Peter M. Hall

The Social Conditions of the Negotiated Order

A BASIC SOCIOLOGICAL question has always been: Under what social conditions does a phenomenon occur? This article explores that question with reference to when the negotiated order perspective is an apt description of an organization. Early work on which the perspective is based challenged the stable, structured, functionalist view of organizations by clearly depicting continuous ongoing dynamic change via negotiations in medical, professional, and hospital settings (Strauss et al., 1963, 1964; Bucher and Stelling, 1969; Bucher, 1970). Several sympathetic critics, while supporting the attention to process, an action orientation, and participants’ perceived and constructed reality, have severely questioned the assumption, implication, or assertion that everything is negotiable in organizations. They argue that there are limits to negotiation and that users of the perspective should give

The Quasi-Theory of Communication and the Management of Dissent

A series of Presidential actions and other events connected with the recent use of U.S. troops in Cambodia suggest a preoccupation with communication (its presence or absence, its process, and its style) that deflected and obscured the basic issue of the war by defining events in terms of a quasi-theory of communication failure. The cultural and situational bases of such a theory of communication failure as a means of explaining and coping with social problems are explored in this paper; evidence for its use in the Cambodian situation is examined; and its possible consequences are suggested. The role of symbolic reassurance in coping with public uneasiness about the war and the anti-war movement is also examined.

Policy as the Transformation of Intentions: Making Multicultural Education Policy

This qualitative policy study applies an interactionist framework for policy analysis, especially the concept of intentions, to an examination of the construction of multicultural education policy in a midwestern U.S. school district. Intentions-purposes and goals meant to shape the behavior of actors in the future and at other sites-motivate actors to act in the policy arena, to use policy as a vehicle for realizing their purposes. Initiated in response to a racial conflict in a high school, the policy process entailed the school boards creation of a committee including many African American community members to generate recommendations for improving race relations. During the process, the school boards intentions, and those of many community members, were transformed due to the administrations reinforcement of district conventions and power structures. Race relations became multicultural issues. Community members who misconstrued the process as granting them real policy-making authority were most disappointed with the outcomes.

The handshake as interaction

The Handshake is a social act wherein we have a combination of contact experience between two hands of different persons that communicates the degree of mutual physical resistance äs well äs the exchange of social identities and the beginning and ending of social activity. The Handshake has been discussed äs a form of nonverbal communication and has acquired such labels äs tie signs (Scheflen and Ashcraft 1976; Goffman 1971; Morris 1977); emblems (Harrison 1974); tactile modes (Leichty 1973); collapses, openers, and closures (Schiffrin 1974); tactile holds (Scheflen and Ashcraft 1976); metasignals (Scheflen 1972); access rituals (Goffman 1971; Schiffrin 1974); and greeting behavior (Scheflen 1972). No doubt the common reference point among these definitions is in the meaning of the Handshake äs a physical act. We can look to the following definition to set a basic reference point.

ERVING: A Program to Teach Sociological Reasoning from the Dramaturgical Perspective.

This paper describes ERVING, a computer program that uses artificial intelligence techniques to teach students to reason sociologically from Goffinans dramaturgical perspective. The ERVING program is one of the first applications of artificial intelligence in sociology and perhaps the first designed to teach sociological reasoning. This paper describes how artificial intelligence techniques are used in ERVING to teach sociological reasoning and how they might be used in other applications as well. Important features and capabilities of the ERVING program are discussed, and results of classroom tests to assess the program are reported.

RESTING, REFLECTING, AND RENEWING

It is a sunny, windy, and cool spring day as I sit down to write my reflections on the preceding papers. It is the end of another semester and the final grades have been turned in. Forty years ago I began my academic career at the University of Iowa and two weeks ago my departmental colleagues and my family staged a symposium to mark my retirement. On my desk, just to my right, is a draft of an article requiring my next attention for a special issue of Symbolic Interaction on the past and future of the perspective. So, it feels fitting to comment on my career and scholarly corpus, and the sense-making and framing of it by my gracious, learned and most collegial fellow travelers. I am honored by their willingness to participate in this endeavor and their generous accountings and interpretations. But I can write no further without acknowledging the respectful but strong directing of Shing-Ling Chen in planning and producing the session and the publication of these papers. She gets us all organized, despite our tendencies to procrastination.