This article contributes to the emerging sociology of mind-sport as a new area of research by showing how everyday interaction and life skills are sharpened and honed through strategic interaction at the bridge table. Using the example of the card game bridge, the article explores how elite players engage in time-consuming and repetitive performances that display their ongoing impression management and strategic interaction work. Through interviews with 52 elite bridge players, the article argues that preparation and practice are required to improve play, alongside the ability to combine deception with notions of skilfully supportive transparent play. These contradictions are played out through learning to read the impressions given off by other players as well as plan in a disciplined manner for mistakes made at the table and to support their partner through silence. Using an interactionist framework, this article illustrates how strategic interaction and impression management are skills continually worked on in high-pressured and competitive environments. The article demonstrates the ways that everyday interaction practices are enhanced by and through a competitive mind-sport.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which reactive researcher collaboration helps to manage some of the challenges present in insider research.Design/methodology/approachEmploying (auto)biographical reflections from across two different case-studies, the authors explore the ways in which reactive collaboration is enmeshed with issues associated with researching the familiar in a marketized university environment.FindingsThe authors develop the term “reactive collaboration” to explore the ways in which insider research projects have to deal with a range of challenges from within their own research community. Reactive collaboration is as much about insider research solidarity as it is with reacting to anticipated and unanticipated events during the research process (and how inside researchers do and do not deal with them). Reactive collaboration highlights the successes as well as the failures of insider researchers negotiating complex research situations.Originality/valueThe authors show how reactive collaboration occurs in challenging research environments, including the joys, sorrows and failures. The authors argue that the challenges and benefits of insider research can be helpfully crystalised through reactive collaboration.
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