This dissertation examines mealtime conversations between parents and children in eight Swedish and eight Italian middle class, dual-earner households, exploring the ways in which children are engaged in the cooperative construction of social order. The study is part of an international project (cf. Aronsson & Pontecorvo, 2002), coordinated with prior work in the US (cf. Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013). Study I explores how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. So called proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) and varied verbal accounts are analyzed in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences. Study II focuses on the use of endearment terms in directive sequences between parents and children. The findings show an asymmetrical distribution of endearment terms, in that only parents make use of them when interactional problems – children’s non-compliance with parental requests in particular – arise.   Study III examines the ways in which Italian parents deploy the discourse marker dai (‘come on’) in directive sequences. This is a flexible linguistic resource that is employed by parents as a cajoling token when children fail to comply with parental requests, hindering the advancement of the in-progress activity. This thesis describes family mealtimes as parent-directed activities where sociality, morality and local understandings of the world (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) are collaboratively re-created and enacted. This confirms the crucial role of everyday family meals as rich cultural sites (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) for reasserting moral attitudes of the family: participants learn moment by moment how to be competent actors that are able to choose between alternative courses of action and that can therefore be held accountable for their actions (Bergmann, 1998: 284). From this point of view, a dinner is paradigmatic of the deep moral sense that permeates the making of a family.

This thesis considers the perceptions and enactment of social and urban order in the estate society of eighteenth-century Sweden. The central concept of order is approached as something which becomes most readily available when it has been transgressed against, and attempts are made to regain it. This is employed by exploring the practices of Sweden’s first proper police, the Royal Police Chamber of Stockholm founded in 1776, during its establishing year. The analytical part of the thesis is divided into three chapters. The first considers contemporary ideas of order in connection to the new organization, as to give a hint of the ideals which were said to be strived for. The second analytical chapter explores the nature of disorder, asking what, who and where made its way into the registers of the Chamber. Through these questions categories of disorder, norms of identification and abstract geographies are identified and used to tell of the things perceived as disorderly. In the third analytical chapter the how of ordering is considered as the acts taken against disorder are studied. Correction dominated, rather than punishment, thus echoing the ideas of order to a significant degree. Overall, this thesis can be said to accomplish in-depth basic empirical research on a hereto little studied material. The Chamber is shown to from the start to have taken an extremely active part in controlling and constructing society around it, something done by making a good effort towards fulfilling the panoptic ideal. Though not perfectly achieved, its practices are thus shown to adhere to a larger European trend of the period. Three concepts emerge as essential and fundamental to how social and urban order was perceived. These are the street and particularly the visibility thereupon exhibited, adding that order often only could be regained by establishing responsibility for those moving there. The centrality of the public sphere of the streets even goes beyond expectations and it appears as the main feature of enacting order. As such it is found to be both a material concept and imbued with meaning in itself. / Se ståndssamhället! Olikheternas kultur i Sverige under tidigmodern tid

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The fundamental sociological problem of social order finds a somewhat ”unorthodox” solution in the ethnomethodological program, the main responsibility of which is ascribed to Harold Garfinkel. The current thesis rests on the view that the program offers insights that have not been sufficiently recognized, and that it bears a message to sociology that has been somewhat lost. The study aims to investigate and uncover the ethnomethodological conception of social order in a comprehensible way. Comparisons are made to “formal analytical” perspectives, notably that advocated by Talcott Parsons. The result suggests that the ethnomethodological conception of order is closer related to intersubjectivity than to action theory, and that the ethnomethodological view completes rather than opposes that of formal analysis. The deeper ontological and epistemological implications of ethnomethodology are discussed, partly by invocation of the notion of radical reflexivity.

