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This study contributes to the sociology of knowledge and the history of the human sciences by tracing the complex social action processes through which knowledge is produced about a major classical author, George Herbert Mead. The case raises acute questions regarding how authoritative knowledge comes to be produced about an intellectual and about the social nature of knowledge production in academic scholarship. Instead of treating Mead’s problematic reputation as a separate topic of study from his own intellectual biography, the analysis reconceptualizes both as essentially knowledge production processes with empirical connections in identifiable social actions. Substantive chapters utilize archival and primary document research to examine the centrality of Mead’s public speaking and engagement with the social problems of territorial Hawaii, the variety of representations Mead’s students made of his courses and his students’ influences on him, the problematic process of constructing posthumous volumes attributed to Mead, the mobilization of controversial claims about him by former students on the basis of their sense of his approval and collaboration, the development of patterns of published reference to Mead along lines of social connection and in response to local institutional transformations, and the reconstruction of domains of Mead’s research that have been neglected in dominant accounts of his philosophy. The study provides a novel, productive approach to knowledge making in scholarship, which focus on empirical social action processes as they connect and change over time instead of any single set of documents, concepts, mechanisms, or individuals.

Getting other people to do what another person want is a useful skill. Whether you are seeking a job, negotiating a deal, or angling for that big promotion, you are engaged in strategic thought and action. In such moments, you imagine what might be going on in another person's head and how they will react to what you do or say. At the same time, you might also tries to pick the best way to realize your goals, both with and without the other person's cooperation. This book teaches its readers how to win that game by offering a fuller understanding of how strategy works in the real world. As we all know, rules of strategy are regularly discovered and discussed in popular books for business executives, military leaders, and politicians. Those works, with their trendy lists of pithy maxims and highly effective habits, can help people avoid mistakes or even think anew on how to tackle their problems. But they are merely suggestive, as each situation we encounter in the real world is always more complex than anticipated, more challenging than we might have hoped. This book shows how to anticipate those problems before they actually occur—by recognizing the dilemmas all strategic players must negotiate, with each option accompanied by a long list of costs and risks.

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? This book investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany's unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. The analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, the book analyzes how these two opposing factions' understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence. Out of this ambitious study, the book extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand it offers an epistemic account of socialism's failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand it develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

This book sets out positively what a vision of processual sociology looks like. The processual approach presumes that everything in the social world is continuously in the process of making, remaking, and unmaking itself (and other things), instant by instant. This approach begins by theorizing the making and unmaking of individuals, social entities, cultural structures, patterns of conflict as the social process unfolds in time. In a word, the processual approach is fundamentally, essentially historical. All of the micro elements with which the other approaches begin are themselves macrostructures in the processual approach. Their stability is something to be explained, not presumed.

Symbolic interactionism, resolutely empirical in practice, shares theoretical concerns with cultural studies and humanistic discourse. Recognizing that the humanities have engaged many of the important intellectual currents of the last twenty-five years in ways that sociology has not, the contributors to this volume fully acknowledge that the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities has begun to dissolve. This volume explores that border area.

This book advances a personalist account of human beings to help us better understand and explain human persons, motivations, interests, and the social life to which they give rise. It offers an alternative to the standard views in contemporary sociology and most of the rest of social science. This book seeks to answer three big questions: What basic motivations and interests generate and direct human action? What is by nature good for human beings—that is, what are real human goods? How should we understand and explain the lack of goodness—sometimes even the definite destructiveness and evil—that are so prevalent and damaging in human life? Stated differently, this book seeks to better theorize the micro-foundations of social life, yet not from the rational-choice perspective that has dominated micro-foundations discourse. Altogether, the chapters make a case for the need to take seriously the reality and nature of subjective human motivations for generating action, to resist problematic versions of social situationism, to define carefully the relationship between distinct persons and their social environments, to identify which goods are by nature basic to human life, to develop a teleological account of human flourishing that defines objective human interests, and to understand how the natural human telos of flourishing can be compromised and destroyed by failure, destruction, and evil. It is guided by critical realism and by a broadly neo-Aristotelian view of human life as theoretical frameworks.