Governance of Endurance beyond Telos: Observing Conduct of Conduct in Situ

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Embodied Trauma, Death, and Addiction

Abstract

This paper draws on immersive observation of prolonged machine gambling among older women to reconsider what “loss chasing” describes in real time. Across sessions marked by continued play, we did not observe escalating attempts to recover losses or exit upon winning; instead, we observed sustained engagement organized around persistence. In the moment, extended play often looks less like a plan to recover losses and more like staying with the machine through pacing, micro-pauses, and self-soothing routines.
Building on Schutz’s distinction between lived action and retrospective typification, Goffman’s argument that action need not be organized around discrete endpoints, and Martin’s account of goal language as retrospective rationalization rather than a generative source of conduct, we show how a telic explanatory frame of loss chasing has been projected onto conduct that is not organized by telos in practice.
We argue that governance operates not only by steering action toward goals, but by stabilizing persistence when clear endpoints no longer organize conduct. Drawing on Foucault’s “conduct of conduct,” we develop a diagnostic approach for analyzing how settings structure the temporal conditions under which persistence is sustained. This lens travels to social fields characterized by structured repetition, monitoring, and disruption absorption, such as app-based engagement loops, customer service environments, repair garages, or dancing clubs, where governance operates through the regulation of staying rather than the direction of ends.

Authors

• Noa Vana, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Robert Futrell, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

• Shane W. Kraus, UNLV