, sufficient resources or a sufficiently rich and flexible tradition of analysis of communication and culture. However, he maintains that an "incipient cultural studies tradition and agenda, focused on communications has always lurked inside interactionism" (p. 100) and this absent presence he attempts to elucidate. This is rather an intellectual game of what if: what if symbolic interactionists had taken more seriously continental writers like Derrida and Foucault, British scholars such as Stuart Hall or even Americans working under the banner of cultural studies? Alternatively, what if symbolic interactionists had taken their own tradition seriously enough to formulate a conception of symbolic processes,

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of the intersection of culture and communication, consistent with and derived from the best work of Mead, Dewey, Park, etc.? The hero of the book, stated or not, is C. Wright Mills with his insistence that social theory must connect biography to history, connect the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which are impositions of a narrative line on the phantasmagoria of experience, with the stories the narrative machinery of society tells not only about us but about the society itself. This project, a larger project than interactionists have typically envisioned, was undertaken by figures such as Mills and Kenneth Burke, David Riesman and Harold Innis that were on the margins of interactionism but whose work never penetrated the heart of the enterprise. On this point Norman Denzin is right: symbolic interactionism as I described it, did not do an adequate job in filling the space between symbolic and interaction via communication and culture. Symbolic interactionism did not contain a cultural theory of communication; or a communicative theory of culture attuned to contemporary (or postmodern concerns) and he has been trying to do this. But there are additional resources in that tradition, that however well known, I will attempt to highlight in conclusion. Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies is a book of the break both within social theory and within Denzin's own work. Since 1990 at least, cultural studies has marginalized much of symbolic interactionism and sociology generally within the university and within the bookstores as well. Over that same period Denzin has attempted to move outward from symbolic interactionism most evidently in his engagement with motion pictures and with the general drift of the large scale currents of modern history. The first break is seen in Denzin' s Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism and the American Cinema which enlarges his studies of the alcoholic self as sustained in interaction within the family, therapeutic and Alcoholics Anonymous communities into the overarching stories the culture tells of alcoholism and alcoholics. The second is best seen beginning with his re-engagement of C. Wright Mills in his Presidential address "The Sociological Imagination Reconsidered" (1990). II Let me outline the arc of Denzin's argument. In his view, and mine as well, symbolic interactionism is a product of pragmatism and a distinct, which is not to say unique, body of American experience combined in the empirical spirit of the early Chicago sociologists. From pragmatism it inherited not only an outlook on truth and knowledge but a commitment to the inseparability of the self and society combined with an anti-essentialist view of social theory. As a result, it was in revolt against many things, particularly the philosophy of

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the subject that dominated (still dominates) European philosophy, and the essentialist separation of the theory of the self from the theory of society, of psychology from sociology. Self and society co-determine one another in the interactions that form both and in the worlds constructed out of such acts. Interaction is not merely the shadow act of society, the manifestation of larger social forces; it is the space where these forces are created, sustained and transformed. Society in all its reach and complexity exists in these interactions because societies are organized systems of meaning and knowledge. Meaninglessness is here ontologized; and whatever order and meaning exists in the world is constituted in interaction and the self reflections persons bring to and discover in their situations. (The processes are simultaneous ontogenetically if not phylogenetically.) The co-determination of self and society in interaction is the chief means by which humans are able to form and sustain joint acts. The formation, dissolution, transformation, merger, and celebration of joint acts constitutes the social life of a human society as well as, through self-reflection, the individual life of social actors (pp. 25-26). What gives this view an Americanist tinge is a historical rather than a logical fact. Symbolic interactionism had a normative side for it both expressed and created a fundamentally democratic impulse that refused to accord to sedimented traditions or enduring structures an ontological privilege The normative was also empirical because the process of symbolic interaction was more apparent in a landscape in which tradition, the sedimentation of jointly constructed action, played a smaller role relative to the spontaneous though still conjoint acts of individuals confronting the novel problems that faced them. This was a sociology of change rather than structure or, better, a sociology of structuration before Anthony Giddens invented the word. The principal works in this scholarly tradition all made a space for the analysis of what came to be called the mass media because in the absence of fixed tradition, in the absence of traditions sedimented in families, neighborhoods, communities or nations, these media inevitably played a larger, more determinative role in the creation and sustenance of self-reflection and the interactionist order than was either necessary or possible in social landscapes more oriented to the past than to the present and future. In fact, one way of understanding the distinctive quality of the mass media is not only that they are present oriented but that they comprehend the whole of the real under the sign of the present. Many things that start out well get side-tracked while engaged in the concrete struggles of history and such was the case with symbolic interactionism. In the competition for allegiance which constitutes intellectual life symbolic interactionism lost out both within sociology to structural-functionalism and in the wider intellectual world to elitist theories of democracy. But symbolic

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interactionists, it is clear now, conspired in their own defeat by falling into intellectual habits that were destructive of their own foundations and by failing to develop and correct the internal resources of their own tradition. The first part of the story is well known. In the prolonged crisis of democracy which, to put arbitrary parentheses around it, stretched from World War I to the Vietnam War, a social theory designed to deal with the crisis was developed, one which placed alternating emphasis on the structural stability of American democracy either as something stitched into its genetic, that is, institutional arrangements or into the cultural outlooks of elites assigned the prerogatives of rule by those institutions. As I and many others have argued, the opening salvos in that continuing struggle were found in the dialogue between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey in Public Opinion and The Public and Its Problems which in the 1920s attempted to assimilate and theorize the consequences for democracy of World War I. Lippmann won that argument politically: we were to live under a theory of democratic elites in which public deliberation and the public sphere were eclipsed, either feudalized or rendered as mere shadow to the acts of governance forged by ruling elites. Within social theory, structural-functionalism expressed this same outlook on political life expressed in terms of the functional necessities of social systems rather than the role of elites within such systems. Because the structures of society - hard, enduring, consensual - were given pride of place within such a formulation and social change made merely epiphenomenal, symbolic interaction was cordoned off into a minor specialty within social theory, one concerned with the grubby details of interaction and superficial changes that occurred in the surface features of social life. Interaction was not solid; it melted into air and was of little significance except to novelists, journalists, and interactionists. Talcott Parsons et al., Theories of Society is the magnum collectivus of this view of the structural-functional tradition in which George Herbert Mead occupies a place of prominence and anumber of figures associated with symbolic interactionism appear (Cooley, Park, Wirth, Thomas and Zanecki, Kenneth Burke, Suzanne Langer) but as minor players devoted to derivative problems in the drama of social theory. The second part of the story, how symbolic interactionists conspired in their own defeat, is also well-known. To a significant degree, symbolic interactionists accepted the marginalization that mainstream sociology offered them; they held on to an area of inquiry by conceiving of it as a research tradition within sociology - empirical but non-quantitative, devoted to change rather than stability, to identity formation more than social formation - that supplemented but did not threaten the theoretical hegemony. Symbolic interactionism therefore sealed itself off from the larger world, from the

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interactions of history and biography and from the structures of power and control inherent in the dominant sociology. As Denzin says, the public intellectual role adopted by Park and his followers led them to comment on the dominant political problems of their day and whatever their ideological outlooks, to grapple with the problems facing a democratic social order (p. 166). This sealing off was aided and abetted by largely abandoning the study of mass media and in fact buying into the major paradigm of mass culture-mass media-mass society, a position that whether formulated in radical, conservative or liberal terms inevitably led to an elitist theory of society in which the interactions of its members counted for little. These interactions presented problems for the management or manipulation of the present in the service of social control or expressed the arbitrary "taste cultures" of different social groups but did not present existential issues to be engaged. But the acceptance of such an outlook undercut both the empirical and normative thrusts of symbolic interactionism, essentialized the structures of society and led to the neglect of media as principal points at which power and inequality inevitably presented themselves. Further, that acceptance required abandoning what I can only call aesthetic theory - the commitment to understanding how symbols captured, focused, mapped and ordered cognitive and emotional life - that was at the heart of any adequate theory of symbolic interactionism. In short interactionism grew silent on the media as the media became more important elements in the interactionist order. There was one distinguished hold-out to the consensus formed within sociology and to a large extent the wider society, however, and that was C. Wright Mills. Formed by pragmatism and symbolic interactionism and by a populist radicalism wholly American in outlook, Mills attempted to add respectability to this ensemble by appropriating the classical tradition of sociology and reading it against the grain of the mainstream interpretation that was the life long project of Talcott Parsons. Mills attacked the elitist theories of democracy in The Power Elite, analyzed the new elites in politics and the economy in White Collar and tried to resurrect the linkages between history and biography, the co-determination of self and society within history, in The Sociological Imagination. Mills' criticized the pragmatists, especially Dewey, for "their uncritical celebration of science and technology, their neglect of Marx and Weber, their overly biological model of action and the social and their neglect of America's class structure and the power elite" (p. 58). He also held out for a "kind of radical democratic politics" calling for the creation of publics organized around troubles and issues" and "the creation of the discursive conditions for the emergence o f . . . collective action" (p. 59). In this way Mills actually envisioned a critical cultural studies which would critique "the fourth

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historical epoch which he called the 'postmodem' period" (p. 72). Unfortunately, Mills' increasing frustration and anger, even paranoia, over the drift of the United States as well as his premature death led to an almost permanent eclipse of symbolic interactionism with its underlying commitments to democratic theory within American social thought. That was where things stood when the Vietnam war shattered the intellectual consensus built up over decades• The war of the Best and the Brightest exposed both the limitations and consequences of elitist democracy, exposed the temporary, makeshift character of institutions, re-focused attention on social change and created a laboratory for the renewed study of symbolic interaction, self-formation, and social disorganization. The social movements surrounding the war initially expressed a native spirit of both protest and analysis but that was quickly eclipsed in bitter quarrels framed by classical Marxism and a European structural sociology from which it derived. Years of neglect had depleted native sources of analysis, interpretation and protest and so those looking for a new handle on social theory set out to reinvent the wheel within what came to be known as cultural studies, initially patched together out of thinkers such as Mills and Riesman, remnants of the labeling theory of symbolic interaction spiced with newer European work on cultural semiotics, and cultural anthropology. This unlikely brew caught hold but it had one glaring weakness: it applied to everything and nothing, it was too abstract, divorced from hard surfaces and almost completely insensitive to variations in cultures and the concrete processes of interaction that created and sustained them. This was particularly damaging in the analysis of mass media where, all protests to the contrary notwithstanding, a crude transmission theory of ideology and ruling elites continued to hold sway leavened only a bit by a theory of the resistant subject. When the latter broke free into identity politics, the promising opening to symbolic interactionism was closed off for identity was treated as a genetic inheritance rather than an achievement of the process of interaction itself• This is the context in which I understand Norman Denzin's project of uniting cultural studies with symbolic interactionism, his steady refusal to abandon a distinguished body of theory and research, and his belief that C. Wright Mills had to be reappropriated along with cultural studies and a new grouping of canonical texts (Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucanlt, and Baudrillard) • . . supplementing - but not replacing - the works of Dewey, Cooley, Mead, James . . . Park" and so forth (p. 20). He cites Peter Hall, among others, who have tried to historicize and clarify the interactionist project, to resurrect and vivify it, making it capable of dealing with the unique conditions of politics and culture of our times. In short, Denzin wants an interactionist cultural studies,

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something we don't quite have at the moment (p. 80). And, to at last come full circle, this requires fleshing out the space between symbolic and interaction via a more generous understanding of communication and culture. III In this concluding section I want to draw further on the resources of Chicago sociology and contribute to Norman Denzin's project of enlarging both symbolic interactionism and cultural studies by exploiting the relative strengths of each. Within American sociological theory there have been three dominant traditions in the analysis of culture: neo-parsonian, classic attitude-behavior social psychology, and neo-marxist commodity theory. Each of these positions treats culture as a system of objects independent of the self, objects which shape and constitute the self from the outside as it were, as an external force, and, by the way, integrate or stabilize the social system whether viewed as a positive achievement in structural-functionalism or a ideological force in neo-marxism. This work empirically commodities cultural representations, turning them into countable objects which can be studied with statistical procedures. Not surprisingly, these same conceptions of culture gave rise to parallel views of communication as an integrative sub-system, agent of attitude and behavior change or a commodified process of mystification. By contrast, and true to the interactionist heritage, Denzin views culture as the taken-for-granted and problematic webs of significance and meaning that human beings produce and act on when they do things together. These meanings are shaped and molded by the larger culture and meaning-making institutions of society-at-large, including the mass media, film, social science, art, religion, and politics (p. 74). Culture, at this level, becomes, and here Denzin quotes Barthes, the "endless production of myth that has no reference to the real world" (p. 74). Cultural studies, and here I depart from Denzin somewhat, directs itself to how the history that human beings make and live spontaneously is always constrained and infused, though never fully determined, by structures of meaning they have not voluntarily chosen for themselves and, therefore, the cultural process is always a site of political struggle over the making of the real. "A central problem becomes the examination of how interacting individuals connect their lived experiences to the cultural representations of those experiences" (p. 74). Denzin cities accounts, first from Herbert Blumer's studies of movies and then from his own field work, that stand as problematic texts: From Blumer's respondent: When I was on the outside I went to the movies almost every night but only about twice in two months to a dance. I didn't like dances as well as movies. A movie would get

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me so passionate after it was over that I just had to have satisfaction. You know what I mean. If you don't I tell you in plain English and that is, to have sexual relations. From Denzin's field work: How do I get to one of those A.A. meetings?What do I say? I seen them in movies. That Michael Keaton (Clean and Sober, 1988) just stood up and said he was analcoholic. Do I have to do that? I ain't even sure I am one, but I drank a fifth of Beam last night and I started up again this mornin'. I'm scared and I don't know what to do. Denzin goes on: Accounts such as these are the stuff of an interactionistcultural studies. These emotional experiences connect persons to others (a delinquentwith other delinquents, a woman with a man, an ordinary alcoholic male with a Hollywood star), yet they are filtered through preexisting cultural meanings and representations ... These accounts are shaped by the culture-making institutionsof a society ..., by the gender stratification system and by the political economyof everyday life. They are located within the broad structuraland cultural contexts of modern and postmodern American society. An interactionist cultural studies aims to make sense of such experiences (p. 73). But what does it take to make sense of these experiences? Let me add a few observations to the program Denzin lays out. First, interaction occurs within time and space. However, time and space are not neutral and natural containers; time and space, like everything else, is made in the interactionist process, by definitions which stipulate and maintain a temporal and spatial context. Interaction occurs, again, within time and space, history and geography, clocks and architecture. Moreover, what Denzin calls American society is more than context. Interaction in the modern world occurs within nations. Since at least 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the production of meaning has gone on predominantly within the time and space of the nation, or, to put it differently, nations are the major culture bearing contexts of the modern interactionist order and nationalism the major form of ideological bonding in that world. Most interactions, including the ones cited from Denzin above, only make sense within the system of nation states which establish a range of narrative forms in which biography can be turned into history, geography into place. Moreover, there is an ecology within the interactionist sphere. That is, there are a set of mutual dependencies among the meaning making institutions. Thus, there are definite but changing relationships between different technologies of communications (film, books, movies, etc.) and institutions (religion, economy, etc.). Face-to-face interaction is shaped by the overall ecology and not solely by the individual technology or institution. Moreover, these ecologies correspond roughly to what Denzin takes to be the stages of the sign. These stages of the sign - iconic, conventional, hyperreal - correspond not only to the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution and the Postmodern but to definite

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regimes of political and economic organization: religious empires, national states and global organizations. But they correspond as well to stages in the evolution of communications technology, roughly the oral tradition, writing and printing, and electronic communication. These are stages in the disembodiment of the sign that also stages in the disembodiment of the self. I have suggested here that there are resources within the same Chicago sociology that gave rise to symbolic interactionism that have not been fully exploited. These are its emphasis on ecology (admittedly shorn of its overly biological nature), time and space, the nation, and, finally, the alternating episodes of social organization and disorganization. And that leads us to a closing argument about postmodernism, narratives and movies. Postmodernism as an outlook seems to confuse the historical and contingent with the natural and inevitable. I want to suggest that the postmodern should be viewed as nothing more than another turn in the cycle that runs from social organization to disorganization and back again. Postmodern therefore refers to a moment in the recurrent phases of social disorganization when the symbolic structure, the categorical structure, of the society melts down and is no longer adequate to connect biography to history, individual experience to collective experience. But such a state is temporary; inevitably the force of joint sense making and settled categorical structures reassert themselves. Post-modernism is more than that of course but in whatever guise it refers less to something definite, than something liminal, a moment between forms of social organization where everything has risen and diverged. The postmodern is not only liminal relative to culture - the system of meanings and sense-makings but also a liminal moment in the history of states, economies, and technology. The meltdown of culture is not caused by these structural factors as much as they constitute reciprocating forces of development. New technology both expresses a desire to transform the interacfionist order and a moment in the transformation of that order as well. One of the features of such liminal moments is the loss of metanarratives, of large-scale narrative structures that can serve as resources for individual acts of self-narration. Another aspect of the meltdown is the blurring of narrative genres such that neither incorporating nor inscribing practices make sense; they no longer fit established molds. The new and contradictory genres biography as history, polemics as science, novels as journalism, news as entertainments - represent the search for new ways of sense making to correspond with new machinery of narration and a new spatial/temporal framework within which such sense making must occur. But the self also comes in blurred and contradictory genres perhaps best and most humorously caught by David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise. Bobos refers to the merging of the two contradictory categories of modern culture, bohemian and bourgeois, into one unstable self.

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As societies take on a more "mass" quality, in the sense the Chicago sociologists used that word to refer to a moment of social disorganization, stories take on more individualized qualities, divorced from collective experience and this is no where more apparent than in motion pictures. There was a time not so long ago when movies were part of a collective life and a collective experience. Not only did "everyone" go to the movies multiple times each week and in which every one saw the major motion pictures, but the experience of moving-going was an integrated part of community life. Most moving-going occurred in neighborhood theaters and served a variety of social purposes: collective gathering, announcements of who was connected with whom, extended forums of socialization and conversation. And the stories told in such theaters were celebrations of the great collective myths of the society that could serve as vehicles - tragic, comic and ironic - of self-understanding. Scenes from such films (as opposed to the narrative itself) could serve as life-long mnemonic triggers recalling entire stretches of biography and history. Film today is global rather than national and individual rather than collective. Myth has been displaced by memoir and only the personal is political. The moral space occupied by movies has changed from the community and nation to the universal and individual. The epiphanies experienced are moments in the life of individuals but dislodged from larger, collective apparatus of mythmaking. There are some exceptions to this of course such as the recent renewal of celebrations of the "greatest generation" on the eve of their passing away. But the general argument holds: movies are part of a different ecology of sense-making. Divorced from their natural home within nation states, they try to speak a universal language. As the universal, along with the global, does not as yet exist, they revert to telling individual stories or tales of Everyman and Everywoman which make no claim greater than themselves. Biography and history, personal issues and public problems are again disconnected in a cultural moment betwixt and between where the next stage of the cultural and interactionist order is but a vague apprehension and the settled past but a disquieting memory.

REFERENCE Denzin, N. K. (1992). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM Norman K. Denzin

I want to thank Shing-Ling Chen for making this session possible. I want to thank Larry for chairing it, and I ' m speechless in the presence of the generous words spoken by Jim, Carolyn and Art, Cliff and David. I've stewed for days over how to insert myself into this situation. I told Nate, my step-son about this event. I said I was humbled and found myself without words. He shared my opinion, and said this sounds like what they do for you when you die or retire. Since I ' m neither, that didn't help. I turned to Jack Bratich. I said "Jack, look at these names, look at these people." Jack said, "Tell a story. Tell a story of hardship, talk about how hard it has been to bring these perspectives together." I said, I can do that. So here is a small story, more, perhaps, a set of reflections. In a sense Jim Carey is responsible for all of this, for this particular intersection of cultural studies and symbolic interactionism. In 1989 he wrote, "Cultural studies, on an American terrain, has been given its most powerful expression by John Dewey and in the tradition of symbolic interactionism, which developed out of American pragmatism generally" (Carey, 1989, p. 96). I felt that Carey's lines were correct, but that symbolic interactionists did not know this. Further, no one except Carey had made this connection. I went on to write a book with the title Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies. This was my version of cultural studies, based on what I had learned at Illinois, listening to lectures by Jim, Larry and Cliff, Stuart Hall, Jameson, and others. I succeeded in making the interacfionists mad, for they wanted none of this Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 211-212. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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poststructural, feminist, cultural studies stuff. One thing led to another, and I wrote the Cinematic Society, which David likes. Then I read Altheide's b o o k on Postjournalism, and felt his anger about the way journalists were writing about postmodern society. I started reading Art and Carolyn, on composing ethnography, and Cliff on ethics and protonorms, commnnitarian philosophy, universal human dignity, resistance and empowerment. All of this reading put me in-between landscapes, to borrow a line from Mary Clearman Blew (1999, p. 7). In attempting to find a space between cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and interpretive ethnography I was in a liminal space, looking for a new way to be ethical, critical, moral and interpretive, all at the same time. Without high theory. Today I seek a writing form that is part cultural critique, part autoethnoethnography, a form that uses the techniques of a minimalist fiction: plot, characterization, dialogue, more showing than telling. I want to learn how to write from the scenes of cultural memory, to write about moments of injustice, racism, injury, intolerance, rearranging, suppressing, even inventing scenes, foregoing claims to exact truth, or factual accuracy, searching instead for emotional truth, for deep meaning, for texts that move persons to critical consciousness, and political action in the world. In so doing I ' m in the "boundaries of creative nonfiction [which] will always be as fluid as water" (Blew, 1999, p. 7). In this writing I claim a new ownership of my relationship to my disciplines, changing this relationship as I write about it. And this is how it should be. Paraphrasing and stealing from Kittridge (1992, p. 238) I want to do this so I can feel at home in this crazy world I keep calling my own. And in so doing, I hope to be able to better see that I am part of what is sacred. Again from Kittridge (1992), this is my "only chance at paradise" (p. 238). I thank my friends on this panel for leading me to this place.

REFERENCES Blew, M. C. (1999). Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading and Place. Norman: University of OklahomaPress. Kittridge, W. (1992). Hole in the Sky: A Memoir. New York: Vintage.

THE ROLE OF THE SELF IN THE SOCIAL WORLD

Catherine Kaha Waite

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the changing relationship of public and private life, as that relationship is altered by emerging communication technologies. Implicit in the writings of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is an answer to the changes in the social domain we are now experiencing. Each of these scholars offers valuable insights into how the conceptualization of the self shifts over time. Considered as a group, their collective writings deepen the significance of each singular perspective. These scholars are concerned with the process of social change, with the transformations of technology, and with the evolution of human awareness. In so far as Ong argues for a secondary orality and McLuhan argues for a new awareness of interrelatedness, one must ask to what end? It cannot merely be that the emergence of new social forms implies no consequence, leads to nowhere in particular.

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Here as elsewhere in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the simple sum of the elements of which it is formed. The human individual does not exhaust in himself the vital potentialities of his race. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that there has been a radical shift in the public and private domain. Confronted with public conversations about private lives, it seems the boundary between public and private experience has dissolved. Given the astonishing array of personal details, portrayed in various media forms for public consumption, public life in America today appears inherently problematic. This paper will address the changing relationship of public and private life, as that relationship is altered by emerging communication technologies. The very American concept of individuality, of an autonomous self, provides the frame through which we experience public and private life. Individuality, with the concordant rights and privileges that concept assigns to the person, provides the key for unlocking the larger puzzle of how current communication technologies are altering the self in the social world. The dissolution of the boundary between public and private life indicates underlying changes in the concept of individuality. The works of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provide a shared framework for addressing this shift in the role of the self in the social world. Implicit in the writings of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and less directly, the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, are perspectives that might help us understand some of the radical changes we are now experiencing. That these scholars would develop shared themes is not surprising: Marshall McLuhan directed Walter Ong's Master of Arts thesis at Saint Louis University and Ong lived in the same Jesuit community with Teilhard de Chardin in France. Both Ong and McLuhan focus on the social and psychological consequences of technology, both were medium theorists, as Meyrowitz uses the term. And these three scholars, each in their own way, are concerned with the process of social change, with the transformations of technology, with the evolution of human awareness. So it is appropriate that their ideas should be placed within a shared framework and it is within such a shared framework that one can see more clearly the implications of their collective work. In The Future of Man, originally published in France in 1959, Teilhard (1964) writes that "We have only to go a little further, I am convinced, and our minds, awakened at last to the existence of an added dimension, will grasp the profound identity existing between the forces of civilization and those of evolution. Because Ong and

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Teilhard, both Jesuit priests, lived in the same Jesuit house in France for a time, it is probable that Ong was influenced by Teilhard's work. There is dissenting opinion about whether McLuhan was influenced by Teilhard, but in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) McLuhan links his own interest in electricity to Teilhard's work: "That electro-magnetism as such is an extension of the central nervous system, is a persistent theme of Teilhard de Chardin in his Phenomenon of Man" (p. 292). Regardless of the extent of such influence, there is much to be gained by placing the work of these three scholars within a shared framework. I will begin by addressing Ong's "secondary orality", move to McLuhan's explication of post-literate depth culture, and then link the ideas of these two writers to Teilhard's insights regarding the evolution of man. When placed side by side, the concerns of these three scholars prepare the way for a richer understanding of what it might mean to be an individual at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fundamental to the American way of life is the sanctity of the individual. In an earlier era, Ralph Waldo Emerson espoused the view that "There are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." (p.21) By the middle of the twentieth century it was Carl Jung, (1957) in a text titled The Undiscovered Self, who privileged the individual, arguing that man must turn inward to gain his sense of direction. He placed "the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things" (p. 52). To a large degree our shared experiences now indicate that the "measure of all things" cannot be fully captured by an individual perspective. The sanctity of each singular life not withstanding, we are all too aware that individual decisions can have long ranging consequences for diverse groups. Public policy decisions concerning health, welfare and education provide outstanding examples.

ONG'S PERSPECTIVE Ong's work reflects the perspective of a medium theorist, though Ong would not refer to his own work as theorizing. As Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) explains, "The medium theorists do not suggest that the means of communication wholly shape culture and personality, but they argue that changes in communication patterns are one very important contribution to social change and one that has generally been overlooked" (p. 18). Ong (1977) writes that % . . the new medium is not just a new way of purveying what other media purvey in their own ways, but is rather the implication of a new state of a w a r e n e s s . . . " (p. 319). In Interfaces of the WorM, Ong (1977) writes "The evolution of human consciousness would be

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impossible - unthinkable - without the alienations introduced by writing, print, and the electronic transformation of the word" (p. 47). It was Ong' s task to detail the ways in which communication technologies both humanize and alienate man from himself. According to Ong (1977), communication is always about the self: Communication does not have simply to do with oneself, but in fact can concern everything and anything. But it always involves the self, for communication, whatever it is concerned with, is a conscious activity, and the I which I speak and which I alone can speak lies at the center of my consciousness (p. 336). Ong understands that this "discussion of the T . . . would have been impossible a few centuries ago." The concept of an individual perspective is a fairly recent historical phenomenon and with that concept comes isolation. To the extent that it is possible to stand apart as an individual, it is also possible to be separated from the group and in curious ways, to be separated from oneself. This separation began with the first creation of written forms. As Charles Taylor (1989) explains in Sources of the Self, "This freeing of nature from the iconographic tradition also carries consequences for the place of the subject. The artist who sets himself to imitate nature sees himself as standing over against the object" (p. 201). As Ong (1988) explains in Orality and Literacy, "Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons" (p. 179). Eric A. Havelock (1986) argues "that the concept of selfhood and the soul, as now understood, arose at a historical point in time and was inspired by a technological change . . . " (p. 120). It was the paradoxical ways in which technology altered human experience that compelled Ong to investigate orality and literacy. Based on a thorough understanding of preliterate cultures, Ong describes a "new kind of orality, the secondary orality of our electronic age, which both resembles and contrasts with primary or preliterate orality" (p. 305). "Secondary Orality" is the orality of radio and television, which demands writing in order to be invented and developed. Though produced by machines, Ong writes that: This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas (Ong 1971, pp. 284-303; 1977, pp. 16-49, 305-341). But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print. . . . (1988, p. 136). In so far as the balance between public and private life has shifted, that shift can partially be understood through a comparison of early and later conceptualizations of self in community. Ong's concept of secondary orality is important because it embodies an evolving concept of community life. A key

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distinction between preliterate orality and secondary orality is that preliterate or primary orality at best manifests little potential for either individual perspectives or separation of subject and object. With secondary orality there is great potential for both. Preliterate oral cultures were "group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself. But in our age of secondary orality, when we are group-minded, we are so self consciously and programmatically" (p 136). Relating secondary orality to the media of telephone, radio and television and electronic technology, Ong highlights the contrast between primary and secondary orality by noting in secondary orality the "stronger group sense," noting that " . . . secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture - McLuhan's 'global village' " (p. 136). For Ong, it is this technological ability to communicate the spoken word to a mass audience, unlimited in size, that contributes to the groupmindedness of secondary orality. Ong's concept of secondary orality does not in and of itself, address the point of this paper by offering a deeper explication of public and private life. But this concept does suggest that forms of social organization evolve, and that features of earlier eras can reappear in new forms. But step back and place this concept in a broader framework and then its power will become evident. The concept of secondary orality draws on his earlier work. As early as The Presence of the Word (1967), Ong was focusing on both technology and evolution. He was aware of the ways in which electronic media contributed to new forms of social awareness. "The fragmentation of consciousness initiated by the alphnbet has in turn been countered by the electronic media which have made man present to himself across the globe, creating an intensity of self-possession on the part of the human race which is new, and at times an upsetting experience" (p. 321). That "intensity of self awareness" is the link that connects the work of Walter Ong to McLuhan and Teilhard. It is the accumulation of knowledge that alters the progression of humankind. Ong (1967) writes: With the accumulation of knowledge of all sorts made possible by writing, by typography with its accompanying techniques of printed illustrations (exactly repeatable visual statement), and now by electronic devices, man has built up his awareness of himself and his fellows in all directions .... Man must now situate himself in the universe today in terms of all this knowledge (p. 313). MCLUHAN'S

CONTRIBUTION

McLuhan's work can be characterized as an exploration of pattern, in that he understood the way in which technologies reconfigure space, time, community and personality. Characterizing his comments on changing media

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as "probes", he grasped the key point that " . . . no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media" (1994, p. 26). His obsession with the medium was predicated upon an awareness of the subtle and profound environmental changes that arise with each new technology. The information revolution offers new ways to configure experience. What is needed is the ability to discern patterns in a wide and changing array of information. He writes of a new social order that emerges out of a growing awareness of interrelatedness. In Media and the American Mind (1982), Czitron details McLuhan's argument that "New forms of electronic media seemed to have reversed the sensory fragmentation of visual space, thus foreshadowing a psychic return to the tribal situation" (p. 174). But retribilization, like secondary orality, would assume new forms for a highly literate and visual culture. Neither Ong nor McLuhan believed a simple return was possible. McLuhan would have agreed with Ong that the culture was moving into a type of secondary orality, though he did not use that specific term. He referred instead to depth culture, juxtaposing the fragmentation of a previous mechanical and specialist culture to a new cultural experience that required one live with a deeper awareness of pattern, of simultaneity, of interrelationship. In Understanding Media, originally published in 1964 and republished in 1994, he wrote that "Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality" (p. 289). McLuhan argued that "Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development" (p. 352). He contrasted linear fragmentation with depth mosaic, hot with cool, specialist learning with simultaneity, explosion and implosion. While these terms may confound the reader, they also indicate a new terrain, like mysterious markers on a map. He was not suggesting, as is often indicated, that this era would become a glorious cosmic embrace of unity. He believed new forms of social organization would be one result, but that "the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal man" (p. 51). He was deeply troubled by the changes he saw and hoped that understanding those changes would offer some protection from the violence of the resulting cultural upheaval. He found "some easing of the burden in just understanding and clarifying the issues" (p. 51). In a passage from McLuhan, The Man and His Message (1989) McLuhan writes, "If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves" (p. 1). A passage from Understanding Media details those social and psychological changes:

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Thousands of years ago man, the nomadic food-gatherer, had taken up positional, or relatively sedentary tasks. He began to specialize. The development of writing and printing were major stages of that process. They were supremely specialist in separating the roles of knowledge from the roles of action, even though at times it could appear that 'the pen is mightier than the sword.' But with electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for overall consideration of human unity. Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before - but also involved in the total social process as never before (p. 358). Like Ong, McLuhan situates this complex array of technological change within an evolutionary framework, which entails a movement from simpler to more complex forms. He was interested in exploring and understanding adaptive responses to that increasing complexity. Both scholars investigate the broad historical changes evidenced in the transition from oral to scribe, to print, to electronic cultures. They each highlight the adaptive processes that evolve in response to such transformations. But M c L u h a n ' s idiosyncratic use of language makes it very difficult to figure out specifically what he might have meant by "involved in the total social process as never before." The terms that he used to explain this involvement in the total social process challenge the reader, terms such as simultaneous, mosaic, depth, interdependence, interrelation of the total field. One is forced to ask, how does this involvement differ from earlier types of involvement? "According to McLuhan, the new electric technology is 'organic and non-mechanical in tendency because it extends, not our eyes, but our central nervous system as a planetary v e n t u r e ' " (Czitron, p. 177). As we shall see later in this article, Teilhard de Chardin is also concerned with such a "planetary venture." To return briefly to O n g ' s text Orality and Literacy, in a section titled "Consciousness and the Text" he writes that "Since at least the time of Hegel, awareness has been growing that human consciousness evolves . . . . Growth in historical k n o w l e d g e has made it apparent that the way in which a person feels himself or herself in the cosmos has evolved in a patterned fashion over the ages" (p. 178). For Ong, this evolution depended on writing and was marked b y an emerging emphasis on individuality. "The evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced - though not necessarily separated - from the communal structures in which each person is necessarily enveloped" (p. 178). M c L u h a n was also concerned with the evolutionary process of consciousness and with individuality. Technology is nothing less than an extension of our nervous system and the result is a profound shift in consciousness: "Electric speed, in bringing all social and

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political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree" (p. 5). He understood that "fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society" (p. 51). Concerned less with print and more with emerging electronic technology, he was interested in the changing perspectives, patterns, and mosaics created by different technologies. He saw that " . . . the instant speed of electric information . . . . for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development" (p. 352). The structure of print encouraged a separate, specialist, individualistic perspective that was simply not possible with television or radio or electronic media. For McLuhan, adaptation to this new environment required insight, a kind of awareness to subtle environmental factors that he felt was most evident in the perspective of the creative artist. As detailed by Czitron, "The effects of media technology occur not on the conscious level of opinion and concepts, but on the subliminal level of sense rations and patterns of perception" (p. 177). McLuhan tried again and again to explain that new social order to his reader, inventing terms, using metaphors and analogies, presenting the idea first from one side and then from another. And yet for many his message was confounding, in part because he was talking about a world that was equally confounding. Ong's investigation of orality and print at least provided the comfort of a domain that most scholars knew very well, in so far as they had spent their lives experiencing the text. McLuhan's work offered no such comfort zone. Where Ong referenced secondary orality, McLuhan wrote that " . . . electric technology now begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence" (p. 50). For McLuhan, we were a culture caught at the break point, schooled in one way of thinking even as our environment demanded a very different type of response: "We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes" (p. 25). Decades have passed since Ong and McLuhan first wrote about secondary orality and retribilization. During that time the digital divide has reconfigured communication technologies, radically altering our public and personal lives. It is difficult to conclusively prove that Ong and McLuhan were right. It might be possible to argue that the terms secondary orality and retribilization referenced quite different things. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this paper it is relevant to note that both these scholars agreed that forms of communication were altering the social contract in subtle and profound ways. This claim deserves careful consideration, if it will help us understand why the self in the social world appears so problematic today.

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TEILHARD'S UNIFYING THEME Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's writing provides a framework for better understanding how these two ideas of an evolutionary process and a new social order are linked. Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, a biologist and a paleontologist, who sought to reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution. In this article I will reference two of his texts, The Phenomenon of Man, first published in France in 1955, and The Future of Man. As a scientist, Teilhard (1964) thoroughly understood the power of human action. "Man finds himself overtaken and borne on the whirlwind which his own science has discovered and, as it were, unloosed" (p. 262). He was interested in the consequences of that science of discovery, consequences that he addressed from the perspective of both scientist and priest. Because some considered his ideas unorthodox, the Roman Catholic Church discouraged the reading of his books and forbade him to continue teaching. It was not just that he dealt with the theory of evolution, but more importantly he argued that the pressures of our scientific discoveries, our inventions and our technologies, were leading somewhere, that humankind was evolving. This stance flew in the face of the doctrine that man was created in G o d ' s image, suggesting instead that humans were engaged in a crucial process of becoming: But now, following the dramatic growth of industry, communications and populations in the course of a single century, we can discern the outline of a fornfidable event. The hitherto scattered fragments of humanity being at length brought into close contact, are beginning to interpenetrate to the point of reacting economically and psychically upon each other; with the result, given the fundamental relationship between biological compression and the heightening of consciousness of an irresistible rise within us and around us of the level of reflection (1964, p. 294). The translator's note from The Future of Man, (1964) explains Teilhard's use of the term r e f e c t i o n to mean "the power of conscious thought which distinguishes Man from all other living creatures" (p. 9). In Teilhard's texts the term reflection is also spelled reflexion, when the context seems to require it. The use of the term reflexion is meant to indicate the way in which consciousness "coils inward upon itself and thus generates new (spiritual) energies and a new form of growth" (p. 9). Contrast M c L u h a n ' s point about a growing awareness of interrelatedness with Teilhard's point regarding "an irresistible rise within us and around us of the level of reflection." In so far as Ong argues for a secondary orality and McLuhan argues for a new awareness of interrelatedness, one must ask to what end? It cannot merely be that the emergence of new social forms implies no consequence, leads to nowhere in particular. The translator of The Phenomenon of Man, Bernard Wall, (1959) wrote that Teilhard:

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is rightly and indeed inevitably driven to the conclusion that, since evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processes, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction, their inherent possibilities (including of course also their limitations) and their deducible future trends (p. 13).