The appearance, use, and philosophy of the disabled detective are latent even in early detective texts, such as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical Sherlock Holmes series. By philosophy, I am referring to both why the detective feels compelled to detect as well as the system of detection the detective uses and on which the text relies. Because the detective feels incompatible with the world around him (all of the detectives I analyze in this dissertation are men), he is driven to either fix himself, the world, or both. His systematic approach includes diagnosing problems through symptomatology and removing the deficient aspect. While the detective narrative’s original framework assimilates bodies to medical and scientific discourses and norms in order to represent a stable social order, I argue that contemporary detective subgenres, including classical disability detective texts, hardboiled disability detective texts and postmodern disability detective texts, respond to this framework by making the portrayal of disability explicit by allocating it to the detective. The texts present disability as both a literary mechanism that uses disability to represent abstract metaphors (of hardship, of pity, of heroism) and a cultural construct in and of itself. I contend that the texts use disability to investigate what it means to be an individual and a member of society. Thus, I trace disability in detective fiction as it parallels the cultural move away from the autonomous individual and his participation in a stable social order and move towards the socially located agent and shifting situational values.

The English Public Boarding School is considered from a sociological perspective, and more particularly in the context of research in the field of complex organizations, as a residential organization. Concepts are used which have been developed in studies of other residential organizations such as military units, hospitals and prisons. The account is of an exploratory, descriptive case study of 'the research school', using a variant on the method of participant observation as the principal technique of data collection supplemented with data collected during visits to certain other public schools and an examination of published and unpublished documents by staff and past pupils. The size of these schools and their residential nature, which involves them in the custody of their pupils, give rise to certain specific organizational problems to which similar solutions have been devised by most of the schools. Certain aspects of the social process in the education provided by the schools are indicated in the examination of their admission procedures, processes of socialization on entry and the concomitants of organizational membership, of the agents and means of social control, together with a discussion both of the boys' perception of relative gratifications and deprivations with respect to various reference groups both within and without the school system and of the boys' different modes of adaptation to life in the socio-cultural context of the school. These schools belong to that category of complex organization which in addition to working through and with people work on them. The role of the school in socializing the boy and regulating his behaviour while a member of the school is emphasized, as education in the public boarding school is as much the attempt to socialize its pupils as to enable them to pass formal examinations or otherwise achieve academic ends, and it is with this former aspect of the schools that this account is primarily concerned. The schools' combined custodial and educational commitments make the maintenance of social order within them of fundamental significance. By anticipatory socialization in the home and at 'preparatory' school, and by their recruitment selection and admission procedures, by a formal system of control exercised partly through the prefect system, by the privilege system and certain ritualistic activities and ritualistic symbolization, the staff combine a high degree of organizational control with high scope and pervasiveness. During term a boy is engaged almost exclusively in activities involving other members of his school and organizational status embraces his life to an extent which is approached by few other types of organization in English society. Aspects of life at these schools are described which involve the pupils experiencing, rather than a sense of relative gratification, one of relative deprivation. The extent to which a particular boy experiences this is discussed in terms of disparities between his presenting culture on entry and the way of life associated with organizational membership, and in terms of his expectations and of the mode of adaptation and constellations of reference groups he has adopted at the time. The boys' responses to life in the socio-cultural context of the public boarding school are presented within the framework of a revised form of Merton's Typology of Individual Adaptation, and discussed in relation to the availability of the various modes of adaptation and to some of the determinants of their adoption by particular boys at certain stages of their school careers.

