Ambiguity inheres in social interaction. Cultural schemes do not always provide clarity in interactions, and so interactional problems may arise. However, we rarely look to situational ambiguity to understand interactional problems. I illustrate interactional problems in ambiguous situations through an ethnographic case at a high school in a progressive, U.S. Midwest suburban school district that is developing a race-conscious culture. I argue that reputation management is central to these social interactions, and therefore, difficulties with managing reputation due to the perceived ambiguities over what counts as racism constitute the interactional problem. Furthermore, this ambiguity generates anxiety and thus disruptes social bond. To manage reputation, teachers often choose to control information by disengaging from situations that could be construed as racial. However, this strategy impedes teachers' day-to-day work. Integrating micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture, this paper offers a theoretical framework for examining interactional problems in ambiguous situations.
Playing with a robot's face detection capabilities constitutes a praxeological approach to learning about new technology. We explore how family members discover suitable formations for a Cozmo robot to scan a single face, drawing on video recordings from Swedish homes. Taking an ethnomethodology and conversation-analysis perspective, we demonstrate how family members jointly establish a face-to-robot-face formation, moving themselves and the robot camera to frame a relevant face. Other family members engage in backgrounding their own faces and foregrounding the face to be scanned. We discuss how participants' emergent troubleshooting practices reveal differences between robot perception and human situated seeing.
Despite evidence linking customer product touch to positive sales outcomes, how salespeople actively facilitate intersubjective tactile experience remains underexplored. Adopting a practice-based perspective, this study analyzes sales interactions in bedding retail stores using ethnomethodological conversation analysis. The findings show that salespeople actively guide customers' sensory perception as a situated sensory marketing. In particular, the study identifies an embodied practice termed model touch, through which salespeople demonstrate and instruct specific ways of touching products. These findings contribute to debates on embodiment and situated experience in service encounters and highlight the value of fine-grained qualitative methods for analyzing interactive service work.
This article engages in a close rereading of Stigma, relating it to Goffman's biography as a person who faced stigma. Exploring his biography helps us to recognize the ways Goffman applies stigma strategies in how he represents himself as the author in Stigma. I explain that the strategic ways in which he represents himself as the author can be understood by seeing them as "tricks of the trade" used by "the stigmatized," and more specifically as "passing as fun," which Goffman describes as "tempting the devil" or fooling "the normals." This article aims to show that a key to an in-depth understanding of Stigma lies in gaining insight into the multilayered and often ironic ways in which Goffman represents himself in relation to what he calls "the normals." By exploring Goffman's semi-hidden positionality, this article demonstrates that Goffman sides with "the stigmatized" while exposing their ordeal and the hegemonic force of the interaction order.
This article revisits Goffman's original formulations of stigma. In doing so, the discussion focuses, specifically, upon his emphasis that a “language of relationships, not attributes is needed.” The analysis is intended to demonstrate how Goffman's observations offer a starting point for an inquiry in to just how members produce and orient to “spoiled identities” in specific courses of action. While much recent work has sought to “move beyond” or “resituate” Goffman's observations by invoking structure and dualisms of micro and macro, such moves miss or obscure the practical actions that, in the first instance, provide the interactional grounds of what comes to be called “stigma.” The article makes this argument in two ways: first, it demonstrates that Goffman's call for a “language of relationships” can be radically respecified by treating it as members' language; second, it shows how “stigmatizing conditions” are produced and oriented to through categorization practices in naturally‐occurring interaction and self‐organizing settings. The argument is made via a re‐analysis of Harvey Sacks' (1967) corpus of calls to a suicide prevention center. In attending to actual practices involved in potentially stigmatizing contextures, an alternative approach to understanding stigma as a contextured phenomenon—occasioned, contingent, and achieved through members' practices—is proposed, offering new directions for a praxeological interactionism and studies of moral order.
