Book review: Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value:
01 May 2020-European Journal of Social Theory (SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England)-Vol. 23, Iss: 2, pp 284-288
About: This article is published in European Journal of Social Theory.The article was published on 2020-05-01. It has received 10 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Value (mathematics) & Narrative.
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TL;DR: Through analysis of the UK government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture’s relative autonomy by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus.
Abstract: Through analysis of the UK government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture's relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or 'social drama', it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action through simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally charged events such as human death.
36 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a problematisation of how one can meaningfully discuss the concept of quality in a methodology as notoriously "murky" as narrative research is discussed, and a solution to this problem is presented.
Abstract: This article opens with a problematisation of how one can meaningfully discuss the concept of quality in a methodology as notoriously ‘murky’ as narrative research. Unlike other kinds of qualitativ...
15 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that American public discourse is increasingly populated by the names of Black men and women killed by police, often because their deaths were caught on camera and footage of their deaths has circulated.
Abstract: American public discourse is increasingly populated by the names of Black men and women killed by police, often because their deaths were caught on camera and footage of their deaths has circulated...
6 citations
Cites background from "Book review: Narrative Power: The S..."
...Narrative life, its stories, imaginations, and realities are transforming under the rule of digitalism’ (Plummer, 2019, p. 90)....
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TL;DR: This paper analyzed and discussed some recent trends in the use of personal documents, highlighting the various needs they can fulfill by improving and deepening hermeneutic approaches, and the possible risks and drawbacks of the most radical choices and experimentations.
Abstract: Thomas and Znaniecki’s highly celebrated contribution to the methodology of social research is mainly due to the kind of data they used in their well-known work The Polish Peasant : an enormous number of personal documents. However, treating autobiographies and personal narratives as empirical data can raise objections not only because they are reconstructive experiences, but also due to the formal characteristics of the narrative reconstruction. A tale of one’s own life is, to all intents and purposes, a literary genre, which consists of a subjective selection of facts reported following rhetorical and stylistic conventions. Fiction narratives and reality narratives actually belong to the same continuum and this is quite clear from the recent trend in mixing different genres. Fictional tales are sometimes loosely based on real events. Surveys, inquiries, reports, diaries and pamphlets are often made up of a patchwork of reality and fiction. The boundaries between entertainment and information tend to disappear. In the light of this new scenario, what are the outcomes of the use of biographical documents in sociological research? Many symbolic interactionists have moved away from orthodoxy, proposed a radical use of biography and autobiographies, introduced new ways of reporting - even borrowing from the arts - and developed new techniques such as autoethnography. The aim of this paper is to analyze and discuss some recent trends in the use of personal documents, highlighting the various needs they can fulfill by improving and deepening hermeneutic approaches, and, on the other hand, the possible risks and drawbacks of the most radical choices and experimentations.
2 citations
Cites background from "Book review: Narrative Power: The S..."
...Plummer has recently highlighted the pervasive nature of narrations and storytelling (Plummer, 2019): in order to be defined social, events will have to be narrated; society is narrated, and narrations are social....
[...]
TL;DR: In this article , the intersection between macro-level political narratives on diversity and micro-level lived experience of social inclusion and everyday interaction is investigated in two regional sub-state nationalist contexts, Scotland and South Tyrol, Italy.
Abstract: Abstract This contribution investigates the intersection between macro-level political narratives on diversity and micro-level lived experience of social inclusion and everyday interaction. The case studies for analysis comprise of two regional sub-state nationalist contexts, Scotland and South Tyrol, Italy. Scotland is a nation state that defines itself vis-a-vis the rest of the UK and where a discourse has emerged that Scottish nationalism is both civic and inclusive. South Tyrol is an autonomous province in northern Italy which remains a liminal space between Austria and Italy and is presented as a model to protect minorities. We argue for developing a critical stance on diversity narratives identified in these two-regions. Based on in-depth narrative interviews with young adult migrants, we use an ontological security framework to examine the relationship between macro-narratives and micro-level lived experiences of everyday social interactions. Firstly, we address how macro-level national identity discourses manifest themselves in micro-level everyday interactions. Secondly, we look at how young adults interpret these narratives when retelling their everyday experiences, sometimes to the point of excluding their own experiences of discrimination. In this way, we trace the negotiation of belongingness in these two contexts.
1 citations
References
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TL;DR: Through analysis of the UK government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture’s relative autonomy by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus.
Abstract: Through analysis of the UK government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture's relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or 'social drama', it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action through simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally charged events such as human death.
36 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a problematisation of how one can meaningfully discuss the concept of quality in a methodology as notoriously "murky" as narrative research is discussed, and a solution to this problem is presented.
Abstract: This article opens with a problematisation of how one can meaningfully discuss the concept of quality in a methodology as notoriously ‘murky’ as narrative research. Unlike other kinds of qualitativ...
15 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that American public discourse is increasingly populated by the names of Black men and women killed by police, often because their deaths were caught on camera and footage of their deaths has circulated.
Abstract: American public discourse is increasingly populated by the names of Black men and women killed by police, often because their deaths were caught on camera and footage of their deaths has circulated...
6 citations
TL;DR: This paper analyzed and discussed some recent trends in the use of personal documents, highlighting the various needs they can fulfill by improving and deepening hermeneutic approaches, and the possible risks and drawbacks of the most radical choices and experimentations.
Abstract: Thomas and Znaniecki’s highly celebrated contribution to the methodology of social research is mainly due to the kind of data they used in their well-known work The Polish Peasant : an enormous number of personal documents. However, treating autobiographies and personal narratives as empirical data can raise objections not only because they are reconstructive experiences, but also due to the formal characteristics of the narrative reconstruction. A tale of one’s own life is, to all intents and purposes, a literary genre, which consists of a subjective selection of facts reported following rhetorical and stylistic conventions. Fiction narratives and reality narratives actually belong to the same continuum and this is quite clear from the recent trend in mixing different genres. Fictional tales are sometimes loosely based on real events. Surveys, inquiries, reports, diaries and pamphlets are often made up of a patchwork of reality and fiction. The boundaries between entertainment and information tend to disappear. In the light of this new scenario, what are the outcomes of the use of biographical documents in sociological research? Many symbolic interactionists have moved away from orthodoxy, proposed a radical use of biography and autobiographies, introduced new ways of reporting - even borrowing from the arts - and developed new techniques such as autoethnography. The aim of this paper is to analyze and discuss some recent trends in the use of personal documents, highlighting the various needs they can fulfill by improving and deepening hermeneutic approaches, and, on the other hand, the possible risks and drawbacks of the most radical choices and experimentations.
2 citations