First published in 1983. Leisure has too often been approached as a set of activities that people do when everything important has been completed. This text provides a different analysis demonstrating the centrality of leisure to human development and to important relationships. In Leisure Identities and Interactions the author analyses leisure in the context of role changes through the life course, but also as a social context in which we work out the identities that express who we really want to be. His focus is on the kinds of leisure that are both most common and most significant face-to-face encounters, family interaction, and episodes found in the midst of our roles and routines. Varieties of leisure styles are found to be developed out of available opportunities and in relation to cultural values, but also are chosen to express and negotiate our self-definitions. Leisure is both social and existential and can best be understood in the dialectic of role expectations and decision. Kelly utilizes symbolic interaction, interpretive, and dramaturgical metaphors to develop a different sociology of leisure one that brings together the concepts of role and identity. Expressive identities and intimate communities are as essential to leisure as they are to life.

Talk in Action examines the language, identity, and interaction of social institutions, introducing students to the research methodology of Conversation Analysis. Features a unique focus on real-world applications of CA by examining four institutional domains: calls to emergency numbers, doctor-patient interaction, courtroom trials, and mass communication, Provides a theoretical and methodological overview of the roots of CA, reviewing the main developments and findings of research on talk and social institutions conducted over the past 25 years Showcases the significance of this subject to everyday events, making it ideal for students coming to the field for the first time Written by two leading figures in the field of Conversation Analysis

Narrative research is frequently described as a diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they tend to be autobiographical and elicited in interviews. This book sets out to carve out a space alongside this narrative canon for stories that have not made it to the mainstream of narrative and identity analysis, yet they abound as well as being crucial sites of subjectivity in everyday interactional contexts. By labelling those stories as 'small', the book emphasizes their distinctiveness, both interactionally and as an antidote to the tradition of 'grand' narratives research. Drawing primarily on the audio-recorded small stories of a group of female adolescents that was studied ethnographically in a town in Greece, the book follows a language-focused and practice-based approach in order to provide fresh answers and perspectives on some of the perennial questions of narrative analysis: How can we (re)conceptualize the mainstay concepts of tellership, structure and evaluation in small stories? How do the participants' telling identities connect with their larger social identities? Finally, what does the project of storying self (and other) mean in small stories and how can it be best explored?

This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories. Stories and Social Media brings together the stories told in well-known sites like Facebook and lesser-known community archives, providing a landmark survey and critique of personal storytelling as it is being reworked online at the start of the 21st century.

`Identity′ attracts some of social science′s liveliest and most passionate debates. Theory abounds on matters as disparate as nationhood, ethnicity, gender politics and culture. However, there is considerably less investigation into how such identity issues appear in the fine grain of everyday life. This book gathers together, in a collection of chapters drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, arguments which show that identities are constructed `live′ in the actual exchange of talk. By closely examining tapes and transcripts of real social interactions from a wide range of situations, the volume explores just how it is that a person can be ascribed to a category and what features about that category are consequential for the interaction.

Examining the emergence of new sexual and gender identities in the context of an ever-changing digital landscape, Emergent Identities considers how traditional, binary understandings of sexuality and gender are being challenged and overridden by a taxonomy of non-binary, fluid classifications and descriptors. In this comprehensive account of the ongoing shift in our understandings of gender and sexuality, Cover explores how and why traditional masculine/feminine and hetero/homo dichotomies are quickly being replaced with identity labels such as heteroflexible, bigender, non-binary, asexual, sapiosexual, demisexual, ciswoman and transcurious. Drawing on real-world data, Cover considers how new ways of perceiving relationships, attraction and desire are contesting authorised, institutional knowledge on gender and sexuality. The book explores the role that digital communication practices have played in these developments and considers the implications of these new approaches for identity, individuality, creativity, media, healthcare and social belonging. A timely response to recent developments in the field of gender identity, this will be a fascinating read for students of Psychology, Gender Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and related areas as well as professionals in this field.

The concept of identity has become widespread within the social and behavioral sciences, cutting across disciplines from psychiatry and psychology to political science and sociology. Introduced more than fifty years ago, identity theory is a social psychological theory that attempts to understand person's identities, their sources in interaction and society, their processes of operation, and their consequences for interaction and society from a sociological perspective. In this fully updated second edition of Identity Theory, Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets expand and refine their discussion of identity theory. Each chapter has been significantly revised and chapters have been added to address new theoretical developments and empirical research in the field. They cover identity characteristics, the processes and outcomes of identity verification, and the operation of identities to detail in particular the role of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive processes. In addition, Burke and Stets explore the multiple identities individuals hold from their multiple positions in society and organizations as well as the multiple identities activated by many people interacting in groups and organizations. Written in an accessible style, this revised edition of Identity Theory continues to make the full range of this powerful theory understandable to readers at all levels.

This volume is presented in four sections based on recent research in the field: the sources of identity, the tie between identity and the social structure, the non-cognitive outcomes - such as emotional - of identity processes, and the idea that individuals have multiple identities. This timely work will be of interest to social psychologists in sociology and psychology, behavioral scientists, and political scientists.