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Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based approach to these questions, one that compels a wholesale rethinking of the roots of responsible democratic citizenship. The central claim of the book is that partisan identity comes in qualitatively different forms, with distinct political consequences. Blind partisan loyalty, as the pejorative label implies, facilitates bias and reduces attention to valuable information. Critical loyalty, by doing the opposite, outperforms standard measures of political engagement in leading to normatively desirable judgments. Drawing on both experimental and survey methods—as well as five decades of American political history—this book examines the nature and quality of mass political judgment across a wide range of political contexts, from perceptions of the economy, to the formation, updating, and organization of public policy preferences, to electoral judgment and partisan change. Contrary to much previous scholarship, the empirical findings reveal that rational judgment—holding preferences that align with one's material interests, values, and relevant facts—does not hinge on cognitive ability. Rather, breaking out of the apathy-versus-bias prison requires critical involvement, and critical involvement requires critical partisan loyalty.

Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swept markets, infiltrated consumer minds through media, and aroused inhibited desires. This has engendered a fast-paced and relentless relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.

From natural disasters to private funerals, digital media are playing a central role in the documentation and commemoration of shared significant events and individual loss experiences. Yet few studies have fully engaged with the increasing role mobile media play in making meanings related to traumatic events across different individual and collective contexts. Haunting Hands provides the first in-depth study into understanding the role of mobile media in memorialization and bereavement as a cultural and social practice. Throughout the chapters in this book, we explore how mobile devices are both expanding upon older forms of memory-making and creating new channels for affective cultures whereby the visual, textual, oral, and haptic manifest in new ways. Encompassing everything from phones to tablets, mobile media are not only playing a key role in how we represent and remember life, but also in how we negotiate the increasingly integral role of the digital within rituals in and around death. Haunting Hands posits how, during times of distress, mobile media can assist, accompany, and at times augment the disruptive terrain of loss. The book expands upon debates in the area of online memorialization in that the mobile device itself takes prominence, not only for its communicative or social function, but also for the ways in which it can contain as well as generate an intimate space within it. In this way, the device becomes an important companion for mobile-emotive grief as the bereaved engage with emotionally charged digital content in solitary, sometimes secretive, and sometimes shared ways.

While examining its neuro-cognitive hardware, psychology usually ignores the socio-cognitive software underlying human attention. Yet although it is nature that equips us with our sense organs, it is nevertheless society that shapes the way we actually use them. The book explores the social underpinnings of attention, the way in which we focus our attention (and thereby notice and ignore things) not just as individuals and as humans but also as social beings, members of particular communities with specific traditions and conventions of attending to certain parts of reality while ignoring others. As members of such communities, we are socialized into culturally, subculturally (ideologically, professionally), and historically specific norms that delineate the scope of our attention thus effectively determining what we ought to consider relevant and what we may tacitly inattend, or should explicitly disattend, as irrelevant. The book argues that in order to study human attention, psychology and neuroscience are therefore clearly not enough and that we also need a sociology of attention.

The concept of identity has become widespread within the social and behavioral sciences in recent years, cutting across disciplines from psychiatry and psychology to political science and sociology. All individuals claim particular identities given their roles in society, groups they belong to, and characteristics that describe themselves. Introduced almost thirty years ago, identity theory is a social psychological theory that attempts to understand identities, their sources in interaction and society, their processes of operation, and their consequences for interaction and society from a sociological perspective. This book describes identity theory, its origins, the research that supports it, and its future direction. It covers the relation between identity theory and other related theories, as well as the nature and operation of identities. In addition, the book discusses the multiple identities individuals hold from their multiple positions in society and organizations as well as the multiple identities activated by many people interacting in groups and organizations. Finally, it covers the manner in which identities offer both stability and change to individuals. Step by step, the book makes the full range of this powerful new theory understandable.