Although internet chat is a significant aspect of many internet users’ lives, the manner in which participants in quasi-synchronous chat situations orient to issues of social and moral order remains to be studied in depth. The research presented here is therefore at the forefront of a continually developing area of study. This work contributes new insights into how members construct and make accountable the social and moral orders of an adult-oriented Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel by addressing three questions: (1) What conversational resources do participants use in addressing matters of social and moral order? (2) How are these conversational resources deployed within IRC interaction? and (3) What interactional work is locally accomplished through use of these resources? A survey of the literature reveals considerable research in the field of computer-mediated communication, exploring both asynchronous and quasi-synchronous discussion forums. The research discussed represents a range of communication interests including group and collaborative interaction, the linguistic construction of social identity, and the linguistic features of online interaction. It is suggested that the present research differs from previous studies in three ways: (1) it focuses on the interaction itself, rather than the ways in which the medium affects the interaction; (2) it offers turn-by-turn analysis of interaction in situ; and (3) it discusses membership categories only insofar as they are shown to be relevant by participants through their talk. Through consideration of the literature, the present study is firmly situated within the broader computer-mediated communication field. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were adopted as appropriate methodological approaches to explore the research focus on interaction in situ, and in particular to investigate the ways in which participants negotiate and co-construct social and moral orders in the course of their interaction. IRC logs collected from one chat room were analysed using a two-pass method, based on a modification of the approaches proposed by Pomerantz and Fehr (1997) and ten Have (1999). From this detailed examination of the data corpus three interaction topics are identified by means of which participants clearly orient to issues of social and moral order: challenges to rule violations, ‘trolling’ for cybersex, and experiences regarding the 9/11 attacks. Instances of these interactional topics are subjected to fine-grained analysis, to demonstrate the ways in which participants draw upon various interactional resources in their negotiation and construction of channel social and moral orders. While these analytical topics stand alone in individual focus, together they illustrate different instances in which participants’ talk serves to negotiate social and moral orders or collaboratively construct new orders. Building on the work of Vallis (2001), Chapter 5 illustrates three ways that rule violation is initiated as a channel discussion topic: (1) through a visible violation in open channel, (2) through an official warning or sanction by a channel operator regarding the violation, and (3) through a complaint or announcement of a rule violation by a non-channel operator participant. Once the topic has been initiated, it is shown to become available as a topic for others, including the perceived violator. The fine-grained analysis of challenges to rule violations ultimately demonstrates that channel participants orient to the rules as a resource in developing categorizations of both the rule violation and violator. These categorizations are contextual in that they are locally based and understood within specific contexts and practices. Thus, it is shown that compliance with rules and an orientation to rule violations as inappropriate within the social and moral orders of the channel serves two purposes: (1) to orient the speaker as a group member, and (2) to reinforce the social and moral orders of the group. Chapter 6 explores a particular type of rule violation, solicitations for ‘cybersex’ known in IRC parlance as ‘trolling’. In responding to trolling violations participants are demonstrated to use affiliative and aggressive humour, in particular irony, sarcasm and insults. These conversational resources perform solidarity building within the group, positioning non-Troll respondents as compliant group members. This solidarity work is shown to have three outcomes: (1) consensus building, (2) collaborative construction of group membership, and (3) the continued construction and negotiation of existing social and moral orders. Chapter 7, the final data analysis chapter, offers insight into how participants, in discussing the events of 9/11 on the actual day, collaboratively constructed new social and moral orders, while orienting to issues of appropriate and reasonable emotional responses. This analysis demonstrates how participants go about ‘doing being ordinary’ (Sacks, 1992b) in formulating their ‘first thoughts’ (Jefferson, 2004). Through sharing their initial impressions of the event, participants perform support work within the interaction, in essence working to normalize both the event and their initial misinterpretation of it. Normalising as a support work mechanism is also shown in relation to participants constructing the ‘quiet’ following the event as unusual. Normalising is accomplished by reference to the indexical ‘it’ and location formulations, which participants use both to negotiate who can claim to experience the ‘unnatural quiet’ and to identify the extent of the quiet. Through their talk participants upgrade the quiet from something legitimately experienced by one person in a particular place to something that could be experienced ‘anywhere’, moving the phenomenon from local to global provenance. With its methodological design and detailed analysis and findings, this research contributes to existing knowledge in four ways. First, it shows how rules are used by participants as a resource in negotiating and constructing social and moral orders. Second, it demonstrates that irony, sarcasm and insults are three devices of humour which can be used to perform solidarity work and reinforce existing social and moral orders. Third, it demonstrates how new social and moral orders are collaboratively constructed in relation to extraordinary events, which serve to frame the event and evoke reasonable responses for participants. And last, the detailed analysis and findings further support the use of conversation analysis and membership categorization as valuable methods for approaching quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication.