Ong, McLuhan and others draw on a knowledge of the past, specifically the traditions of preliterate orality, scribe and print cultures, to understand the present, and thereby gain some understanding of the future. They realized that they were describing evolutionary processes, "of course including the phenomenon known as man." At the very least, these three scholars each in their own way understood the power of invention to transform the natural world. As Teilhard (1964) argued, "One may say that until the coming of Man it was natural selection that set the course of morphogenesis and cerebration, but that after Man it is the power of invention that begins to grasp the evolutionary reins" (p. 293). We are changed by our inventions and Teilhard discerned a pattern to those changes, having to do with the evolution of humankind and the noosphere. As explained by Sir Julian Huxley in the introduction to the Phenomenon of Man (1959) Teilhard " . . . coined the term noosphere to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life" (p. 13). Both Ong and McLuhan understood that we are changed by our inventions and also discerned patterns, not only about the cosmos and humankind, but also about social forms of organization. All three understood that the nature of the social contract, of life in community, was being transformed. Teilhard (1964) believed that this process of development was accelerating: " . . . there are growing indications that the process, far from slowing down, is now entering upon a particularly accelerated and critical phase of its development" (p. 294). McLuhan argued that we were at a critical juncture that required reflective awareness of the inevitable changes that would follow the advent of new technologies. Ong insisted that our very humanness necessitated that we understand both what was lost in the alienation that comes with the technologizing of the word, as well as what was gained. When McLuhan refers to media as extensions of our nervous system, he is expressing in his own way a point that is clarified by Teilhard's belief that our inventions alter the environment, which in turn impacts the evolution of humankind. Relying again on the words of Sir Julian Huxley, "In P. Teilhard's view, the increase of human numbers combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts of the noosphere together, has increased the tensions within it, and has caused it to become 'infolded' upon itself, and therefore more highly organized" (p. 17). Who we are, how we see the world and how we form our communities, all this and more is affected. Teilhard viewed the world as an ascending web of reflective

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interrelatedness, understood that physical and cultural pressures were forcing humankind to change, to evolve, to become more aware of both themselves and of their relatedness to others. McLuhan (1994) writes that "In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin" (p. 47), a typical McLuhan probe that seems to lead nowhere, until this opaque statement is placed next to an otherwise opaque statement by Teilhard (1959), who writes that "the consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting" (p. 220). Both statements speak to a new awareness of connection, of the curious effect of being caught in an extensive reflective gaze that cannot be denied. For Ong (1988), "Oralityliteracy dynamics enter integrally into the modem evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorization and greater openness" (p. 179). Greater interiorization results in a heightened awareness of one's inner experiences and greater openness results in a heightened awareness of the experiences of others. Communication technologies have contributed, in unprecedented ways, to a heightened awareness of both inner experience and greater openness to a world that was, at an earlier time, simply not within one's reach. Ong wrote that "both orality and the growth of literacy out of orality are necessary for the evolution of consciousness" (p. 173). Ong, McLuhan, and Teilhard, each attempt to indicate where that evolution of consciousness is headed and for each of them, the key issue is the intersubjectivity of all communication, the growth of a reflective awareness that transcends individual perspectives.

THE SEA CHANGE I turn now to the problem of the self in contemporary American life. It is my intention to apply the perspectives of these three scholars to the changing geography of public and private life. How do we characterize the self without referring to such dichotomies? Postmodemists hedge by denying that a unitary self exists. In an earlier era transcendentalists emphasized a unitary and separate self. If Teilhard is correct, both postmodernists and transcendentalists are wrong. The individual is not merely the multiplicity of various identities and roles. Nor is the individual defined by inner experience, if that was ever the case. The former situates the self within outer experience. The latter situates the self within inner experience. Neither response appears to address the crucial issue of a self that is public and private, as well as something else. Though it would require a longer text to fully explicate what is implied by that something else, my purpose in this article is to draw on the shared frameworks of Ong, McLuhan, and Teilhard, in order to suggest how their collective works might address emergent changes in the concept of individuality.

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We are confounded by rapid changes that leave us without adequate concepts to explain how we are both grounded and in flux, both tribal and literate. It is no longer possible to posit the individual as separate from the group, guided by an inner dictum that exists independently of shared experience. If there ever was such a privileged domain, current experience no longer supports that conceptualization of the self. Ong's secondary orality and McLuhan's emphasis on the interrelatedness of social life entail a more complex concept of individuality. Ong writes of the gain that comes with loss, of the way in which the move to print both humanized and yet isolated the individual from the group. McLuhan writes of the ability to discern patterns in a wealth of information, of the move away from a specialist perspective to something more inclusive, more interconnected. Teilhard argues that the heightened reflection entails awareness of more than a singular perspective. It is paradoxical that one result of a greater sense of connection to others is a greater awareness of one's own isolation. When one's horizon is opened to the experience of others, the multiple perspectives can be overwhelming, so that it is difficult to find one's place. At the very least, what it means to be an individual today is quite different than what it meant to be an individual in an earlier historical era. From Emerson and Thoreau to Alexis De Tocqueville to Bellah's Habits of the Heart, writers have sought to spell out the problematic nature of public life in America. This fundamental tension between private and public life, between the desires of the individual and the needs of the group, is woven into the American political process, American philosophy and American literature. The concept of individuality is historically situated, emerging as a consequence of specific social, economic and political conditions. That concept has evolved over time as changing conditions altered the social fabric that supports and sustains collective notions of what it means to exist as an individual in a social world. There is nothing foundational about the dichotomy of public and private, as much as one may personally be confused by the current lack of boundaries. Historians have indicated that the concept of individuality, and the resulting distinction between public and private experience, emerged within a particular time and place. As explained by Jagodzinski (1999), "When books came into the home, public events became private concerns as well; they could change the mental#d, the way of observing the self and the world of the early modern English citizen (p. 22). Of necessity, such terms will be altered by shifts in historical circumstances. As media theorist Joshua Meroywitz (1985) explained, "Historians have noted the new sense of 'boundaries' dividing public and private, domestic and political, family and community, in the transition between the pre-modern and modern age. In our own time we have found

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a dramatic reversal of this trend" (p. 314). That reversal is illustrated in Charles Taylor's Sources o f the Self: The modernist retrieval of experience thus involves a profound breach in the received sense of identity and time, and a series of reorderings of a strange and unfamiliar kind. As a result of this, the epiphanic centre of gravity begins to be displaced from the self to the flow of experience, to new forms of unity, to language conceived in a variety of ways (p. 465). When language, self, and experience are conceptualized in a variety of ways, the consequences are more than philosophical. To the extent that our language has not yet caught up with our experience, there is the inevitable discontinuity between concepts and actions. American culture characterizes the self as autonomous, a private citizen with certain inalienable rights and responsibilities. Our laws, our public policies, and our ethics are predicated on this concept of the self. But the concept is neither universal, nor immune to historical circumstance. Place the concern with public and private life within a framework established by the shared scholarship of Ong, McLuhan and Teilhard, and challenging new forms surface. It was inevitable that our country would evolve into a new era, with or without the rapid technological changes of this remarkable century. But in fact, those profound technological changes have transformed our way of life far more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. Descriptions of those changes are often played out in the negative: such commentary grieves for what is lost without acknowledging what is gained. The violence of a new medium, or a new technology, or a new idea, is never simply negative, though the chaos of our time makes it difficult to see the gain. We are collectively caught up in a profound sea change. Individuality, with the concordant rights and privileges that concept assigns to the person, provides the key for unlocking the larger puzzle of how current communication technologies are altering the self in the social world. The very American concept of individuality, of an autonomous self, provides the frame through which we experience private and public life. The violence that arises as a consequence of new communication technologies can best be understood through a discussion of the private and public domain, because that is our particular American heritage, that is where we began. The disintegration of the boundary between public and private life constitutes a sea change because that dichotomy is fundamental to the American concept of individualism. When this distinction breaks down, the fundamental concept of what it means to be an individual breaks down as well. As a consequence of technology, we are repeatedly confronted with an awareness of the ways in which we are connected to others. Whether by telephone, fax, Internet, or television, we are bombarded with images and voices, sound and movement. Some scholars have argued that what results is a dislocation of place and a growing tendency to isolation. Meyrowitz (1985) asks:

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Why and how do technologiesthat merely create new connectionsamong people and places lead to any fundamental shift in the structure of society or in social behavior? One potential answer to this question rests in the ways in which disconnectedness - the separation of social situations and interactions - shapes social reality (p. 23). But there is also, curiously, the opportunity to listen and observe as others share their most intimate secrets. In growing more isolated, we have also grown more intimate. As the distinction between public and private weakens, the distinction between intimacy and alienation is also obscured. These distinctions are no longer clear, whether one is talking about medical records, credit history and other electronic records, the portrayal of intimate secrets on the Internet, or the sharing of personal stories via telephone and electronic mail. It is not just that it is much easier to communicate, but that the nature of communication has changed. It is possible to say things to a camera that one would never say to one's family in the privacy of the home. The telephone changes the nature of the conversation by omitting both the gaze of the other and powerful nonverbal responses such as facial expression. Electronic mail allows us to forward messages and create conversational loops that are very different from either face to face conversations or traditional correspondence. Meryowitz argues that " . . . once widely used, electronic media may create new social environments that reshape behavior in ways that go beyond the specific products delivered" (p. 15). As Ong 0 9 7 7 ) explains, "Before television no human psyche had experienced visually and aurally events actually going on in the real present but in an extraneous locale" (p. 316). Technology makes it possible to communicate in new ways. New social environments are created. Our awareness of time and space is altered. But far more fundamental things are being altered as well: the role of the self in the social world. If television was a technology that moved viewers to experience the social world in new ways, as print at an earlier time encouraged the development of private thought, what can be said of the new communication technologies? McLuhan insisted that each new technology provides a vantage point from which we can more clearly see the previous technology. But it is most difficult to see the present, to see how we are constrained by the latest technological innovation. Today we have not just television, not just text, not just computers, but hybrids of all of these. The keyboard offers linked print in a variety of fonts and forms. The multimedia monitor provides image, sound, and text. Cable or phone lines provide immediate access to sites all over the world. It is difficult to grasp the constraints of this hybrid technology, though it is clear that what we are dealing with now is not like television, is very different from telephones, is nothing like books. The landscape has shifted and the map must be reconfigured. But that requires a point of reference, which is exactly what

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is lost in this new place. Meryowitz's text, titled No Sense of Place tells only part of the story. We may feel that there is no sense of place because we have never seen a place like this before. It appears there is no longer a secure vantage point from which to judge the world. Teilhard (1964) was interested in evolutionary phenomena, including the phenomenon known as man. He believed that he could discern "an irresistible rise within us and around us of the level of reflection" (p. 294). McLuhan wrote of a " . . . interrelation in depth, even of the personality" (p. 289). Ong (1988) spoke of the way in which "secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral c u l t u r e . . . " (p. 136). How do we characterize the self in the social world without referring to dichotomies like public and private? How might we explain what it means to be public and private, as well as something else? Our language does not help us. The terms public and private arise from an understanding of a self in community that is knowable. The public domain of a local community can be understood. The public domain of an Internet chat room exceeds our grasp. The term private is meaningful when used to indicate those experiences belonging to an autonomous individual. Without the concept of autonomy, the idea of privacy becomes problematic. Hence the difficulty of knowing how we should handle computerized medical records. In some deep way the very nature of computerized records effaces the very concept of individuality. The deep interrelationship, the depth culture McLuhan referred to, cannot be explained by dichotomous terms like public and private. And yet that is our heritage, that is the framework we have used to understand what it means to be an individual in a social world. Preliterate cultures lacked an adequate concept of what it would take to be an individual, in the way that we use this term today. In a later age, the individual became the measure of all things. Now the concept of individuality has become inherently problematic. As communication technology creates the potential for great isolation we are also confronted, at the touch of a keyboard, with the images, sounds, and voices of people from all over the world. How can that not have an impact? How could we not be changed? We are accustomed to thinking that an individual can be reflective. It is the autonomous individual who bases his actions on such careful reflection. We are less accustomed to thinking of a larger, collective group as being reflective. We have terms like group think and mob action, but few concepts to capture the possibility of collective sustained reflection. Could we even recognize it?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper addresses the changing relationship of public and private life, as that relationship is altered by emerging communication technologies. Implicit

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in the writings of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is an answer to the changes in the social domain we are now experiencing. Each of these scholars offers valuable insights into how the conceptualization of the self shifts over time. Considered as a group, their collective writings deepen the significance of each singular perspective. These scholars are concerned with the process of social change, with the transformations of technology, and with the evolution of human awareness. In so far as Ong argues for a secondary orality and McLuhan argues for a new awareness of interrelatedness, one must ask to what end? It cannot merely be that the emergence of new social forms implies no consequence, leads to nowhere in particular. The author wishes to acknowledge Walter O n g ' s contribution to this work. His detailed comments and conversations provided an invaluable source of inspiration. Thanks also to Hamilton College for making it possible to travel on two different occasions to Saint Louis University to speak at length with Walter Ong.

REFERENCES Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan,W. M., Swidler, A., Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper & Row. Commager, H. (1993). Commager on Tocqueville. Columbia:Universityof Missouri Press. Chardin, T. de. (1964). The Future of Man. N. Denny (Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Chardin, T. de. (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. B, Wall (Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Czitron, D. J. (1982). Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. Emerson, R. (1975). Self Reliance. St. Helena: IlluminationsPress. Gergen, K. (1991). The Saturated Self' Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books. Havelock, E. A. (1986). The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jagodzinski, C. M. (1999). Privacy and Print." Reading and Writing in Seventeenth Century England. Charlottesville: UniversityPress of Virginia. Jung, C. (1957). The Undiscovered Self New York: The New AmericanLibrary. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford UniversityPress. McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Molinaro, M., McLuhan, C., & Toye, W. (Eds) (1987). Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. Ong, W. J. (1977). Interfaces of the World: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Comell UniversityPress. Ong, W. J. (1988). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge. Ong, W. J. (1971). Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithica: Comell UniversityPress.

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Ong, W. J. (1967). The Presence of the Word." Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Binghampton, NY: Global Publications. Riesman, D. (1961). The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sanderson, G., & Macdonald, F. (Eds) (1989). McLuhan, The Man and His Message. Golden, Colorado: Falcrum, Inc. Sennett, R. (1974). The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Sola Pool, I. de. (1990). Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. (1989). f: The Making of the Modem Identity Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tocqueville, A. de. (R. D. Heffner, Ed.). (1956). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Group. Thoreau, H. (1966). Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

POPULAR MUSIC AND TEENAGERS IN POST-COMMUNIST POLAND

Joseph A. Kotarba

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between popular music and adolescent identity in Poland. I will specifically discuss how this relationship has evolved within the context of complex changes occurring in Polish society over the past twenty years. This analysis is largely derived from interviews with and observations of young people in Wroclaw, Krakow, and Katowice, Poland in 1992 and 1999. Before the revolutionary events of the late 1980s, popular music in Poland reflected the drudgery of everyday life under communism and the severe economic constraints placed on young people's musical experiences. Since the democratic revolution in 1989, the popular music scene has become increasingly complex and fragmented. Styles of music have expanded three ways. First, Polish youth now have access to all the popular music available to American or British youth via the Internet, Euro MTV, and so forth. Second, Polish artists are devising local versions of this globalized music. Third, Polish artists are creating new music that is true to traditional, even folk, musical styles. The net effect of these trends is the availability of the kind of musical resources long used by Western adolescents to create the identity of the "teenager."

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The relationship between popular music and youth in modern society has been intimate and inseparable. Scholarly observers as far back as James Coleman have written about the ways popular music has functioned simultaneously as a soundtrack for generations of young people's lives, as well as a commentary on the meaning of those lives. In a sociological and historical sense, this relationship has also been dynamic. As the cultural configuration of youth has changed - from teenager and hippie to Gen X-er and hip-hopper - the style of the soundtrack has changed accordingly - from rock 'n' roll and the Beatles to Kid Rock and Snoop Doggie Dogg. While the relationship between popular music and youth has been very well chronicled in the West, we know relatively little about this relationship in other societies. The purpose of this paper is to examine this relationship as it takes form in a rapidly changing society: Poland. Through ethnographic observation of the world of young people in Poland, I will suggest that major political and economic changes taking place in Poland over the past twelve years are accompanied by the concurrent Westernization and fragmentation of the popular music experience in Poland. This musical experience, consequently, is contributing to Polish youth's ability and desire to shape their culture increasingly like "teenagers" in the West have for the past fifty years. SOCIO-POLITICAL-CULTURAL CHANGE IN A LATE CAPITALISTIC/POSTMODERN WORLD The changes taking place in Central and Eastern European societies in the late 1980s through the 1990s have been broad and complex. Beginning with Poland, the former satellites and client states of the Soviet Union have all experienced various degrees of democratization, capitalization and Westernization. A detailed analysis of these massive events is obviously beyond the scope of this paper. 1 Suffice it to say that many people living in Central and Eastern Europe have worked feverishly to catch up with the late capitalistic West - largely in economic, cultural and political terms. The culture of the West, which Jameson (1984) and many other observers have referred to as postmodernism, is most notably marked by a shift in the economy from production to consumption, the disappearance of the distinction between high and popular art, and the near hegemony of the mass media. Harvey (1989) argues that the two defining characteristics of postmodern culture in the late capitalistic West are ephemerality and fragmentation (see also Grossberg, 1988). Elements and styles of our way of life are increasingly

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both fleeting and diffuse. Harvey's discussion of the net consequence of postmodern culture on personality, motivation and behavior on an individualistic level is of direct relevance to the present discussion. A powerful metaphor for individual experience is schizophrenia. In its common, as opposed to clinical, sense, the individual is schizophrenic to the degree he or she is neither capable of nor desirous of integrating the past, present, and future. Cultural items are subject to rapid transformation, and time is overwhelmingly the present. By applying Harvey's argument to the status of "teenager" in late capitalistic society, we expect to find a young person who organizes personal identity around ever-changing styles, a very situational and selective use of history, and an overwhelming dependence on mass mediated resources for identity construction. In the remainder of this paper, I will describe ethnographically the relationship of the rapid and recent movement towards late capitalism and postmodernism in Poland to the self-identity of the Polish teenager. I will present vignettes from various ethnographic conversations I have had with Polish teenagers regarding their everyday lives and musical experiences since democratization.

METHODS There were three observational stages in this study. The first stage was conducted in October, 1992. I spent two weeks in Wroclaw, Poland, at the invitation of the Institutes of Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Wroclaw. I was invited to lecture on my ethnographic research with homeless adolescents. This research investigated both the activities that place them highly at-risk for HIV contagion (Kotarba, 1991a), and the way their musical experiences help them make sense of their complicated lives (Kotarba, 1991b). This scholarly visit also provided the occasion to begin data collection for the present study. I conducted three group interviews with the following adolescent cohorts: a class of 32 third-year students at the elite high school for the gifted; a group of 16 adolescents with mild emotional problems receiving counseling at the Center for Social Psychological Therapy; and an informal group of seven adolescents at a church-sponsored disco. The second stage of this study was conducted upon my return to Houston, Texas. Through the assistance of the local, Polish-American community, I discussed popular music in Poland with five recent Polish 6migr6s. Three were teenage males, one a young adult female and one a young adult male. I used their experiences and insights to enrich my ethnographic findings from Poland, and to suggest research questions for my next visit.

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The third stage of this study was conducted in May, 1999, when I visited the city of Krakow in southern Poland specifically to continue this research. I talked with a group of eight first-year students at the Jagiellonian University; a group of 10 teenagers at a heavy metal music club; a group of seven teenagers at a disco; and several rock musicians. I also got a chance to visit the nearby industrial city of Katowice, which is one hour away by commuter train. There, I talked to a group of 20 high school students at a public school; and a group of nine young adults at an underground music club in Katowice. My hosts in Wroclaw, a professor of Social Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Wroclaw; in Krakow, a professor of English and American Studies at the Pedagogical University; and in Katowice, a professor of Polish History and Philosophy at the Silesian University, served as translators and participated in many of the conversations. There are two reasons why I am confident that the conversations were valid, or truthful. First, the majority of respondents were fluent in English, thus easing any language problems. My hosts' translation work was most useful in conversation with working class youth. Second, I did not get the feeling that respondents tried to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. The conversations were not structured to appear to elicit knowledge or expertise. Instead, my demeanor was completely nonjudgmental. I responded positively to all respondents, whether they enjoyed heavy metal music, jazz, or pop. Wroclaw is a large city (population: 700,000) in the southwestern part of Poland. It is close to Germany, perhaps a four-hour train trip from Berlin. Wroclaw was annexed from Germany following World War II, thus reflecting a rich combination of German and Polish culture. Krakow is the second largest city in Poland (population: 800,000), and its historical and cultural capital. Unlike Warsaw, Krakow was not destroyed during World War II. Krakow is home to several medieval castles, and one of the oldest and most distinguished universities in Europe (Jagiellonian University). Krakow was chosen as the Cultural Center of Europe for the Millennium celebration.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF P O P U L A R MUSIC AND YOUTH IN POLAND BEFORE 1989 The history of popular music in Poland is notably marked by a long and rich love affair between young people and rock 'n' roll music (Kan & Hayes, 1994). Ryback (1990) and other observers have cited 1957 as the year several Polish bands began playing their versions of "Rock Around the Clock" and "Don't Be Cruel." Since then, the Polish rock scene has produced numerous artists performing music ranging from punk and heavy metal to pop rock and rap.

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Rock music is very popular among Polish youth. Sasinska-Klas (1993) found in her survey, for example, that over 90% of Polish youth aged 16 to 25 preferred Western-style rock to any other musical genre. As George Lipsitz (1994, p. 138) notes, popular music specifically plays a complicated yet critical role in times of great political fervent, for "It helps to construct the nation state while at the same time being constructed by it." Accordingly, rock music has served as a political medium for youth during the cyclical episodes of economic and political unrest that marked Poland's history under communism. In a brief historical essay, Pekacz (1992) assesses the quality and integrity of Polish rock music in terms of its status as an instrument of protest. In the 1970s, Polish rock music did not protest directly against the communist authorities, but, "Instead, it was focused upon broad, 'existential' or 'allhuman' universal issues in a post-hippie style" (Pekacz, 1995, p. 205). With the imposition of martial law in the 1980s, the government used rock music to coopt potentially revolutionary feelings among youth. Nevertheless, the emergence of punk rock in the 1980s produced militant, anti-government music. Kan and Hayes describe how the most popular punk band, Perfect, performed concerts for workers in Warsaw to celebrate the spread of Solidarity's strike from Gdansk to the rest of Poland. One song in particular, Perfect's 1981 hit "Autobiography," became the revolutionary anthem for angry Polish youth: My father was working at a steel plant God knows where I also roughed up my hands I wore out my guitar and played millions of worthless tunes I learnt about sex There were three of us, each different Let's leave, the police are waiting for us, although others are busy stealing now But, well... This world is unbelievable our music causes fear our music causes fear (pp. 50-51). The punk movement in Poland, as elsewhere, largely vanished by the mid1980s. The most popular bands, including Perfect, turned to the search for commercial success. Huge crowds at rock music festivals - such as Jarocin which annually draws tens of thousands of fans - and large sales of cassettes largely replaced open political criticism. The Polish government supported rock music as an apolitical safety valve to channel young peoples' anger and energy, even to the point of providing radio programming for American heavy metal music (Weinstein, 1991).

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The everyday musical experiences of Polish youth before the revolution, especially those of the massive working class, directly reflected the drudgery of everyday life under communism. For example, O'Rourke (1988) visited Warsaw in 1986 and observed how the ultimate boredom produced by socialism led young people to drink themselves constantly into a stupor. For many, there was little prospect of a meaningful job, and even less prospect of a useful education. Alcohol and heavy metal music provided efficient analgesia from the pain of totalitarianism. Sadly, the ultimate economic poverty of socialism even precluded punk rockers from spiking and coloring their hair because of a shortage of commercially available cosmetics in Poland. Youth disappeared from public life by escaping into vodka and rock and roll.

P O P U L A R MUSIC IN P O L A N D SINCE 1989 Since the revolution in 1989, the popular music scene in Poland has become increasingly fragmented. The move to a market economy has resulted in an explosion of the amount, quality and diversity of popular music available to young people. One of the dramatic examples of the rapid transition to a commodity economy was the explosion in the number of televisions, VCRs, cable television systems, and TV satellite dishes. The number of television stations in Wroclaw, for example, grew from two before the revolution to more than a dozen by 1992. The emergence of Western-style, mall-like music stores in all major cities brought compact disks to the marketplace. And the widest range of music is now available to Polish kids through Internet services such as MP3 and Internet radio broadcasts. Major record companies like Sony and Warner Music are distributing CDs in Poland and developing local talent for eventual global marketing. Consequently, the styles of popular music available to young people have expanded three ways. First, Polish youth now have access to all the popular music available to American or British youth. The traditional time lag between popularity in the States and popularity in secondary markets like Poland's has virtually disappeared. Polish youth no longer have to rely on Voice of America to broadcast popular American music, nor do they have to rely on poor quality bootleg tapes. Second, Polish artists are devising local versions of all this globalized music. For example, we now witness Polish rap music (Kazik), Polish "boy bands" (Just 5), and even Polish Celtic New Age Music (White Garden). Third, Polish artists have been creating much new music that is true to traditional musical styles. Cabaret music, performed in melancholy or torch style by a singer accompanied by piano or some other very simple instrumentation, has traditionally been very popular in Poland and remains so, for example, in the person of Anna Maria Jopek.

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There are other indicators of the expansion of popular music in Poland. The market for "teen" music magazines, largely from Germany, exploded as local entrepreneurs began publishing Polish versions of them (e.g. machina and Tylko Rock). Western rock bands, such as the Rolling Stones and the Cure, began performing at concerts in Poland. Before the revolution, these concerts were very rare because the weak economy and the weak Polish Zloty resulted in widespread skepticism among rock performers that they would be paid for their concerts in currency with any kind of reasonable exchange value back in the West. There are plans for Michael Jackson to finance the construction of an amusement/theme park near Warsaw (The Warsaw Voice 1996).

W O R K I N G CLASS TEENAGERS: LIFE B E Y O N D H E A V Y M E T A L The working class teens I talked with have experienced both the high expectations associated with democratization and, to a more modest degree, the early rewards of democratization. The important point is that their musical experiences have become very diverse. The Center in Wroclaw in 1992 was an after-school and weekend place for the teens to visit when they are not in school. These teens came from working-class families in rural areas in the Silesian or southwestern section of Poland. They were sent to Wroclaw to attend high school. They lived either in dormitories or with host families. Since they lived away from their own families, they were often lonely and emotionally "uneasy," as one young man put it. They used popular music as a source of comfort during times of loneliness. The boys at the Center preferred Western heavy metal music such as Queensryche and AC/DC. They related to this music because it fit their concern for personal problems such as abusive families, conflict with teachers, problems with drugs, and so forth. Like their American counterparts, Polish "headbangers" commonly listened to speed metal music, such as Slayer and Metallica, as a way of relieving everyday life stress. The working-class girls at the Center preferred pop music, especially female performers such as Madonna, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. They not only appreciated songs about love and relationships, but they paid close attention to the fashion and style trends highlighted by these stars. When I talked to these teens about their favorite songs, they generally indicated a preference for songs about relationships, parents, adults, morality and personal problems, regardless of the genre or style of rock music to which

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the kids were committed. The Polish rock song cited most frequently as the kids' favorite was "For Ann," by the group KULT, which they indicated is a song about boyfriends and girlfriends. Another favorite song was "Autobiography," by the group Perfect, which the kids said is about the complexity of growing up. One sixteen year-old boy had been living in a high school dormitory for three months. He indicated that the song functions almost like a good friend for him: I like the song because I have the same kinds of dreams. My life is like the song .... It warns against certain things in life. It helps me get over melancholy feelings. Interestingly, this boy's interpretation of the theme of "Autobiography" is very different from Kan and Hayes' political interpretation of the same song, as cited above. One of the very powerful features of rock music, especially heavy metal music, is the open horizon of meaning for its songs. The intensive use of metaphoric imagery allows audience members to interpret the song and apply the feelings of the music to the personal needs of their everyday lives. In the movement towards capitalism, these personal needs supplant political needs. In this respect, Polish teens are becoming more like American teens (Kotarba 1994). In 1999, working class teens' tastes in music have changed much like they have in the West. Interest in heavy metal music in general has been limited to two themes. First, the teenage boys I talked with in Katowice still enjoy "death metal" music, a style of heavy metal music spiced with quasi-satanic lyrics and horror movie imagery that has been very popular among working class youth in Poland even before the revolution. 2 Their sources for death metal music, however, reflect the more general globalization of their culture: Scandinavian countries, Western Europe, Eastern Europe as well as the United States. Music television from Germany contains a significant amount of German heavy metal. Second, they voice great interest in "classic" rock, especially 70s hard rock such as Led Zepplin. This music is available through many sources, including Euro MTV. Like their counterparts in the West, working class boys in Poland are most excited about rap music and rock music integrated with rap (e.g. Kid Rock). The meaning of rap music has changed considerably since I began this study. In 1992, the kids I talked with from all backgrounds were fascinated by rap music, including Ice Cube, Ice T, Public Enemy, and Sister Soulja. The working class boys were especially drawn to rap because of its sheer volume and power, but also because of its apparent function as a window to the ever-intriguing American society. Race and ethnic relations in the United States is the case in point. They were familiar with the political controversy over the Ice T song,

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"Cop Killer." They were very anxious to talk to me about the Rodney King affair in Los Angeles. A common interpretation of the Polish news media coverage of these events was that the United States is racked by racial violence, and that rap music is the distinct voice of politically disenfranchised and militant African-American youth. In 1999, the working class boys I talked with appreciated rap more for its lifestyle dimensions and its compatibility with rock music. They all spoke well of recent Polish attempts at rap music. A universal favorite is Kazik, who was also the lead singer for the most popular band in Poland, KULT. His rap songs talk about very current political issues in Poland. For example, one song repeats the line, "Lech, where are my ten million zloty?" in reference to former President Walesa's unfulfilled campaign promise to give all Polish citizens the equivalent of $667 once he was elected. The respondents downplayed the significance of explicitly sexist lyrics in Kazik's music, such as his "I'm on Fire" (cf. Bollag 1992). Kazik continues to be the single most popular musical performer in Poland. Boys and girls from the working class showed great interest in a major element of social class cultural conflict in Poland: "disco polo." Disco polo is a very simple if not primitive form of disco music unique to the Polish media. There are television programs in Poland devoted to hours of broadcasting disco polo videos. To an American observer, disco polo music videos come across as almost a parody of American youth culture. The lyrics are almost childlike, but contain a bit of sexual overtone. The music videos are basically about having fun. They typically involve groups of young people partying at the beach, riding around in convertibles, or dancing at discos. The working class kids I talked to noted the globalization function of disco polo. For example, a 19 year-old girl who regularly patronizes a popular disco in Krakow with her friends noted: I like disco polo because it's fun. We like to dance and disco polo is fun to dance to .... The videos show us how youngpeople in Americahave fun. They'relucky- lots of beaches to party on. We don't have beaches like that here in Poland. Working class teens in Poland still depend primarily on radio and television for their music. Television ownership is virtually universal in urban Poland. Although most of the kids I talked to owned boom boxes with CD players, they simply could not afford to purchase CDs. Many observers argued that the underground, "bootlegged" taped music industry in pre-revolution Poland was to a large extent the result of a shortage of licensed, recorded music from the West. The continuing existence of this industry denotes the continuing high cost of commercial tapes and CDs in Poland.

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MIDDLE-CLASS TEENS: F R E E D O M TO TASTE THE M A R K E T In 1992, the middle class teens I talked to preferred what they referred to as "college" rock groups such as R.E.M. and U2. This musical genre, with its thoughtful lyrics and modest stage persona, was conducive to their concern for broad, economic and political issues such as environmental protection and European solidarity. (The three most popular prospective university majors among this group, incidentally, were environmental science, business and English.) The middle-class kids I talked to were also drawn to sophisticated forms of hard rock, such as grnnge or alternative bands such as Nirvana and Soundgarten that were very popular in the early 1990s. Furthermore, interest in these musical styles was a passion for the culturally critical intelligentsia in Poland, emerging as a cultural bridge across generations as well as social classes. I met a middle-aged woman at a party my last evening in Wroclaw, a teacher and scholar in existential philosophy at the university. I had heard earlier in our visit that she was a fan of heavy metal music, someone with whom I needed to talk. In preparation for my trip to Poland, I was told to bring precious rock music tapes with me to distribute as "good guest" gifts. I gave my last good guest gift to her, a Faith No More tape. She loved the tape, and she told me that she shared her love for heavy metal and grnnge with her seventeen year-old son. When I told her that this kind of mother-son bond is unusual in the United States, she was dismayed. She noted that elements of Western culture are so intriguing and valuable in Poland that there is no need to invoke unnecessary criteria of taste, just to make a parental point. There is one other interpretation of the inter-generational desire for Western popular music. This mother is part of a generation that grew up under the totalitarian control of culture by the communist regime. Although the Voice of America broadcast rock and roll music to the Communist Bloc beginning in the 1950s, Polish people could only listen to these broadcasts in secret (see Pells, 1997). As a university student, the mother likely experienced government produced propaganda radio piped into her dormitory room (Dziegiel, 1998, p. 146). Free access to Western popular music of any style was likely as liberating for her as for her son. The musical tastes and experiences of middle-class teens in 1999 have become perhaps even more complex and fragmented than those of working-class teens. Middle class girls show great interest in feminist music and musical themes, for example, Bonnie Raitt's and Annie Lennox' work. But, they also enjoy romantic teen music such as 'N Sync, Britney Spears, and The Back Street Boys.

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At the same time, middle-class teens enjoy the renaissance in Polish popular music. Polish folk music, especially from the Tatra Mountains area, is very popular in recordings and in concert. An extremely popular act is the duo, Kayah and Bregovic. They sing pretty, folk-like songs derived from both Polish and Baltic culture. Social class differences linger strongly in terms of the disco polo phenomenon discussed above. A first-year, female university student in Krakow voiced her disdain for the genre: Disco polo is just stupid. The music all sounds the same. The people in the videos acts like fools. They dress like they found clothes from the 1970s in the rubbish. Only people in the country, the peasants could like this ugh, kind of thing. Both males and females indicate great enthusiasm for the trend in Polish rock music to highlight America and American culture through lyrics. One hard rock band, Quo Vadis, recorded an extremely popular song in 1993 called: "Ameryka." This song largely celebrates America by exclaiming its many great accomplishments over a short - by European standards - 200-year history. The song states that America is a symbol of freedom for the rest of the admiring world.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION These findings from ethnographic conversations and observations suggest that experience with popular music among teenagers in Poland is evolving in terms of several trends. Although virtually all teenagers I talked to have access to radio and television, social class differences remain and evolve in a particularly Polish way. The dispute over disco polo closely resembles the traditional animosity between the urban middle class, who self-identify as "intelligentsia," and the rural working class peasantry. Yet, young people from all backgrounds voiced familiarity with heavy metal music from Germany, techno dance music from Denmark, hard rock from Italy, and death metal from the Baltic. Although they are not limited to American music as their primary source of Western teen culture, they still desire and admire American popular culture in general. In a recent New York Times (1994, p. 31) article, a list of the most popular American movies, television programs, and pop musical artists was compiled. The most popular American musical artists in Poland were Whitney Houston, Aerosmith, R.E.M., and Guns 'n' Roses - representing a fairly diverse group of styles. Teenagers no longer have to travel to Berlin or Warsaw to purchase the latest CDs, but they must have the money to do so in their own cities. The great

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equalizer may turn out to be the Internet. Computers are widely available in Poland, both in schools and in the home. Like Sony televisions and VCRs, they are generally quite affordable. As Internet connections become affordable (and free, as is the trend in the U.S.), young people gain tremendous access to all the music available through services like MP3.com and rollingstone.com. The major finding of this study has been the convergence of Polish and American views on what it means culturally to be young. This convergence can be summarized in terms of the concept of "teenager." Sociologically, "teenager" does not refer to a person, but to a status or a social identity. Hine (1999) describes the history and complexity of this idea in great detail. Although the movement towards conceptualizing young people as adolescents and warehousing them in high schools can be traced at least as far back as the Great Depression, the term "teenager" gained currency after World War II. The term "teenager" refers to the period in life between childhood and adulthood marked by high levels of leisure time consumption (Frith, 1981). Widespread affluence following World War II enabled middle and working-class families to survive on the parents' income, freeing adolescents from economic responsibilities. Adolescents populated high schools during the day and spent their allowances on cars, movies, and records at night. Young people had the opportunity to give much of their time and attention to dating, fun, and other youthful concerns. The marketing of music to teenagers addressed these concerns with Top 40 radio, 45 r.p.m, records, sock hops, and fan clubs. Political issues were not of much concern to teenagers until the latter part of the 1960s. Young people in Poland experience a similar cultural process. As the capitalistic revolution gains momentum, and as a market economy takes hold, we would expect more and more young people to experience increasing leisure time. An identity based upon consumption and fun is replacing one based upon the political need to account for an oppressive government and the lack of available work. Young people in Poland, however, are not likely to recreate and relive the naive world of 1950s American youth. American youth have evolved way beyond the teenage golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, with its Archie comic books, 45 records, and bobbysoxers. As Hines notes (1999, p. 82): This generation (of American teenagers) has grown up in a period of declining personal income and increasing inequality. A sizable percentage consists of the children of immigrants. Educational aspirationsare very high, and no wonder: You need a college education today to make a salary equivalent to that of a high school graduate in 1970. To the degree Hine's assessment of American youth is correct, then Polish youth are not in fact that far behind. My respondents in Poland form all

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background voiced collective concern that the revolution of 1989 did not solve all their problems, and probably created some new ones. They are concerned that well-paying jobs may not be there upon graduation from either the prestigious Jagiellonian University or the local trade school. They are increasingly aware of what they share with teenagers in other societies: a complex world that requires limited expectations and practical approaches to life. Their complex experiences of popular music reflect this reality. NOTES 1. An excellent source for examining the socio-political-cultural changes in Central and Eastern Europe is Murray and Holmes (1998). 2. After spending several days with members of Violent Dirge and Vader, Gaines (1994, p. 55) concluded dramatically that death metal reflects both the status of rock and the texture of everyday life in Poland. Gaines can be critiqued for generalizing to all Polish youth from very little data derived from a short stay with one subculture in the capitol city.

