Opening refers to the activity of two or more persons moving from a condition of behavioral independence to one of interdependence. It is thus the first necessary activity that any two persons must perform successfully if they are to do anything else together. Two empirical studies focusing on this social activity were conducted with four elements of opening being delineated: (1) reciprocally acknowledged attention, (2) mutual responsiveness, (3) congruent functional identities, and (4) shared focus. Each of these elements must be constructed and maintained if concerted behavior is to occur. Evidence includes both successful and unsuccessful attempts at opening.
This paper describes reactions by regular patrons of a family restaurant to an armed robbery that occurred within its premises. One of the victims, the restaurant's co‐manager, and these regulars participated in the construction of a narrative in order to restore their normal involvement within the community and to incorporate the profound disturbance of a robbery into the patrons' and manager's shared pasts. We discuss two different types of regulars who view this particular restaurant as a sacred place. In this context, we discuss particular discourse, appearance, and touch codes that support perceptions of the restaurant as sacred. To conclude, we discuss how regulars and management resolved this profound disturbance to establish shared histories in regard to the robbery and to restore communal relations within this restaurant.
Each system of communication introduces its own "bias" in how the coordination of social activity can he accomplished.All instances of social action ( 5 ) and forms of social relationships (11) require reciprocating communication. We will explore how various forms of mediated communication alter the processes of constructing social action and social relationships.Prior to the development of various forms of mediated communication, persons dispersed in space could communicate with each other only by means of a messenger who moved from one situation to another and back again. With the development of writing-reading skills, the level of competence and trust required for messengers was dramatically reduced. It also became possible to make a clearer distinction between the messenger and the message. When the messenger was the material carrier of the message, rather than the carrier of a material message, he was necessarily a representative (acting in behalf of) of the formulator of the message. This gave him the power to alter the message by intent or incompetency; it allowed him to be an active participant in the negotiations between two parties. With the advent of writing-reading skills, the messenger is transformed into an instrument.The advent of writing allowed separated parties to communicate with each other without necessarily informing any third party of the content of the communication. When written messages became an integral part of the organization of social units, elaborate seals were developed to ensure that unintended parties could not read the message and pass it along as though the content was still private. This development made it possible for elites to develop monopolies of knowledge (2); however, it had a particular consequence on the temporal element of reciprocity.
Twenty years after its publication, the “openings” research of Miller, Hintz, and Couch (1975) continues to be the conceptual foundation of the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interation. However, we believe that this work has been misread. Returning to the original work, we offer a new reading of this groundbreaking research that broadens the scope of the analysis and more closely defines the hierarchical structure of social interation found in all social encounters.
The form of association made possible by the complementary activities of reading and writing is examined from the perspective of each. The primary focus is on the differences in how readers and writers experience both themselves and others in the process of such mediated communication as opposed to the experience of persons in face‐to‐face interaction. These differences are then related to the rise of individualism and the mode of analytic thought in Western Civilization. A final section focuses on the relationship between writers and authority systems as a possible explanation for bursts of creative literary production in societies.
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