Resisting alignment: Negotiating alignment, responsibility, and status in everyday life

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksContributions to collected editions/anthologiesResearchpeer-review

Authors

The study of accounts, corrective practices, or aligning actions has grown to constitute a significant sub-discipline within everyday life sociology. Most work in this field starts with an assumption of order and assumes that accounts reestablish broken sociality. However, much accounting activity resists against alignment efforts, and alignment efforts can be used as a means of conflict. The present chapter aims to survey situations in which actors resist and negotiate alignment and the power and status conflicts involved in these negotiations. With these conflicts, participants also negotiate responsibility, which is here seen not as an internal attribute of actors, but a socially negotiated meaning as well. On a larger level, the present chapter shows how levels of meaning are intertwined in alignment situations, making them much more than mere tools to produce and protect order.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationContributions from European Symbolic Interactionists : Conflict and Cooperation (Studies in Symbolic Interaction
EditorsThaddeus Müller
Number of pages18
Volume45
PublisherEmerald Publishing Limited
Publication date02.07.2015
Pages159-176
ISBN (print)978-1-78441-856-4
ISBN (electronic)978-1-78441-855-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 02.07.2015
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Michael Dellwing
Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists: Conflict and Cooperation, ISBN: 978-1-78441-856-4, eISBN: 978-1-78441-855-7

    Research areas

  • Accounts, Aligning actions, Conflict, Resistance, Stability
  • Sociology