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Divided into four parts, this title examines commodity racism: representation, racialization and resistance. It presents the interpretive works in the interactionist tradition. It features the essays which interrogate the intersections between biography, media, history, politics and culture.

Shaun Gallagher presents a ground-breaking interdisciplinary account of action. He shows that in order to understand human agency and the aspects of mind that are associated with it, we need to grasp the crucial role of context or circumstance in action, and the normative constraints of social and cultural practices.

The first part of this collection of essays is devoted to the work of Peter Hall in communications and sociological inquiries. It emphasises developments in interactionist theory, as well as examples of post-modern ethnograohy and performance texts on border crossings and performances.

This paper studies the relevance of social interactions among the unemployed. Identification is based on a salient and selective extension of the potential duration of unemployment benefits. If social interactions are important, ths policy change affects entitled individuals not only directly, but also indirectly by altering the duration of unemployment in the reference group. Moreover, this spillover effect of the policy should also be observed in the non-entitled group. Results indicate that there are strong indirect effects on the entitled, strong positive spillovers on the non-entitled, and the social interactions are about as important as the direct effects of the policy change.

The theory of social systems claims to be a general theory of social phenomena. So far, this ambition has primarily been tested at the level of society and organisations. Operationalising systems theory at the level of interactions, however, has not been attempted to the same extent. This easily leads to the misunderstanding that the theory only applies to society and organisations. This is not the case. On the contrary, on several occasions Niklas Luhmann has addressed interaction in great detail as an independent form of communication with its own special characteristics and possibilities.1 But while Luhmann has defined the relationships that exist between interaction and society as a social system, he has not categorised the relationships that exist between interaction and organisations.2 This article will demonstrate that a detailed theoretical study of how these two independent types of social systems relate to each other can form the basis of specific empirical studies. Based on two empirical examples, the article will outline how it is possible to observe communicative dynamics, dilemmas, tensions and paradoxes, simply by differentiating between the logics of interactional and organisational communication.

Members of divergent societies are increasingly involved in interactional situations, both publicly and privately, where participants do not share linguistic resources. Second language conversations have become common everyday events in the globalized world, and an interest has evolved to determine how interaction is conducted and understanding achieved in such asymmetric conversations. This book describes how mutual intelligibility is established, checked and remedied in authentic interaction between first and second language speakers, both in institutional and everyday situations. The study

Sociological analyses of social interaction have been primarily directed toward human-to-human exchange. Recently, some have begun to actively question that stance. Challenges are found in new theoretical ideas and in empirical study—experimental, field, and survey data on people's attitudes and behaviors toward nonhumans. Such developments are leading many scholars to carve out a more central role for animals, objects, images, and both memories and projections of the self and others in the study of social interaction. In this article, I review these innovative ideas, pursuing four specific tasks. First, I briefly review the theoretical grounds that eliminated nonhumans from studies of social interaction. Next, I present new theories and empirical studies that construct a role for nonhumans in social interaction. Third, I review surveys that document popular perceptions of human/nonhuman interaction. I conclude by proposing some conceptual guidelines that might bring nonhumans into our contemporary analytic frames.

Archaic State Interaction casts valuable new light on how extra-societal contacts may be implicated in processes of increasing social complexity. As the title makes clear, the contributors ground their discussions of interaction theory in the specific sequence of events dating to 3100-1000 BCE in that portion of the Mediterranean basin stretching from Italy to the Levantine Coast. Their goals, as stated clearly by Parkinson and Galaty in the introduction, are to consider how local social and economic changes, on the one hand, were related to: variations in the intensity of interactions occurring at differing spatial and temporal scales; changes in how, and by whom, such contacts were conducted; and, shifts in the routes these transactions followed. The result is less a consensus than a healthy, productive debate on these issues. The main points of contention concern: rates of socio-political change; how to translate patterns among static material remains into dynamic political and economic processes; whose interests drove and shaped the course of cross-border contacts; and what interpretive frameworks are best suited to modeling the latter interactions. With respect to the last point, a consistent theme running throughout the papers deals with the utility of world-systems theory (WST) in describing and understanding the developmental significance of inter-polity contacts.

The title of this paper suggests at least two possible points of departure. First, one can argue that spatial patterns are themselves an important feature in the study of social life which deserves our attention: that there is a significant geographical dimension to social interaction. Secondly, the title also implies that various social groups interact differentially with one another: that interaction is itself a proper focus for social investigation. Both points will be developed in the present paper with respect to ethnic minorities in Britain and the United States.

Theories of social interaction focus on attributes of persons, situational expression of these attributes, and relation of personal attributes to those of others in groups. Task groups are the main topic of interest in these studies. This article briefly reviews core ideas of one theory of interaction. This theory emphasizes the relational explanation of organizing interaction. Developments within the theory based on research that is both supportive of it and challenging to it are discussed. The article concludes with a brief overview of other articles in this special issue.

This volume covers many of the ways of speaking that create problems between doctor and patient. The questions under consideration in the present book are the following: How is the doctor-patient interaction structured in a particular culture? What takes place during the process? What causes misunderstandings, lack of cooperation and even total non-compliance? What is the outcome of the interaction and how does the patient benefit from it? Finally, and this is the ultimate purpose of this book: How can the interaction be improved so that an optimum outcome is assured for the patient with maximum satisfaction to the physician?