I have used an extended, open-ended interview with Robert Prus as a means with which to consider his contributions to ethnographic research and social theory. Given the range of his scholarship, a fairly detailed listing of the topics covered in the interview is presented at the outset. In addition to (a) considering Robert Prus’s own career as a scholar, attention is given to (b) his involvements in symbolic interaction as a field of study, (c) ethnographic research as a mode of inquiry, (d) generic social processes as a realm of theorizing about the nature of human group life, and (e) some specific ethnographies on which he has worked as well as (f) his critiques of both positivist and postmodernist scholarship and (g) his involvements in tracing the development of pragmatist social thought from the classical Greek era to the present time and even more recent thoughts on (h) the sociology of Emile Durkheim and (i) public sociology.

This article examines means of coping adopted by defeated politicians to manage their unexpected loss. In particular, we consider how they deploy deflection rhetoric to claim that circumstances beyond their control resulted in the undesirable outcome. The data mainly derive from transcribed conversations with Canadian politicians at both provincial and federal levels of government. The analysis offers a case study of disengagement and how individuals, forced to assume a new status involuntarily, attend to the presented challenges. An understanding of social life is enhanced by investigating not only the dynamics of identity construction but also processes of “un-becoming.”

is a Professor of Sociology at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. He has published on the topics of symbolic interactionism, pragmatist social theory, the sociology of knowledge, the culture of competitive chess, environmental sociology, Canadian sociology, and open-access publishing. With William Shaffir and Steven Kleinknecht, he is a co-editor of Ethnographies Revisited (Routledge, 2009), and with Bradley Brewster, he is a co-editor of Microsociological Perspectives for Environmental Sociology (Routledge, 2018).

social change. This section also stresses the importance of using an historical lens to understand the future. In his 'Technobiographical Reflections', Howard Rheingold warns us against the dangers of being unaware of the origins of our technological and learning tools:One of the things that makes technology dangerous is that most people never learn where tools come from, what they were originally designed to do, and how people have evolved, appropriated, subverted, perverted, and augmented them from their original purposes and designs. (p. 255)In his 'Historical Archaeologies', David Silver examines the origins and development of two community networks. He argues that complex histories have 'constructed' both networks to have different positions and priorities. As Silver points out, the internet is not 'a neutral, barren frontier: rootless, settlerless, waiting to be civilized ' (p. 303). Ultimately, Shaping the Network Society's mission is to reveal, criticize and thus also rewrite the complex histories and power structures underlying the global network society.

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