2
0
0
3
C
O
N
F
E
R
E
N
C
E
|
Topic 1: Emergence
EMERGENCE: The Mechanisms of Boundary Work
Symbolic Boundaries Research Network
Online Conference, Feb. 10-14, 2003
|| Home
|| Convention Center
|| Emergence
| Change
| Interplay
| Sub/Objective
|
NOTE:
New posts are at the end of this page.
Yours too, if you've just added one!
From: Cynthia Fuchs Epstein CEpstein@gc.cuny.edu
CUNY Graduate Center
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (17:00)
--
A few thoughts on Boundaries
Responding to Bethanyís proposal the following are a few paragraphs on boundaries. They are not meant to be a capsule definition or an inclusive review. Merely, some ruminations about boundaries as a sociological category and a set of talking points. (For a comprehensive account see Lamont and Molnar. ìThe Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciencesî in The Annual Review of Sociology 2002. 28. 167-95).
(I cannot help but recall that my first message as culture section chair in the culture section Newsletter was written just after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. This one is being written just as news of the crash of the space shuttle Columbia is being broadcast on radio and television. Both make the relevance of the study of boundaries vivid. In the first case, the terrorist attack violated Americansí belief in the impenetrability of their borders; in the second, the tragedy undermined the sense that there were no boundaries of time and space in moving beyond the boundaries of our planet
The entire field of Sociology may be thought of as a way of organizing perceptions of social life through the use of conceptual categories with boundaries marking them. Sociologistsí categories (e.g.class, status, race, gender, profession) may generally match everyday categories used in common parlance and media, or they may develop more technically distinct ones (e.g. ìlocalî and ìcosmopolitan;î ìother-directedî and ìinner-directed;î paradigm, episteme, or habitus).Thus, the study of boundaries is as large as the study of sociology. However, it has become a sub-field within sociology with particular emphases, some of which I consider below.
The notion of boundaries may have emerged from an earlier literature on groups although one does not see much analysis of this continuity. Perhaps because in focussing on the cultural elements rather than the structural properties of groups (such as group size, economic status, institutional organizational arrangements) attention has become refocused on the ways in which individuals within groups develop identities not so much by the bonds that unite them, but by drawing distinctions between themselves and those marked as outsiders. This focus picks up on a tradition that highlighted symbolic distinctions (a la Durkheim) and is more than the in/group -out/group perspective of the study of groups. General tendencies toward distinctions, and the study of particular kinds of distinctions, (E.g. the tendency toward dichotomous distinctions is an important part of this analysis.
The work on boundaries has also reflected ideological themes of various periods. For example, several decades ago sociologists (a generally social justice-oriented bunch) sought to find commonalties among individuals. A motivating question might be how to achieve friendship and integration; what do people share? A ìone worldî orientation guided sociologists to a particular subset of questions. Sociologists of various academically political natures looked to a classless society. Today too, political outlooks motivate an orientation toward social justice that leads, almost ironically, to another set of questions many of which have to do with the benefits of multiculturalism within a society. .
Of course, today theorists argue about the root basis for distinctions, with cultural theorists oriented to the integration of culture and structure Today, splintering and fractionalization through identity politics at home and abroad make social scientists (and others) wonder about the processes that have resulted in conflict, including, for example, intra-group friction, political activism and armed conflict Examples are the activity of social movements defining the agenda of people within categories (e.g. women, African-Americans, Latinos, etc.) seeking redefinition of their category in the society in which they live, with an accompanying program of status enhancement); and the geopolitical and status conflicts waged by majority and minority ethnic groups ( for example, between sectors of the former Yugoslavia; the former Soviet Union, the conflicts in Rwanda, the Congo, countries of the middle east; Korea with its North/south split and Southeast Asia) .
Going beyond a former emphasis on the broad unifying values in a society and their highly specified norms (e.g. Parsonsís view) cultural sociology also has explored the power of symbolic representations in determining group boundaries. Administrative, political, economic and military resources have long been regarded as contributing to group definition and group solidarity (or group dissolution).
