Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26 (Studies in Symbolic Interaction)

ENGAGING PETER HALL’S WORK CONCERNING SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, POWER, POLICY, AND COMMUNICATION William K. Rawlins

The essays composing this special partial issue grew out of a program featuring and honoring the work of Peter M. Hall that was presented at the 2001 Convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) in Atlanta. The session was entitled: “Social Organization, Power, and Communication: The Contributions of Peter Hall in Organizational and Interpersonal Communication Inquiries.” Since the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) became an affiliate of NCA in 1997, spotlight sessions like this one have been sponsored to recognize the work of distinguished scholars of symbolic interaction who have made important contributions to communication inquiry, as well as to promote further conversation and engagement with the featured scholar’s ideas. The participants in these panels are accomplished scholars in their own specialties who are well-credentialed to address and exemplify the value of the featured scholar’s work. Accordingly, the authors of the essays appearing here are fellow Symbolic Interactionists and include former and current colleagues and students of Peter Hall, as well as his students’ students. Mary Jo Neitz celebrates Hall’s penchant for conversation as a sociologist and as an actively involved citizen of the world. Within the discipline of sociology,

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Neitz appreciates Hall’s practice of working out new ideas through embodied conversation with other people. She believes Hall’s work has broadened the questions of Symbolic Interactionism to include concerns with social policy and power, and how they are negotiated, wielded, accomplished and practiced in contingent structural and temporal contexts. She applauds that he has not merely studied the processes involved in public policy but has been actively involved in formulating, evaluating and implementing educational policy on state, regional and national levels. For Neitz, Hall’s combination of theoretical conversation and informed activism “make him a model of what an Interactionist can be.” David Altheide draws on Hall’s theoretical work on communication, meta-power and policy changes to analyze the “anti-terrorism” bill passed by Congress in the wake of the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, which “gave the federal government unprecedented power to investigate and engage in surveillance of American citizens in order to combat terrorism.” He finds useful Hall’s notions of mesodomain analysis, and the conditioning of social possibilities and perceptions through the communicative achievement of meta-power. Using these ideas, Altheide scrutinizes several domains where mass media have shaped American citizens’ expectations of and ignorance about government actions and their impacts at home and abroad, images of and information about our “enemies,” the marketing of patriotism, and the symbolic production of fears and potential threats. Consistent with Hall’s perspective, Altheide observes “that the communication order is a critical foundation for constituting social and political changes, and that the logic of this order underlies how power is communicated.” David Maines believes Hall has persistently addressed “root images of social organization” and chronicles their emergence in his essay. For Maines, Hall’s early work on developing human potential importantly acknowledges the dialectical necessities of social life, such as stability and flux, comfort and challenge, solidarity and diversity, etc. Maines argues that once Hall realized that the same factors enabling human potential also limit it, he was drawn to the problematics and analysis of power relationships and social organization. In short, Maines believes that Hall’s implicit concerns with a healthy society found him increasingly involved with developing “a perspective on the social organization of policy processes.” For Maines, in Hall’s subsequent, detailed conceptual and empirical work concerning mesodomain analysis and educational policy, “Hall holds out the hope that positive systemic change is possible,” even as it “requires a kind of advanced citizenship for those policies to actually contribute to social health.” Maines suggests that figuring out how to foster and achieve such advanced citizenship is the next challenge for Hall’s commendable project. Hugh Mehan, Amanda Datnow and Lea Hubbard draw upon extensive studies of school reform policy to demonstrate the value of Hall’s conceptual ideas

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concerning the public policy process as a continually negotiated, “conditional matrix’ in contrast to a rational, linear, unidirectional, top-down enterprise. In discussing actual cases of how a variety of schools and districts adopted reform designs, these authors show in detail how reform designs were molded in specific circumstances to accommodate local constraints, how they changed in light of state and local political exigencies, and how such school reforms were altered in response to market forces and new government policies. Taken together, and consistent with Hall’s theorizing, these authors find school reform policy formulation to be an ongoing, dynamic and strikingly contingent process, with educators actively negotiating and “making policy in their everyday actions,” not merely and passively implementing directives from above. Spencer Cahill good-naturedly chides and congratulates Peter Hall for the inventive uses to which he has put ideas from a variety of disciplines during the course his career. Hall’s signal accomplishment for Cahill is his liberation of Symbolic Interactionism from a perceived concentration upon interpersonal and intrapersonal processes. Like other authors in this special issue, Cahill sees Hall’s work concerning the social organization of policy, metapower, and mesodomain analysis as transcending the macro/micro divide persisting in much sociological theorizing. In addition, Cahill admires Hall’s attention to communication and the symbolic constitutions of power. Using examples from the Kennedy presidency and the use of commercial airplanes to attack the World Trade Center, Cahill demonstrates and reinforces Hall’s contention that “perception, interpretation, and communication are intimately involved in acts of power.” Throughout his essay, Cahill argues and illustrates the importance of Hall’s recognition of the inseparable connections among the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, and what Cahill terms the transpersonal, “the realms of mass politics and power, of social organization and policy.” Read together, these essays compose a thoughtfully rendered, nuanced and substantive tribute to the sustained theorizing and social involvement of Peter Hall in the best tradition of Symbolic Interactionism. They also raise questions and pose possibilities for further engagement with his multi-faceted oeuvre.

CONVERSATIONS AND ENGAGEMENTS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEORY IN THE WORK OF PETER M. HALL Mary Jo Neitz We as sociologists practice our discipline through the development and use of particular theoretical perspectives and through the use of the methodological conventions of the discipline to have a conversation with the world. In my comments here I approach Peter Hall’s work through the metaphor of conversation.

THEORY AS A CONVERSATION WITH THE DISCIPLINE One way of thinking about “theory” in sociology is that theory is the ideas, concepts, and frames, which we get from reading the insights, interpretations, and explanations of other sociologists. Doing theory is about being in a conversation with the discipline. It is in this spirit that I approach talking about theory in the work of my colleague, Peter Hall. This idea of theory as conversation is particularly apt for talking about Peter’s work, about Symbolic Interactionism today, and Peter Hall’s contribution to it. There was a time when Symbolic Interactionism was a relatively bounded theory with a core of practitioners – albeit dispersed through several “schools” – most of whom adhered to a perhaps specifiable set of domain assumptions about the nature

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of science and the nature of the world. We are now living in a time when Symbolic Interactionism is much less unified and bounded. (Arguably, this is true of other perspectives as well.) David Maines (2001) has recently argued the basic ideas of Symbolic Interactionism are so pervasive that all sociologists are now Symbolic Interactionists. One could also argue the reverse: That Symbolic Interaction has embraced a variety of issues and concerns that reach far beyond the canonical Blumer (1969). Peter Hall has been one of the key people opening up the perspective to questions of power and social policy, in moving from the micro to the meso and now the meta. Theory as conversation with the discipline is more than a metaphor for Peter Hall. It is an embodied practice. The exchange of ideas with others is a way of thinking and working. Part of the mythology about Symbolic Interactionism I was taught in graduate school was that it was an “oral tradition.” We were told stories about the students who published the notes of George Herbert Mead and founded the tradition. In my experience, fieldwork traditions were transmitted not through texts, but through discussion. We were told that Symbolic Interactionism continues to be talked as well as written. When I moved into an office next to Peter’s at the University of Missouri, I was struck by how he worked through ideas in conversations with other people. I observed this when he was writing his Presidential address for the Midwest Sociological Society. While he framed his year of activity in terms of “writing his address,” I was not seeing words on paper. Instead, I noticed that Peter seemed to be traveling a lot: To Iowa to see Carl Couch. To Ohio to see Stan Saxton. To Illinois to see Norm Denzin and Clark McPhail. These conversations and others are reflected in the work “Interaction and the Study of Social Organization,” (Hall, 1987). In this address we find him in a conversation with Everett Hughes and Howie Becker, with Anselm Strauss, Carl Couch and David Maines, Norm Denzin, Stan Saxon, Clark McPhail, and Eviatar Zerubavel. Peter Hall himself was moving away from an emphasis on the micro, and a view of society that emphasized face to face communication and consensus, and he showed others how to do that as well. “Interactionism and the Study of Social Organization” brings together a diverse array of approaches to social organization to Interactionism, and then uses them to frame an Interactionist perspective at the meso-level. This perspective is attentive to context, both structural and temporal. The concern with context in his work, however, was not entirely new. He had a long-term interest in politics and power. Peter grew up in a family in which political activism was central, and then participated in the social movements at University of California at Berkeley. Early in his writing, he began to try to figure out what a Symbolic Interactionist analysis of power might look like. Looking at American history and the experience of the social movements of the sixties, he had seen both

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the great hopes for changes and the perpetuation of the existing power structure, and that experience informed his theory. Within sociology, Peter Hall first became aware of the importance of context through conversations with the ethnomethodologists among his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sociologists outside Symbolic Interactionism were also critical of the neglect of issues of power and conflict. In Peter’s world, one of the persistent critical voices was that of our colleague, Ken Benson, who in his own rock-like way, insisted on the obduracy of structure, the hegemony of capitalist ideology. Peter began to think about how what we have now, particular organizations, for example, are the result of a sequence of negotiations, which have occurred over a period of time. He began to ask how he could “slice backwards” in his work. This thinking led to the article “Meta-power, Social Organization, and the Shaping of Social Action” (1997). In this article, Peter examines how we address empirically questions of how social organization occurs time and space. Although he continues to be attuned to conventional Symbolic Interactionist concerns with processes, he argues in that we cannot understand institutions without a sense of history and structure. In this work he is very directly concerned with how the systems work and how practices reproduce inequalities. He points our attention to the directing, shaping, and conditioning influences of social organization on social activity. Peter Hall’s work on metapower further extends the development of how an Interactionist analysis might examine the ways social organization influences expressions of power. In this work Peter’s conversations bridge Symbolic Interactionism and the work of others in sociology outside of the perspective. Especially important to this work are the ideas of Steward Clegg and Rosabeth Moss Kanter who helped him to see power as a form of agency. The metapower essay is an attempt to contribute to a shift of the definition of power from domination/manipulation to looking at power as horizontal and thinking about how power is used to mobilize resources. Peter is interested in how “power is manifest through the intended creation by some actors of the conditions and contexts in which other actors find themselves” (1997, p. 403). In the 1997 article, Hall (1997, p. 407) presents organization as “structurations of meta-power which are dependent upon processes of delegation to achieve intended ends.” In this concept he captures both the on-going features of social organization – division of labor, channels of communication, hierarchies of authority – and the presence of managers and subordinates who act within the organization, for the organization’s interest, but with some degree of discretion. As Hall (1997, p. 407) notes, “A central paradox of metapower is that it is both extended and threatened by delegation.” This is a conceptualization of power which operates in the mesodomain, and it suggests one way to bridge sociology’s micro/macro divide.

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This theorizing comes out of developments in sociology generally. Hall’s theoretical movement would not have been possible if he had limited his conversation to Symbolic Interactionists. In the 1990s some sociologists across the discipline became more concerned with history. The concern took particular forms that connected with some of Peter’s on-going interests. Thinking about the importance of history was incorporated into social analysis that used a process model, especially in conjunction with the problem of how to think about agency in social movements. This thinking helped to develop forms of analysis that suggested ways to avoid getting stuck on one side of the structure/agency divide. We can begin to understand how “structures” are continually constituted by the actions of individuals within social organizations. Also, among historical sociologists there was a renewed interest in thinking about contingency. Looking at changes in the policy process over time brought issues of contingency to the fore. Peter Hall became interested in how social organization is produced over time. Expecting contingencies opens up theoretical possibilities. Peter’s explorations of some of these possibilities reflect his conversations with thinkers outside of sociology altogether. His recent reading in biology influences his current theorizing. Stephen Jay Gould’s work, especially Wonderful Life (1989), with its argument that evolution is not a linear process, had an impact of Peter’s thinking about change over time. More recently, he has been reading, thinking and talking about complexity and chaos theories. In Hall and McGinty (2002) complexity has emancipatory possibilities. It leads away from a simple way of seeing how to get things done organizationally: it suggests that one might expect to have situations where one would have alternatives, even the opening up of agency. For Peter Hall, developing ways of understanding institutions and inequality is the frontier of what Interactionism is about: he questions how inequalities are reproduced and what Interactionists can have to say about it.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WORLD Thinking about what Interactionists can have to say about how inequalities get reproduced is more than a theoretical question for Peter Hall. In the last decade Peter has not just studied the policy process; he has sought engagement and been sought after in the public policy terrain in Missouri at the state and local levels. Stan Saxton reminded Symbolic Interactionists of the early pragmatists’ commitment to the scholar activist role, and himself endorsed the idea of the “citizen scholar,” (Saxton, 1993). In his activity in educational policy, Peter Hall brings himself as sociologist into a conversation with the world.

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Local school districts in Missouri have sought him as a consultant in their attempts to study problems from what to do about students dropping out of school to questions of restructuring schools. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and a long range planning committee in the Missouri House of Representatives has sought his help. In the Columbia Public Schools, Peter has served on committees devoted to multi-cultural issues and school reorganization. Peter was a member of the Missouri Re-Learning Work Group in the Missouri Department of Elementary And Secondary Education. He was also a member of the Advisory Committee on the Evaluation of Education Act in the Missouri Department of Education, and the Coordinator of the Dialogue on Education Issues and Policy. Since 1998 Peter’s commitment to school reform has led him to engage in an extensive involvement with the Coalition of Essential Schools, serving as a delegate to the National Congress. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Board of Directors for the Central States Coalition of Essential Schools Regional Center, and the vice chair, and then chair of the Board of Directors for the Central States Center for School Reform. At this point Peter Hall’s thinking about the mechanisms through which metapower occurs in organizations is closely tied to these sites of involvement.

CONCLUSION Peter Hall’s contributions to theory reflect his conversations within the discipline of sociology and his conversations with the world as a researcher and activist. He has helped bring about an Interactionism, which is a long way from the “social psychology box” of the past. Peter Hall proposes a kind of institutional analysis that includes the micro and the macro, and a sense of history that shows us stability and change. Periodically, Peter and I have a conversation, which is initiated by my asking him what is distinctive about Symbolic Interaction today. His answers vary. But his engagement in the conversations I have described with Theory and with the world make him a model of what an Interactionist can be.

REFERENCES Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful life: The burgess shale and the nature of history. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

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Hall, P. M. (1987). Interactionism and the study of social organization. Sociological Quarterly, 28, 1–22. Hall, P. M. (1997). Meta-power, social organization, and the shaping of social action. Symbolic Interactionism, 20, 397–418. Hall, P. M., & McGinty, P. (2002). Social organization across time and space: The policy process, mesodomain analysis, and breadth of perspective. In: S. C. Chew & D. Knottnerus (Eds), Structure, Culture, and History: Recent Issues in Social Theory. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, Publishers. Maines, D. (2001). Faultlines of sociology: A view of interactionism in sociology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Saxton, S. (1993). The sociologist as a citizen scholar. In: T. Vaughan, G. Sjoberg & L. Reynolds (Eds), A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (pp. 232–251). Dix Hills, NY: General Hall.

COMMUNICATION AS POWER IN PETER HALL’S WORK David Altheide Peter Hall’s work on social organization and symbolic interaction provides an inspiration and a conceptual framework for developing social science understanding of not only complex social issues, but the changing nature of social organization. The following comments are offered as a tribute – and a challenge for all of us – to some of his insights regarding communication, social power and social policy. I wish to explore how his seminal ideas on meso-structure, meta-power, and social policy provide a framework for explaining complex changes. The policy change that I will examine is the Congressional approval of an “anti-terrorism” bill (HR 3162) that gave the federal government unprecedented power to investigate and engage in surveillance of American citizens in order to combat terrorism. Hall’s theoretical contributions permit cogent analysis of policy changes in a “real world” context. As noted by Vidich (1991), most social theorizing since the turn of the century presupposes that social theory is an autonomous intellectual domain, and that the structures it seeks to uncover are ahistorical and invariant. Virtually all major social theorists have seen the expectancies and predictions of received social theory violated by emergent patterns of social and institutional organization (Vidich, 1991, p. 521).

In particular, most theorizing has neglected the historical impact of institutional transformations such as centralized bureaucratic mass society, the context in which Peter Hall (and the rest of us) work. Informed by a symbolic interactionist perspective that appreciates human agency and contingencies, Hall’s use of meso-structure Studies in Symbolic Interaction Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, 13–21 Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/PII: S0163239602260032

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and meta-power link social processes with individual actors. As Hugh Mehan suggests (his essay in this tribute to Peter Hall), social actors and structure reflect and can direct one another. As suggested by (Vidich, 1991, p. 523), any adequate social theory must consider the central trends and tendencies in our bureaucratic order, including: (1) The penetration of bureaucracy as a form of organization in all institutional orders. (2) The development of mass communications and mass media and their pervasive global penetration. (3) The consequences of industrial capitalism and the machine process of traditional sodalilties, communal relations, universities, economics, political totalism, religion and war. I argue that the communication order is a critical foundation for constituting social and political changes, and that the logic of this order underlies how power is communicated. Hall’s insights direct our attention to the career of a policy change and how prior events and political contexts add important meanings that help produce the change. A case in point is the Bush Administration’s use of terrorist attacks to change long-standing policy about civil rights. As we all recall, on September 11, 2001, three hijacked jets were crashed, respectively, into the World Trade towers in New York City, and the Pentagon. Courageous passengers brought down a fourth hijacked jet before it crashed into another terrorist target. The death toll exceeded 2,800 people. Related events, charges, military action, repetitive broadcast visuals of the events and aftermath, and dramatic rhetoric about “acts of war” and “defeating evil” followed these horrendous deeds. Mass mediated fear gripped the nation, airlines were grounded, stock markets plummeted, some Arab-Americans were attacked and removed from passenger jets, and a sense of “national crisis” was everywhere as investigators’ pursuit of “terrorist supporters” at home and abroad unearthed conspiracies, extensive networks, and revealed more threats. Stores sold out of flags, businesses linked advertising to patriotic slogans (e.g. General Motors’ “Keep America Rolling”), baseball fans sang “God Bless America” instead of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and children helped raise money for the Afghanistan kids who were “starving” (and being bombed). The atmosphere of alarm and fear was heightened as federal law enforcement officials warned that more attacks were likely. On October 12, 2001, the House of Representatives advanced “anti-terrorist” legislation to grant broad surveillance and detention powers to the federal government. There was little debate despite pleas from civil liberties advocates that the legislation could be a dangerous infringement on rights, along with admissions by many members of Congress that they had not read the legislation. One of the dissenters, John Conyers, Jr.

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(Mich., Dem), stated: “But we must remember that just as this horrendous act could destroy us from without, it could also destroy us from within” (NYT, Oct. 13, 2001, B6). Following some revisions to remove several of the most draconian attacks on civil liberties, a revised bill that was known as PATRIOT (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Interdict and Obstruct Terrorism) passed by a vote of 366–357. The senate approved the bill (98–1) the following day, and President Bush signed it into law on October 26, 2001. This is a policy change that needs explaining, and Peter Hall’s work can help. I wish to explore this dark terrain with Hall’s conceptual mapping of power and communication in order to explore how bureaucratic elites in mass society may manipulate and control habits, routines, fears and anxieties, including to what extent (and by what process) “individual and mass irrationality generated precisely by formally rational bureaucratic structures” (Vidich, 1991, p. 531). My argument is that the passage of this control legislation occurred through a process that linked several contexts with authoritative narratives frozen in the visual depictions of crashing buildings and a mass media post mortem. The terrorist attacks were but one critical stage in a progression of gradually expanding windows of opportunity to contract civil liberties in the name of public safety and protection. This legislation, I argue, is the symbolic victory of a very real conflict-with-noend. The government’s actions to promote more control was carried out because it was the most direct and acceptable option they had to show that they were in control. It represents an appeal to rationality in an absurd situation when “nongovernment” forces negate established routines and formats for conducting peace, war, and engaging in a “modern approach to life.” Beyond conventional terrorism, the attacks of September 11 represent a negation of basic assumptions of civility. The rules and logic of nation-states prevail in the modern world. I suggest that we recognize the modern world through shared and taken-for-granted social relationships and expectations of order that are communicated routinely through symbolic patterns, regularities, norms, and discourses. For example, people – even terrorists – fly on planes to get to destinations to conduct business, tourism, or terrorism. The modern world requires civility, even in death. For example, during one of the U.S. bombing raids over Afghanistan in October 2001, it was acknowledged that a jet “accidentally dropped a 2,000 pound bomb on a residential area. The Pentagon is investigating what caused the mistake” (NBC radio newscast, October 13, 2001). These assumptions of civility infuse the information technology and communication formats that are widely shared throughout the world. In the comments to follow, I suggest that the policy change is part of several moments to communicate control and authority to citizens in the United States and throughout the world. The steps that the U.S. government has taken, including the passage of anti-terrorist legislation, are intended to convey

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a sense of order, civility, and rationality, but in a centralized bureaucratic mass society. Hall’s work on the meso-domain and meta-power put communication in context, while also enabling the communication logic of a culture to convey the contours of the mesa-domain that are cross-cut through acts of power. Meso-domain analysis “is designed to show how social organization is an interaction of action, structure, and history” (Hall, 1997, p. 401). For Hall, the meso-domain refers to contexts, social structures, and patterns of action that inform specific situations that may be negotiated. (Mehan refers to this general process as the “conditional matrix.”) While everyday life takes place in situations, Hall reminds us that there are contexts and previous scenarios that have been played out, reified, and taken into account as we enter the next situation. Thus, we have continuity, largely from shared memories and experiences; what happened “then” is relevant (sort of ) for what we have here and now. Social definitions that were enacted at Time 1 can have consequences for situations at Time 3, and the understandings that contributed to negotiating outcomes at Time 1 may become taken-for-granted by the time that we get to Time 2. Even terrorists rely on aircraft to travel from one “staging area” to another; their terrorism would not be as effective – or even possible – without commercial aircraft. Thus, in the past, aircraft have been used for their vulnerability, symbolic value, and passengers’ – both actual and virtual – awareness of risk, should a crash occur. But, with a few exceptions (e.g. Lockerbie), terrorists have not tried to destroy aircraft with passengers, especially with the terrorist on board! And we have never seen an example of aircraft being used as a weapon, a bomb to drive into buildings. This can only occur when terrorists negate the modern world and a sense of survival. To understand the policy process requires identifying the relevant contexts and scenarios that members take into account. The analysis of the total policy process requires attention to action at each site/phases, contextual influences and the network of site linkages that conveys the conditioning of action. Overall, this constitutes the social organization of the policy process. The networks of collective activity and consequences – conditioning relationships and linkages across time and space (Hall, 1997, p. 401).

