Expanding the reflexive space: resilient young adults, institutional cultures, and cognitive schemas

For many U.S. young adults, being resilient to stressful events hinges on making meaning of such events and thereby minimizing their negative emotional impact. Yet why are some better able to do this than others? In this study, which uses an innovative outlier sampling strategy and linked survey and interview data, we argue that one important factor is connection to institutional cultures associated with higher education, religion/spirituality, and the military. Such cultures provide material for the development of cognitive schemas that can be adopted and applied to their stressful experiences, which include narratives of social progress, divine providence, and self‐discipline. Using a metaphor adapted from the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, we argue the resulting schemas have the effect of “expanding the space” of reflexive thought, providing new cognitive material for interpreting stress and supporting resilience. Finally, we argue this framing improves in several ways on the concept of meaning making often used in stress process research.Accepted manuscrip

Overview of the American City

American cities can be looked at in many ways, but one thing everyone should be able to agree on is that they are in big trouble. They are dilapidated, congested, trash-strewn, unsafe, rebellionprone, poverty-stricken, polluted, frightened, demoralized and generally on the run. They give every indication of being beyond hope, and little leadership or new ideas are in evidence suggesting otherwise. Actually all cities throughout the industrial world are in trouble, but U. S. cities seem to be especially bad. In contrast, Toronto and Montreal, which Americans visit in great numbers, have a completely different tone. Not only do they look better, they feel a whole lot better, with an optimism and verve that is noticeably absent from Chicago, Cleveland, New York or Los Angeles. This is a striking paradox, that the richest and most powerful nation in the world is losing its ability to maintain healthy communities, that somehow material growth has created problems that are bigger than the people, not just in the environment but in social and psychological life as well. This article will be an attempt to take a cold look at this situation. The approach will be sociological, with an eye toward social relations and problems of organization. It will be diagnostic, with an emphasis on what is wrong and how it might be righted. This analysis will also be from the heart, for I have lived in American cities all my forty years and my six children will probably be doing the same. These are my cities and their sadness is my sadness. I will begin by discussing some of the broaderpublished or submitted for publicatio

History of the Self: From Primates to Present

The article begins with a semiotic theory of how human selves emerged from the primates. It then follows the history of the self from classical Greece, throught the Christian Middle Ages, to early industrialization (as seen by Durkheim) and later industrialization (as seen by Weber). The story is largely an implicit struggle between self and society for what might be called the steering power, or “cybernetic control,” of life.</jats:p

The current interregnum in American sociology

Social Research -- Spring 1985 -- pages 179-207