J. Patrick Williams

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · Division of Sociology

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the connections between and across Goffman’s sociological theories of social life and sociolinguistic theories of language use as communicative action. That there should be numerous points of convergence is quite obvious; Goffman’s scholarly attention was focused on the social organization of everyday life,...

This study examines the gender and country differences with respect to a range of gaming motivations (e.g., social, performance, habit) and game genre choices (e.g., action, sports, casual). Surveys were conducted on 634 university students from Singapore, Germany and the US. Overall, the findings suggest that many game motivations and genre choice...

This chapter introduces the esports subculture in Singapore, a highly urbanised island-nation in Southeast Asia. We focus on the cultural and social backdrops which support esports as an unconventional sport subculture and facilitate subcultural identity work. Using articles published in Singaporean newspapers, we find evidence for contradictory di...

Esports has generated an industry of increasing economic and cultural importance. In recent years, universities and other higher education institutions have responded to its growth by establishing undergraduate courses to satisfy the needs of innovators operating in the area. However, there is not yet consensus on what an esports curriculum should...

This study examines the gender and country differences with respect to a range of gaming motivations (e.g., social, performance, habit) and game genre choices (e.g., action, sports, casual). Surveys were conducted on 634 university students from Singapore, Germany and the US. Overall, the findings suggest that many game motivations and genre choice...

This chapter describes five curatorial and performative events developed and staged by Singaporean punks and associated artists between 2012 and 2017. Mirroring the participatory trends common in non-institutionalized new or post-museums, these initiatives are not limited to exclusive, insider-only music gigs or events, but involve practices that s...

This chapter discusses the ways in which mythical stories of the origins of subcultures and the authenticity of subcultural identities have influenced subculture research since the 1970s. It states that neither the origin stories nor the authentic identities may be real, but that people nonetheless believe in them and base their actions on these be...

Influencers are social media users who create digital cultural content, cultivate followers through social media accounts, and monetize their social media identities through financial relationships with commercial and culture industries. Influencers collaborate and compete with one another for the attention of other social media users, whose views,...

As identity and authenticity discourses increasingly saturate everyday life, so too have these concepts spread across the humanities and social sciences literatures. Many scholars may be interested in identity and authenticity, but lack knowledge of paradigmatic or disciplinary approaches to these concepts. While the book as a whole (which this cha...

We discuss how instructors and game-design students, for whom playing games for fun makes up a significant part of their self-definitions, made sense of transformations in perceptions of games, play and work during socialization into professional games-related careers. Our data come from 6 weeks of field research and 14 semi-structured in-depth int...

The concept of authenticity emerged in Greek antiquity and referred to the author or originator of certain actions or objects. Over the centuries, meaning shifted away from the author to concerns with the originality or genuineness of the actions or objects themselves. Today the concept is widely used across the western social sciences and humaniti...

This chapter reconstructs the ways in which mythical stories of the origins of subcultures and the authenticity of subcultural identities have influenced subculture research since the 1970s. It states that neither the origin stories nor the authentic identities may be real, but that people nonetheless believe in them and base their actions on these...

This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mech...

This chapter maps out a symbolic interactionist conception of authenticity as it relates to identity and identification. It begins by distinguishing between the phenomenological concept of self-authenticity and the interactional concept of identity authenticity. Emphasizing the latter, it discuss the significance of essentialism, categories, and bo...

Empirical studies of youth cultures and subcultures continue to flourish alongside active theoretical progression and debates within and across a variety of intellectual traditions. Annually, a range of published articles, monographs and edited collections improve our collective knowledge about youth (sub)cultural phenomena from nearly every corner...

While research on youth cultures in Southeast Asia has traditionally focused on crime, class, and delinquency among adolescent and young-adult males, the 21st century has seen an increase in research on the intersections between youth, religion, popular culture, media, identity, and consumption. As part of this trend, we report on an exploration of...

Authenticity has become an increasingly salient topic within various interactional traditions, including conversational and discourse analysis, discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and symbolic interactionism. However, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts. In this study, we conside...

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing with...

Since the late 1990s, the Korean pop-culture wave has had a huge impact, achieving immense popularity and sustaining a global community of consumers and fans. In Singapore, a significant K-pop fan culture has emerged among youths. In this article, we study the emergence of the sasaeng fan—a stigmatized fan identity that refers to individuals who ar...

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/951

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/912

Aim. In this article, we develop a method, that we call the gameplay review method, for measuring players’ engagement with digital games through players’ interactions with video recordings of their own gameplay. Method. The gameplay review method arose from a microsociological study of the gameplay of eight young adults who each played approximatel...

This article theorizes and performs an analytic and evocative autoethnography about participation in the Rude Boy subculture in Singapore in the 2000s. Relying on critical pedagogy and a performative conception of subcultural theory, we analyze the second author’s past self as a Rude Boy through a collaborative narrative that emerged out of a unive...

Role is an under-studied topic in research on virtual game worlds, despite its centrality in the ubiquitous term “massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).” In this article, we report on a study of the role concept and its relevance to virtual worlds, with emphasis on the MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW). In particular, we focus on the...

Over the last 20 years there has been an expansion of network mediated social activities, and an accompanying explosion of research interest into the poetics of networked communication. Of particular interest is the rise of what have come to be known as “virtual worlds”: persistent graphical environments populated (and often partially authored) by...

In this chapter, I outline a genealogy of the concept of subculture. My interest is in the degree of assumed connections between subculture and deviance, as well as with other related social scientific concepts such as marginalization, resistance and lifestyle. What I argue in short is that there has been a diverse set of uses for the term subcultu...

