In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the "narrative turn" in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in which narrative competence is socially organized and unevenly distributed. We show how this approach, or cluster of approaches, rooted variously in conversational analysis, symbolic interactionism, network analysis, and structuralist cultural sociologies, has both responded to problems associated with the narrative turn and shed light on enduring sociological questions such as the bases of institutional authority, how inequalities are maintained and reproduced, why political challengers are sometimes able to win support, and the cultural foundations of self-interest and instrumental rationality. 109 Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2011.37:109-130. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of California -Irvine on 03/12/13. For personal use only.

Purpose -To theorize and research the conditions under which a highprofile social movement organization (SMO) receives newspaper coverage advantageous to it.Design/methodology approach -To explain coverage quality, including ''standing'' -being quoted -and ''demands'' -prescribing lines of actionwe advance a story-centered perspective. This combines ideas about the type of article in which SMOs are embedded and political mediation ideas. We model the joint influence of article type, political contexts and ''assertive'' SMO action on coverage. We analyze the Townsend Plan's coverage across five major national newspapers, focusing on front-page coverage from 1934 through 1952, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (fsQCA).

Scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of culture in social movements' emergence, trajectories, and impacts. Culture is no longer conceptualized as a subjective lens through which people perceive objective structures, but rather as a key dimension of those structures. This has allowed researchers to shed new light on why certain areas of social life come to be contested when they do, as well as to understand the limitations on activists' ability to act strategically, and the sometimes surprising ways in which movements have influence. We focus on one vein of research: the role of institutional schemas in spurring mobilization and accounting for its effects. Schemas are accepted ways of doing things—doing business, obstetrics, race relations, or Internet protest. Research has investigated both the conditions in which institutionalized schemas become vulnerable to challenge and whether winning the acceptance of a new institutional schema counts as movement success.

As deliberative democratic theory has moved from a macro theory of democratic legitimacy to prescriptions for institutional design, questions about what constitutes deliberative communication have taken on increasing practical importance. At the same time, empirical data has accumulated to answer those questions. We review findings on the kinds of talk that produce either mutually-agreed upon decisions or better understanding of the issues at stake, equality among speakers, and impacts on policies or participants after the forum is over. Deliberative talk in facilitated settings today does not resemble the abstract, dispassionate reason-giving imagined by many theorists of deliberation. However, precisely for that reason, deliberative talk today is producing some of the benefits claimed for it.

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