REFERENCES Arnett, J. (1991). Adolescents and Heavy Metal Music: From the Mouths of Metalheads. Youth and Society, 23(1), 76-98. Bollag, B. (1992). The Curtain Parts, and Rap Emerges. The New York Times, August 23. Coleman, J. (1961). The American Adolescent. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Denzin, N. K. (1992). Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Dziegiel, L. (1998). Paradise in a Concrete Cage. Cracow: Arcana. Frith, S. (1981). Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll. New York: Pantheon. Gaines, D. (1994). In Search of Death. Spin, 10(1), 52-58. Grossberg, L. (1988). It's a Sin: Essays on Postmodernism, Politics and Culture. Sidney: Power Publications. Harvey, D. (1987). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen. Hine, T. (1999). The Rise and Decline of the Teenager. American Heritage, (September), 71-82. Jameson, F. (1984). Postmodemism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146, 53-92. Kan, A., & Hayes, N. (1994). Big Beat in Poland. In: S. P. Ramet (Ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 41-53). Boulder, CO: Westview. Kotarba, J. A. (1994). The Postmodernization of Heavy Metal Music: The Case of Metallica. In: J. Epstein (Ed.), Adolescents and their Music (pp. 141-163). Hamden, CT: Garland. Kotarba, J. A. (1993). Rock Music in Poland Since the Fall of Communism. Paper presented at "On The Beat: Rock 'N Rap, Mass Media and Society" Conference, School of Journalism, University of Missouri--Columbia (February, 1993). Kotarba, J. A. (1991a). Postmoderuism, Ethnography and Culture. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 12, 45-52.

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Kotarba, J. A. (1991b). Rock Music as a Medium for AIDS Intervention. AIDS Education and Prevention, 3(1), 47-49. Murray, P., & Holmes, L. (1994). Europe: Rethinking the Boundaries. Aldershot, Australia: Ashgate. New York Times. Global Smarming: America's Pop Influence. January 30, 30-31. O'Rourke, P. J. (1988). Holidays in Hell. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Pekacz, J. (1992). On Some Dilemmas of Polish Post-Communist Rock Culture. Popular Music, 11(2), 205-208. Pells, R. (1997). Not Like Us. New York: Basic Books. Ryback, T. W. (1990). Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press. Warsaw Voice (1996). Just Another Royal Visit, 39.414, 23. Weinstein, D. (1991). Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Lexington Books.

A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTURAL IDENTITY: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS Todd A. Hechtman

INTRODUCTION The enterprise of representing lived experience must confront a wholesale critique of knowledge production as empirical truth claims become increasingly suspect a priori (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Derrida, 1978; Lyotard, 1984). Indeed, human behavior should not be viewed as transcending time or space without also demonstrating that certain aspects of human experience are not constituted socially, culturally, and historically. Much social psychology ignores this in the quest for universal and objective theories of human behavior (Parker & Shotter, 1990). In contrast, poststructuralist and postmodernist perspectives go too far when they dismiss the possibility of rendering useful accounts of social reality (Burman, 1990). Poststructuralism and postmodernism are related to a "social construction of reality" perspective (Berger & Luckman, 1967) based on the common supposition that knowledge emerges from human experience. ~ A key difference for poststructuralism and postmoderuism is that due to infinite interpretations of human behavior, none should be privileged (Denzin, 1998). Thus, representations are never "true" or "authentic." This presents a dilemma for those of us Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 247-264. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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who engage in empirical research. On the one hand, that reality transpires within concrete contexts suggests that it is discernible as long as milieus are carefully specified and observed. On the other hand, the idea of narrative reality (i.e. reality as text) is fatally skeptical of finite explanation. The problem is that one must advocate social constrnctivism without indicating precise contexts and meanings of human experience. At the other epistemological extreme, objecfivists respond to the problem of representation through "objectification of the generic relationship of the observer to the observed" (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 15) that amounts to the mistaken assumption that social inquiry can escape subjectivity. Bourdieu (1980) warns against a "subjectivism" that "universalizes the experience that the subject of theoretical discourse has of himself as a subject" (p. 46). While the most vulgar forms of rational action theory ignore structural constraints on action, denouncing the explanatory value of subjectivity is not the answer. This essay develops a social psychology of cultural identity as a dialectical alternative to dichotomous intellectual tendencies of postmodernism /poststructuralism and objectivism. M y effort to situate this epistemological debate within social psychology derives - in part - from Gerth and M i l l s ' s (1953) definition of the field: Our general purpose is to study the personalities of men2 in connection with types of socialhistorical structure.., to analyze conduct and character by understanding the motivations of men who occupy different positions within various social structures ... [and] to understand how creeds and symbols contribute to the motivations required for the enactment of given roles by persons within institutional structures (p. xiv). As a uniquely sociological approach to social psychology, they sought to combine structural or institutional dimensions of human experience with the often contradictory perspective of human agency. It should come as no surprise that Mills (the social psychologist!) is responsible for the enduring motto of many sociologists regarding the need to understand the "intersection of biography and history" (Mills, 1959).

CULTURAL IDENTITY: IDENTITY AS LIVED EXPERIENCE By establishing the social constitution of the self, Mead provides one of the earliest, and still most effective, foundations for cultural identity: A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct. He takes its language as a medium by which he gets his personality, and then through a process of taking the different roles that all the others furnish, he comes to get the attitude of the members of the community... (1934[1977]).

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Although Mead describes the self in terms of community, so too, community is possible only to the extent there are selves. In other words, self and community are mutually-constitutive. Mead paved the way for this inter-subjective and dialectical understanding of experience based on the centrality of culture particularly language - in the development of the self. Blumer's symbolic interactionism, drawing directly from Mead, provides two fundamental notions related to cultural identity: (1) interaction depends on taking oneself as object; and (2) interaction is contingent (1969). The first statement recognizes the formative role of others in self-identity. The individual is capable of intentional action only insofar as s/he is socially constituted. The second statement highlights that meaning is always variable due to an interplay of identities, each with a different interactional perspective. Thus, the interpretive or discursive basis of human experience finds its most forceful justification in the reality of social interaction. The centrality of situated meaning in an interactionist approach to identity emphasizes the cultural: " . . . symbolic interactionism sees meanings as social products, as creations that are formed in and through the defining activities of people as they interact" (Blumer, 1969, p. 5). This process of meaningformation is possible due to the active subject present in interaction: "People in interaction are not merely giving expression to such determining factors in forming their respective lines of action but are directing, checking, bending, and transforming their lines of action in the light of what they encounter in the actions of others . . . " (Blumer, 1969, p. 53). Although subjectivity is central to interaction, an interplay of subjectivities requires a shared language - i.e. a culture - to render such activities intelligible. According to Strauss (1959), identity construction involves an active process of naming that emerges in interaction. Thus, identity is cultural - that is, a shared and negotiated process. By establishing the relevance of social processes in human behavior, symbolic interactionism provides an indispensable framework for understanding identity. Making the case for the changing of identity across time and space (Hall, 1990, 1991) - i.e. a "cultural" identity - requires an explanation of both how and why this occurs. Through a social constructivist theory of the self, symbolic interactionism provides a foundation for a theory of cultural identity (Becket & McCall, 1990; Denzin, 1992; Lemert, 1994). The central concept of "lived experience" in cultural studies provides a clear link to symbolic interactionism (Brunt, 1992; Clifford, 1988; Fiske, 1992; Frith, 1992; Hoggart, 1957; Sahlins, 1976; Schneider, 1987; Swidler, 1979; Watson & Watson-Franke, 1985; Williams, 1973). Willis defines the "cultural" as: . . . the milieu of everyday existence and its commonplace span of shared concerns, activities, and struggles. It is also the realm of meanings, objects, artifacts, and systems of

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symbols which both help to constitute and make some meaning of these things (1977, p. 201). The key issues for cultural identity are: What are the sources of cultural meaning? What is the content of this cultural meaning? How is culture manifested by individuals in everyday life? These questions are addressed by research on identity from cultural studies, feminist theory, gay/lesbian studies, and race/ethnic studies. 3 More than simply recognizing the "gestalt" of identity formation, a common theme across these otherwise diverse areas is the social, cultural, historical, and unconscious constitution of identity with emphasis on the relationship between identity and inequality. For example, in feminist theories - broadly speaking - gender is posited as a fundamental identity characteristic around which Western societies organize (Jaggar, 1983). The construction of "female" gender identity maintains subordination to "maleness," not only in overt forms of patriarchy manifested through institutional frameworks such as the family or workplace, but equally important, through gendered subjectivities. Cultural studies interest in identity emphasizes the self as a source of conflict. In other words, power is central to identity (Calhoun, 1994; Mercer, 1992). Unequal access to public discourse is a fundamental type of oppression (Hall, 1992; Mani, 1992) due to a lack of control over self-representation. This "politics of identity" begins with subjective experiences of oppression and then proceeds to situate identity in broader social contexts. Following Probyn, " . . . ours 'selves' constitute an obvious place from which to rework the ways in which we go about 'representing' " (1992, p. 503). While an emphasis on the 'politics of voice' (Bhavnani, 1990; Bhavnani & Phoenix, 1994; Gergen, 1989; Parker, 1989) is an important response to a social science that ignores power relations, there is a paucity of methodological discussion regarding the importance of cultural identity. My purpose for positing a social psychology of cultural identity is to analyze the variety of ways people are categorized, and thus situated, in social hierarchies. It is not simply a matter of adding the categories race, class, and gender into the identity fold. Race, class, and gender represent a disproportionate share of the identity characteristics through which power is wielded, however, there is not a single definitive statement on being a women/man, black/white, etc. (Appiah & Gates, 1995). The goal is to recognize the various ways in which these, and other identity characteristics, are manifested in lived experience and mediated by social forces. Again, Willis effectively articulates the agenda: We need to understand how structures become sources of meaning and determinants on behavior in the cultural milieu at its own level. Just because there are what we can call

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structural and economic determinants it does not mean that people will unproblematically obey them. . . . In order to have a satisfying explanation we need to see what the symbolic power of structural determination is within the mediating realm of the human and cultural (1977, p. 171).

IDENTITY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE It is necessary, therefore, to demonstrate the relationship between social structure and identity - t h a t is, the ways in which social forces delimit subjectivity. Following Michaels, " . . . the logic of capitalism produces objects of desire only insofar as it produces subjects, since what makes the objects desirable is only the constitutive trace of subjectivity those objects bear . . . (1987, p. 20). This point comes directly from Marx's analysis of commodity value deriving from a mode of production (i.e. through social actors in particular institutional contexts). The central point is that social objects are historically constituted. An individual's social position in the means of production does not result in monolithic consciousness. The "history" in "historical materialism" highlights the variability of experience across time and space (Roseberry, 1991). Sartre's critique of the Marxian tendency to place experience into "prefabricated molds" points out that Marx's most important insight gets lost: "there are only men and real relations between men" (1968, p. 76). Social structures are not essential, but instead, result from social organization. Because individuals create and sustain social structures through interactional processes, individuals can initiate social change. The challenge is to understand both the constraints and creative potential of human action. While Marx focused primarily on class, the relationship between the "material" and "cultural" can be understood through various other identities. For example, Anderson equates nationalism with identity by stating that "nationhess is virtually inseparable from political consciousness" (1991, p. 135). Communities are "imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (1991, p. 6). Similarly, Hunt describes the central issue of the French Revolution as " . . . the ways that people collectively imagine - that is, think unconsciously about - the operation of power, and the ways in which this imagination shapes and is in turn shaped by political and social processes" (1992, p. 8). The centrality of "imagination" in explaining nationalism and revolution is the mutually-constitutive relationship between collectivities and identities. Instrumental historical events represent internalized and shared symbolic

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orientations, providing meaning and modes of action that are expressed by individuals and coalesced into widespread collective action. Cultural production - from revolution to television - is possible only insofar as individuals are not passive recipients of social forces. Institutions and organizations emerge through active social interaction, albeit based on rules of communication that render interaction intelligible. This "social production of culture" approach (Becker, 1982, 1986; Wolff, 1981) avoids excessive reification of concepts by not relegating individuals to non-instrumental status. Put differently, cultural identity is the lived experience of social structure, revealing otherwise invisible relations of power. Hegemony, for example, represents a " . . . dominant system of meanings and values . . . . " but, it is " . . . not merely abstract but [is] organized and lived . . . " (Williams, 1973, p. 9). Hegemony is similar to the ubiquitous nature of power/knowledge in Foucault's work: both are compelling theories, but ultimately non-falsifiable without demonstrating how they organize perception. Foucault concurs, describing his lifetime of scholarship as an effort: to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves... The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze ... specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves .•. Perhaps I've insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of the self (1988, pp. 17-19). •

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Foucault recognized that the process of interaction is essential to understanding history, but, he was not content with analyzing the mechanics of interaction while neglecting institutional forces. In different ways, Williams and Foucault articulate the need to move beyond the bifurcation of structure and agency by emphasizing the duality of lived experience. Yet, a persistent assumption is that objects constitute knowledge while subjectivity is beyond definitive specification (Wuthnow, 1987). As symbolic interactionism contends, behavior is not transparent because meaning does not simply derive from the movement of physical bodies in time and space. What must be understood instead is that behavior is an embodiment of subjective meaning (Schutz, 1967). W h a t this means for the study of identity is a focus on the particular man in the social field, in his class, in an environment of collective objects and of other particular men... The dialectical totalization must include acts, passions, work, and need as well as economic categories; it must at once place the agent or the event back into the historical setting ... (Sartre, 1968, p. 133). •

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One must not only study the relations between individuals, but equally important, individuals need to be understood as distinct units. Sartre's insistence on the epistemological centrality of the individual does not necessarily suggest a radical volunteerism. Rather, the individual infuses social relations with the problem of meaning due to the fact that individuals produce knowledge in praxis. In other words, people think in order to act - albeit not unrestrained.

REPRESENTATING CULTURAL IDENTITY In different ways, but with some similar goals, Somers (1994) and Clough (1993) depict the multi-faceted problem of rendering a theory and methodology of identity. Somers's notion of "narrative identity" is an effort to overcome the essentialism of identity politics and other representational forms that impose order based on interests and norms (1994, pp. 605, 614). Efforts to demonstrate the instrumentality of race, gender, class, etc., often result in fixed categories that neglect the interplay of "time, space, and relationality" (1994, p. 606). For Somers, an understanding of identity requires an empirical and historical rendering of "causal emplotments" constituted by social networks of symbols, institutions, and material practices (1994, p. 616). In short, identity is ontological - i.e. it depicts a "sense of being in a particular time and space" (1994, p. 624). Somers's approach derives from the attempt to expand the notion of identity by incorporating the constitutive importance of society, culture, and history, but not limiting analyses to manifestations of race, class, and gender. One could say, following Clough, that Somers is pursuing - like standpoint epistemology - a "successor sociology" (1993). For Clough, the central problem of identity is the act of authorship in which reader and writer are infused with unconscious "authorial desires" that "fracture intentionality" (1993). In other words, identity is discursive, thus beyond specification. While Clough and Somers share in their rejection of essentialist standpoints - be they gender-, race-, class-based or otherwise - Clough's critique pushes epistemology out of sight and into the unconscious, for that is where one finds desire and knowledge/power, the driving forces of discourse. However, to completely reject the explanatory value of structural standpoints is to deny systematic oppression through the means of production or other social hierarchies. While power operates in the invisible spaces of unconscious desires, it is also maintained in the political economy, and manifested through standpoint identities. Speaking from experience is indeed a discursive act; however, it is an effective way - among others - to disrupt entrenched relations of power. Asserting the primacy of experience forces an inter-subjective dialogue about alternative realities, rendering explicit otherwise invisible relations of power.

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This does not mean that one should "merely ask natives to explain the code they use" even "where communication is conscious" (Schneider, 1987, p. 813). In other words, the meaning of self-reports are not entirely transparent. Bourdieu is correct that " . . . instruments of cognition fulfill as such functions other than those of pure cognition" (1977, p. 97). However, Bourdieu goes too far with his assertion that " . . . the explanation agents may provide of their own practice . . . conceals, even from their own eyes, the true nature of their practical mastery, i.e.. that it is learned ignorance . . . . a mode of practical knowledge not comprising knowledge of its own e x p e r i e n c e . . . " (1977, p. 19). To accept Bottrdieu's extreme position is to invalidate the role of the active i.e. thinking - subject in interaction. Indeed, the realization that all aspects of human experience are socially, culturally, historically, and unconsciously constituted has resulted in ontological and epistemological uncertainty (Gergen, 1991; Habermas, 1973; Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991; Kellner, 1992). A t its best, this crisis over representation generates "systematic analyses of the ways in which the dominant culture creates borders saturated in terror, inequality, and forced exclusions" and responds by "giving voice to those who have been normally excluded and silenced" (Giroux, 1992, p, 209). Unfortunately, such pronouncements do not overcome the underlying problem of representational uncertainty. In a description of the "predicament of culture" that pertains more broadly to all of the social sciences, Clifford correctly struggles with the "ultimate dilemma of giving public form to personal experiences without betraying their peculiar lived authenticity" (1988, p. 167). While the centrality of interpretation (i.e. subjectivity) can lead to a crisis in the possibility of authentic portrayals of lived experience, this idea is a key insight of symbolic interactionism that can serve as the basis for a rigorous methodology (Denzin, 1989a, b). For Schutz, subjectivity provides an epistemological foundation for a methodology of lived experience: The problematic of subjective and objective meaning includes evidences of all sorts. That is to say, anyone who encounters a given product can proceed to interpret it in two different ways. First, he can focus his attention on its status as an object, either real or ideal, but at any rate independent of its maker. Second, he can look upon it as evidence for what went on in the mind of its makers at the moment it was being made. In the former case the interpreter is subsuming his own experiences . .. of the object under the interpretive schemes which he has at hand. In the latter case, however, his attention directs itself to the constituting Acts of consciousness of the producer .... Objective meaning therefore consists only in a meaning-context within the mind of the interpreter, whereas subjective meaning refers beyond it to a meaning-context in the mind of the producer (1967. pp. 133-134). The representational priority of subjectivity derives from the nature of interaction: "Social interaction is . . . a motivational context, and, in fact, an

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intersubjective m o t i v a t i o n a l c o n t e x t " (1967, p. 159). S i m i l a r to Blumer, interaction is an interpretive process because it depends upon an interchange b e t w e e n individuals and their cultural understanding or experiential k n o w l e d g e about the world. A l t h o u g h k n o w l e d g e is discursive - i.e. it e m e r g e s f r o m interaction and thus is contextual - not all accounts o f reality are equally authentic or representative: We must say that at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain it at that given moment. Skepticism begins if we conclude from this that our ideas are always false. But this can only happen with reference to some idol of absolute knowledge. We must say, on the contrary, that our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment - since they always express our contact with being and with culture - are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express .... The certainty of ideas is not the foundation of the certainty of perception but is, rather, based on it - in that it is perceptual experience which gives us the passage from one moment to the next and thus realizes the unity of time. In this sense all consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves .... Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp. 13-14, 21). T h e impossibility o f accounting for e v e r y t h i n g - i.e. e v e r y i n d i v i d u a l ' s experience - does not u n d e r m i n e the pursuit o f authenticity. T h e p r o b l e m of representation is not a crisis in the possibility o f rendering authentic depictions o f culture, but instead, a c h o i c e - albeit highly political - regarding w h o s e v o i c e s to include. This is not an arbitrary process because it depends on the cultural milieu o f interest. T h r o u g h careful definitions o f context one can limit the degree o f o m i s s i o n because not all p e o p l e are relevant to all contexts. Further, e v e n w h e n such definitions o f m i l i e u are provided, although v o i c e s will inevitably be misconstrued, this is only a crisis to the extent one holds absolute truth as o n e ' s criterion versus the attainable goal o f authentic approximation. G e e r t z ' s notion o f "thick description" remains a useful hermeneutic for rendering intelligible and authentic accounts o f cultural identity. It is an attempt to reconstruct "native" categories o f meaning: " W h a t we w a n t . . , is a developed m e t h o d o f describing and analyzing the m e a n i n g f u l structure o f e x p e r i e n c e (here, the e x p e r i e n c e o f persons) as it is apprehended by representative m e m b e r s o f a particular society at a particular point in t i m e - in a word, a scientific p h e n o m e n o l o g y o f culture" (1973, p. 364). Put differently, identity is discursive, yet, discernible and comprehensible. W h a t needs to be d e v e l o p e d are m e t h o d o l o g i e s for a c c o m p l i s h i n g this task

A M E T H O D O L O G Y OF C U L T U R A L IDENTITY B e f o r e discussing a particular m e t h o d for representing identities, the p r e c e d i n g discussion can be s u m m a r i z e d through a definition o f identity: identities are

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socially constructed representations of the self (i.e. discourses of the self) that enable and constrain interaction and thereby situate individuals in social structures. Although race, class, and gender represent a disproportionate share of the collective identities constituting social structures, identifies must be shown to derive from and be manifested in lived experience. This empirically driven perspective leads to the methodological challenge of trying to best represent lived identities. To begin, there are two basic models for creating identity typologies. First, one can recognize an average of similarities, failing to consider potentially important single factors. In this model, individuals who are most alike one another (i.e. have the most number of "variables" in common compared to others) are grouped together while ignoring linkages that do not represent a preponderance of the total number of factors. Second, distinct single factors can be given a disproportionate weight, excluding ties deemed theoretically insignificant even if there is numerical preponderance. In this instance, one presumes to know, a priori, what matters and/or there is a qualitative strength of fie that is not quantitatively significant. A related set of problems is how to define similarity and difference in order to render these models. Is similarity the mere absence of explicit difference or does it derive from distinct shared experience? Conversely, is difference the inability to locate commonality or is it based on explicitly contradictory tendencies? These problems inherent to methodology are important for understanding the processes in which all individuals come to identify "self" and "other." In other words, to what extent does one look for what one has most in common with others versus responding to a set of distinct, even if proportionately small, set of common experiences or attitudes? Do we associate with others based on salient commonalities or because there is no clear reason for opposition? The suggestion here is that identifies are based on mundane and profound aspects of experience and are deemed important based on qualitative and quantitative measures. Rather than struggle with these fundamental definitions of similarity and difference, the study of identity often entails the search for cultural differences that correspond to mutually exclusive identity clusters. Implied is this conception of identity is a continuum in which absolute difference represents the labeled identity types whereas similarities are ignored. The problem with the concept of "social difference" is that it implies the inverse of "universal." Because no person has complete autonomy - i.e. dissociation from society/culture - the notion of "difference" is misleading. Instead, it is best to think in terms of degrees of universality, with "strong" and "weak universality" representing the sides of a continuum. All human beings share a minimal number

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of experiences that render a weak universal identity. While some of these shared experiences are trivial, others can be substantive for identity. "Strong universals" typically occur among individuals within the widely recognized social structural categories of race, class, and gender. However, there are strong universal identifies based on other salient experiential frameworks. For example, one can distinguish between identifies based on institutional roles (e.g. spouse, student, attorney, etc.) and psychological characteristics (e.g. authoritarian, optimistic, carefree, etc.). Moreover, all of these types can be mutually constitutive. In order to render distinct identity groups without presupposing the relevant membership criteria, methods of social network analysis (Knoke & Kukliski, 1982; Krnskal & Wish, 1978; Wasserman & Faust, 1994) can be adapted to coded qualitative data. Importantly, these tools offer an analytically convincing solution to the challenge of data reduction (see, for example, Mohr, 1994; Mohr & Duqueene, 1997) that exemplify the inductive spirit of qualitative epistemology. Using network methods enables a fine-grained coding scheme in which one can avoid the tendency to aggregate categories of meaning early in the research process in order to facilitate the analysis (a common flaw of qualitative research). A benefit is a clearly defined interpretive method given the formal relationship between data and its analytical structure. All qualitative analysis entails strategies to reduce data and thereby derive analytical meaning. By using formal methods, one can be more consistent, particularly with large amounts of field data. By adapting network methods to perceptions about various aspects of everyday life, identities can be depicted in terms of structurally equivalent discourse. Using this approach, cultural identifies are groups of individuals whose perceptions on a related range of issues are most similar to each other when compared within a finite universe (delimited by the data set) of alternative discourses. Individuals who share a cultural identity do not express identical discourse, and may express likeness to members of other groups. Rather, members of an identity group are most similar (or least dissimilar) given the totality of their discourse compared across other individuals in the sample. This represents a compelling sociological approach because identity types are rendered from salient social groupings as opposed to individual trait similarity. While no two individuals have identical perceptions (a problem exacerbated by the lack of control when using open-ended interviews), even individuals who are most similar - in terms of structural equivalence - express views that are contradictory. The methodological problem of creating meaningful identity typologies lends itself substantively to the notion that identity does not conform

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to the categories depicted in the literature. In short, identities are complicated but proximately discernable sociologically.

CONCLUSION Taussig's "Nervous System" depicts a "postmodern world" in which he ponders: " . . . might the very concept of the social, itself a relatively modern idea, be outdated insofar as it rests on assumptions of stability and structure (1992, p. 17)?" Skepticism towards the legitimacy of social categories is a plausible outcome of postmodernity, yet, Taussig modifies this conjecture by stating that " . . . violent and unexpected ruptures in c o n s c i o u s n e s s . . . [are] not so much a psychological as a social and cultural configuration and it goes to the heart of what is politically crucial in the notion of terror as usual . . . " (pp. 17-18). Although the "Nervous System" is an emotional experience, the forces which generate it are social. We know it subjectively, but it is recognizable, thus meaningful, because of its collective or systemic nature. Nervousness results from social life taking on a passive normalcy, and as the social fabric unravels, we experience the terror of indeterminacy. Taussig conceptualizes the relationship between individuals and society in terms of a treachery in the social contract and the ensuing terror when identity no longer has clear social cues. The stage has been set for a representational crisis, particularly among those of us dissatisfied with conventional ways of knowing, but unprepared - for both practical and theoretical reasons - to abandon ship. Again, Taussig eloquently states the dilemma: •.. our very forms and means of representation are under siege .... To take social determination seriously means that one has to see oneself and one's shared modes of understandingand communicationincludedin that determining.To claim otherwise, to claim the rhetoric of systematicity'sdeterminismsand yet except oneself, is an authoritariandeceit, a magical wonder• Those of us who have had to abandon that sort of magic are left with a differentwondering;namely how to write the Nervous System that passes through us and makes us what we are - the problem being ... that every time you give it a fix, it hallucinates, or worse, counters your system with its nervousness,your nervousnesswith its system (1992, p. 10). If one remains committed - as I am - to rigorous and systematic understanding of human experience, one must proceed - somehow. It is necessary to recognize the discursive nature of knowledge without falling into the always present possibility of infinite regress. At some points and in some ways, reality is consequential. Despite our inability to make ultimate sense of it all, there is equal implausibility in the rejection of a comprehensible reality, based, as it is, on the power of existence. While this power can

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be understood as the ability to "make history" (Flacks, 1988), it also includes the force of subjectivity that animates lived experience. At a conference several years ago, 4 Stuart Hall discussed the dilemma of remaining committed to a political movement based on artificially constructed cultural categories. He spoke about his own conflict trying to remain active in race politics despite a theoretical conviction that all movements are incapable of giving voice to the varieties of racial (or other types of) experience. His answer was that one must compromise one's theoretical convictions in order to do something to fight the ongoing reality of racial oppression. In the end, experience and political necessity take precedence over theory. I have attempted to demonstrate that it is unnecessary to 'rob Peter-the-researcher/theorist to pay Paul-the-activist.' The salience of experience to which Hall remains committed is politically, epistemologically and methodologically robust. The centrality of identity begins with the notion that individuals constitute the social (DiMaggio, 1997; Zerubavel, 1997). Theoretical constructs such as institutions, states, hegemonies, nationalisms, etc., require evidence of the ways in which subjects manifest these macro-analytical frameworks in practice. As Sartre states, The world is outside; language and culture are not inside the individual like stamps registered by his nervous system. It is the individual who is inside culture and inside language (1968, p. 113). Indeed, agency is a fundamental characteristic of human experience, especially due to the contingencies and heightened "reflexivity" of late modernity (Giddens, 1990, 1991; Sahlins, 1985). While "time" and "space" are fundamental dimensions of modernity (Friedland & Boden, 1994), adding cultural identity completes the framework by providing an empirical means to ground otherwise elusive social forces. A social psychology of cultural identity seeks to understand human experience by connecting individual perceptions to the meta-domains of social structure, recognizing both the limits and possibilities inherent to social conditions of existence.

NOTES 1. In contrast, an essentialist epistemology contends that knowledge exists in nature and thus certain things are true and others false regardless of human presence. 2. Although I notice the inappropriate use of the male pronoun as neutral, it is tedious and distracting to point out every occurrence of this antiquated format. However, because one of the purposes of this paper is to overcome the unquestioned dominance of any identity characteristic - including, but not limited to, gender - I consider it necessary

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to state that unless otherwise noted, quoted passages which use the male pronoun refer to both men and women. 3. See, for example: Anzaldtla, 1990; Butler, 1990; Chabram-Dernersesian, 1992; Chen, 1995; Chodorow, 1995; D'Emilio, 1983; Fiske, 1992; Gates, 1985; Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Haraway, 1990; Hartsock, 1995; Kitzinger, 1993; Lorde, 1990; MacKinnon, 1995; McCarthy, 1995; Obeyesekere, 1995; Parker, 1989; Radway, 1984; Rich, 1980; Rutherford, 1990; Sampson, 1989; Sayers, 1990; Weeks, 1991; Wellman, 1993. 4. Decentering Identity, Recentering Politics, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE RACIAL ORDER John W. Murphy and Luigi Esposito

ABSTRACT In this article, we develop an understanding of racism based on a style of social control that recent writers have referred to as "symbolic violence." Symbolic violence is novel in that agents are oppressed through their own complicity as they accept and reproduce a "reality" that is made to appear unavoidable and even beneficial. Although many sociological discussions of racism have contributed to the sort of reification that leads to symbolic violence by understanding racial identities as essential, cultural ideals as ahistorical, and market dynamics as autonomous, we make the point that symbolic violence survives even as oppressed members are understood as active agents. We discuss how symbolic violence differs from other variants of racism and address the sort of theoretical maneuver that needs to be made if a more equitable order is to be fostered. Specifically, only by restoring the praxiology of language can race cease from being an immutable social fact that normalizes racial inequalities.

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INTRODUCTION Racism has taken different forms and meanings throughout American history. As is well known, the civil rights movement of the 1960s promoted legislative reforms that broke from blatant'forms of racism (i.e. Jim Crow). More recent variants are covert and unobtrusive. At the heart of these new modalities are discriminatory beliefs and practices that operate inconspicuously within the institutional and ideological structures of a free modem market. Most insidious about these new styles of racism is that they do not violate but instead are supported by democratic principles associated with individualism, merit, and equality of opportunity. Recent developments in race research have revealed two new forms of racism that fall under these general descriptions. One variant has been labeled "laissez faire" racism (Bobo, Kluegel & Smith, 1997), while another has been referred to as "symbolic racism" (Sears & Kinder, 1971; McConahay & Hough, 1976; Kinder & Sears, 1981; McConahay, 1982; Kinder, 1986; Sears, 1988; Hughes, 1997). The former focuses on structural-perceptual considerations including class dynamics and raced-based perceptual differences in the racial order, while the latter focuses on psychological-affective issues including the relevance of moral imperatives and the social learning of racial stigmas and stereotypes. Throughout this literature, there is a tendency to understand racism in terms of "common sense" explanations of racialized differences. Categories such as black and white are implicitly assumed to be ahistofical, unitary, and universal. Thus, for example, race is assumed to be an a priori construct that elicits specific responses, social meanings, or lines of action in the form of attitudes, stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination - all of which sustain racial inequality in the occupational structure, the housing market, education, and the legal system. No effort is made to understand how meanings of race and racial identity are contested and negotiated among different groups through processes of interaction that are played out in various social contexts and everyday practices. Accordingly, racialized structures of inequality are typically reinforced rather than investigated. These structures become reified and typically understood as the natural features of the so-called real world. According to James Mckee (1993), this sort of myopia has a long history in the American sociology of race relations. Although different theoretical approaches have been used to explain the "race problem" - from biological to culture to assimilation models - the point is that sociology has failed to under stand and/or predict shifts in the racial order by ignoring the struggles and tensions that underlie race relations. In short, the American sociology of race relations, as a tradition and perspective, defined the social world along various

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Eurocentric terms that ignored the voices of dissent and acts of resistance that gave new shapes and meanings to race relations - particularly during and after the civil rights era. Recent writers (elg. Hall, 1980, 1996; Omi & Winant, 1994) have sought to break from this sort of reductionism by advancing a theoretical understanding of racial domination based on the Gramscian notion of "hegemony." Rather than simply an outcome of institutional (e.g. economic) and ideological structures, racism is understood by these writers as a conjectural process imbricated in a host of social relations, all of which reflect different social positions, identities, and experiences. Accordingly, domination is never total because the different histories, identities, and experiences that interplay to produce racism - including its institutional features - are constantly reproduced in everyday practices and thus may take different forms and meanings that challenge structures of inequality. Herbert Blumer (1958) suggests a similar understanding of racism and racial prejudice as a formative process of ongoing definition whereby different groups define themselves and their world - including their identities and social positions - in relation to one another. Similarly, Cornel West (1993) uses the term "intertextual" to explain how racial identities are produced and played out in everyday life. In short, race, racial identity, and racism are embodied in meanings produced in human relations rather than derived from psychological properties, essential sources, or institutional features. Racism, accordingly, is something akin to a discursive formation embedded in various - often contradictory - histories, experiences, and identifies and thus subject to conflicts and tensions. Accordingly, in rethinking structures of inequality as discursive in nature, people become agents of social change as opposed to object-like entities whose identities and social positions are simply epiphenomena of essential features or institutionai imperatives associated with political policies, market demands, or cultural standards. Nonetheless, even when structures of domination are understood as discursive and relational, racism and racial inequality still survive. Consistent with the Francophone tradition which includes seminal works such as Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), Jean Paul Sartre's Anti-semite and Jew (1969), and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1967), racism arises in defence of a unique identity whose very privilege is predicated on defining other identities as as inferior, barbaric, or "different." Eventually, the resulting categories are reified to the point that resistance is subverted. Referring to Albert Memmi's recently published book tided Racism, Steve Martinot (2000, p. xxxiii) writes in the introduction that "people caught in being categorized, however much they may try to reappropriate [their

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identity] in order to reconstitute a sense of autonomy, nevertheless find themselves in a social structure that speaks for them and that drowns out their voice by doing so." People, in other words, are overcome by a racial reality that they are unable to control, and thus are readily marginalized and exploited. In this article, we develop an understanding of racism that avoids the structural reductionism espoused in much of current sociological literature, while at the same time providing a different angle to the historical, discursive, and relational understanding of racism and racial prejudice advanced by symbolic interacfionists (e.g. Blumer, 1958, 1965, 1980) and writers associated with cultural studies (e.g. Hall, 1980, 1992; Gilroy, 1987, 1993; Brah, 1992; Said, 1993). Central to our discussion is that racism in contemporary American society is akin to a style of social control referred to by recent writers as "symbolic violence" (Callaghan, 1997; Murphy & Choi, 1997; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 1993, 1991, 1990, 1986, 1977; Thompson, 1984). Although not many attempts have been made to address symbolic violence as a style of racism (for an exception see Callaghan, 1997), this mode of violence is novel in that disenfranchised racial groups are oppressed through their own complicity. Specifically, symbolic violence promotes conformity by totalizing knowledge and order in such a way that language is rendered passive. Accordingly, racism and racial inequality are perpetuated as people accept a "reality" that is made to appear inevitable and even beneficial. They become complicit by trying to improve themselves, as a result of internalizing particular mores that are made to appear universal and real. Literary critic Roland Barthes (1957, p. 155), referred to this style of domination when he wrote about a "metalanguage" that sustains an "inalterable hierarchy of the world." Specifically, by totalizing the symbolic code of social reality and purging systematically interpretation from language, the world becomes immutable, so-called facts are treated as objects, institutions and ideologies are granted a disturbing sense of autonomy, and persons are stripped of the possibility of imagining a different and more equitable order. People, in other words, are entrapped within a matrix of domination organized around hierarchically arranged symbols that are granted a sui generis status. Although resistance to this privileged reality may take place in group interactions and the meanings produced therein, the very ideological basis that substantiates the implied symbolic, cultural, and racial asymmetry is left intact. Specifically, challenges to cultural domination and racial privilege are typically reduced to exchanges that hold little promise for fostering alternatives to what is considered to be real and evident. Racism and racial inequality are thus entrenched within a ontological totality that eschews critique and defies alternatives.