How things move across this process – and are constituted in various moments of a policy’s career – reflect power that may be manifested in societal, organizational, and situational contexts. This is where Hall’s insights about meta-power become critical to understand policy change. Meta-power refers to the shaping of social relationships, social structures, and situations by altering the matrix of possibilities and orientations within which social action occurs. As Spencer Cahill suggests (see his essay in this tribute to Hall), meta-power is about the ability to control the

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games that others must play. What is critical for any analysis of change and action, then, is the manner in which power is communicated. This relies on audience’s assumptions of order and social reality, on the one hand, as well as experiences of similar “events” in the past, and in particular, what “memories” can be called forth as features of the context of the present challenge. In the postmodern age the foundations of experiences, memories, and scenarios for action are informed by information technology and mass media. These resources and accompanying formats for selecting, organizing, and presenting information must be relied by those who seek (e.g. politicians) to shape policy, particularly with the “consent of the governed.” The contexts, events, situations and understandings, then, are brought to bear in actual situations as political actors seek to provide interpretations and courses of action that “make sense,” and most importantly, will “make sense” to audiences. In our age, much of this turns on mass media information and entertainment formats that tap into audience’s realities based, by and large, on previous media messages and images. Several of the contexts and experiences that are relevant to the recent policy changes regarding civil liberties involve the “communication of crisis” and the organizational factors that have produced these. The bureaucratic elites – led by a President narrowly elected – operate in contested symbolic media space over which they have an edge as authoritative news sources. Following the brutal attacks of September 11, these elites provided answers to such questions as what do these attacks mean, and most relevantly, what will an audience expect, accept, and how would leadership most benefit from certain meanings as opposed to others? The original “definition” floated by the President was that this was terrorism, but that changed within two days to “acts of war,” albeit war by an unknown enemy. That changing definition emerged, was tested, and then sold to Congress and the American people, because we have historical, cultural and symbolic frameworks for dealing with “war” that we don’t with terrorism, especially with acts of the magnitude of September 11. The resulting policy changes were closely tied to this definition. An overview of key considerations in history, memory and collective media experiences may be of some use here. My general thesis is very simple: The government’s actions to promote more control was done because it was the most direct and acceptable option they had to show that they were in control. I turn to several of these dimensions that contributed to the passage of PATRIOT: (1) The role of the mass media in shaping audience expectations of leadership and presidential politics. Mass media processes and thematic emphases informed recent policy actions. Hall and others have pointed out the significance of the mass media for information control and impression management. Leaders now take into account the key rhetoric, symbols, and entertainment formats

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that are employed. This involves the use of slogans, visual icons of certain events, and evocative graphics. “Any attempt to understand contemporary social life must attend to the relationship between public, media, and officials and political actors” (Hall, 1988, p. 349). (2) The role of government in “letting this happen” has not been addressed in any systematic way. Notwithstanding years of a massive military budget, including billions of dollars (that we “know about”) being spent on “intelligence,” it was clear that the failures were massive, ineffective, and by some accounts completely misdirected. Social scientists have long recognized the tendency of organizations to view “problems” in terms of available “solutions,” sort of like putting the cart before the horse. Notwithstanding the obvious errors of our “intelligence” ways, we are told that the “solution” is that we must follow the same paradigm, including adding more layers and control in keeping with the program. We are asked to give even more authority and trust to the very agencies and, in some cases, individuals who were involved in “pre September 11 policy.” This is a clear example of the power of media sources getting to define key situations, independently of other authorities and “voices.” (3) Previous mass media reports and emphases about the “enemy.” The mass media have been the source of numerous distorted reports about the Middle East and “Muslim radicals” for more than two decades. But these views are what the public(s) have in mind. The “Iranian Hostage Crisis” in 1979 came to be known as “America Held Hostage,” and was the start of the news show, Nightline. Arabs “in turbans,” chanting anti-American slogans became the key visual. By and large, audiences saw Americans in bondage, a lot of images of chanting Arabs doing strange “religious things,” and above all, we heard about “Islamic radicals.” This would be replayed several times over the next two decades, culminating in the Gulf War in 1991, and repetitious battle scenes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. (4) Mass media reports have been in short supply about the negative impact of U.S. foreign policy on international opinion and resulting conflicts and problems. Hall suggests that powerful interests often engage in practices of “preventing us from knowing what they are doing” (Hall, 1988, p. 351). United States citizens’ awareness of the rest of the world – geographically, politically, culturally – is not impressive, and the mass media are clearly implicated in this pluralistic ignorance. Like most social phenomena, there is an organizational dimension to it, and it is such contexts that Hall’s work stresses should be taken into consideration. Network and major news organizations have reduced foreign correspondents, favoring instead to emphasize more domestic news, particularly reports dealing with crime, drugs, and fear. “Some dramatic event may also raise questions that penetrate a backstage

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region” (Hall, 1988, p. 351). Foreign events were seldom systematically linked to our foreign policy. Indeed, most Americans were not aware until the September 11 attacks that the government, implicated in harboring the suspected architect of these murders had been, essentially, put in place by the United States some twenty years ago in order to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Shockingly, President Bush, who had barely traveled abroad before being elected to the world’s most powerful office, remarked in a news conference on October 11, that he did not understand why Americans were so disliked in the Middle East, and that we would have to do a better job of getting our message out! (5) Americans had grown accustomed to war “without war.” And doing well. Since the Vietnam War, we had won (sort of . . .) all of our military actions against Panama, Grenada, Somalia, and Iraq, and a few others. Except for occasional setbacks, often involving terrorist attacks against overseas bases and ships, we were having military success. Even the peacekeeping mission that we participated in Kosovo as part of a UN force was not too brutal. The news reports of such incursions were usually favorable, often supported by graphics, included, in the war with Iraq, “bomb site” visuals of “smart bombs” obliterating structures and roads. Another memorable visual was provided to an international audience when the Marines stormed the beach in Somalia to be met by several dozen camera crews! But a major organizational shift that had occurred involved a cozying relationship of the media-military complex that included numerous retired generals and Pentagon flacks (e.g. Pete Wilson) being hired as “consultants” and reporters by the major mass media. These changes, along with an impressive array of popular culture movies about war, terrorism, and overcoming “evil” were part of the audience’s experience and expectations. Thus, war was not a bad thing or something to be dreaded at all costs, particularly for the “younger generation.” (6) War coverage of Iraq (“The Gulf War”), with its slogans (e.g. “a line in the sand,” “Operation Just Cause,” etc.), is also part of the context of experience and policy for the treatment of journalism. Control of information and access in the Gulf War seems minor compared to the “asymmetric control” of information that Peter Hall has discussed in his work, and that we are now experiencing with the recent war against terrorism. “When information control fails, it leads to stigmatization and delegitimation” (Hall, 1988, p. 352). One consequence is that, with a few exceptions, only the government and military are offering sustainable definitions of these events, including the notion that terrorism is a military rather than a political problem. (7) Entertainment, marketing and surveillance have been joined through information technology and entertaining media formats. Fear, help, and patriotism

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have been joined through symbols of caring and compassion, but also business and commercial interests. Americans were asked to give and did so in unprecedented amounts, with donations of blood and more than a billion dollars extended to the “victims” and “survivors,” while local charities were, so to speak, “going begging.” As my colleague John Johnson pointed out, war metaphors have usually been useful for moods of consensus and “bringing us together.” (8) Marketing of patriotism included buying flags and many other things, like cars (with no interest, to “Keep American Rolling”), and consumers were exhorted to buy things, and even the mayor of New York urged Americans to visit New York, to attend a show, to spend. But patriotism was connected symbolically with caring and concern and help. Children were asked to give a dollar to help the starving children of Afghanistan, and a separate zip code was established for this. Reports about “anthrax” cases led many citizens to “prepare,” not only by buying guns (gun sales increased in Arizona) and provisions, but also by buying Cipro, an antibiotic useful in some treatments. One internet web site noted to “Fellow Americans” that Cipro is getting harder to get, and added, “We are asking you to please order 100 pills at the very low price of $4.49 per pill . . . God Bless America.” The entrepreneur behind patriotic huckstering, reported, “I’m not out there beating the bushes to make sales on this, but I’m out to make money, and if someone wants to buy it to alleviate fear and it gives them a feeling of security, that’s great” (Arizona Republic, October 13, 2001, p. A4). (9) The fear industry in the United States prepared citizens for accepting many of the “fears” associated with these events. Fear and victim have been culturally produced and reified as “facts of life.” Mass media reports about fear and potential threats were everywhere. Primarily associated with crime-reporting over the last two decades, this mass mediated fear industry has produced a discourse of fear that is now a staple of cultural expectations. A discourse of fear may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life (Altheide, 2002). We were told within a matter of hours by politicians and network anchors wearing flags in lapels that the “country would never be the same.” General alerts were offered, with nothing specific. Clinically, these messages are akin to promoting cultural psychoses, be afraid and cautious, but we can’t be sure of what. And like the discourse of fear associated with crime, audiences were told to look to the government for more help and updates. (10) The staging of celebrations and rituals affirms our media reality about the crisis including the leaders and their actions. God Bless America signs were

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everywhere, as were exhortations that we’re attacking “evil.” As noted above, there are many “sub-agendas” contained in these pledges. President Bush led children in a nationally televised “simultaneous” “Pledge of Allegiance” on October 12, 2001. Said a fourth-grader, “I think it’s for freedom. It means I promise to be a loyal American.”

CONCLUSION Meta-power is communicated in our media age. Memories, expectations, assumptions of audiences, and decision-making practices take into account many messages and images. When democratic decision-making is expedited to enact policies that contradict the democratic process underlying a free society, then more than “politics as usual” is at work. Rather, the appearance of the political process has changed; it no longer matters that Congress pass legislation in a hurry because the “urgency demands it.” This is not easy to accomplish, and it is more difficult to understand. Peter Hall’s work offers some insights into these exciting, yet perilous times. Hall’s conceptualization suggests that social policy is reflexive of communication, meso-structure, and meta-power. Hall certainly complies with Vidich’s directive that “The source of some of sociology’s most compelling and important contributions to the understanding of social phenomena is the capacity for the sudden insight and the interpretative analysis . . . at its best it is an interpretative, creative craft” (Vidich, 1991, p. 522). Now more than ever it is imperative to understand the relationships between action, structure and history and their grounding in information technology, impression management, asymmetrical control. As Hall suggests, “Reviving the concept of institution would focus our attention upon the meso domain where social arrangements exist in and through processes that render them operational and operative. That is where the action is” (Hall, 1988, p. 355).

REFERENCES Altheide, D. (2002). Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Hall, P. (1988). Asymmetry, information control, and information technology. In: D. Maines & C. J. Couch (Eds), Communication and Social Structure (pp. 341–356). Springfield, IL: Thomas. Hall, P. M. (1997). Meta-power, social organization, and the shaping of social action. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 397–418. Vidich, A. J. (1991). Social theory and the substantive problems of sociology. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 4, 517–534.

MESODOMAIN ANALYSIS AND CONSIDERATIONS OF A HEALTHY SOCIETY David R. Maines Since the mid-1980s, Peter Hall has given us an interactionist-based theory of social organization that is both complexly argued and complexly structured. He has taken up a variety of what I would call root images of social organization – images signified by sensitizing concepts such as negotiation, mesostructure, loose-coupling, emergence, and asymmetry – and he has incorporated those images into large scale empirical research endeavors to craft a theory, that throughout its development, has foreshadowed developments in general sociology. Hall’s scholarship is significant not only on its own terms but also because of its potential impact on social science in general. Indeed, as we witness sociology and other social sciences in the last decade focusing more on questions of agency, structure as process, the significance of situations, and the centrality of communication, we find justification in asserting that sociology may well be catching up to interactionism and its grounding in pragmatism (see Maines, 2001, pp. 28, 99 for a discussion of how Hall has anticipated some of these trends). In this essay, I wish to trace some of the ways in which Peter Hall has come to give us an advanced and very sophisticated sociology of social organization and social processes. In the course of this examination, I point out in Hall’s earlier work the recognition of the importance of considering the nature of a healthy society, and then raise questions about that moral dimension in light of Hall’s depiction of mesodomain analysis.

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I begin with a reading of an early paper Hall published (1966) on the development of human potential in which he was concerned with the conditions that limit or facilitate “some total within the individual, some things which the individual is capable of achieving . . .” (p. 156). In considering human potential, Hall rejects the conventional view that the “warm, comfortable, homogeneous and harmonious environment is best for the protection of the individual” (p. 157). Such environments, he says, . . . are self-defeating if the attempt is to structure interactive settings to maximize development, growth, creativity and progress, because complete agreement is boring; complete comfort is regressive; complete peace is stagnating and complete stability is ultimately destructive. Development and growth require open, not closed, flexible, not rigid systems. Development and growth require thinking and consciousness which depend on diversity, heterogeneity, conflict, alternatives, challenges and change.

Hall goes on to tell us, however, that On the other hand, too much diversity, conflict and ambiguity is destructive and regressive, for people need foundations, landmarks and frames of reference to hold onto, to depend upon, to structure situations, to define reality and to give meaning to their existence (p. 157).

In identifying the poles of stability and change, we see Hall grappling with Durkheim’s problem about the nature of a healthy society. Durkheim, of course, hypothesized that both too much and too little social solidarity facilitated the commission of suicide in particular and deviant behavior in general. Hall (1966, p. 157) puts it this way: It is obvious, therefore, that what is necessary for the development of human potentialities is an appropriate balance between stability-change, homogeneity-heterogeneity, definiteness-ambiguity, comfort-challenge, closedness-openness.

Attempting to find that balance, Hall notes that independence and autonomy vary from one person to another, but, more importantly, that factors such as culture and formal organization tend to limit human experience. Those same factors, though, are necessary (but not sufficient) for the degree of clarity needed for self-realization. What we see here, therefore, is a very sticky situation for persons living their lives and for social scientists trying to understand them. That situation is one in which the same general processes and factors that release human potential or, better, make it possible, are the same ones that limit it. Human potential, self-realization, and actualization, therefore, are ongoing problematics whose nature and character are very subject to interpretation. The key variable, as it were, governing those ongoing problematics in Hall’s view is power, or as he expresses it in more Weberian terms, “. . . without a question,

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the power relationship” (1966, p. 160; emphasis in original). In some cases power literally allocates identities to persons and involves little choice on the part of those holding those identities. Power itself, though, is a process of interaction. Hall writes that: . . . this power to define is an outcome of interaction, and when interaction is recurrent the power becomes stabilized. However, if the balance of power becomes upset and the outcome questionable, then the question of definition becomes problematic and will be solved in further interaction. Self-realization requires an appropriate degree of power in one’s interactive world. The individual needs resources to say, ‘This is what I am’ and to withstand pressure to change his identity. He must be self-confident, self-sufficient and from this will flow motivation for realization of his human potentialities (1966, pp. 160–161).

If a measure of power is necessary for healthy identity formation, so too is the social organization of social relationships. Hall continues: An appropriate degree of social organization, adequate definitions of goals, norms, roles and identities is necessary for participants in established situations. There must be integration and clarity in order for human potentialities to be realized. Conversely, lack of integration and clarity, that is, social disorganization, leads to situations whereby individuals have difficulty determining appropriate conduct or reasons for performing the conduct desired by others (1966, p. 162).

There are two very interesting elements in Hall’s (1966) essay on human potentialities. The first element is what might be seen as the “early Hall” on the nature of social organization. We see him explicitly making matters of power and social stratification central to sociological inquiry, which is something that only a few interactionists at the time were doing. We also see his preliminary conceptions of social organization and his incipient formulation of the dialectics of order and change. The second element is signified by his repeated use of the phrase of the “appropriate degree” of power or balance between opposing processes. This phrase is intriguing because the term “appropriate” designates the operation of normative and moral orders. That is, I think that this phrase is more than a semantic writing device in this 1966 essay. Rather, it is Hall’s recognition that social organization and the development of human potentialities – resting in the relations of what Everett C. Hughes (1937) might have called institutions and the person – entail the struggle to find optimizing conditions for social health. He doesn’t write about human potential this way, nor does he answer the question of what in fact is the appropriate balance, but considerations of a healthy society resonate throughout Hall’s analysis. My observation about Peter Hall’s concerns for a healthy society is given further credence by looking at the various topics Hall has written about since then. Here it is clear that he has manifestly devoted a great deal of attention to these matters

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as is evident in his writings about the Vietnam war, race and ethnicity, schooling, poverty, and the application of knowledge to social problems. Beyond these areas of topical relevance, moreover, is his work on policy analysis, since clearly public policies in various ways are focused on the improvement of the health of a society. Some policies are written and enacted to promote the health of the general public – to clean the air we breathe or water we drink – but most pertain to selected groups of people defined by the policy. We can think of affirmative action, designed to improve the access to resources for women and minorities; driver’s education requirements, designed to increase the safety of roadway users; tax abatements, designed to improve local economies; building code guidelines, designed to accomodate the needs of the physically handicapped; and so on for literally thousands of cases that are audience-specific. All such policies, in fact, can be seen as forms of affirmative action insofar as political, administrative, and economic resources are mobilized to privilege a particular group or aggregate constituency. Whether seen as just or unjust, wise or unwise, competently or incompetently conceived, all policies intrinsically involve the identification of a set of conditions that are defined as in need of change for purposes of improving the life conditions of people covered by the policy. What does Hall tell us about those policy processes? To answer that question, we must do as he does and consider the nature of social organization, since obviously policy processes are organizational processes. While the seeds of Hall’s work in this area are evident in his work during the 1960s, the fundamental framework that he has developed stems most directly from his Presidential Address to the Midwest Sociological Society (Hall, 1987), which has become a classic in the interactionist analysis of social organization. He identifies six core dimensions for organizational analysis. The first is collective activity – people doing things together: communicating, planning, adjusting, and so on. Second, networks: sets of linked transactions, which are the elementary forms of social organization. Third, conventions and practices: relatively standardized and taken-for-granted ways of doing things. Fourth, resources and power: anything used to achieve a goal or to get one’s way. Fifth, processuality and temporality: the emergent and necessary historicity of organizations. And sixth, grounding: that the contexts of action are themselves set in other contexts. In identifying these six dimensions, Hall takes on an extremely ambitious task, namely, to develop “an approach which is simultaneously concrete, observant, processual, conditional, contingent, dialectical, comparative, and contextual” (Hall, 1987, p. 18). In developing just such an approach, which he has termed “mesodomain analysis,” Hall emphasizes the empirical scrutiny of how structure and history dialectically constitute one another. As he puts it,

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On the one hand, history is an active process of linked orderings of conditions – actionsconsequences sequences embedded in the layered intersections of multiple contexts. Thus, conditioned action in the past has consequences for present conditions and future action. On the other hand, social actors carry ‘history,’ their sense and knowledge of past times, conditions, and events, with them from place to place – albeit interpreted, incomplete, and with muted accuracy (Hall & McGinty, 2002, p. 306).

Moreover, . . . mesodomain analysis focuses on the networks that cluster in space and the linkages necessary to convey the consequences of conditioned action across space. In the end, the mesodomain analyst looks for varying patterns of network organization that link sites which stand out as relatively bounded and clarified, as embedded and nested, loosely coupled, or multifocal. History and structure provide contexts and conditions for social action (Hall & McGinty, 2002, p. 306).

What Hall has done, in short, is to take the commonly-expressed platitude that “social organization is a process” and has worked it through in considerable detail to show us how to conceptualize that process. He has moved Strauss’s concept of “structural process” into a more workable conceptual framework that might direct researchers to focus on selected aspects of social organization and to allow them to analyze those aspects as social processes. In roughly one decade, Peter Hall has made a quantum leap forward in organizational analysis that in my judgment is so nuanced that it will take non-interactionists yet another decade to reach the level of sophistication that he displayed in 1987. So, what does all this tell us about policy processes? Hall has keyed on Estes and Edmonds’ (1981) proposal of policy as a transformation of intentions to empirically develop a perspective on the social organization of policy processes. As he and his co-authors express it, “Policy is not a concrete text to be implemented but a transformation of intentions in which content, practices, and consequences are generated in the dynamics” (Placier et al., 2000, p. 260). These transformations are clearly caught up in organizational processes. Keeping in mind Hall’s dimensions of networks, grounding, and processuality from his 1987 essay, consider the following depiction of policy processes: Policy initiators, dependent on those who follow to fulfill their intentions, set conditions that both limit and facilitate later action. Conditional effects vary due to tight or loose linkages between phases/sites and between initiators and those to whom they delegate responsibility. Policy initiators may intentionally grant delegates a level of autonomy, but, whether intended or not, delegates will have at least some discretion. If decisions set unclear conditions, if communication is poor, or if linkages are weak, they may have more. Even the strongest linkages are not automatic and must be enacted to have effects (Placier et al., 2000, p. 261).

As the above passage suggests, Hall has been busy working out a kind of “moving matrix” composed of types of conditions, communication channels,

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and sense-making processes that influence the various trajectories policies can take. Hall (1995; Hall & McGinty, 1997) has shown, for instance, how reforms intended to improve quality of teaching were transformed into a means to increase teacher salaries. It has also been shown that policy ambiguity and weak linkages among implementation sites increase the interpretive autonomy of local actors (Placier et al., 2000, pp. 262–263). The empirical evidence giving warrant to Hall’s perspective, in other words, is clearly present in the published literature. But, what does this have to say about a healthy society? One of the next big questions that Hall and his collaborators can take is exactly the one pertaining to the nature of a healthy society that is implied by the framework they have developed. Certainly the seeds of this consideration are already there in the mesodomain perspective, and Hall himself even comes close to that question in his thinking about the restructuring of schools. He has this to say: It is not enough to know what restructured schools should look like and why that transformational process provides solutions to problems. Given the complexity and uncertainty of restructuring, it would be helpful to have a sense of how to produce systemic change (Hall, 1997a, p. 213).

In the face of the complexity that mesodomain analysis seeks to discover, that is, Hall holds out the hope that positive systemic change is possible. Stated differently, he hopes that the educational health of society can be improved. But there is a dilemma here, insofar as mesodomain analysis at it exists does not deal with Becker’s (1967) question of whose side the mesodomain analyst is on. Let me illustrate. As already mentioned, Hall shows in splendid detail how policy intended to increase quality of teaching was in some circumstances used to support underpaid teachers. Obviously the goal was not achieved as intended and thus the transformation that occurred can be regarded as relatively dysfunctional. Stated another way, the health of the educational system was thwarted to the extent that reform goals were not met. On the other hand, unintended goals were met, namely better teacher pay, which presumably contributed to the health of families. How do we evaluate this kind of situation? If pushed to make a choice, which locus of social health do we advocate? And, how do we theorize the various stakeholders who produced the transformation? For instance, Hall’s depiction of the bureaucratic and legislative processes that contributed to the transformation of intentions suggest a cynical interpretation of actors responding only situationally in the context of their own interests and without an operating moral concern for the educational health of society; or, if that concern was ever expressed, its substance took the form of self-interested political rhetoric with altercasting designs. Moreover, the legitimacy of goals and intentions often do not remain stable and thus their moral grounding can be evasive. Jim Crow laws come to mind as a form

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of social policy in which land use, public utilities, and access to institutions were distributed for the benefit of white citizens and at the expense of black citizens. Whereas those policies can easily be thought of as affirming the value and promoting the well-being of identifiable groups, we now see them some decades later as unwise, unjust, and as running counter to the currents of a healthy society. All in all, Hall’s analysis of the social organization of policy processes, considering that policies imply a concern for a healthy society, requires a kind of advanced citizenship for those policies to actually contribute to social health. Or, to use Hall’s terms, advanced citizenship is necessary to produce positive “systemic change.” By advanced citizenship, I refer to the ability to remain consistent with core values – equality of opportunity, shared governance, quality education, the youth as our future, and so forth (see Hall, 1997b for a discussion of his value commitments) – both in terms of policy formulation and implementation. Advanced citizenship assumes that we have thought through whose side we are on, including even whether that question is a moral one to ask, in such a way that we can address and possibly even adjudicate issues of values and social significance. Clearly this is an area containing classical problems of justice and society, of the distribution of individual and collective rights and obligations, and of the inevitable segmentation that accompanies integrative processes of social orders. This difficult area of inquiry seems to be the natural next step for Peter Hall’s project, and he has the advantage over social philosophers and theorists of moral orders of having produced a realistic conceptualization of social organization within which to raise these questions and answer them in ways that will further the superior scholarship he has already given us.

REFERENCES Becker, H. (1967). Whose side are we on? Social Problems, 14, 239–247. Estes, C., & Edmonds, B. (1981). Symbolic interaction and social policy analysis. Symbolic Interaction, 4, 75–86. Hall, P. (1966). Social factors limiting the development of human potentialities. In: H. Otto (Ed.), Explorations in Human Potentialities (pp. 154–173). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Hall, P. (1987). Interactionism and the study of social organization. The Sociological Quarterly, 28, 1–22. Hall, P. (1995). The consequences of qualitative analysis for sociological theory: Beyond the micro level. The Sociological Quarterly, 36, 397–423. Hall, P. (1997a). The integration of restructuring and multicultural education as a policy for equity and diversity. In: P. Hall (Ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Multiculturalism: Policy and Practice (pp. 203–217). NY: Garland Publishing. Hall, P. (1997b). Epilogue: Schooling, gender, equity, and policy. In: B. Bank & P. Hall (Eds), Gender, Equity and Schooling: Policy and Practice (pp. 405–441). NY: Garland Publishing.

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Hall, P., & McGinty, P. (2002). The policy process, mesodomain analysis, and breadth of perspective. In: S. Chew & D. Knottnerus (Eds), Structure, Culture, and History (pp. 303–322). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hall, P., & McGinty, P. (1997). Policy as the transformation of intentions: Producing program from statute. The Sociological Quarterly, 38, 439–467. Hughes, E. C. (1937). Institutional office and the person. American Journal of Sociology, 43, 404–413. Maines, D. (2001). The faultline of consciousness: A view of interactionism in sociology. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Placier, M., Hall, P., Benson McKendall, S., & Cockrell, K. (2000). Policy as the transformation of intentions: Making multicultural educational policy. Educational Policy, 14, 259–289.

PETER HALL’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH: APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATIONAL REFORM1 Hugh Mehan, Amanda Datnow and Lea Hubbard Peter Hall has contributed significantly to a fundamental paradigm shift in our thinking about public policy. His conceptualization of the public policy process as a “conditional matrix” provides a corrective on technical-rational conceptions of public policy and helps cool the long simmering macro-micro debate in sociology.

PETER HALL’S WORK ON SOCIAL POLICY IN CONTEXT: THE TECHNICAL-RATIONAL PERSPECTIVE To understand Peter Hall’s work on social policy, it is heuristic to place it in the context of work that was done contemporaneously. Public policy studies in the late 1960s through the early 1980s concentrated in large part on the large-scale governmental policies such as the Great Society Programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration, Follow-through, Headstart, special education, bilingual education. Social policy research of that time tended to take Weberian notions of technical rationality seriously, probably too seriously. The technical-rational perspective on public policy incorporates principles from classical management theory, which places a premium on planning, Studies in Symbolic Interaction Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, 31–50 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/PII: S0163239602260056

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organization, command, coordination, and control. The presumption was that “. . . authority and responsibility should flow in a clear unbroken line from the highest executive to the lowest operative . . .” (Masie, 1965, quoted in Smith & Keith, 1971, p. 241). The “grammar” of the technical-rational theory of public policy identifies actors, actions, and the objects of action. Two classes of actors are implicated: The program designers (also called “the design team”), and the “implementers” – the people who operate and work at the local or street level of bureaucracies. Likewise, two classes of actions are identified: “planning” and “implementing.” Significantly, the actions are segregated and the actors are stratified. What has come to be called “the design team,” situated at the top of the bureaucracy, “makes plans” while the educators – the people down the causal chain – are relegated to “carrying out the plans,” that is, completing the pre-determined goals and objectives of the design team. In this “grammar of implementation,” the causal arrow of change travels in one direction – from active, thoughtful designers to passive, pragmatic implementers. As the authors of one of the seminal works on implementation of a government policy succinctly defined it: “Implementation is the ability to forge subsequent links in the causal chain so as to obtain the desired results” (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1973, p. xv). Often policy wasn’t implemented in the way that policy makers intended. Proponents of the technical-rational perspective tended to blame the practitioners “on the ground,” the “street level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1982) for not following through, for not doing what the policy makers intended. Educators in schools, for example, were said to circumvent well-intended reforms, either because they acted irrationally, were protecting their own interests, or they just didn’t understand the intentions of the planners. Certainly not all those who treat reform as a technical and rational process believe that recalcitrant educators undermine reform. However, we wish to raise the point that the technical-rational perspective is more likely to see local variation in implementation as problematic, or as a dilemma rather than as inevitable – that is, as a natural, normal routine feature of everyday life in schools. Furthermore, reforms built on rational grounds often assume that reforms can be sustained on technical considerations alone, and downplay or do not account sufficiently for the social, cultural, and political factors that lead to local variation (Oakes, 1992; Oakes et al., 1999).

PUBLIC POLICY AS A CONDITIONAL MATRIX Other authors in this collection have described Peter Hall’s strong roots in symbolic interactionism. Some of the key concepts that he developed in his policy work,

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especially the “conditional matrix,” “the mesodomain,” and “metapower” (Hall, 1995, 1997; Hall & McGinty, 1997) have roots in this tradition. Behind specific references to Corbin and Strauss and Estes & Edmonds is the influence of George Herbert Mead’s conception of emergence – all of which lead Peter Hall to see the policy world in an entirely different way than proponents of the technical rational perspective. Hall sees the social world as a negotiated order rather than a static order, social policy as co-constructed rather than imposed from above. Research and theorizing from a number of perspectives, including symbolic interactionism, call our attention to the importance of context. It is important to point out, however, that Hall employs a sense of context that is different than traditionally employed. The traditional view treats contexts as embedded systems. Often a setting, such as a classroom is placed at the center, surrounded by other layers or levels of context. Cole (1996) cites Brofenbrenner’s formulation of human development as a prime example of this embedded conception of context. Brofenbrenner conceives of social life as starting with the microsystem at the core, and proceeding outward through mesosystems and exosystems to the macrosystem. In educational research, the embedded sense of context appears in Fullan’s (1991, p. 49) description of the classroom, school, district, state, and nation “levels” of the implementation system, Wilcox’s (1982) description of classroom socialization shaped by organizational and community constraints, and McLaughlin and Talbert’s (1993) analysis which places the classroom in the center of school, community, higher education institutions, professional and environmental levels of contexts. The embedded sense of context is important, to be sure, because it calls our attention to the fact that social life is generated in face-to-face interaction, and then acknowledges that face-to-face interaction occurs within wider dimensions of social life – the organizational, the institutional, the structural. It is limited, however, because it often puts one site, and only one site, in the center, and pushes other sites to the periphery. The embedded sense of context can also leave the impression that social life is uni-directional; forces emanating from higher levels of context cause or determine action at lower levels. While actions initiated at some distance away from local events may indeed constrain or shape actions, they do not totally determine them. And actions initiated in local events generate or construct conditions or structures that have consequences in settings far removed from local events. For example, constraints originating at a distance from the classroom influence teacher-student interaction. Instruction uniformly takes place in confined physical spaces and circumscribed time segments. Teachers uniformly organize instruction and call upon students to demonstrate their knowledge. Classroom interaction varies within these narrow parameters because it is not easy to escape the

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constraints imposed upon the teaching-learning setting. First and foremost, schools are a part of education in industrialized societies which means teachers develop their particular recipes for teaching within limits that are beyond their control. The length of the school day and school year, the number of students per class, and the age-graded system, the availability of certain teaching materials are all established by the state. Public expectations (e.g., that students can read by the end of the first grade, meet college entrance requirements by the end of high school, etc.) reinforce these state organized constraints. French high school teachers, for example, operate within a highly competitive examination system, which in turn, exerts pressure on teachers at the elementary level to make judgments about passing or retaining individual students at the end of the year. The same can be said of Japan, Germany, Korea and any other countries that use a competitive exam as a gate-keeping encounter. U.S. high school teachers teach with the knowledge that colleges and universities (to say nothing of well-to-do parents) expect a certain amount of literature, mathematics and science to be “covered,” which discourages instructional systems that are built on peer tutoring and group evaluation. By and large then, we see similar features appear again and again in the formal teaching-learning situations we call classrooms because of constraints created in situations that reside far away from the immediate teaching environment. While actions emanating at a distance may constrain local actions, they do not determine them totally. Indeed, local actions change and shape the structural features of the system. For example, teachers often vary considerably in how they interpret the conventions of the school and the dictates of the state. Differences in the organization of classroom interaction have been found in some cultures (Au, 1980; Au & Jordan, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988), illustrating once again the mystery of cross-cultural variation in the face of social, political, and economic constraints. More fundamentally, we must remember that in order for an event we call the lesson to occur, the teacher and students must engage in “lesson making” (Cazden, 1986; Mehan, 1979; Varenne & McDermott, 1998): Without forgetting for a moment that the power relations among participants are often unequal, it is no less important when using the nested-contexts approach to take into account the fact that context creation is an actively achieved, two-sided process (Cole, 1996, p. 134).

Peter Hall’s concept of the “conditional matrix” helps us avoid the traps of structural determinism and unidirectionality that potentially plague the embedded sense of context. He depicts social policy as a web of interrelated conditions and consequences, where the consequences of actions in one context may become the conditions for the next (Hall, 1995; Hall & McGinty, 1997). That is, interactions in one policy context generate “outcomes,” such as policy statements,

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new rules or procedures (which often appear in textual form), which in turn potentially condition the interactions of other actors in other contexts in the policy chain. Whereas the embedded sense of context can be interpreted to mean that events at higher levels of the context occur first and are more important analytically, the conditional matrix does not automatically assign an a priori sense of importance to any one context. Events certainly occur in the chronological past, present and future, near to or far away from us. And we can use these temporal divisions to clarify our statements about events. But we must also recognize the mutual influence of one context upon the other when accounting for social policy in general, the implementation of educational reforms in particular. Take for example the classic sociological topic of occupational advancement. A person may, at age 21, make $18,000 a year in a computer programming job. She may at 35 make $300,000 as president of a computer company. If she anticipates at 21 that in the future she will gain upward mobility by the time she is 35, then the $18,000 a year salary will hold a different meaning for her than if she expects to remain in the same job forever. As Schutz (1962, p. 69) noted, the future perfect tense of English depicts the time structure of projects of action, but no future ever turns out exactly as the future perfect depicted it because at the very least, the person has grown older, which cannot be experienced ahead of time. Similarly, after she becomes president, the former computer programming job has a different meaning for her (it was “preparation,” “learning the work ethic,” “hard knocks”) than if she had not become president. Then the computer programming job might be seen as a “treadmill,” a “dead end.” There are chronological pasts, presents and futures here, but as Mead (1954) says, their social influence upon one another transforms the purely physical metric as the course of events unfolds. What Mead (1954) called “emergence” exists here because the past influences the symbolic definition of the present, the definition of the present is influenced by inferences about the future, and the events of the future will reconstruct our definition of the past. Or, as Schutz (1966), and later the ethnomethodologists phrased it, events have a retrospective and a prospective sense of occurrence. What is not actually perceived is filled in from the standpoint of the present while unclear information is allowed to pass with the expectation that later information will clarify matters. Applying these ideas to the policy context, Hall (1995, p. 408) says: The social organization of the policy process as a network of relations across space and time can be viewed prospectively, retrospectively and in the present. Prospectively, it is a means to produce desired behavior at a future time in distant locations. Retrospectively, it emerges out of historical pasts and embeds structural contexts. In the present it has to be constituted through collective activity that dialetically relates past and future, ‘structure’ and intention.

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As we will illustrate below, we have found Hall’s formulation of the “conditional matrix” concept to be powerfully heuristic. We do have a quibble with it, however. A matrix implies, to us at least, the rectangular arrangement of elements into columns and rows. The image this conveys is too static, too angular – and not in keeping with the fluidity of the rest of his thinking. As a corrective, we have found that the expression “conditional process” represents the public policy phenomenon better.

IMITATION: A SINCERE FORM OF FLATTERY As fellow researchers of the public policy process, especially as policy plays out in educational arenas, we have relied heavily on Peter Hall’s orienting concepts. To illustrate how we have appropriated these concepts for our purposes, we call upon our studies of the “scaling up” phenomenon, which involves the transfer of school reform models that have been successful in one or a few schools to many schools (Datnow, Hubbard & Mehan, 2002). We studied how a variety of schools and school districts adopted reform designs sponsored by the Coalition of Essential Schools, Success for All, the Comer School Development Project, the Audrey Cohen College System of Education, the AVID Center, the Modern Red Schoolhouse Institute, and the Core Knowledge Foundation. All of these reform designs were originally implemented in one location and, as they became successful, were exported by design teams and adopted by educators in other locations.

Molding Reform Designs to Accommodate Local Considerations A well documented finding in studies of educational reform is that schools modify reform models as much as, if not more than, reform models change schools (Cuban, 1998, p. 455). As the examples we select from our work shows, however, these accommodations are not the result of recalcitrance, resistance, or ignorance of educators in local school sites. Conditions in local contexts caused educators to modify reform models to better suit their needs. Some adaptations were rather benign, other adaptations were enhancements to the designs, whereas still others threatened the intensity and potential success of the reform. Many of the schools we studied made adaptations to reforms to accommodate organizational constraints in their school settings. These organizational constraints were typically related to school size, level of resources, school organizational features, time, and staffing arrangements. In some cases, the constraints led teachers to simply implement program features less frequently, or not at all. For example,

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one school working with the Coalition of Essential Schools found it difficult to schedule time in the school day for teachers to meet with “critical friends,” an important design feature of this reform model. As a result, this seldom occurred. Another school implementing the Modern Red Schoolhouse found the technology features of the model, which called for fully wired computers in every classroom, to be a “pipe dream” and not practicable when teachers worked without overhead projectors or other more simple technology. Most schools were able to find the tension point between organizational constraints and reform design demands, and found rather creative solutions. For example, in the 12 schools that we studied which were implementing AVID, educators described tutoring as “probably the most critical component of the whole program . . .” and yet, “one of the most difficult ‘AVID essentials’ to implement.” The lack of qualified college tutors, the difficulty in coordinating university and high school schedules, the difficulty in obtaining funds to reimburse tutors in a timely manner are just some of the practical problems that plagued the schools that attempted to meet the expectation of this AVID essential and, in turn, the needs of their students. As one state education official explained, “we have very isolated schools. Some are six hours away from a college. Getting tutors to come to them is impossible.” Some schools responded in very innovative ways to these sorts of problems. In North Carolina, the tutoring component of an AVID program has been embellished by the use of graduate students and teachers. This program has also introduced content-based tutoring to supplement AVID’s Socratic approach. Tutors with deep knowledge of subjects such as chemistry, math, and English bring a high level of expertise to the tutoring situation. According to educators in North Carolina, these modifications have enhanced the AVID prototype. However, in some cases, local modifications became constraints to program success. One California school responded to the difficulty of attracting and retaining tutors by holding tutoring sessions after school with a teacher who volunteered her time. This arrangement excluded many AVID students who were not able to stay after school due to transportation problems. Other schools chose to subsist without tutors, or with sparse coverage. This meant that some AVID students did not have the benefit of interacting with tutors who could both assist them with their schoolwork and could share their college experiences. Similarly, large school size impacted the implementation of Success for All (SFA) in three elementary schools in one district, leading to significant adaptations that hindered the success of the reform. Success for All calls for reading classes of no more than 20 students. This design feature is facilitated through the use of classroom as well as non-classroom teachers who act as reading group leaders for 90 minutes per day. The program also requires that the reading period be offered

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at the same time for all students, to facilitate movement among the groups. These critical program features could not be implemented as designed in these schools, each of which served over 1000 students and were severely overcrowded, operating at up to 75% over their designated space utilization rates. At one elementary school, the dearth of space was so severe that some teachers had to share a cramped classroom during the reading period, making for a noisy, distracting environment. One teacher led a reading group on the stage in the school auditorium. Due to the restrictions of space and the number of teachers available, some reading groups had as many as 32 students, instead of the 20 suggested by SFA. At all three schools, two reading periods were offered at different times, in order to maximize the use of space and resources. This constrained students’ ability to move among groups (e.g. a first grader reading at the third grade level could not be grouped with third grade students). The sheer number of teachers and students to monitor in these large schools meant that the job of the SFA facilitator, already a taxing one, was even more difficult. As one facilitator described, “When I was at the convention, there were schools that had 400 students and one facilitator,” whereas her school served 1400 students. She explained: “That’s three times the materials I have to organize, three times the teachers I have to work with . . . because of that I’m limited in what I can do with the teachers.” The large number of students that needed to be tested every eight weeks, according to the SFA design, was also too much for the facilitator and the tutors to accomplish by themselves, outside of the 90-minute reading period. “We’d never get done. And it would be impossible to . . . it would take us eight weeks to do it the way they wanted to us to do it. So we cheat.” The school has made a significant adaptation by having reading teachers conduct testing during the reading period. This took time away from reading instruction. In many of the schools that we studied, multiple reforms existed in a school at a given time, leading educators to make modifications in order to accommodate the various program goals and demands. In some schools, this meant forgoing components of particular reforms, or not enacting reforms fully. In each case, it appeared that existing practices were strong enough to suppress the new reforms, and thus adjustments to the new reform needed to be made, rather than the other way around. Reform designs – such as Comer’s School Development Program model – that involve the creation of new governance structure, such as school-based management teams, were often adapted in local schools as educators fit existing structures into the new model. Sometimes these teams simply changed names when the new reform was adopted. In other cases, educators struggled to meet the team goals as established by the reform design team as well as those that the team formerly organized around. One Comer SDP elementary school provides an interesting case

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in point. The Comer SDP model requires schools to institute three teams: a School Planning and Management Team, a Student and Staff Support Team, and a Parent Team. The teams are designed to “work in tandem and synergistically to design and implement the social and academic program of the school” (Haynes, 1998, p. 5). When it came time for the school to institute their teams, the faculty decided that they wanted to change the name of the Student and Staff Support Team to the Home School Services Team (HSST). Some of the components of the team were already in place because of the school’s prior and ongoing involvement as an integrated services school. For instance, the school had three or four psychological or counseling agencies that already sent full-time counselors to the school. They had legal aid representatives on site and were connected to agencies addressing domestic violence. The HSST was therefore formed by bringing together representatives of these groups, rather than by forming new connections. This was an easy, benign, and successful integration of the reform model and the school’s existing reform: integrated services. Less simple was the adaptation of the team to the functions suggested by the Comer model. For example, in accordance with the model, the school tried having teachers and administrators as caseworkers for students referred to the HSST but found this didn’t work because of time constraints. Instead, they chose to employ after-school social work interns from neighboring universities whom they paid with stipends from a grant the school received. Some of the interns stayed for the whole school year, whereas others were there only one semester. This caused a continuity problem, as some interns were not around long enough to keep track of students’ progress over time. Although some schools were able to make effective adaptations in response to the layering of reforms, in other cases, pre-existing reforms threatened the integrity and success of the new reform. For example, one Coalition of Essential Schools site did not implement the “teacher as generalist” principle as recommended by the design team because the teachers were implementing a local university program which was explicitly aimed towards organizing teachers by subject specialization and rotating students among them. The teachers felt that the program was working well for them, and did not see it conflicting with the goals of the Coalition reform. However, clearly it did. The “teacher as generalist” principle of the Coalition calls for teachers to see themselves as general educators and scholars, rather than just experts in a particular subject. The move towards this principle is often much more difficult in secondary schools but usually requires no changes in elementary schools, as teachers usually teach multiple subjects in self-contained classrooms. Due to the local program, the teachers in this school were expressly doing the opposite. Similarly, in Freeport, Virginia, the success of the AVID program was seriously undermined when the district implemented AVID solely as a 9th and 10th grade

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program, rather than offer it for four years because of conflicts with another reform designed to help minority and low-income students that was well-entrenched in the district. The “College Partnerships” program was perceived as “the GATE program for African American kids.” Apparently the two programs could only coexist at different grade levels because of the competition for students and prior agreements that protected the College Partnership “territory.” Their turf battle resulted in minimizing the support available to AVID students. A problem arose, therefore, when students completed two years of AVID but were not accepted into College Partnerships. They were left to struggle with the more difficult classes offered in their junior and senior years without support structures. The AVID teacher complained that many students were trying to take rigorous academic classes, including International Baccalaureate classes, but were dropping out because they lacked the help they needed to do well. Ironically, early participation in AVID actually disadvantaged students who were later unable to take advantage of College Partnerships. As these vignettes illustrate, educators modified reforms to accommodate organizational constraints, thereby demonstrating that educators in local school settings are not passively implementing programs designed elsewhere. They are actively making policy through their adaptations. Actions that educators take during later stages in the implementation process modify the reform that was originally designed. In the case of AVID’s tutoring component, some schools responded in creative ways to their practical circumstances and enhanced the reform, but others did not. The educators also responded in practical ways when the SFA reform demands bumped up against the constraints of their large school size and overcrowding – both features that were unchangeable. However, their solutions tended to compromise the success of the program in providing all students with small class sizes for reading and created significant headaches for school leaders. Taken together this range of actions suggests that public policy is co-constructed in the negotiations that educators take to meet the practical demands of their everyday lives; it is not a matter of design teams making plans that are carried out passively by educators further down the implementation chain.

Reform Designs Change in Response to State and Local Politics Another segment from our research reinforces Hall’s point that the vector of educational reform efforts does not flow in just one direction. That is, educators’ actions in schools are not only influenced “top-down” by the actions of design teams; the actions of design teams are also influenced “bottom-up” by the actions of educators in schools, as well as by other forces existing in different spheres.

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An interesting case of a design team changing in response to a combination of political actions initiated by the state and pressures from local constituents occurred when AVID redefined its student population. From 1980 until 1995, AVID said it recruited low-income students with high academic potential from ethnic groups historically under-represented in colleges and universities. Materials from an AVID staff development document disseminated in the early 1990s detail the criteria for “Who Belongs in AVID?”
Underachieving students with four-year college potential;
Students who are currently under-represented in our University of California and California State University systems (primarily, but not limited to, AfricanAmerican, Native American, Latino and low-income students);
Students who can succeed in college preparatory (A-F) courses with tutor assistance;
Students who are motivated to work hard to become independent thinker and learners. In practical terms, this meant African American, Latino, and Native American students with high test scores but average grades were targeted by AVID. To be sure, not all students in AVID were from these ethnic minority groups, but this was the operational definition of the AVID student. In its current literature, AVID now says that it recruits “students in the middle.” This official statement has been echoed in public discussions about AVID. Guthrie and Guthrie (1998, p. 1), in their comprehensive review of AVID’s impact on California education, define AVID as a “college preparatory program for low-income and underachieving students – those unlikely to attend four-year colleges and universities.” In a widely-read educational magazine, Bushweller (1998, p. 16) reported AVID students were defined as “average kids,” “in the middle of the academic pack, an educational no man’s land . . . the unfortunate members of the forgotten majority of public education,” the kids that are “more and more invisible.” The American School Boards Journal article goes on to describe the “typical” AVID profile – a student with “a C average, no behavior problems, and parents who did not graduate from college. The students must show a desire to want to do better, and their parents must agree to help the school push the kids.” Note that neither race nor ethnicity nor minority status are mentioned in these statements. This shift in representation to “forgotten students” invokes images of the “silent majority” which is much different than an “equity” agenda – conceived as affirmative action, or active recruitment or active preparation of students from under represented minority backgrounds. AVID changed its way of representing students partially in response to actions taken by the state of California, and partially in response to sentiments expressed at

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new school sites. In June 1995, the Regents of the University of California passed a resolution (SP 1) forbidding the 9 campuses of the UC system from using race, gender, and ethnicity as supplemental criteria in admissions decisions. In November 1996, the voters of California passed the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative” (Proposition 209), which reinforced this position. Although these changes in California state law did not directly affect AVID, the leadership felt AVID would be on safer ground not mentioning race or ethnicity in its program statements. An AVID design team administrator offered a profile of the students that AVID intended to help before Proposition 209 passed. She reported that in 1995 “the program was to help students who are traditionally under-represented in postsecondary, and we used the word ‘under-represented.’ ” After Proposition 209 passed AVID began talking differently about the students they would serve. She said, “Now you’re not supposed to use the word ‘under-represented.’ We wouldn’t want people to think that it’s an affirmative action program because of the antiaffirmative action thing.” Local political pressures have reinforced AVID Center’s redefinition. The change in language by AVID Center in response to California state law has influenced student selection at school sites in Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. Educators at two Kentucky high schools confirmed that they recruited students without taking race or ethnicity into account and from their perspective this is preferable. One AVID teacher described that the AVID program at her school is for the “C” student: The greatest number of students that we have are in the middle, the “C” student, and there are no programs for the “C” student. And that just hit me in the head, and I was thinking “My God, this is finally something for the mass of society,” something that would be great for our kids . . ..

This educator welcomes the redefinition of AVID’s students, because it reduces tension among the faculty and between the program and parents concerning recruitment: Now the mission has changed, so it’s much easier now. Now you don’t have to be underrepresented. You don’t have to be on free or reduced lunches. You don’t have to be a minority, and I even like the program more, because we were losing a lot of (voice gets quieter) white kids . . . because . . . you know . . ..

Educators at another Kentucky school implementing AVID have taken similar steps. The counselor at this high school, when asked how she would define AVID responded: “I define it as a program to offer support for students who attend college or some post-secondary educational setting.” This definition is remarkable because it doesn’t mention students’ ethnicity, minority status, or socio-economic status as features considered in student selection. Indeed, this counselor explained that

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her high school was more comfortable depicting AVID in non-racialized terms because of faculty and parental concerns. A program presented in “majority/minority terms,” she said is “perceived as negative” in her community. These views expressed by educators in Kentucky were also echoed by educators in Virginia. An AVID teacher in “Freeport,” Virginia said that the way in which AVID Center describes the students eligible for AVID (“students in the middle”) works in Virginia helps to appease the strong right-wing element in the state. Apparently, Virginia schools cannot have special programs devoted exclusively to minorities. Therefore, talking about AVID as “helping minorities” gets educators in Virginia nervous. AVID may be resented in certain communities in the South if it is a program identified as specifically and especially for blacks. One North Carolina AVID educator stated that “Now that our kids are having the opportunity to take the Princeton Review, I’ve even heard some jealousy amongst the faculty about that. ‘Well, why can’t this be an opportunity for others?’ ” The AVID teacher, who is black, justified AVID’s original concentration on minority students because of the supports that black students in her district still need, long after civil rights legislation officially ended discrimination. She was critical of the shift in AVID recruiting and pointed to the often unspoken, unwritten affirmative action policies that have always benefited whites: “. . . If you ask me about affirmative action, then I will say that whites have always had affirmative action.” The observations of these AVID educators are powerful for many reasons: Their words reveal ambivalence about AVID’s change in focus. Some educators perceive it negatively – as if it is ‘discriminatory.’ Others see it as a welcome shift in practice away from the quotas associated with affirmative action and toward programs emphasizing intensified academic preparation. Local context has affected representations as well. The redefinition of the AVID student to one “in the middle” has a different meaning in California schools. Schools that had established AVID programs before the passage of anti-affirmative action legislation have not shifted their recruitment and selection practices. For one AVID teacher in California, “AVID is a program for under-represented students.” When asked how California’s Proposition 209 has affected her AVID program, she indicated that it really hadn’t. There is every indication, however, that California schools that adopt AVID after the passage of anti-affirmative action legislation may have a different ethnic profile than schools that adopted AVID before the passage of anti-affirmative action legislation, especially given the watchful diligent eye of special interest groups who monitor policies and practices that might single out benefits for minority students. The demographics of the various schools implementing AVID also have a significant impact on who is selected for AVID and directly effects the number of

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minority students served by the program. At “Palm Valley High,” for example, the population is approximately 99% Hispanic therefore, almost all students in AVID are Hispanic. Conversely, in North Carolina where there is only a 12–16% African American population in East Oakwood High and Oakwood High respectively, one AVID teacher complained that the AVID classes are getting whiter and whiter. In sum, AVID’s decision to change the definition of students targeted for admission occurred in response to forces outside of AVID, specifically the political and social climate in California, Virginia and Kentucky. This redefinition of the target population is a particularly vivid case of a design team continuing to change its organizational forms and their reform models in the process of working with schools, “building the plane while flying it,” as it were.

Reform Model Changes in Response to New Government Policies and Market Forces As we just explained, AVID made adjustments to its model to keep pace with state legislation eliminating affirmative action and to appeal to a broader base of constituents in diverse communities. So too, in response to the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program2 funding at the federal level, several design teams are making changes, often enhancing the services they offer schools. In several cases, the design teams have further specified their reform models, or at least what is required to implement their models, in order to make them more marketable in the CSRD landscape. For example, largely in response to CSRD, the Core Knowledge Foundation now offers professional development, sample lesson plans, and assistance in preparing grant applications for e federal funds. This is a significant departure from even three years prior, when relatively no assistance to schools was provided. At most, schools received short overview presentations from Core Knowledge Foundation (Datnow, Borman & Stringfield, 2000). Now, as a response to CSRD, the Foundation has substantially increased its professional development offerings to include a series of four workshops. These workshops are required for any schools that contract with the Foundation as part of their CSRD grant applications. For CSRD schools, the Foundation requires a formal application process which includes a letter of commitment stating how buy-in of 80% of the staff was obtained. Schools must also submit a school-wide planning document that includes a year-long proposal for teaching Core and state and district standards, and sample lesson plans. They must also spend a minimum of $200 per teacher on Core Knowledge-related resource materials. None of these guidelines existed before CSRD, nor did most of the professional development offerings.

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Although not all design teams have scaled up their offerings in response to CSRD, they have all become more specified in one way or another. As a design team member from Comer SDP stated: “Obey-Porter really highlighted that we need to be more definitive in our program, what it is that we do, and what it takes to do this program . . . I think that was a good thing.” The Comer design team has also recently developed a web site, as have most of the other design teams, to answer people’s questions about the reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools national office explained that they too have made efforts to think about how CES can “do well in the design fairs” that now occur as a result of CSRD. In essence, CSRD has pushed reform designs further into competition with each other. Most of the representatives from design teams that we spoke with were intimately aware of this. One design team member spoke of Success for All as having the “market share . . . and once you have the market share, you never lose it.” Breaking into the reform market was difficult for some design teams who were not accustomed to marketing efforts, or to how they might be seen to the outside world. The lesser-known reform designs had to struggle to establish a national reputation or “increase visibility,” particularly if they were not affiliated with a well-known university. Some newer design teams worried about being “pigeon-holed” as having particular types of schools, such as suburban schools or charter schools, as their only “customers,” when they were in fact attempting to appeal to a broader market. Design teams have also responded to the rising tide of academic standards and accountability, particularly with respect to reading and math, as well as to the competition from other reform designs that already address these issues. For example, the Modern Red Schoolhouse Institute responded by engaging in “product diversification” by developing “a targeted reading program that really addresses shifting scores on state tests.” A member of the design team explained that this component of the design could be “unbundled” from the rest of the model for specific use in low performing schools, particularly those that needed to raise basic skill levels before they could begin the major work of reform through Modern Red. The Institute thought they could better market their services to low-performing schools that are often in need of quick fixes this way, and thereby deflect schools away from a model such as SFA that can be implemented more rapidly. The Modern Red Schoolhouse Institute also engages all schools in a process of aligning the school curriculum to state and local standards, as well as the standards of the reform. In order to be more responsive to schools’ needs and similar policy demands, the Coalition of Essential Schools has also formed a partnership with the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland to provide optional elementary school curricula and lesson ideas. CES has begun conversations about working with the National Writing Project in a similar fashion with respect to high school curricula. The CES web site now also includes a repository of “best practices” which teachers can

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use as resources. All the while, CES has been careful not to endorse a particular curriculum, yet as a staff member explained, there is concern that CES has not provided enough help to teachers over the years. Also in response to market demands, the Comer School Development Program has made its model more “academic” according to a member of the design team: I think we believe that schools were having dialogues about the curriculum and instruction and the more we worked with schools we realized that those conversations weren’t happening, or they weren’t happening to the degree that we thought they should be happening. And certainly as school reforms and different programs were focusing on special areas, literacy, math, social skills, etc . . .. And that if we didn’t do that, that would be a gap, and people would see that as a weakness in our program, and so we got criticized in many instances for not having a stronger academic focus.

She went on to say that they brought the “Essentials for Literacy” program, developed at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, into the School Development Program. The design team does not require schools to use this literacy program, but they might recommend it after schools have undertaken the “balanced curriculum” process. This process involves staff development activities in which school staffs work together to align the curriculum with state and district standards, use assessment results to refine and improve the curriculum, and make connections to the development pathways that are at the heart of the Comer model (Squires, 1998). This process has been refined in response to increased pressure for schools to address state standards and perform well on high-stakes tests. While schools that have been implementing Comer SDP for some time may not have participated in the curricular aspects the model as of yet, they acknowledged that the reform was heading in that direction. A principal who attended the design team’s leadership institute noticed this change, “The last conference that I attended, they were getting very much into the developmental pathways.” Like the Comer School Development Program, the Audrey Cohen College design team has adapted its model to help new schools correlate state and local standards with the “24 abilities” that are part of the reform model. Audrey Cohen College has also responded to the increased emphasis on accountability for reading and math, but to a much lesser degree, even if it meant slower growth, rather than swimming with the tide. As a representative from the college stated, “While we’re trying to be more and more sensitive to the issues of reading, and we’re trying to come up with recommendations for reading approaches that are complementary. And we certainly are working on math . . . But we’re still . . . I think we just have all these additional pieces.” She also included: Schools are sort of like in the literacy frenzy . . . and here we come along saying ‘yes, you have to develop reading skills and you have to develop math skills, you need to be oriented toward the world of work and to the future, but there’s a whole lot more that has to be done if the

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children are going to be competitive for the next century.’ And what we offer you is a whole package to get to work on all of those issues. So when a superintendent or a principal looks at that says, ‘oh that sounds wonderful, but right now I’ve got to raise those reading scores’ . . ..

They might choose a structured literacy program instead. In fact, she pointed to an example of a district that wanted schools to implement SFA as well as the Audrey Cohen model, which was already in place. The design team chose to withdraw its involvement from those schools because they did not see the compatibility between the reforms. However, there is a cost involved in these decisions, as the design team member explained: “We’re going to grow at a slower rate because we’ve got a good design, it’s just that I view it as a little ahead of its time.” In other words, the Audrey Cohen College design team has been willing to compromise their rate of growth in favor of working with schools that have goals beyond improving students’ literacy and numeracy skills. Even Success for All, which is naturally well aligned with the policy focus on improved reading achievement (and arguably helped to fuel the reform movement in this direction), has had to adjust its model in some localities to meet demands of state and local tests. In one district, for example, the Success for All design team worked to supplement some features of their curriculum around the state test, as students were not showing expected improvements in reading comprehension. According to one SFA facilitator, Slavin and Madden themselves visited the district and provided materials that would aid the school in preparation for the state assessment test. As these and the other examples make clear, design teams have been flexible in responding to changing policy and political climates in order to better compete in the reform marketplace. Our findings about the changing design team add credence to our argument that the scaling up of school reform is not just about school level change. No doubt, the school is a center of action in reform, but it is not the only locus of action. Actions (or inactions) taken by the design team are inextricably connected to actions taken within schools. Design team actions are also bound up with actions occurring on the senate floor, in staterooms, in district offices, in the public domain, and in other design teams. The relationship between the actions in these various sites can be understood as Hall’s conditional process or a “thick chain or braid” (Star & Bowker, 1997, p. 17; cf. McDermott, 1980, pp. 14–15), not a one-directional process emanating at the “top” or the “bottom” of the reform process.

CONCLUSIONS Peter Hall’s work disputes the claim that qualitative analysis cannot address “macro issues.” When the public policy process is portrayed as a linear sequence of

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implementation or a mechanical process of program testing, adoption and institutionalization, then our theories and models are susceptible to structural determinism – the fallacy that structural forces, often originating in sites away from local circumstances constrain, even determine action. Our studies of school reform policy reinforce Peter Hall’s theorizing about social action. Educators – design team members, teachers, principals – are not compliant actors, passively responding to directives mandated from higher levels of bureaucracies. Instead, they are active agents, making policy in their everyday actions. In concrete educational encounters, educators may act in a variety of ways in response to reforms – initiating alternatives, advancing or sustaining reform efforts, resisting or actively subverting reform efforts. Most importantly, the agency of educators is part of a complex dynamic, shaping and shaped by the structural and cultural features of school and society. In other words, local educators helped to “make” educational reforms, regardless of whether a reform had well-defined elements. Educators modified reform design features in various ways to fit with sociopolitical and cultural factors, their local needs, practical circumstances, and their own ideologies. In some cases, reform implementation was enhanced. In other cases, reform implementation was constricted. And, just as schools changed, design teams changed. In some cases, design teams metamorphosed into different forms, often to serve increasingly large numbers of schools effectively. Elements of reform models themselves were sometime changed to reflect market and accountability demands. But when we formulate social policy as a conditional process as Peter Hall instructs us, we see that public policy is generated in face-to-face interactions among real people, confronting real problems in concrete social contexts, such as classrooms, school board meetings, courts of law, and state legislatures. Because these contexts are inevitably connected to other contexts (Sarason, 1997), contexts throughout the public policy system must be considered. At a given point in time in research on implementation, the interaction among social actors in one context is fore grounded, and of necessity, the other contexts are back grounded. But in order to render a more complete analysis, Peter Hall’s work shows the value of describing the interconnections among contexts throughout the social system. Building upon and extending Hall’s work, we believe it is also important to pay attention to the role of power and perspective in shaping policy implementation. Put simply, educators in schools had to respond to decisions made by more powerful people who interacted in board rooms, legislatures, or design teams. Once underway, reform efforts are suffused by politics in various ways. The meaning of a policy (here, a reform) – and how it was implemented – varied according to a person’s or organization’s perspective. That is, as a result of the institutional distribution and application of power, the meaning of the implementation system

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or its aspects is not necessarily shared; there can be disagreement, or conflict over the meaning of actions, events, even the system itself. If there is consensus, it is not the automatic result of a shared culture. Consensus is achieved, not given. It is achieved through negotiation and often strife, which means it is fragile, subject to revision and change. In our studies of school reform, schools, districts, design teams, and states found ways to successfully work together – or did not work well together – to implement a reform or a policy in their particular local contexts. In sum, bringing data on school reform into conversation with a theoretical framework inspired by Hall’s work has rendered a more complex and nuanced understanding of the public policy implementation process and importantly moves away from micro-macro dualisms in sociological theory.

NOTES 1. It’s all his fault. Peter Hall was the first author’s first graduate advisor at UC Santa Barbara. Hall pointed Mehan toward Cicourel, Shibutani, Scheff, Zimmerman, and his own developing work in symbolic interaction. Mehan has done the same for Datnow and Hubbard. The rest is history. 2. The federal CSRD program, also known as the bipartisan Obey-Porter bill, allocated $150 million in 1998 (and additional funds in subsequent years) to schools willing to adopt “research-based” reform designs.

REFERENCES Au, K. (1980). Participation structures in a reading lesson with Hawaiian children. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 11(2), 91–115. Au, K., & Jordan, C. (1981). Teaching reading to Hawaiian children: Finding a culturally appropriate solution. In: H. Trueba, G. P. Guthrie & K. H. Au (Eds), Culture and the Bilingual Classroom (pp. 139–152). Rowley, MA: Newberry House. Bushweller, K. (1998). The forgotten majority. American School Board Journal (March), 16–21. Cazden, C. B. (1986). Classroom discourse. In: M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (pp. 432–463). New York: Macmillan. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge: Harvard Balknap. Cuban, L. (1998). How schools change reforms: Redefining reform success and failure. Teachers College Record, 99(3), 153–177. Datnow, A., Borman, G., & Stringfield, S. (2000). School reform through a highly specified curriculum: A study of the implementation and effects of the Core Knowledge Sequence. The Elementary School Journal, 101(2), 167–191. Datnow, A., Hubbard, L., & Mehan, H. (2002). Extending school reform: From one school to many. New York: Routledge Falmer. Erickson, F., & Mohatt, G. (1982). Participant structures in two communities. In: G. D. Spindler (Ed.), Doing the Ethnography of Schooling (pp. 132–175). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Fullan, M. G. (1991). The new meaning of educational change (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Guthrie, L. F., & Guthrie, P. G. (1998). The 1997 evaluation of statewide AVID expansion, Final report. Burlingame CA: Center for Research, Evaluation And Training in Education. Hall, P. M. (1995). The consequences of qualitative analysis for sociological theory: Beyond the microlevel. The Sociological Quarterly, 36(2), 397–423. Hall, P. M. (1997). Meta-power, social organization, and the shaping of social action. Symbolic Interaction, 20(4), 397–418. Hall, P. M., & McGinty, P. J. W. (1997). Policy as the transformation of intentions: Producing program from statutes. The Sociological Quarterly, 38(3), 439–467. Lipsky, M. (1982). Street level bureaucracy. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. McLaughlin, M., & Talbert, J. E. (1993). Contexts that matter for teaching and learning. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Center for Research on the Context of Secondary School Teaching. Mead, G. H. (1954). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: Open Court. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oakes, J. (1992). Can tracking research inform practice? Technical, normative, and political considerations. Educational Researcher (May), 12–21. Oakes, J., Quartz, K. H., Ryan, S., & Lipton, M. (1999). Becoming good American schools: The struggle for civic virtue in educational reform. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pressman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A. (1973). Implementation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sarason, S. (1997). The culture of the school and the problem of change (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Schutz, A. (1966). Collected papers. The Hague: Nijhoff. Smith, L., & Keith, P. (1971). Anatomy of an educational innovation. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Squires, D. (1998). Towards a balanced curriculum: Aligning standards, curriculum, and assessments. ERS Spectrum, 16(3), 17–24. Tharp, R., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning and schooling in social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varenne, H., & McDermott, R. P. (1998). Successful failure: The school America builds. Boulder CO: Westview Press. Wilcox, K. (1982). Differential socialization in the classroom: Implications for educational opportunity. In: G. Spindler & L. Spindler (Eds), Doing the Ethnography of Schooling (pp. 268–309). New York: Harcourt, Brace, World.

TRANSVERSING INTRA-, INTER-, AND TRANSPERSONAL COMMUNICATION: THE LARCENOUS LEADS OF PETER M. HALL Spencer E. Cahill In the late 1960s, as Peter readily admits (Hall, 1972, p. 70), he accidentally discovered Murray Edelman’s (1964) The Symbolic Uses of Politics. He immediately pilfered Edelman’s ideas and ran with them. That was only the beginning of his larcenous career. Over the years, Erving Goffman, Anslem Strauss, and David Maines, to name but a few, fell victim to his scholarly pillage. Yet, no one seemed to mind. Perhaps it was because Peter never tried to pawn the plunder as his own. Maybe it was because he didn’t hoard the spoils but publicly plied them. Most likely, it was because of what he did with the booty. What he did was to break symbolic interactionism out of the intrapersonal and interpersonal prison in which its detractors and more than of few of its practitioners had confined it. Eluding its captors, he took it up into the fresh air of what I am calling the transpersonal – the realms of mass politics and power, of social organization and policy. He admittedly had accomplices in this daring escapade, including a couple of contributors to this symposium (Altheide, 1976; Maines, 1982), but I am sure even they would admit that Peter was a ringleader. Not everyone was pleased. An early critic thought symbolic interactionism was fine in its place, its microsociological place according to her (Kanter, 1972, p. 80), but that Peter was taking it too far. She accused him of tarnishing the noble

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sheen of collective interests with the messiness of political bargaining, impression management, information control, and symbolic mobilization (Hall, 1972; Kanter, 1972, p. 81). Perhaps she had not read his 1970 article with John Hewitt on the Nixon administration’s response to the vocal and bloody protests following the American military invasion of Cambodia. There, Peter and John demonstrated that the presumption of collective interests, or what they termed value consensus, provides a handy resource for attempts at symbolic mobilization and pacification. That presumption provides a foundation for what they called the “quasi-theory” of communication. If we share common values and interests, then our disagreements and disputes must result from “breakdowns in . . . communication” (Hall & Hewitt, 1970, p. 20). As Peter and John argued, this quasi-theoretical sleight of hand magically transforms substantive political conflicts into technical issues of repairing and enhancing communication. To presume the existence of common interests or values, as Peter (e.g. Hall, 1980, p. 58) would later implicitly argue, is to treat what should be a topic of study as a resource for study (Zimmerman & Pollner, 1970), in the ethnomethodological language of the time. In further developing their analysis of quasi-theories, John and Peter pilfered that language. They suggested that political culture includes background expectancies, like the expectancy of value consensus, on which ad hoc and post hoc explanations of social problems are built (Hewitt & Hall, 1973). These quasi-theories bring interpretative order to social disorder and, over time, become part of the common stock of knowledge on which political rhetoric draws. As such, they are powerful resources for symbolically mobilizing certain responses to social problems and precluding others. The savvy quasi-theoretician trades upon members’ own interpretive methods to shape their definitions of social problems and, thereby, their political sympathies. Such quasi-theorizing has less to do with the arts of democratic consensus building than with the craft of political manipulation. To Peter’s early critic, Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1972, p. 86), paying all this attention to “symbolic manipulation” trivialized the very real role of “guns, bombs, and large sums of money” in politics. Ironically, as Peter would later demonstrate, it is the neglect of the symbolic and communicative import of “guns, bombs, and large sums of money” that trivializes their political effects. The targets of force and violence seldom are their only audience or their principally intended one. For example, in “The Presidency and Impression Management” (Hall, 1979, pp. 292–293), Peter convincingly argues that the Kennedy administration’s strategy of limited warfare, as in Vietnam, was intended not so much to conquer territory as to foster the impression that America was strong and resolute. Although impoverished peoples like the Vietnamese were its principal victims, its principally intended audiences were more formidable foes such as the Soviet Union. Limited warfare was meant to deter them; the killing and destruction in other lands was

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merely collateral damage of the deterrent message. More recently, Americans were rudely reminded of the often deadly effects of symbolic politics. The intentional crashing of commercial airliners into the World Trade Center was arguably meant to alter the global mediascape even more than it altered the landscape of lower Manhattan, and it arguably succeeded. Guns, bombs, large sums of money, and hijacked airliners do have very real consequences, not the least of which are symbolic ones that are often more enduring than their immediately material effects. The powerlessness of what had been and still is touted as the most powerful country in history against a handful of destructive dramaturges also sadly confirmed Peter’s (e.g. Hall, 1985) symbolic interactionist conviction that power is not something one possesses but something that must be realized. Power is not a thing but an act. Resources of various sorts are certainly implicated in such acts, but they must be mobilized and artfully deployed in order effectively to control the actions of others, in order to realize their powerful potential. As Peter (1985, p. 320) argues, perception, interpretation, and communication are intimately involved in acts of power. The potential power of resources is, in part, a matter of its expression and the impressions its expression fosters. Potential targets of its use may fear its possessors or doubt their willingness to use it, to use it competently, or to use it resolutely. Possessors of potential power must anticipate the likely reactions of both targets of and audiences to its use. Will they submit, resist, or form coalitions that counter the power imbalance? Acts of power are as much interactions as any social act, and as much matters of meaning. Descriptions of the social distribution of resources, whether material or symbolic, may document the allocation of potential power, but explaining power, as Peter has so elegantly shown, requires detailed attention to the interactive processes of its realization. Perhaps if his surname were not so Anglican, his work would have attracted as much attention as that fashionable French inquisitor of power. It arguably teaches us as much about how “infinitesimal mechanisms” of power are colonized and utilized by “ever more general mechanisms” as that of Foucault (1980, p. 99). Over the years, Peter has detailed the complex processes of power, both analytically and empirically. He has shown how the consequences of collective action in one situation set the conditions for actions in others (Hall, 1995, 1997). He has documented how such “infinitesimal mechanisms” as strategic positions within flows of social action, the establishment of rules and conventions, the structuring of communication and situations, and the shaping of collective symbols and discourses coalesce into what he calls “meta-power” or the ability to determine the very nature of the social games others must play (Hall, 1997, p. 405). Yet, like Foucault, Peter recognizes that power is never absolute. Others may determine the conditions under which and the resources with which we act, but we always retain the power of interpretation, leaving a space for what Herbert Blumer (1969, p. 18)

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called “the play and fate of meanings.” And, as George Herbert Mead (1934, p. 145) taught us, responses to acts, including those of power and meta-power, make their meanings. That is why, although the potentially powerful usually get their way, it is seldom quite the way they intended. Yes, people do not make history just as they please; “they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves” (Marx, 1852, p. 436): but make it they meaningfully and fatefully do. However constrained, we are not mere marionettes in one or another historically determined melodrama but collaborative authors of our own historic farces and tragedies. Although Peter has taken symbolic interactionism in a variety of new directions, he never lost sight of the interpersonal and intrapersonal home where he found it. He empirically dissolves reified social structures of analytic making into the active structuring of social life by those who live it. He shows how transpersonal processes of power, politics, and social organization structure and bind varied social situations together while at the same time being animated by interpersonal processes within them. For example, Peter (Hall, 1995) has documented how an educational reform bill that emerged out of legislative hearings structured interactions among school board members, school administrators, and teachers, but that those situated interactions then restructured what legislators intended. Similarly, the political effects of politicians’ carefully crafted attempts at public impression management are ultimately decided by countless interpersonal and inner conversations in front of flickering screens and over morning coffee (Hall, 1985, p. 339). Peter teaches us that public policy is as much a product of its implementation as its making and that public opinion is as much a product of interpretation as manipulative messages. Peter also recognized that participants’ self-images and definitions are implicated in these and other political processes. For example, Peter (Hall, 1979) documents that the self-assured John Kennedy wielded his Presidential power assuredly while the self-doubting Nixon wielded his defensively and ultimately self-destructively. The self-images of those over whom power is wielded are no less important in deciding its effects. They may grudgingly accept or defiantly resist the disempowering self-definitions seemingly more powerful others attribute to them. And, their resistance can be empowering. That was arguably the case during the 1950s with insurgent Algerians who resisted French colonization of their country and consciousness, with those “uppity” African-Americans in the 1960s who refused to keep their lowly social place at the back of the bus and away from lunch counters (Hall, 1985, pp. 329–330), and with those defiant women who wrestled microphones away from strutting male revolutionary “wanna bees” (like a much younger me) in the early 1970s. Like symbolic interactionism, history teaches us that the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are inseparably connected. Peter never forgot that lesson and never let the rest of us forget it.

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Peter has even taken an occasional holiday from his interrogation of power, politics and policy to explore the interpersonal. For example, along with Dee Ann Spencer, he has delved into the origins and interactional dynamics of the ritual handshake in Western societies. Although seemingly perfunctory, Peter and Dee Ann recognize that hand shaking is an enabling convention, in Goffman’s (1983, p. 5) sense, that makes possible variably meaningful variations and departures. For example, as a ritual of solidarity and equality, the pointed refusal of an outstretched hand is a particularly disarming expression of distance and contempt (Hall & Spencer Hall, 1983, p. 257). On another hand, the grab handing shakes of politicians simultaneously express that they are both of the people and sufficiently above them to bestow the blessing of their hands (Hall & Spencer Hall, 1983, p. 252). Peter and Dee Ann also consider more subtle but no less meaningful variations. The implied solidarity and equality of the handshake may be betrayed by either an unexpectedly limp or crushing hand (Hall & Spencer Hall, 1983, p. 258). A firm hand may convey self-confidence and a clammy one self-consciousness. In any case, in offering others access to ourselves by offering them our hand, we open ourselves up to their assessments (Hall & Spencer Hall, 1983, p. 256). Peter and Dee Ann’s detailed analysis of the seemingly perfunctory handshake demonstrates that there is an abundance of meaning between pressed palms, confirming Goffman’s (1956, p. 91) insight that “the gestures we sometimes call empty are perhaps the fullest things of all.” Along with the late Stan Saxton, Peter also urged us to rethink how we think about relations between the interpersonal and intrapersonal. In 1987, Stan and Peter (Saxton & Hall, 1987) called upon symbolic interactionists and their scholarly kin to scale the disciplinary barriers dividing social psychological inquiry and embrace Kenneth Gergen’s (1982) innovative historical version. Few listened. Gergen and his followers kept plugging along as did we, paying only passing attention to our mutual duplication of efforts. They examined the role of narrative in our social and inner lives as did we (e.g. Gergen, 1994, pp. 185ff; Maines, 1993). They explored how so-called post-modern social conditions affect our interpersonal and inner lives and so did we (e.g. Gergen, 1991; Shalin, 1993). They considered how the social construction of the person was possible as did I (Cahill, 1998; Shweder & Miller, 1985). Over the years, a few of them and a few more of us discovered our common cause, and, at the dawn of our young millennium, the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction hosted Kenneth and Mary Gergen as keynote speakers at its annual symposium. It was a belated coupling. Who knows how fruitful the union might have been if we had heeded Stan and Peter’s earlier matchmaking. In this and many other respects, we should have followed Peter’s larcenous example. It is criminal of us not to do so. Scholarship is a larcenous business, and the social scientific variety most of us practice is particularly so. We pilfer elegant

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ideas from whomever and wherever we find them. We lurk in the shadows of other people’s lives and textually abduct them. We lure people into conversations and then electronically steal their words. We then analytically rummage through the plunder, add a few words of our own, and offer the laundered loot to anyone willing to read it. That’s our disreputable business, but it is my conviction that it is only criminal when we do not give as much back as we take. By that standard, Peter would be acquitted of any and all charges. He has always given more back than he has taken. As these brief comments suggest, we are all intellectually richer because of his larcenous scholarly ways. I encourage him to continue them and am even willing to aid and abet them. Thanks to Peter, we better understand the discourse and practice of politics, the complexities of power, the trans-situational structuring of social life, the meaningful nuances of interpersonal rituals, and the value of scholarly ecumenicalism. And, that is quite a haul from Hall.

REFERENCES Altheide, D. (1976). Creating reality. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cahill, S. (1998). Toward a sociology of the person. Sociological Theory, 16, 131–148. Edelman, M. (1964). The symbolic uses of politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Two lectures. In: C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge (pp. 78–108). New York: Random House. Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self. New York: Basic Books. Gergen, K. (1994). Realities and relationships. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, E. ([1956] 1967). The nature of deference and demeanor. In: Interaction Ritual (pp. 47–95). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1–17. Hall, P. (1972). A symbolic interactionist analysis of politics. Sociological Inquiry, 42, 35–75. Hall, P. (1979). The presidency and impression management. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Vol. 2, pp. 283–305). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Hall, P. (1980). Structuring symbolic interaction: Communication as power. In: Communication Yearbook (Vol. 4, pp. 49–59). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Hall, P. (1985). Asymmetric relationships and processes of power. In: H. Faberman & R. Perinbanayagam (Eds), Foundations of Interpretive Sociology: Original Essays in Symbolic Interaction (pp. 309–344). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Hall, P. (1995). The consequences of qualitative analysis for sociological theory: Beyond the microlevel. The Sociological Quarterly, 36, 397–415. Hall, P. (1997). Meta-power, social organization, and the shaping of social action. Symbolic Interaction, 20, 397–418. Hall, P., & Hewitt, J. (1970). The quasi-theory of communication and the management of dissent. Social Problems, 18, 18–27.

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Hall, P., & Spencer Hall, D. A. (1983). The handshake as interaction. Semiotica, 45, 249–264. Hewitt, J., & Hall, P. (1973). Social problems, problematic situations, and quasi-theories. American Sociological Review, 38, 367–374. Kanter, R. M. (1972). Symbolic interactionism and politics in systemic perspective. Sociological Inquiry, 42, 77–92. Maines, D. (1982). In search of mesostructure: Studies in the negotiated order. Urban Life, 11, 267–279. Maines, D. (1993). Narrative’s moment and sociology’s phenomena: Toward a narrative sociology. The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 17–38. Marx, K. ([1852] 1972). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In: R. Tucker (Ed.), The MarxEngels Reader (pp. 436–525). New York: W. W. Norton. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saxton, S., & Hall, P. (1987). Two social psychologies: New grounds for discussion. In: N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interactionism (Vol. 8, pp. 43–67). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Shalin, D. (Ed.). (1993). Special feature: Self in crisis: Identity and the postmodern condition. Symbolic Interaction, 16, 303–426. Shweder, R., & Miller, J. (1985). The social construction of the person: How is it possible? In: K. Gergen & K. Davis (Eds), The Social Construction of the Person (pp. 41–68). New York: Springer-Verlang. Zimmerman, D., & Pollner, M. (1970). The everyday worlds as phenomenon. In: J. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding Everyday Life (pp. 80–103). Chicago: Aldine.

RESTING, REFLECTING, AND RENEWING Peter M. Hall 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. Each of the preceding papers has its own topic and separate theme and reflects the style and inclination of the authors. Each also engages common and convergent ideas and issues across the papers. I will not dwell on extensive comments about the papers. That would no doubt be redundant and dismissive of the interaction between author and audience. Rather, I will call attention to what I value and take from the articles. Spencer Cahill, through his marvelous facility with language and deft, sly sense of humor captures the essence of many parts of the published record, its dependence on the contributions and cooperation of others, as well as a larger purpose, which he characterizes as the transpersonal. David Altheide,

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in his inimitable provocative way, develops a powerful analysis of a larger-thanlife recent event with enormous human and global consequences by linking his extensive knowledge of mass media with ideas about power and metapower. David Maines, taking his turn in our ongoing, several decade-long dialogue, while acutely analyzing early and late writings on social conditions, social organization, the mesodomain, and forms of inequality, prods me in his “up front” way to move forward and be explicit about expressed values and tacit assumptions about the nature of a healthy society and choosing sides. Bud Mehan, Amanda Datnow, and Lea Hubbard, a trio of superb educational scholars, show vividly the power of what can be done with a processual examination of educational reform across space and time. Mary Jo Neitz, whose voice is one I carry with me when at work and who has observed that work most closely, captures a transformation in the scholarly agenda and an ongoing dialectic in my life and my work which she artfully represents as conversations. It should also be noted that in our conversations she often asks me why I have not “conversed” with this sociologist or that concept. I want to use these papers and this occasion to discuss the trajectory and development of my scholarship. I also want to ground its formulation direction in my biography and experiences. Finally, I want to suggest some subjects and issues that could benefit from further attention by interactionists, not to mention sociologists in general. I went to the University of Minnesota for the purpose of learning symbolic interaction and studying the self-conception of juvenile delinquents. I did both and left graduate school as a social psychologist interested in self, interaction, symbols, and communication. My early work and teaching focused on these and related areas. However, while teaching political sociology, I chafed under the conventional literature and approach of that field, and as Spencer Cahill noted, stumbled upon Murray Edelman, later took up Kenneth Burke and Walter Buckley, then reread Goffman and found a way into power and politics. The thrust of that work, including the quasi-theory articles, was on communication and power. Three elements would begin a shift towards a somewhat different focus. The first was the work on organizations as negotiated orders and a developing interest in schools and education. Dialogue with Ken Benson, mentioned by Mary Jo Neitz, and collaboration with Dee Spencer culminated in using the negotiated order perspective to compare several school districts. The second is less visible and less public. In David Miller’s exegesis on G. H. Mead, there is a discussion of the role of the hand, its connection to mind, the importance of physical objects, and the hand’s role in manipulating the environment. Somehow in my education and reading, I had missed this. The immediate consequence was the handshake article but the longer run effect was a shift to the primary significance of activity, work, and the material sphere over

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communication. This was coupled with the orientation to organizations and the major contributions of the late 1970s and 1980s that I utilized in “Interactionism and the Study of Social Organization” which made collective activity a starting point and major building block. (Clearly, I was not alone here, borrowing and being influenced as I was by Strauss, Becker, Maines and Hughes.) Examination of asymmetric relations and processes of power represented the third element. Here for me was an explicit examination of inequality. It was, I hoped, the basis for a more extensive discussion of stratification, which did not occur. Nevertheless, it created a discussion around how domination was created, sustained and how, because of subversion and resistance, undermined, held at a distance or overthrown. An opportunity to study an educational policy using the mesodomain perspective led to new insights into the perspective and to formulations about the policy process. The first was a shift from the focus on elementary components of the perspective to the systemic quality of the social organization of the policy process, how it represented a whole. The second was greater attending to the grounding through processuality and temporality as well as history and context. The third was the recognition and elevation of metapower as a major process in extending control over time and space. Response to this work again by Ken Benson, together with Michelle Martindill, led to further modifications by including the addition of a policy context containing power relationships, paradigmatic perspectives, and conventional practices that sets conditions for the making of any new policy. In addition, they encouraged me to re-examine the work on policy by historical institutionalists. Meanwhile, in ways not visible to most interactionists, I was working in the area of education and inequality. Together with Bruce Biddle and Barbara Bank, we organized separate symposia on race and ethnicity, gender, and poverty and class in schools. For each of those symposia, I wrote pieces that examined the concepts, their effects in schools, and discussed policies that could mitigate negative influences. I have also been engaged in and writing about the work of restructuring schools and extending these reforms and other policies beyond local sites. For some time, my intentions have been to use interactionism to address issues of power, politics and inequality and to deal with larger forms of social organization. While deeply committed to the pragmatists assumptions of interactionism, I also never believed it was a complete perspective or that there were not other points of view and practitioners that were congruent and useful. Finally, my research into the state policy process led me to increased awareness of the insides of schools, educational bureaucracies, and capitol hallways as well as extensive involvement with others working hard to reorganize schools and eliminate inequities. I also have come to take most seriously Stan Saxton’s challenge to us to become

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citizen-scholars and of others like Harvey Farberman, David Maines, Kent Sandstrom, and Pat McGinty who have called for a critical pragmatism. In summary, the work began with a focus on self, interaction, talk and symbols – in a social psychological vein. It expanded to concerns with power, activity, and organizations. The next iteration featured asymmetry, mesodomain, and the policy process. The most recent work concerns metapower, social organization across space and time, policy contexts, historical institutionalism, and forms of inequality – sociological to the core. While I will take any and all criticism for the inadequacies of those conceptualizations and the research, I freely admit to using other people’s ideas – both inside and outside the perspective – to advance and extend the perspective. It could not have been otherwise. I attribute some familial influences and biographical experiences to the development of this body of scholarship and the way it was constructed. My parents met in New York City in the early 1930s. My father was born to Southern Baptist parents in Mississippi and raised in Alabama. He came to New York City to attend Columbia University. My mother, a Latvian Jew, came to New York with her parents in 1913. She would, in opposition to her father, attend Hunter College. My parents met in radical circles of the time and would spend the next 25 years involved in left-wing political activity in Alabama, Washington, DC, among other venues. They divorced in 1950. After leaving “the Party,” my mother went on to receive a Ph.D. in Anthropology and become an expert on murals at Teotihuacan (Mexico). My father took his journalistic expertise to upstate New York where he published several weekly newspapers, served on the commission establishing the Adirondack Park, and edited the state conservation magazine. My parents embued me with a set of family values that emphasized activism, justice, equality and democracy. They were also incredibly smart people with a broad array of knowledge, interests and skills. At the same time, they were part of a collectivity that claimed to have the truth. There was a sense that people who disagreed with us lacked intelligence. As a youth, I certainly never felt comfortable expressing doubt or raising questions about that worldview. Over time I would come to raise questions, probably a form of adolescent rebellion. Nevertheless, the revelations of the mid-1950s showed vividly the crimes and hypocrisies upon which epic myths were constructed and then crashed to the ground. I have, as a result, continued to be uncomfortable with claimants to monopoly of truth. In addition, I have always felt a sense of marginality, never quite fitting in. I think that has led to a view from the edge, a multiple consciousness that sees alternatives. While retaining the basic values and desires for a humane society that my parents favored, I have sought perspectives beyond Marx for their solution. Even as I worked to do this through interactionism, I looked outside the perspective to find useful ideas whether in systems theory, ethnomethodology, Weberian-influenced

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scholars, or neo-Marxists. But above all, it has meant maintaining an interactionism that is conditional, contextual, constructed, contingent and processual. In the effort to expand the perspective while retaining its processual character, I suggest that we give attention to the study of institutions, inequality orders, space and time, the coordination of collective action and its consequences across those dimensions, and the utilization of complexity theory as a meta-theory to synthesize processual and action-oriented sociologies. Interactionism can benefit from broader and deeper exploration of the consequences of contextualization. While the policy process analysis is improved by the addition of the policy context, it is further informed by the development and organization of the institution of American education. Institutions, relatively bounded domains that are socially organized and cultured, provide historical and structural contexts in which much collective activity takes place. But it is also critical that we not reify institutional influences, and, therefore, show its socially constructed, historically contingent nature and the processes by which it conditions, structures, and cultures collective action. Similarly, we must be attentive to avoiding monolithic objectification and point out conditions for change as well as stability and open to the contradictions, conflicts, loose coupling, and multiple perspectives. Interactionists, as a rule, have not given sufficient attention to the study of inequality. While interactionists have over the years examined race and ethnicity, they have focused on gender to a lesser degree and much less so in regard to class. It is possible to offer an interactionist perspective that demonstrated how they are socially produced formations and constructed social definitions. That is, through collective activity particular racial orders are formed, sustained, and/or altered. Similarly, actors construct, carry, and change meanings and images of genders or classes that support or change those formations. Given the character of different societies, institutions, and organizations, we would argue that race, class, and gender are also situational and situated – that is potentially differentially relevant. Moving beyond that, we would note that heuristically, they can be separated, but in the lives of people often intersect. The nature of that intersection, however, is not predetermined but played out by contextualized actors in numerous situations where the inequality orders must be brought to bear and enacted. Here is an open invitation to the interactionst perspective to explore the processual, contingent, but conditioned enactment of intersecting race, class, and gender orders in particular places and times. A major issue facing social science is how to handle processes labeled globalization, namely that action in one time and place has wide and significant consequences of many other places and times. A first project in developing understanding is take seriously the phrase, “across time and space” and examine how time and space are socially constructed, consequential and conditioning.

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Interactionists have made major contributions to demonstrating the social character and influence of temporality and spatiality separately, but not jointly. Modern physics and some social scientists, however, have noted the two are co-existent, interdependent, dynamic, and mutually elaborated through action. Thus, it is vital to make clear how spatiotemporal orders are constructed, how they time and space structuring and culturing processes, and how these timings and spacings contribute to the consequences of these processes. Following from that then should be an examination of how institutional processes are stretched to coordinate activity and interactions with those who are distant. The second project then involves understanding how collective action is constructed, coordinated, and made consequential across those divides. We know too little about how multinational corporations conduct their activities, how militaries conduct wars in foreign terrain, how social movements mobilize to create international protests, or how the Olympic games, peace efforts or disaster relief are carried out. I have recently been reading in the areas of biology, physics, and cosmology and have been led to a perspective with intriguing implications. It carries various labels – complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics, and complex adaptive systems. It is portrayed as a “living system” with complex organization, open boundaries, nonequilibria, nonlinearity, self-organizing, irreversibility, relationality, dynamics, and possibilism. It demonstrates how the local gives rise to the global, and how the latter turns back and affects the former. It conveys a view of agency that is objectively real as an emergent of biological and social life. Its reliance on relationality places emphasis on the dyad, networks, and collective activity. Its view of contingency opens up the possibilities of alternatives and emancipation. Complexity theory has strong parallels and compatibility with mesodomain analysis. It offers a metatheory for synthesizing diverse perspectives. It supports future theory integration by providing a comprehensive context for unraveling problems of collective action across space and time and for clarifying the opaqueness of troublesome unexpected consequences. It promotes a reconstruction of sociological theory by grounding pragmatist, processual, historical, conditional, relational, and reflexive analyses of social life. David Maines wrote in his response to the first of these sessions that the purpose was not personal but heuristic. That is, that it provided panelists with opportunities to analyze a corpus of work and to improve our understandings and knowledge. That was true for me when I read and commented on David’s work of that event. I hope it is the case of the panelists for this session and for those who read these pages. I have offered my comments here with that heuristic purpose in mind. Nevertheless, it is also personal and I remain grateful to my colleagues for their efforts. It was an interesting and stimulating experience with its usual amount of

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discomfort for me. I want to close by remembering colleagues who have helped me through their ideas, work, and support but who are no longer with us. Carl Couch, Stan Saxton, Anselm Strauss, Lou Zurcher, Dennis Brissett, and George Peters all contributed to clarifying social reality and in making our world a better place. Remembering them as inspirations, I trust we will sustain an interactionism that is engaged, receptive, and critical.

MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNICATION AS ACTION, SYSTEM, RELATION Wayne D. Woodward ABSTRACT Contemporary emphasis on language and communication in mental health research and practice establishes the need for a communication model that addresses the variety of contexts – institutional, social, and cultural – in which attribution of mental disorders, treatment, and recovery occur. A ‘triadic’ approach to communication considers sufferers’: (1) transactions with environmental circumstances; (2) interpretive engagement with symbolic/discursive resources; and (3) relational interactions with others. Foundations for the model derive from pragmatism, systems theory, and theories of dialogue. A brief case study of depressive illness illustrates the value of the model. Implications for the organization of professional expertise in mental health fields are discussed.

