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This paper develops the concept of a futureless past, drawing upon G. H. Mead's theory of the past. The futureless past is distinct from several other familiar conceptualizations, including symbolic reconstruction, anomie, and nostalgia. Specifically, the futureless past represents acknowledgment of prior significance and the co-acknowledgment that whatever has occurred cannot possibly occur again. Drawing upon films such as The Days of Wine and Roses and No Country for Old Men, the paper explores the notion of moving forward in time with recollections of things that have passed, using such passage as boundaries between what should and must occur and what can never occur in order to project or deny a shared future.

In this chapter I wish to acknowledge the unintentional contributions made by Norman K. Denzin to the new Iowa School, one which championed laboratory research, or what Dr. Denzin referred to as, “Green Carpet Sociology.” The term refers to the pea-soup-colored rug that covered the new Iowa School Research Laboratory. I also wish to extend the notion of Dr. Denzin as one of the unintended fathers of the Green Carpet approach by describing my particular intellectual relationship with him and noting how he inspired me while I completed my undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Illinois. In particular, I review three phases of Dr. Denzin's influence: the awakening, the metamorphoses, and the benediction. All three phases relate to how Dr. Denzin inspired a commitment to the ethos of the “Green Carpet Way.”

David Maines established himself as one of the premier symbolic interactionists who did not attach himself to any particular interactionist school of thought. In creating an extensive and intensive legacy via his publications, Maines looked into issues that other interactionists, bound to particular schools of thought, either took for granted or neglected to examine. In so doing, Maines resembled Simmel's Stranger not only as one who fits into a community but also as one who remains distant from the community. One of the key areas of investigation that defined Maines' work and that separated him from other interactionists pertained to his interest in social structure and specifically, how people become structurally situated as social-structural interactors. This chapter examines, in detail, Maines' interest in getting structurally situated and uses a television series, Dopesick, to discuss the relationships between institutional actors as a way to substantiate Maines' theoretical interest in social structure and the activities involved in the process of getting structurally situated.

Purpose – I extend the discourse regarding The Days of Wine and Roses (TDoWaR) as an Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) film in particular and analyses of A.A. films in general and provide a symbolic interactionist reading of TDoWaR as involving compliance dramas.

Design/methodology/approach – Borrowing from Norman Denzin's notion of a subversive reading of films, in which the author attends to the literal content of a text from a predefined perspective, I deal with the characters as if they create and maintain aligned and congruent actions that authors can analyze as conversational and interactional content. My main interest, drawing upon symbolic interactionist conceptualization and previous reviews of TDoWaR, involves the decisions made by characters to imbibe against their better judgment.

Findings – I detected four dramas (foreshadowed, evocative, profane, and complementary) that differed in interactional intensity and consequences. Each involves mutual decision making associated with self-definition and definition of the relationships. I also locate the dramas in the context of moral themes of an A. A. Film, specifically an epiphany, a categorical commitment to sobriety, an ongoing life cycle of recovery, and synchronicity.

Originality/value – Compliance dramas involve decisions to engage in ordinary activity (in this case, drinking) that becomes nonordinary, owing to semiotic, situational, historical, and interactional dynamics. The chapter can encourage thinking about alcoholism and alcoholic films as involving a moral career of a recovering alcoholic that sometimes must involve sacrifice of other prestigious moral careers (e.g., of a romantic relationship) in order to maintain the authenticity of the identity.

David Altheide has provided a sociological story that may not resemble the fabled bed time stories of your youth, or even the moral parables that guide our commonsensical understanding of the everyday world. However, the story has some resemblance to Hans Christian Anderson's “The Emperor's Clothes,” especially with regard to his observation that we Americans have accepted and complied with policies, directives, and rationalizations that seemed problematic in the first place and downright odious in retrospect (see Cetola, Willer, & Macy, 2005, pp. 1010–1011). Just as Denzin (2007, pp. 449–451) noted with regard to the “one percent doctrine” (if something can happen once it will therefore happen again), Altheide points out the simple fact that our fears, lacking logical premise, have instead become dressed up in vivid colors on television screens. We as citizens seem mesmerized by an apparently inevitable concept that if we fear it, it will indeed come. A few years ago Glassner (2000) discussed how fear mongers create a false logic of inevitability. Currently, Altheide extends this argument to show how such logic has become clothed in the regalia of patriotism, news void of context, and incessant anger.

While distinguishing himself as a vanguard of postmodern symbolic interaction, Norm Denzin remained loyal to his roots as an empiricist and theorist of the self. He displayed such loyalty to the examination of social relationships, involving the complex process of self-lodging, and significantly, the examination and analysis of alcoholics. This focus on lodging and the alcoholic introduced a paradoxical agency in which one's choices to act create obdurate constraints that limit choices. His particular focus on the recovering alcoholic not only involved comprehensive observations of recovery in situ (e.g., in Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings) but also in cinematic representations. Denzin also merged his ethnographic observations and cinematic readings while merging the perspectives associated with pragmatism, interactionism, and dramaturgy. In effect, by engaging in the worlds of alcoholics, alcoholics in recovery, and their images and portrayals in films, Denzin emphasized the importance of talking about the self (via internal conversations and relationships with external others). In doing so, he provided a theory of the self while straddling the symbolic line between a postmodernist imagination and a modernist commitment to realism.

This article provides rhetorical commentary to Ryan Turner’s arguments pertaining to animal self-hood. Turner’s assessments address one of the central lynchpins of Mead’s subordination of animals (and denial of animal selves), but he also presents a limited and selective review of Mead. In particular, in making his case for establishing the criteria for self-hood, Turner seems to ignore that temporal location, either in a static, individualistic, point-in-time, or more processual, social, and across time terms, becomes central to the question of animal selves. Turner also seems to minimize the extent to which animals can create complex coordination here and now, even employing dramaturgical sophistication as rotted in Goffman’s analysis of the self as performance. Despite his limited use of Mead and Goffman, however, Turner’s assessment of animal self-hood based on his criteria can stimulate interactionist inquiry into the similarities between animals and humans.

This chapter provides the historical and intellectual context of studying inequality and domination using the symbolic interactionist perspective. Lonnie Athens' radical interactionism was identified as a useful framework to research the omnipresent and insidious inequality found in everyday life. Chapters presented in this volume represent a follow up of Volume 41 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, edited by Athens, where he laid the ground work for the research of domination and subordination. Chapters in this volume demonstrate the advancements made in studying inequality in symbolic interactionist research.

Signs of a new period of theoretical and methodological ferment – consequent real growth – are finally appearing on the horizon. Old theoretical and methodological issues that have merely been papered over in the past, stymieing progress for decades, are now undergoing long-awaited resolution. New burning issues necessary to stimulate theoretical and methodological growth are now being raised for resolution in the future. Perhaps, no better evidence of this potential renewal of interactional thought can be provided than in the seven chapters published in this edition of the “Blue-Ribbon Papers.” The first three of these chapters aim to resolve, or – at least – reframe long-standing theoretical and methodological controversies.