1st Edition
People, Technology, and Social Organization Interactionist Studies of Everyday Life
This insightful and accessible book is a response to the increasing important role that technology plays in everyday life, and the urgent need for empirical studies that analyse the impact of technology on social practices.
The chapters in this co-edited collection reveal how technology is oriented to and embedded within the social organization of action in a wide range of settings and institutions, including education, markets, arts and culture, health and social care, media, politics, and science. In their analyses, the contributing authors adopt interactionist perspectives to explore how the meanings of technology emerge and are negotiated within and through action and interaction. The volume comprises 14 empirical chapters from authors working in fields such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, discourse methods, ethnographic enquiry, video-based methods, and others. The chapters are framed by an introduction and a concluding discussion by the co-editors which draws out the key themes and issues that the individual chapters speak to, and show the importance of these themes for the social sciences and for society.
The book is primarily aimed at researchers in the social sciences, including sociology, social psychology, organization studies, and beyond whose work is concerned with the interplay between social interaction, technology, and institutions.
1 Introduction
Dirk Vom Lehn, Will Gibson, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco
Part 1 Power and Control
2 Being Family and Friends to Abused Women – A Qualitative Study of Digital Media in Intimate Partner Violence
Susanne Boethius and Malin Åkerström
3 News, Sex, and the Fight Between Corporate Control and Human Communication Online
Michael Dellwing
4 Terminal Violence: Online Interactions and Infra-Humanization
Simon Gottschalk
5 Summing Up the Criminal Case Online
David Wästerfors
Part 2 Identity and Community
6 Organizing Subcultural Identities on Social Media: Instagram Infrastructures and User Actions
J. Patrick Williams and Samuel Judah
7 A Queer Kind of Stigma
Christopher T. Conner and Sarah Ann Sullivan
8 Symbolic Separation: The Amish and 21st-Century Technologies
Corey J. Colyer, Rachel E. Stein, and Katie E. Corcoran
Part 3 Practices and Technology
9 Receiving Phone Calls During Medical Consultations: The Production of Interactional Space for Technology Use
Aleksandr Shirokov, Iuliia Avgustis, and Andrei Korbut
10 Non-Talking Heads: How Architectures of Digital Copresence Shape Question-Silence-Answer-Sequences in University Teaching
Kenan Hochuli and Johanna Jud
11 The Role of Cursor Movements in a Screen-Based Video Game Interaction
Lydia Heiden, Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre, and Matthieu Quignard
12 Problems with the Digital Public Encounter
Daniela Boehringer
13 Smartphone Tooling: Achieving Perception by Positioning a Smartphone for Object Scanning
Louise Lüchow, Brian L. Due, and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen
Part 4 Reflections on Interactionist Studies of Technologies
14 Where Next for Interactionist Studies of Technology?
Dirk Vom Lehn, Will Gibson, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco
Biography
Dirk vom Lehn is Professor of Organization and Practice at King’s Business School/King’s College London, co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism, and author of Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology.
Will Gibson is Professor of Interactional Sociology and Qualitative Research at the Institute of Education, University College London, co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism and co-author of Institutions, Interaction and Social Theory.
Natalia Ruiz-Junco is Associate Professor of Sociology at Auburn University, USA, and co-editor of Updating Charles H. Cooley: Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic and The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism.