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This insightful and accessible book is a response to the increasing important role that technology plays in everyday life, and the urgent need for empirical studies that analyse the impact of technology on social practices.
The chapters in this co-edited collection reveal how technology is oriented to and embedded within the social organization of action in a wide range of settings and institutions, including education, markets, arts and culture, health and social care, media, politics, and science. In their analyses, the contributing authors adopt interactionist perspectives to explore how the meanings of technology emerge and are negotiated within and through action and interaction. The volume comprises 14 empirical chapters from authors working in fields such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, discourse methods, ethnographic enquiry, video-based methods, and others. The chapters are framed by an introduction and a concluding discussion by the co-editors which draws out the key themes and issues that the individual chapters speak to, and show the importance of these themes for the social sciences and for society.
The book is primarily aimed at researchers in the social sciences, including sociology, social psychology, organization studies, and beyond whose work is concerned with the interplay between social interaction, technology, and institutions.
List of contents
1 Introduction Part 1 Power and Control 2 Being Family and Friends to Abused Women - A Qualitative Study of Digital Media in Intimate Partner Violence 3 News, Sex, and the Fight Between Corporate Control and Human Communication Online 4 Terminal Violence: Online Interactions and Infra-Humanization 5 Summing Up the Criminal Case Online Part 2 Identity and Community 6 Organizing Subcultural Identities on Social Media: Instagram Infrastructures and User Actions 7 A Queer Kind of Stigma 8 Symbolic Separation: The Amish and 21st-Century Technologies Part 3 Practices and Technology 9 Receiving Phone Calls During Medical Consultations: The Production of Interactional Space for Technology Use 10 Non-Talking Heads: How Architectures of Digital Copresence Shape Question-Silence-Answer-Sequences in University Teaching 11 The Role of Cursor Movements in a Screen-Based Video Game Interaction 12 Problems with the Digital Public Encounter 13 Smartphone Tooling: Achieving Perception by Positioning a Smartphone for Object Scanning Part 4 Reflections on Interactionist Studies of Technologies 14 Where Next for Interactionist Studies of Technology?
About the author
Dirk vom Lehn is Professor of Organization and Practice at King’s Business School/King’s College London, co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism, and author of Harold Garfinkel: The Creation and Development of Ethnomethodology.
Will Gibson is Professor of Interactional Sociology and Qualitative Research at the Institute of Education, University College London, co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism and co-author of Institutions, Interaction and Social Theory.
Natalia Ruiz-Junco is Associate Professor of Sociology at Auburn University, USA, and co-editor of Updating Charles H. Cooley: Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic and The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism.
Summary
This insightful and accessible book is a response to the increasing important role that technology plays in everyday life, and the urgent need for empirical studies that analyse the impact of technology on social practices.
