James A. Holstein

Marquette University · Department of Social and Cultural Sciences

This chapter frames the interview as an actively constructed conversation through which narratives are produced. It views empirical results as by-products of narrative practice, distinguishing the whats and hows of a communicative process involving the active subjectivity of interview participants. The framing has profound implications for how inte...

In January 2014, President Barack Obama made headlines when he confided to New Yorker reporter Davis Remnick that, if he had a son, he would discourage him from playing in the NFL. “I would not let my son play pro football,” he told the writer. Obama’s words came on the heels of a year of heightened awareness of the life-long consequences of a prof...

In contrast to the popularity of various "grounded" approaches to ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter turns to theoretical strategies that can inspire field understandings. From seeing culture as narrative, to discovering to social worlds and to documenting collaborative accomplishment, the significance of the conceptual frameworks that guide the...

Applies a vocabulary that makes the self visible as a project of everyday life. This book begins with the social self as envisioned early in the 20th century. Then the authors trace its movement from its ordinary social conditioning to its current existential dilemmas and crumbling experiential moorings. Part I revisits, then revises, this story of...

Wing-Chung Ho offers an extensive critique of what he calls our "radical constructionist approach to family experience" questioning the theoretical validity and empirical utility of the research program. This article responds to the charges in the broader context of the program's constructionist analytics, discussing family's experiential location,...

The new edition of this landmark volume emphasizes the dynamic, interactional, and reflexive dimensions of the research interview. Contributors highlight the myriad dimensions of complexity that are emerging as researchers increasingly frame the interview as a communicative opportunity as much as a data-gathering format. The book begins with the hi...

Mel Pollner regularly cautioned researchers not to argue with the members of settings under consideration. He warned against substituting the researcher’s meaning for the meanings of those being studied. This article discusses facets of the caution as they relate to the research process. Seemingly simple, the tenet is nuanced in application. The ar...

This article highlights and appreciates an often overlooked aspect of John Kitsuse’s work in the sociology of deviance. Years before he invented a new sociology of social problems, Kitsuse crafted theoretical and empirical statements that helped establish the “labeling” or “societal reaction” definition of, and perspective on, deviance. Kitsuse’s w...

This article decribes how organizational disputes emerge within, and are shaped by, dispute domains. We analyze dispute domains as the fundamental assumptions, vocabularies, orientations, concerns, and constraints that circumscribe conflictual interaction in particular organizational settings. Organizational disputes are transformed as they move fr...

Written and edited by social gerontologists, and focusing on everyday experiences, these essays draw from original case studies to look at the diverse ways of growing and being older. Collects ten original essays on the aging experience, written by prominent social gerontologists. Highlights diverse ways of growing and being older. Offers detailed...

O nce upon a time, stories were told and written for what they were about. The ancients wrote love stories, recorded histories of military campaigns, produced treatises on flora and fauna, medical texts, and philosophical discourses, and recounted oral histories of countless domains of experience. Some told of the emotions, some of strategic action...

This article reviews recent developments in constructionist approaches to life course studies. It outlines the general tenets of social constructionism and compares and contrasts two contemporary constructionist perspectives on the life course.

This paper examines the interactional underpinnings of social scientific research. Based on a detailed examination of a two-hour research interview, it describes aspects of the conversational practices through which social scientific knowledge is generated. Past critiques of interview research have been somewhat unilateral in their focus, typically...

Anecdotal accounts suggest that athletic contests affect the psychological well-being of members of the community represented by the competing teams. While these effects are sociologically plausible, there is virtually no systematic evidence that documents the relation between athletic contests and well-being. This study examines the relation betwe...

Offers a distinctive view of what the social worlds of family life might look like from the standpoint of "insiders."

In postmodern discourse, self is displaced as a central presence in experience and reappropriated as yet another personal signifier. This paper describes key postmodern views, then reframes postmodern vocabulary in terms of interpretive practice. It argues that the postmodern framing of self is too abstract and that a distinctly modern discourse fo...

The postmodern challenge to sociological notions of individual agency assails its experiential substantiality, conveying agency instead in philosophically abstract terms and fleeting media images. In opposition to this, we argue that everyday interpretive practive reflexively constructs agency, utilizing resources drawn from the ordinary contours o...

The concept of culture has gained considerable attention within the humanities and social sciences in general, and this is certainly true in the field of gerontology. The new perspectives thus gained widen the scope of gerontology. In this study, chapter authors examine the growth of gerontology as a discipline, the phenomenon of ageism as a socio-...

While commentators on the postmodern scene have dismissed or trivialized the personal self, it nonetheless remains a central experiential construct, articulating a sense of moral agency for everyday life. This article examines self-construction in the context of a world of proliferating going concerns - social institutions - that increasingly shape...

RECENT PROJECTS HAVE DRAWN US into analytic terrain that defies the emerging border between narrative and ethnography.This journal’s celebration of the turn of the century affords us the opportunity to reflect on the border as we consider ethnography’s past in relation to its future. We believe that the most promising challenge awaits qualitative r...

The nursing home has become a paramount site for the care and custody of old people, but it also affects how we think and talk about the ageing body. In this article, narrative and ethnographic material drawn from a variety of care-related settings is used to illustrate how and where the nursing home serves as a discursive anchor for embodiment...

A number of issues have arisen in response to our original development of a social constructionist approach (see WHAT IS FAMILY, 1990). In this article, we offer clarification of three issues. First, the settings of family construction do not determine outcomes, but rather their conditions are taken into account in the construction process. Second,...

