Books/Dissertation by Scott Grills
This book examines management and management-related activities as a feature of everyday life. An... more This book examines management and management-related activities as a feature of everyday life. Any person or group that attempts to influence or shape the behaviors or experiences of others may be understood as engaging in management activities. The study of management involves the study of achieving understanding, providing direction and coordinating activities with others across an endless array of humanly engaged terrains. Management Motifs provides a research agenda for an interactionist approach to the study of management activities. Moving well beyond more organizationally-based understandings of managers and management, it examines the pragmatic accomplishment of management activities and the generic social processes that accompany them. This work addresses diverse issues related to management such as: holding and doing office, pursuing cooperation, developing policy, envisioning and advocating for missions, establishing teams and generating team identities, sustaining team endeavors and managing self. By attending to management-related concerns as a generic feature of human group life, the authors develop and articulate a research framework for the study of managing and management.
Papers by Scott Grills
Symbolic interaction, Feb 22, 2024
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Nov 7, 2014
Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2004
Dame. His dissertation examines how consumers negotiate meanings of self and society amid a marke... more Dame. His dissertation examines how consumers negotiate meanings of self and society amid a marketing-intensive cultural landscape. Future research interests include cross-national comparisons about attitudes toward consumption and marketing, and examining alternatives to consumptiondriven societies based on principles of social and environmental justice.
Qualitative Sociology Review
Envisioning success and its pursuit as an enduring feature of human group life, this paper exami... more Envisioning success and its pursuit as an enduring feature of human group life, this paper examines success as a humanly constructed and realized social process. As framed herein, success represents the attribution by some audience of qualities associated with achievement, attainment, and/or accomplishment to social act(s) and/or social objects. Consistent with symbolic interactionist approaches to the study of deviance, success is not a quality of the situation at hand, but rather is audience-dependent. Therefore, while the social construction of success may be evidence-based, what is defined as successful outcomes and what constitutes evidence of success is subculturally located. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, an application of alternate definitions of success is examined in the context of those participating in an electorally unsuccessful political party—the Christian Heritage Party of Canada. Specifically, this paper examines the definition of success in terms of p...
University Corporate Social Responsibility and University Governance
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Sociologica
Drawing upon the extended symbolic interactionist tradition, this paper examines management activ... more Drawing upon the extended symbolic interactionist tradition, this paper examines management activities in the context of office holders and teams. As researchers, if we wish to fully appreciate management in everyday life, then we must pay particular attention to teams, team creation and teamwork, for it is through people doing things together that organizational life is realized. Specifically, I examine the relevance of performance teams, legacy teams, legislated teams, mission-based teams, and the relevance of secrecy for enacting teams. Encouraging an attentiveness to perspectives and activities of office holders, this paper resists more structural renderings of organizational life and encourages researcher to attend to management in the making.
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis Folia Sociologica, 2022
Drawing upon the extended symbolic interactionist tradition, this paper examines management activ... more Drawing upon the extended symbolic interactionist tradition, this paper examines management activities in the context of office holders and teams. As researchers, if we wish to fully appreciate management in everyday life, then we must pay particular attention to teams, team creation and teamwork, for it is through people doing things together that organizational life is realized. Specifically, I examine the relevance of performance teams, legacy teams, legislated teams, mission-based teams, and the relevance of secrecy for enacting teams. Encouraging an attentiveness to perspectives and activities of office holders, this paper resists more structural renderings of organizational life and encourages researcher to attend to management in the making.
This chapter offers an overview of some of the various ways in which sociologists have attended t... more This chapter offers an overview of some of the various ways in which sociologists have attended to management activities. The chapter is intended to provide a sense of some of the key themes in the literature, rather than attempting to produce an encyclopedic overview of the various ways in which social scientists have approached management, office and organizations. Reflecting this interest, we specifically address the following traditions and perspectives: (1) structural-functionalist emphases also; (2) Marxist and postmodernist interests; (3) humanistic debates and metaphoric representations; (4) organizational culture approaches; (5) advisory stances and ethno-historical resources; (6) interpretive and pragmatist approaches and (7) interactionist perspectives on individuality, agency and groupness. A more sustained examination of symbolic interaction—the central perspective of this volume—is to be found in Chap. 3.
Qualitative Sociology Review, 2017
The article examines the social processes that accompany the social construction of value within ... more The article examines the social processes that accompany the social construction of value within subcultural settings. Taking the evaluation of university essays as the case-at-hand, this paper argues for the importance of attending to the generic social process of assigning evaluative meaning. Specifically, this article locates these processes relative to the themes of: 1) socialization of new academics, 2) contextualizing the essay pedagogically and pragmatically, 3) grades as currency, 4) recipes of action and meaning-making, 5) assigning grades, and 6) managing troublesome cases. The collective work that we do to rank, sort, evaluate, and determine the relative worth of social objects reflects a set of processes that are to be found in multiple settings. This article contributes to our understanding of these rather central everyday life activities.
Uploads
Books/Dissertation by Scott Grills
Papers by Scott Grills
By Howard Becker
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014, x+204 pp.
ISBN 13:978-0-226-16649-0