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Record W2462022795 · doi:10.29173/cjs27799

Cohen, Ira J., Solitary Action: Acting on Our Own in Everyday Life.

2016· article· en· W2462022795 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Kevin Walby

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Canadian Journal of Sociology · 2016
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Winnipeg
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAction (physics)SociologyEveryday lifeEpistemologyPsychoanalysisPsychologyPhilosophyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

S olitary Action by Ira Cohen contributes to the legacy of interactionist sociology and pragmatist philosophy in the United States.Cohen's purpose is to examine solitary action, which he defines as "sequences of behavior enacted by individuals with no input or interference by anyone else from one move in the sequence to the next" (5).Cohen's core argument is that solitary actors retain agency, and that their actions happen in and are generative of a context.Solitary action is not the same as solitude, since solitude does not meet Cohen's threshold for defining some human experience as action.Cohen believes that previous experiences shape how individuals act, even when people are acting alone.In other words, he is not trying to suggest that individuals have some pre-social trait that enables solitary action.However, he claims that specific characteristics of solitary action are ignored by existing sociological theories.To examine solitary action, Cohen suggests sociological theories of interaction must be revised.Solitary Action is dedicated to addressing that gap.For Cohen, the main problem with interactionist sociology is that it has overlooked solitary action.Goffman, Garfinkel, and Mead "relegated solitary behavior to the status of a trivial concern" and "left things people do by themselves out of their accounts" (11), suggests Cohen.The claim here is that these canonical authors focus on small groups, thereby neglecting analysis of solitary action.Chapter Two reviews some works of Goffman, Garfinkel, and Mead.Cohen spares no time on exegesis, moving through the writings of these authors in a mere 20 pages.He does not spend too much effort differentiating interactionist sociology from ethnomethodology either.Chapter Three examines Cohen's three generic elements of solitary action.First, reflexivity is defined as the ability to change one's conduct based on variation in a context, even when acting alone.Borrowing a page from Garfinkel, Cohen engages with the notion of contextual reflexivity, which refers to the way sequences of action are shaped by prior conduct but at the same time remain generative

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.023
Threshold uncertainty score0.047

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0060.011
Scholarly communication0.0040.010
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0050.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.173
GPT teacher head0.379
Teacher spread0.206 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2016
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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