Lamont and Molnar make a distinction between social and symbolic boundaries. Social boundaries would include those that refer to economic, physical and political location. symbolic boundaries include moral boundaries, socioeconomic boundaries and cultural boundaries. They are, of course, overlapping. symbolic boundaries refer to conceptualizations by which people define themselves and others (including the choice to make distinctions at all). An example of this would be the use of different job titles for men and women who do the same work; the view that a sub-group in society is smarter or less intelligent than the majority population.; definition of a particular style of art or music as high culture or popular culture, or that a work activity is ìskilledî or ìunskilled.î
One might even ask whether there any boundaries that are not symbolic, determined as they are, by (changeable) popular controls ( through the dynamics of normative frameworks), and political decisions (such as through treaty, exploration, settlement or war).
Rich bodies of research are in process that explore boundary construction (whether consciously created or seemingly evolving). Through a focus on cognition the very thought processes of boundary construction are being explored. Systematic political agendas that create boundaries through law is an important area of study (consider the old law that did not include women in the category of ìperson,î or the ìone drop of bloodî rule that defined a person as black at the turn of the century (and beyond, in some states) Recently too, there has been an exploration into the cultural practices that define, enunciate and perpetuate social definition of groups through myths, rituals, monuments and the writing of ìhistory.î
As a way of encapsulating an orientation toward boundary work I will note my own work which explore the consequences of dichotomous distinctions with regard to sex and gender outside and within the scholarly community. Moving beyond an early theoretical emphasis on the structural conditions for inequality I saw intellectual profit in using ìboundariesî as an important heuristic device. Conceptual and social boundaries (such as purdah, sex segregation in work and education) define the ìnature,î character and practices of women and men . These are among the most entrenched boundaries in all societies. Ideologies lodged in every institution of society affect perception and commitment to the paradigms conceptualizing gender. The social consequences of definition are well known to the readers of this section.
My most recent research is trying to understand how the division of lawyers into those who work in the ìpublic interestî and the ìfor profitî sectors occurs. Here, the social creation of identities, ideological distinctions, moral boundaries, human and cultural capital and the symbolic representations of money and prestige seem to interconnect. These are rich concepts to frame inquiry, and all are related to boundary issues.
The rich toolkit of conceptual frameworks that cluster around the lead concept of ìboundariesî are leading to exciting lines of inquiry for me, as they are for thousands of sociologists working on the sociology of culture today.
From: Howard Aldrich howard_aldrich@unc.edu
UNC, Chapel Hill
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (17:03)
--
From an evolutionary perspective, the development of organizational boundaries is important for four reasons. First, until organizations become bounded entities, selection pressures can only affect the direction of the founding process and not its ultimate outcome. A true test of the knowledge and resources assembled by founders occurs when an organization achieves standing as a population member. Second, organizations contribute to population dynamics only after they become fully-fledged units of selection. As bounded entities, they become actors that compete and cooperate with others. Third, after boundaries coalesce and activities begin, organizations become viable carriers of routines and competencies. They thus contribute to the reproduction of population-level knowledge and become points of knowledge diffusion. As new entities, they are potential sources of variation within populations. Fourth, after it emerges as an entity, an organization becomes another arena in which new routines and competencies can be generated, nurtured, and possibly copied by others. Every new organizational entity represents another test of an organizational formís fit with its environment, as well as an opportunity to modify the form.
In their struggle to build bounded organizational entities, founders and other participants face serious difficulties. In addition to mobilizing knowledge and resources and using them effectively, they must deal with two other problems. First, they must learn how to maintain organizational boundaries. Second, they must learn how to reproduce their portion of organizational knowledge. Their knowledge must endure from day to day, and over generations of newcomers. Preserving this knowledge requires that people play two somewhat contradictory roles in organizations: as users of what organizations offer through the resources they control, and as supporters of what organizations must do to reproduce themselves. From a user perspective, organizations are marketplaces of incentive exchanges and sites for negotiation over inducements and contributions. From a supporter perspective, organizations allocate incentives that constrain membersí role behaviors according to some scheme greater than their own needs.
