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Erving Goffman has been variously interpreted as a symbolic interactionist, a structural functionalist, or an a-structural power-game theorist. However, when considering Goffman’s affiliation with the human ecology (HEC) of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, one is able to shed new light on Goffman’s relationship to the aforementioned sociological paradigms. This chapter will demonstrate that his Darwinist underpinnings and overall implicit evolutionary perspective allowed him to develop a dramaturgical theory that explicates how actors are able to understand, predict, anticipate, accommodate to, and influence others while pursuing one’s own or own group’s interests, through one or more of role “taking,” “playing,” and “making.” Furthermore, Goffman elaborates upon Park’s use of dramaturgy, following him in making more room for competition and inequalities in status and power, and offering new dimensions and categories for specifying when and why different adaptive strategies will be used, within different types and degrees of accommodation. Ecological dramaturgy is the term we give to these interdependent lines of social action within stratification contexts. Such structural concerns ultimately separate Goffman from the more subjective and less deductive elements of traditional symbolic interactionist thought. We argue that Goffman’s much neglected ecological and evolutionary-minded approach to role-taking and its inspired analysis of competitive interactive processes provide a missing link in better understanding his complicated intellectual heritage.

To elucidate issues involved in the problem of scale, in particular the relations, analytical and dialectical, among first-person experiences of theorist and theorist’s object-complex of individual actor, group, society, motives and causes, intended and unintended effects, and so forth, as these experiences are manifest in an aesthetics of the judicial moment of perception, and enunciated as first-person accounts directly or indirectly, of third-person accounts, sometimes via explicit but usually via virtual or even vicarious second-person accounting practices.

Discussion begins with some classical formulations by neo-Kantian theorists (Simmel, Durkheim, Weber) regarding relations of “individual and society.” Brief citations of various twentieth century responses to the problem of scale follow. Attention then becomes more intensively focused on the basic problem of first-person experience and accounts with respect to the problem of scale, using Coleman’s “foundations” work as guidepost for navigating issues of effects of cognition, consciousness, and action in still mostly obscure processes of aggregation. This leads to explication of the thesis of “impossible individuality,” in present-day theoretical contexts and in the context of post-Kantian romanticism, with special attention to Hölderlin and the feeling/knowing dialectic, Benjamin’s treatment of temporality with respect to metrics of history, and the question what it means to “theorize with intent.”

The discussion ends with some tentative resolutions and several lacunae and aporia which are integral to the current face of the problem of scale (i.e., processes of aggregation, etc.).

The discussion builds upon the work of many others, with first-person illustrations.

The lack of systematic methods for reducing the complex reality has hampered many of the contributions that processual research might have produced. This paper presents a methodology for processual strategy research that offers a systematic approach for causal explanation across complex sequences of events and enables theorization about underlying causal mechanisms driving the processes. In addition, a comparative analysis of two organizational decline and turnaround processes is presented in order to illuminate how the methodology is able to generate a substantial advancement in knowledge by indicating the causal mechanisms underlying the decline and turnaround processes. The findings show that the turnaround is produced by four causal mechanisms that cumulatively and interdependently work against the mechanism of decline.

Institutional logics and collective identities are closely intertwined: logics shape the emergence and evolution of identities, which in turn play a crucial role in mediating the influence of the logics themselves. Though there exists a significant body of research on the intersection of the two phenomena, relatively little attention has been given to changes in the strength, content, and permanence of particular logic–identity associations. In this paper we explore empirically the question of whether and how a logic and identity may become severed, through an inductive case study of the development of the hospitalist identity in health care in the United States. Based on this study, we propose a set of mechanisms through which the distancing of a logic and an identity may occur. We also discuss potential counterfactual outcomes, in order to build theory regarding the longitudinal relationship between logics and identities.