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Our discussion is organized as follows. First, the theoretical legacy that leads to symbolic violence - commonly referred to as social ontological realism - is discussed in relation to the classical sociological tradition. In one way or another, many sociologists have supported and reproduced the sort of reification that sustains symbolic violence by understanding identities as essential, social order as functional, and social reality as autonomous. Second, we discuss how this tradition also influenced how sociologists have understood race and racism, and provide a general inventory of some of the different modalities of racism that have pervaded U.S. history - from biological to cultural to new styles of racism grounded on democratic ideals associated with a free market (e.g. laissez faire and symbolic racism). Third, we discuss modem racism as a form of symbolic violence and address how this style of racism differs from other variants. We make the point that although interpretive paradigms such as cultural studies and symbolic interactionism challenge the sort of totalization promoted in symbolic violence by focusing on the contested, agency-based character of social reality, these accounts fail to address directly the sort of theoretical shift that would allow a more equitable social order. Specifically, rather than simply offering accounts of opposing discourses, the aim must be to decenter meaning from reified epistemic foundations. In this manner, the praxis of language is restored and thus no particular symbol has the status necessary to silence or inferiorize others. Unless this theoretical maneuver is given serious considerations, symbolic violence faces little opposition.

MODERN SOCIOLOGY, REALISM, AND R A C E RELATIONS For some time, critics have been arguing that sociology has a conservative legacy. This point is central to Dennis Wrong's (1961) article on the "oversocialized concept of man." Basing his conclusions on the work of Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons, Wrong's argument is that most sociologists believe order will collapse in the absence of a widespread system of social constraints. The onset of what Parsons called the "Hobessian problem" is inevitable, in other words, unless a common set of standards is instituted to secure stability. As is well known, sociology was developed in 19th century Europe as an attempt to restore social order. According to the writers of this period, a moral social order can be maintained only if society is understood to be more than simply an aggregate of its parts. In Durkheim's terms, society must constitute a reality "sui generis." This sort of autonomy is granted to society through a

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particular philosophical gambit that some writers refer to as social ontological realism (see Murphy 1989). Central to realism is a dualistic understanding of the world whereby social reality exists independently of the ways in which people experience, define, and enact what is "real." With respect to early modern sociology, this sort of realism inspired the aim to find a moral order that transcends human contingencies. Rather than repressive, however, early sociologists were convinced that this type of order guaranteed a just and perfect society. Because order reflected ahistorical laws rather than political mandates, universal conformity benefited everyone. As people relate to one another on the basis of these laws and institutional imperatives, morality and social stability are possible. Order, stated differently, is justified by factors that no one interprets or controls, and therefore society is assumed to be fundamentally sound. As a result, social relations and social identities are assumed to be governed by an underlying order that gives them a specific meaning. This sets the stage to "normalize" human differences through a variety of strategies designed to regulate a society. This sort of realism - and the accompanying dualism - has also informed most ethnic and race relations research in American sociology (Ladner, 1973; Stanfield, 1993). According to John Stanfield (1993, p. 17), the racial categories typically employed by current sociologists and other social scientists are grounded on a realist conception of the world that divides various populations into a superior/inferior dualism. This dualism, moreover, was traditionally defined along genetic or phenotypic lines, all of which are understood as the objective manifestations of essential differences among the races. This acceptance of biological differences among the races was later abandoned starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and thus the "race problem" became "race relations" (McKee, 1993). Nonetheless, this initial obsession with categorizing the races along biological/phenotypic lines later led to the idea that races were culturally different, that assimilation was inevitable (as proposed by Robert Park), and that the American "moral dilemma" raised by Gunnar Myrdal (i.e. that a society committed to democracy was also a racist society) could be resolved only by assimilating blacks into the dominant white society and culture. In effect, as biological reductionism came under attack, racial categorizations were retained that pointed to essential differences among the races defined in cultural or behavioral terms. According to David Theo Goldberg (1993), these essential racial categories spawned a racialized language that sustains a racist culture. For example, terms typically employed by social scientists such as primitive, the Third World, and underclass are color coded. These sorts of representations transform people of color into "others" in such a way that their cultures and identities are assumed

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to be pathological deviations from white identities and cultures that embody morality and civility. Omi and Winant (1986/1994) make a similar point by arguing that researchers have traditionally relied on realist (e.g. essential) meanings of race that "normalize" structures of oppression. In short, the history of American research on race has been largely informed by realism and the quest to uncover the objective factors or conditions the mediate and specify the racial order while, at the same time, reifying a racial hierarchy. As a result of this realism, various types of racism have pervaded U.S. history. What follows is a discussion of these different variants.

TRADITIONAL RACISM: FROM GENES TO CULTURE Prior to the social and political liberalism of the 1960s, racism in the United States - particularly in the South - was pervasive. Court-ruled segregation, lynchings, voting restrictions, and many other unfavorable rules, practices, and conditions existed that were underpinned by a clear racist agenda. This type of racism has been referred to in recent literature as "Jim Crow" racism (e.g. Bobo, Kluegel & Smith, 1997) and/or "old fashioned" racism (e.g. McConahay & Hough, 1976; Kinder, 1986; Hughes, 1997). A brief description of this variant is necessary in order to compare its underlying assumptions to other forms of racism that emerged later. As stated above, blacks and other racial minorities had been typically understood to be genetically inferior to persons of pure European ancestry until the later half of the 19th century. That is, these groups were thought to represent a deviation from idealized versions of the human state. These biological (e.g. phenotypic) ideals were grounded on a Eurocentric vision of the world that tethered minorities (especially blacks) to the lower rungs of a presumed "natural" racial hierarchy. The advent of Darwinism gave these explanations scientific cogency, for principles of biological evolution (e.g. survival of the fittest) were often invoked to justify racial inequality (Hofstadter, 1944). From this perspective, the presumed natural inadequacies of these hapless groups meant that they were incapable of prospering in a civilized society. Thus, blacks and other racial minorities became known as the burden of white people. In terms of black-white relations, the general pattern that emerged from this imagery was described by Pierre van den Berghe (1966) as a "paternalistic model." Specifically, the dominant group legitimizes its authority through an ideology of racial supremacy and benevolent despotism. Like unruly children in need of discipline, blacks were punished - often severely - for rebelling or even questioning their subordination. In the view of many Southern whites,

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such discipline was needed and was the rightful thing to do, for blacks must become accustomed to the fact that they are inferior and cannot fend for themselves (Cell, 1982). Indeed, blacks were not thought to be intellectually equipped to partake in the country's political affairs and thus had to rely on whites for their welfare. In effect, whites had the moral obligation to assist blacks with their innate deficiencies. As modern social science debunked the so-called natural laws that justified this fixed racial arrangement, however, biology was replaced by culture as the principal explanation for the existence of a racial hierarchy. What emerged is commonly referred to as the "culture of poverty thesis" (e.g. Steinberg, 1989). Poverty and social failure, simply put, were attributed to deficient norms and values that were socially learned and intergenerational. Writers such as Patrick Moynihan (1965) and Edward Banefield (1970), to give examples, argued the need for the cultural rehabilitation of lower class blacks. In their view, poor blacks were entrapped within a web of cultural pathology and lacked the values that are necessary to foster social mobility in American society. In short, the only hope for blacks is to socialize them into more productive (white) values - including an appropriate work ethic - that encourages them to improve their life chances and those of their offspring (a claim also made implicitly by Gunnar Myrdal). As should be noted, many of these writers had noble intentions and genuinely sought to help disenfranchised racial minority groups. In a crucial respect, moving away from biological racism is consistent with democracy. Stated simply, this sort of determinism is incompatible with the idea that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. Nonetheless, cultural interpretations of racial inequality were hardly liberating and did not fare much better than Darwinism in humanizing race studies. In fact, Stephen Steinberg (1989, pp. 77-81) refers to the cultural of poverty thesis as a "new Darwinism," while Henry Louis Gates (1992, pp. 108-112) calls this viewpoint "cultural geneticism." According to Henry A. Giroux (1993), this new "cultural racism" is just as exclusionary as biological racism but operates under the guise of equality. E. Balibar (1991, p. 21) describes this new type of cultural racism as one " . . . whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but 'only' the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions" (as quoted by Mirrn & Inda, 2000, p. 98). In other words, culture including lifestyles and traditions - replaces biology as the fundamental marker of racial differences. At first glance, this cultural interpretation of racism seems to undermine the notion that there is a natural racial hierarchy - defined along biological -

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terms - that no one controls. People, in other words, are responsible for their own failures and marginalization. Inequality is simply the result of embracing lifestyles and traditions that hinder social mobility. Nonetheless, because realism is retained when discussing cultural differences, the door remains open to justify racial and cultural supremacy in the name of progress, civility, prosperity, or rationality. Specifically, blacks and other disempowered groups are usually portrayed as "others' who - because of their "different" cultures - are condemned to live in the shadows of the mainstream. Their marginality, in other words, is explained typically in terms of the prevailing (Eurocentric) beliefs, norms, and values - including issues of morality and social behavior linked to Victorian secular progress and ideals of individualism, efficiency, and productivity associated with the Protestant work ethic - that their "different" cultures are said to lack. Accordingly, being culturally different is tantamount to being immoral or pathological. In this sense, cultural racism is not necessarily a break from biological determinism. As noted by Miron and Inda (2000, p. 98), "cultures considered incommesurable to the national [i.e. dominant] culture almost always belong to people whose visible characteristics distinguish them from the majority 'white' population." Accordingly, the alleged pluralism that is said to characterize U.S. race relations has not fostered the equal playing field that many people believe is the most salient virtue of American democracy. In short, because European ideals are dressed as "cultural universals" (Gilroy, 1990, p. 190), anything deviating from whiteness comes to be seen as "other" and inferior. As a result, white dominance is sustained. Indeed, long after the political advances of the 1960s, this realist Eurocentric cultural legacy remained at the core of the American zeitgeist that spawned the "gentler" types of racism that surfaced during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s all of which operate within a discourse of social liberalism and egalitarianism. What follows is a description of these new variants.

M O D E R N RACISM: ATTITUDINAL TRENDS AND EMPIRICAL BACKGROUND Both laissez faire and symbolic racism were developed on the basis of findings in attitudinal research that reveal quantitative discrepancies among beliefs about race, equality, and social policy. A brief outline of these general trends must be understood in order to appreciate fully these models' similarities and differences, as well as how they differ from the notion of symbolic violence. A common belief that the United States offers all its citizens ample opportunity for social and economic success, coupled with cherished values

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such as individualism, have set the stage for most whites to attribute the social or economic adversity of blacks to personal failure (Kluegel & Smith, 1986, pp. 179-213). Central to this position is the idea that racism no longer represents a significant problem in American society, and thus racial discrimination is no longer a viable justification for unfavorable social and economic positions. Many recent scholars have contributed to this sort of outlook by claiming that racial inequality is a dwindling problem in contemporary politics (e.g. Sniderman & Piazza, 1993), the economy (e.g. Wilson, 1978), and other areas of American society (e.g. D'Souza, 1995). These sorts of widespread beliefs have prompted many middle and upper class whites to be suspicious of the moral integrity and work ethic of lower class blacks (Kinder & Sears, 1981). Although most whites report adhering to racial equality in principle (Schuman, Steeh & Bobo, 1985; Firebaugh & Davis, 1988; Steeh & Schuman, 1992), they tend to reject the need for social policies that aim to improve the social and economic status of racial minority group members (Bobo & Smith, 1994; Kluegel & Smith, 1986). After all, if racism is no longer a problem, why would racial/ethnic minorities need such policies? In short, most whites understand such policies to be unfair handouts and anathema to the principles of individualism and self-reliance that characterize American democracy (Kluegel & Smith, 1986). Today, this sort of racial backlash is at the heart of social constructions of whiteness (Gallagher, 1995). Although many whites associate with particular ethnic groups, they typically lack a racial consciousness (Waters, 1990). Nonetheless, politically driven images of the U.S. as an egalitarian, colorblind society, coupled with unfavorable reactions against race-based policies such as affirmative action, have led many young whites to transform the meaning of whiteness "from privileged oppressors to [a] socially disadvantaged group" (Storrs, 1999, p. 193; see also Gallagher, 1995). Whiteness, in effect, is not necessarily grounded on race but rather on a steadfast opposition against racebased policies that are geared to improve the status of racial minorities. LAISSEZ

FAIRE

RACISM

On the basis of these findings, proponents of laissez faire racism explain the reluctance of whites to favor the political implementation of racial equality as an insidious attempt to defend white privilege (Bobo & Kluegel, 1993; Bobo, Kluegel & Smith, 1997). The theoretical basis of this thesis is Herbert Blumer's (1958) group position theory, which pertains to the idea that racially-neutral imperatives in the economy (i.e. principles of equal opportunity and standards of efficiency and productivity) have accomodated themselves to an already

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existing racial hierarchy that is perpetuated by a sense of group position. This perceived positional arrangement is collectively constructed and rooted in historical processes - including colonization, slavery, and the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy - whereby a racial order is established that defines each groups' "proper place" in society. Hence, racism is understood as an attitudinal dynamic whereby in-group members (i.e. the dominant group) perceive those belonging to out-groups (i.e. subordinate groups) as a "threat" to the dominant position they consider to be rightfully theirs (Bobo, Kluegel & Smith, 1997). The result is the perpetuation of exclusionary practices that are not thought to be racist in nature. After all, the rules and outcomes of trading are not tied directly to race. A historical background that has been racist is simply presumed and never confronted in this model. The economy is assumed to be a reality sui generis. Accordingly, social changes or advancements that may upset an implicitly perceived racial hierarchy may trigger new attitudes among whites that attempt to subvert such advances (e.g. rejecting race-based policies such as affirmative action and busing are examples). In sum, the "threat factor" proposed by Blumer is elevated in importance. However, in the quest to quantify this "threat factor," proponents of laissez faire racism largely base their analyses on the attitudes of whites. These attitudes and the structures that shape them are later used to explain racial inequality in places such as the occupational structure and the housing market. In this sense, the intersubjective dimension of Blumer's understanding of racial prejudice is largely overlooked (Esposito & Murphy, 1999). Rather than investigating the relational thrust of prejudice (i.e. how groups define themselves in opposition to others and the different experiences and contested meanings that mediate this process) specific outcomes are proposed that offer little insight into the actual interaction that underlies race relations. The end result is that blacks - including their actions, beliefs, and experiences - are either ignored or not given serious attention when analyzing contemporary racism. SYMBOLIC

RACISM

In symbolic racism, the focus is placed on social learning and the psychological-affective nature of racial attitudes. Instead of focusing on group interest, perceived group positions, and the "threat" factor proposed in laissez faire racism, symbolic racism relies on moral imperatives and the social learning of racial stigmas and stereotypes to explain racism and prejudicial attitudes. Unlike old fashioned or Jim Crow racism that is predicated on gross stereotypes and blatant discrimination, proponents of symbolic racism recognize that racist

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expression has become a lot more sophisticated. Simply put, changes in the racial order are hindered by attaching negative affects to ostensibly non-racial elements such as "quotas" and "busing" (see Pettigrew, 1985, p. 338). In this sense, whites will tend to oppose busing and affirmative action not because they believe that these issues represent a threat to members of their group, but because they believe that the recipients of these policies - the majority of which are black - violate noble American values such as individualism, hard work, self-reliance, and discipline (Hughes, 1997; Kinder & Sears, 1981). Accordingly, the prevalent belief that the United States is a fair and just society - Kluegel and Smith (1986) refer to this as "the dominant ideology" along with the social learning of stereotypes that depict blacks as violators of traditional American values, have interplayed to promote a widespread belief among whites that blacks "want more than simply the rights that everyone else has. Blacks are too pushy, too demanding, too angry . . . and they are getting more than what they deserve" (McConahay & Hough, 1976, p. 38). Blacks violate standards that are simply logical and lead naturally to economic and other types of success. Hard work and discipline, for example, are traits that will improve everyone, regardless of race. Although symbolic racism is indeed more sophisticated than old fashioned racism, the central focus of this thesis - like that proposed in laissez faire racism - is the attitudes and beliefs of whites. The idea that blacks themselves are both constrained and seduced to reproduce the symbolic imperatives that reinforce their repression is overlooked. The alleged neutral values of success exist within an exclusionary system that most persons never think about abandoning. For the most part, the majority of whites are said to differ from many blacks in attitudinal measures about the American stratification system, in that the former tend to have "individualistic explanations" for class and racial inequality (e.g. lack of moral values, indolence, etc.), while the latter attribute poverty and social adversity to structural constraints (e.g. lack of an adequate education, lack of productive social networks, lack of resources, etc.) that hinder many lower class people of profiting from respectable American values associated with individualism and self reliance (Siegelman & Welch, 1991). These structural explanations may sound liberating, in that persons are not held accountable for their unfortunate social positions. However, this interpretation - which many blacks embrace - also implies that persons must learn how to navigate this system of institutional constraints. Sometimes a few persons succeed in this endeavor. The majority, however, are either marginalized or seek relief provided by programs such as affirmative action or other government interventions. To many people, these interventions represent the violation of a logic that is basic to any rational society.

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To give an example, even among lower class blacks, policies such as affirmative action lose support when issues such as "quotas" enter into the picture (Seigelman & Welch, 1991, pp. 126-134). In effect, most blacks, like whites, refrain from favoring policies that go against democratic ideals including equal treatment, merit, and self reliance. Here again, structural restrictions are said to exist that hinder blacks and other minority groups from capitalizing on such values. The idea that these values themselves are at the heart of contemporary racist discourse is not given serious attention. Most important, the dynamics that compel blacks to reproduce the same ideals that bolster their subordination are ignored.. SYMBOLIC

VIOLENCE

In contrast to laissez faire or symbolic racism, symbolic violence is neither purely structural nor strictly affective. That is, attitudes cannot be understood outside of the structural imperatives that influence them, nor can structural considerations be fully appreciated without taking into account the actions, beliefs, and behaviors that give them meaning. And because all these considerations inevitably emerge from linguistic exchanges, language becomes the means whereby power is subtly exercised (Bourdieu, 1991; Thompson, 1991). 1 Indeed, Bourdieu (1992) emphasizes that both habitus (i.e. the mental or cognitive images whereby people perceive themselves, others, and their world) and fields (i.e. the network of social relations that make up social structures) are outgrowths of communicative interactions. More simply stated, through modes of linguistic praxis, the perceptual parameters are established whereby the objective world is understood. In this sense, so-called racist institutions cannot be understood outside the dialogical exchanges whereby these organizations are negotiated, established, understood, and reproduced. At first glance, this idea may seem hardly repressive. Indeed, arguing that both structures and beliefs are mediated by linguistic exchanges implies a sense of empowerment that many structural theories lack. As already discussed, symbolic interactionists, such as Herbert Blumer, and students of cultural studies such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others agree with this sort of approach by understanding all social relations in terms of negotiated meanings and lines of action that are typically in conflict. A similar approach is adopted by Omi and Winant (1986/1994), who emphasize the political thrust of all social constructions of race - w h a t they call "racial formation." Race, according to Omi and Winant (1986, p. 1), has always been and continues to be a "profound determinant of one's political rights, one's location in the labor market, and

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indeed one's sense of identity." Accordingly, race and racial dynamics cannot be appropriately subsumed into paradigms grounded on ethnicity, class, or nation that they claim have dominated discussions of race relations. According to these writers, these approaches have downplayed the construction of race as a central axis of social relations (Omi & Winant, 1986, p. 61). At the same time, race is neither "essence . . . something fixed, concrete, and objective . . . [nor is it] a mere illusion, which an ideal social order would eliminate" (Omi & Winant, 1986, p. 68) Instead, race is always embedded within a complex network of competing meanings and practices that both shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political forces. In short, people are portrayed as agents of change that routinely challenge white hegemony. Nonetheless, symbolic violence is sustained even when people are understood to be active agents. To many people, this assertion may appear to be contradictory. After all, if communicative interactions are what create and mediate the social (and hence racial) order, then why would people choose to be repressed? Furthermore, if most people in the United States adhere to the principle of racial equality, why would they engage in actions that promote domination? To answer these queries appropriately, one must first understand that symbolic violence does not rely on specific agents of socialization or systemic constraints to secure domination. Instead, the aim is to neutralize discourse and subsume all modes of interpretation and interaction into a predefined rendition of the social world that seems rational, fair, and beyond question. As a result, identifying a particular class of people as agents of repression is very difficult. Repression, in short, is understood to be a natural part of the social order. Once established, this arrangement, and the asymmetrical social relations within it, become static and beyond serious challenge. In this sense, actors are stripped of the power to even rebel against the prevalent status quo. Not only is any basis for resistance undermined by this position, but even the most oppressed members of society fail to recognize that their own subordination is predicated on a reified imagery that their actions and beliefs sustain. For this reason, Pierre Bourdieu and Lo'fc Wacquant (1992, p. 167) define symbolic violence as a type of domination that "is exercised upon an agent with his or her complicity." That is, persons become accomplices to their own oppression by constantly aligning their actions and beliefs to a specific world view that is made to appear self evident. As all communicative interaction is directed toward this universal rendition of the world, an unalterable hierarchy is established by totalizing language. All speech acts, in other words, are entrenched within reified symbols that signify a priori renditions of reality. In the end, these symbols and the meanings they represent support racial elitism

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by reifying the basic Eurocentric values that are said to be the hallmark of American democracy. Here again, realism is present but in a new form. But if such values are supposed to represent freedom and equality, why is racism still a pervasive problem in American society? Bourdieu (1991, 1993) offers an answer to this question by proposing the existence of a "linguistic market" that is monopolized by specific members of society (namely upper and middle class whites). However, because this market places a premium on meanings and symbols that are presumably accessible to every member of society (e.g. hard-work, merit, etc.), the power arrangements that are promoted are obscured and overlooked. Specifically, dominant symbols are accepted by all groups to represent universal mandates that presumably insure everyone's welfare and thus contribute to the common good. The exalted values sustained by American democracy are grounded on this rhetoric. For example, because specific interpretations of morality, rationality, intelligence, talent, and even beauty are understood by everyone to represent neutral meanings untainted by the whims and opinions of people, they become normative referents to which all other meanings are compared and measured. In sum, these ideals produce the most "symbolic profit" for anyone who adopts them. 2 Nonetheless, according to Bourdieu (1990, pp. 84-85), because whites are implicitly the "authorized representatives" of these dominant symbols including phenotypic, moral, and cultural ideals - the stage is set to bolster racial domination by means of linking the "force of the universal" to the "force of the official". The social and cultural capital that is acquired as a result of adhering to these symbols, in other words, produces differing levels of symbolic profit that are race-based and asymmetrical. As noted by Bourdieu (1986, p. 245), this sort of domination "manages to combine the prestige of innate property with merits of acquisition." Specifically, whites are endowed with an innate (although implicit) cultural or symbolic capital that blacks lack, but which the principles of (American) meritocracy conceal. For this reason, whites will profit more than blacks by adhering to ideals associated with merit and self reliance. To be sure, numerous studies have found that blacks who are middle class, college educated, and generally conform to basic American values do not fare as well as whites with the same sorts of attributes (Feagin & Feagin, 1997). And even the most affluent of blacks who have fulfilled the so-called American dream by adhering to these values constantly encounter discrimination, are generally dissatisfied with their lives, and in fact are less optimistic than lower class blacks about their futures (Hochschild, 1995).

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In short, the ideals that extol hard-work and merit as the sole criteria for social and economic success are by no means color blind. Nonetheless, a rational facade is placed on these values that secures white hegemony. Attributing success to individual ability, talent, and effort provides a smooth veneer to the racial inequality that these definitions produce. RACIAL

DOMINATION

THROUGH

CONSENT

Symbolic Violence advances an understanding of racial domination that is underpinned by a powerful discourse that defies the usual dichotomy of freedom and constraint (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 50-51). Specifically, oppressed racial minorities are subordinated through their own choices (i.e. their own freedom). In fact, whites do not even have to pursue their dominance through socialization or other active means. As noted by Bourdieu (1977, p. 190), "the dominant group[s] have only to let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise its domination." In this regard, the social system is legitimately autonomous and something that transcends individual preferences and personal biases. So, how can this rational and ideal realism support prejudice and discrimination? In this sense, racism (including racist practices and prejudicial attitudes) is no longer a by-product of "threat" factors proposed in laissez faire racism, nor is racism the natural outcome of social learning or the violation of moral imperatives by minorities as argued in symbolic racism. Instead, the idea is proposed that as subordinated persons actively strive for self improvement and symbolic profit, they reproduce and reaffirm hegemonic symbols that bolster their oppression. Focusing on socialization in this way, on the other hand, implies that people are taught to adhere to a specific set of values, commitments, and beliefs that exist alongside a plethora of other legitimate possibilities. Devoid of these alternative options, what would be the point of socialization? With regard to symbolic violence, however, this insight is lost and persons seem to confront an inviolable reality. For example, the standard definitions of success and failure - that are for the most part rooted in the experiences and interests of whites have become such a vital part of contemporary American culture, economy, and politics that they no longer face serious challenges from alternative interpretations. For this reason, blacks and other disempowered groups explain their subordination by often engaging in the same supremacist discourse that justifies their marginality. Even many black scholars who are committed to undermining racism, for example, advocate the refinement of standardized testing instruments that

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measure factors such as intelligence and academic ability (see Stanfield, 1994, p. 182). Indeed, the heated debate sparked by Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) claim that blacks have on average lower scores on IQ tests compared to whites, and thus are less intelligent, was largely limited to technical considerations. However, the logic of inquiry that underpins instruments such as IQ tests (i.e. formalization, standardization, quantification, etc.) are seldom challenged. The prospects for rebelling against the established order, therefore, are subverted. Searching for new and more refined means of asssessment is not the same as addressing the issues that support and reinforce prejudice and injustice. At best, "oppositional cultures" are said to be constructed by racial/ethnic groups living in repressive conditions that give them a sense of empowerment and self identity (Mitchell & Feagin, 1995; Martinez, 1997). The work of Robin Kelley (1994) exemplifies this style of research. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, Paul Willis and other writers associated with the Birmingham Center for cultural studies, Kelley elevates in importance the oppositional nature of American black culture. For example, he provides an interesting account of the strategies of resistance that have been used among many blacks to rebel against racial segregation in public transportation. In a revealing passage, Kelley (1994, p. 70) writes: "No matter how well drivers, conductors, and signs kept bodies separated, black voices could flow easily into the section designated for whites, serving as a constant reminder that racially divided public spaces was a contested terrain." In short, Kelley (here again) portrays working class black people as agents of social change. Clearly, Kelley's work is important and elevates in importance the voices of people who have been traditionally silenced in both public and social scientific discussions. But despite this sort of empowerment, the modes of action and meanings that comprise these oppositional cultures seldom pose a serious threat to or become a central part of white society. In this case, transportation systems simply lead to workplaces that are undemocratic and replete with barriers to the advancement of blacks and other minorities. Changing the fundamental character of the economy, for example, has been restricted to tinkering at its periphery. To be sure, predominantly black cultural/artistic movements such as hip hop culture and rap music - which sometimes convey stories and narratives of the African American experience - are most often divested of their oppositional nature by becoming commodified, distorted, and subsumed within the dominant culture, not as expressions of political struggle but rather as sources of entertainment for consumers who are mostly white. Moreover, the idea that ghettos are "organized according to different principles, in response to a unique set of structural and strategic constraints" (Waquant, 1997, p. 346) is usually ignored. Most often, these places are

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exoticized or viewed in light of dominant Eurocentric interpretations that define these communities as "disorganized" and morally deficient (Waquant, 1997). Even many celebrated ethnographical studies of race have fallen into this sort of trap in their attempts to restore and element of dignity, morality, and respectability among lower class blacks by portraying them as endowed with white, middle class values (see Esposito & Murphy, 2000). Most important, many blacks have also accepted the adequacy of these portrayals and willingly reproduce them in their quest for social improvement. A prime example of this tendency can be found among many contemporary black community leaders who denounce ghetto related norms and traditions -including the use of vernaculars and mannerisms associated with ebonics and hip hop culture to be a type of vulgar populism that is destructive and uncivilized. According to Errol Henderson (1996, pp. 308-308), rather than finding "African-centered definitions of manhood and womanhood rooted in righteous behavior, support for liberation . . . [and] Afrocentric community building . . . too many in the Black community, their white supremacism intact, simply parrot the EuroAmerican condemnation of hip-hop. ''3 Here again, the dominance of Eurocentric symbols is reinforced in these renditions of black culture and people. Values that may threaten the "official language" or prevailing status quo are inferiorized and stripped of any symbolic profit. Questioning authority or basic American values is often equated with moral bankruptcy. Accordingly, racial minorities are easily subordinated through their own complicity. In other words, racism and racial inequality are sustained as blacks themselves strive for symbolic profit and self-enrichment that are made to appear racially neutral. PERPETUAL

ALIENATION

The aim in this discussion of symbolic violence is not to leave persons in an untenable situation, whereby they cannot escape from their alienation. In fact, mainstream sociologists have been contributing to the sense of powerlessness and meaningless experienced by many groups and individuals for quite some time. As a result of describing the social world in structural and causal terms, the image has been created that institutions are autonomous and operate according to natural laws. Those who expect upward mobility, accordingly, must be pragmatic and adjust or assimilate effectively to the demands made by these organizations. Anyone who might consider rebelling is given a strong dose of realism by the social imagery advanced traditionally by most sociologists. And of course, the imagery conveyed by symbolic violence epitomizes this trend.

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Moreover, subsequent to the widespread critique of Herbert Marcuse's (1964) book One Dimensional Man, social critics have come to understand that change is not likely in the absence of any ability to transcend repressive conditions. If social control is described to be so thorough and complete that change appears to be impossible, persons may begin to feel helpless rather than inspired. For example, although they may be well intentioned, many critics of capitalism have described this economic system in such a manner that rebellion appears to be idealistic and unlikely to succeed. With social actors overwhelmed by structural or empirical conditions, praxis is eviscerated and fatalism is encouraged. Nonetheless, symbolic violence does create a novel condition that proponents of change should understand. That is, merely rejecting a label or stigma is not sufficient to promote freedom or diversity, because this new mode of control is able to manage acts of refusal and make them appear to be illogical or irrational. Something more than simply a "counter-narrative" is needed to provide the social world with a new direction. Any refusal, instead, must not be merely a reaction but a freely developed option. This kind of choice is not necessarily an extension of the so-called opportunity structures that are prescribed by various institutionalized practices. An unmanaged option, in other words, grows out of praxis and defies labels such as idealistic, irrational, or deviant. When conceived in this way, an act of refusal is one choice among others that, later, may begin to acquire negative or positive political connotations. Stated differently, when options are understood to emerge from praxis, both the dominant reality and the proposals that accompany rebellion are nothing but opposing options, rather than a reality juxtaposed to a flight of fantasy. In this way, persons are not stiffled by reality but simply their own imagination. This sort of theoretical maneuver has been advanced by the most progressive elements of the Afrocentrist movement. As Molefi K. Asante (1990, p. 12) says, Afrocentrism represents the idea that Africa should no longer live in the shadow of Europe. His point is not simply that the influence of Europe should be rejected, but that the culture associated with this continent is not universal and thus does not have the right to suppress other viewpoints. Rather than constituting a reality sui generis that all people must either accept or deny, Europe merely represents one approach among others to constructing a society. Because of this change of status from a universal to an option, Europe is no longer the key reference that must be consulted by everyone before any choice about behavior is made. Europe is not the framework that all persons must use to rationalize their actions and cultures. What Afrocentrists do is to undermine the social realism that forces people to be either rational or irrational, or stated differently, accept European

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standards or face the threat of marginalization. Because these writers are anti-dualistic, the privileged position of Europe is undermined; Europe is simply a particular interpretation of reality. And because Europe does not constitute a reality sui generis - an uncontested set of cultural ideals - choices are not irrational simply because they diverge from European standards. In the absence of the usual absolutes, Europe must compete with other renditions of identity, politics, and history for recognition. All that is possible now are "authentic" choices that represent diverse perspectives, none of which can demand automatic and general recognition. In this sense, persons are free to make themselves in various ways, without the fear of stigmatization because they do not choose one direction or another. There can no longer be maintained a so-called natural distinction between normalcy and deviance, for example, because such a differentiation is now understood to represent diverse interests. And coming into conflict with particular interests does not have the same repercussions as violating fundamental moral principles. What is important to recognize at this juncture is that challenging symbolic violence requires a sophisticated theoretical maneuver. Denying or rejecting particular norms or demands is insufficient to liberate persons from the confines of unfair strictures. Now the ahistorical character of the realities that perpetuate this violence must be exposed as untenable. Indeed, in the absence of dualism claims about certain norms existing sui generis are difficult to sustain. Accordingly, more possibilities are available than merely responding pragmatically to specific institutions or risking social exclusion. Every modality of reality is available for critique and possible selection without a priori conditions that detail their utility. A fecund reality is presented that can be reworked in an almost unlimited manner. CONCLUSION Racism in the United States and elsewhere has taken a nasty turn. Cultural and racial supremacy, for example, are able to hide in places that, subsequent to the Enlightenment, are supposed to be free of such biases. For example, science and related rational practices have become a key means to conceal acts of discrimination. Because science is thought to consist of what might be called a fundamental vocabulary, this particular language is assumed to be neutral and a conduit for reality. This modality of realism, like all of its other forms, creates the illusion of neutrality and universality. As a result, statements about race are provided with a patina of objectivity and rationality. But the insights provided by Herrnstein and Murray (1994), for example, are not new but are part of a long

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history of claims about eugenics, colonization, and segregation. In other words, their strategy is political and contingent, as opposed to disinterested and simply driven by data. Nonetheless, the modus operandi adhered to by these and similar authors requires that the language known as scientific be thoroughly deanimated, so that their data can be made to appear unbiased to the public. How else can their scurrilous social agenda hope to succeed? Language, however, is never innocent. According to Barthes (1982), any attempt to obscure the contingent and incomplete character of language is doomed to fail. For there is no way that something as thoroughly existential as language can be made absolute. Those who study race relations, however, are witnessing an attempt to make language appear autonomous, thereby reviving an old rationale for racism. The aim is not only to stigmatize minorities, but to manage and redirect their responses to these efforts. Through the use of symbolic violence, their reactions can be restricted to a narrow and ineffective range. They can only complain about this situation, like everyone who laments the absence of justice in the so-called real world, or appear to be unreasonable. Reversing this tactic of inferiorization is not impossible, due to the creative capacity and unpredictability of language, but has become increasingly difficult to undermine. New conceptual and philosophical tools are necessary to undermine symbolic violence and liberate persons from this strategy of control. One recent effort to undermine this sort of control is made by Louis F. Mir6n and Jonathan Xavier Inda (2000). Following the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, these writers develop an understanding of race as a kind of speech act. Central to their argument is the idea that nothing outside of language can be invoked to justify a hierarchy of meanings/statements. Dualisms such as true/false, inferior/superior, civil/barbaric, in other words, are rethought as language games that inevitably derive from the same source-human praxis. This also suggests that because race is nothing but a "sedimented effect of reiterative practices, it must be susceptible to being rewritten, and that systems of racial domination are not systematic totalities destined to keep racialized subjects in positions of subordination." Instead, because race lacks any a priori significance and instead must be necessarily produced mad reproduced in everyday practices, racial identity must be rethought as "performative" as opposed to essential. Moreover, language is no longer simply a communicative tool but rather mediates everything that is known. In other words, far from simply pointing to objects, events, or people, language actually shapes all aspects of reality. This means that the meanings placed on race and racial subjects - no matter how repetitive and long-lived - are always a product of reiteration. Stated otherwise, only through linguistic praxis, through a process of performativity in

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naming and enacting "what is" can it be possible to sustain the naturalized effect of language. A n d because every utterance is a product o f praxis, race is a never-ending construct. As summarized nicely by Mir6n and Inda (2000, p. 101) "the constitution of a racial subject is never complete." In effect, only when race ceases to be an immutable "social fact," and instead is rethought as a mode of praxis, can the sort of totality associated with symbolic violence be undermined. Understanding that even "reality" is predicated on a specific language game calls into question the static world sustained by realism. Subsequent to this linguistc turn, a world engendered in non-hierarchical relations becomes not merely a utopian dream or even a moral obligation, but rather an ontological necessity. In sum, only by making this sort of theoretical shift can sociology begin to challenge the sorts of "natural inequalities" fostered by symbolic violence. NOTES 1. On this crucial point, consider Thompson's (1984, p. 2) description when he notes that "Bourdieu portrays everyday linguistic exchanges as situated encounters between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and reproduces." Here again, language (or "linguistic praxis") both produces and is shaped by social structure. According to Bourdieu, the two - language and structure - are inextricably bound to one another. 2. Consider the example of female physical beauty. Many black females straighten their hair and bleach their skin in order to enhance their attractiveness (see Leeds, 1997). Most often, these practices are not viewed-by either whites or blacks-as examples of self-annihilation, but rather as a rational, calculated means devoted to self improvement. In this case, adhering to European ideals of female pulchritude presumably yields the most symbolic profit (i.e. beauty) to anyone that adopts this criteria. 3. Although Henderson does not dismiss the notion that hip hop culture (e.g. gangsta rap) is often detrimental in terms of its tendency to celebrate violence and sexism, he does see hip hop as having the potential to fuse black popular and national culture in such a way that become Afrocentric and transformative. However, this objective has been undermined by negative media representations of black popular culture. He writes: "As the black media and its black surrogates began to paint hip-hop as inherently violent • . . it seemed as though hip-hop would be attacked, that concerts, bookings, and dollars would be lost under the guise of preventing the violence that hip hop 'naturally' spawned" (Henderson, 1994, p. 322).