In chapter 5 of my book, Organizations Evolving (Sage, 1999), I examine the dilemma of people caught in these contradictory currents: users need to learn only that organizational knowledge serving their own interests, whereas supporters need to learn their part of the organizational knowledge that fully reproduces the organizationís form. I pursue these themes by focusing on the processes by which new organizations create boundaries and become viable organizations by attracting, recruiting, and hiring applicants. I also focus on the construction of reward and control systems.
From: Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Swarthmore
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (23:21)
--
My current project analyzing military surrenders grows out of a search for fruitful concepts and analytical tools by which to articulate the mechanisms at work during interstitial (boundary) moments of assumption and divestment generally? As such, I pose the following questions: How are transfers or transformations of power and identity accomplished? What particular burdens are placed on such transfers when they occur in situations of crisis, conflict, emergency or liminality? What are the tasks of the central protagonists? What are the tasks of the witnesses? How are the transfers and transformations codified and represented? What, if any, is the role of force in these situations? What, if any, is the role of law? Are these events accomplished once and for all, at a specific time and place with oaths, promises, signatures, and exchanges across the boundaries of old and new, or do they require continuous reiteration in order to hold steady? Do they have built-in grounds for reversal or revocation? Do they necessarily alter the participants' cognitive and political maps of time (history) and space (social geography)? What does it mean to say that the assumption of a new identity, sovereignty, or set of social and political obligations in a surrender, a founding, an annunciation, a resignation, and so forth, is voluntary or that it is imposed? How do we 'read' and index these new identities and reordered relations?
Such questions raise the possibility of describing the deep structure of transitional events and of connecting them, as a series of archetypal social situations, to each other.
These situations are initially linked by their common project of escorting historical protagonists (ranging from the most local level to that of nations, up to that of the cosmos) across existential thresholds. They may dramatically differ in their normative inflections. Some are initiations into and assumptions of greater power, authority, and rights (inaugurations, annunciations, marriages, foundings). Some are degradations that remove, precisely, power, authority and rights (resignations, surrenders, divorces). Nevertheless, they all manage identity transformations that are recognized and have consequences. Societies are literally re-composed by these assumptions and divestments of power. This approach takes seriously the charge to study the material culture of the abstract concepts of law, power, authority, and identity. Thus it casts its interpretive gaze at the objects, gestures, recognitions, and representations that do the work of transition. A tripartite typology of action is proposed to capture these exchanges and acts of witness: demonstrative actions (including deixis), performative actions (esp. speech act theory), representational actions (in both textual and pictorial modalities). At the most theoretical level, tracking the boundary interactions via this typology aims to elaborate the on-the-ground constitution of social identities (both individual and collective) as these identities are transformed. It is a study of, precisely, the forms and practices around and on the threshold.
From: Nina Eliasoph
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Thursday, Feb 10, 2003 (10:26)
--
'Moral and Political Dialogue in Institutionally Ambiguous Settings: The Case of US Youth Groups'
Here's a draft of a draft of a working paper. The first few lines are pasted below. You can download the rest with this link: EliasophWrkPap.doc.
Raising good citizens in a bad society presents a puzzle. Hegel once quipped, 'To a father who asked how he might best bring up his son [the answer is given]- 'By making him the citizen of a state with good laws.' ' (Hegel, 1954 [1821]: 269). If society forms you, a deformed society deforms you. So, raising good citizens in a bad society is impossible.
