Culture--the
rules, codes of conduct, and meanings that underlie human societies--is
largely
instantiated and reproduced through face-to-face interaction. At the
same time,
culture can be created and transformed in such encounters, when new
ideas are
infused with significance and old ones are found to be inadequate to
the
interactional challenges at hand.
Members
of this cluster, which was formed in 2006, study the
culture-interaction
nexus--how culture constrains interaction and how interaction
transforms
culture--in a variety of settings, including: city neighborhoods,
urban
nightlife venues (such as clubs and blues bars), service-oriented
workplaces
(such as fast-food restaurants), corporate boardrooms, religious
councils,
theater, hospitals, courtrooms, press conferences, and during moments
of
collective effervescence that can fuel violence or, alternatively,
ideational
innovation. To this task they bring multiple methods to bear, including
ethnography, quantitative interactional analysis, archival research,
statistical analysis, audio and video analysis, and computer simulation.
The
University of Pennsylvania offers rich and diverse resources for the
study of
culture and interaction, with interested scholars in the Departments of
Anthropology and Linguistics, the Graduate School of Education, and the
Annenberg School of Communications, in addition to those from Sociology
listed
below. Many of these scholars self-consciously follow in the footsteps
of the
great Erving Goffman, who spent most of his career at Penn.
Affiliated
faculty:
David Gibson (chair)
Melissa
Wilde
(co-chair)
Other affiliated scholars:
Teresa Labov (Research Affiliate, Population Studies)
Magali Larson (Professor Emerita, Temple University)
Visiting
faculty:
Michel
Villette (EHESS and Agro-
Paritech
Paris;
fall
2006)
Robin Wagner-Pacifici (Swarthmore College; spring 2007)
Paul
DiMaggio (Princeton University; fall 2007)
The cluster meets approximately once every three weeks, normally on Friday afternoons. The goals of the workshop are to foster intellectual community around the symbiotic themes of culture and interaction; to stimulate a distinctively Penn approach to the study of each based on that intersection; and to provide a venue for the discussion of, and improvement of, work-in-progress.
Schedule
2007-8 (most recent first)
April
18, 2008: Ksenia Gorbenko (Doctoral student, University of Pennsylvania)
"The Revolution Will Be Televised"
(Discussant: Melissa Wilde)
March 29, 2008: Jacob Avery (Doctoral student, University of
Pennsylvania)
"Gambling as a
Way of Life"
(Discussant: Keith Brown)
March 7, 2008:
Ivan Chase (SUNY Strony Brook)
"The Origins of Social Organization: Evidence from Animal Dominance Hierarchies"
February 15, 2008: Ruth Burke (Doctoral student, University of
Pennsylvania)
"Class,
Hierarchy and Color: A Comparison of Black Methodist Episcopal and
Baptist Denominations"
(Discussant: Robin Leidner)
January 25, 2008: Joanna Kempner (Princeton University) and Charles
Bosk (University of Pennsylvania)
"Forbidden
Knowledge: The Phenomenology of Scientific Inaction"
(Discussant: David Gibson)
December 7, 2007: Alexander Jerneck (Doctoral student, University of
Pennsylvania)
Synopsis: We
discussed Alexander Jerneck's promising research an
on open-source software community; Melissa served as discussant. We
talked
about the relationship between theory and method, including the
question of how
one tests a theory of what motivates people to contribute to software
development when there is no remuneration involved. We also talked
about the
applicability of competing theoretical constructs, such as market,
network, and
symbolic community.
November
16, 2007: Greg
Urban (Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis: We were
grateful to have esteemed
anthropologist Greg Urban present his work on secularism (as a
"metaculture") and its relationship to constitutional statutes. We
broke with our normal format to give Greg a chance to present his work
at
length, but still had time to talk about the relationship between
culture and
metaculture, the relationship between professed and actual beliefs, the
diffusion of constitutional ingredients, and the durability of
decontextualized
cultural remnants. To illustrate the last of these, Greg described a
certain
anthropologist who has bounded up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art
and waved his fists in the air despite having never seen Rocky.
October 26, 2007: Meredith Rossner (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis: Meredith
Rossner gave a formal presentation of her fascinating work on
restorative justice conferences, at which victims of crimes meet
face-to-face
with offenders. Meredith's argument is that the success of these
encounters--in
assuaging victims' fear and hostility, and in reintegrating offenders
into a
moral community--hinges upon the precise emotional dynamics of the
conferences,
and particularly whether participants can overcome their initial
suspicion and
animosity to pull off a solidarity-building "interaction ritual."