The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate how the Swedish peasantry was perceived by the Swedish Burgher, Clerical, and Noble Estates during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By studying the Diet protocols of each Estate from three Diets, and by applying the concept of social imaginary, it considers what a peasant was perceived to be, who was perceived to be a peasant, and how these perceptions changed. The period under investigation is a time when the orders of society began to change and the peasantry underwent a process of radicalization. It is also a time when the way people perceived themselves changed, from a perception of “the self” heavily influenced by the collective, to a more individualistic one. These circumstances made the Estates question the traditional ideal of what a peasant was, re-writing the social script of the peasantry to include new attributes, duties, and virtues than it did a century earlier. Three main categories are used and aims at exploring the peasantry’s perceived social dignity, political role, and economic function, each representing its respective order in estate society. The study has shown how the Estates perceived peasants to be simple, uneducated, and foolish in the early stages of the Age of Liberty (1718–1772), and that the social dignity of a peasant was fundamental in conceptualizing what and who a peasant was. This changed towards the end of the century and became much more diverse and complex during the early nineteenth century. By the early 1820’s, the Noble and Clerical Estates perceived them as competent, responsible, and as being capable of betterment and upward mobility in a spiritual and worldly sense. The Burgher Estate perceived them as self-righteous, rustic, and intrusive as they had begun to invade their cities, steeling their livelihood, and thus threatening their entire existence as an estate. The economic transformations of the period also proved how the economic function of the peasantry was now to a larger degree emphasized as the determinative factor of what social dignity and political role they should have. / <p>The author has changed name to Jakob Starlander.</p>

This thesis discusses the possibility of social order based strictly on market and liberty principles, thus without a state hegemony. Firstly It's said that the rules of social order don't have to be necessarily products of legislation. That implies that stateless society doesn't mean that rules don't exist at all. Next the thesis explains fundamental principles of libertarian ethics -- self-ownership, homesteading and non-aggression principle. These principles give us the answer why state is an institution incompatible with individuals' rights. In the last chapter, thesis discusses the possibilities of private providing of some public services and goods, which are provided by the state these days. Conclusion is that these public goods don't differ from any other goods provided on private basis, so institution of state isn't that vital as we are forced to believe.

This dissertation investigates how social order was created in the Swedish navy at the end of the Swedish imperial age (1670-1716).  During the period the Swedish navy went through many changes that led to an expanding and re-structuring of both the administration of the Admiralty and the naval activities. These changes contributed to shape the life on board ships and at shipyards in more fixed ways than before. The dissertation analyses the social order on the basis of three overlapping themes, inspired by Michel Foucault’s theories on power relationships and the exercise of power. First it investigates how the navy upheld its hierarchy and formed the relations between superior officers and subordinate men, second how the Admiralty and officers exercised power in order to make the subordinates behave in the desired way and third how the subordinates reacted to the control; especially how they formed different strategies of resistance to challenge or escape it. Using micro-history methodology, in-depth analyses have been made of individuals and situations mostly found in judicial cases from the navy’s own court (the admiralty court).     Social relations were however not only a result of naval control. They were also highly guided by social orders that existed in civil society. Thus naval rank emerged with marital status, age, experience and masculinity ideals into a complex and shifting hierarchy that was constantly questioned. The dissertation shows that upholding naval social order was dependent on the fact that the Admiralty and officers used both productive and repressive power strategies simultaneously. The naval order offered opportunities and careers to those who were obedient and skilful but could threaten the disobedient troublemaker with severe punishments. The order was also highly dependent on individual relations and situations. Since order primarily was challenged in face to face- situations the superiors had to devise power strategies to control those situations. By doing that they at the same time reduced all resistance to separate, single events and repeatedly rejected the slightest implication of any criticism towards the general social order. The power relations thus were a delicate theater were both superiors and subordinates pretended their actions meant something else than it did. From the point of view of the subordinates the social order always was about obligations and rights but from the superiors’ perspective social order basically was the main difference between chaos and control.