Teenagers in the United States hear mixed messages about sexuality from the people and institutions around them. These social norms are important for understanding teen sexuality because they shape teens’ sexual behaviors and because the negative sanctioning of norm violators affects teens’ lives. Struggles over norms and enforcement around teen sexuality are also a major cultural battleground in U.S. society today. Based on 133 in-depth interviews with college students and teen mothers and fathers, this book reveals teenagers’ fascinating and complicated social worlds of communication and silence, rules and inconsistencies, control and evasion, hidden behaviors and threatened reputations. The book develops theoretical tools for understanding norms and social control in ways that attend to social inequalities and emphasize conflict and change. Teen sexuality norms come in internally conflicting sets that regulate teenagers’ behaviors, emotions, public portrayals of behaviors, and sanctions. These norm sets and teens’ behaviors look very different from one community to the next. Norm enforcers—such as families, peers, schools, and communities—strategize to gain control over teens’ behaviors using informal social sanctions like gossip and exclusion and formal communication such as sex education, but teens strategize to keep control over their own behaviors. Most eventually seek to violate sex norms while evading negative sanctions. This book helps us understand why teen sexuality norms are sometimes effective and sometimes ineffective. It contributes to research in social psychology, adolescence, and the life course, and its findings are relevant for improving sexual and reproductive health policy.

The environment, and how humans affect it, is more of a concern now than ever. We are constantly told that halting climate change requires raising awareness, changing attitudes, and finally altering behaviors among the general public—and doing it fast. New information, attitudes, and actions, it is conventionally assumed, will necessarily follow one from the other. However, this approach ignores much of what is known about attitudes in general and environmental attitudes in particular—a huge gap lies between what we say and what we do. Solving environmental problems requires a scientific understanding of public attitudes. Like rocks in a swollen river, attitudes often lie beneath the surface—hard to see, and even harder to move or change. This book helps us read the water and negotiate its hidden obstacles, explaining what attitudes are, how they change and influence behavior. Rather than trying to change attitudes, we need to design solutions and policies with attitudes in mind. Heberlein illustrates these points by tracing the attitudes of the well-known environmentalist Aldo Leopold, while tying social psychology to real-world behaviors throughout the book. Bringing together theory and practice, this book provides a realistic understanding of why and how attitudes matter when it comes to environmental problems; and how, by balancing natural with social science, we can step back from false assumptions and unproductive, frustrating programs to work toward fostering successful, effective environmental action.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with parents both rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers, this book reveals how digital technologies give parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. It argues that, in late modernity, parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and yet increasingly charged with respecting and developing the agency of their child—leaving much to be negotiated. The book charts how parents enact authority and values through digital technologies—as “screen time,” videogames, and social media become ways of both being together and of setting boundaries, with digital technologies introducing valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward hard-to-imagine futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children’s lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere.

Social structures can be fruitfully studied as networks of social relationships. These should not be conceptualized, and examined, as stable, acultural patterns of ties. Building on relational sociology around Harrison White, the book examines the interplay of social networks and meaning. Social relationships consist of dynamic bundles of expectations about the behavior between particular actors. These expectations come out of the process of communication, and they make for the regularity and predictability of communication, reducing its inherent uncertainty. Like all social structures, relationships and networks are made of expectations that guide social processes, but that continuously change as the result of these processes. Building on Niklas Luhmann, the events in networks can fruitfully be conceptualized as communication, the processing of meaning between actors (rather than emanating from them). Communication draws on a variety of cultural forms to define and negotiate the relationships between actors: relationship frames like “love” and “friendship” prescribe the kinds of interaction appropriate for types of tie; social categories like ethnicity and gender guide the interaction within and between categories of actors; and collective and corporate actors form on the basis of cultural models like “company,” “bureaucracy,” “street gang,” or “social movement.” Such cultural models are diffused in systems of education and in the mass media, but they also institutionalize in communication, with existing patterns of interaction and relationships serving as models for others. Social groups are semi-institutionalized social patterns, with a strong social boundary separating their members from the social environment.

This book presents a unique and engaging view of the world of behaviors individuals perform by themselves. The book’s central claim is that solitary action, in its many diverse and often highly absorbing forms, is as prevalent in everyday life as the complimentary domain of social interaction. But, while there are numerous studies of social interaction, this is the first work in social theory to develop an understanding of what people do when they are on their own. Like many studies of interaction, by authors such as Mead, Goffman, and Garfinkel, the book focuses on forms of behavior rather than the meaning individuals ascribe to their acts. The focus on forms of behavior leads to three novel premises that shape the understanding of solitary action throughout the book. First, solitary action is a contextually reflexive form of behavior. Second, many forms of solitary action have the distinctive capacity to hold the individual’s attention as the context of activity proceeds. Third, solitary forms of action vary noticeably in their structural constraints. To cite a contrasting set of examples highlighted in the book: whereas the game of solitaire is played with rigid constraints on each move in a sequence of action, the art of solo jazz improvisations provides a multitude of possibilities for variations on a theme. While the book is written with intellectual rigor, the text is surprisingly accessible and includes novel examples that illustrate the significance of each conceptual step.