Supporting evidence comes several kinds of data, including interviews,
statistical analysis of observational data, and fine-grained
qualitative
analysis of a selection of conferences. The group discussed gender
dynamics,
the issue of temporal ordering, the role of expert informants, and
empirical
indicators of turning points and entrainment.
October 5, 2007: Julie Szymczak (Doctoral student, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis: The cluster discussed Julie Szymczak's excellent paper on full-body CT scans, with Robin Leidner serving capably as discussant. We spent a long time talking about alternative framings for the paper -- as about competition between social problems for attention, the introduction of a new product (and its failure to find a market), a medical innovation both indicative of and incongruous with cultural dispositions, or defensive actions on the part of a medical establishment threatened with loss of control over the diagnostic process. We also discussed how the research might be extended using interviews, archived medical discourse, and comparison cases involving other medical fads in the U.S. or other countries' experiences with CT scans.
September 14, 2007: Organizational meeting and David Gibson (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis: On Friday the Culture & Interaction cluster had its first meeting of the year. Nineteen people attended, despite the fact that several couldn't come due to the Jewish holiday and ESS-related meetings in New York. We did a new round of introductions, in part to welcome some newcomers from the Annenberg School. We also scheduled some tentative presenters for the rest of the fall semester. Then we discussed David Gibson's paper on statistical models used to study conversational sequences and external effects (of status, attributes, and relationships) upon the same. (Stefan Klusemann served ably as discussant.) This gave us the chance to talk about the relationship between quantitative and qualitative research, the role of emotional factors, the relationship between verbal and non-verbal behavior, and the need for comparative micro-sociological research.
2006-7 (chronological order)
October 6, 2006: Organizational meeting
Synopsis:
The first meeting of the Culture & Interaction
workshop last Friday was a great success. Sixteen people attended,
including
eleven students, four faculty members, and Michel Villette, our
visiting
scholar from France. We did introductions, and learned about all the
terrific
research that people are involved in, including (but not limited to!)
studies
of adolescent poker play, childhood illness, restorative justice
meetings, and
police violence. One surprising thing that emerged from the discussion
is that
even those of us doing deliberately "cultural" research rarely use
"culture" in our writing; as Prof. Villette explained in connection
with his own research on French business, culture is something that the
people
we study appeal to (for example, in "how we do things around here"),
without actually being a particularly useful analytical category.
October
27, 2006: Vida Bajc (Ph.D. candidate, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis:
Vida Bajc gave a lively summary of her research on
uncertainty and routine in the religious tourism industry in Israel.
Most of
our discussion revolved around her idea that tour guides have to
continuously
work to maintain a phenomenological "bubble" which both shields
tourists (or pilgrims--she uses both words and the reality seems to lie
in
between) from the chaos of a bustling (and sometimes downright chaotic)
city
and transports them back through time as they attempt to (literally)
follow in
the footsteps of Jesus. There was also a lot of interest in other
chapters of
her dissertation, including one on the relationship between space,
time, and
power in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
November
17, 2006: Michele Villette (Professor of Sociology, EHESS and Agro-
Paritech
Paris)
Synopsis:
We had a fast-moving discussion of Michel Villette's
ethnographic and historical/archival research on French business--which
began
with Michel's provocation that sociology should be more of a humanity
than a
science! After the resulting furor died down, the discussion mainly
revolved
around issues of method (including the role of ethnography and
published
journalistic accounts in reconstructing business process) and framing
(including pertinent theoretical debates in the organizational and
economic
sociology literatures). Had we had more time, we might have discussed
French
business culture as such, and how this differs from business culture in
the
U.S. (as scathingly described in Jackall's Moral Mazes, and
more
favorably by Kotter and Heskett in Corporate Culture &
Performance).
But alas, it seemed a bit much to ask people to stay for a third hour
and thus
we adjourned after two.
December
8, 2006: Stefan Klusemann (Doctoral student, University of Pennsylvania)
Synopsis:
Stefan gave a fascinating presentation about his
research on the emotional dynamics preceding and underlying the July
1995
massacre in Srebrenica. His presentation included video segments, which
afforded the group an opportunity to directly confront--and sometimes
reinterpret--Stefan's data. We talked about the relationship between
theory and
data, considered the interplay between emotional dynamics and
situational
definitions, and struggled with some of the challenges of analyzing,
and
systematically describing, non-verbal behavior. One of Stefan's most
provocative claims is that an encounter can bring about an emotional
"turning point" with consequences extending over subsequent
situations involving other people--raising a host of challenges for any
resolutely macro theory of violence or, more generally, social change.