But a lot of people try to do it anyway, both in public and private settings. This article focuses on public, non-family based settings for moral and political socialization in the US. In examining the ways adults pick through this puzzle, I found that dramatic changes in civic life in the US are opening up new puzzles and opportunities for people negotiating this dilemma in everyday conversation. The institutions of local civic life are becoming increasingly tied up with the state, with the market, with large bureaucratic nonprofit agencies. Conversation is central to social theory¼s understanding of the importance of civil society. These shifts are allowing political and moral dialogue to spring up in surprising ways, and in surprising places. Some ideas become easier to communicate, and some become more difficult...
From: Kim Manturuk manturuk@email.unc.edu
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (20:34)
--
Nina Eliasoph's posted working paper bring to the surface several issues that I have been examining in my research related to the emergence of symbolic boundries in public discourse. Her research clearly hits upon the way in which people engaging in quasi-political discourse (not overtly political but evoking political themes and concerns within the public sphere) rely on different languages. An example of this is the way in which the language of "family" can be summoned in public discourse to justify a particular action, while the opposing side can use the same language to oppose the action. "Family" can mean the group you protect above all else, but it can also be used in a negative way to represent something you need to rise above and escape from. In such cases, the language becomes simply a code that is socially seen to represent a greater concept with little if any actual connection to the original language being used.
This gains significance when considered in terms of Eliasoph's statement, ìThis blend makes it hard to know whether you are speaking as a citizen (to the state) or as a consumer (to a market entity) or as a neighbor and equal (to a voluntary association)ófor example.î Because there is such ambiguity in public sphere discourse, individuals rely on stratagies that call upon conceptual codes rather than specific arguements or rational. These conceptual codes have greater portability across multiple entities within a society reducing the need for the speaker to gain an understanding of the audience. I have been researching how this has developed in the post-9/11 discourse surrounding political proposals debated within the public sphere. Because people speak as many different roles (citizen, consumer, victim, etc...), they use conceptual codes for good and bad that are highly portable across these roles. A commonly used and understood code is the often-heard reference to bravery vs. cowardice to define right and wrong, to give an example. These codes provide cognitive shortcuts allowing people to engage in public discourse without having to redefine the boundries and terms of the conversation with each new participant. So what happens when the codes are not universally understood? Post-9/11, a very widely used code was the concept of "with us or against us". As several researchers have pointed out, however, this is not a code that is hiughly portable across racial groups. A recent study out of NC State found that many African-Americans felt that the "with us or against us" line left them with the choices of either supporting a government that did not represent their interests, or being defined as "against us".
Eliasoph also stated, "My point is that the frames or discourses are context dependent. They take on different meanings in different contexts; and discourses that are easily available to a person in one setting are often hard for that same person to summon in another." This gets at the heart of both the successes and failures of conceptual codes in public discourse. They eliminate, or at least presume to eliminate, the ambiguity of being context dependent. They are esoteric enough to be used in different ways to mean different things in different settings, allowing people to participate in public discourse while leaving them some "wriggle room" to backtrack from an unpopular or potentially risky position. I my project looks at the different conversations in which verious conceptual codes are more or less accessable, reliable, and productive. My initial sense in that it has more to do with the nature of the conversation (confrontational, one-directional, etc...) than the location (association, public forum, etc...). I especially like the point about the differences between observed and requested speech, and this is something I plan to add to my project. There is absolutly a difference between the codes people invoke during everyday conversation and the ones the more carefully select when asked to give an opinion or explanation for something. This is something I have not seen brought to light in many research projects, and I believe it is a rich area for further study.
From: Markella Rutherford mrutherford@virginia.edu
University of Virginia--Dept. of Sociology; Center on Religion and Democracy
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (12:11)
--
Much of the language of symbolic boundaries is relatively new to me, but I am interested in how it can enhance my current study of the views of morality expressed in college and university commencement speeches. Commencement speeches are saturated with both explicit and implicit statements on morality. Like the conversations that Nina Eliasoph reports on, commencement addresses are a form of public discourse that is (usually) only quasi-political. Unlike the everyday conversations she studies, speeches are a highly ritualized and one-sided form of discourse. Obviously, speech texts reveal very carefully-constructed statements, unlike the ones we might observe them to use in everyday, unplanned conversation. I think that Eliasoph raises interesting points about the kinds of inconsistencies that appear in real-life conversations that might get ?cleaned up? in interviews or pre-formulated speeches. Nonetheless, I have a similar interest in the ways that commencement speakers contribute to the institutionalization of the views they express.
