From speech as “situated” to speech as “situating”: insights from John Gumperz on the practical conduct of talk as social action

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Practical Conduct ◽  
Further Development

AbstractThe article begins by reviewing the early research interests of John Gumperz and their further development across the course of his career. His doctoral research documented spoken language in an immigrant community. He then focused on bilingual speech communities and “code switching.” Later he became concerned with various aspects of style shifting within a language. Whether he was considering language switching, or dialect switching, or shifts in register, Gumperz showed that speakers were creative in their language use — active agents rather than passive rule followers — alternating among disparate styles to communicate metaphoric and usually implicit social meaning. Through changes in speech style, interlocutors could be seen to be reframing their social relations, modifying the social situation they were in. ( NB This lability in situational framing is a major point of emphasis in Gumperz's notions of “contextualization” and “conversational inference.”) The article continues by presenting and discussing two of Gumperz's “telling cases” of contextualizing frame shifts by speakers. In concluding, a few examples from the author's own research are presented, with emphasis on the use of contextualization in establishing local alignments of solidarity-in-the-moment among interlocutors — indexical shifts to a footing for interaction that the author has termed “situational co-membership.”

scholarly journals Srebrenica is not a Metaphor

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Sarina Bakić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Further Development

The author will emphasize the importance of both the existence and the further development of the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center, in the context of the continued need to understand the genocide that took place in and around Srebrenica, from the aspect of building a culture of remembrance throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). This is necessary in order to continue fighting the ongoing genocide denial. At first glance, a culture of remembrance presupposes immobility and focus on the past to some, but it is essentially dynamic, and connects three temporal dimensions: it evokes the present, refers to the past but always deliberates over the future. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the concept of the place of remembrance, the lieu de memoire as introduced by the historian Pierre Nora. In this sense, a place of remembrance such as the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center is an expression of a process in which people are no longer just immersed in their past but read and analyze it in the present. Furthermore, looking to the future, they also become mediators of relations between people and communities, which in sociological theory is an important issue of social relations. The author of this paper emphasizes that collective memory in the specific case of genocide in and around Srebrenica is only possible when the social relations around the building (Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center) crystallize, which is then much more than just the content of the culture of remembrance.

The main causes of social anxiety in the context of social action

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.

scholarly journals Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-70
Author(s):  
Bernard E. Harcourt
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Homo Oeconomicus ◽  
Legal Subject ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Actor ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Biopolitical Power

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce.

scholarly journals Identity and help in calls to Victim Support

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Tennent
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Discursive Psychology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Competent Person ◽  
Victim Support ◽  
Seeking Help ◽  
The Relationship

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help.  The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable.  Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided.  The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves.  The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>

scholarly journals Immigrant Life in an Artistic District. Polish and Ukrainian Immigrant Community and the New York Bohemia of East Village

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3 (177)) ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Anna Fiń
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Immigrant Group ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
East Village ◽  
Ethnic Neighborhood ◽  
Final Question

The paper is a case study and addresses the issue of intersection of the immigrant and artistic worlds, exemplified by functioning of Polish and Ukrainian communities in East Village in New York. The Author tries to show how ethnic can intersect with the world of alternative artistic and intellectual culture and what the consequences of such a phenomenon for the transformation of the ethnic neighborhood and its status among the diaspora can be. The analysis is embedded in the historical and humanist perspective, accentuating the “longue durée” process, emphasizing the importance of the area and the social relations going on there for their users. Such an approach allows to form a final question on the possibility of conceptualizing this particular ethnic neighborhood in terms of cultural heritage of the immigrant group.

Moral Regulation: A Reformulation

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Ruonavaara
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer introduced the concept of moral regulation to contemporary sociological debate in their historical sociology of English State formation, The Great Arch (1985). In their work they fuse Durkheimian and Foucauldian analysis with a basic Marxist theory. However, this framework gives too limited a perspective to their analysis. I suggest that moral regulation should not be seen as a monolithic project, as merely action by and for the State, nor as activity by the ruling elite only. It should be seen as a form of social control based on changing the identity of the regulated. Its object is what Weber calls Lebensführung, which refers to both the ethos and the action constituting a way of life. The means of moral regulation are persuasion, education, and enlightenment, which distinguishes it from other forms of social control. Analyzing the social relations of moral regulation provides a useful perspective on this form of social action.

