Variations on the Spectator-Player Relationship. Part III
Saturday, September 29th, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Encounter, Asymmetrical Relationship | No Comments »Come on in. Expect to be startled and provoked. You have started down a yellow brick road to brains, brawn and love. Oz or bust. We've been on our way for several weeks, a rag-tag band of, as far as I ...
The Flexible Spectator-Player Relationship. Part II
Thursday, September 27th, 2007 Posted in Unit Act, Encounter, Asymmetrical Relationship | 2 Comments »The Spectator-Player model covers a broad range of experience. There are three tests for inclusion in this class: (1) Two actors in an encounter-relationship. (Note that the type of actor is not fixed; it can be one person or ...
Spectator-Player Relationship. Part I
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 Posted in Unit Act, Encounter, Asymmetrical Relationship | No Comments »Say a card game with seven players around a table. No chairs left. An eighth man, excluded from the central action, patrols the perimeter, watching and listening and gabbing. He is the kibitzer, the spectator, the gadfly, the superfluous person. ...
More on the Encounter/Unit Act. Part II
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Unit Act | No Comments »The match of the professional sports encounter and the model (the unit act) that describes it is wonderfully close. The rules are recorded in an official manual. The informal lore of the game is widely, if unevenly, dispersed. Large ...
Unit Act. Sociology Describes the Encounter. Part I
Thursday, September 20th, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Unit Act | No Comments »I got the unit act from Talcott Parsons. Not directly but through his book "The Structure of Social Action." Spending his youth (in the 1920s) in scholarly study in Europe (for that is where Americans went then to ...
The End of Second Hand. Part IV
Friday, September 14th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand | No Comments »Material goods are easy. The user queue describes the experience of a large array of them, from the ephemeral to the durable. They all fit the same abstract model. The distinctions: producers from consumers, sale from gift, public from private, useful ...
Another Round of Palaver About Second Hand. Part III
Monday, September 10th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand | No Comments »Watch the leaving out. In emphasizing consumption we omit the obviously critical producing side. The search for the social pattern of using up is balanced by a social pattern in the making. While conceptually separate ...
More Second Hand Stuff. Part II
Saturday, September 8th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand | No Comments »Using up of material goods is straight forward. A queue (anywhere from one on up) of users forms for each specific item This describes the sequence and trajectory of the using up. A large range of ...
Second Hand Transfer and the Exhaustion of Value. Part I
Thursday, September 6th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand | No Comments »Life requires the collection and transformation of materials in our environment to usable forms that we consume. The newly produced (made-up or found or defined) is full-of-use. It falls into the hand of an initial consumer who begins the process ...
Research Confusion. Interorganized Medical Units. Part III
Monday, September 3rd, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Research Confusion | No Comments »Act III. Discovery of the Basic Missing Fact. ^^^^^ Cliffhanger: Like a hound who has been offered the wrong scent, I was making progress on a meaningless track. The denouement, the last cliff, was fast approaching. ^^^^^ In the novel "The Crying of Lot ...