Jeffrey L. Kidder

Style and Action: A Decoding of Bike Messenger Symbols

Using a social world’s perspective, this article looks at the style of New York City bike messengers. Combining the works of Hebdige and Biernacki, it is argued that messenger style is intertwined with messenger practice. Five stylistic elements are analyzed: riding behaviors, the use of helmets, bicycle choice, clothing, and language. In each case, evidence is presented to illustrate how a liminal social position and an outlaw character is expressed within the signs messengers display.

Toward a Theory of Emotive Performance: With Lessons from How Politicians Do Anger

This article treats the public display of emotion as social performance. The concept of “emotive performance” is developed to highlight the overlooked quality of performativity in the social use of emotion. We argue that emotive performance is reflexive, cultural, and communicative. As an active social act, emotive performance draws from the cultural repertoire of interpretative frameworks and dominant narratives. We illustrate the utility of the concept by analyzing two episodes of unrehearsed emotive performances by two well-known politicians, Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin. The two cases demonstrate how emotion can be analyzed as a domain in which culturally specific narratives and rhetorics are used to advance the situational agenda of actors. The concept opens up a more expansive research agenda for sociology. It pushes sociologists to pay greater attention to peoples experiences, interpretations, and deployments of emotions in social life.

College Republicans and Conservative Social Identity

Through participant-observation and interviews, I explore the conservative social identity of College Republicans at a midsize, midtier public university in the United States. Using the concepts of repertoires and frames, I analyze how individuals make claims to political social identities. Specifically, I show that symbolic appeals to the free market were an essential aspect of the conservative repertoire at my field site. Furthermore, the shifting and contradictory frames used by the College Republicans in this study demonstrate that their discursive political practices were not primarily about policy preferences; they were about affirming a conservative social identity. Understanding how stated policy preferences and identity intertwine in everyday political talk has important implications for American democracy.

Hollywood, Bike Messengers, and the New Economy

The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks.

The Sociology of Speed: Digital, Organizational, and Social TemporalitiesThe Sociology of Speed: Digital, Organizational, and Social Temporalities, edited by WajcmanJudyDoddNigel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 210 pp.

Judy Wajcman and Nigel Dodd assert that acceleration is emblematic of modernity. Their edited volume, The Sociology of Speed: Digital, Organizational, and Social Temporalities, brings together a variety of reflections about this ever-quickening temporality. The impetus behind their project is an interest in promoting studies of time that attend to its materiality and political implications. To this end, the writings collected here emphasize the institutions and interactions enabling acceleration. The authors show how the technologies so often credited with speeding up society—airplanes, fiber optic cables, microprocessors, and the like—are embedded in a social context infused by hierarchical relationships of power. And of this inequality, the editors tell us, the ‘‘powerful are fast, the powerless are slow’’ (p. 3). The book is divided into three sections: theories, materialities, and temporalities. The chapters that compose each section cover a wide variety of topics. For example, John Urry discusses global warming as it relates to conceptualizing the future of western society, Saskia Sassen writes about cultural biases in the development of smartphone apps and unmet technological needs in low-income neighborhoods, and Harvey Molotch riffs on the relativity of speed in relation to modes of travel, lines for the toilet, dinner with friends, and so on. Some of the chapters offer sweeping overviews on temporality, while others provide a great deal of depth within a particular area. Given the practical limitations of space, I will narrow the bulk of my review to just a single work from each of the volume’s three sections. Each chapter, though, is superbly written and will undoubtedly prompt readers to rethink various elements of their own professional and personal lives from the vantage point of speed. Dodd and Wajcman pen the book’s first substantive entry. It is an effort to excavate a concern for acceleration within the classic sociological canon. Specifically, they reassess the theories of Simmel and Benjamin in terms of temporality. In the case of Simmel, money facilitates the ceaseless motion of modernity because it is liquid and formless. Simmel’s analysis of the city also hinges on a perception of a quickening pace and a rapidity of change in modern life. For Benjamin, the authors note his desire to upend notions of historical progression; the temporal order is understood as an endless repetition. More importantly, they are interested in his exploration of the flâneur—a detached observer, casually strolling through the streets (famously described by Baudelaire). With the flâneur, Benjamin seeks to contrast the harried (or blasé) aspects of urbanism with a figure that appears to transcend the demands of time. In the materialities section of the book, Donald MacKenzie provides a fascinating study of high-frequency trading (HFT) and what seems to be (for an outsider, at least) an absurd desire for speed. MacKenzie looks at competing efforts to connect the data center for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (located in Aurora, IL) to the East Coast data centers in New Jersey. Even though information is already arriving in mere milliseconds, huge investments are made to decrease the transmission time between the nodes. Telecommunication companies, it turns out, are indifferent to the differentials in speed that HFT firms obsess over. In response, HFT firms sponsor projects that break conventions for laying fiber optics or setting up microwave towers. For example, HFT firms are willing to pay a premium for the most direct route—going so far as to fret about the effects of a few extra meters of cable at amplifying stations (despite the fact that their data are traveling at approximately 200 million meters a second). In the case of microwave towers (which allow for velocities approaching the speed of light), firms are willing to reduce the number of repeater stations to cut travel time by a couple milliseconds from the best fiber optic lines, even though in doing so they sacrifice reliability (especially when it rains). Built 234 Reviews

45.00 paper. ISBN: 9780198782865.

keeping secrets requires analysts to attend to impression management and informationcontrol practices. The compartmentalization of secrets at work creates power imbalances throughout organizations, including in people who also keep secrets unofficially. One particularly interesting idea that the authors explore is how keeping secrets enables people to maintain power through cultivating an air of mystery that furthers one’s status. They explore how value can emanate just from being known as someone with access to secret information, irrespective of any secret’s content. Overall, they employ multiple examples that demonstrate secrecy’s organizational effects in creating social boundaries and exclusivity, establishing cohesion, providing autonomy, and enabling people to act to protect themselves. They then suggest ways that scholars could examine these effects in approaching larger topics in organizational studies such as decision-making, leadership, and networking (among others). Costas and Grey generate many insights from taking their fresh look at secrecy. There are new aspects of secrecy to ponder everywhere in their book. That creative bonanza requires a heavier burden of organizing on the authors. They do provide conclusion and summary sections, but they do not corral all their insights enough, which is different from summarizing a chapter’s argument. This point is not meant as criticism of their ideas but rather reflects some slight frustration at not being able to inventory all of them more easily. In sum, reading this book will provide you with useful ways to think about secrecy as an under-explored aspect of workplaces. You will enjoy Costas and Grey’s clear writing, interesting examples, and thoughtful review of theoretical concepts and organizational literatures along the way. In addition to highlighting some older favorites in organizational ethnography, the authors also connect to sociologists (Everett Hughes, for example) associated with symbolic interactionist approaches to workplace studies, which marks a welcome return to a historically rich tradition in organizational sociology. Overall, Costas and Grey succeed in wresting secrecy’s importance out of its hiding places, and they make a good case for applying their position more widely in organizational studies.