Robert Prus

Working from a symbolic interactionist perspective (GH Mead, Herbert Blumer)  my research and analysis is characterized by the interrelated emphases of (a) learning about the ways that people make sense of and go about their activities in conjunction with others in the community and (b) developing more fundamental and focused analytic understandings of human group life – regardless of the particular people, places, activities or times under consideration. In more focused conceptual terms, this has meant examining the ways that people (a) become and remain involved in situations, (b) acquire and defend as well as challenge perspectives or worldviews, (c) develop identities and reputations, (d) do activity (as in the processes and problematics of getting things done and making adjustments as things develop), (e) engage in persuasive interchange (and resistance), (f) generate and sustain relationships, (g) achieve linguistic fluency in their respective theatres of operation, (h) experience and manage emotionality, (i) develop and coordinate associations, (j) participate in collective events, and (k) become entangled in realms of intergroup relations. The quest is one of deriving, examining, and qualifying concepts that are fundamental to community life in more transsituational or transcontextual and transhistorical informed terms. These concepts or “generic social processes” (GSPs) not only enable researchers to make comparisons within particular contexts as well as across wider ranges of settings but these GSPs also represent sets of conceptual resources for examining people’s experiences and interchanges in all realms of community life. In addition to benefiting so centrally from the theoretical foundations, methodological practices and sustained comparative analysis as well as the community of scholars associated with the interactionist tradition, I’ve been fortunate in having had opportunities to embark on several ethnographic studies as well as develop some more theoretically oriented materials that deal with issues related to human knowing, acting, and notably broad realms of interchange. For me, this has meant studying the life-worlds, activities, and relationships of (a) religious leaders and their followers, (b) parole officers, (c) card and dice hustlers, (d) the hookers, strippers, bar staff, entertainers, patrons, and others who constitute the hotel community, (e) people involved in the more conventional marketplace as buyers, suppliers, and advertisers as well as salespeople and consumers, (f) magicians, (g) those involved in economic development as political representatives, developers, realtors, financiers, and corporate investors, and (h) the problematic nature of the lives of those struggling with chronic illnesses.Still, beyond these ethnographic ventures, I have been acquiring an exceptionally valuable, historically informed awareness of the nature of community life through a more sustained study of the classical Greek and Latin texts and a wide range of European and American interim scholars who built on Greek and Latin social thought.