The Scandal as the Play of Symbolic Boundaries

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Symbolic Boundaries Research Network

Abstract

THE SCANDAL AS THE PLAY OF SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES
Mark D. Jacobs
George Mason University
January 2014

I propose to explore the scandal as an elemental cultural form that indicates (and indeed helps govern) both the ballast and the flux of symbolic boundaries. Scandals, I would argue, are constitutive of modern politics, finance, economics, and civic life. They demonstrate the primal dialectic of concealment and disclosure analyzed by a tradition of sociological thought extending from Simmel to Goffman to Jack Katz and Josh Gamson. The particular agonistic dramas that they enact are symbolic of displaced structural strains. Their outcomes are variable: more or less consequential, representing varying dimensions of change, sometimes beneficial to the civil sphere and sometimes harmful. They illustrate the different systems levels on which symbolic boundaries operate: phenomenological, dramatistic, and structural. My presentation will be more heuristic than didactic, as befits a round-table discussion, and will (within the limits of time) make reference to a range of specific scandals—political, financial, and sexual—to probe the systemic interrelations of different types of scandal.

Author

• Mark D. Jacobs, George Mason University