Another Look at the Boston ‘Caucus’

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan ◽  
Katherine Day
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
American History ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Department ◽  
The Many ◽  
The University

The authors are graduates of the University of Southampton. Both are now at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where Alan Day is completing his doctoral research in the History Department and Katherine Day is a special student in the Social Relations Department. They wish to acknowledge with gratitude the many valuable criticisms and suggestions made at various stages of this paper's composition by Dr Philip S. Haffenden of the University of Southampton and Dr Jack P. Greene and the Early American History Seminar of the Johns Hopkins University.

scholarly journals Leading international schools: The questions of cultural and social justice

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Nidal Sleiman
Keyword(s):  
Educational Leadership ◽  
School Leadership ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
International Schools ◽  
Leadership And Management ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contextual Elements ◽  
Further Development

This article focuses on international school leadership and raises questions on the mono-dimensional approaches to leading, teaching, and learning in diverse contexts. The growth of international schools all over the world represents increasing patterns of geographic and economic mobility, and the growth of socially and culturally diverse communities. While international schools generally represent different elements of internationalisation, their policies and leadership do not demonstrate an adequate response to the social and cultural needs of their communities. Based on her doctoral research, the author argues that internationalisation in educational leadership is not given sufficient attention and that the field requires further development of learning and exploring the contextual elements in which leaders lead. The article draws on a set of approaches to educational leadership, mainly contextually and culturally relevant leadership, and theories of internationalisation in educational leadership and management, in addition to transformational and engaged pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning.

scholarly journals The Role of Self Esteem in Developing Social Anxiety

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 543-559
Author(s):  
Mariana Floricica Calin ◽  
Mihaela Luminita Sandu ◽  
Miruna Alexandra Chifoi
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Excessive Perspiration

Nowadays, anxiety is a growing phenomenon because people come across more and more stressful situations. Therefore, among its different forms of manifestation, there is social anxiety. This type of anxiety generally starts in adolescence, when personality is still shaping up and when teenagers are more and more interested in getting confirmation from others. When he is analyzed by others, a teenager fears failure and being ashamed when things are not the way they should, he fears being judged by others for possible small mistakes and, thus, anxiety appears. In other words, persons with low self-confidence and lacking confidence in their abilities have low self-esteem and can easily develop a form of anxiety. As we have already mentioned, social anxiety is caused by the fear of being criticized by others, by the fear of being improperly evaluated, by the feeling of being ashamed, of being in the presence of unknown persons, etc. All these social contexts are backgrounds for individuals’ unexplainable restlessness that can lead to physical symptoms such as excessive perspiration, trembling, palpitations, blushing etc. Self-esteem is very important here as it is very important how the subject sees himself or herself in the social situation.  Thus, if a person feels unable to deal with situations considered difficult and if there is lack of confidence in her/his own abilities, meaning he/she has low self-esteem, it is highly possible that this behaviour lead to the debut of social anxiety. Therapy sessions help reduce and even eliminate this disturbance. There are certain techniques consisting of facing the problems up to the moment where the subject begins feeling comfortable with normal life aspects which used to be considered anxiety episodes.  

scholarly journals TRANSFORMASI STRUKTUR SOSIAL DALAM PEMANFAATAN RPTRA DHARMA SUCI JAKARTA UTARA

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sugeng Wahjudi
Keyword(s):  
Communication Network ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Community Services ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Authority Structure ◽  
The Social

<p><em>The focus of RPTRA's activities reflects services for children and community services to become a community center that functions as a center of interaction and is used by all elements of society from various age groups. This research is an advanced stage of previous research on the relationship of RPTRA managers. The communication network that is built into the use of the RPTRA can be utilized for the development of institutional components that are socio-economic. By using Max Webber's instrumental rationality approach, this study can identify the social changes that have been formed. This study will provide a description relating to changes in knowledge, attitudes and actions of the people who use RPTRA. Changes that arise from individual RPTRA users (mothers) are driven by actions based on value orientation. Their actions involved in activities at RPTRA were not driven by instrumental orientation (to obtain economic benefits) or traditional orientation (because of tradition - driven by the authority structure) In general it can be concluded that RPTRA was able to take a good role. RPTRA is not a material space that distributes materials / materials to make a transformation of the social structure of society (change in social action). The results of the study indicate the formation of rationality in the use of RPTRA if it is associated with user social actions and program activities that put RPTRA as a center in building social relations for their local communities and social change.</em></p><p><strong><em> </em></strong></p><p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>RPTRA<strong>,</strong></em><em> communication network</em><em>, </em><em>social change, social actions</em><em>.</em></p>

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