TOWARDS A COMMUNICATIVE MODEL FOR MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH AND PRACTICE Post-Freudian perspectives on mental and emotional disorders emphasize the role of interhuman perplexities associated with language use and communication. Mechanistic implications of the “intrapsychic or one-person model of psychoanalysis championed by Freud and his early followers” (Langs, 1998, p. xi) are supplanted by interpretive values that characterize various versions of a Studies in Symbolic Interaction Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, 69–92 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/PII: S0163239602260081

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contemporary “interactional or interpersonal, two-person model.” This approach inclines towards culturally-based understandings of mental health and disorder, and beyond that, to broader analyses that connect mental health syndromes to human suffering in its multiple manifestations. Interpretive models regard therapeutic treatment as communicative practice in which therapist and patient, or client, undertake the “creation of new experiences” (Miller & Dorpat, 1998, p. 3), involving formation of revised “schemas.” This collaborative, creative work counteracts disturbed behaviors by establishing a basis for more satisfying forms of “lived interactions” for sufferers. Attention to ‘twoperson,’ or dyadic, interactions that characterize the analytic setting can also extend to broader, environmental factors, as treatment strategies incorporate awareness of the social and cultural experiences that analysts and patients alike bring to the therapeutic interaction. A “triadic” (see Woodward, 1996) perspective is called for that combines attention to: (1) material, or physical-artifactual; (2) socio-cultural; and (3) relational, or mutual-personal, dimensions of mental-emotional health and disorders. From this perspective, therapy becomes a way of modeling dialogue and mutual-personal relations. The patient’s active ‘living through’ of improved interactions in the analytic setting can be developed as a basis for transforming his or her mutual-personal relations within the material and socio-cultural milieus of everyday life. A countervailing tendency is to view mental illnesses, or “somatopsychic disorders” (F´abrega, 1997, pp. 156 ff.), exclusively in terms of “biochemical processes within the brain and genetic influences” (Stoppard, 2000, p. 91). Biomedical explanations, conceptualized as causal accounts of mental diseases, take precedence over cultural analyses, which are viewed as addressing secondary, contextual factors derived from mental health illnesses (see Healey, 1997, p. 7). This movement towards biogenic explanations has been bolstered since the mid-1960s by “the advent of the psychiatric researcher who was conversant with the details of neurotransmitter metabolism, receptor binding, and endocrine changes – a researcher who spoke a different language from the analyst” (p. 157). This lexicon also differs from that of social and cultural theorists who consider mental health and disorders in terms of information-processing, interactions, and transactions. This paper asserts that research and treatment require an integrative mix of biogenic, psychological, and socio-cultural accounts to form technical descriptions, causal explanations, and recovery strategies related to mental disorders. The personal experience of suffering from a psychiatric disorder includes mental and physical distress, along with feelings of interpersonal and social maladjustment. Even if mental disorders could someday be definitively linked to biogenic causes, sufferers’ experiences still would retain a “social or moral dimension” (Young, 1997, p. 245). In addition, sufferers would need to signal their distress and

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communicate about progress towards recovery and maintenance. Furthermore, the significance of social and cultural responses to mental illness remains paramount, in terms of how psychiatric conditions are addressed institutionally and how sufferers experience the personal and social identities attributed to them in connection with their disorders. Accordingly, a communicative perspective on mental health is called for as a contribution to “disciplinary hybrids” (Stoppard, 2000, p. 91) that attempt to address psychological and socio-cultural factors surrounding mental health phenomena, while also acknowledging how mental disorders as “embodied experience” (p. 90) derive, certainly in part, from biogenic sources.1 A communicative approach challenges “the intellectual isolation . . . that separates studies of individual psychology from studies of the scoiocultural environment in which individuals live” (Wertsch, 1985a, p. 1). This perspective helps to integrate research and practice by extending across institutional barriers; these have tended to isolate professional roles and activities directed towards treatment of the individual psyche – i.e. therapists and general primary physicians – from roles and activities that address sufferers as they are situated in the milieu of their lived social and cultural relations – i.e. communication and public affairs professionals, other institutional administrators, colleagues, friends and relatives, community members. Communication is a constitutive practice that shapes professional as well as social relationships. Thus, it usefully links the variety of contacts and exchanges that contribute to mental health, mental disorders, and their treatment and recovery. A communicative understanding of mental-emotional disorders and their treatment can advance along several alternative, established paths. For example, communication can be conceived comprehensively as an explanatory model for the pathologies of mental disorder and/or a descriptive model for processes of treatment and recovery. This theoretical trajectory is exemplified by Ruesch’s and Bateson’s (1951, p. 5) pioneering advocacy of communication as an integrative focus for psychiatric research and practice, based on their assertion that “communication is the only scientific model which enables us to explain physical, intrapersonal, and cultural aspects of events within one system.”2 Theory and research can also highlight the significant role played by communication in the context of therapeutic exchanges between therapist and patient, or client. Dialogic approaches to therapy (see Friedman, 1985) provide historical precedents, while Robert Lang’s theories of “communicative psychotherapy” (see Smith, 1998) offer a contemporary extension of the approach, one that connects the communicative paradigm with cognitive studies and systems theory. Multiple contexts of communication are emphasized by the “interactionist approach” (see Spitzer & Denzin, 1968, p. vi) taken by “socially-oriented” (p. 1) psychiatrists and psychologists, along with sociologists, anthropologists,

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communication and language theorists, and interpretive scholars. A key concern is the “ascription process” by which sufferers are identified as disturbed, along with attention to institutional and socio-cultural forces that shape ascription practices and condition the overall experiences of sufferers.3 Transactional models (see Becker, 1964; Berne, 1961; Dewey & Bentley, 1949; Grinker et al., 1961; Spiegel, 1971; Woodward, 2001) contribute significantly to all three avenues for research and practice. The concept of “transaction” (see Bruner, 1986; Kaufer & Carley, 1993) is particularly relevant to the interactional perspective with its concern for wide-ranging forms of contact and exchange that play a part not only in administering treatments, but in addressing the social and cultural life of the sufferer. This paper describes a “transactional-participatory” (see Woodward, 1996) approach to mental health communication as a framework for research and practice. Drawing on an interdisciplinary mix of sources, the position derives significantly from modes of inquiry that are linked by a “contextualist” (see Rosnow & Georgondi, 1986) or “constructivist” (see Watzlawick, 1984) perspective. These include American pragmatism (see Grinker et al., 1961; Joas, 1993, 1996; Perry, 2001; Spiegel, 1971); contemporary cultural psychology inspired by Vygotsky’s (1978) “activity theory” (see Cole, 1996; Engestr¨om, 1999; Shweder, 1991; Wertsch, 1985a, b), current formulations of the systems-theoretic position (see Luhmann, 1995; Rasch & Wolfe, 2000), and theories of dialogue (see Buber, 1970; Maranh˜ao, 1990; Tedlock & Mannheim, 1995). The paper sketches out the principal features of the model; indicates its applicability through an illustration of depressive illness; and identifies the model’s general implications for the organization of professional practice in mental health fields. The transactionalparticipatory approach accounts for communicative aspects of therapeutic technique; information dissemination about mental health, as well as media representations of mental health phenomena; and interpersonal support networks that supplement therapy. As such, it provides an integrative communication model that supports a general theory of mental health communication, applicable to research and practice in all relevant areas of mental health professionalism. As socio-culturally ‘situated’ understandings of mental health and disorder have developed, inquiry has benefited from “new paradigms of how to do research” (Kleinman & Good, 1985, p. 11). These include better ways to “account for the interaction of nature and culture in the production and shaping of human distress.” Communication is a principal concern – thematic and practical – in allowing broadbased cross-cultural and historically-informed research on sickness and health (see F´abrega, 1997) to enhance strategies for treatment and recovery. Mental health research acquires a reciprocally augmented ability to contribute to knowledge about broader dimensions of human distress and suffering.

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Three communicative frameworks – action-based, systems-theoretic, and relational – contribute to the transactional-participatory model, which addresses: (1) the conditioning circumstances – material, technological, and socio-cultural – of sufferers’ lived experiences; (2) the active roles that communicators play within the structures and processes of communication systems; and (3) the complex dynamics of identity formation and mutual-personal relation that are at the heart of somatopsychical distress and recovery. The action-based perspective derives from pragmatism (see Dewey, 1925; Mead, 1934) and views communication as exemplifying “the creative character of human action” (Joas, 1996, p. 4). This includes the “ability to create consistent behaviour within the conflict of different expectations and irregular instinctive impulses” (p. 188). Emphasis is on the active role persons can play in constructing a common sphere of meanings, purposes, activities that provide the basis for communication. The creative action view is a socially-oriented variant of what theorists have labeled as a “self-action” (Spiegel, 1971, pp. 32 ff.) approach. The orienting value is “expression” (Earle, 1976, p. 76) through communicative action. The systems-theoretic view understands communication as an autopoietic, “completely closed system” (Luhmann, 1992, p. 254). Such systems sustain their operations without motivated intervention based in consciousness or individual agency (Luhmann, 1994, pp. 254, 373). A claim that “communication constructs itself” (p. 379) derives from premises: (1) that “[s]ystems of the mind and systems of communication exist independently of each other” (p. 138); and (2) that “only communication can control and repair communication” (Luhmann, 1992, p. 254). Communication systems and “psychic systems” (Luhmann, 1995, pp. 255–277) are both “structurally determined” (Luhmann, 1994, p. 373), meaning that they “create differentiations through the realization of their own operations, create boundaries, accumulate their own history . . . and with all this define their own environment.” A communication system can be conceptualized as a form of self-reproducing ‘memory’ – an information-processing capacity that “uses the mind as a medium” (p. 378). Thus, consciousness would not be a substantive, motivating force behind agency, but would be seen as a conventionalized description of one important, functional element ‘enlisted’ by a communication system in its self-reproduction. Clarity about systemic structure, sub-structures, and interactions of elements is key to this approach, which takes as its primary value “lucidity” (see Earle, 1976, p. 76) of, and about, communicative contacts. The relational perspective adopts norms of dialogue as these have emerged within phenomenology and philosophical anthropology (see Henrici, 1983; Schacht, 1991).4 Mutual-personal responsibility for the ‘other,’ especially the conversational partner, becomes the centerpiece for ethical communication. The motivating value is “concern” (Earle, 1976, p.76) for the relational other as the basis

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for communicative integrity. Communication is directed towards mutual responsibility as the source of human identity. None of the models is adequate on its own, but considered integratively, they address crucial questions about mutual-personal relations and agents’ communicative action within self-reproducing systems of communication. Effective mental health communication combines a relational perspective based in concern and dialogue, with a perspective that emphasizes expression and creative agency, and an approach that seeks lucidity in understanding how structured interactions of elements can constitute a self-subsistent communication system that ‘enlists’ the individual’s consciousness and action as elements. This latter possibility is especially significant for understanding the technologically-mediated, communicative environment of contemporary society. The transactional-participatory model provides for a broad view of “psychopathology” (see Levin, 1987, p. 22) as emanating from a universal “human experience of suffering (patheia).” From this standpoint, identification of mental disorders would not coincide exclusively with “institutionally validated categories . . . the narcissistic personality disorders, the schizophrenias, and the depressions” (p. 22). Rather, the definitions encompass “any comportment that only deepens or intensifies the inadequate way in which the psyche manifests its pain, its suffering, its afflictions.” Debilitating intensification of personal suffering is the distinguishing feature of mental-emotional disorders. Such intensification is observably outside the expected contours of either a common human adaptation to pain and affliction, or a culturally-specific variant of such adaptation. Drawing the boundaries between pathology and normalcy may be challenging, but possible ambiguities are compensated by an enhanced ability to compare attributable disorders with generalized forms of personal and social suffering. Culturally and historically, specific examples of mental disorders demonstrate “how the forms of human suffering can be at the same time collective and individual, how the modes of experiencing pain and trauma can be both local and global” (Kleinman, Das & Lock, 1997, p. x). Combined attention to general and particular aspects of mental health phenomena makes the transactionalparticipatory approach well-suited for generating findings from cross-cultural and historical researches into mental-emotional disorders. This allows advances in general knowledge to be shaped and refined for the needs of specific institutional settings and cultural contexts. The model derives its ‘account of pathological function’ from John Dewey’s (1925) theory of transactional5 experience as a balancing of “doing” and “undergoing.” Dewey’s framework has been refined by theorists who adopt a communicative perspective on mental disorders (see Spiegel, 1971). Ernest Becker (1964, pp. 11–17) summarizes the position. Arguing that “[w]e have here a fundamental

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way of distinguishing human worlds” (p. 25), Becker describes the relevant distinctions made by Dewey as “not simply a matter of ‘more’ or ‘less’ experience” (p. 23), but “a matter of a more or less proper ‘balance’ between doing and undergoing.” Unrestrained ‘doing,’ is when “action is too facile, too fluid,” which can undermine “the capacity to refer experiences to properly tested powers” and to manage “a self-reflective placing of [one’s] self in the world.” Constant ‘undergoing’ has an opposite impact of placing “incoming sensory impressions, perceptions, ideas, impulses, and tendencies” into “confused and disorganized relationships” (pp. 23–24). Either extreme can contribute to intensified, mental-emotional suffering. The ‘self-reflective’ positioning that Becker emphasizes is pre-eminently symbolic and communicative. A person constructs relations to others and to significant environmental objects by appropriating systems of meanings that circulate within one’s cultural and subcultural milieus. ‘Doing’ and ‘undergoing’ are meaningful actions and experiences in a person’s life story rather than simple reactions or mere behavioral events in an organism’s life cycle. The process of healing is also communicative. It entails attainment or recovery of a receptive capacity for “self-reflective registering of experience” (Becker, 1964, p. 23), along with a productive capability that “brings order into a chaotic mass of sensation by experiencing active powers.” These powers have to do with the creation of “behavioral time” (p. 27), “a notion of past-present-future, a time stream in which [one] places [one]self and . . . continually scans and appraises.” Complementary to this is the creation of a “[l]ived, action space” (p. 31). Both are dimensions of our “cognitive world,” but “we are strangers until we have traveled the road” constructed by our own, actively-produced “measured time and measured space.” This construction, or recovery, of a time/space for ‘lived action’ is modeled in the therapeutic setting and then extended into broader domains of social experience. Acquiring or restoring the capacities for this embodied experience involves processes that Becker labels “symbolic achievements,” as “[m]an [sic] creates his own world, in large part, and makes it a more comfortable home than the chaotic, raw, event-world of nature” (p. 32). Communication scholar James W. Carey (1989, p. 30) offers a comparable formulation as a generalized principle of his cultural approach to communication theory: “We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced.” Communication plays a constitutive role in creating worlds of experience that people come to occupy in multiple, diverse ways – before, during, and after therapeutic treatment. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s (1989, p. xiii) “theory of transitional phenomena,” the transactional-participatory model emphasizes the creation of a “third part of the life of a human being . . . to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (p. 2). Understanding the dynamics of this ‘third part’ requires inquiry into “object-relating and . . . symbol formation” (p. xiii)

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along with mutual-personal relations, within the framework of an integrative theory of communication as transactional-participation. The mediating element is language, conceived as an activity (see Engestr¨om, 1999; Woodward, 1996, p. 170) that produces the ‘third time-space’ that Winnicott cites.

Creative Action One strategy for developing the model is from ‘inside-out,’ from “intrapersonal thoughts, feelings, and motives” (Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 8) outward to “concrete forms of extrapersonal culture in learners’ worlds.” This approach supports the agent-based model of creative activity associated with pragmatism. The transactional philosophy of pragmatism has its origins in a theoretical and methodological challenge to an empiricist or “causal view” (Taylor, 1985, pp. 81–83) of reality. This causal conception begins with individual motivations, formed in “a separate domain of inner, mental space.” Motivations are seen as directed towards environmental elements on the basis of “my desire or intention – the causes of my action.” ‘Reality’ thus becomes an “external event” – an objectified state of affairs that can stand over against the inner experience that originated its production. Pathology would arise when the control or authority attributed to this perceived outer structure of reality becomes debilitating for ongoing action (see Woodward, 2000, pp. 68–72; also Becker, 1964, pp. 11–17). This picture of two domains – an ‘inner’ realm that motivates action and an ‘outer’ reality that receives the impetus of the motivation but that can turn objective consequences back against inner intentions – is inadequate. What needs to be conceptualized is a “third part of the life of a human being . . . an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute . . . for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 2). George Herbert Mead, writing in 1903, introduced the concept of creative action as this mediating element. Mead specified the ‘psychical’ (Mead, 1964) “not . . . as a substance or sphere sui generis corresponding to the external world in a parallel way, but rather . . . [as] . . . ‘a particular phase in the development of reality’ ” (Joas, 1985, p. 65). Mead’s conception of creative action challenges a dualistic supposition “that we are dealing with two fundamentally different types of thing, mind and (mind-independent) reality” (Joas, 1985, p. 77). Rather, mind as “self-conceptualizing” plays an integral role in communicatively transacting the experience of a ‘third realm’ of meaningful performances and objects whose significance is both private and public. This third realm is inwardly experienced and outwardly symbolized and shared – or, at least, made shareable – with others.

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According to this view, “the intrapersonal and extrapersonal realms are . . . separated by a boundary, but one that is permeable” (Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 8). Creative, communicative transactions mediate the boundary symbolically and span it ontologically, bringing objects and interactions into concrete, meaningful existence.

Communication Systems and Psychic Systems An alternative is to consider how “the world outside of persons” (Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 8) produces impacts on the “inner world or psyche.” The systemstheoretic view approaches this question initially by recasting the pragmatist interest in “the inside-outside relationship between the knowing subject and the world” (Habermas, 1990, p. 369) in terms of a “system-environment relationship.” The key concern becomes how a “complex network of contemporaneous communication processes” (Luhmann, 1994, p. 376) reproduces the conditions of its own existence as the system “addresses its operations to those who are required to continue communication” (p. 371). From a systems perspective, these addresses are not agents, nor are they the ‘individual’ or ‘subject’ (Luhmann, 1992, p. 251), concepts that are “basic assumptions of the philosophical tradition” that contemporary systems theory attempts to supersede. Rather, the addresses are functional “elements” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 22) of systems – “e.g. atoms, cells, or actions” – each of which is “constituted as a unity only by the system that enlists it as an element to use it in relations.” Any system, including the complex technological networks that provide a starting point for understanding contemporary communications, will subsist only if it is able to “equip the momentary elements that compose it with the capacity for connection, that is, with meaning, and thus reproduce them” (p. 11). Communication systems do not serve directly as ‘media resources’ for self-motivated human agents, since “[s]ystems of the mind and systems of communication exist completely independently of each other” (Luhmann, 1994, p. 380). A mind can observe communication; it can be enlisted as a functional element of a communication system. But a mind cannot be directly manifested through communication as a form of self-action or as a component of social action. Distilled to a formulaic statement, the contemporary systems-theoretic position holds that “[h]umans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate” (Luhmann, 1994, p. 371).6 Fundamental propositions of the systems-theoretic view would appear to be incompatible with those of the creative action perspective. After all, if communication systems are ‘closed’ from direction by systems of mind, or psychic systems,

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how could expression be viewed as indicative either of mental health or disorder, or be considered as a means to achieve mental or emotional outcomes? Reconciliation of the pragmatist and systems views can be sought by examining a transition that is underway “from system/environment theory to the theory of self-referential systems” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 218). Self-identification, based in differentiation from other elements in an environmental field, characterizes self-referential systems. Identity and difference emerge “when a self (whether as element, process, or system) can be identified through itself and set off as different from others” (p. 10). Ongoing communication constitutes a triadic environment. A self can set itself off as different from this environment (i.e. construct its identity as distinguishable from the triadic field); at the same time, self-identity becomes functional only through operations based on the multiple relations at play within this triadic field (i.e. the self is functionally part of the triadic field from which it differentiates itself). Constructed boundaries are conventional differentiations that allow for functional self-orientation. The boundaries that the self constructs as a basis for identity are not “tied to an ontological matrix” (Schwanitz, 1995, p. 157); they are not “objective observations, dependent on reality” (p. 156). Rather, they should be considered reflexively “as indication[s] based on distinction, accepting at the same time that no observation . . . is [fully] able to observe its own distinction” (p. 157). The observing self continuously runs up against “observation’s ‘blind spot’ . . . [that] observation is also unable to see whatever has been excluded from observation by its distinction” (p. 156). Reflexive capacity – i.e. the capacity to indicate and to be included in what is indicated (Luhmann, 1995, p. 442) – is basic to observation. This capacity is also part of the operations that observation attempts to observe (see Elmer, 2000, p. 241). Reflexivity is an attribute that may apply not only to selves, but to a variety of systems: “cells and societies, maybe physical atoms, certainly immune systems and brains” (Luhmann, 1986, p. 322). Accordingly, from the perspective of a general interest in self-reproducing systems, “[c]onscious systems” (Luhmann, 1986, p. 322) – i.e. selves, in the sense indicated by the creative action perspective of Mead – “have no exceptional status.” Contemporary systems thought rejects the notion of a “center [i.e. an autonomous self] in which the [psychic] system as a whole is made present to itself and knows itself in the form of self-consciousness” (Habermas, 1990, p. 369).7 Systems theory replaces the pragmatic figure of the reflexive self managing its environments through creative action with an alternative “figure of observation” (Elmer, 2000, p. 236) which achieves “a vantage on the operation of the communication system . . . seeing the code as code.” This shift entails

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“extrication of reflexivity from consciousness,” coupled with “rhetorical intrication of the figures of observation with the [systems theory] development of the idea of communication.” Creative action, in the pragmatist sense, assumes consciousness as the locus of self-expression. Systems thought seeks lucid comprehension of system operations and identifies its locus in reflexive observation. These constructivist principles of systems theory direct therapy towards an emphasis on “observation of observation . . . how the observed observer observes” (Elmer, 2000, p. 237, quoting Luhmann, 1990, p. 73). Particularly significant for comprehending mental-emotional disturbance – whether within the range of common experience or in pathologically intensified manifestations – is an augmented attention to conditions under which “an observed observer is unable to observe.” With the erosion of observational capabilities, the possibility of lucidity breaks down. Therapists and sufferers must acknowledge together that they operate in therapy with a “mirage of identity” (Elmer, 2000, p. 241). Rather than an authenticated self that would attain expression through creative action, a ‘constructed observer’ acquires lucidity about its own identity-constructing operations through selfobservation. Notwithstanding its conventionalized character, the “alibi of identity” that operates within systems processes can provide a focus for self-transformation. Self-reference and self-observation can be – arguably, must be – oriented towards a particular kind, or convention, of identity-seeking. The creative selfhood predicated by pragmatism is the example that interests us. This conventional notion of identity provides reflexivity with a direction for its development. As “selfobservers” (Luhmann, 1986, p. 323), those seeking and providing therapeutic help are “free to choose conscious systems as the system reference most appropriate for what we want to express” (pp. 323–324). In short, therapeutic exchange can be constructed “to create consciousness precisely where consciousness fails because of its own necessary latencies” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 336), its own “lack of explicit awareness” (p. 335). System memory, as a “latency of consciousness” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 335) which can take the form of “unawareness, ignorance,” produces states in which “disturbances are stored, combined, represented again, and amplified by the reinforcement of deviation and hypercorrection” (p. 259). The systems-theoretic position embodies a reluctance “to distinguish clearly between psychical and social pathologies.” However, the reflexive lucidity that the approach values can be deployed by therapist and client to achieve therapeutic outcomes. A particular strength of the systems-theoretic perspective is that it provides a useful framework for describing and assessing impacts of the “mediazation of culture” (Thompson, 1995, p. 46) that characterizes the contemporary era. This “systematic [and systemic] cultural transformation” accompanied the “electrical

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codification of information” when “symbolic forms were produced, reproduced, and circulated on a scale that was unprecedented.” Sophisticated media technologies increase the spatial and temporal reach of communications – “space-time distanciation” (pp. 21 ff.) – leading to “new forms of action and interaction and new kinds of social relationships” (pp. 81–82). Instances of “mediated quasi-relation” include “intimacy at a distance” (p. 219). When personal involvement and identification are based on extensive contact with mediated realities, such as television and the movies offer their viewers, profound impacts on people’s lives may result (see McCarthy, 2001). Questions emerge about “whether normal relationships can match the powers of artifice” (Gergen, 1991, p. 57). Under these circumstances, involvement in imaginary worlds could even undermine the ability of individuals “reflexively to incorporate symbolic materials (mediated and otherwise) into a relatively autonomous process of self-formation” (Thompson, 1995, p. 218). Instead, an “absorption of the self” can occur whereby these mediated symbolic materials “become ends in themselves, symbolic constructs around which the individual begins to organize his or her life and sense of self.” Imagined worlds are then “not merely a resource for the self but its central preoccupation” (p. 219). When communication systems operate as “more than technology and more than ‘cultural form’ ” (Fry, 1993, pp. 11 ff.), they can begin to constitute an “ontological domain.” Such an emergence can alter the conditions for establishing mutual-personal relations with others. Attention to this ontological character of communication systems helps to integrate the systems-theoretic view and the perspective on creative agency with a third view that emphasizes dialogic relation.

Mutual-Personal Relation Communication theorist Tony Fry indicates a direction for a synthesis. He illustrates the first two positions – creative agency and systems-theoretic – by highlighting the role of television as a pervasive, dominant media system. Fry (1993), argues that television can be viewed as “an instrument of cultural authorship” (p. 12) at the same time that the “televisual” is considered as “an organic part of the social fabric” that “has acquired its own legs and walks where it will” (p. 13). Comparing the ‘call’ of the televisual with a “call of conscience from self to self,” Fry moves towards a relational perspective when he observes that the “being of television is not a being we can know or name as Being – it is not self as our self, it is someone which is some-thing which is no-thing, ‘it’ is not reducible to an essential essence that we place behind the face and voice, it is out of reach” (p. 41). And yet, the televisual can “tell us what is present in our condition . . . as it goes ahead of us and becomes a large part of our ‘seeing-the-world’ ” (p. 29). Television

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invites, even demands, dialogic relation, while at the same time it frustrates a person’s attempts to establish such a relation. The transactional-participatory model explains how a space for ‘cultural authorship’ or creative action is conditioned by constraints imposed when communication systems operate as ‘ontological domains.’ This approach indicates how the pragmatist position of Dewey, Mead, and Becker that posits an active self based on the privileging of consciousness can be made compatible with the systems-theoretic position, exemplified by Luhmann, which emphasizes how action and consciousness are conventional ways – co-equal with other conventions – for signifying system states. Media play a significant role in determining the degree and quality of a person’s “ontological security” (Giddens, 1990, p. 92), both as a signified ideal, and a lived experience. Such security is grounded in “the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action.” Thus, security is a matter of symbolic control linked with an ordered, embodied experience of what is signified. Reliable relations – symbolic and material – to persons and things undergird “active engagement in the world” (Silverstone, 1994, p. 5). The “events and patterns and relationships” of worldly engagement are “physical . . . cognitive . . . [and] . . . affective” (pp. 5–6), involving “interactions, communication, language . . . understanding, memory, reflexivity, an awareness of position in time and space . . . [and] . . . unconscious processes . . . a kind of faith” (p. 6). The horizons extend from preoccupation with the most private, personal imaginings, to negotiation with highly public ‘artifacts’ – the icons of popular culture, for example – which develop into “an aspect of the material world that has been modified over the history of its incorporation into goal-directed human action” (Cole, 1996, p. 117). The context for building and sustaining relations is a communicative environment, and in the contemporary case, it is technologically-mediated. Modern and “hypermodern” (Borgmann, 1992, pp. 78–109) contexts tend to replace earlier dependencies on “localized trust” (Giddens, 1990, p. 102) as situations involving “trust relations vested in disembedded sytems”8 are charged with “stabilising relations across indefinite spans of space-time.” Mutual-personal relations depend on the exercise of “participant power” (Pols, 1975, pp. 331 ff.; Pols, 1982, p. 97; see also Woodward, 1996, pp. 166–167), the ability to play an active role in creating and shaping the potential, cultural space (see Winnicott, 1958, 1989) between self and environment. Participation in this ‘third space’ is achieved through the “originative act” (Pols, 1982, p. 210), “what an agent does” (Frankfurt, 1997, p. 42) rather than “what merely happens to him [sic].” Action may be full and ‘originative’ or more passive, receptive. In either case, it derives from language as activity and the role of the body as an “expressive space . . . our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty,

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1962, p. 146). Whatever is “given-in-experience” (Pols, 1982, p. 134) is, moreover, “given-to-be-experienced” according to our “power of engagement.” Philosopher Edward Pols (1975, p. 225) observes of the linkages between reality, experience, and participation that “[this] is subjectivity in the positive sense: a creative activity that does not however create objectivity but discloses it, while disclosing at the same time its own proper nature and proper role with respect to objectivity.” The creative act helps to shape a world of relations with others, within a milieu of artifacts and meanings. This milieu impresses its significance on the person, as the person reciprocally impresses significance on the milieu through creative action as a dimension of mutual-personal relations.

