More Like, SONS OF CONFORMITY: Motorcycle Clubs, Moral Careers, and Normalization

Abstract

This chapter explores that landscape between the imagination and practice of ethnographic research as well as a concomitant transition in a sociologist's felt identity. Specifically, it describes the larger effect of building a persona for fieldwork on the self of the ethnographer. The work begins with an examination of the motives behind a proposed study of a deviant counterculture and the efforts that went into crafting a presentation of self appropriate for the milieu. It offers a detailed analysis of the social foundations of the outlaw motorcycle culture and a phase model of their socialization process.

Citation

Conti, N. (2021), "More Like, SONS OF CONFORMITY: Motorcycle Clubs, Moral Careers, and Normalization", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Radical Interactionism and Critiques of Contemporary Culture (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 52), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 115-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620210000052008