Discusses a pragmatist--alternatively bracketed--constructionist approach to family as a social form.

While the sociological analysis of personal stories is becoming more sophisticated, it would benefit from a refined appreciation for narrative practice. The theme of this article is that the coherence of stories and the experiences they convey are reflexively related to the manifold activities and the increasingly diverse conditions of storytelling...

Interpretations of family and domestic life are increasingly deprivatized, that is, accomplished in various sites outside the household. Addressing this situation, this article has two goals. First, it presents a constructionist approach to family studies that views family as a social object constituted through interpretive practice. Second, it doc...

Contemporary social life is increasingly deprivatized, that is, conducted under the auspices of formal and informal groups, organizations, bureaucracies, and institutions. In these circumstances, personal (often private) experiential objects such as family, self, and the life course are subjected to extensive public discussion, debate, and definiti...

The traditional view of the life course as the patterned progression of individual experience through time has been challenged on several fronts. The emerging view is that patterned progression is subject to diverse social, historical, and cultural influences. This article extends the challenge by considering the way ordinary biographical work situ...

This article describes how organizational disputes emerge within, and are shaped by, dispute domains. We analyze dispute domains as the fundamental assumptions, vocabularies, orientations, concerns, and constraints that circumscribe conflictual interaction in particular organizational settings. Organizational disputes are transformed as they move f...

Considers family as a wide-available cultural form for the application of moral, interactional, and personal meaning

Treating family as an everyday, working vocabulary or discourse for assigning meaning to social relations, the analysis considers the social processes and descriptive conditions through which meaning is established, managed, and transcended. Highlighting both the descriptive utilities and the limits of organizationally embedded discourses, the arti...

Conventional approaches to family studies typically begin with an understanding or definition of the family that specifies its characteristics as a particular kind of group. This seems eminently reasonable, both commonsensically and as a social scientific practice. We all believe families to inhabit everyday life as concrete entities, and to study...

This paper offers an interactional perspective on the emergence and organization of disputes in organizations. Organizations are analyzed as interrelated dispute domains which consist of standardized and recurring argumentation practices and constraints, orientations to interactions and relationships, and role formats. The paper considers how organ...

This analytic monograph lays out a constructionist approach to family as a social form. From its consideration as a phenomenological object , to its everyday usages, and its organizational embeddedness, the form is provided a conceptual framework for empirical investigation.

This article examines how the discourse of age is used in involuntary mental hospitalization proceedings. Based on fieldwork in mental health and legal settings, the author describes how images of age and the life course are articulated throughout the involuntary commitment process to influence commitment decisions. The author argues that age and i...

This article suggests an interactional approach for analyzing victimization–that is, the social processes through which person come to be known and understood as victims. The authors conceptualize victimization in terms of interactional and descriptive practices through which victim status is assigned to persons and/or groups. Using data from the p...

Presents a constructionist approach to the family and domestic life as social forms.

This article offers an approach to family studies focusing on “family usage”—that is, discursive application and manipulation of family signs and imagery. Reconceptualizing family in terms of descriptive practice, I examine how family image and discourse are used to interpret and organize everyday social relations. Field data from community mental...

This study analyzes the organization of discourse in involuntary mental hospitalization hearings. I examine conversation between attorneys and witnesses as they collaborate to produce evidence upon which determinations of grave disability are based. Patients' courtroom talk is frequently cited as evidence of their interactional competence or incomp...

Prevalent in family studies is the private image of domestic life, in which household members' perceptions of family living are considered to be more realistic and telling than those of other persons. This article considers the private image for its methodological assumptions and implications. Recasting the assumptions in terms of descriptive pract...

Under reformed commitment legislation, mental illness alone is insufficient grounds for mental hospitalization. Nonetheless, judges of involuntary commitment hearings operate under the working assumption that persons sought to be committed are mentally ill, and this assumption shapes all other aspects of their evaluations. This article treats the m...

This study examines how considerations of a candidate patient's gender influence involuntary mental hospitalization decisions. Based upon fieldwork done in mental health and legal settings, I describe the dynamics of the commitment decision-making process. I argue that effects of gender do not derive from a candidate patient's gender per se. Rather...

In arriving at their verdicts, jurors must determine what really happened in the case at hand. Their interpretations then guide their decision making and become influential in the group deliberation process. This article uses conversational data from simulated jury deliberations to describe jurors' practice of articulating schematic interpretations...

This ethnography of legal proceedings examines how judgments of “grave disability” are formulated to effect involuntary mental hospitalizations. Such commitment decisions are based on judges' pragmatic evaluations of the viability of candidate patients' proposed community living situations and the ability of those situations to contain the havoc as...

Personnel in "people-processing" settings (Hasenfeld, 1972) are frequently asked to make evaluative decisions regarding clients who seek, use or are subjected to their services. Organizations like the police, courts, clinics, social service agencies, and myriad others produce ratings, judgments and diagnoses in order to determine appropriate organi...

Findings from studies of jurors' use of judges' instructions have been equivocal. This article examines conceptual and methodological features of these studies that may have contributed to their inconsistent results. Past research has focused exclusively on jurors' cognitive “rule-following” and consequently may have neglected to consider social di...

Considerable evidence has been gathered from studies of "jury-like" decision-making suggesting that jurors tend to render "legally irrational" verdicts. Much of this research has failed to examine the influence of the jury deliberation on this process. Conclusions of juror "incompetence" also arise from evidence indicating that jurors may fail to c...