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Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic. London: Verso. Goldberg, D. T. (1993). Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hall, S. (1980). Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance. In: Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (pp. 305-343). Paris, France: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Hall, S. (1992). The Question of Cultural Identity. In: S. Hall, D. Held & T. McGrew (Eds), Modernity and Its Futures. London: Polity/The Open University. Hall, S. (1996). The Relevance of Gramsci in Race Relations. In: D. Morley & K. H. Chen (Eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London & NY: Routledge. Henderson, E. A. (1996). Black Nationalism and Rap Music. Journal of Black Studies, 26, 308-339. Herrnstein, R., & Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve. NY: The Free Press. Hochschild, J. L. (1995). Race, Class, and Soul of the Nation: Facing up to the American Dream. Princeton, NJ: Princenton University Press. Hofstadter, R. (1944). Social Darwinism in American Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hughes, M. (1997). Symbolic Racism, Old-Fashioned Racism, and Whites' Opposition to Affirmative Action. In: S. A. Tuch & J. K. Martin (Eds), Racial Attitudes in the 1990s (pp. 45-75). Westport, CT: Praeger. Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. NY: The Free Press. Kinder, D. R., & Sears, D. O. (1981). Prejudice and Politics: Symbolic Racism versus Racial Threats to the Good Life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 414-431. Kinder, D. R. (1986). The Continuing American Dilemma: White Resistance to Racial Change 40 years after Myrdal. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 151-171. Kiuegel, J. R., & Smith, R. A. (1986). Beliefs About Inequality: Americans" Views of What is and What Ought to Be. NY: Aldine De Gruyter. Ladner, J. A. (1973). The Death of White Sociology. New York: Random House. Leeds, M. (1994). Young African-American Women and the Language of Beauty. In: K. A. Callaghan (Ed.), Ideals of Feminine Beauty. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. Martinez, T. A. (1997). Popular Culture as Opposifional Culture: Rap and Resistance. Sociological Perspectives, 40, 265-286. McConahay, J. B., & Hough, J. C., Jr. (1976). Symbolic Racism. Journal of Social Issues, 32, 23-45. McConahay, J. B. (1982). Self-interest Versus Racial Attitudes as Correlates of Anti-Busing Attitudes in Louisville: Is it the Buses or the Blacks? Journal of Politics, 44, 692-720. McKee, J. B. (1993). Sociology and the Race Problem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Memmi, A. (1991). The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. Memmi, A. (2000). Racism. Translated and with an Introduction by Steven Martinot. Minneapolis, University of Arizona Press. Mir6n, L. F., & Xavier Inda, J. (2000). Race as a Kind of Speech Act. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual, 5, 85-107. Mitchell, B. L., & Feagin, J. R. (1995). America's Racial-Ethnic Cultures: Opposition Within a Mythical Melting Pot. In: B. Bowser, T. Jones & G. A. Young (Eds), Toward the Multicultural University (pp. 65-86). Westport, CT: Praeger. Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor.

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Murphy, J. W. (1989). Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Murphy, J. W., & Choi, J. M. (1997). Symbolic Violence and Social Control. In: Postmodernism, Unraveling Racism, and Democratic Institutions. Westport, CT: Praeger. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial Formation in the U.S.: From 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). NY: Routledge. Pettigrew, T. F. (1985). New Black-White Patterns: How Best to Conceptualize Them? Annual Review of Sociology, 11, 329-346. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Sartre, J.-P. (1969). Anti-Semitic and Jew. NY: Shocken. Schuman, H., Steeh, C., & Bobo, L. (1985). Racial Attitudes in America: Trends"and Interpretations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sears, D. O. (1988). Symbolic Racism. In: P. A. Katz & D. A. Taylor (Eds), Eliminating Racism: Profiles in Controversy (pp. 53-80). New York: Plenum Press. Sears, D. O., & Kinder, D. R. (1971). Racial Tensions and Voting Behavior in Los Angeles. In: W. Z. Hirsch (Ed.), Los Angeles: Viability and Prospects for Metropolitan Leadership. New York: Praeger. Sigelman, L., & Welch, S. (1991). Black Americans" Views of Racial Inequality: The Dream Deferred. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sniderman, P. M., & Piazza, T. (1993). The Scar of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stanfield, J. H. (1993). Epistemological Considerations. In: J. H. Stanfield, II & R. M. Dennis (Eds), Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods (pp. 16-36). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Stanfield, J. H. (1994). Ethnic Modeling in Qualitative Reserach. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook for Qualitative Research (pp. 175-188). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stark, W. (1963). The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought. NY: Fordham University Press. Steeh, C., & Schuman, H. (1992). Young White Adults: Did Racial Attitudes Change in the 1980s? American Journal of Sociology, 98, 340-367. Steinberg, S. (1989). The Ethnic Myth. Boston: Beacon Press. Storrs, D. (1999). Whiteness as Stigma: Essentialist Identity Work by Mixed-Raced Women. Symbolic Interaction, 22, 187-212. Thompson, J. B. (1984). Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Van den Berghe, P. L. (1966). Paternalistic Versus Competitive Race Relations: An Ideal Type Approach. In: B. E. Segal (Ed.), Racial and Ethnic Relations. New York: Crowell. Waters, M. (1991). Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berldey, CA: University of California Press. West, C. (1993). Keeping Faith. NY: Rontledge. Wilson, W. J. (1978). The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wrong, D. (1961). The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Society. American Sociological Review, 26, 183-193.

CRITICAL HUMANISM IN A POST-MODERN WORLD Ken Plummer

ABSTRACT The 'human being' and 'humanism' have become thoroughly contested terms and widely denounced from a range of intellectual positions from behaviorism to post-modernism. After outlining some elements of the anti-humanist critique, the paper attempts to mount a defence. It concludes by suggesting some of the elements for a 'critical humanism', and suggests that postmodernism and humanism need not be incompatible. The writing on the wall is legible enough. The European Text, more of a museum prospectus these days than a gospel, is taken to task from within and without. It is made responsible for colonizing the past. It is labelled ethnocentric by guilt-ridden Europeans and irrelevant by those excluded from the European text. Its universalism is treated as oppressive on the one hand and impotent on the other . . . . And yet, there seems to be no viable alternative to the restoration of the text of interpretation and the universal hermeneutic community through the revitalization of (European) humanism . . . . Agnes Heller & Ferenc Fehdr, 1991, pp. 561-562. Holding on to the promises of the modern age is very difficult in a time of fragmentation. Yet while each of us lives in his or her own village, we live in a global village too .... It is a mark of the vitality of modernism despite its undertakers that the smlggle for human rights is global, that the sciences are everywhere, that democracy attracts our energies and loyalties... Howard Radest,

Humanism with a Human Face, 1996, pp.

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There is an illusive center to this contradictory, tension-ridden enterprise that seems to be moving further and further away from grand narratives, and single overarching ontological, epistemological and methodological paradigms. This center lies in the humanistic commitment of the qualitative researcher to study the world always from the perspective of the interacting individual. From this simple commitment flow the liberal and radical politics of qualitative research. Action, feminist, clinical, constrnctivists, ethnic, critical and cultural studies researchers all unite on this point. They all share the belief that a politics of liberation must always begin with the perspectives, desires and dreams of those individuals and groups who have been oppressed by the larger ideological, economic and political forces of a society or a historical moment' (Norman Denzin, 1994, Handbook, p. 575).

INTRODUCTION I have recently argued that a view which takes the h u m a n being as an embodied, emotional, interactive, self striving for m e a n i n g in wider historically specific social worlds and an even wider universe is not a bad, even h u m b l i n g , starting place for the ' h u m a n sciences'. A n d that to listen attentively to the stories people tell of their lives is, equally, not a bad take off point for doing ' h u m a n research' (cf. P l u m m e r , 2001). 1 A n d yet these days 'life stories' 'the h u m a n b e i n g ' and ' h u m a n i s m ' are thoroughly contested terms. A very specific, narrow 'westernized version' of h u m a n i s m has simultaneously been made d o m i n a n t and has then b e e n heavily discredited. Indeed, the twentieth century witnessed attacks on ' h u m a n i s m ' from all sides. Behaviourists claimed it was too subjective. Religions - old and n e w - claimed it was too materialist. Pessimists saw the history of the twentieth century u n f o l d i n g as evidence of m a n ' s accelerating i n h u m a n i t y to m a n along with the ' e n d of progress' firmly thus enshrined. ' D e c o n s t m c t i o n i s t s ' saw ' m a n ' as a 'fiction' (and a gendered one at that!), claimed the 'death of the author', and reconstructed ' h i m ' as 'subjectivities' found in 'discourse', 'regimes of truth', and 'technologies of the self'. Indeed, with the arrival of the post-modern, ' h u m a n b e i n g s ' and ' h u m a n i s m ' are seen as 'master narratives' whose day is over. All in all, h u m a n i s m and all it stands for has b e c o m e a dirty word. As the p r o m i n e n t anthropologist Clifford Geertz w o u l d have it: [t]he Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated, motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action, organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures' (Geertz, 1979, p. 229). Or again, as the feminist anthropologist Lila A b u - L u g h o d notes in her book

Writing Women's Worlds:

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There are certainly good reasons to be wary of a philosophy that has masked the persistence of systematic social differences by appealing to an allegedly universal individual as hero and autonomous subject; that has allowed us to assume that the domination and exploitation of nature by man was justified by his place at the center of the universe; that has failed to see that its 'essential humanism' has culturally and socially specific characteristics and in fact excludes most humans; and that refuses to understand how we as subjects are constructed in discourses attached to power (Abu-Lughod, 1993, p. 28). Given such damning attacks from such a wide range of sources, humanism looks beyond defence. A n d yet that is precisely what I wish to do. W h y should I wish to retrieve the term and make a defence? At the simplest level, I would argue that we need it because we have little else. Indeed, Lila Abu-Lughod herself after making such scathing remarks - goes on to make a plea for a 'tactical humanism'. As she says, 'humanism continues to be in the West the language of human equality with the greatest moral force. I do not think we can abandon it' (1993, p, 28). A t the start of a new century, then, it seems to me that it is time for a reconsideration of this language. W e need to reconsider the old arguments about the importance of looking at lives in all their differences and generalities as a prime goal for the human sciences; and that this 'looking' is predicated upon a kind of humanism which needs clarifying. 'Differences' may have been insufficiently recognized in some of the humanisms of the past.

THE ANTI-HUMANIST PROJECT Let me be clear first about the claims made against 'humanism', and suggest that generally they demean a complex, differentiated term into something far too simple. W h y has 'humanism' become the enemy - in our - midst, a term 'used by its critics to identify everything they think is wrong with the m o d e m world?' (Johnson, 1994, p. vii). The long-standing attacks from theologies, from behavioural psychologies and from certain kinds of philosophers are well known. But the more recent attacks have denounced 'humanism' as a form of white, male, Western, elite domination and colonization which is being imposed throughout the world. This loose but important cluster of positions - usually identified with a post-modern sensibility - would include multicultural theorists, post-colonialists, many feminists, queer theorists and anti-racists, as well as post-strnctural theorists! Of course, it is a grouping which traditionalists and conservatives would not even start to take seriously. But for me, this forwardlooking contemporary thought is vital for change; and yet it is generally united in its opposition to the humanist project. One key object of attack is what N. J. Rengger has called 'High Humanism' (1996, p. 29), a position which defends all the classical canons of the west in

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art, literature, music, etc. In general, there are three things which seem especially to worry the critics. First, there is the worry that humanists propose some kind of common and hence universal 'human being' or self: a common humanity - an ontological position that senses an essential and common human nature. This universalism is held to blind us to wider differences and positions in the world. Second, there is a concern that humanists see this 'self' or humanity as a powerful, actualizing and autonomous force in the world - a theory of action that puts the individual agent at the centre of the universe. In contrast to the first worry over universalism, this results in a critique of the overt individualism of the theory and of the ways in which this individualism is a result of the Enlightenment project which is not to be found in other societies. Far from being a positive, this is seen to lead, morally, to a dangerous self absorption, narcissism, and selfishness; and, politically, to justify the excesses of the free markets of a laissez faire capitalism. And thirdly, the critics are concerned that this 'humanism of self actualization' turns itself into a series of moral and political claims about progress through a liberal and democratic society, ultimately a progress which champions the development of Enlightenment thought and the western ideal. Here the concern turns to the ways in which much humanism far from being a liberatory force has served as a blanket ideology to justify all manners of oppression - from holocausts to colonialism to wars. Hence the most general principles of modern humanism - a universal, unencumbered 'self', a belief in the power of unique autonomous individuals, and the linkage to the 'modern' Western liberal project - are seen as betraying an ethnocentric and colonising (even totalitarian) impulse. This humanism is both racist and misogynist and has served as a major dominating discourse to organise imperialism, the colonisation of whole societies, and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. People outside of this western hegemony are necessarily co-opted into it. There are strong 'romantic' tones behind this worship of the self, which are only a few steps away from racist and European 'Superman' overtones. These ideas of the human subject are distinctly 'western' and bring with them a whole series of ideological assumptions about the centrality of the white, western, male, middle class/bourgeois position - hence it becomes the enemy of feminism (human has equalled male), ethnic movements (human has equalled white superiority), gays (human has equalled heterosexual) and all cultures outside of the western enlightenment project (human has equalled the middle class west). There are myriad strands in these critical arguments and I cannot rehearse them all here. Michel Foucanlt, the French philosopher of ideas who was extremely influential during the 1980s and 1990s, is often seen as a key

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spokesperson for them. His theory d e v e l o p s an influential critique o f E n l i g h t e n m e n t thought and the rise o f the individual subject, suggesting that far f r o m b e i n g an e m a n c i p a t o r y project ' h u m a n i s m ' is one in w h i c h subjugation o f all kinds can be f o u n d . . . The modern individual - objectified, analysed, fixed - is a historical achievement. There is no universal person on whom power has performed its operations and knowledge, its enquiries. Rather, the individual is the effect and object of a certain crossing of power and knowledge. He (sic) is the product of the complex strategic development in the field of power and the multiple development in the human sciences' (Foucault,1979, pp. 159-160). The ' H u m a n S u b j e c t ' b e c o m e s a western invention. For F o u c a u l t 'there is no point o f d r e a m i n g of a t i m e w h e n k n o w l e d g e will cease to depend on power; this is j u s t the w a y o f r e v i v i n g h u m a n i s m in a utopian guise' . . . w e should not be d e c e i v e d by all the Constitutions f r a m e d throughout the w o r l d since the French R e v o l u t i o n , the C o d e s written and revised, a v~hole continuous and c l a m o r o u s legislative activity: these w e r e the forms that m a d e an essentially normalising p o w e r acceptable' (Gordon/Foucault, 1980, p. 52; Foucault, 1979b, p. 144). F o u c a u l t sees our h u m a n subjectivities as constituted in and through a spiral o f p o w e r - k n o w l e d g e discourses. F r o m the discourses of psychiatry, sexology, c r i m i n o l o g y , m e d i c i n e and the w h o l e of the humanities, the ' m o d e r n individual' has b e e n invented. But it is not a progress or a liberation - m e r e l y a trapping on the forces o f power. But if F o u c a u l t is one voice, there are m a n y influential others. F e m i n i s m s o f various kinds, for instance, h a v e suggested h o w the ' h u m a n ' o f h u m a n i s m is a b o u r g e o i s white male, and that e m a n c i p a t i o n has largely m e a n t his e m a n c i p a tion: a different m o d e l was n e e d e d for w o m e n . It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedently multiple, pregnant and complex. 'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time (Haraway, 1991, p. 160). A n d f r o m the post-colonial m o v e m e n t , A i m 6 C6saire critiques the so-called h u m a n i s t i n v o l v e m e n t of the west: They (colonisers) talk to me about progress, about achievements, diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out (Cesaire, 1972, pp. 23-24). A n d at its boldest, all e n c o m p a s s i n g p o s t m o d e r n turn, w e find with Baudrillard that the h u m a n b e c o m e s a counterfeit hyper real simulation, a false representation

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inhabiting a world of its own, the real h u m a n confused with the model. With Lyotard we find s o m e o n e who declares the end of all our grand narratives, of which perhaps h u m a n i s m has to have b e e n the grandest of all. As he says, so famously: I will use the term modem to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative. Such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth . .. I define post-modern as incredulity towards metanarratives .... The narrative function loses its function, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv). Over and over again, and usually with due reason, the voices c l a m o u r to a n n o u n c e the death of h u m a n i s m .

WEAKENING THE CRITIQUE A n d yet despite these m a n y and serious objections to h u m a n i s m , there is a long history of diverse forms of h u m a n i s m s in world history and the object of attack is usually a very limited 'Eurocentric' one, often an i n v e n t i o n of critics. Early humanists of the pre-Renaissance m o v e m e n t - like Erasmus did not find their h u m a n i s m incompatible with religion; any more than the existence of an Islamic h u m a n i s m or Buddhist h u m a n i s m . Indeed, Alfred M c L u n g Lee - c h a m p i o n of a humanistic sociology - sees it everywhere: Humanism has figured in a wide range of religious, political and academic movements. As such it has been identified with atheism, capitalism, classicism, communism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism, nationalism, positivism, pragmatism, relativism, science, scientism, socialism, statism, symbolic interactionism, and supernaturalism, including versions of ancient paganisms, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Mohammedanism. It has also been rationalized as being opposed to each of these. It has served as an ingredient in movement against each. And these terms do not at all suggest all of humanism's ideological and social associations (Lee, 1978, pp. 44-45). It seems to be one of those words that can m e a n all things to all people. More: it is also clear that the attack is usually waged at a high level of generality in itself - between, for instance Sartre and Heidegger most f a m o u s l y - where specifics of what constitutes the h u m a n are often seriously overlooked. A n d more curiously, it is also clear that m a n y of the opponents of h u m a n i s m can be found w a n t i n g to hold on to some version of h u m a n i s m at the end of their critique. Indeed, it is odd that some of the strongest opponents lapse into a kind of h u m a n i s m at different points of their argument. For instance, Edward Said a leading post colonial critic of western style h u m a n i s m actually urges another k i n d of h u m a n i s m 'shorn of all its ' u n p l e a s a n t l y triumphalist weight' (Said, -

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1992, p. 230) whilst Aime Cesrare (quoted above) actually sees the enemy as a 'pseudo-humanism', implying that humanism still matters and that it is actually just the recent, western conception of humanism that should be objected to, not the word itself or indeed its apparent wide meanings. Likewise, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod - again cited above and so clearly aware of the deficiencies of humanism - actually writes and champions a mode of humanism (she calls it 'tactical humanism') as more or less the best vision we have. Others, maybe less critical, go even further and suggest that the claims of multiculturalism actually depend upon a tacit pact with western democratic assumptions. Thus the liberal political scientist Benjamin Barber can say: Think for a moment about the ideas and principles underlying anticanonical curricular innovation and critical multiculturalism: a conviction that individuals and groups have a right to self-determination; belief in human equality coupled with a belief in human autonomy; the tenet which holds that domination in social relations, however grounded, is always illegitimate; and the principle that reason and the knowledge issuing from reason are themselves socially embedded in personal biography and social history and thus in power relations. Every one of these ideas is predominantly the product of Western Civilization (Barber, 1992, p. 147).

Likewise with feminism. Whilst many feminists espouse a hatred of humanism for its seeming equation with 'man' (and liberalism), many of the earliest writings were clearly humanist inspired - from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. Indeed, in an important, neglected study, the Australian feminist Pauline Johnson has very gently and systematically argued that 'feminism is a humanism' (p. x, my italics). For her, feminism - in its many shades - has actually been infused with a kind of radical humanism - 'a historical project born of conscious value choices and the vagaries of critical, social and political movements' (Johnson, 1994, p. xi). She hints clearly at the problem which comes with humanism in a striking passage: Modern humanism is pinned on a dilemma which invades its very core. It recognizes that modern humanism is caught in a paradoxical relation between the universalistic character of its own aspirations and the always particularistic, culture bound terms in which these universalising claims are raised. Radical humanism is . . . . distinguished both by its determination to defend the ideas of modern humanism as contingent, historical values and by its efforts to grasp the consequences which this recognition of its historically contingent character must have for the 'cause' of modern humanism i t s e l f . . . (Johnson, 1994, p. 135).

Indeed, at the start of the twenty-first century, there have been many signs that the critique of humanism which pervaded the previous century has started to be weakened. More and more contemporary commentators - well aware of the attacks above - go on to make some kind of humanist claims. It would not be

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hard to find signs of humanism in the works of Cornell West, Jeffrey Weeks, Martha Nussbaum, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Banman, Agnes Heller, Jttrgen Habermas, Michel Bakhtin and many others: none of whom I have space to consider in a brief essay like this, but all of whom I suspect would not be unhappy with a humanist tag!

A HUMAN CONCEPTION: FOR A PRAGMATIC CRITICAL

HUMANISM

To recap and to be clear. What I want to suggest is a restoration of a language of humanism for social science. Of course, there are many who have never given this language up. But it is also the case that many did in the wake of the post-modern imagination. Simply, I am trying to show that often the claims of anti-humanists have rested upon an overly simplified view of humanism that many humanists have already relinquished. The view of a simple 'unitary' human being is simply not sustainable. Moreover, frequently even this self-same post-modernism re-imports humanistic assumptions back into its work without acknowledging them. I also believe that social science would benefit from a strong commitment to a humanistic methodology, one that takes humanism, the humanities and the human being as its albeit highly fractured baseline. I argue this position more fully in a recent book (Plummer, 2001). It should by now be very clear that the humanism which I am talking about is not the solitary, unencumbered self of much liberal theory - not a simple, self actualising individual. Quite the contrary, given what has been said above, 'the human being' (or self, person, agent, subject, personhood) of the 'critical humanism' I am trying to locate has a number of differing characteristics to this solitary isolated individual. I call it 'critical' precisely because it stands in critical opposition to earlier oversated assumptions of unitary human beings. Briefly, this 'human being' that life stories aim to describe is always an embedded, dialogic, contingent, embodied, universal self with a moral (and political character). Thus, humans are: (1) Embedded. Human beings cannot be understood if they are taken out of the contexts of time and space of which they are always a part. Thus the 'human being' is not a universal empty signifier: rather 'it' is always stuffed full of the culture and the historical moments of which it is a part, and this history and culture is always in process and changing. Human beings 'nest' in a universe of contexts. To talk otherwise is to engage in the 'myth of the universal man'. As the historian David Hackett Fischer has nicely put it:

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The fallacy of the universal person falsely assumes that people are intellectually and psychologically the same in all times and places and circumstances .... People, in various times and places, have not merely thought different things. They have thought them differently. It is probable that their most fundamental cerebral processes have changes through time. Their deepest emotional drives and desires may themselves have been transformed. Significant elements of continuity cannot be understood without a sense of the discontinuities too ... (Fischer, 1971, p. 204). (2) Symbolic, Dialogic, Inter-subjective with Selves. L a n g u a g e and symbolic c o m m u n i c a t i o n is central to h u m a n beings, yet it is not a solitary or m o n o l o g i c language. H u m a n s are never alone (except perhaps in extreme psychotic situations, but e v e n here there m a y be a sense of others), and are dialogic, inter-subjective (i.e. with others and not simply subjective), and have selves that are capable of reflexivity and reflectivity. H u m a n s can and do c o m m u n i c a t e with themselves and others, critically because (as M e a d has it) they have selves. H u m a n beings are able to take the roles of others, i m a g i n a t i v e l y and sympathetically, and chart their o w n actions in relations to these others. T h e y live in worlds reflected in and through others and their languages. A n d more: they are able through language to hold conversations with others. Of course, other animals can do this too - but not in the same c o m p l e x fashions which lead to cultures and histories. Most especially, h u m a n beings as part of their selfhood and dialogic character can b e c o m e story tellers. T h e y are ' h o m o narrans' the narrators of their o w n lives, both interpersonally and internally (cf. Dean, 1996; Holstein & G u b r i u m , 2000). (3) Contingent. H u m a n b e i n g s are surrounded throughout their lives b y chance, fateful m o m e n t s , contingencies. A g n e s Heller draws out the philosophical metaphor that ' m a n is thrown into the world' and argues that:

The modern person is a contingent person .... Contingency is one of the main constituents of the human condition, for nothing in our genetic equipment predetermines us to be born in precisely such and such an age, in such and such a social condition, caste, class and the like ... the modern person is born as a cluster of possibilities without telos ... (and) it must choose the framework , the telos, of his or her life ... (Heller, 1990, pp. 5~6). (4) Dually embodied and symbolic. H u m a n beings are both animals and creatures with great symbolic potential. T h e y are in the words of Ernest Becker 'little gods who shit'. Thus, whilst h u m a n i s m must e x a m i n e the ways in which h u m a n s develop massive symbolic and m e a n i n g f u l worlds - how m a n is engaged in a search for m e a n i n g - it should never overlook the embodied and animalistic nature of this experience. U n l i k e some past h u m a n i s m s , this cannot sever the h u m a n being from the wider a n i m a l k i n g d o m - nor even would it place the h u m a n being at the centre of the animal world. Rather, h u m a n beings are part of this wider animal world - and, again, contingent u p o n it.

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(5) Universal. To say this is not to contradict the above. There is a continuous tension between the specificities and variety of humanities at any time and place, and the universal potentials which are to be found in all humans. Quite what these universals may be is a matter of dispute: the liberal, humanist feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1999, p. 41) for example, suggests a long list of 'human capabilities' like 'bodily health and integrity' senses, imagination, thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; concern for other species; play; control over ones' environment; and life itself'. To this I might add the crucial self reflexive process - a process of communication - which is central to the way we function. This is just one listing: there are many others. (e.g. Donald E. Brown, 1991). The point is to recognise both universal capacities along with diversity and specificity. (6) With a moral (ethical, political) character. Another abiding feature of human lives has to be the question: 'how to live a life?'. Human cultures drip with moral and ethical problems, and are organized through and within circuits of power. Of course, such issues can be avoided: but overwhelmingly they are the stuff of human cultures - the webs of meaning through which lives get organized. We are talking about the potentials for lives individually and collectively - to become more and more enriched, varied and fruitful. Postmodernism has brought a strong critique of traditional notions of the human and humanism. In its most sceptical, cynical, ludic and despairing forms, it will remain resolutely anti-humanist. But in some of its more affirmative, open, critical and political versions, it can easily be accommodated with most (if not all) of what I have said above.

NOTE 1. This article is reproduced from the appendix of Documents o f Life - 2, at the suggestion of Norman Denzin. It is slightly edited.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1993). Writing Women's Words: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barber, B. (1992). An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. C6salre, A. (1972). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press (and excerpted in: P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds) (1998), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader). Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Dean, J. (1996). Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds) (1994). The Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (Eds) (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermenutics. Power. Brighton: Harvester Press. Fischer, D. H. (1971). Historians' Fallacies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gordon, C. (Ed.) (1980). Michel Foucault: Power~Knowledge - Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Brighton: Harvester Press. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Heller, A. (1990). A Philosophy of Morals. Oxford: Blackwell. Heller, A., & Feher, F. (1991). The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. (2000). The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, P. (1994). Feminism as Radical Humanism. San Francisco: Westview. Lee, A. M. (1978). Sociology for Whom? New York: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999). Sex and Social Justice. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of Life - 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism. London: Sage Radest, H. B. (1996). Humanism with a Human Face: Intimacy and the Enlightenment. London: Praeger. Rengger, N. J. (1996). Retreat from the Modern: Humanism, Postmodernism and the Flight from Modernist Culture. Exeter: Bowerdean Publishing. Said, E. (1992). Edward Said." A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

POWER: A PRAGMATIST PROPOSAL Joel D. Wolfe

ABSTRACT The rollback of state intervention presents a major challenge to the leading models of power. Since these models imply that greater power entails an increasing concentration or intensification of the techniques of rule, they are unable to explain how delegation and displacement can enhance effective control. An examination of the philosophical methods informing major models of power shows their conceptual limitations and the need for a Deweyan pragmatist alternative. This method leads to an alternative analysis of power that combines both direct power or causal interaction evident in agency and structural models and indirect power, transactional operations through which intelligent agents generate media of social production. From this perspective, power becomes more effective by withdrawing and consolidating direct while expanding indirect power. This view suggests a revision of state theory and a means for social criticism and amelioration.

INTRODUCTION Power is a concept central to political and social theory. Its subject-matter concerns the origins, modes, location and results of making a difference to the world (Lukes, 1986). In addressing these topics, models of power draw on and develop distinctive philosophical methods - empiricist, realist, or interpretative - resulting in different judgments about what makes a difference and what

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differences are made (Gibbons, 1987; Keat & Urry, 1982). Empiricism underpins agency models of power, analyzing the objective resources by which actors can enforce their will. Philosophical realism girds structuralist models, picturing agents as refractors of organizational interests and capacities (Lane, 1996). And interpretative methods inform Foucault's conceptualization of power as disciplinary practices and the symbolic interactioniss view of power as an interplay between tactician and target. Unfortunately, the philosophical methods informing these models of power create an enigma. Their reliance on antecedent commitments to concepts that fix the sources and processes of power imply that enhancing the capacity for producing effects depends on the expansion and intensification of state, economic, cultural apparatuses. Yet, recent trends toward the "hollow state", entrepreneurial government, and globalization and the influence of concepts such as neoliberalism and the new public management suggest that governance is more diffuse, complex, and self-administering than ever before. These changing forms of rule contradict the supposition of our traditional conceptions that greater power comes from more resources, better organization, or extensive disciplinary practices. In a world in which the state is devolving control both downwards and upwards and in which greater control is being taken by societal processes such as the law or the market, the notion that more power entails a larger and more refined administrative apparatus seems untenable. A pragmatist conception of power offers a way out of this quandary, suggesting that power resides in the ways actors participate in and change transactions which bind agent and context, internal and objective, past and unfolding present. The transactionalist perspective pictures agency and structure as different aspects of dynamic interchanges constructed by agents dealing with what they define as problematic situations. This centers the analysis on the operations linking agent and context but includes interactions based on overt force in the absence of transactions. From this viewpoint, increases in power arise from changing the character of transactions, not from external constraints or impositions. Moreover, since this perspective makes concepts and actions accountable to their consequences, the analysis of the way agents operate in making differences provides a means for the critical assessment of behavior and theory. Such an analysis should facilitate social amelioration. The presentation, first, shows that the antecedent philosophical presuppositions underlying the main models of power create barriers to understanding how the efficiency of power can increase by its delegation and recommends the Deweyan pragmatist method as an alternative. Next, using this method, it proposes a theory of generative power capable of explicating variation in the modes and

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distribution of power. Finally, the discussion briefly considers some implications of the model.

P H I L O S O P H Y AND THE ANALYSIS OF P O W E R The main models of power rely on philosophical methods - empiricism, realism, and interpretivism - that picture power as a function of external compulsion or disciplinary strategies and lead to the conclusion that any enlargement of power requires more concentrated, extensive, and intrusive instruments. Yet, the movement away from command and imposition has made control more pervasive, self-enforcing and effective. The delegation of functions to private providers, regional and international bodies, and quasi-governmental agencies appears to be enhancing state interests. How can a decline of rule by command and imposition, evident in the collapse of communism and the rollback of the West European managed economy, succeed in enhancing state power? To explore this dilemma, this section first examines how the antecedent philosophical assumptions of models of power fail to explain the productive effects of power. Then, the discussion turns to considering how a pragmatist method provides an alternative. Empiricism informs agency notions of power. In examining those factors which enable one agent to prevail over another, it looks for regularities in the conjunction of contingent events, a manifestation of causality analogous to the concept of force in mechanics (Ball, 1992, p. 16). An isolated causal agent is given and assessed in terms of objective resources applied in overt contests. This means that power is evident only in overt and observable instances of one, isolated agent producing intended effects on other similar agents, of agent A getting agent B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl, 1957). In agency models, power differentials arise from differences in actors' interests, motives and resources. These determine whether an agent prevails over adversaries. Whatever the factors distributing force, agency notions of power entail zero-sum relations of command and obedience, domination and subjection, winners and losers. The implication is that greater power resides in greater material and social resources. Agency models of power emphasize the unencumbered agent, individual or collective, rather than structure and portray power as episodic rather than inherent or ever present in social relations. By construing agents as influenced be external causes, the empiricist notion views human actors as refractors of external forces, such as military might or political support (Isaac, 1987, p. 76). Expanding this idea, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz argue that political authorities could exercise power by keeping problematic

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issues off of the public agenda, exercising a "non-decision" (Bachrach & Baratz, 1962). Moreover, the agency notion of power acknowledges structural forces not only in the way agents can use structure to shape the interests of opponents but to account for the way the organization of activities privilege some interests over others. Moving beyond anagency model based on overt conflict as well as one recognizing that individual decision-makers control interests through non-decisions, Steven Lukes contends that social processes and institutional practices shape interests (Lukes, 1974; Hindess, 1996). When introducing structure, the agency approach did so in order to acknowledge how context affords differential privileges that advantage some agents over others. For example, Charles Lindblom contends that business has a privileged role in liberal democracy, because politicians find that it is in their own interests to back business on issues affecting economic prosperity (Lindblom, 1977, pp. 170-188). The recognition of structure by agency theorists was a decisive step in a more general shift toward confronting the dualism of conduct and context - combining concepts of agency and structure - into the analysis of power (Clegg, 1989, p. 85). Just as the debate about the relationship between agent and structure became central to discussions of power, empiricism was losing ground to challenges from alternative philosophical approaches (Ball, 1992). The leading rival is philosophical realism, which inspires the neo-institutional movement in political science and sociology (Koelble, 1995; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Hay & Wincott, 1998). Instead of viewing power as a cause and effect among isolated and contingent events, realism explores the inherent properties of objective reality (Isaac, 1992) One version emphasizes structure over agency as the primary mover. As Terence Ball writes, "realists hold that power is possessed and exercised not by individuals as individuals but by people in their capacity as socially situated role-bearers possessing certain intrinsic characteristics or 'natures' " (Ball, 1992, p. 26; Isaac, 1992, pp. 34, 42-44). This structuralist version pictures enduring social patterns as causes of agents behavior, a one-sided view encouraging passivity (Hay, 1995, pp. 194-195). The Marxist work of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas exemplify this version, privileging given structures as determinants of agency. By implication, the more extensive structures are more capable of constraint and causation. A second realist variant proposes a complex interweaving of structure and agency. This school posits a duality of structure and agency, suggesting that social structures are both the medium and effect of agency (Giddens, 1984, p. 25). Acknowledging this duality - two sides of a coin or even the admixture of two metals in a coin (Hay, 1995, p. 200) - attributes causation

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to social structure and to specific agents and recognizes that power is present in all social relations. This version of realism, however, still locates primacy in enduring social relationships, for while the exercise of power is contingent, the capacity for the exercise of power is structural. As Jeffrey Isaac writes, "social power refers to the capacities to act possessed by agents in virtue of their social relations" (Isaac, 1987, p. 81). In interlacing separate determinants - social relations and human actions - and making structure primary, this duality version retains the legacy of Cartesian dualism and makes individual capacity dependent on the extent to which institutional relations define potency. Interpretative approaches emphasize the role of meaning and knowledge, conceptualizing power as constructed. They divide between those involving the recovery of meaning in everyday practices and those searching for a hidden truth, the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, pp. xx-xxiii). The work of Michel Foucault exemplifies and challenges the hermeneutics of suspicion, amounting to an interpretative but distanced analysis of the history and logic of cultural disciplines or what Dreyfus and Rabinow identify as "interpretive analytics" (1983, p. 124). His genealogical focus goes beyond examining theory itself, while his archaeological bent locates meaning in cultural practices and concerns power rather that discourse as such. Rejecting the idea of sovereign or agency power, Foucault elaborates a concept of disciplinary power, which focuses on the way knowledge informs productive networks, such as prisons, schools, and clinics (Kerr, 1999). In shaping truth, values, and identities, knowledge-based disciplines establish micro-level control through fields of activity defining human subjects and functioning. Surveillance and the partitioning of space are external techniques for ensuring powers productivity, constraining behavior by making it visible and accountable and establishing practices which subjects internalize and hold themselves accountable to. Rather than a force weighing on agents, disciplinary practices are strategies with their own agency that envelop and colonize subjects. Foucaults anti-foundational approach deconstructs these cultural practices by seeing through accepted values. Yet, his bias toward deconstruction too easily finds oppression and opposition increasing with the growth of knowledge and fails to delineate how to identify or achieve the desirable (Stuhr, 1997, pp. 102-114). And because power centers on analyzing administrative and cultural techniques, the implication is that a more " . . . extensive and finer-grained knowledge enables a more continuous and pervasive control of what people do" (Rouse, 1994, p. 96). The hermeneutics of recovery and expression aims to explain the reality of appearance, the interpretations embodied in everyday practices. Practitioners of this type of interpretative approach include symbolic interactionists, who examine how the construction of meanings in intrapersonal and interpersonal

