Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiotic mediation.Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition...

The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism features a diverse array of cutting-edge scholarship in symbolic interactionism (SI). Contributors present original research in various established and emerging areas of concern while outlining key theoretical and methodological foundations of this multifaceted and broadly relevant perspective in the field of sociology. The scholars featured in this volume present new and evolving outlooks on foundational SI themes including the self ...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent. ...

How do people think about their identities? How do they express themselves individually and as part of collective groups, social movements, organizations, neighborhoods, or nations?Identity has important consequences for how we organize our lives, wield social power, and produce and reproduce privilege and marginality. In this lively and engaging book, Wayne H. Brekhus explores the sociology of identity and its social consequences through three conceptual themes: authenticity, mult...

How does culture shape our thinking? In what ways do our social and cultural worlds enter into our mental worlds? How do the communities we belong to influence what we notice and what we ignore? What cultural variation do we see in cognition? What general patterns do we see across this diversity and variation?In this lively and engaging book, Wayne H. Brekhus shows us the many ways that culture influences our cognitive thought processes. Drawing on a wide range of fascinating examp...

This edited collection brings together social scientists to interpret identity from a wide range of analytical perspectives. Drawing on multiple interpretive traditions from the last 100 years, the book explores how underlying social, cultural and psychological forces shape the dimensions of identity.Chapters emphasize how identity forms and functions in relation to key sociological issues such as social power, social control and the production and reproduction of social inequaliti...