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 ...