Transactional-Participatory Perspectives on Treatment and Recovery Experience and participation result from that “vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. 52–53). This setting is the ‘third time-space’ of Winnicott’s description. Reality, as this third time-space, can be disclosed through “creative and responsible activity,” (Pols, 1975, p. 225); or its stultification can confront the individual consciousness with “a strange and incomprehensible landscape of its own making . . . troubled all the while by its inability to see what it wanted to see.” Mental health activities are attempts to reconstruct the latter situation into an experience of creative agency as the “result, the sign, and the reward” (Dewey, 1958, p. 22) of “that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication.” Participatory communication is both the goal of mental health efforts and the active path the sufferer travels towards participation and communication as emergent values. As temporal and spatial experiences provide “routines and rhythms of everyday life” (Silverstone, 1994, p. 20) these become ‘templates’ for how life is “felt, lived, and secured.” Creative action is liberated and constrained by “clock times free and indentured . . . embedded in the times of biography and the life-cycle.” Mutualpersonal relations are ‘performed’ in “public and private space: the front-stages and the back-stages: the spaces of gender and generation, domesticity and community.” Institutionalized media, operating as self-reproducing systems become “very much a part of the taken-for-granted seriality and spatiality of everyday life . . . of beginnings, middles, and ends, and of characterization . . . the paramount narrativity of experience.” Distress is ‘narrated’ in multiple communicative settings and mediated forms. Media messages and other communications provide symbolic elements, or texts,

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that inform and structure transactions – socio-cultural, mutual-personal, and material – that play a part in people’s lives. Narrative claims about mental health are scientific, literary, and popular; they emanate from various sources, which often represent competing claims to institutional, social, and cultural authority. Sufferers, along with other ‘consumers’ of communications, are positioned as audiences for these messages. Some sufferers are selectively qualified as producers of messages about mental health, with varying levels of authority and credibility attributed to the narratives they provide, based on educational and professional credentials, institutional experience, social and cultural position, economic power, managerial or bureaucratic authority, personal history, and other contributing factors (see, e.g. Burns, 1989; Jamison, 1993, 1995; Kristeva, 1989; Styron, 1990). The transactional-participatory approach focuses attention on the experience of narrativity as a triadic integration of meanings (socio-cultural), order (physical-artifactual) and identity (mutual-personal). Established mental health practices predicate a ‘dyadic’ theoretical system wherein the concept of cure and its methods of obtaining that cure are subsumed under the system. The cured individual and the psychotherapeutic system are simply correlated with each other. The system defines what cure is – integration and individuation, attainment of the depressive position, the ability to carry on one’s own self-analysis, and so on – and the cure occurs because of the correct application of the method of cure generated by the system (Heaton, 1988, p. 8).

Emmanuel Levinas’ (1987, p. 67) dialogic philosophy describes, alternatively, how “disturbance” or “enigma” irrupt “as the entry into a given order of another order which does not accommodate itself with the first.” Suffering and recovery constitute “a plot with three personages” – the sufferer, the therapist, and the “infinite” horizons – of inner experience and outer, worldly involvement – that the “transcendence” entailed in recovery must embody. Thus, we exclude from disturbance the simple parallelism of two orders that would be in a relationship of sign to signified, of appearance to thing in itself, and between which . . . the relationship would re-establish the simultaneity of one single order.

The individual sufferer recovers a mutual-personal ground and the capacity for creative action by moving towards successful, ‘triadic’ communicative relations – i.e. the exercise of participant power through engagement with: (1) environmental objects and artifacts; (2) available frameworks of meaning as these circulate within the socio-cultural domain; and (3) other persons through dialogue. Distress, diagnosis, and recovery unfold as emergent states within the infinite horizons of objects, meanings, self and others in relation that define the triadic field of experience.

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A TRIADIC VIEW OF DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS Mainstream mental health research and practice accept a “trait-situation dichotomy” (Eskola, 1999, p. 108). In the study and treatment of depression, for example, “diathesis-stress models” (see Stoppard, 2000, pp. 43 ff.), predicate that personality (diathesis) is to be correlated with changes in environment (stress). This latter variable is “operationalized as ‘negative life events’” based on the assumption that “the categories of stressful events . . . apply in the same way to all research participants, regardless of gender (or social class, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on)” (p. 55). The dualism of this “mechanistic-deterministic research paradigm” (Stoppard, 2000, p. 55) makes consideration of communicative and cultural variability secondary to establishing causal, determinative relations between factors that can be labeled as dependent and independent variables. The task of research in such a scheme is to identify “universal laws, psychological, social, or biological” (Eskola, 1999, p. 107) to support diagnostic predictions and to explain and justify their basis. Winnicott’s (1989) post-Freudian perspective provides a triadic alternative by emphasizing “an intermediate area of experiencing (p. 13) . . . [a] . . . vast area between objectivity and subjectivity” (p. 20). Here is where “the root of symbolism in time” (p. 6) is planted, where relations with the world are established, along with personal identity as part of such relations. “Essential to all this is continuity (in time) of the external emotional environment and of particular elements in the physical environment” (p. 13). A developmental perspective suggests that the infant’s early transactional experience of the world expands through contact with, and imaginative attachment to, a transactional object such as “a teddy, a doll, or soft toy, or to a hand toy” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 1). This physical, intermediate area of transactional learning persists in the self-organization of the adult, whose capacity for creative action, amidst systemic complexity, in the milieu of mutual-personal relations “is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work” (p. 14). These are exemplary activities that parallel everyday forms of creativity that are integral to well-being. (See Williams, 1961; also Woodward, 2000.) Confronting the stultification of a person’s capacity for full, transactional participation, therapeutic communication responds by having therapist and sufferer construct a dialogue where the sufferer’s “actions or the language of the body is [sic] squeezed into words” (Mitchell, 1986, p. 11). Material performances and interactions, personal meanings, and participant power ultimately come to play integral roles during recovery as the “thrust toward self-understanding . . . blocked by myriad inhibiting forces” (Lear, 1990, p. 8) begins to be liberated.

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Interpretive capabilities support a view of the individual as “a psychological achievement” (Lear, 1990, p. 156); however, the individual also “cannot be understood other than as a response to certain forces that permeate the social world into which he is born.” The analytic interpretation involved in therapy enables the sufferer to transcend a predicament wherein one’s own “ideals and norms” are not “located in him [sic] at all” but are transposed entirely from “over there, operating in his parents and cultural environment” (p. 204). Alternatively, the person, liberated for activity through analytic interpretative achievements, is able to create, or to participatively transact, a ‘here and now’ within the “tripled context of human creative action, involving the personal space in which the human agent acts” (Woodward, 2000, p. 345). Therapeutic ‘cure’ is an instance of a general communicative development in which “[w]hat is happening in humans is not the projection of value onto inert nature, but the emergence of value in nature” (Lear, 1990, p. 210). The interpretive dimensions of this process are crucial, but should not be allowed to obscure recognition that “[w]hatever else it may be, depression is an embodied experience” (Stoppard, 2000, p. 90). Dual awareness of the “body as ‘text’ ” (p. 91) and of “the ‘practical’ or ‘useful’ body” drives the search for an adequate communication model beyond traditional boundaries that would divide the study of depression between psychological approaches with a “focus on experience and behavior” (p. 90) and medical approaches which “take the physical body as their primary subject matter.”9 Communication in a transactional-participatory mode presents a “disciplinary hybrid” (p. 91) that illuminates the triadic “lived experiences” of the depressed self in the: (1) discursive; and (2) material contexts in which; (3) sufferers’ daily lives, and the creative agency and mutual-personal relations those lives require, are embedded (see Stoppard, 2000, p. 22). Consistent with the contextualist emphasis on situating analysis in relation to the lived experience of particular sufferers, psychologist Janet Stoppard (2000) directs her interests towards a feminist, “material-discursive” (p. 21) approach to depression that “begins from women’s standpoint and is informed by a social constructionist epistemological perspective.” Mediated forms of communication emerge as a central element in exploring how “people’s ideas about how to conduct their everyday lives, the options and choices available to them, are formed in the course of their social interactions with the world around them” (p. 104). Stoppard emphasizes the role of institutionalized communications such as print and visual media, media used in formal education, and advertising in “forming an implicit cultural background to information circulating within society.” The transactional-participatory model provides a communicative framework for integrating themes that address the situated predicaments of women sufferers: (1) “material themes . . . the close links between their experiences and their

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embodiment” (Stoppard, 2000, p. 208); (2) “discursive themes . . . the sociocultural backdrop to their everyday lives and . . . shared ideas about what it means to be and act as a woman” (p. 209). Additionally, the triadic model highlights mutual-personal relation in ways that clarify how identities, “the subjectivities of both knowers (researchers) . . . [or practitioners] . . . and research participants . . . [or sufferers]” (p. 208) are conditioned, and conditioning, as part of the triadic field of experience. Thus, the transactional-participatory model of communication responds directly to Stoppard’s (2000, p. 208) call for forms of inquiry into depression that are “freed from the restrictions of positivist assumptions” while “notions of objectivity are expanded” along with definitions of “subjectivities.” This revised communicative paradigm parallels a clinical view of depression as triadic, involving “psychological (e.g. self-criticism, anhedonia), biological (e.g. weight loss, insomnia), and social (e.g. avoidance, passivity) symptoms that impair an individual’s ability to function normally” (Kaiser et al., 1998, p. 177). The model accounts for how participation is transacted within a third area of experiencing that is distinctively communicative.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE IN MENTAL HEALTH FIELDS A full examination of the model’s applications to mental health professionalism is beyond the scope of this article. However, a general statement can be made about what the approach implies for the organization of professional expertise. The emphasized mixture of material and discursive influences on sufferers makes the transactional-participatory approach distinctively appropriate for understanding how meanings generated by expert institutions interrelate with meanings produced within the broader transactional environment in which individuals and groups conduct activities and make sense of their everyday lives. Professional roles and activities directed towards treatment of the individual psyche are effectively linked, through communication in a transactional-participatory mode, to roles and activities that characterize persons situated in the transactional milieu of lived social and cultural relations. Mental health communicators, such as public information specialists, address messages to sufferers whose daily lives involve the drama of discovering and identifying with a condition that they may ultimately seek treatment to relieve (see Denzin, 1987a, b). Therapists and care providers address the same sufferers at different phases of the overall ‘transactional’ “career” (see Goffman, 1961, pp. 127–169) that crystallizes a person’s pattern of distress, suffering, recovery. A broad transactional view takes into account the “breach” (see Turner, 1988, p. 91) of “ongoing social life” (p. 90) represented by the appearance of the

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symptom, along with the “crisis” (p. 91) and the “restoration of peace” (p. 92) that treatment is intended to address and to accomplish.10 The professional roles of therapist, psychiatric social worker, as well as public information specialist and even lower-level administrative support worker all share the communicative challenge to connect messages concerning interactive phases of sufferers’ experiences of mental disorder to the transactional history of the person (see Dewey & Bentley, 1949, pp. 103–118, Ch. 4, “Interaction and Transaction”) gripped in the ‘social drama’ of distress, suffering, and recovery. All professional roles related to mental health treatment involve the communicative mandate to contribute to “transactional learning” (see Bruner, 1985, p. 25) as a way of conceiving how life’s narrativity can be reformulated and re-experienced as a triadic unity. Existing divisions of labor within institutional settings are reconceived as collaborative contributions towards assisting in sufferers’ transactional learning patterns on the path to recovery and beyond.

CONCLUSION: ACTION, SYSTEM, AND RELATION ARE THE KEY COMPONENTS OF COMMUNICATION THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE IN MENTAL HEALTH FIELDS Freudian theory has it origins in the discovery and exploration of an “inner world toward which we are emotionally oriented” (Lear, 1990, p. 159), a world that proves to be “a re-creation of the outer world.” Post-Freudian refinements indicate how the correspondences are complexly triadic, as the human search for “ontological security” (Silverstone, 1994, p. 5) requires persons to integrate three levels of contact and exchange – material (“physical”), symbolic (“cognitive”), and mutualpersonal (“affective”) – uniting inner and outer realms, experience and world. [B]oth trust and ontological security are the product of an active engagement in the world, of an active engagement in the events and patterns and relationships of everyday life. That active engagement is physical; it requires bodily presence, face-to-face interactions, communication, language. It is cognitive; it requires understanding, memory, reflexivity, an awareness of position in time and space. And it is affective; our relationships to material objects, to other people and to symbols are grounded in unconscious processes, but can only be sustained through a confidence, born of experience, in the certainty of the world – that is, in a kind of faith.

The transactional-participatory model of communication enables mental health professionals, and others charged with understanding and addressing human distress, to proceed in their work with a clarified framework for investigating the communicative processes at work as sufferers seek to acquire personal mastery within triadic fields of human experience.

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NOTES 1. A number of contemporary movements in psychoanalysis reflect a concern to integrate biological, physiological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors, often by conceiving an individual’s developmental history as an integration of creative and adaptive responses to environmental demands and opportunities (see Langs, 1998). 2. Communication, in this broad sense, encompasses language use and social processes of symbolic and material exchange. Thus, language-based or linguistic perspectives on psychic processes – as exemplified by Sullivan (1953) and Lacan (1977) – are viewed as a sub-category of explanatory or descriptive models. 3. Howard Becker (1973, p. 179) suggests that interactionist perspectives on mental health disorders should not be viewed narrowly as forms of ‘labelling theory’ but as ways of accounting for how “labelling places the actor in circumstances which make it harder for him to continue the normal routines of everyday life and thus provoke him to ‘abnormal’ actions.” Accordingly, interactionist analyses consider “two distinct though overlapping systems of collective action” (p. 185). The first is “the system of action in which . . . judgments occur . . . [and] . . . our unit of study [is] those who committed the act” (pp. 185–186). The second is “the drama of moral rhetoric and action in which imputations of deviance are made, accepted, rejected, and fought over” (p. 186). The interactionist approach referred to in this paper integrates study of these domains in the interest of understanding “the interplay between the deviant and the audience . . . the persona and the social context in which he is embedded” (Spitzer & Denzin, 1968, p. 2). 4. This synthesis is taking shape within American cultural studies as proponents draw on the philosophical anthropology of Martin Buber (1970) the post-phenomenological philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1987, 1989, 1993), and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) perspectives on interpretation and practice. 5. An overview of transactional sources is provided in Woodward (2001). 6. This formula does not attempt to deny to persons the “self-reference (or reflexiveness)” (Luhmann, 1992, p. 251) that one conventionally associates with intentional communication, but rather to extend self-referentiality and self-reproduction into a “general principle of system formation” so that it “is not a property peculiar to thought or consciousness.” Luhmann (1996, p. 216) acknowledges that “[h]uman beings are needed for uttering and understanding, and often also for creating artifacts that function in the communicative nexus as information.” However, “self-reproduction of social systems by communication’s triggering further communication will continue if nothing stops it” (p. 218). Accordingly, communication as a self-reproductive system is what communicates “the referential wealth of meaning [that] enables the formation of societal systems through which human beings can have consciousness and life.” Employing the notion of “interpenetration” to designate “the contribution of complexity to the construction of emergent systems” (p. 216), Luhmann specifies the intricate interdependencies of psychic and social systems as they relate to and depend upon communication: Interhuman interpenetration is indisputably possible only by communication, that is, only by forming social systems. Nevertheless, we must retain the distinction between interhuman and social interpenetration, not just for analytical reasons. Interhuman interpenetration exceeds the possibilities of communication. This refers not only to the boundaries of linguistic possibilities and not only to the meaning of bodily contact. Instead, intimacy includes what is incommunicable and therefore includes the experience of incommunicability (p. 228).

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Luhmann’s statements indicate the complex relationship of contemporary systems theory to action-based and relational perspectives. Communication is not deployed as a resource by persons or agents, since the interpenetrative relation between social and psychic systems means that they are “structurally coupled” (p. 220), but not causally related. They subsist within a reciprocal “intersystem relation between systems that are environments for each other” (p. 213), where “both systems enable each other by introducing their own already-constituted complexity into each other.” Relational indeterminacies, such as intimacy, emerge as part of the “reproduction of the indeterminacy that always appears in what is determinate as a horizon of possibility” (p. 220). 7. Habermas (1990) specifically addresses Luhmann’s (1995) systems theory, which takes social systems as its principal concern. Luhmann’s critique of the notion of an autonomous, or transcendental, social subject (“Which one of the five billion?” [Knodt, 1995, p. xxvi], he inquires) can also be directed at the self as a presumed locus of consciousness able to realize its autonomy not only in its own conscious life but also in its interactions with others and in its roles within social systems. ‘Which of the multiple selves that each of us inhabits?’, one might also ask. 8. Giddens (1990, p. 21) describes “disembedding” as “ ‘lifting out’ of social relations from the local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.” 9. Similar divisions within communication studies exist between symbolic and material approaches to the field. 10. Turner (1988) describes the “social drama” (p. 90) as “an eruption from the level surface of ongoing social life, with its interactions, transactions, reciprocities, its customs for making regular, orderly sequences of behavior.” In line with earlier analysis in this paper, the transactional-participatory approach emphasizes how social dramas are experienced by individuals in ways that threaten the sense of ontological security associated with life’s predictably ‘regular, orderly sequences of behavior.’

REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Becker, E. (1964). Revolution in psychiatry. New York: Free Press. Becker, H. (1973). Labelling theory reconsidered. In: Outsiders (pp. 177–212, rev. ed.). New York: Free Press. Berne, E. (1961). Transactional analysis in psychotherapy. New York: Grove Press. Borgmann, E. (1992). Crossing the postmodern divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bruner, J. (1985). Vygotsky: A historical and conceptual perspective. In: J. Wertsch (Ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition (pp. 177–212). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. (1986). The transactional self. In: Actual minds, possible worlds (pp. 57–69). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buber, M. (1970). I and thou. Walter Kaufmann (Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Burns, D. (1989). The feeling good handbook. New York: Plume. Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Denzin, N. (1987a). The alcoholic self. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. (1987b). The recovering alcoholic. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and nature. Chicago: Open Court Press. Dewey, J. (1958). Art as experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston: Beacon Press. Earle, W. (1976). The death of culture into expertise. In: Public Sorrows and Private Pleasures (pp. 74–95). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Elmer, J. (2000). Blinded Me With Science: Motifs of Observation and Temporality in Lacan and Luhmann. In: W. Rasch & C. Wolfe (Eds), Observing Complexity (pp. 215–246). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Engestr¨om, Y. (1999). Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In: Y. Engestr¨om, R. Miettinen & R.-L. Punam¨aki (Eds), Perspectives on Activity Theory (pp. 19–39). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Eskola, A. (1999). Laws, logics, and human activity. In: Y. Engestr¨om, R. Miettinen & R.-L. Punam¨aki (Eds), Perspectives on Activity Theory (pp. 107–114). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. F´abrega, H. (1997). Evolution of sickness and healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frankfurt, H. (1997). The problem of action. In: A. Mele (Ed.), The Philosophy of Action (pp. 42–52). London: Oxford University Press. Friedman, M. (1985). The healing dialogue in psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aronson. Fry, T. (1993). RUA TV? Heidegger and the televisual. Sydney: Power Publications. Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Grinker, R., MacGregor, H., Selan, K., Klein, A., & Kohrman, J. (1961). Psychiatric social work: A transactional case book. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York: Anchor. Habermas, J. (1990). The philosophical discourse of modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Healey, D. (1997). The antidepressant era. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Heaton, J. (1988). The other and psychotherapy. In: R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (Eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (pp. 5–14). New York: Routledge. Henrici, P. (1983). Towards an anthropological philosophy of communication. Communication Resource, 30(1), 1–4. Jamison, K. (1993). Touched with fire. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. Jamison, K. (1995). An unquiet mind. New York: Knopf. Joas, H. (1985). George Herbert Mead: A contemporary re-examination of his thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, H. (1993). Pragmatism and social theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaiser, A., Katz, R., & Shaw, B. (Eds) (1998). Cultural issues in the management of depression. In: S. Kazarian & D. Evans (Eds), Cultural Clinical Psychology (pp. 177–214). New York: Oxford. Kaufer, D., & Carley, K. (1993). Communication at a distance. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kleinman, A., Das, V., & Lock, M. (Eds) (1997). Social suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kleinman, A., & Good, B. (Eds) (1985). Culture and depression. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knodt, E. (1995). Foreward. In: N. Luhmann (Ed.), Social Systems (pp. ix–xxxvi). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kristeva, J. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

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´ Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Langs, R. (Ed.) (1998). Current theories of psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Lear, J. (1990). Love and its place in nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Levin, D. (1987). Psychopathology in the epoch of nihilism. In: D. Levin (Ed.), Pathologies of the Modern Self (pp. 21–84). New York: New York University Press. Levinas, E. (1987). Phenomena and enigma. In: Collected Philosophical Papers (pp. 61–73). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Levinas, E. (1989). Martin Buber and the theory of knowledge. In: Se´an Hand (Ed.), The Levinas Reader (pp. 59–74). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Levinas, E. (1993). Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and philosophy. In: Outside the Subject (pp. 20–39). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1986). The individuality of the individual: Historical meanings and contemporary problems. In: T. Heller, M. Sosna & D. Wellberry (Eds), Reconstructing Individualism (pp. 313–328). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1990). The cognitive program of constructivism and a reality that remains unknown. In: W. Krohn, G. K¨uppers & H. Nowotny (Eds), Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution (pp. 64–85). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Luhmann, N. (1992). Autopoiesis: What is communication? Communication Theory, 2(3), 251–258. Luhmann, N. (1994). How can the mind participate in communication? In: H. Gumbrecht & K. Pfeiffer (Eds), Materialisms of Communication (pp. 371–388). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maranh˜ao, T. (Ed.) (1990). The interpretation of dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCarthy, A. (2001). Ambient television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1964). The definition of the psychical. In: A. Rech (Ed.), Selected Writings (pp. 25–59). New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miller, M., & Dorpat, T. (1998). Interactional psychoanalytic theory. In: R. Langs (Ed.), Current Theories of Psychoanalysis (pp. 1–30). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Mitchell, J. (1986). Introduction. In: J. Mitchell (Ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein (pp. 9–34). New York: Free Press. Perry, D. (Ed.) (2001). American pragmatism and communication research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pols, E. (1975). Meditations on a prisoner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pols, E. (1982). The acts of our being. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Rasch, W., & Wolfe, C. (Eds) (2000). Observing complexity: Systems theory and postmodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosnow, R., & Georgondi, M. (1986). Contextualism and understanding in behavioral sciences. New York: Praeger. Ruesch, J., & Bateson, G. (1951). Communication: The social matrix of psychiatry. New York: Norton. Schacht, R. (1991). Philosophical anthropology: What, why, and how. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1(Supplement, Fall), 155–176. Schwanitz, D. (1995). Systems theory according to Niklas Luhmann – its environment and conceptual strategies. Cultural Critique (Spring), 137–170. Shweder, R. (1991). Thinking through cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and everyday life. New York: Routledge.

