Generic Social Process and the Problem of Success-Claiming: Defining Success on the Margins of Canadian Federal Politics

• Authors: Scott Grills

Abstracts

EN

Envisioning success and its pursuit as an enduring feature of human group life, this paper examines success as a humanly constructed and realized social process. As framed herein, success represents the attribution by some audience of qualities associated with achievement, attainment, and/or accomplishment to social act(s) and/or social objects. Consistent with symbolic interactionist approaches to the study of deviance, success is not a quality of the situation at hand, but rather is audience-dependent. Therefore, while the social construction of success may be evidence-based, what is defined as successful outcomes and what constitutes evidence of success is subculturally located. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, an application of alternate definitions of success is examined in the context of those participating in an electorally unsuccessful political party-the Christian Heritage Party of Canada. Specifically, this paper examines the definition of success in terms of political influence, providing political alternatives and demonstrations of religious faithfulness as strategies of success-claiming. Framing success in process terms, this paper examines the trans-contextual and trans-historical qualities of “doing success” as a feature of everyday life.

Keywords

EN

Generic Social Process; Political Activities; Success; Symbolic Interaction; Qualitative Sociology

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Qualitative Sociology Review
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 54-69

Dates

published

2022

Contributors

author

Scott Grills

• Brandon University, Canada

• https://orcid.org/0000000225962068

References

• Albas, Daniel and Cheryl Albas. 1988. “Aces and Bombers: The Post‐Exam Impression Management Strategies of Students.” Symbolic Interaction 11(2):289-302.
• Becker, Howard S. 1973. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.
• Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Becker, Howard S. 2013. What About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning from Cases. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Becker, Howard S. 2017. Evidence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Becker, Howard S., Blanche Geer, and Everett C. Hughes. 1968. Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life. New York: Wiley.
• Becker, Howard S. et al. 1961. Boys in White: Student Culture in a Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Besbris, Max. 2020. Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Blumer, Herbert. 1971. “Social Problems as Collective Behavior.” Social Problems 18(3):298-306.
• Brunet Marks, Alexia and Scott A. Moss. 2016. “What Predicts Law Student Success? A Longitudinal Study Correlating Law Student Applicant Data and Law School Outcomes.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 13(2):205-265. doi: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12114/pdf.
• Carnegie, Dale. 1937. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Toronto: Musson.
• Charmaz, Kathy. 1991. Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Cohen, Albert. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press.
• Covey, Stephen. R. 1989. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Dingwall, Robert and Phil M. Strong. 1985. “The Interactional Study of Organizations: A Critique and Reformulation.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 14(2):205-231.
• Ebaugh, Helen Rose Fuchs. 1988. Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Edgerton, Robert B. 1967. The Cloak of Competence: Stigma in the Lives of the Mentally Retarded. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. 2009. When Prophecy Fails. Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing.
• Fine, Gary A. 1998. Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Gardner, Robert Owen. 2011. “The Portable Community: Mobility and Modernization in Bluegrass Festival Life.” Symbolic Interaction 27(2):155-178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2004.27.2.155
• Gardner, Robert Owen. 2020. The Portable Community: Place and Displacement in Bluegrass Festival Life. London: Routledge.
• Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61(5):420-424.
• Glaser, Barney and Anselm L. Strauss. 2011. Status Passage. London: Transaction Publishers.
• Goffman, Erving. 1952. “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 15(4):451-463.
• Grills, Scott. 1994. “Recruitment Practices of the Christian Heritage Party.” Pp. 96-108 in Doing Everyday Life: Ethnography as Human Lived Experience, edited by M. L. Dietz, W. Shaffir, and R. Prus. Toronto: Copp, Clark, Longman.
• Grills, Scott. 1997. “Tomorrow for Sale: Politics and Religious Fundamentalism.” Pp. 262-271 in Small World: Readings in Sociology, 2nd ed., edited by L. Tepperman et al. Toronto: Prentice-Hall.
• Grills, Scott. 1998. “On Being Non-Partisan in Partisan Settings: Field Research among the Politically Committed.” Pp. 76-93 in Doing Ethnographic Research: Fieldwork Settings, edited by S. Grills. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Grills, Scott. 2020a. “The Virtue of Patience.” Qualitative Sociological Review 16(2):28-39.
• Grills, Scott. 2020b. “Understanding Everyday Life: Generic Social Processes and the Pursuit of Transcontextuality.” Symbolic Interaction 43(4):615-636.
• Grills, Scott and Robert Prus. 2019. Management Motifs: An Interactionist Approach for the Study of Organizational Interchange. Cham: Springer.
• Haas, Jack and William Shaffir. 1987. Becoming Doctors: The Adoption of a Cloak of Competence. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
• Hall, Peter M. 1980. “Structuring Symbolic Interaction: Communication and Power.” Annals of the International Communication Association 4(1):49-60.
• Hill, Napoleon. 2017. The Law of Success. New York: Penguin.
• Litman, Barry R. 1983. “Predicting Success of Theatrical Movies: An Empirical Study.” Journal of Popular Culture 16(4):159-175.
• Lofland, John. 1966. Doomsday Cult : A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. New York: Prentice-Hall.
• Lofland, Lynn. 1980. “Reminiscences of Classic Chicago: The Blumer-Hughes Talk.” Urban Life 9(3):251-281.
• Loseke, Donileen. 1992. The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Low, Jacqueline and Gary Bowden, eds. 2020. “Special Issue: Celebrating and Interrogating the Blumerian Legacy.” Symbolic Interaction 43(4):575-738.
• Malloy, Jonathan. 2017. “Political Opportunity Structures, Evangelical Christians and Morality Politics in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” Australian Journal of Political Science 52(3):402-418. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2017.1330396
• McKeen, Leah A. 2015. “Canadian Christian Nationalism? The Religiosity and Politics of the Christian Heritage Party of Canada.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Religion & Culture. Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
• Merton, Robert K. 1938. “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3(5):672-682.
• Mitchell, Richard G., Jr. 1983. Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Prus, Robert. 1989. Pursuing Customers: An Ethnography of Marketing Activities. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Prus, Robert. 1997. Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities: An Ethnographic Research Agenda for Pragmatizing the Social Sciences. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
• Prus, Robert and Scott Grills. 2003. The Deviant Mystique: Involvements, Realities, and Regulation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Prus, Robert and Styllianoss Irini. 1980. Hookers, Rounders and Desk Clerks: The Social Organization of the Hotel Community. Toronto: Gage.
• Puddephatt, Anthony J. 2003. “Chess Playing as Strategic Activity.” Symbolic Interaction 26:263-284.
• Rodney, William. 1968. Soldiers of the International: A History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1919-1929. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Sauder, Michael and Wendy Nelson Espeland. 2009. “The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.” American Sociological Review 74(1):63-82.
• Schneider, Christopher J. 2016. Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Schütz, Alfred. 1945. “The Homecomer.” American Journal of Sociology 50(5):369-376.
• Shaffir, William. 1995. “When Prophecy Is Not Validated: Explaining the Unexpected in a Messianic Campaign.” The Jewish Journal of Sociology 37(2):119-136.
• Shaffir, William and Stephen Kleinknecht. 2005. “Death at the Polls: Experiencing and Coping with Political Defeat.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34(6):707-738.
• Shover, Neil. 1996. The Great Pretenders: Pursuits and Careers of Persistent Thieves. New York: Routledge.
• Spradley, James P. 2000. You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
• Weber, Max. 1992. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge.
• Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2015. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/1733-8077.18.3.02

Biblioteka Nauki

2106785