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interactions affect conflict between tacticians and targets. Power involves asymmetric relationships between social actors based on their resources and will (Blumer, 1954, p. 235). David Luckenbill (1979) sees power as a "collective transaction" between an agent who dominates and an agent who complies and involves mutual adjustment characterized by its asymmetry, intentionality, and overt conflict. This picture of power gains from Erving Goffman's dramaturgical perspective, discussing how agents attempt to manage interactions by playing out parts they have chosen. Through performance to particular audiences, an agent aims to shape the "definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan" (Goffman, 1959, p. 4). Similarly, Altheide and Johnson (1980) examine the gap between image and reality within organizations and the role of information in presentational management, while Donileen Loseke (1992) uses an interactionist perspective to report how workers at shelters for battered women were clientmakers, identifying and transforming clients. Other interactionist work elaborates this analysis and develops a structural dimension. Robert Prus (1999) comprehensively examines the nature and variety of relations between tacticians and targets. He starts from the proposition that "power is brought into existence only when someone defines the situation in power or influence (and resistance) terms of some sort" and so depends on the "intent and capacity on the parts of a person or collectivity to influence, control, dominate, persuade, manipulate, or otherwise affect the behaviors, experiences, or situations of some target" (Prus, 1999, p. 152). Moreover, Peter M. Hall (1985, 1997) adds a structuralist dimension to this model of power. His concept of "metapower" focuses on the constitution of situations and "to what extent their consequences and conditioning were due to the actions of prior actors and situations" (1997, p. 405). Highlighting that power involves the way meaning is used to define roles mad situations, these efforts unfortunately fail to transcend a picture of power as derivative, limiting power to overt contests of strength between agents or between agents and structures. The result is to imply that greater power belongs to those agents with more resources and cultural skills. In short, the philosophical methods used to conceptualize power antecedently fix categories that lead to a view in which increasing power depends on the concentration and refinement of factors yielding functional capacity for compulsion, constraint, or subjection. The attempts by proponents of empiricist, realist, and interpretative approaches to account for the relationship between agency and structure fail to overcome dualist philosophical

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assumptions. Each approach antecedently fixes the contours of analysis in favor of a particular category. Conceptually predetermining the primacy of the individual or institutional, the internal or external, the overt or covert, strategies or strategists, and tacticians or targets yields different but fixed conceptions which are unable to appreciate the variable, complex, and generative character of power relations. Moreover, the growing influence of realism and interpretivism point toward a convergence on locating agency within structure and reinforce longstanding assumptions among social theorists that "power to" entails "power over", that it is given by factors external to subjects, and that increasing capacity depends on enhancing administrative and cultural means. The result views power as external constraint, compulsion, or disciplines producing subjection and implies that any increase in the ability to make a difference depends on enhancing the capacity for domination. Accounting for the development of non-imposed, self-organizing forms of making differences requires a philosophical alternative to the methods that antecedently fix pictures of power relations and lead to the connotation that increasing power depends on the aggregation or generalization of factors enhancing a functional capacity for domination. Pragmatism provides an attractive alternative because it rejects the antecedent fixing of conceptual primacy and offers a method for the intelligent control of the consequences of philosophical methods. Yielding to neither relativism nor a totalizing grand social theory, it provides a critical strategy for assessing the origins and consequences of concepts (Bohman, 1999). Drawing on postmodernism with which it shares many issues, pragmatism targets experience and reconstruction rather than subjection and deconstruction (Stuhr, 1993, p. 568). But unlike Foucault for whom the deconstruction of the deeper meaning of disciplinary practices exposes the production of subjects and so facilitates thinking differently, Dewey suggests a self-consciously critical reconstruction that makes action accountable to its effects. For Dewey, analysis itself transforms isolated acts into transactions yet subjects its own and others' analyses to a critical diagnosis of the way its differences and oppositions link doings to outcomes (Stuhr, 1997, pp. 110-112). In contrast to self-actional strategies, in which "things are viewed as acting under their own p o w e r s . . . " or interactional stances, in which things are viewed as "balanced against things in causal interconnection," the Deweyan pragmatist method develops a transactional approach in which " . . . systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to elements . . . " (Dewey, LW16, pp. 101-102). In an unpublished comment from about 1950, Dewey wrote that all behavior is transactional because " . . . it is constituted by the cooperation or working together

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of activities which, when they are distinguished, are referred respectively to an organism in one respect and to environing conditions in another regard" (Fort, 1998, p. 87). Analyzing behavior as transactional acknowledges that human beings are "live creatures" whose internal organization requires and enables them to select and to do work on their physical and social environments. Dewey turned to the notion of transaction in order to stress that the interrelationship among the elements in any experience defines the transaction, that is, that experience is socially constituted (Stuhr, 1997, p. 184). Strategic operations take place within tensional situations, specific domains of experience involving responses to actual imbalances or breakdowns (Burke, 1994, p. 46). As Dewey argued in his 1896 article criticizing the arc reflex concept in psychology, "The stimulus must be constituted for the response to occur . . . The sensation or conscious stimulus is not a thing or existence by itself; it is that phase of a co-ordination requiring attention because, by reason of the conflict within the co-ordination, it is uncertain how to complete it" (Dewey, EW5, pp. 106-107; Tiles, 1988, pp. 42-48). Perception of and response to structure itself involves the act of inquiry. The transactional viewpoint provides a method of critique and conceptual control. For Dewey, the concept of experience binds the primary facts of everyday existence with secondary intellectualized interpretations. The transactional analysis of experience makes knowledge accountable to their beginnings in primary and ordinary experience, while avoiding antecedent conceptual commitments. In his Experience and Nature, Dewey makes critical analysis a liberating tool, writing that qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be imputed to our own ways of experiencing them, and that these in turn are due to the force of intercourse and custom (Dewey, LW1, p. 23). He continues, "Only analysis shows that the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous affect upon what we believe and expect." Instead of being mastered by pre-existent conceptual fixings, examining the effects of action on things and events within circumstances provides a method for taking charge of concepts, of gaining critical control over their use and meaning. As Dewey emphasizes in his 1925 article on the development of pragmatism, "Pragmatism . . . does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but upon consequent phenomena; not upon the precedents but upon the possibilities of action" (Dewey, LW2, p. 12). More generally, in rejecting fixed foundations for knowing, pragmatism stresses the fallibility of knowledge, locates knowledge in the social or intersubjective, envisions an open universe subject to novelty and complexity, and contends that people can influence their own destinies (Bernstein, 1992, pp. 813-815; Campbell, 1995, p. 14; Thayer, 1973, pp. 215-227).

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Viewing agent and context as dynamic wholes accountable to empirical effects centers the analysis on the organized, learned, and strategic operations by which agents construct and reconstruct transactions. This rejects unidirectional causation in favor of continuity, seen as continuum and growth. In connecting subjective and objective and the static and dynamic within situations, undertakings embody a continuity of conditions and operations and involve episodes of continuity and disequilibrium (Burke, 1994, pp. 22-53). As Dewey states, " . . . every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences. For it is a somewhat different person who enters into them" (Dewey, LW13, p. 18). Moreover, conflict arises within continuities, since the environment is either supportive or hostile to an agent. Dewey observes: "And since the environment is only incompletely enlisted in our behalf, self-preservation - or self-realization or whatever - is always indirect - always an affair of the way in which our present activities affect the direction taken by independent changes in the surroundings" (Dewey, MW10, pp. 7-8). Discontinuity leads to breakdown, the use of overt force, and the re-institution of continuity. The Deweyan method implies a focus on the effects of maneuvers within situations, strategies by which an agent strives to reconcile the tensions of the internal and external within ongoing situations in order to renew and advance life. Since experience centers on transactions, agents balance external and internal factors and move forward through episodes of doing and undergoing (Campbell, 1995, pp. 70-71). Insisting on the continuity of and in experience, Dewey writes: "The only power the organism possesses to control its own future depends upon the way its present responses modify changes which are taking place in its medium . . . It is all a matter of the way in which its present reactions to things influence the future reactions of things upon it" (Dewey, MW10, p. 15). These self-organizing strategies result from the conativity agents exhibit in drawing on, making use of, and changing their environment. The transactional method emphasizes the reconstructive, the redirection of present conditions in order to control their future effects. From this perspective, the control of practices, by making inferences accountable to effects, allows for functional and productive changes within and to a situation. Through thought and action agents attain self-control, enabling them to make a difference in their use of things and the context of experience. Knowing is itself a product of operations and a means to further operations, enabling agents to make use of and to reconstruct their environments. Knowledge and thus control originates in the instrumental, contextual, and transformative character of human action in a precarious environment. The "practical

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character of reason and reality," means that, "since existence is transitional, knowledge is one of the ways of effecting transitions of events, and the only reliable way of guiding them" (Thayer, 1973, p. 221). Since knowledge "makes a difference in and to things," ideas are instruments or tools (Dewey, MW4: 127). Their usefulness and meaning is determined by their "conceivable effects" (James, 1987, p. 506). But, it is inference that gives humans the autonomy and ability to use things to improve life (Campbell, 1995, pp. 45-53). Inferences generate signs of future consequences, facilitating dynamic interaction and adaptation because they are " . . . causally real in the emergence of new features of things 'entering the inferential function' " (Sleeper, 1986, p. 83). Dewey observes: "The extent of an agent's capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability systematically to enlarge its control of the future" (Dewey, MW10, p. 15).

P R A G M A T I S M AND P O W E R The Deweyan method of inquiry provides a means for reconstructing the notion of power, moving beyond the empiricist examination of behavioral regularities, the realist focus on enduring social mechanisms, or the interprefivist concerns with disciplinary practices and the role of meaning in tactician-target conflicts. I n focusing on the cooperative working of elements, the pragmatist method emphasizes continuity and discontinuity in human experience. Instead of asking who triumphs over whom, how structure constrains action or examining the ways disciplinary strategies produce subjection, the transactional approach asks how individual participation within a situation, a projection of past learnings into new circumstances, carries forward a sequence of encounters constituting a medium or thread of activity that defines and frames a concatenation of acts, such as market exchanges. Continuity of cooperation among participants institutes a medium of operations which binds agency and structure as different phases of the same whole. Strauss's (1993) concept of trajectory captures this notion, referring to the course and the actions or interactions that constitute patterns and meanings in streams of experience. But when discontinuity or disruption occurs, agents interact through direct causation. From the Deweyan perspective, power is not a confrontation between opponents, a structure of constraint making agents into bearers of institutional interest, or a "mode of action upon the actions of o t h e r s . . . " through disciplinary discourse (Foucault, 1982, p. 221). Rather, power is both direct and indirect; it is the difference made in, through, and to transactions by means of voluntary participation or coercive interactions. Increases in power therefore result from changes to the

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way things are done and undergone or from acts of strength based on physical, material, administrative, or strategic advantage. In explaining increases in state power, acknowledging the transactional facet of power enlarges upon explanations based on coercion by analyzing the way a medium of operations controls activity and differentially distributes the ability to make differences.

DIRECT AND INDIRECT POWER When transactions are disrupted, direct power operates as agents use overt compulsion, incentives, or context to shape the action of others. Possibly eventuating in overt conflict, direct power refers to the application of external and superior force to interactions. A teachers rebuke or redirection of a troublesome child, the policeman's arrest of a burglar, or the bombing of a hostile state are examples. Dewey observes, "When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled" (Dewey, MW9, p. 31). Moreover, he adds, that physical results may not produce moral or educative effects, pointing out that putting a man in prison may not make him penitent or change his disposition for crime (Dewey, MW9, p. 32). Even so, unlike the cause and effect correlations of the empiricist's sovereign agency notion of power, a pragmatist view suggests that instances of direct power involve communication of meaning that affect both the perpetrator and receptor, fostering new situations that may lead in unpredictable directions (Luckenbill, 1979, pp. 98-103). More important and pervasive is indirect power, the voluntary coordination of an individual's actions with reference to the common business of associates. Dewey explains: T h e . . . fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual . . . . It consists in the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and competition (Dewey, MW9, p. 38).

Because of this, joint efforts constitute a social medium or operations of association that guide activity. Dewey writes: "The very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his activity." A medium is a living process including both agent and structure: " . . . it is intermediate in the execution or carrying out of human activities, as well as being the channel through which they move and the vehicle by which they go on" (Dewey, LWl6, p. 244). It is the pattern of particular habits fitted together for a substantive pursuit, where

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this conjoint activity involves interdependence between subject-matter, purpose, and method. Participation within a medium regulates activity. First, unlike direct control, indirect control is self-producing, drawing on individuals voluntarily contributing to associated action. Instead of conceptualizing society as constraint, pragmatism suggests that society constitutes agents and that agents in turn constitute and modify society through creative activity instantiating cultural practices in specific situations, yielding a "negotiated order", "social world", or "policy arena" (Strauss, 1993, pp. 248-250; Joas, 1993, p. 255). Dewey writes: "In contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence (referring to physical changes, such as a frown), stand associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and as measures of results . . . . Imitation, emulation, the need of working together, enforce control" (Dewey, MW9, p. 33). Conjoint activity has an educative, transformative effect, furthering understandings about the use or meaning of things and developing self-control in response to changing situations. As Dewey reflects on the reconstructive and transactional character of action and context: "Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which subsequent experiences take place. The difference between civilization and savagery.., is found in the degree in which previous experiences have changed the objective conditions under which subsequent experiences take place" (Dewey, LW13, p. 22). Second, gauging the standpoints and behavior of others defines a transactional situation, framing ways of working together for recognized ends. Interpreting purposes of others enables individuals to define how they and others should act and to hold themselves and others accountable to those expectations. As Dewey illustrates in his Education and Democracy, "If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control" (Dewey, MW9, pp. 37-38). Citing the difference between a noise which startles and a noise indicating a fire which needs extinguishing, Dewey notes: "When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently" (Dewey, MW9, p. 34). Conjoint activity, moreover, relies on the reflexively monitored strategies linking and controlling specific internal dispositions and external impediments and having causal efficacy. Dewey calls these strategies of projection habits; they are "a moving force" shaping the sensibilities, motivations, and interests which engage and structure the environment. Projection produces changes in

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the world, which challenge agents in new ways (Dewey, MW14, p. 31). As learned projections for selecting and utilizing the environment, habits frame a context spatially and temporally, such as when putting on a coat signals a cold temperature. Habits also enable agents to view objects as part of possible contexts and so reconstruct the present in view of future consequences. In structuring a field of meaning and action, habits make it possible to create an environment and the quality of experience in it. Thomas Alexander notes that the same mountain may have different meanings to different individuals, a religious significance for an American Indian and a reservoir of mineral wealth for a geologist; each sees the same mountain but views it differently because each lives in different worlds (Alexander, 1987, p. 143). Habits generate a "referential basis of interpretation and action", a perception of context which becomes evident in optical illusions. In actively forming what we see and how we respond, habits become the means constituting activity (Alexander, 1987, p. 145). Third, while projections activate transactions, the transactional definition in turn controls the projection, the pattern of existential engagements. As complex projections constituting the self, defining situations, and varying with contingencies, habits comprise the basic elements and means of power; they are the tools for determining situations and then transforming them. Importantly, habits organize the way individuals hold themselves accountable and take the presence and meaning of others into account. By referring ones behavior to others and judging the meaning of their actions, an agent decides how to contribute to the interplay of the social medium. Social transactions rely on and produce socially regulated behavior, taking the responses of others into account and having one's actions taken into account. Dewey observes: "The individual is held accountable for what he has done in order that he may be responsive in what he is going to do . . . Gradually persons learn . . . to hold themselves accountable, and liability becomes a voluntary deliberate acknowledgment that deeds are our own, that their consequences come from us" (Dewey, MWl4, p. 217). Transaction requires both interpreting the meaning of others and indicating to oneself and others how to act. Through interpretation and judgment, " . . . participants fit their own acts to the ongoing acts of one another and guide others in doing so" (Blumer, 1969, p. 66). "Cooperation is constructed by each agent's definition of the situation which in part depends on their operative medium, as illustrated by the case of naval personnel using battle efficiency reports to rationalize their role in war making" (Altheide & Johnson, 1980, pp. 224-227). In short, transactions define ways of acting within situations, producing social cooperation and social control.

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From this viewpoint, the character of means, the way things are used, binds and transforms agent and context. A university consists in the specific patterns of actions of administrators, faculty and students, with each fitting their acts together in a particular cooperative effort, while the character of these contributions make each institution unique. Human actions fit into a confluence of interactions producing substantive currents, drawing out the different habits of the players while taking direction and form. The effect or end of such streams of operations is a pattern or structure of a medium of activity characterizing a type of social organization, such as an army, a family, or the market. The use of direct or indirect power depends on how the problematic situation elicits the operation of force. The use of direct force arises when indirect transactional media fail to operate, when different media clash or when individuals refuse to participate (Dewey, MWl0, p. 246; Hickman, 1992, p. 187). The failure to make diplomacy work leads to war, or the teacher sends the disruptive child out of the classroom. Direct controls rely on external might, whether coercion, incentives, or persuasion. Indirect control involves force operating through the self-control of persons co-operating within transactional situations. Like direct power, indirect control can entail unfavorable as well as favorable existential effects, such a accepting the assignment of a subordinate position. Direct force is relatively inefficient. Dewey notes, "force is efficient socially not when imposed upon a scene from without, but when it is an organization of the forces in the scene" (Dewey, MWl0, p. 215). According to Dewey, total reliance on pure external direction of human beings is impossible. He writes: "The environment can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear" (Dewey, MW9, p. 30). For its part, indirect control entails assimilating environmental events by the selfadministration of behavior. This is more efficient because it enables individuals to co-ordinate their activities in view of their ends. The efficiency of coordinated control depends on the medium of association, reflecting a recognition of the consequences of particular social transactions and the roles played in it by participants. Institutions, such as state or market, are specialized and routinized manifestations of associated transactions.

THE STRUCTURE OF P O W E R For agency theorists, questions about the distribution of power concern the differences in resources available to opponents (Clegg, 1989, pp. 39-65). For

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realists, the locus of power lies in an institutional landscape producing different capacities among actors. And among interpretive approaches, Foucanlt analyzes how disciplinary knowledge harnesses actors and turns them into active subjects, whereas symbolic interactionists examine the ways tacticians engage targets in order to get their way. The Deweyan pragmatist's view offers a conception of power focusing on transactions, the direct and indirect ways of working together that link agent and context and produce hindrances and sustenance. Analyzing the flow of operations from within transactions dissects the way conjoint activity distributes control among participants. This section offers three categories for deconstructing the locus of control within associational media. The first element analyzes the construction and authorization of the subjectmatter - the "what" of the transactional medium. Rather than being given by either internal preferences or external authority, the practical character of knowledge means that anticipated effects ground activity, constituting the stimulus and arousing a response (Dewey, LW4, pp. 136-155). Purposive action within a social medium relies on learned dispositions that select a specific environment and activate habits carrying events forward. Ways of projecting interpretations and order on the world, in turn, become carriers of control because they are prescriptions for further activity. A professor anticipates collegiality from colleagues and the completion of assignments by students. This first element derives from Dewey's argument for the unity of value and existence within experience, a view connected to his rejection of foundational accounts of knowledge and action. Rather than being fixed in things as with the Lukes' concept of real interests, the "grounds" for experience depend on productive and dynamic transactions that can only be discovered through empirical examination of a particular medium of activity. The reference frame of experience is a matter of the transactional relationship between a living being and its environment. For example, buyer and seller or doctor and patient are concepts implicated in each other. Anticipated results arise as a part of a specific action context, animating habits that evoke further references defining individual interests and the application of operations in answer to problematic aspects of their situation. The subject-matter of an existing social medium authorizes substantive expectations that include or exclude, privilege or deprive, particular interests. A second element in analyzing the ways in which transactions distribute the ability to produce effects evaluates the locus and use of strategic opportunities by the players within a particular associational medium. This element focuses on strategic and tactical activities and suggests that various ploys arise from the specific processes involved in the playing out of a medium (Prus, 1999; Goffman, 1959). Transcending the dualism of agency and structure, this element clarifies

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who decides which issues - the content, purpose, and means - and how much. As agents draw on the energies and confront the hindrances presented by their environment, they play out the advantage of their different predispositions and situations. Analyzing these transaction exposes the way a behavioral medium favors or hinders an agent's ability to take rewarding actions. The chief executive, for example, possesses different options and habits than the shop floor worker. Analyzing the way agents are able to operate within the dynamic and interdependent relations of their situations is attentive to the unpredictable ability of agents to turn conditions to advantage (and sometimes hindrance). Dewey emphasizes that experience is open-ended, the action of each agent is a projection into circumstances not fully known and therefore an experiment for the purpose of connecting with the future. As actors undergo a circumstance, they simultaneously attempt to control it. Pragmatism emphasizes the rebellious, projective and educative nature of human experience, while rejecting simple and mechanical causal relations. For Dewey, individuals are "live creatures," never totally passive (Dewey, LW10, pp. 9-25). Their experience involves "simultaneous doings and sufferings." As Dewey writes, "Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves" (Dewey, MW10, p. 9). Dewey continues: "The most patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent - a reactor, one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may influence what is still to happen" (Dewey, MW10, p. 8). A third element in analyzing the way transactions distribute the ability of agents to direct the flow of events within media is the "how to" of decision making, the way things are used to realize anticipated purposes. Linking subjectmatter and purpose, a decision is a judgment that transforms a problematic into a settled situation, giving purpose to immediate consequences. Whereas agency models target individuals and structural approaches identify organizational processes as shaping final decision-making, a pragmatist view focuses on the form-giving standards for turning conditions into effects. For Dewey, reality is remade through judgment, which functions through experience in accordance with the test of consequences and for the purpose of "readjusting and expanding the means and ends of life" (Dewey, MW2, p. 296). Thinking projects possible consequences and concludes by using things to bring about anticipated results (Dewey, MW10, pp. 15-16). Judgment selects and implements procedures that transform objective circumstances into desired ends, resolving a tensional situation and creating an existential unity (Dewey, MW6, pp. 259-270; Burke, 1994, p. 109). Therefore, analyzing the working rules used in constituting a medium indicates the criterion and exposes its effectiveness and pervasiveness in dealing with the environment.

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In short, these elements identify how transactions frame participation and distribute advantages and disadvantages, that is, how a medium or transaction defines and authorizes players and rules, how strategies afford players differential advantages in taking up initiatives, and how a standard of working turns conditions into results. At the same time, these three elements are useful in analyzing the distribution of control from outside a particular medium. Whatever the social medium, it is possible for agents who are either superior or subordinate to the medium of control to change it. Agents outside a particular medium can influence its elements through direct power, that is, through the force of command, definition, or coercion, or by changing the character of indirect power, that is, the interpretation and use of things. Agents at a higher order of social activity may draw on a supplementary medium as a means of enhancing their own control. For example, the sell-off of state industries in Britain succeeded because the government relied on an indirect means, using a process of commercial transactions engaging business partners and minimizing union opposition rather than acts of state coercion (Wolfe, 1996, pp. 66-95). Conversely, citizens may organize in order to exert control over the substance and manner of their representatives' activities. By defining interests, purposes, and modes of decision making, units at lower levels can assess and control decisions from below, that is, they can reconstruct the indirect power structure of policy-making so that the hierarchy of conjoint activity realizes their interests (Macpherson, 1977).

IMPLICATIONS The need for a new theory of power arises from fact that state power in the industrialized countries seems to be increasing despite the reduction in state ownership and provision. By avoiding antecedent assumptions that predetermine the elements and structures of power, the pragmatist method provides for a model of power for addressing this issue, examining how patterns of cooperation constitute carriers of control and serve as a complement to direct power. Greater state power does not come from more intervention by ever larger instruments of public administration but from the mobilization and regulation of the indirect power. The delegation of control to various media of societal provision, such as the market, medicine, or the law, adds to a states capacity to rule. Accounting for the current trend toward less interventionist but more effective state power acknowledges both direct and indirect power, recognizing the concentration and holding in reserve of direct force and the simultaneous expansion of a reliance on self-administering and self-organizing indirect power. This view contrasts with current agency, realist, and interpretive models

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attributing the generation and exercise of power to "given" elements, such as resources, consent, traditions, disciplines, or institutions. From these perspectives, agents are either made capable, pushed along, or colonized by external forces. Moreover, while agreeing with Foucault in seeing power as ubiquitous and productive, generative power differs in centering power on human agents' social accomplishments in the construction of ongoing media. Rather than being anterior assets or machinery shaping action and truth, power originates in the human experience and struggle of shaping that experience. This analysis connotes an alternative view of state power. Rather than looking at the state as the locus of group pressures, the apparatus promoting capitalist interests or an administrative and institutional fortress with interests of its own, the pragmatist model of power suggests that the state is both the reservoir of legitimate force and the regulator of various media of indirect control. This offers insight into the changing form of modern states, which increasingly center on delegating decision making to providers at levels below or above the core state. Government is increasingly about regulating regimes of indirect control, such as markets, laws, medicine, criminal justice, or education. Delegating control to non-public, non-state "media" depoliticizes state power and enlists streams of private-regarding activities as carriers of state order. State power increases as it expands the regulation of private transactional processes, which authorize the motives and justifications for action, limit players, provide the rules of initiative, and establish the criterion for decisions. For example, the sell-off of utilities in Britain led to their regulation through a marketizing of the relationships between the state, regulatory agencies, and firms (Wolfe, 1999). Another effect of this framework is to provide for the deconstruction of the structure of power. The proposed model of power offers a method for illuminating the way theory and practice carry effects for those participating and those impacted. In contrast to Foucault's deconstruction of disciplinary practices, this offers a self-consciously critical reconstruction that makes action accountable to its effects. Since different transactional patterns produce different effects while controlling participation, examining the justifications establishing a particular transactional medium, the opportunities for tactical maneuvers, and the criteria of judgment applied in transforming situations into results exposes the way a particular medium structures the extent and distribution of power. Making transparent the effects of theoretical and practical action provides a method for implementing James Bohman's suggestion that social scientists should strive to create contexts in which all theories are open to public scrutiny (Bohman, 1999, pp. 472-477). Moreover, the critical assessment of power poses the possibility of social amelioration. For example, Charlene Haddock Seigfried

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suggests that pragmatism's perspectivism and pluralism give feminists critical insight and commitment to overcoming " . . . the prejudices and oppressions that hinder the full participation of all in the life of multiple communities of which they are members" (Seigfried, 1987, pp. 187, 204). In short, deconstructing the way conceptual and concrete transactions structure and distribute action gives a critical perspective that makes amelioration possible. CONCLUSION Deweyan pragmatism provides for an analysis of power that makes it possible to explain how its dispersal can enhance effective control. The rollback of governance by public ownership and command challenges the implication of the major models that greater state power depends on increasingly concentrated and complex administrative mechanisms. By contrast, Dewey's empirical method centers attention on transactions and the individual contribution in defining and working within transactional media, with both agent and reactant being changed in the process. Dewey's method locates agency within the situation of specific transactional problems and pictures agency as organized and learned operations aiming to advance an individual's interests within a current of exchange, drawing on and changing the way the environment influences further activity. Continuity and discontinuity in moving within and through associational situations becomes the target of analysis. From this perspective, power is the ability to make differences to the transaction and thereby through it to change the way transactions have consequences by changing the way the environment acts toward the agent in the future. Power is not simply personal force, resources, public consent, a generalized capacity, a structural property of institutions, a tactical maneuver, or disciplinary practices. Rather, power is the generation, operation, and reconstruction of transactions in order to turn impediments into instruments, modifying the tools through which and by means of which existential effects are constructed. As a result, different forms of media establish different patterns and distributions of indirect power, providing transactional control involving agent and reactant. Yet, when transactions are disrupted, agents interact through direct power, that is, overt imposition by physical and social coercion, though this too involves communication of meanings and changes both actor and context. This suggests that power can increase without increasing the external instruments of imposition. This occurs as non-political societal media, such as the market or medicine, more extensively and efficiently determine participation, providing the means of indirect control and complementing more

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concentrated forms of direct power. Focusing the analysis on transactional media means that attention is on the elements and phases of the finkages between agents and structures within situations and characterized by continuity and discontinuity. The transaction defines relational properties between agent and structure and can lead to expanding the scope and effectiveness of transactional regulation. Power is not given but is created and reconstructed through and by the properties implicating agents within an environment, the transactional media distributing the way agents work in, on and through situations. Finally, because a Deweyan pragmatist view makes concepts and actions accountable to consequences, it provides a method for critical assessment of the ends of power and the desirability of effects. Acknowledging the practical impact of human thought and intelligence signals the unity of conduct and control, making possible the critical evaluation of desirable ends. Applying intelligent inquiry to the control of power - the substantive practices through which individuals draw upon their knowledge of connections to change the present course of events in order to effect its future impact on them - provides the means for improving the quality of future events. REFERENCES Alexander, T. M. (1987). John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Altheide, D. L., & Johnson, J. M. (1980). Bureaucratic Propaganda. Boston: Bacon and Allyn. Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1962). The Two Faces of Power. American Political Science Review, 56, 947-952. Ball, T. (1992). New Faces of Power. In: T. E. Wartenberg (Ed.), Rethinking Power (pp. 14-31). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bernstein, R. J. (1992). The Resurgence of Pragmatism. Social Research, 59(4), 813-840. Blumer, H. (1954). Social Structure and Power Conflict. In: A. Kornhauser, R. Dubin & A. M. Ross (Eds), Industrial Conflict (pp. 232-239). New York: McGraw-Hill. Bhimer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionist: Perspective and Method . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-HalL Bohman, J. (1999). Theories, Practices, and Pluralism: A Pragmatic Interpretation of Critical Social Science. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 29(4), 459-480. Burke, T. (1994). Dewey's New Logic: A Reply to Russell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, J. (1995). Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Dahl, R. A.(1957). The Concept of Power. Behavioral Science, 2, 201-205. Dewey, J. (1969-1972). The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1892 (EW), 5 Vols. J. A. Boydston (Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1976-1983). The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. (MW), 15 Vols. J. A. Boydston (Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Dewey, J. (1981-1990). The Later Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. (LW), 17 Vols. J.A. Boydston (Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fott, D. (1998). John Dewey: Americas Philosopher of Democracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. In: M. Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow (pp. 208-226). Gibbons, M. T. (Ed.) (1987). Interpreting Politics. N.Y.: New York University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Hall, P. A., & Taylor, R. C. R. (1996). Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms. Political Studies, 44(4), 936-957. Hall, P. M. (1985). Asymmetric Relationships and Processes of Power. In: H. A. Farberman & R. S. Peringanayagam (Eds), Foundations of Interpretive Sociology: Original Essays in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 309-344). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Hall, P. M. (1997). Meta-Power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 397-418. Hay, C. (1995). Structure and Agency. In: D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds), Theory and Methods in Political Science (pp. 18%206). New York: St. Martins Press. Hay, C., & Wincott, D. (1998). Structure, Agency, and Historical Institutionalism. Political Studies, 46, 951-957. Hickman, L. A. (1992). John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hindess, B. (1996). Discourses of Power: from Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell. Isaac, J. C. (1987). Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Isaac, J. C.(1992). Beyond Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique. In: T. E. Wartenberg (Ed.), Rethinking Power (pp. 32-55). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. James, W. (1987). Pragmatism. In: William James: Writings 1902-1910. New York: Library of America. J0as, H. (1993). Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keat, R., & Urry, J. (1982). Social Theory as Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kerr, D. (1999). Beheading the King and Enthroning the Market: A Critique of Foucauldian Governmentality. Science & Society, 63(2), 173-202. Koelble, T. A. (1995). The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology. Comparative Politics, 27(2), 231-243. Lane, R. (1996). Positivism, Scientific Realism, and Political Science: Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 8(3), 361-382. Lindblom, C. (1977). Politics and Markets. New York: Basic Books. Loseke, D. R. (1992). The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Luckenbill, D. F. (1979). Power: A Conceptual Framework. Symbolic Interaction, 2, 97-114. Lukes, S.(1986). Introduction. In: S. Lukes (Ed.), Power (pp. 1-18). N.Y.: New York University Press. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Macpherson, C. B. (1977). The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Prus, R. (1999). Beyond the Power Mystique: Power as Intersubjective Accomplishment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rouse, J. (1994). Power/Knowledge. In: G. Gutting (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foueault (pp. 92-114). NY: Cambridge University Press. Seigfried, C. H. (1998). John Deweys Pragmatist Feminism. In: L. Hickman (Ed.), Reading Dewey: Interpretation for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sleeper, R. (1986). The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Strauss, A. L. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Stuhr, J. (1993). Can Pragmatism Appropriate the Resources of Postmodernism? A Response to Nielsen. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 29(4), 56--572. Stuhr, J. (1997). Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Thayer, H. S. (1973). Meaning and Action: A Study of American Pragmatism. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Tiles, J. E. (1988). Dewey. London: Routledge. Wolfe, J. D. (1996). Power and Privatization: Choice and Competition in the Remaking of British Democracy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wolfe, J. D. (1999). Power and Regulation in Britain. Political Studies, 47(5), 890-905.

LAYERED BUREAUCRACY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITIES: INTERPRETIVE DIMENSIONS OF THE RESEARCH APPROVAL PROCESS Sylvia J. Ansay, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT Institutional controls and legal enmeshments have become increasingly problematic for social scientists in recent years. For sociologists, whose disciplinary ethic is defined by rigid standards of confidentiality and admonishments to "do no harm," the dilemma appears to be one of accepting legislative protections based on the natural science model of good science or enduring the consequences of compelled disclosure of data and participant identities in court. Some critical and interpretive sociologists offer a third option - a return to a moral framework for the discipline, one that focuses on the ways power and ideology influence institutions. In this paper, I examine how street-level politics and the enmeshment of the scientific paradigm within the various contributing (layered) bureaucracies influence the shape of university research and challenge the ideal of a moral framework. I use personal experience to demonstrate how subjectivities, or narrative identities, are continuously negotiated and redefined during the research approval process to produce bureaucratic acceptability, scientific legitimacy, and legal accountability. The analysis

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has broader implications as it demonstrates how the biases that equate good sociology with scientific method can ultimately shape research decisions and create additional challenges for those who seek to change the discipline

INTRODUCTION Everybody has trouble with bureaucracy. Citizens and politicians have trouble controlling the runaway bureaucratic machine. Managers have trouble managing it. Employes [sic] dislike working in it. Clients can't get the goods from it. Teachers have trouble getting an overall grip on it. Students are mystified by the complexity of it. Hummel, 1982 We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanisms. Foucanlt, 1979 the definition of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? .

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Robert Penn Warren, 1959, quoted in Holstein and Gubrium, 2000

Bureaucracies are frequently portrayed by their clients as monolithic entities, unchanging, unmoving, and almost irrationally rational in their approach to solving everyday problems. Contrasting scholarly views portray bureaucracy as nebulously formed within an ideological framework - an organizational discourse - operating purposively in place and time (Berger & Luckman, 1976; Douglas, 1986; Meyer & Rowan, 1991). Approaching the bureaucratic realm at the "street level" (Lipsky, 1984), as clients in need of a service or product (i.e. research approval), we encounter both "monolith and ideology"; we meet the process of "personnel bureaucracy" (Ferguson, 1984) face-to-face. Here at the interactional level is the Oz of the real world, where, like Dorothy in her quest to return to Kansas, one bravely enters into the rituals of an organization that is monolithic in definition and purpose, and ideologically focused on maintaining its claims. As Ferguson suggests: . . . personnel bureaucracy carves out its turf and establishes its claims to resources by becoming a resource to other bureaucracies. To do this, personnel management must be defined as a profession with a monopoly on a field of knowledge that is both necessary and otherwise unavailable to other bureaucracies. Claims to new knowledge are often primarily labels to rituals and techniques, legitimated by claims to the knowledge as both scarce and valuable (p. 79).

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As an interactive construct, personnel bureaucracy acts deliberately as individual administrators performing specific tasks, constructing clientsubjects who are deserving of the organizations valued resources. Through policies and practices, personnel bureaucracy defines the legitimacy of client needs and maintains a collaborative link within a broader bureaucratic network. As agents of their own subjective making, personnel bureaucrats frame the multiple versions of self and others within the particular discourse that defines their roles. Thus, personnel bureaucracy is both agent and agency; it is the social process through which bureaucratic understandings enter the everyday world. As bureaucracies become resources to other bureaucracies, as frequently happens through legislation and policy change, new knowledges are interpreted among bureaucratic agents, incorporated into the existing patterns of ritual and technique, and integrated as practice in face-to-face negotiations with clients. It is not uncommon for client-subjects to negotiate various "layers" of institutional bureaucracies, each with its "going parameters and expectations for the kinds of self-interpretations that readily 'make sense' in the existing institutional scheme of things" (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, pp. 166-167. See also Holstein, 1993; Gubrium & Holstein, 1997). In these circumstances, the language of bureaucracy, shapes the client as "deserving" or "undeserving" of the prized resources the agency controls. The matter of negotiating institutionally acceptable, or legitimate selves, is highly relevant within the context of bureaucratic ritual in the social sciences for, as Littrell (1993) states, "bureaucratic organizations now form the most important social context of science" (p. 207). Legitimacy, like the bureaucracies through which it is organized, is process. Lyotard (1993) provides an example and a definition: Take any civil law as an example: it states that a given category of citizens must perform a specifickind of action. Legitimationis the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm (p. 8). As bureaucratic organizations become further enmeshed in a legal-centric discourse that claims all knowledge as its own, the matter of how legitimacy is defined becomes increasingly problematic, especially for sociologists who remain guided by the American Sociological Association's ethical constraints of protecting the confidentiality of our research subjects and sensitive data at all costs (ASA, 1982, Section I.E.5., cited in Picou, 1996a). The matter is complicated by the enmeshment of bureaucratic organizations within a discourse that singularly privileges the natural science paradigm and organizes around adversarial processes in search of a determinate Truth.