Sociology is often pitched as the social science discipline most obviously in need of postcolonial deconstruction, owing to its ostensibly more transparent Eurocentrism as a formation. For this reason, even postcolonial scholars working within the ambit of sociology are reluctant to play up its analytical strengths in addition to exposing its ideological deficits. Without underestimating the profound impact of the growing body of postcolonial theorizing and research on self-reflexivity within sociology, this paper points up some key ways in which the structure of comprehension within postcolonial critique itself is characteristically sociological. Alternatively, if that latter conclusion is to remain in dispute, a number of core epistemological and socio-theoretical problems must be accepted as being, still, radically unresolved. Consequently, a more dialectical grasp of sociology’s role within this domain of enquiry and style of intellectual politics is needed. I develop these considerations by critically engaging with three recent currents of postcolonial critique – Raewyn Connell's advocacy of “Southern Theory”; the project of “reinventing social emancipation” articulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos; and the “de-colonial option” fronted by Walter D. Mignolo.

Discrimination is defined as negative or harmful behavior toward a person because of his or her membership in a particular group (see Jones, 1997). Unfortunately, experiences with discrimination due to racial group membership appear to be a normal part of development for African American youth. Discrimination experiences occur within a variety of social contexts, including school, peer, and community contexts, and with increasing frequency as youth move across the adolescent years (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000; Seaton et al., 2008). Recent research with a nationally representative sample of African American 13–17-year olds revealed that 87% had experienced at least one racially discriminatory event during the preceding year (Seaton et al., 2008). Most of the research on the consequences of youths’ encounters with racial discrimination has focused on mental health outcomes (Cooper, McLoyd, Wood, & Hardaway, 2008), with surprisingly little work examining whether and through what mechanisms discrimination affects achievement motivation.

Theorists often point to social theory's normativity, but Gouldner's later works provide the most explicit, comprehensive treatment of it as post-traditional normative discourse – a practice distinct from sociology and sociological theory, yet linked historically and analytically to them. His argument about the need for a discourse space to debate social science's normative directions and to strengthen its connections to civil society is relevant today. Because Gouldner's approach has gaps and is somewhat fragmented I will reconstruct his argument about social theory per se. Although I point to problems that derive from his incomplete pragmatic turn, his approach offers an excellent departure point for discussing the meaning of social theory.

The thing about naïveté is its hermetic tendency. One imagines having graduated out of it, but imagination proves only its own potentials. It is of course good to be held to account by the question that circulates through so much of our belletristic literatures (as in, for instance, Edward St Aubyn's Bad News): How can one think one's way out of a problem, when the problem is the way one thinks? Yet an extra layer of diagnosis need not result in anything beyond itself. I can easily glimpse the chiaroscuro of another mind and thus know of the limits of my knowledge of its furnishings without knowing what they (the limits or the furnishings) are, or even whether the clarity is meant to be hidden by, more than hide, the dimness. But is inner presentation/apprehension of one's own self-portrait any more diamantine, any less naive, in its “obviousness”? And if it should be, at any moment, where/what are the reliably timely markers? When, therefore, I experience increasingly complex realities – layer upon layer, cut and recut and repackaged – without commensurate increases in production of value, am I experiencing a mind-blindness?– An out-take from “After Fin de partie”

Upper echelons research considers the relationship of top executives to organizational attributes or outcomes, vis-à-vis, their individual or group demographic characteristics such as tenure or experience. The upper echelons perspective is typically associated with the theorizing of Hambrick and Mason in their 1984 Academy of Management Review article, but also has much broader and deeper organizational theory roots as demonstrated by Pfeffer's (1983) earlier exhaustive review of organizational demography. Since the early 1980s, hundreds of upper echelons studies have been published – some explicitly invoking the upper echelons theoretical perspective, while others employing its underlying methodology of relying on executive demographic characteristics as proxies for executive and top management team (TMT) related constructs. This chapter examines three important features and their related challenges and opportunities in future upper echelons research. Specifically, we focus on (1) the identification of upper echelons constructs, (2) embedding those constructs in a meaningful way to develop new theory or better our understanding of extant theory, and (3) the related operationalization and measurement of those constructs that are eventually included in qualitative and quantitative analyses using TMT demographics. We conclude our chapter by drawing these three features together to provide a benchmark process to gauge the theoretical and methodological contributions of upper echelons-related work, and ultimately improve the chances of getting such research published.