January
9, 2007: collective analysis of Chris Wallace's interview with Bill
Clinton
Synopsis: There was a lot of interest in video and audio analysis after
Stefan's December 8 presentation, so we undertook a collective analysis
of a
video segment for today's workshop--Chris Wallace's (notorious)
interview with
Bill Clinton. Foci included: power dynamics evidenced in verbal and
non-verbal
behavior; evidence for and against pre-planning (by Clinton); recurring
references to death (of Clinton, of bin Laden); the degree of
on-the-fly
conscious conversational strategizing; the relationship between generic
conversational norms and those applicable in a news interview; and the
way in
which the broadcast interview is conducted "behind the scenes" (with
respect to which it helped that one of our members has broadcast
television
experience!). And we couldn't resist talking about "who won"--the
consensus being that it was Clinton, though more by virtue of
self-assurance
than conversational finesse.
February
9, 2007: Charles Bosk (Professor of Sociology, University of
Pennsylvania)
Synopsis:
Charles Bosk,
medical sociologist par excellence, talked about his research on
medical
errors--including an ambitious project he's proposing to undertake on
challenges the medical establishment is having in implementing a
satisfactory
"culture of safety." We didn't have nearly enough time to talk about
the many issues of relevance to the cluster, including the meaning of
culture,
how it's operationalized (in particular, how we recognize it as
decisive
"on the ground"), and the degree to which it's independently
causative as opposed to merely intermediate between large market forces
and
medical outcomes. We did, however, touch upon the important question of
culture's malleability and the relationship between medical culture and
alternative systems of medical funding. We also discussed the
generalizability
of research on the causes of medical error to other (non-medical)
settings. And
we learned a lot about the medical world, including never to volunteer
for a
Phase 1 study.
February 23, 2007: Robin Wagner-Pacifici (Professor of Sociology,
Swarthmore
College)
March 23, 2007: Keith Brown (Doctoral student, Department of Sociology,
University of Pennsylvania)
Our
presenter was Keith
Brown, talking about his intriguing work on the Fair Trade movement. We
experimented with a new format, involving a discussant (David Gibson)
who
summarized the paper--as a result of which the presenter didn't really
present--after
which Keith offered his responses. This, and a more formal queuing
system, left
us more time for sustained discussion about a large number of
interesting
aspects of the work, including the multiplicity of interests bundled
under the
Fair Trade label, the role of rituals (particularly gift-giving) in
signaling
(and sometimes obscuring) value commitments, the relationship between
moral and
market valuations, alternative strategies for distinguishing between
consumer-activist "types," and corporate fair trade strategies.
April 6,
2007: Keri
Monahan (Doctoral student, Department of Sociology, University of
Pennsylvania)
On the hot
seat was
Keri Monahan, and her intriguing and rich paper on how judges evaluate
gymnastics routines--given the large degree of discretion necessarily
involved,
particularly when it comes to assigning a score to a routine's
"artistry." Robin Wagner-Pacifici generously served as discussant. We
talked about the relationship between athleticism and artistry, the
notion of "coachability,"
the relationship between training and judging (many judges were
previously
gymnasts), the attunement of judges with each other and the crowd, the
temporality of the performance (in terms of the exertion-recovery
cycle), the
gymnast's experiences of (at opposite extremes) "flow" and fear, and
possibilities for quantitative analysis of judge scoring patterns.
April 27, 2007: Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom (Doctoral student, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
We concluded the
workshop's first year with a
discussion of Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom's captivating senior thesis on
adolescent
gambling. David Grazian, our discussant, situated the research relative
to
literatures on youth and transitions to adulthood, confidence artists
and hustling,
and the history of card play, and put forward the thesis that poker may
be
well-suited for preparing young people for the cognitive and
performative
demands of the global economy. The discussion, which could have
continued for
many more hours, touched upon themes including: poker-as-addiction
versus
poker-as-informal-haven as alternative explanations of the explosion in
youth
poker play; the blending of risk and safety in adolescent poker
settings; the
relationship between chance and skill, and knowledge and uncertainty,
in Texas
Hold'em; and the (apparently minor) significance of monetary losses and
gains.