In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the "narrative turn" in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in which narrative competence is socially organized and unevenly distributed. We show how this approach, or cluster of approaches, rooted variously in conversational analysis, symbolic interactionism, network analysis, and structuralist cultural sociologies, has both responded to problems associated with the narrative turn and shed light on enduring sociological questions such as the bases of institutional authority, how inequalities are maintained and reproduced, why political challengers are sometimes able to win support, and the cultural foundations of self-interest and instrumental rationality. 109 Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2011.37:109-130. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of California -Irvine on 03/12/13. For personal use only.

This article focuses on the use of narrative to understand the dynamics of social movements. More specifically, it examines how the strategic use of storytelling can shed light on the distinctly cultural obstacles that activists face in effecting change. After discussing the main approach to culture in movements, that of collective action framing, the article considers how a study of storytelling can help to account for the cultural and institutional constraints activists face in trying to develop persuasive messages. It then evaluates activists’ variable success in using stories as a persuasive tool and argues that the conditions of reception for narratives are unevenly distributed. Studying the structure of this unevenness, the article asserts, needs to be a part of cultural sociology.

This article develops a theory of the gendered character of public talk as a way to account for women's variable participation in the settings that make up the public sphere. Public settings for citizen talk such as radio call-in shows, social networking sites, letters to the editor, and town hall meetings are culturally coded female or male. In feminized settings, where the people who organize public talk are from feminized professions and where the favored modes of talk and action emphasize stereotypically feminine values, women are likely to be as active and influential participants as men. We test this proposition by way of an examination of the organized public deliberative forums in which many Americans today discuss policy issues. We show that women truly are equal participants in these forums. We account for this surprising development by demonstrating the female gendered character of the contemporary field of organized public deliberation.

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Does information improve deliberation? Proponents of online deliberation argue that the availability of the Internet can solve two longstanding problems of citizen decisionmaking: that preexisting inequalities tend to be reproduced rather than minimized in deliberative forums and that citizen decisionmaking sacrifices the benefits of expertise. Because all deliberators online can access information during their discussion, deliberation should be more informed and more equal. We put those claims to the test by analyzing URL-link posting in an online deliberative forum composed of 25 deliberating groups. On the positive side of the ledger, we show that participants did take advantage of the informational capacities of the web. URL-link posting not only generated more interaction than did opinions posted without links but it also responded to what we call the scale and uptake problems of public deliberation. On the negative side of the ledger, far from equalizing deliberation, the availability of online information may have given additional advantages to already advantaged groups. This was true even in groups that were actively facilitated. The availability of online information may also have fostered discussions, in some instances, that were more opinionated than informed. Information in the Internet age is newly accessible, we conclude, but is also politicized in unfamiliar ways.