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Smith, D. L. (1998). The communicative approach. In: R. Langs (Ed.), Current Theories of Psychoanalysis (pp. 297–304). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Spiegel, J. (1971). Transactions. New York: Science House. Spitzer, S., & Denzin, N. (Eds) (1968). The mental patient. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stoppard, J. (2000). Understanding depression. New York: Routledge. Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Styron, W. (1990). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. New York: Random House. Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Taylor, C. (1985). Hegel’s philosophy of mind. In: Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language (pp. 77–96). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Tedlock, D., & Mannheim, B. (Eds) (1995). The dialogic emergence of culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, J. (1995). Media and modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turner, V. (1988). The anthropology of performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watzlawick, P. (1984). The invented reality. New York: W. W. Norton. Wertsch, J. (1985a). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. (1985b). Culture, communication, and cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1961). The creative mind. In: The Long Revolution (pp. 3–40). New York: Columbia University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1958). Collected papers: Through pediatrics to psycho-analysis. New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1989). Playing and reality. New York: Routledge. Woodward, W. (1996). Triadic communication as transactional-participation. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 13(2), 155–174. Woodward, W. (2000). Design/communication as mutual-personal creative action. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual, 5, 337–362. Woodward, W. (2001). Transactional philosophy and communication studies. In: D. Perry (Ed.), American Pragmatism and Communication Research (pp. 67–88). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Young, A. (1997). Suffering and the origins of traumatic memory. In: A. Kleinman, V. Das & M. Lock (Eds), Social Suffering (pp. 245–260). Berkeley: University of California Press.

VOICES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS: A DIALOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONIST MODEL Lawrence T. Nichols This article has two primary objectives: to provide a friendly critique of the constructionist understanding of social problems, and to sketch out a conceptual and methodological variant that moves in the direction of communication studies. I critique the original consructionist formulation on the grounds that it has a strong “monological” tendency, which I account for in terms of the influence of labeling theory. I refer to the proposed alternative as “dialogical constructionism” in order to highlight the centrality of communicative interaction among speakers (i.e. claimsmakers) and listeners (i.e. audiences, including counter-claimsmakers) at every point in the process of defining collective troubles. From this perspective, social problems are not merely the claimsmaking activities of aggrieved parties who identify allegedly harmful conditions and demand remedies; rather they are joint productions of extremely complex dialogues (direct and indirect) that involve both rhetorical playfulness and political power. In accordance with the theoretical framework of George Herbert Mead, I characterize the overall interplay of voices as a “generalized social problems dialogue” that sustains and modifies collective moral orders. This formulation immediately suggests that conversation analytic methodology offers valuable clues for development of a fully dialogical approach. Within the broader literature of communication studies, the dialogical perspective has been most forcefully advocated in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, who uses the term “dialogism.”1

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The central events to be discussed began in the mid-1970s, when Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse introduced a symbolic-interactionist approach to the analysis of social problems, which they called “constructionism.” This term has proven to be problematic because it is widespread among interpretive sociologists generally, some of whom would prefer other names, such as ethnomethodologists or postmodernists. Indeed, David Maines (2001, p. 228) has recently argued that “the entire field of sociology has been a constructionist one for most of the twentieth century insofar as practicing sociologists look directly at social processes to find their explanations for societal configurations and arrangements.” Given the impossibility of dealing here with all interpretive perspectives, the discussion will focus primarily on the influential variant introduced by Spector and Kitsuse. Although these authors were influenced by a number of frameworks, including phenomenology, their approach is best characterized as symbolic interactionist. Indeed, Spector and Kitsuse explicitly testify to their close links to this theoretical tradition as it developed at the University of Chicago: . . . the underlying sociological theory that guides our approach to social problems has also guided a major orientation of research on occupations, symbolic interactionism . . . The interactionist view in the sociology of occupations is evident in the writings of Hughes (1971) and his followers. This body of literature provides us with theoretical analogies for our study of social problems (2001, pp. 74–75).

The Spector/Kitsuse approach has also been characterized as symbolic interactionist in a frequently-cited article by Hilgartner and Bosk (1988, p. 53). The importance of the Spector/Kitsuse approach is evident in its enduring popularity over three decades and in the wealth of scholarship it has inspired. Indeed, according to such expert commentators as Holstein and Miller (1993, p. 5), “The social constructionist perspective has been the most controversial – if not the most influential – development in social problems theory in the past twenty-five years.” Joel Best (1993, p. 131) has likewise asserted that the constructionist approach “has become a – perhaps the – leading school of social problems theory.” Further evidence of the relevance of this model is provided by the republication, in 2001, of the original Spector/Kitsuse treatise on the constructionist treatment of social problems.2 Constructionist scholars have illumined the definitional dynamics of social problems through researches on a broad range of issues: child abuse (Nelson, 1974; Pfohl, 1977); criminal prosecutions (Hagan, 1975); hyperkinesis (Conrad, 1975); corporate homicide (Swigert & Farrell, 1980); tobacco and smoking (Troyer & Markle, 1983); medical malpractice (Morrow, 1982); menopause (McCrea, 1983); battered women (Loseke, 1992; Loseke & Cahill, 1984); coffee drinking (Troyer & Markle, 1984); urban legends (Best & Horiuchi, 1985); learning disabilities (Erchak & Rosenfeld, 1989); rock ’n roll (Gray, 1989);

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immigration (Bilderback, 1989); missing children (Best, 1990); prostitutes’ rights (Jenness, 1993); homelessness (Spencer, 1994); the Japanese economic threat (Nichols, 1995); multicultural education (Nelson-Rowe, 1995); clergy sex offenders (Jenkins, 1996); psychotherapy (Miller, 1997); crime films (Nichols, 1999); and television talk shows (Lowney, 1999), among others.

CLAIMS AS MONOLOGUE OR DIALOGUE What I refer to as a “monological” tendency is clearly seen in Spector and Kitsuse’s definition of their central term: . . . we define social problems as the actions of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions (2001, p. 75).

There is no mention here of audiences who hear such claims and grievances. The definition suggests that social problems are spoken into existence unilaterally by those who are especially aggrieved by perceived conditions of group life. Speakers are thus of primary importance, while listeners are not. There is likewise no reference to interactions between speakers and their audiences. To be fair, the authors do proceed to mention such issues. Thus, having introduced their definition of social problems, they sketch out a program of study: The central problem for a theory of social problems is to account for the emergence, nature, and maintenance of claimsmaking and responding activities (2001, p. 76).

This statement indicates a two-sidedness in the construction of problems, and may even be read as placing claimsmaking and responding on an equal basis. Spector and Kitsuse then briefly sketch out a much more complex network of participation in definitional activities that includes: . . . protest groups or moral crusaders who make demands and complaints; the officials or agencies to whom such complaints are directed; members of the media who publicize and disseminate news about such activities . . .; commissions of inquiry; legislative bodies and executive or administrative agencies that respond to claimsmaking constituents; members of the helping professions . . .; and sometimes, social scientists (2001, p. 79).

Despite its inclusiveness, however, this formulation still characterizes the speaking activity of claimsmakers and the responding activity of audiences as quite separate, rather than mutually interpenetrating aspects of the same action. Indeed, the statement suggests a temporal, two-phase model of behavior in which claimsmaking occurs first, and is then followed at some interval by positive or negative responses. The authors write as though the content of claims is finalized; they do not consider the possibility that audiences might influence claims or

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cause them to be modified in an open-ended process of mutual give and take. To a significant extent, the Spector-Kitsuse model presents a “litigious” metaphor in which claimsmaking resembles going to court (“officials,” “commissions of inquiry,” “adminstrative agencies,” etc.) with a lawsuit and eventually coming away with a favorable or unfavorable verdict. The image of the trial jury is also significant in this connection, for it suggests a relatively passive audience. In 1993, Kitsuse and Peter Ibarra offered a reformulation of the constructionist approach that focused on “vernacular constituents of moral discourse.” According to this proposal, sociologists should concentrate on the “condition-categories” used in defining problems. Condition-categories are . . . the terms used by members to propose what the social problem is “about.” As parts of a classification system, condition-categories are first and foremost units of language . . .. We intend condition-categories, then, to highlight the symbol- and languagebound character of claimsmaking, as well as how members’ facility with certain discursive strategies . . . initiate and constitute the social problems process (1993, pp. 30–31).

From this perspective, social problems are a “language game” or “a kind of articulation contest on the part of members to establish what the social problem is ‘really about’ ” (p. 31). The authors devote most of their discussion to examining several dimensions of social problems discourse: rhetorical idioms, counterrhetorics, motifs and claims-making styles. The Ibarra-Kitsuse formulation reaffirms Spector and Kitsuse’s earlier stance but takes a strong “rhetorical turn” toward textuality and away from the politics of interest groups. Consequently, the model says little about how participants listen to one another or how they collaboratively produce emergent definitions of social troubles. If this much be granted, the question naturally arises: How to account for the monological emphasis in the most influential constructionist formulations? One explanation lies in examining the derivation of the model, that is, its intellectual origins. As the discussion below will show, the constructionist view of social problems emerged from the popular labeling model of deviance and social control (also deeply rooted in symbolic interactionism). I shall argue that much of the logical structure of labeling theory is reproduced in constructionism.

Monological Tendencies in Labeling Theory According to its most prominent advocate, Howard S. Becker, the labeling perspective begins with the premise that deviance is not an inherent characteristic of behavior, but is rather a quality conferred upon behavior by social groups. Thus, for Becker (1963, 1964) and other proponents, the central question becomes

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the manner in which the attribute of deviance is imposed upon both behavior (e.g. smoking marijuana) and individuals (e.g. marijuana smokers). This is exactly parallel to Spector and Kitsuse’s later premise that social problems are not conditions per se (e.g. air containing industrial emissions), but rather definitions that are applied to conditions (e.g. that industrial emissions should be understood as harmful “pollution”). Like Spector and Kitsuse’s treatise, theoretical statements and empirical researches within the labeling perspective emphasized public arenas, especially the criminal courts, the juvenile justice system, schools, hospitals and mental institutions. Within such sites, relatively powerful groups (e.g. judges, psychiatrists) spoke deviance into being by authoritatively pronouncing individuals under their care or jurisdiction to be “criminal” or “insane.” Those subjected to such verdicts or diagnoses were portrayed as relatively powerless. Indeed, labeling theorists emphasized the “degradation ceremonies” (Garfinkel, 1956) and formal rituals that imposed longlasting “stigmas” (Goffman, 1963) upon labeled persons. Popular treatises such as Edwin Schur’s Crimes Without Victims (1965), attacked the arbitrariness of labeling, criticizing laws and policies dealing with abortion, homosexuality and drug use.3 Within this conceptualization, recipients of labels, as victims of discriminatory enforcement that spared privileged individuals or groups (e.g. middle-class lawbreakers), could hardly be equal partners in a dialogue with labelers. Indeed, labeling theorists (e.g. Lemert, 1967), generally asserted that those labeled would tend to internalize offical categories through self-labeling, and then act out the labels through careers of “secondary deviance.” In short, within the labeling model, speakers appear as all-powerful, while audiences are relatively passive victims. These two groups, moreover, are separated by chasms of social inequality, based especially on race and class.4

From Labeling Theory to Constructionism For present purposes, two considerations are particularly important: (1) John Kitsuse was a prominent proponent of the labeling perspective; and (2) the constructionist model of Kitsuse and Spector developed from labeling theory in a very self-conscious manner. Indeed, as will be seen below, Kitsuse and Spector articulated constructionism as a response to what they regarded as the contradictions and limitations of the labeling approach. Constructionism in its original form is thus both a departure from, and a continuation of, the labeling theory project. Indeed, both were seeking to slay the same dragon, namely, the functionalist perspective on deviance and social control (e.g. Parsons, 1951),

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and the functionalist perspective on social problems (e.g. Merton & Nisbet, 1976). Kitsuse was a contributor to one of the most important collections of essays defining labeling theory, The Other Side (1964). His article, “Societal Reaction to Deviant Behavior: Problems of Theory and Method,” moreover, proved to be influential and widely cited. Indeed, this analysis should be regarded as one of the classics of the labeling canon. Kitsuse begins by calling for a reorientation away from behavior per se to the process by which behavior is interpreted by others: I propose to shift the focus of theory and research from the forms of deviant behavior to the processes by which persons come to be defined as deviant by others. Such a shift requires that the sociologist view as problematic . . . that certain forms of behavior are per se deviant (1964, pp. 87–88).

In the spirit of the famous “Thomas theorem” about defining situations, Kitsuse also immediately asserts that intepretations have practical consequences:5 . . . deviance may be conceived as a process by which the members of a group, community, or society: (1) interpret behavior as deviant; (2) define persons who so behave as a certain kind of deviant; and (3) accord them the treatment appropriate to such deviants (1964, p. 88).6

This formulation does more than emphasize the importance of social reactions to behavior; it asserts that social responses constitute deviant behavior. As an illustration of this principle, Kitsuse cites the issue of homosexuality: . . . I shall proceed on the principle that it is only when individuals are defined and identified by others as homosexuals and accorded the treatment considered “appropriate” for individuals so defined that a homosexual “population” is produced (1964, p. 90).

Again like the “Thomas Theorem,” this “principle” expresses the pragmatist epistemology that pervades many writings in symbolic interactionism. What is especially noteworthy is how Kitsuse portrays labeling as monologue. One person or group acts, another interprets the action as improper, and then this observer unilaterally confers the character of deviance upon the action by engaging in “appropriate treatment.” The point of view of those being labeled is treated as irrelevant and ineffective. There is no consideration of the possibility that targets of definitional processes might “talk back” and initiate a dialogue that modifies observers’ perceptions. Labeling appears as omnipotent and always successful – indeed as exempt from the negotiation that underlies emergent meanings, according to symbolic interactionism (e.g. Blumer, 1969; Charon, 1997). For Kitsuse as labeling theorist, stigmatized persons and groups are objects, rather than self-actualizing subjects. This recalls a statement by Tannenbaum, whose analysis of “the dramatization of evil” was an important influence on labeling scholars:

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“The person becomes the thing he is described as being” (1973, p. 214, emphasis added).7 Eventually, Kitsuse moved away from labeling theory and began a collaboration with Malcolm Spector. In 1973, four years prior to their seminal treatise, Constructing Social Problems, these authors published two articles setting out the major themes of the constructionist model. The first, “Toward A Sociology of Social Problems: Social Conditions, Value-Judgments and Social Problems,” argued that sociology lacked a genuine conceptualization of social problems: As long as social problems is just another name for social disorganization, pathology, deviant behavior, value-conflict, or dysfunction, there is little hope that any theory of social problems will ever develop (1973a, p. 408).

After reviewing specific deficiencies in functionalist and value-conflict approaches, Kitsuse and Spector proposed that social problems be conceptualized as “the activities of groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (1973a, p. 415). On this premise, they argued, it would be possible to develop a sociological program “to account for the emergence and maintenance of claims-making and responding activities” (1973a, p. 415).8 What is most germane about this formulation is its explicit recognition of two-sided interaction in the definition of social problems. Indeed, had this dimension remained a focal point in the model, constructionism might have become dialogical from the outset. Kitsuse and Spector might have developed a series of propositions about the interplay of claims and responses, showing how each influenced the other and how both contributed to the emergence of collective perceptions of shared problems. They might have kept the perspectives and voices of claimsmakers and respondents clearly in view at all times. In a second 1973 article, “Social Problems: A Re-Formulation,” Kitsuse and Spector postulated a naturally occurring sequence in the process of claimsmaking: In Stage One, groups assert the existence and offensiveness of some condition. In Stage Two some official agency responds to the claims; in Stage Three claims and demands re-emerge, expressing dissatisfaction with the official response. In Stage Four alternative, parallel, or counter-institutions are established (Spector & Kitsuse, 1973b, p. 145).

This formulation has obvious potential for analyzing the interplay of communicative acts in definitional processes. Indeed, Stages One and Two, taken together, constitute an explicit dialogue between aggrieved speakers and official listeners.9 In 1975, Kitsuse and Spector published a third article bridging labeling theory and their emergent model of constructionism, “Deviance and Social Problems: Some Parallel Issues.” In this essay, the authors expressed respect for two

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approaches to social problems – value conflict and labeling – but concluded that these paradigms contained fatal contradictions. Kitsuse and Spector credited labeling and value conflict theory for correctly shifting the emphasis toward interpretive processes. They concluded, however, that this was not done in a completely consistent manner, for proponents of the two perspectives continually returned to the analysis either of rule breaking or of social conditions. For example, even such leading theorists as Becker and Lemert tended to speak as though some external stimulus (“primary deviance”) was required before labeling could occur. Kitsuse and Spector call this the “balanced view” which seeks to escape the criticism that labeling theory is radical subjectivism; and they condemn it for surrendering the insight of an interpretive approach: The balanced view suggests that definitions of social problems may be understood as reactions to conditions. This reduces the definition from a construction of reality, an accomplishment of members of the society, to a mere mechanical reaction to exterior forces. The integrity of the definitional process is sacrificed (Kitsuse & Spector, 1975, p. 589).

In sum, the writings of Kitsuse and Spector in the 1970s sometimes envision the process of defining social problems in dialogical terms. There is an explicit recognition of the complex interplay of communication among aggrieved claimsmakers and various (often official) respondents. Perhaps because of their continued acceptance of certain tenets of labeling theory, however, Kitsuse and Spector do not sustain a dialogical focus. Instead, they return to an emphasis on the utterances of claimsmakers, which leads toward a monological model of problem construction. Nevertheless, it is still possible to incorporate their valuable insights into a dialogical understanding.

DIALOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM The appearance of arguably monological features in constructionist writings suggests that the perspective has somewhat drifted away from symbolic interactionism, which from its earliest days has been explicitly dialogical.10 Thus, Charles H. Cooley’s (1907) famous conception of the “looking-glass self” immediately involves the interplay of perspectives, even within the most personal realm. In this treatment, one does not simply see oneself; rather, one sees others seeing oneself (e.g. I am successful because others congratulate me). The dialogical foundations of symbolic interactionism appear most clearly in the classic work of George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (1962 [1934]). This is evident in Mead’s definitions of his central terms. “Mind” is an “internal

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conversation,” and thought always involves choice among possible actions, which requires that individual thinkers understand what potential acts mean both to themselves and to others: . . . when we speak of significant speech we always imply that the individual that hears a word does in some sense use that word with reference to himself . . . That is true of a person who makes use of significant speech to another. He knows and understands what he is asking the other to do, and in some sense is inviting in himself the response to carry out the process. The process of addressing another person is a process of addressing himself as well . . . (1962, p. 108).11

The operation of mind thus always has a double audience of the individual thinker and others to be addressed. The self as famously described by Mead consists of two components, the “I” (i.e. the free, spontaneous aspect) and the “me” (i.e. a set of internalized social roles). Thus, the self is also dialogical, for it is an ongoing conversation between the “I” and the “me.” As Mead says: The I both calls out the me and responds to it . . .. The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases (1962, p. 178).

The self has a multiplicity of internal audiences corresponding to the differentiated social roles that have been learned. Interestingly, Mead also argues that the moral development of the self leads to a conversation with the larger community about its collective well-being and problems. We are not simply bound by the community. We are engaged in a conversation in which what we say is listened to by the community and its response is one which is affected by what we have to say . . .. The process of conversation is one in which the individual has not only the right but the duty of talking to the community . . . and bringing about those changes which take place through the interaction of individuals (1962, p. 168).

This statement can be read as saying, in effect, that moral development involves individuals in social problems dialogue with a larger community.12 Society, in Mead’s well known phrase, is the “generalized other,” which he understood also as a dialogical process in the broadest sense. The principle which I have suggested as basic to human social organization is that of communication involving participation in the other. This requires the appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other (1962, p. 253).

Thus, Mead portrayed society as a conversation among all members of human communities. A quarter-century after the publication of Mead’s seminal treatise, Erving Goffman developed a “dramaturgical” variant of symbolic interactionism that

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placed greatest emphasis upon an interaction order and face-to-face interaction. The dialogical dimension of Goffman’s works is most evident in his treatment of audiences, and of interaction between performers and audiences. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), which introduced the model, Goffman stressed that the apparently sharp distinction between performers and audiences is illusory. Audiences are not detached and passive; they are really silent partners, whose collaboration is necessary for the occurrence and success of performances. In Mead’s terms, audiences mentally take the role of performers, even as performers simultaneously take the role of their audiences. The resulting enactments (e.g. social roles) – even though they may seem to be the accomplishments of performers only – are actually joint productions based on mutual orientation and accommodation.

TOWARD DIALOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONISM Over the past two decades, as sociologists of social problems have become engaged with the constructionist perspective introduced by Spector and Kitsuse, a number of published works have pointed in a dialogical direction. For instance, in Threatened Children (1990), Joel Best introduced a sequential model of the process of social problems claimsmaking, based on the idea of three types of claimsmakers with distinct interests and agendas. “Primary” claimsmakers initiate the process by going public with grievances and demands that are often based on personal experience (e.g. the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving had lost a child to a drunk driver). “Secondary” claimsmakers are mass media organizations, as well as the makers of popular culture (e.g. novelists, motion picture producers), who learn about primary claims and subsequently broadcast them to wider audiences. Importantly, however, secondary claimsmakers do not simply repeat claims in their original form, but modify them for their own purposes, such as maximizing the number of viewers of televised programs or movies. For instance, they may highlight features of primary claims that have the greatest emotional impact (e.g. scandalous sexual details), or are most amenable to visual portrayals (e.g., the wreck of a car caused by a tire that manufacturers knew to be unsafe). The activity of secondary claimsmakers leads to the involvement of “tertiary” claimsmakers, that is, members of the general public who learn of claims via mass media and popular culture. Again, according to Best, these claimsmakers exercise initiative in reworking the messages they receive, consistent with their own interests and pre-existing attitudes, and they produce modified claims in such forms as rumor, gossip, urban legends and public opinion. Considered in terms of monologue and dialogue, Best’s model of sequential claimsmaking might be termed “indirect dialogue” among three distinctive types of voices.

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Social historian/sociologist Philip Jenkins has applied Best’s ideas in his research, and has developed a model of claimsmaking that emphasizes rational group interests and irrational “moral panics.” Thus, in Using Murder (Jenkins, 1994), his analysis of the social construction of serial homicide, Jenkins examines the activity of a broad range of claimsmakers and assesses the outcomes of their efforts. Official claimsmakers in the federal government, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he believes, became dominant in public discourse on serial murder and thus, in a sense, the “owners” of this social problem. Meanwhile, unofficial claimsmaker groups, including feminists, proponents of racial equality, and advocates of gay rights also became involved. All of these diverse groups, according to Jenkins, listened to one another’s claims. Indeed, they borrowed portions of others’ claims when such rhetorical materials suited their purposes (e.g. feminists made use of FBI claims that pornography causes sexual violence). In addition to these “primary” claimsmakers, Jenkins devotes considerable attention to “secondary” claimsmakers in the realm of popular culture. He examines the literature of crime novels and “true crime” magazines, as well as a series of “slasher films” depicting serial killers (e.g. “Halloween,” “Friday the Thirteenth”). These forms of claimsmaking are presented as sometimes closely linked to primary claims (as when The Silence of the Lambs incorporates the FBI’s belief in offender profiling techniques), and sometimes loosely linked (as when slasher films use nude scenes of teenage victims, in order to appeal to young filmgoers). Thus, in addition to the strategic dimension of claimsmaking (i.e. pursuit of the political agendas of interest groups), Jenkins recognizes also a non-strategic dimension (i.e. artistic expression