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Legal Challenges To Confidentiality During the past 25 years, the mesh of legal discourse has been refined while the net of the legal system has tightened around formerly respected zones of academic privilege. In high stakes cases, corporate or state entities with "deep pockets" issue deliberately broad subpoenas of researcher data, leaving the courts to define the limits of protection. Steven Picou, a sociologist who has experienced the monetary and professional costs of involvement in the legal system, understands the broad dimensions of protecting sensitive data and participant confidentiality. On October 1, 1992, Picou, who had returned the previous month from fieldwork among Alaskan residents impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, received a subpoena from Exxon, Inc. "requesting every scrap of information I had collected in four years of research in Alaska, as well as personal financial records" (Picou, 1996a, p. 219). Ruling on a protective order filed by Picou's employer, the University of South Alabama, the judge denied access to respondent identities, however, the ruling on data disclosure was more problematic. In this case, the judge differentiated between published and unpublished data, not on the basis of its sensitivity or the possibility of any harmful effects on the participants, but on the single fact of publication. Despite the raw form of much of the published data, the court reasoned that the "underlying data must be made available to others equally skilled and perceptive" (Protective Order, In re the Exxon Valdez RE: all Cases, Misc. 92-0072 RV-C (S.D. Ala. July 1, 1993, quoted in Picou, 1996, para. 17, italics added). In the Picou case, the ruling judge assumed the universality of research method; the "computer dump" of Picous data should, if analyzed "scientifically" by "qualified experts" (i.e. by those who apply the correct method) produce a single, discernable Truth. For Mario Brajuha, a graduate student conducting participant-observer research in a Long Island New York restaurant, the courts privileging of the scientific paradigm is even more disconcerting as an example of the courts use of sensitive data to produce the case itself. While working as a walter in the restaurant, Brajuha became a victim of circumstances, in a sense, when the restaurant burned under suspicious circumstances. A Federal Grand Jury subpoenaed the entirety of Brajuha's data - notes, diaries, everything - to be turned over to the courts. Brajuha's university chose not to support him and, while the American Sociological Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other professional organizations voiced their support, they would not provide legal assistance. Moreover, Brajuha's non-standard methodology made it difficult to find an attorney willing to argue his case. Brajuha, representing

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himself, entered a plea of scholar's privilege, which was subsequently denied. In this case, the court ruled that confidentiality protections extended to "the relationships [italics added] represented by the privileged data, not to the notes themselves" (Brajuha & Hallowell, 1986, p. 462, cited by Picou, 1996). Overall, it appears judges have been sympathetic to the matter of respondent confidentiality; however, they have been disturbingly consistent in their reliance on the natural science model as the standard from which their decisions of data protection are being made (Crabb, 1996; Wiggins & McKenna, 1996, Jasanoff, 1996). Judicial logic flows from skepticism, which is inscribed in legal discourse and shapes the way scholarly expertise is constructed. Legal professionals take for granted the "good science" model that separates participants, researchers, and method. Judge Barbara Crabb's (1996) advice to social science researchers is but one example. She writes: "So long as rules [of appeals] authorize broad discovery, the federal courts are far more apt to allow litigants to attack scientific studies through the usual methods of cross examination that depend for their effectiveness upon extensive discovery of the underlying data and possible biases of the scientist" (para. 13). Thus, legal scholars advise researchers to take heed and build confidentiality protections into the research design (Traynor, 1996; Crabb, 1996; Picou, 1996b; Wiggins & McKenna, 1996).

Instituting New Authorities Challenges to excessive subpoena and compelled disclosure have prompted new legislation at the federal level. Those litigants issuing subpoenas are now required to show strong evidence of "need"; however, the measure leaves judges to interpret the criteria on which to breach confidentiality protections. As noted in the earlier cases, judicial interpretation does not guarantee participant confidentiality nor does it accept academic privilege as a standard for protecting sensitive data. Ironically, the legal protections provided through legislation ignore the standards of confidentiality that currently define sociological research ethics. Instead, these new measures enhance the authority of certification agencies and Institutional Review Boards and provide additional layers of bureaucratic (legal) protection (i.e. Certificates of Confidentiality) around them (Christian, 2000, pp. 140-141).

Shifting the Subjects Emphasis on protections for "human subjects", institutionalized by the U.S. National Commission for Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and

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Behavioral Research in 1978, appears to have shifted formally in 1989 when Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act and formed the Commission on Research Integrity. While the earlier Act emphasized the human side of research, the later measures were concerned with strengthening ("revitalizing") bureaucratic authority and empowering an apparatus for greater scrutiny of the research itself. Technically, NIH became a collaborator with university Institutional Review Boards in producing legitimate models of research and constructing the kinds of subjects necessary to insure "good science" and maintain status quo. A Moral Dimension This layering of bureaucratic agencies is increasingly problematic, especially to those sociologists already critical of the institutional ties and utilitarian philosophies privileging the natural science model and defining a research ethic that effectively eliminates the social dimension of the discipline. Clifford Christian puts it this way: •.. The way power and ideology influence social and political institutions is ignored• Under a rhetorical patina of deliberate choice and the illusion of autonomous creativity, a meansend system operates in fundamentally its own terms. •.. This constricted environment no longer addresses adequately the complicated issues we face in studying the social world. Celebrity social scientists generate status and prestige •.. But failure in the War on Poverty, contradictions over welfare, and ill-fated studies of urban housing have dramatized the limitations of a utility calculus that occupies the entire moral domain (2000, p. 142). To an extent, the criticism is not new. Already in the late, 1950s, C. Wright Mills voiced concerns about the increasing linkage between sociological research and the bureaucratic institutions that support it (Christian, 2000). However, today the critical lens from within the discipline focuses more directly on the role of the natural science hegemony not only on the kinds of research being done but also on the way it is carried out (Christian, 2000; Vaughn, 1993; Sjoberg & Vaughn, 1993). Scholar-critics advocate a moral shift in the discipline, one that emphasizes the communitarian dimensions of social life and organizes its methodologies around a dynamic version of "interpretive sufficiency". Citing Denzin (1989), Christian defines interpretive sufficiency as "taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural complexity" (p. 145). One example of the kinds of questions that need to be asked within this new moral framework is suggested by Sjoberg and Vaughn (1993) who ask: "How is the natural science model, and the research procedures associated

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with it, interlaced with the bureaucratization process?" (p. 75). While they go on to discuss the matter within its broad social context, I address the question interactionally, at the face-to-face level where interpretive sufficiency begins. In the following section, I focus on "the practice of subjectivity and . . . the varied language games used in the practice" (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p. 71), as I show how bureaucratic layering and discursive enmeshment makes the critical goal of change within the discipline particularly challenging. CONTEXTUALIZING BUREAUCRATIC NEGOTIATION The interpretive context for the present analysis emerged from a process familiar to all university-affiliated researchers, my application to the university's Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval of my proposed research. I was a graduate student at the time, just a dissertation away from a Ph.D. in Sociology. The research focus, family life on house arrest, had emerged from my experiences working with families, first as a 15-year veteran public school teacher, later, following retirement from an interim career in business, as a Guardian ad Litem representing the interests of physically and sexually abused children in court. As usual in studies involving human subjects, my research proposal required examination by the university's Institutional Review Board (IRB), ostensibly to assure the safety and confidentiality of the study participants - felony offenders on house arrest and the family members with whom they lived. What I expected to be a routine approval process took an unexpected turn when Board members, after scrutinizing the text of the various consent forms which I had submitted, shifted their attention to include issues of liability as well as protecting the research from subpoena. Hence, the IRB provided only conditional approval for my work, the condition being that I obtain a Certificate of Confidentiality from the National Institute of Research Certification (NIRC), 1 an agency directly responsible to the U.S. Congress. During the process of negotiating with the NIRC agents, the narrative focus of bureaucratic concern shifted even further - from protecting not only the subjects and the data, but also to protecting me. 2

THE E M E R G E N C E OF A NEED The Proposed Research Stricter crime controls, prison overcrowding, and the increasing costs of incarceration have fueled the trend toward home confinement with intensive

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supervision - house arrest - as an alternative form of punishment. In most cases, house arrest restricts offenders to the physical premises of home except for specific hours of paid employment, court-ordered community service or rehabilitation programs, or personal/familial needs as specifically pre-approved by the case officer. Because I was interested in the accountability strategies used by members in negotiating the roles and relationships that produce "family" under rigidly controlled circumstances, I designed the interviews and the analysis around individual narratives in the form of life stories (Atkinson, 1998; Denzin, 1989; Gubrium, 1993; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). The methodology offered participants the freedom to move in directions most meaningful to them and, in that way, to respect their privacy in relation to the criminal offense. This, then, was the ethical framework for the design I submitted. I considered the various consent forms to be of equal importance in protecting this particularly vulnerable group of participants, although, at the time, I was naively unaware of the Board's role in protecting the university as well. I was similarly unaware of the Federal rules of procedure, particularly Rule 45, the, 1991 legislative amendment concerned specifically with legal procedures in subpoenas issued to "unretained experts" like me (FED. R. CIV. P. 45 [c][B][ii]). Nor did I understand that certain strategies for protection from subpoena must be integrated into the research process from its inception in order to protect data and participant confidentiality (Traynor, 1996). After meeting with the Review Board's administrative secretary to attend to what she called "housekeeping details," my proposal was forwarded to the IRB. Based on her experience in working with the Board, the secretary assured me that my proposal was clearly written and would merit routine approval. Her confidence as well as my own were to dissipate over the next few weeks; the terse message that she left on my answering service announced "problems", and the need to meet together as soon as possible.

The Embedding of New Knowledge During the week prior to receiving my proposal, various members of the IRB attended an out-of-state conference dealing with new legislation and participant protection. According to the administrative secretary who described the conference, one of the sessions was devoted to legal concerns related to confidentiality. Citing cases in which sensitive research data had been subpoenaed by the courts, the attendees were encouraged to take seriously the need to protect the university, as well as the subjects and the investigator, from potential legal complications. Specifically, they were introduced to the protections offered by certain federal confidentiality certificates. Attorney Michael

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Traynor explains the legal protections offered under Certificates of confidentiality this way: "Once armed with a confidentiality certificate under federal law, a researcher in federal or state court, or in other proceedings, has the discretion to refuse to divulge the identity or identifying details of the individual source(s) who furnished the data upon assurance of confidentiality. The substance of the information disclosed, however, is not confidential - only the identity of the source is - and it may be aggregated with comparable data in a public report" (Picou, 1996b, p. 150). Despite the limitations of Certificates of Confidentiality in protecting data, this "new knowledge" among Board members greatly changed the IRB process in relation to my work. Instead of receiving the routine approval as predicted, I was given only conditional approval, the condition being that I apply for and receive a Certificate of Confidentiality from NIRC, an agency that answers directly to the Congress of the United States. As I left her office with the news, the secretary commented that, although she knew of only one other current study requiring a Certificate, she expected, "we'll see a lot more of them now that the Board members are aware of the problem". The New Criteria of "Need" I began the process of applying for a Certificate of Confidentiality with a phone call to the offices of NIRC. My call was directed to a woman - I'll call her Hannah - who explained the use of Certificates of Confidentiality in NIRC funded research. Since my work was not funded at that time, she wondered aloud why I was applying for NIRC protection. "I need it," I explained simply, "for IRB approval of my research proposal". Since I had already FAXed a copy of the Board's letter of conditional approval to her, she responded: "Yes, they've made it a condition. You will need it. They must have a reason". (The latter was said slowly and deliberately.) "I will send you instructions for applying". Within a few days I received a six-page printout titled, "NIRC CONFIDENTIALITY CERTIFICATE APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS". Except for requiring copies of my consent forms as approved by the IRB, the instructions stated: "Please do not respond by submitting supplementary materials". I was further advised that, since I was "Non-DHHS-supported", I would need to comply with "all the requirements of 45 CFR Part 46 103 (c) and document legally informed consent in a manner consistent with the principles stated in 45 CFR 46 111". The remaining five pages of information, titled, "PROTECTION OF IDENTITY - RESEARCH SUBJECTS", (Section 301 (d) of the Public Health Service Act) provided an "Interim Policy Statement" as to who could be authorized to receive a Certificate,

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who would handle requests by Federal agencies, and what research circumstances would be protected, the scope of the Act as it applies to unfunded research, and the "exceptions" to the Certificates protection. For the most part, the exceptions cited other Federal laws which were not explained in the document. Mostly, the papers in my hands outlined the agencies policies in relation to client approval for certification, although certain exceptions for "scientific research" applied as well. Thus began the process of negotiating the subjective boundaries of my proposal within the institutional definition of "good science".

Negotiating Boundaries Despite the conditional approval of the project by the university IRB, my "nonscienfic" proposal raised several questions that became the focus of boundary negotiations between me and the federal agency. The methodological design of the proposed research, unquestioned by the university Board familiar with various qualitative research methodologies, had raised concerns from the person whom Hannah described as the methodology expert at NIRC, a man whom I'll call Dr. Derrick. According to Hannah, Dr. Derrick wanted to know: (a) what exactly was I planning to ask the participants; (b) what formal agreements did I have for recruiting volunteers; and (c) how would I analyze the data "scientifically", all questions that, in my mind, had been addressed adequately within the framework of interpretive sociology as outlined in the proposal I had already submitted. Dr. Derrick's questions came through Hannah who acknowledged that she was not familiar with research methods and would not be able to advise me more specifically on how to respond. Hannah's concerns centered on the consent forms, which she claimed also needed to be more explicit. Why, she wondered, had I included the phrase "to the extent of the law" without elaborating further on the exceptions to the law. I explained that the phrase had been added as required by the university IRB. Because Hannah had recognized the IRB's professional construction of need in requiring a Certificate of Confidentiality, I fully expected her to honor their discretion on the wording of the consent forms. That did not occur. "To the extent of the law" was inadequate under NIRC guidelines, according to Hannah. I would have to include a further statement on the forms indicating the exceptions to confidentiality; specifically, I would have to state clearly my obligation to report any direct knowledge of current child abuse, and I would have to report a participant's stated intentions for future criminal acts.

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Shifting Visions of "Protected Selves" The introduction of this new criteria shifted the vision of "protected subject" from its moral framework within my research design into the legal discourse of a legitimating bureaucracy. Having designed the research methodology around an image of families in their everyday environments, my human subject was already alive for me, carefully watching me as I introduced myself and the project, weighing the stories that were being told. My human subject was already on the wrong side of the law, wary about my position "inside the system". For me, a Certificate of Confidentiality was a guarantee that I would not pass information along to a supervising corrections officer. It was, for all practical purposes, my pledge to secrecy, the visible proof of my integrity. For Hannah, privacy and confidentiality were legal matters to be addressed in writing. Therefore, additional procedural information must be included on the Offender Consent Forms as well as on the Family Member Consent Forms. The Parental Permission form, allowing me to interview juvenile members of the household, required a script to be used in soliciting the interviews with children. In the documents, as well as in phone conversations between the IRB secretary, or Hannah, and me, research subjects were narratively portrayed as those-who-need-protection-from-exploitation, indeed as passive subject-objects in the process of the research itself. However, when it served our purposes, these subjects were interactionally transformed into actors in their own right.

Constructing Legal Subjects One such shift occurred in relation to NIRC's requirement to include a sentence addressing my "affirmative responsibility" (the exceptions to confidentiality as stated earlier). My concern was that a direct written statement such as this would create apprehension on the part of prospective participants, whose emotional vulnerability I was wanting to protect. I also reasoned that, since the research was a family study rather than a criminological one, the likelihood of any person disclosing sensitive information around the details of a crime was minimal. Ignorant of my own vulnerability under the "protections" of Rule 45 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, I felt the phrase, 'to the extent of the law,' as required by IRB was adequate written notice of the legal limits of confidentiality, and that a verbal explanation of these limits would be a more meaningful approach. I expected (and later knew for certain) that many participants would have limited reading ability or, at least, little inclination to read a lengthy document prior to making a commitment. I feared that the length and

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details of the consent forms might be intimidating and negatively affect their decision to participate in the study. Hannah, however, presented the legal aspects of full disclosure. No longer was it the subjects' protection that concerned her; instead it became an issue of my protection against the subpoena of my data by the court. After repeatedly emphasizing that the Certificate offered no protection without proper language, I made the changes as I understood them.

SHIFTING SUBJECTIVITIES Shifting visions of subjectivity are practical productions emerging from the different organizational worlds of meaning. James Holstein (1993) points out that one organizational outlook is not necessarily more accurate than the other, 'but that each reflect[s] the interpretive concerns of an organized domain of practical interests" (p. 171). The meaning of Holstein's claim became increasingly clear during the negotiations that followed as each new "problem" required another shift in the vision of subject. Initially, "human subjects" were the focus of the research approval process at both IRB and NIRC, and these organizations appeared to have direct concern for them. Hannah's insistence that I provide more details on how subjects would be solicited and where audio-taped interviews and coded identities would be stored reflected these concerns. However, as each new methodological problem emerged, my identity as a researcher changed too. My need for a certificate transformed into a need to fulfill "the criteria". These are "the rules", Hannah assured me, and "this is the way these things are done". To her, my participation in the process was strictly routine, that is, what was expected under the circumstances.

Organizing Subjects Organizational processes are not static, nor do they flow in the manner of a river moving from upstream to downstream. Instead, they are increasingly complex with members seemingly speaking everywhere and at all times. As participants in the approval process, we were the IRB, NIRC, Hannah, Dr. Derrick, the Principal Investigator (PI), and the prospective interviewees - our human subjects. Each became for the others an interpretive resource used in negotiating toward our respective goals in the social context of institutional routine. As the approval process progressed, multiple subjectivities emerged, all speaking for themselves instead of adhering to the "objective parameters" of the Instructional Guidelines.

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Applicant as Researcher and Subject Early on in the application process, I, as researcher-who-needed-a-Certificate, felt confident that the criteria necessary for approval were clear and that I would merely have to adjust my description of the project to fit the existing organizational framework. I was confident, too, that it was my proposal, not me, that was being evaluated. Having been required to add the words Principal Investigator to the explanatory material in the consent documents, I was within the framework of objectivity in which the proposal itself would be viewed. I felt protected by its aura, even after Hannah called to tell me that the changes I had made on the consent forms, although more specific about the exceptions to confidentiality than in the earlier version, were still inadequate "under the guidelines". She offered to FAX some examples from proposals others had written as models of legally acceptable verbiage, and I used these examples subsequently in the final revision of the forms. My next call from Hannah came several days later. My consent forms were approved, she said, however Dr. Derrick's concerns about the theoretical and methodological orientation of my proposed work were more disconcerting to her. Hesitantly, she added that "perhaps [these concerns were] not as easy to resolve". Basically, Dr. Derrick had said he didn't understand my work as "scientific". Responding to my remark that IRB had not questioned the design of the research, Hannah explained: "Perhaps you don't understand. He is an expert with many years of experience". The implication was that, if he didn't understand my research design, clearly it was "inadequate". I would have to explain the methodology in much greater depth and show how narrative analysis relates to "good science". Hannah added: "We're used to receiving great numbers of applications for funded research, and he [Dr. Derrick] says he has never seen anything like this". Summarily, she said it was he who would make the final decision on the approval. It was my turn to produce organizational adequacy - whatever that was - for Dr. Derrick and Hannah in my proposed research design.

Renegotiating Subjectivities Once again, my need for a certificate had to be reconstructed as a need to negotiate the boundaries of adequacy, but this time it was not just the adequacy of my research design. I was now the researcher with less expertise than Dr. Derrick. Moreover, I was now the subject of my own, Hannah's, and Dr. Derrick's approval process. What concerned me more at the moment, however, was the problem of portraying a "non-scientific methodology" to someone unfamiliar with, perhaps even antagonistic to, interpretive sociology.

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The movement away from formulaic objectivity in the approval process was even more evident after my second submission, when Hannah requested a conference call with my participating professor. By that time, I had fulfilled the requirements for the consent form disclosures and satisfied Dr. Derrick's request for more methodological details. However, as Hannah explained, there were other "issues of concern" surrounding the project. These she would not discuss with me alone, so we arranged a date and time for the three-way conversation to take place. The phone rang in my professor's home precisely at the time scheduled. I recognized Hannah's voice as my professor answered from his desk. Hannah asked him if I was present and I acknowledged verbally that I was speaking from a separate phone in an adjacent room. After that, she shifted her attention solely to my professor for several minutes. In each of her earlier conversations with me, Hannah had identified herself as the agency's executive administrator, an official bureaucratic position. With my professor on the conference call, she recontextualized herself outside of her bureaucratic designation, identifying herself to him as an attorney with legal experience "on these matters". As in previous conversations with me, she described Dr. Derrick as "an expert in his field". However, as an attorney, she now wanted justification from my professor as to why I would be collecting the kind of data that needed to be protected by the certificate of confidentiality. As spokesperson for Dr. Derrick, she wanted to know how this project would be different than what he described as "ordinary journalism". Patiently, my professor spoke of my work, legitimating my research within the discipline, and constructing his own expert status to match that of Dr. Derrick's. Following the conference call, I submitted what eventually became a final revision of the proposal - one liberally spiced with citations legitimating the methodology as "good sociology". At Hannah's insistence, my professor's name would have to appear on the project, therefore, in contrast to earlier submissions, I presented the elaborations as our (my professor's and my) proposal rather than as mine singularly. Along with the newly-framed "objective" focus of the project - the effects of house arrest on families of felony offenders - I cited various of my professor's publications to support my work. Thus, through narrative collaboration rather than in relation to the objective criteria, we - Hannah, Dr. Derrick, my professor, and I - produced an understanding of "expert selves," one which both constituted and reproduced the NIRC's institutional guidelines for certificate approval. My professor and I were now "good scientists"; the design constituted "legitimate research"

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OBJECTIVITY AND OTHERING Hannah, Dr. Derrick, and the IRB speak an official language, an administrative language or discourse, similar to that used in other regulatory disciplines. As Ferguson (1984) notes, administrative language reveals a political culture, one that can be investigated through the language used in applying its rules "objectively". In this case, the bias toward scientific methodology and standardized scales conditioned a shift in the focus of negotiations from the various subjects and data protection to protection of the research project itself. During the interactive process of reconstructing the status of researcheras-expert and negotiating around the exceptions to confidentiality, my courage waned and my strategy shifted to presenting myself and my work to conform with institutional guidelines. My primary motive - obtaining approval remained, however I lost interest in protecting my research design and focus at all costs. I had a dissertation to write. I agreed to the various revisions and elaborations, including a more measurable interview format, and Hannah gave my work her verbal approval. She told me that unless Dr. Derrick had other concerns, she believed I had fulfilled all of NIRC's requirements and the certificate would be issued later in the week when Dr. Derrick returned from a conference. By now, almost four months had passed since my first submission to IRB. A few days later, I received a phone call from Hannah with the message to call Dr. Derrick directly as soon as possible. She said he was satisfied that my research was "theoretically and methodologically appropriate", but that he had serious reservations about my safety. That day was the first time I had spoken directly to Dr. Derrick. His tone demonstrated a paternalistic concern; his purpose, he said, was to help me understand that "nobody does this kind of research because you never know about these people" (meaning, I believe, felony offenders). He told me about "the kind of people who commit those crimes" and how "someone like you" doesn't know the dangers of interviewing "those families" in their homes. In this context, I was now the researcher who needed not a certificate, but protection from the very subjects whose confidentiality the certificate was originally meant to protect. We were no longer even pretending to talk about data; we were talking about real people, active subjects who could/would be dangerous. Shifting frameworks requires shifts in subjectivities. If my research participants were dangerous subjects, I was the potential victim- researcher needing to be protected from my own designs. Making his point perfectly clear, Dr. Derrick summarized his concerns by saying that even if "only one in 10,000 is a psychopath, I need to take these things seriously". By implication, of course, I was not presently doing

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so. Keeping in mind that his approval meant the difference between adding a family-centered dimension to the literature on house arrest - and, ideally, influencing social policy decisions - and finding a new, "acceptable" dissertation topic, I quietly thanked Dr. Derrick for his concern, acknowledged the dangers as he perceived them, and literally begged for his approval of the project. I produced multiple subjectivities - a virtual smorgasbord of selves - submissive student, grateful client, mature woman, capable researcher. I chronicled a history of behavioral understandings and social responsibility - fifteen years of teaching, my criminology master's degree, my experiences interviewing women in prison, my training as a Guardian ad Litem, a role which is frequently perceived as adversarial. At that point Dr. Derrick moved to end the conversation by saying: "There really is nowhere to go in this conversation. I must tell you that if this research design had been submitted for funding through our institution, I would not approve it". Although Hannah had told me earlier that the final decision would be Dr. Derrick's, he ended our conversation by saying he would leave the decision to her. Approximately five months after submitting my proposal to the IRB, my research was approved. During the following year, I conducted the interviews without evidence of the one in 10,000 from whom I may or may not have needed protection. In fact, the offenders and family members whom I interviewed were more likely to pour out their hearts - the frustrations of weekly reporting to sometimes distant offices, the apprehensions of being in place according to the approved schedule when minimum-wage jobs required flexibility, the embarrassments of officers' intrusions at moments of family intimacy, the tensions of deciding between risk and compliance during family emergencies, the boredom of weekends away from friends and family outside the household, the loneliness and accompanying thoughts of suicide, and, the overall stress that constitutes a sentence which some members described as worse than prison.

TRUTH-BASED A S S U M P T I O N S AND SUBJECTIVITIES The deconstruction of institutionally created subjectivities in the research approval process demonstrates how the parameters and expectations of layered bureaucracies (i.e. the university, NIRC, the courts) condition the nature of sociological research overall and present a challenge to those of us who attempt to re-focus policy through research. It points to the ethical dilemma that constitutes the clash of values within the discursive, interpretive domains of sociology and the Truth-based assumptions of layered bureaucratic organizations.

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It also provides evidence of the underlying biasing discourse of scientific method at work at all levels of the legitimation process. Hannah's model of certifiability needs a legal subject. Dr. Derrick seeks one with research expertise. Both rely on the gold standard of scientific method to construct subjects who fit the parameters set by rules of procedure and adversarial scrutiny - subjects whose legitimacy can be defended in court and whose official worthiness protects the issuing institutions from liability as well. Although I saw little need for a Certificate of Confidentiality at the time, in retrospect, I ' m glad to have had its protections (if not its bureaucratic scrutiny), for I understand Attorney Michael Traynor's (1996) words of caution: " . . . even the most objective research may be put at risk if it becomes bogged down in the muddy fields of litigation" (para. 6). Speaking in a similar vein, Judge Barbara Crabb describes the professionally damaging shape those "muddy fields" can take: "Because juries find scientific studies persuasive, trial lawyers defend against them by arguing that they are flawed and unreliable. The lawyers look for potential biases in the researcher's approach and possible error in execution or analysis" (para. 10). Thus, while framed within the discursive realm of scientific claims, the "battle of experts" in the courtroom unfolds as "not so much a contest between 'true' or 'false' beliefs as a test of the strength and unanimity of the prevailing consensus" (Jasanoff, 1996, para. 15). Where would I be in that battle if one of the participants committed a violent felony during the course of the research? Would the university have supported me in a challenge against compelled disclosure, or would I, like Brahuja, been left to fight on my own?

THE "PERIL OF PROTECTION" The peril of institutionalized legal protections lies in the increasing administrative control as institutional review boards - experts operating under an "illusion of good methods" (Littrell, 1996) - include certificates and other federal and state protections as conditions of research approval. In the research approval process described in this chapter, Hannah and Dr. Derrick were seeking the standard package of measurable variables and experimental design and, because mine was interpretive ethnography, it wasn't there. Nor would it have been discoverable in litigation had that occurred because, as Sheila Jasanoff (1996) points out, ethnographic and other "non-standardized" approaches do not provide the tidy data packages of survey research. Jasanoff questions the institutional competence of the courts in making informed decisions regarding the disclosure of ethnographic data. The danger, she says, "is that the research findings 'could be extremely vulnerable to charges of drawing conclusions that

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are insufficiently substantiated by field records' " (para. 42). My own work is vulnerable in that regard; I have no doubt it is the way Dr. Derrick and Hannah would view it. Yet, I wonder what will be the shape of university research in the new millenium as approval boards take more and more responsibility for setting institutional standards for protection and for defining us and our respondents as deserving or undeserving subjects. Will our methodologies shift to find the safety zone of status quo as bureaucrats construct legal subjectivities apart from the moral imperatives of our work? Will ethnographers and other interpretive sociologists choose safe research rather than risking subpoena and the ethical dilemma posed by compelled disclosure? What politic will define our professional integrity?

EPILOGUE While doing research for revisions on this chapter, I came across a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (28, p. 6, 1999) titled, Ethnography: Reflections on the Millenium's Turn. Within its pages are the names of many scholars whom I recognize - Loseke, Cahill, Gans, Atkinson, Denzin, Ellis, Bochner, Gubrium, Holstein, Richardson, Fine, Miller, Stacey people whose writings shape unique possibilities for the discipline in the new millenium. Collectively, they speak enthusiastically about a growing acceptance of ethnography throughout academia and about changes in focus, methodology, and energy from within. Setting the stage for renewed emphasis on action, Denzin says, "This is a return to narrative as a political act, a minimal ethnography with political teeth" (p. 510). I like that. However, the challenge to fulfillment of such lofty goals will lie in playing that politic together, to extract the legal teeth of the layered bureaucracies that support the natural science paradigm and maintain disciplinary status quo.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Dr. Jaber Gubrium, my professor at the University of Florida, who stuck with me through the tedious approval process, and provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to anonymous reviewers and to Dr. Norman Denzin for their helpful comments and insights on the revision. The research from which this paper emerged was funded by a dissertation grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

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NOTES 1. The name of the organization, as well as its agents, is fictitious. 2. It is important to emphasize that the purpose of this analysis is not to criticize the efforts of these agents, but to foreground the interactional context of bureaucratic process.

REFERENCES Atkinson, R. (1998). The Life Story Interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1976). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Christian, C. G. (2000). Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research. In: N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Crabb, B. B. (1996). Judicially Compelled Disclosure of Researchers' Data: A Judge's View. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 9-34. Denzin, N. (1989). Interpretive Interactionism. Newbury Park: Sage. Denzin, N. (1999). Interpretive Ethnography for the Next Century. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5), 510-519. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Ferguson, K. E. (1984) The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Foucanlt, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translation by Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage Books. Gubrium, J. F. (1993). Speaking of life: Horizons of Meaning for Nursing Home Residents. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Grnyter. Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (1997). The New Language of Qualitative Methods. NY: Oxford University Press. Guhrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (2000). Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World. NY: Oxford University Press. Holstein, J. A. (1993). Court-ordered Insanity: Interpretive Practice and Involuntary Commitment. NY: Aldine DeGrnyter. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (1995). The Active Interview. Newbury Park: Sage. Hummel, R. P. (1982). The Bureaucratic Experience (2nd ed.). NY: St. Martin's Press. Jasanoff, S. (1996). Research Subpoenas and the Sociology of Knowledge. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 95-118. Lipsky, M. (1984). The Rationing of Services in Street-Level Bureaucracies. In: F. Fischerand & C. Sirianni (Eds), Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Littrell, B. (1993). Bureaucratic Secrets and Adversarial Methods of Social Research. In: F. Vanghn, G. Sjoberg & G. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary Sociology. NY: General Hall. Lyotard, J. F. (1993). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. G. Bennington & B. Massumi (Trans.). Theory and History of Literature Series, Vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meyer, J. W., & Rowen, B. (1991). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal StructureAas Myth and Ceremony. In: W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Picou, J. S. (1996a). Sociology and Compelled Disclosure: Protecting Respondent Confidentiality. Sociological Spectrum, •6(3), 209-237. Picou, J. S. (1996b). Compelled Disclosure of Scholarly Research: Some Comments on High Stakes Litigation. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 149-157. Sjoberg, G., & Vaughn, T. R. (1993). Bureaucratization of Sociology. In: G. Vaughn, T. R. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, Inc. Traynor, M. (1996). Counter the Excessive Subpoena for Scholarly Research. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 119-148. Vaughn, T. R. (1993). The Crisis in Contemporary American Sociology: A Critique of the Discipline's Dominant Paradigm. In: T. R. Vaughn, G. Sjoberg & L. T. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, Inc. Wiggins, E. C., & McKenna, J. (1996). Researchers' Reactions to Compelled Disclosure of Scientific Information. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 67-93.

THE UNIVERSE IS A ONE-LINE POEM Mary E. Weems

If, as interactionists argue, societies exist only in the interactions between persons, then structures - linguistic, gender, kinship, political, economic, religious, cultural, scientific, moral - provide, as Simmel contended, the horizons of experience against which the actual concerns of human experience are sketched and lived (Denzin, 1983, p. 136). In this unintended, unanticipated, or unconscious way, must be realized interactionally. Gender is a specific structure which all human beings must confront (Denzin, 1992, p. 28). I was introduced to the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, by Dr. Yoon Pak; a historian, and intercultural studies advocate at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Like my own work, Hong Kingston's is self-politically and morally critical. By existing, her writings argue for liberation flowing seamlessly between history, myth, and metaphor. Crossing and re-crossing the ocean between China and America, her stories make it clear that all time is now. In the following series of poems, I interact with Chinese American cultural symbols as re-presented in three novels by Hong Kingston: The Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Life, A Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, and China Men, and create poetic responses to excerpts from these works. This project was prompted by a desire to begin to learn about the Chinese American lived experience, through literature. While it did not begin as a poetry project, the more I read, the more I began to see connections and disconnections between the Chinese American experience as interpreted by Hong Kingston, and my experiences as an African American woman. Upon revisiting the poems during the revision process I realized that in some of them, my own cultural symbols mix with my perceptions of Hong Kingston's creating an intercultural tapestry.

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I realized that w e share an oppressive e x p e r i e n c e as m e m b e r s o f m a r g i n a l i z e d cultures, and as w o m e n . The p o e m s w e r e created while on a stream o f consciousness vibe, then the drafts w e r e shared with other poets, and carefully edited based on their feedback. T h e p o e m s are the end-product o f an e p i p h a n y w h i c h constitutes an aesthetic e x p e r i e n c e in the D e w e y i a n sense. This work, as D e n z i n asserts in the quote w h i c h opens this p i e c e shares f r o m "[two] horizons o f e x p e r i e n c e against w h i c h the actual concerns o f h u m a n e x p e r i e n c e are sketched mad l i v e d " - m y poetic interpretations of H o n g K i n g s t o n ' s and m y own. The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The ideographs for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families." The reporting is the vengeance - not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words - "chink" words and "gook" words too - that they do not fit on my skin. Kingston,1977, p. 53

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts poems I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large. Kingston, 1977, p. 29 T h e speed o f light is a trick baby trying to dance the m o o n walk. I see a b o w l o f rice tilting on its edge starting to scatter on the ground like snow. ' R o u n d m i d n i g h t all is lost, and I catch up with Coletrane on a y e l l o w m o o n dipping to catch the sun. M e and G o d rap. I turn around three times and the u n i v e r s e is a one-line p o e m . T h e bob m y aunt w o r e replaces m y A m e r i c a n beauty shop locks. I p a l m m y brain like a coin and pull it f r o m the ear of m o t h e r w h o replies "no n a m e w o m a n . "

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But the Communists wear a blue plainness dotted with one red Mao button. Kingston, 1977, p. 76

They wear blood. Old sayings fly like sick birds past heads trying to think blue, think blue. Single red drops escape from hearts gather in a tight circle to form the button "Mao" We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can slide up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of pardon and love. Kingston, 1977, pp. 83-84

Ghosts nag for change shape girls from souls, scratch good words on their backs, their legs on the line, talk-story to the little ones being sold or given to palms filled with dirt and yellow dust. They walk across the roofs in the village leave ghost-prints, snapshots, the faces of Chinese American women remembering. Stars collect each spirit in their middles a midnight sky of coffins. When a star falls, it carries these girls with them. They drop over the village, into empty rice bowls filling them with water. We'd have to face four- and five-day-old leftovers until we ate it all . . . . I would live on plastic. Kingston, 1977, p. 92

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Eating is intimately connected to life like air taking different shapes, and smells it colors the breath, makes everyone a member. A mother's hand knocks the block off and filth is fillet mignon, the gravy over breakfast, no lunch, and dinner. In the new world, I set the table with plastic, say a prayer over used 1% milk bottles, tooth brushes, red spoons, and forks still carrying the lick of the last meal. My family gathers around the table bringing their nightmares with them. We create daydreams eat nothing that can be killed, borrowed, or stolen. They must have many interesting savage things to say, raised as they'd been in the wilderness. Kingston, 1977, p. 133

Buildings un-brick dripping mortar like piss - it streams into ditches while bodies undress drop their clothes into baskets and take to the streets wearing signs of the past. Traffic lights atlas-shrug, and accidents pile up on the streets like raincoats. Police run away from bars and cars lay their uniforms on the ground The facts aren't. People fall over themselves Looking for cracks in their mothers. The animals in the zoos hire security guards. Their orders: "keep your guns cocked, shoot first, then sever the whites from their eyes."

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The Universe is a One Line Poem Brave Orchid

Brave Orchid is a woman character's name

There is no talk-story for the grand canyon between the lines, a mother whose name is a mistake, a reverse kick, the last sound her "no name" sister made at the bottom of the well. Brave does not translate to this heart not rare like the orchid, but white shirts in a Chinese laundry. W o m e n force a too tight pattern over their daughters' heads' use long conversations of insults, shout "brave!"

