Michael A. Katovich

Examining Road Rage / Aggressive Driving Media Depiction and Prevention Suggestions

Reports on road rage/aggressive driving imply that most everyone who drives could be involved and affected by such emotions. As victims, witnesses, perpetrators, or protectors, many drivers are confronted with at least some type of aggression and violence on the roadways. Despite inconsistent definitions and subsequent questionable measurements of road rage/aggressive driving, formal social control efforts directed at problematic drivers seem to be the preferred approach for prevention. The present study used newspaper accounts for issue identification regarding the proposed causes of road rage/aggressive driving. It was found that personal/individual factors are more often noted than environmental cues regarding the causes of road rage. In contrast to the more popular crime control approach, a nontraditional application of crime prevention through environmental design, which focuses on traffic facilitation, is offered to address violent and aggressive drivers.

Media Technologies, Images of Drugs, and an Evocative Telepresence

I regard electronic media technologies as framing devices for how viewers perceive issues associated with illegal drugs. Controllers of electronic media technologies produce and disseminate images of illegal drugs and users of such drugs to which viewers respond. People who control the images of electronic media production create an evocative telepresence, or a visual context that relies on appeals to authority and emotion. However, viewers do not merely respond to images of illegal drugs; rather, they actively interpret such images and draw their own conclusions. To demonstrate the complex relationship between electronic stimuli and viewer responses, I report on a classroom experiment comparing those who saw and heard a heroin user with those who only heard this user. I also report findings from student perceptions of and reactions to four drug films. Results of the experiment and the readings of films indicate that viewers, especially those who can see and hear electronic displays, are sophisticated consumers who respond to immediate stimuli while making reference to distal stimuli. In the main, I contend that electronic images of illegal drugs and users in an evocative telepresence are powerful stimuli, but they do not cause viewer perceptions.

Teamwork in sport: a sociological analysis

Abstract The importance of creating and maintaining a working order and solidarity among sports teams is one of the more taken-for-granted assumptions among participants and observers. Even so, delineating the dynamics of its importance, especially in regard to teamwork and insider knowledge (or secrecy) remains unexplored. This paper attempts to fill this gap by employing classical sociological concepts from Durkheim, Mead, and Goffman to discuss the practical and sociological importance of teamwork. We examine two internationally successful Icelandic sport teams to show how the prosocial aspects of teamwork, secrecy, and backstage behavior, keep teammates bonded to each other and to the culture in which they become embedded. Our analysis also highlights the importance of collective representations, organic solidarity and the dynamic processes involving self-presentation, ideoculture and negotiation of meaning.

The Role of Informal Sport: The Local Context and the Development of Elite Athletes

Abstract This chapter explores the role of informal sport in the development of top-level Icelandic athletes. The approach is explorative and intended to develop an empirically grounded theory. We conducted semistructured interviews with 10 Icelandic elite athletes. Our analysis suggests that the development of free play may be of central importance to the development of elite athletes. Free play offers the opportunity to foster intrinsic motivation, mastery of skills, flow, craftsmanship, and aesthetic experience. We suggest that these qualities are important in the development of top athletes, especially in their early sport career. Our analysis also highlights the importance of unsupervised informal peer interaction. A pool of unsupervised peer networks can serve as a prerequisite for the development of informal sport that may promote qualities that are desirable for the development of top-level athletes. Our analysis further suggests that the contribution of informal sport depends on how it interacts with other elements in the social context and its relationship to formal sport.

Cooperative bases of control: Toward an interactionist conceptualization

Abstract While control is a prominent concept in sociology—to the point that it is being considered as the central concept—cooperation has remained a basis for fundamental situated action. This article proposes a merging of cooperation and control by emphasizing the fundamental processes of various cooperative activities, ranging from the immediate face-to-face exchanges to more enduring structural and institutional relationships that encase multiple exchanges. I discuss four social forms of control—instrumental, ceremonial, interpersonal, and categorical—as representing increasingly more complex forms of coordinated control and by implication, more complex affinities with social control. Each form will be discussed in order to demonstrate how social control and cooperation are aligned.

Manford H. Kuhn

Manford H. Kuhn created a school of thought in symbolic interaction, known as the Iowa School, that made the social self its central concept and that galvanized systematic empirical research. In so doing, Kuhn taught and trained several notable interactionists, including Robert Stewart, Carl Couch, and Norman Denzin. Kuhn’s legacy remains, although not often in explicit writings. This essay intends to convey how important Kuhn was in not only providing a foundation for the study of the social self, ‘a universal variable’, as he called it, but for moving symbolic interaction into, again using his word, ‘the age of inquiry’. In providing homage to Kuhn, I wish to articulate his intentions, results, and his legacy, mostly embodied in printed works that represent a new Iowa School, spearheaded by his aforementioned student Carl Couch. It is this writer’s hope that in providing a summary and interpretation of his contributions, readers will be able to identify more precisely how he is important to the study of symbolic interaction today.

The Bus to Mansfield

The author provides a description of a day in jail, beginning just after midnight in early December and ending about 20 hours later. The day involved many interactions with cell mates, especially eight of whom would eventually take the bus to the Mansfield prison. Among other functions, the prison serves as the designated holding place for those charged to post bail. The author’s metaphorical journey from one arrested to one identified as The Professor among his cohort of fellow prisoners leads into a literal journey on the bus to Mansfield. The prisoners imagined the bus, early on, as a horrific representation of their incarceration. Eventually, however, the bus became a symbol of change from the stagnation of place.

Loss and Recovery : One Note at a Time

The following narrative reconstructs a five-act tragicomedy, providing details of a journey from chaos to a moment of serenity. The author tells the journey as he imagines an ongoing soundtrack to accompany themes of loss, love, dissolution, addiction, institutionalization, and codes of the street.

The home run: A Dramaturgical moment in time

This paper describes the home run as a dramatic offensive accomplishment in baseball linked to the five dramaturgical dimensions (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) defined by Burke. Such an accomplishment also pertains to two types of social pasts – categorical and crystallized – that can serve as correlates to the five dramaturgical dimensions. Owing to its dramaturgical and temporal significance, the home run symbolizes a celebrated sign of prowess that contributes to a home run hitters or sluggers rarified status. Further, as a dramaturgical moment, the home run calls forth specified responses (especially on the part of announcers) that contribute to its distinctive meaning in the game.