Written for Introductory Sociology and Sociology of Popular Music courses, the second edition of Understanding Society through Popular Music uses popular music to illustrate fundamental social institutions, theories, sociological concepts, and processes. The authors use music, a social phenomenon of great interest, to draw students in and bring lif...

In this paper we attempt to unpack the meanings of “expert” and “novice” in games research. A literature review reveals unreliable definitions and inadequate operationalization of these concepts. Nonetheless, researchers default to recruiting experienced players for games research projects to the exclusion of novices. We take an interactionist appr...

In this paper we articulate an empirical approach to the study of social action in digitallymediated contexts. Our approach extends Carl Couch’s theory of cooperative action, which is based on a set of “elements of sociation”: acknowledged attentiveness, mutual responsiveness, congruent functional identities, shared focus, and social objective. Thr...

In tandem with the technological advancement of immersive virtual environments, digital games have evolved into complex social worlds where people play collaboratively to achieve individual- and group-oriented goals. The massively multiplayer online games genre has received international attention for the large numbers of users that commit a signif...

In tandem with the technological advancement of immersive virtual environments, digital games have evolved into complex social worlds where people play collaboratively to achieve individual- and group-oriented goals. The massively multiplayer online games genre has received international attention for the large numbers of users that commit a signif...

The folk devil concept has been well used in subcultural studies, yet its importance might be better served by distinguishing among multiple conceptual frames through which it is articulated. In this article, I clarify how folk devils are made possible through the interaction of three concepts used by sociologists to study everyday life. The fi rst...

Cyber worlds fuel innovations in development and design, but whether and how to catalyze a slow-moving interplay among them remains an open question. This paper develops an argument for organizing interdisciplinary research through and around cyber worlds in order to bridge design and development by means of a collaboratory. To this end, it provide...

Musical experiences play a formative role in shaping individuals, culture and society. This chapter descriptively analyzes a six-week study abroad program based in Budapest, Hungary that focuses on music, popular culture, and the politics of everyday life. I begin by describing the program's rationale, goals, and objectives. I then provide insight...

Participation in contemporary street cultures often exposes individuals to a world characterized by violence. The participants in this study admitted to frequent experience with violence and regular use of it. Many viewed violence as an appropriate response to some situations, though they often worked to avoid negative connotations of such behavior...

Virtual-worlds research is a dynamic and growing interdisciplinary area in the social sciences and humanities. Sociological theory can play an important role in how virtual worlds are conceptualized and studied. Drawing on data from ethnographic projects on two distinct types of virtual worlds, an asynchronous text-based internet forum and a massiv...

Much sociological research has focused on the exertion of power, while the subfield of subculture studies has preferred to engage in the study of resistance to power. Acknowledging recent conceptualizations of resistance (and Einwohner 2004; Raby 2005), this chapter considers the relevance of subcultural studies in theorizing resistance, specifical...

We investigate how participants in the street economy of crack cocaine construct a “hustler” identity by contrasting their social behaviors and styles with a dialectically contrastive crackhead identity. For those who are proximate to, or involved in, the crack cocaine economy, effort is required to avoid being labeled a crackhead. Would-be hustler...

Studies of youth subcultures have been carried out for decades from various theoretical perspectives (including functionalism, social ecology, neo-Marxism, deviance and labeling, cultural studies, sports and leisure studies) as well as from various methodological standpoints (e.g., deductive and inductive approaches, insider and outsider perspectiv...

The study of youth subcultures has rich histories in the USA and UK, yet has remained a marginal subfield within cultural sociology. In this article, I begin by reviewing the significance of the Chicago school, strain theory, Birmingham school and post-subcultural studies traditions of youth-cultural and youth-subcultural research. I then conceive...

Previous studies have examined how individuals act in ways that are considered deviant by mainstream standards and how these individuals neutralize their actions to maintain a positive self concept. But little is known about how individuals who defy social norms by ''not doing'' socially accepted behaviors construct meaningful subcultural identitie...

In this article, the author examines the relative roles of music and the internet for self-identifying members of the straightedge youth subculture. For nearly 30 years, subcultures have been conceptualized primarily in terms of music and style. Participation has therefore typically been characterized by the consumption of specific types of music a...

"This book presents the most current research in fantasy games and examines the cultural and constructionist dimensions of fantasy gaming as a leisure activity. Each chapter investigates some social or behavioral aspect of fantasy gaming and provides insight into the cultural, linguistic, sociological, and psychological impact of games on both the...

This article reports research analyzing cultural representations of minorities in Hungarian elementary school textbooks currently used throughout the country. A convenient sample representing more than 75% of first and fourth grade reading books was collected from three academic and public libraries in Hungary. Using content analysis techniques, im...

We analyze how participants in an internet forum dedicated to the straight- edge subculture articulate and express subcultural identities and bound- aries, with particular attention to how they accomplish these tasks in a computer-mediated context. Through participant observation, "focused dis- cussions," and interviews, we explore the complexity o...

This article discusses one way in which cultural studies theories can be applied to current research of subcultures on the internet. Starting from Clarke's and Hebdige's theories of subcultural style and Frith's theory of music and identity, a case study of an online subcultural website is used to highlight the ways in which resistance is displayed...

With new relationships between state and civil society, community building has arisen as a pre- ferred mechanism to ameliorate urban poverty. Community building is a much-supported but undercriticized paradigm, especially with respect to questions about the benefits that impover- ished neighborhood residents actually acquire from these initiatives....

The dominant framework of neighborhood revitalization in the United States that emerged in the 1990s is the comprehensive community-building approach based on a “theory of change” model. This framework posits that to improve neighborhoods and the quality of life of residents, programmatic efforts are needed that are “resident-driven” and holistic i...