One set of questions I have had to wrestle with concern the extent to which speeches can be understood without knowing how the members of diverse audiences hear and interpret what is said. It seems that the idea of conceptual codes that Kim Manturuk raises might be helpful in addressing this issue. Because invited speakers bring their own multiple roles to the podium with them, and because they address audiences that are both diverse and largely unknown to them, they use the kind of conceptual codes for good and bad that Manturuk refers to. My content analysis reveals, for example, that ?freedom? has often served as such a conceptual code. ?Progress? would seem to be another?though somewhat contested?code that is frequently used by commencement speakers. Because the specific model of ?conceptual codes? is a new one to me, I would like to ask whether Kim (or others) could suggest any readings I might refer to on this concept. Thanks.
From: Nina Eliasoph eliasoph@ssc.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (14:10)
--
Kim, you're raising absolutely crucial points about the relations between:
1. the speakers (who are they in relation to each other? Who do they
imagine themselves to be in rel to each other?);
2. the discourses (what does the very act of speaking in this setting
mean?) and
3. the imagined (and/or lived) institutional setting.
I really agree with you that it's not just that the words take on different
meanings in different settings, but mean something different depending
on who is speaking to whom...both to the speaker and listeners. The NC
study is a great example of that. I guess the next step would be to hear
how people (black and white) use those languages in non-interview, and
non-speechmaking settings.
I wrote more in the "Change" section, under Roger Friedland's
section...too many interesting ideas here! thanks, bethany, for organizing
this!
From: Nina Eliasoph eliasoph@ssc.wisc.edu
Univ of Wisconsin
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003 (14:14)
--
Commencement addresses! Cool. My colleague and pal Paul
Lichterman calls graduations "rituals for the 'cult of the individual'." But
you're also finding, it seems, that people are being asked to speak as
representatives of social categories as well as hearty individuals who
have made it through the lonesome valley of college; to speak from
"multiple roles." Great. But only some, and not others, I guess.
From: vivian martin martinv@mail.ccsu.edu
Central Connecticut State University, Journalism/English
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (17:45)
--
I've enjoyed reading the posts and appreciate Nina Eliasoph's posting of her working paper. My interest in symbolic boundaries involves the study of everyday interaction with news. I am working on a Grounded Theory dissertation that involves indepth interviews with newspaper letter writters and other people, participant observation in a book club concerned with books by and about African-Americans, and Internet community with highly partisan discourse, and much textual analysis. My strategy with most participants has been to follow people in their interactions --start with the news that they were responding to naturally -- to understand how they manage this "ongoing concern" in everyday life. News reception studies focused on responses to a television segment or researcher-selected article have not put us into the mix of interpersonal communication and other activities that surround meaning-making around news. Boundaries protecting identity and other interests become important in areas ranging from what people reject/select, criteria for newsworthiness, credibility, bias., etc., but also when it comes to negotiating the line bwteeen what news is appropriate to talk about with children and what news can enter everyday conversation. Confirming some of the ideas Eliasoph outlines in "Avoiding Politics," some of the research participants make distinctions between the chit chat they and co-workers might share about celebrity gossip versus discussion of serious issues from affirmative action, the death penalty, abortion, to talk of war with Iraq(though some indicate this topic is more open now than it was when I was doing interviews last August). For the most part, one has to choose the when/where/and with whom because 1) there is often limited knowledge and interest about discussing serious political issues beyond the obvious scandals and 2)politically charged discussions are uncomfortable for many people;they don't know how to do it. They also try to avoid bringing up issues around those with clearly partisan attitudes; i.e. moderate don't want to get into with the right or the left.
|