When people are facing difficulties, they often feel the need for a confidant—a person to vent to or talk things through with who will offer sympathy or understanding. How do they decide on whom to rely? In theory, the answer seems obvious: if the matter is personal, they will turn to a spouse, a family member, or someone otherwise close. In practice, what people actually do often belies these expectations. This book follows a group of graduate students as they cope with the stress of their first year in their programs, probing how they choose confidants over the course of their everyday experiences and unraveling the implications of the process. The book then tests its explanations against data on national populations. It shows that rather than consistently rely on their “strong ties,” people often take pains to avoid close friends and family, because these are too fraught with complex expectations. People often confide in “weak ties,” as their fear that their trust could be misplaced is overcome by their need for one who understands. In fact, people may find themselves confiding in acquaintances and even strangers unexpectedly, without much reflection on the consequences. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, the book returns to the basic questions of who we connect with, how, and why, and upends decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.

‘Farmers’ suicides’ have largely been framed through official suicide statistics, and they have been explained in terms of agrarian production-related crisis across geographies. Based on ethnographic work in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, this book offers a qualified challenge to such explanations. First part of the book describes local transformations that are taking place in interconnected domains of production, consumption, and social relationships. The attempted transition from a century-long involvement in rain-fed groundnut cultivation to groundwater-irrigated horticulture, which is being actively promoted by a pro-market state, has aggravated production-related risks in this fragile ecological zone. The book then explains how production risks contribute to causing anomic frictions amongst local small and middle farmers who aspire to adopt refined lifestyles and consumption practices. Emergent ideas of individualism, competitiveness, and status inequality are stressing familial roles and bonds. A key argument advanced here is that these local processes, their subjective experiences, and the manner in which they are acted upon, are all mediated by the local ideology of masculinity. Against the background of new social and economic processes, the second part of the book suggests that officially certified cases of ‘farmers’ suicides’ are not always marked by ‘farm-related’ economic factors in an objective and uniform manner. In other words, the entire process of production of official statistics of suicide is socially organized. The book concludes by suggesting that ‘farm-related suicides’ relate to the wider field of rural suicides through new ideas and practices around individual and family honour, status inequality, and dignity.

This book examines how mobile telephony contributes to social change in rural India (West Bengal, Bankura district) on the basis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a village before and after the introduction of mobile phones. The book investigates how mobile telephones emerged as multidimensional objects that not only enable telephone conversations, but also facilitate status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment practices. It explores how this multifaceted use of mobile phones has influenced economic, political, and social relationships, including gender relationships, and how these new social constellations relate to culture and development. The book examines social institutions as culturally constructed spheres tied to translocal processes that, nevertheless, have local meanings. The author delves into social and cultural changes to examine agency and power relationships: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to further their aims to change their lives, or does phone use merely amplify existing social patterns and power relationships? Can mobile telephony induce development? Using a holistic ethnographic approach, the book develops a framework to understand how new media mediates social processes within interrelated social spheres and local hierarchies. It delves into mobile phone use as a multidimensional process with diverse impacts by exploring how media-saturated forms of interaction relate to preexisting contexts.

Legal socialization is the process by which children and adolescents acquire their law-related values. Such values, in particular legitimacy, underlie the ability and willingness to consent to laws and defer to legal authorities and make legitimacy-based legal systems possible. In their absence people relate to the law as coercion and respond to rewards and punishments. By age eighteen a person’s orientation toward law is largely established, yet recent legal scholarship has largely ignored this early period in favor of studying adults and their relationship to the law. This volume focuses upon socialization and outlines what is known about legal socialization in the family, in schools, and through contacts with the juvenile justice system. Our review of the literature indicates that there are ways to socialize that build legitimacy. These are linked to three issues: how decisions are made, how people are treated, and whether authorities respect the boundaries of their authority. Despite evidence that legitimacy can be socialized, views about the best way to exercise authority are highly contested in America today in families, schools, and within the juvenile justice system. In each case pressures toward coercion are strong. This volume argues for the virtues of a consent-based approach and for utilizing socialization practices that promote such a model.