Moon Orchid Moon Orchid is a woman character's name

More fragile than the flower nothing like her name, the beauty of same slipping in and out of days provided by a husband who left her in China for 30 years. When she came to America he questioned why she was there, or anywhere. In the end she was a wig and a wrinkle to her brave sister. Refusing to go outside she crouched in strange corners and when she lost her sister gave her away, opened her shutters, and aired out the house.

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TRIPMASTER MONKEY: His Fake Life poems: These gun pictures were what was left of his childhood ability to see galaxies Kingston, 1989, p. 4 It is the year of the gun and all the ducks, bears, and elephants don't hide. People wear don't shoot me gear 24-7 and walking in the woods has been banned. Big bands use Sousa for toilet paper, and children playing with guns is the new running gag in Congress. Concrete streets are riddled with bullets, and surrender plays at the neighborhood theater. A young man flicks his head on and off like a cheap lamp, and squints at a bottle-blue sky looking for flying elephants and other miracles. At night, he picks up his gun for target practice makes the stars fall. In The cremations along the Ganges, the mourners stay with the burning body until its head pops. Pop. Kingston, 1989, p. 4 It's not the fire. Death has already happened the spirit gone to the last place anyone would find it. To feel better we huddle around her smell like love making sure God doesn't change his mind. We remember her dressed and dancing, her laugh slipping off our skin like soap bubbles leaving calm in every space she ever touched we are there for hours, our skin turning to lash, then ash, the smoke cleating a path for birds, dust, and slow whispers. The weather wraps around what is always

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left sends her spinning away leaving holes. I shall wear my dignity, he used to say, and put on his tux. Kingston, 1989, p. 14 Chinese minstrel dressed to kill. A j o k e stayed in his throat long after the lights went out, his wife's eyes had undressed, de-makeuped and closed like a silent prayer. He used to lie awake and count her toes to stay out of the bedroom mirror, shine his shoes extra black, make sure his formal shirt was real white, so he couldn't see the eyes in the audience. He even changed his name to W o o to make a sound - a train leaving, baggage packed with no home place to go. Twisters & Shouters. Kingston, 1989, p. 67 All the streets are browner than m y one suit. These are thirdhand streets, bought and paid for in a million shot di, stale donuts and coffee. Smells carry signatures and I can close my eyes and say the names of each person who passes before they say mine, closely followed by a question about my mama. Here I walk in a way that tells my family tree, turn m y head at odd angles to catch my friends moving in and out of the storefronts that used to be upfront. Now at after-ours-everybody-else's this-and-that can be bought and sold and nobody talks to police.

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One shout bounces from comer-to-corner like a pinball getting mixed in with the lies of brothers. A t midnight the street rolls itself up like a raggedy shade and the password changes. I can't take West Side Story. It's a bad movie, right? I mean am I crazy, or is it like dog skit? Kingston, 1989, p. 100 So much for whirling skirts, girly-shoes, biker jackets, and boots, 25 year-old gang films about imaginary Latinos and Latinas singing on streets that were never that clean. During movie-making spectators wear everything-but-white and cloudy-day-shades. Songs roll out from the mouth of I-just-met-a-girl-named Maria w h o ' s really Natalie, and white, and knows nothing about this. This is the stuff of pure bred pups. Their pedigrees slip between cut and "action!" 25 Years later I don't remember the plot, the acting, or the ending - but like to imagine teens with nothing to do on a Friday night catching this flick at the dollar show. Throwing crushed butts at the screen and leaving to do their making out elsewhere. Everybody who claimed to have come from here studied this model, and described it to Immigration. It is not a model of anything, do you understand? It's a memory village. Kingston, 1989, p. 192

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There is no ancestral place in my lens, no creeping up village fire, or special grasses, or trees that whisper from thick spaces made for hide-n-seek. When I look back everything stops and starts here and in 1600 something, a time I have to be told about in old-old stories for ears that can't really know about swinging, keeping eyes to the ground, making sure y o u ' r e inside at night. Happy times 1,000 years ago have been erased from m y blue-jean-gene-pool. M y language filled with holes that all start with mama, and no-land, Africa a dream too far-away to smell. Today I hear stories of people that still miss us the lost children. The clothes and toys, and pots, and spaces we left behind wait for us quiet as a wish. The land washes off the shores and drifts To us in lakes, and rivers, and ponds that d o n ' t know how to translate it into a message we can understand. The professor I t.a'ed for told me to give guys like you the Chinese C, never mind the poor grammar and broken English. You're ending up engineers anyway. Kingston, 1989, p. 241 A bastard language gets the grade "A" like eggs, really good steak, milk that's been pasteurized. A colored "C" changes names as it changes hands casting a shadow over the faces of millions

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bent over long desks, long hours trying to travel a landscape of wait, hate, and lies sifting in the dirt arguing. Meanwhile, we walk over the land of opportunity believing in ourselves, working for the caught letter in the end of some professor's pen an extension of his mind set.

China Men poems: You screamed wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night. Kingston, 1989, p. 13 M y father's house has never slept at night. Little tricks for staying awake: lit matchsticks in the comers bullet holes in the windows empty bottles under the stairs where his other daughter huddles his wife mumbles he stumbles from room-to-room shouting man-of-the-houseShe is a brave cooking wife. She has never had a romantic dinner for two. Kingston, 1989, p. 77 her husband has 3 women. They live in the walls of the house. She is the mouse w h o chews the holes in baseboards and skitters across the floors on bound feet. A t night, she lays on a made bed while her husband is the plaster in the walls. She hears songs in each lock of hair, each open mouth,

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each caress a whisper soft as the word "wait" in the love scene of a romance novel. threads like skeins of rainbows. Kingston, 1989, p. 78 The lines in her face weave the old woman together, each one is a waterfall river/ocean each one a low wind in the dessert when her head turns she is dreaming and her breathing makes new paths in the faces of girls. She is the like the land old and not forever. Sun, air, wind chase away his memory of nightingalessinging and night-bloomingcereus. Kingston, 1989, p. 81 You never know when a memory will grow out of words stopping you in tracks that lead to a place that waits like a lonely child. Her story is a fairy tale with a white ghost woman, a Chinese man, and a one-line happy ending. I ' m caught in the tale moving from her impersonation of a m a n ' s mind, to her impersonation of a fallen woman like water that's been this way before: foreign smells at the nape, fuck-sweat on collars I ' v e ironed without too much starch, love notes on matchbooks keep me between lines that forget to end.

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I ' m thinking "the w a g e s o f sin" and then - 3 words carry m e a w a y like sand on the beach at high tide and I ' m b a c k in g r a n n y ' s house and she is back, and her house plant - the one that n e v e r b l o o m e d bursts bright like a bloodlight. Even though they are black Chinese Red Communists living on the other side of the world, and even though they are poor ... Kingston, 1989, p. 86 I read teetering on the edge of " n o w I ' v e heard e v e r y t h i n g " her words stack like presents under the tree at Christmas. R e d takes on a n e w shade I ' m the w o m a n under the mistletoe. C o n s i d e r i n g the alternative in a c o m m u n i s t country a " p o o r " B l a c k C o m m u n i s t feels right an invisible one doesn't. Ah Po ... did not follow him about the house because of her bound feet. Kingston, 1989, p. 19 When a woman's vagina's been mutilated She can still w a l k WHAT ? t [T]here is no record of how many died building the railroad. 1989, Kingston, p. 138 W a l t W h i t m a n wrote about the railroad as object

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the ironhorse invention of white men on a mission. The first group sent into any ready-to-be-conquered country is the missionary - also a fucking position. The ghosts of Chinamen whose fingers are the ties, whose bones are the rails, use the abacus to count: demon explosions, rock-tunnels, raise-rumors, stopped-food-strikes, fast-deaths, quick-funerals, hate higher than kites, mountain-tombs. They wander America like prisoners of war forgotten in the action of faster and faster and faster trains. They find their countrymen still holding chisels, empty cups of tea, unsent letters to loved ones. For decades their spirits have traveled the tracks story-talking to hobosan occasional passenger wearing red.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I ' d like to thank poets Ivan Brady, and Miles Richardson, for their comments and feedback, my daughter, Michelle Elise Weems for believing in me, and Maxine Hong Kingston for writing these inspiring books.

REFERENCES Hong, K. M. (1977). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a GirlhoodAmong Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hong, K. M. (1989). China Men. New York: Vintage International. Hong, K. M. (1989). Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

M.Y. CHRONICLES" THE MOTHERLAND Margaret L. Young

INTRODUCTION These auto ethnographic glimpses into my past are part of a series of what Mary Clearman Blew calls creative non-fiction as it is reflected in the art of memoir, in that they are a projection of my own experiences revolving around epiphanic events in my life. In them I speak only for myself and realize that those things I write about only really exist here in this telling of them. The relationship between the story and the storyteller is a wrenching one.

LOSING FAITH There was a company store for those who worked deep in the earth digging and cleaning gold. We were told that the prices there were better than anywhere else and there was the lure of store credit. It kept some families going when jobs bobbed up and down with the price of gold. It also kept some families tied to the town long after they had left. Like Tennessee Ernie Ford sang, they "owed their souls to the company store." We didn't work for the mine. We shopped at the general store. It was owned by a smallish narrow-eyed man with dark hair curled tight against his skull giving him the appearance of always wearing a hat. He had a girl named Faith who was hunched in the back and crippled in the leg, who helped him out. I rarely saw Faith without a broom clutched in her hands and

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I never saw her smile. At first I thought it was because she had bad teeth, but when she chewed gum I could see that they were set straight in her crooked little body. Faith hated me. I don't know why. I was just a kid a few years younger than she was. But I knew it the way kids know things that grownups don't. The odd thing was that I wanted Faith to like me. I thought we were sort of alike, alone. Neither of us played like other kids. We both spent our time mostly with adults. But, Grandma said it was because Faith was a stray and I had always loved strays, bringing them home, battling their fleas, binding their wounds and then more often than not, watching them die. Looking back, I think it was because, I too, was a stray. Either way I refused to give up on Faith. Grandma's wintertime house was on the outskirts of what was called Tintown. Tintown was away from the mine homes and odds and ends of people lived there, Metis, First Nation, immigrants, drifters and us. She got the town house in the mid-1950s when the winters proved just too cold and too isolating to stay out at the lake alone. There wasn't indoors plumbing at the house. But the house itself was clapboard and well insulated and there were neighbors. When the weather was willing, I would walk the 2 miles into the heart of town and go to the store. I would be quite cold by the time I got there and Mr. Kuperschuk would give me a cup of coffee. Sometimes, but not often, Mrs. Kuperschuk was there too. She was what folks called a convenient invalid meaning that when she didn't want to do something she was sick. Mr. Kuperschuk seemed unaware of the town's collective opinion and doted on her, bringing her little fancy things to eat and urging her to rest so she would feel better. "He is so good to me," she sighed. "I just wish I were in better health." Waverly was not over kind to fragile women. But grandmother felt sorry for her and often sent some homemade claret or jellies when I made my visits. "You can never know what a body has to live with when they are home with the curtains drawn." Faith would glower at me with her eyes until Mr. Kuperschuk would send her off. Then he and I would talk about things. It seemed he liked all things American. So he would talk about how great Mr. Roosevelt was. What wonderful things he had accomplished. And wasn't he crooked too, like our Faith? I, of course, did not remember Mr. Roosevelt and he was not a favorite at our house, but I would nod like I agreed and I would make sidelong glances toward Faith.

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One day when she was gone I asked. "How come Faith is like that?" Mr. Kuperschuk shrugged, "Born that way." Many years later I learned that Faith's mother was about to give birth but her father refused to get a doctor. "You got the other ones okay without him," he said and he continued to drink. "This one is different," she pleaded. He told her to shut her gob and get on with the business of birthing. When they finally pulled Faith from her, her leg had been badly twisted and she wasn't breathing. Faith's mother died. Faith had survived. Survived the neglect and the epithet: You know, She's the one who killed her mother. The other five children left home as soon as they could. None of them finished grade 10 and none of them remembered to take Faith with them. So there she was skinny and crooked and Mr. Kuperschuk gave her a place to live in the back of the store and broom for her hands. One day I came to the store and I had a list from grandma to fill. Faith was delivering stuff so it was just Mr. Kuperschuk and I. The Clabber-girl baking powder wasn't on the shelf. "Here you go into the warehouse and fetch it," Mr. Kuperschuk tossed me the keys. I remember feeling pretty proud that he trusted me to get the stuff. He usually kept things locked up. "There are those who would steal the coffin from a dead man." He had told me once. The warehouse was just mysterious enough. I couldn't find the light but I saw the flour high on the shelf and reasoned that the baking stuff would be close by. There was a small stepladder and I climbed it. Suddenly I wasn't alone. Mr. Kuperschuk was there holding the bottom of the ladder. "Oh, you scared me." He didn't answer. "I'll just come down." Suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me into his arms. "Thanks, a-a please let me go," "Just give us a little kiss," I could smell his breath, sour in spite of the mints. I didn't know what to do so I clenched my teeth. What was he doing? His hands touched me and I felt paralyzed as he forced my blouse open. I was so ashamed as he tried to make me touch him. "Oh please don't." Suddenly the door slammed. It was Faith.

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She just stood there in the open door and glared. I j u m p e d up quickly and ran out the door past her leaving m y gloves and woolen cap. I ran all the way home. W h o could I tell? I wanted to tell Grandma, but was afraid it was my fault. I was in enough trouble for leaving the groceries and m y hat and gloves. I lingered outside until Mrs. Pruitt next door called me in to have a cup of tea. Finally I told my aunt who had come to visit for the weekend. Oh, m y dear pet. The wicked old man. W e just w o n ' t say a word and you will stay away from there. I will explain to Mother. I d o n ' t know what she told my grandmother. Grandma w a s n ' t an easy woman to read even on a clear day. But, I never went back to the store without someone being with me. I sort of gave up on Faith. But then one day I was there. M y dad was with me and m y brother too. I was much older then but I still couldn't look at Mr. Kuperschuk. Even after 5 years it made me sick and I felt dirty. But then ! saw Faith, still not smiling, still with her broom. M y dad was chatting away with Mr. Kuperschuk. I was glad to see that he was nervous and w o u l d n ' t look directly at me. Mrs. Kuperschuk was there too. She had never quite expired from her litany of diseases. She smiled at me wanly. "You have such good color, my dear. You are so lucky to have your health. You remember our Faith, d o n ' t you?" I nodded and smiled. Faith just stared. "Just look at her, Faith, she has grown up so straight and fair. I always wanted a girl like you," she sighed. "But never mind, our Faith takes good care of us. You know she is like a daughter to us." Then Faith looked at me. Our eyes locked and just for a second I thought she smiled.

GIVING OF THE M O O N Most days he sat on a folding chair under the shedding maple tree. He had been 11 when his father had planted the tree. Now it was taller than the wrinkled old farmhouse shedding a century of paint and it spread a shadow shading much of the yard. One day when I was a child, he had come in covered with dirt and dust from the field had put a trapeze there on limb that had now grown so high I could not reach it. Many summer nights we had sat there watching the stars. It was our place.

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Grandmas, his and mine. Grandma and I had done most of the talking back then. But he was always there. Once in a while he would tell wonderful stories about our people, about the summer stars and what they meant. He told me a story once about a king who gave his daughter the moon and when he finished, he handed me a dime. It was the moon he said. He had been a big man but now his body floated in his clothes. He had worked hard all his life. He had smelled of rich black earth and sweat and soap. N o w he would look at his hands, flexing each finger, one at a time. Trying to remember everything they used to do. He had an old m a n ' s smell now: soaps, medicines and aging skin. Sometimes he forgot to go to the bathroom and he would cry. It w a s n ' t any good to be like this, he said. I want to die he said. No, I said. I would not let him go. I wanted more summer stars and another day and the moon. They told me that it was a matter of not enough blood getting to the brain. They said it could take a few days, a few weeks, and maybe even a few months. They said that it wouldn't get better. They said he needed to go to a Home. And I said No. I would not let him go. I will take care of him and he will get better. The tobacco drool stretched from chin to shirt, clinging to the side of his mouth in a brownish trench-like groove. His hand stirred the fur on the old d o g ' s head. He could no longer talk. I gave him a large sugared cookie. He ate it like a child licking the colored crystals with his tongue. It crumbled to where the dog could reach it without exertion. It was an old dog with bad knees and rheumy eyes. He put his head on the old m a n ' s thigh. W e could not talk so we just sat watching the autumn wind grab another red-gold leaf and set it free. Then he looked at me. I took his hand and with tears in my eyes, I nodded. His chin hit his chest and I knew there would be no more summer stars, no more days and no moon. I let him go, Heartsick. Relieved.

THE LAKE Finally the litter of bottles and the crumpled tinfoil prepackaged food wrappings announced the entry into Tin-town. Tin-Town was the name given to the

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miscellaneous assortment of shacks, cabins and shanties that were on the outskirts of Waverly. A ghetto of those who did not belong to the mine, it was filled with widows, fatherless families and the families of men who made their living in the bush. There was a brave attempt at civilization in sporadic little gardens and a tire or two filled with dirt and geraniums. Yard art ranging from last year's caribou antlers to paint-pealed boat oars decorated the fistfuls of dirt and grass that made up front lawns. It was the first of the month. The mail truck was here. It was a celebration. There might be a letter, a package or better yet a check. And if all that fails, then surely an Eaton's catalog of dreams for the children. Getting the catalog was like having ice cream and a movie. It was the big wish book, to drool at the big city fashions and coo at the prices, then to cut out the models to use as paper dolls. The children began to run after the truck that stopped at the general store. I passed out the sack full of cherry jam filled candies into grimy little paws. I heard one of them say, "Is she the princess." Grandma had kept a picture of me on her dresser. I was dressed in costume for a play and I was indeed the princess. She had written that the children would come in and ask to see the picture of the princess. In this unlikely place in my dust and blue jeans I was a princess again. The driver insisted on taking me directly to my Uncle who was to meet me in the Hotel. The word Hotel is a little misleading, in that it is more-or-less just a big room downstairs with a half a dozen sleeping rooms upstairs. It housed the beer parlor and was frequented by all the men of the community regardless of status. Women were not allowed in the beer parlor but they could sit at tables just outside and where they could drink themselves just as stupid as the men. As I looked around the hotel I could hear my uncle's voice and the word "the girl". He came out, glad to see me. His nose and cheeks were a little pink, but the old blue workpants with suspenders were familiar and he gave me a hug that smelled of malt. "Well, girl, it' s about time you got back here." I snapped his suspenders and he howled. I hadn't been back since my grandfather died, almost 6 years. My uncle had rarely spoken while my grandfather was alive. Grandpa called him The Boy. Now with Grandpa gone he was a man and I was The Girl. I fling my backpack into the truck. There is a big yellow and white dog in the back. There is gravel on the road going into Waverly, but the road leading out is dirt. It is 20 miles of dirt and in wet weather it is 20 miles of dirt and ruts. The road is about 35 miles long in total, past our turn-off it goes on towards the summer holiday camp. The road ends at Trapper Johnson's cabin. I imagine

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in my mind that if you go just a little way further you will bump into the dotted line that separates Manitoba from Ontario. In the truck uncle tells me that Bud is his new dog. The old dog, a beautiful husky/wolf mix named Boots was called out on the ice last winter by a lovely tawny she-wolf, he says. "I could see her on the ice calling to him and I tried to pen him up, but off he went. He was a good dog too." Do you think he joined the pack? I asked. Uncle looked at me. No, I think they killed him. He said. We were silent. Where the road turns to go to our landing, there is a dump. It is a vile smelling place filled with unwanted bits and pieces of people's lives. There are lots of ravens feasting on the offal and usually a bear or two fumbling through the debris. It's a bad thing when the bears get dependent on people, my uncle said. At the landing there is a garage for the truck. The canoe is the big green freighter. It is eight miles to our place, due east across the lake near the Blind River. The water smells of life. I see loons resettling themselves after our intrusion. Their haunting calls echo across the lake. The wild rice is ready to harvest, there is a pair of Lesser Yellowlegs standing in the shallows. A splash and a ripple of watermarks where some creature has taken refuge from the noise of the canoe. Uncle points to a moose on one of the islands. My city eyes can't see it. The lake is calm; my fingers trail in the icy water. We pass by the old Conley camps. They have nearly been swallowed by the undergrowth. Grandpa built them in the early '20s when he was staking that part of the Conley claims. Uncle still had the deeds but the strikes, though promising had proved false. It seems to take so long until I can see the glint of red between the green canopy of trees. It's the roof of the cabin Grandpa built in the 30s. A puff of smoke comes from the chimney gray among the white strips of the clouds. Bud stands in the canoe and the big hull wavers in the weight shift. There is grandma at the door. Her arthritis keeps her from greeting us at the dock. I marvel at how good she looks. Tall, straight and thin she stands in the doorway with a sweater around the shoulders of her cotton frock. There are tears when we hug and we duck through the doorway into the house. The house is the same. A green tomato pie sat on the table with a fresh pot of tea in a room filled with memories.

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GREEN T O M A T O PIE My grandma used to make green tomato pie because in northern Manitoba the growing season is too short to get many red tomatoes and to let them die on the vine would be a waste. She would gather them just before the frost would come in late September. Some she would put on the window shelf next to the stove and cover them with brown paper where they could ripen slowly up until Christmas. The others she would store in a bushel in a rock-lined cellar dug in the floor in the middle the cabin. Once in awhile she would take 5 or 6 of the rock hard green fruits and slice them like apples into a pie tin. She would put cinnamon; sugar and allspice over them and soon the sweet smell of baking fruit would bubble through the room. That evening after supper, Grandpa would say, "Mother this pie is pretty good tonight, but those apples are a bit peaked." grandmother gave me a look over the top of her glasses and I was quiet. "Yes, Johnny, the last fruit of the season." She told him. And he would nod. I haven't had green tomato pie since grandma died, but I think of it at least twice a year.

RAISING THE R O O F After I had been there for a couple of days. My uncle announced his plans to raise the cabin. Grandpa has been dead for 6 years. It's time. He explained that Grandpa had built the cabin to fit himself. That anyone over 5'8" would hit his head on the doorframe. "Besides," he said, "the bottom logs are rotting." I noticed my uncle's voice was getting louder. He had a theory. We would jack the cabin up on automobile jacks, remove the rotting logs and insert new ones. I would help. And so I did. Things were removed from the walls and placed in the center of the room. Breakables were taken to the storage cabin. Grandma watched as we slowly jacked the house up on all four comers. There were protests and sighs from the old wood, but it held. Out came the old logs. Grandpa had chinked the logs with everything from old socks to newspaper. Out it came. We now had an air-conditioned cabin with about three feet off the ground. Plans were progressing. The process of cutting new logs took about a week. Bud helped to drag them through the bush. Then suddenly Grandma got sick. It was a new experience since she never got sick before. We used the radiophone to call the air ambulance. It comes free above the 48th parallel. It took a long time to come. I held Grandma's hand as they loaded her onto the seaplane. Uncle would go with her. He left me with Bud.

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A L O N E IN THE BUSH When you are alone in the bush, you are really alone. The first day was great. I shaved the logs with the adz and harvested the wild rice and put it in sacks. Then came the night. I kept a fire in the cook stove. A n d I kept Bud with me. I brought m y sleeping bag into the kitchen and lay down next to the stove. It was darker than the inside of child's closet. I wanted to sing, or recite bible verses, as I had done when I was scared as a child, but I didn't want to challenge the silence. W e heard something in the underbrush. Probably a rabbit. Bud raised his head and fell asleep again. I wonder if he would save me from a bear? He snorted. At last I fell asleep. In m y final look for the stars I saw the fullness of the moon as it slipped beneath the clouds. It was absolute black when my body pitched into the night. I d o n ' t know how long I slept, but when I awoke the sky was filled with an eerie light coming in curtains or waves over the lake. Fantastic colors filled the night sky and I found myself breathless. It was the aurora borealis. There was no one to share it with. Bud was gone. I was alone really alone. I sat there in awe of nature's beauty and I could hear an almost magical noise like a pipe organ in a cathedral. It was then that I knew I believed in God, it would have been a gross ingratitude to not. The light picked up glint from the glass in a frame on the table. It was a picture of my mother who I had never known her smile frozen in time. I was wrong, I had never been alone. A noise plucked me back to the present and I looked behind me to see a fisher. He saw me at the same time gave what sounded like a gasp and disappeared to tell his little weasel friends about the girl. Mr. Champigon came by the next day and took the sacks of rice and stayed for tea. Grandma, he said, would be okay, but would have to stay in Winnipeg for the winter. She was too old for change.

AND THE BOYS CAME A R O U N D There is an old Irish poem about the boys coming 'round on Saturday night. It goes like this: I was might good looking when I was young, Pert and black-eyed and slim A n d the boys they came round on Saturday night Specially Jim But I tossed up m y hands and made fun of the lot Specially Jim

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I got so fired of having them 'round Specially Jim That I made up my mind to settle down and take up with him, So we was married, on a Sunday, the church was filled to the brim Twas the only way to get rid of them all, Specially Jim. There weren't many phones in Waverly, but word got around that Bill Conley's niece was back in town. It was as if there had been a big neon sign in the middle of the lake flashing "Fresh Meat" with an arrow pointing to the cabin. And the town's boys came around. Uncle was delighted. He put them to work and they brought him rum. What an assortment. Most of them I had known as a child and flirted with as a teen. Now they were in their 20s. Most were either married or had children or both. The Katchcan boy, who was double for Paul Anka at 16, was missing a couple of teeth at 24. Fred Watters was rotund, divorced and permanently between jobs. Even the local Mountie came. Unfortunately I mentioned to my uncle that he was not the picture postcard Mountie, tall, dark and handsome and my uncle relayed that to him. It cooled his ardor. I tried staying in my room but it was hard to discourage them until the weather got bad and they sought warmer prey. Late one evening 3 large canoes pulled up to the dock. About 10 big men emerged. They had the look of well-fed hunters in an array of plaid and wool. Barney McGee was among them. An Irishman from Sunday Point, Barney was a man o f many parts. He had mined coal in the States, oil in the Arab countries, emeralds in South America and diamonds in South Africa. He said that he'd been underground more than old Blue's favorite bone. He had been married more than 4 times sometimes to two wives at once. One of a family of 12 children, he had been raised in Irish poverty and the shadow of the Church. He could tell a story and entertain for hours. He was a welcome guest. One time he, my grandfather and the French cook had been following the trap lines when they stumbled into a bear's den awakening the bear. The bear, so early aroused from his nap and hungry reared up on his back legs to his full height of about 7 feet tall. Roaring and not quite steady yet, he lunged toward the Frenchman who had dropped his gun and started to run. "Johnny, Johnny, ze gun, gets ze gun," the Frenchman hollered as my grandfather was shouldering the weapon. The gun jammed, it misfired. The Frenchman was screaming as Grandpa fired again. It was as Barney said later, "I took off. I figured the bear had a Frenchman, he didn't need an Irishman too." With Barney

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it was all in the telling, and a good story, Grandpa had said, demanded some license and the pair had chuckled. Barney had always had an eye for my Aunt Nell and once he had halfjokingly asked my grandpa if h e ' d mind his paying court to her. My grandpa who loved Barney as a son, drank with him, shot bears with him, dug for gold with him and spent the winter with him, fixed him a look without blinking and said, "You touch my girl and I will shoot you." I don't know if Barney believed him or not, but the subject never came up again. As is the custom in the North Country the hunters were welcome to share what we had and to contribute to it. Pickerel, yellow perch, a couple of trout were cleaned and delivered to our door. We fried them with cornmeal and potatoes and Aunt Nell made treacle tarts and tea. After dinner the boys sat around outside trading stories and talking about the weekend ahead. It was goose season. We could hear them. The ebb and flow of their voices came like waves of crickets chirping in the summer as we did the dishes with water pumped from the well and boiled on the old stove. Though it was late, it was still not dark and we settled to our nightly game of Scrabble at the clean table. The rum was flowing outside and the boys had set up a target and were taking turns shooting at it with their big guns. From what we could see the geese would have no worries on the morrow. The noise was powerful in the usual silence of the lake as the guns pumped lead into surrounding area, but the tin on the tree was safe. Aunt Nell got up and went to the little house outback. I watched her retreat down the path and then watched for her return. She didn't come straight back, I noticed. She went directly to the group of shooters. They looked at her and at each other. She didn't say anything, just picked up the shotgun, loaded it, aimed it and fired. It hit the metal target square in the middle of the circle. There was no sound as jaws dropped. She didn't speak. She just put the shotgun back on the table and returned to the cabin and took her seat at the Scrabble board. "If I had two ps," she said, "I could spell Xan-thip-pe." There was no more target practice that night. The boys from the biology camp funded by the University of Manitoba came about once a week. They talked about animals with my uncle who was more or less a lay professor telling them about what animals did outside the book. I found the students interesting, but balked at poking through fox scat to see what they had eaten. I couldn't imagine why it mattered, what they had eaten, where they had eaten it and why their excrement was so exciting. It didn't take me long to learn all I needed to know about fox poop. The professor's daughter did show me how to make jewelry with beaver bones. And they have always been a conversation starter at parties. One boy, Max, had a kitten. I wondered now if it was Max whom I liked or if I was

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attracted by the kitten, so out of place in this wilderness world. This kitten liked to swim and Max would put her in the water next to the canoe and she would swim along side in an ungainly yet dignified dog paddle. She bobbed up and down like a calico cork and her eyes darted back and forth and I wondered if she really liked to swim. Some years later I heard that she had died, but I was glad to know that she hadn't drowned. I didn't mind the tracking of beaver and gene typing of marmots but I decided that I didn't want to marry a biologist after opening a soda freezer and finding a dozen frozen carcasses of least weasels, their little weasel paws curled piously on their little weasel breasts . . . heir small, pointy teeth showing white in an eternal grimace on their frozen faces. When I left the cabin on the lake, I left the old cabin with new insect treated logs, grandma's dishes on the shelf and the picture of a princess on the dresser. Ice was just forming on the surface and we had to break it in spots to pull the freighter through it. It was hard to go and I almost left it too late to leave. I was leaving my mother's land. She belonged there in the frame on the shelf along with the picture of the princess. I did not.

CLIMBING TREES, STACKING WOOD, CHOOSING COFFINS Kate Follett

I used to hate going to the dentist when I was little. But I liked going to the dentist's office. When the weather was nice we would sit outside until the doctor was ready to see us. I loved this part of the visit because it meant Jennifer and I could take turns rolling down an exquisite hill behind the office. As we rolled faster and faster down the hill we gathered grass and leaves in our hair and giggled the entire way down. Racing back up the hill was more of a challenge but dizzy and tired w e ' d reach the top only to collapse at m o m ' s feet. Sometimes we would just lie there in the grass, all three of us in a row, and silently look up at the sky. I liked going to the dentist's office. But I hated going to the dentist. I hated that stupid drill. The whir of the motor alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes . . . "Katie, just try to relax and keep your mouth wide open," Dr. Pfeifle would say, "you have such a pretty little face we need to make your smile pretty too." He was nice but that drill still made me cry. On the really bad days morn stayed close to me and I gripped her hand. I could not see her through the tears but she squeezed my hand each time the drill began to whir - j u s t so I knew she was still there. Cavities and fillings were painful and disruptive to my otherwise happy existence as a six-year-old. At that time we lived in a house on Oak Street three blocks away from E. E. Knight Elementary School and right next door to Wesley Darling. Wesley and I rode bikes, captured bugs, and climbed trees. I could climb much higher Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 25, pages 375-378. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0851-6

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than he could because I was small and limber. Sometimes I would climb so high that I would reach the branches that swayed to the rhythm produced by the wind. It was hard to tell where the branch I was holding on to ended and I began. I liked it like that. When I went inside the house it was to read Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. My older sister had a wonderful collection of stories about girls with problems much more advanced than any of mine. Deenie had scoliosis, Margaret searched for God and found her period, Joss and Kate Beat the Turtle Drum, and Ramona was a Pest. I had boing-boing curls. And ! danced. Two, sometimes three times a week I learned new ways of suspending my body in the air without touching the ground. I measured my success by how often I had to put my hands down. More times than I can remember, my determination to keep my hands up resulted in me falling on my head. The new tumbling tricks I had learned or the old ones I had improved upon were demonstrated for my grandparents every Sunday. They had a living room large enough to do two backhandsprings in a row. They clapped even when I fell on my head. Dance class was put on hold one spring when Marce Cervantes dared me to jump off from the top of her shed. I did it . . . hands first. Almost immediately my left arm began to ache and turn colors. Marce ran into her house so I walked home. I told morn it happened while practicing aerial cartwheels in the yard and I refused to put my hands down until it was too late. She believed me. Morn and ! walked the three blocks to school every day - her to teach and me to learn. When it was cold we counted the steps it took to get there - 316 give or take a few steps. In the second grade I hated wearing stocking hats, no matter how cold the wind, because it messed up my hair. But hatless heads only lasted until morn told Tracy Bashore and me the story about the little girls whose ears froze, turned black, and fell off. Tracy and I decided that our ears were more important than our hair. M o m kept a box of socks in her classroom during the winter months for the kids who came to school without any on their feet. She still does because they still do. In the late fall of 1986 I was in the third grade. For several weeks our class had been learning about space exploration. One chilly day, just after lunch, the entire class gathered around the black and white television that doubled as our computer monitor. We watched in eager anticipation as the space shuttle Challenger prepared for lift off. M o m was glad they had chosen a female elementary school teacher. Mrs. Kennell said that it was a historic moment for teachers and students everywhere. The class counted down in unison and erupted in cheer as the shuttle lifted higher into the air . . . When the shuttle exploded and Mrs. Kennell gasped the class grew very quiet. It was a historic moment for teachers and students everywhere.

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Every other weekend, usually less often than that, dad would pick Jennifer and me up to spend some time with him. We took turns changing stations on the radio. Dad liked Kenny Rogers. We liked Duran Duran. We met in the middle with Janis Joplin. On the way to Ashley we would stop at the Happy Hour Bar or The Bannister Bar or whatever bar we happened by. Jennifer and I drank cokes and ate cheesy popcorn. Dad drank Miller Lite and smoked Marlboro cigarettes. He gave us quarters for the juke box and we danced as Joan Jett belted out lyrics about loving Rock and Roll and Janis sang about Bobby McGee. Later he would drop us off at his house before leaving again. It was the same house where Jennifer and I spent the first few years of our young lives but it no longer felt like home. We waited at the house while dad went to the Ashley Bar or the North Star Bar or whatever bar he happened by. I could never figure out why he liked having us there if he wasn't going to stick around. My father's name was Daniel but everyone called him Boone . . . Daniel Boone. He liked to be outdoors and spent as much time as possible fishing, hunting, and cutting wood. On our visits to see him Jennifer and I would ride along as he checked the traps he had set in the best places throughout Gratiot County. Dad also knew the best places to pick asparagus alongside the back roads of mid-Michigan. When he was pleased with what he found he said things like "Good deal Lucille!" Jennifer and I helped pile the wood that he cut and helped to collect maple syrup in the fall. A fox fur hung on the wall at my dad's house. I liked the way the soft fur felt against my skin. One day I saw a fox in one of the traps . . . after that the fur hanging on the wall was not nearly as soft. When Jennifer's weekends began to fill up with cheerleading and student council and boys we did not go to our dad's house as often. We quit spending weekends at his house altogether when I asked room if I could take my own blanket because the blankets at Nancy's house were dirty and made me sneeze. We didn't want to go . . . and he didn't make us. Sometimes dad came to watch us play basketball, volleyball, and lead cheers. Sometimes he came to the dance recitals and we always saw him at Christmas to give him flannel shirts and gloves to keep his hands warm while he was chopping wood. He called to tell us congratulations when he read our names in the paper for making the honor roll but he didn't help me struggle through geometry. We didn't call dad when we saw his name in the paper for the first drunk driving conviction . . . or the second. We couldn't call him after his phone was disconnected. Even though he lived only twenty miles away . . . the distance between us seemed to grow further with each passing day.

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Mid-Michigan is beautiful in early October. Like a reward for making it through yet another hot summer, the air begins to feel cool and the colors begin to change. In the fall of 1992 I was a sophomore in high school busy with cheerleading, and dance, and student council, and boys. Jennifer had moved on to college, and men. I had turned sixteen August 2nd, which meant Wesley Darling and I no longer had to depend on older siblings for transportation. I had turned sixteen in early August. Dad called from a pay phone in late September to wish me a happy birthday. It was the last time I heard his voice. My dad died early on a Thursday morning, the first day of bow season 1992. The sun was shining and it was still warm but a slight chill in the morning air brought with it a promise that colder weather would soon be upon us. The news came during my lunch hour. I saw my morn standing in the high school office and I knew something must be terribly wrong. She wouldn't leave her second graders unless it was very important. The shock that forced my knees to buckle rose up through my chest and stole the air from my l u n g s . . , when I screamed no sound came out but inside the noise was deafening. We chose for him an oak coffin. Plain, solid, and beautiful. As I ran my hand along the smooth wooden surface I thought of how this wood felt so much different than the pieces Jennifer and I tried to pile up as quickly as dad could chop them apart. I wondered what the casket must have looked like when you couldn't tell where it began and the tree ended. We stood at my father's casket, all three of us in a row, my mom beside me and Jennifer beside her. In a peaceful silence we looked down at him, lying there in the blue flannel shirt Jennifer and I had chosen for him the Christmas before to keep him warm while he worked in the woods. On the really bad days mom stayed close to me and I gripped her hand. I could not see her through the tears but she squeezed my hand - j u s t so I knew she was still there.