Resisting Alignment: Negotiating Alignment, Responsibility, and Status in Everyday Life

Abstract

The study of accounts, corrective practices, or aligning actions has grown to constitute a significant sub-discipline within everyday life sociology. Most work in this field starts with an assumption of order and assumes that accounts reestablish broken sociality. However, much accounting activity resists against alignment efforts, and alignment efforts can be used as a means of conflict. The present chapter aims to survey situations in which actors resist and negotiate alignment and the power and status conflicts involved in these negotiations. With these conflicts, participants also negotiate responsibility, which is here seen not as an internal attribute of actors, but a socially negotiated meaning as well. On a larger level, the present chapter shows how levels of meaning are intertwined in alignment situations, making them much more than mere tools to produce and protect order.

Citation

Dellwing, M. (2015), "Resisting Alignment: Negotiating Alignment, Responsibility, and Status in Everyday Life", Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists: Conflict and Cooperation (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 45), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 159-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620150000045008