Worlds of Talk E-Book

Martin Malone

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 311

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book is about how we present our selves in everyday talk and interaction. Selves and conversations are skilful accomplishments requiring trust, dependency, and co-ordination. They are produced by multiple partners co-operating in the production of social events. The self is a 'performed character' - a 'dramatic effect' in Goffman's terms - which results from shaping our behavior to create a desired impression. Talk is both the means and the product of such events. Selves live in worlds that talk creates.

Using the methods of conversation analysis, this book seeks to discover how selves are created and transformed in everyday talk. It examines how pronouns are used to create interactional boundaries, the strategic manipulation of interactional support, talk in dealing with conflict, and stylistic differences associated with gender. Theoretical discussion is combined with fine-grained analysis of ordinary conversations.

The book will be of particular interest to students and professionals in sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

Leseprobe

Worlds of Talk

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Conversation

MARTIN J. MALONE

Polity Press

Copyright © Martin J. Malone 1997

The right of Martin J. Malone to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Reprinted 2005

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-1433-7

ISBN 0-7456-1897-9 (pbk)ISBN 9-7807-4566-763-8(eBook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Typeset in 11 on 13pt Adobe Caslonby Photoprint, Torquay, DevonPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Transcription Conventions

1  The Interaction Order and the Self

2  Pragmatic and Phenomenological Foundations of Interactionism

3  Pronouns, Interactional Roles, and the Construction of a Conversation

4  Gender and Talk: Ideology and Interaction

5  How to Do Things with Friends: Altercasting and Recipient Design

6  Small Disagreements: Character Contests and Working Consensus

7  Conclusions

Appendix: Data and Methods

Notes

References

Index

The self … is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience.

G.H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society

As a main focus of attention talk is unique … for talk creates for the participant a world and a reality that has other participants in it.

Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual

Preface and Acknowledgements

From 1974 to 1995, 19,341 social science books and articles have had “self” in their titles or abstracts or as key words (Sociofile, 1/74–4/95). The self is also a topic of major interest to philosophers, theologians, and literary theorists, as well as to the general public. Grocery store checkout lines display magazines entitled Self; “self-help” books are among the fastest growing sections in bookstores; and “self-esteem,” “self-actualization,” and “self-consciousness” are treated as major social problems. Oddly enough, the interactional creation of selves in talk has as yet been little studied.

This book is about how we present our selves in talk. It examines conversations as joint productions requiring trust, dependency, and coordination. If we recognize that the self is an interactional accomplishment, then we must also recognize that it is produced by multiple partners cooperating in the production of a social event.

Interestingly, perhaps the most fruitful avenue of inquiry into the nature of the self is only beginning to be traveled extensively. Talk is the principal way for others to know “who” we are. We are always aware that what we say tells as much about who we are as it does about the topic we are discussing. While language has been studied for thousands of years, the study of conversation (actual spoken talk) is a relatively new topic, with a history of barely 30 years. The theory and methods whereby to construct an understanding of this issue are at hand. The time to understand how selves are created and transformed in everyday talk is now.

The study of self-presentation in conversation raises a number of theoretical questions. The most general questions are these:

How are selves communicated?

How does that communication affect the nature of interaction?

How do those effects on the interaction feed back to alter the modes of self-presentation?

More specifically, I would like to know:

1 What is the role of talk in constructing a self-presentation out of the resources available to an individual?

2 How are identities presented, negotiated, and changed in talk?

3 How is talk used as a strategic interactive resource (one which can accomplish desired goals) to tell others how we see the situation, who we are at the moment, and how we see them?

This study is about how individuals tell each other who they are and how this affects conversation. It is about selves in conversation. In fine-grained analyses of a few conversations, it looks at

1 how talk structures interaction,

2 how gender differences are displayed in identity presentation,

3 how individuals manipulate support, and

4 how conflicts affect self-presentations.

This book is designed to appeal to students and professionals in sociology (especially in ethnomethodology, qualitative methods, theory, symbolic interaction, and conversation analysis), social psychology, sociolinguistics, linguistic pragmatics, rhetoric, speech and communication, and any other areas concerned with language use in everyday life. It should also appeal to an educated audience interested in how conversations reveal who we are and how we deal with each other in everyday situations.

Chapter 1 discusses Goffman’s notion of the “interaction order” (1983b) as a separate domain of sociological study. It is in the interaction order that self-presentation takes place. Chapter 2 provides some philosophical foundations for the analytical portion of the book and attempts to show the connections between the symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches. Chapters 3–6 are analyses of conversation that attempt to show, as Labov and Fanshel say, “what gets done by what gets said” (1977, p. 71). Chapter 3 analyzes how pronouns are used to create interactional alignments. Chapter 4 enters the debate on gendered styles of talk. Chapter 5 examines how talkers line up support in conversation, and chapter 6 analyzes an instance of disagreement, its resolution and return to working consensus. The conclusions in chapter 7 return explicitly to the moral nature of interaction and attempt to provide an interactional account of how talk creates selves. An appendix provides information on the data employed here and the methods of collection and analysis.

The analytic portion of the book examines the fine details of how talk constitutes and is constituted by the interaction order and how in this order selves are created and maintained. It employs the insights of Erving Goffman, symbolic interactionism and conversation analysis to understand just what goes on when people come together. The goal is to provide an account of the self in interaction.

I owe thanks to a great many people whose ideas, criticism, encouragement, and support helped this project grow over many years. As a graduate student in anthropology at Southern Illinois University many years ago, I was first introduced to linguistics by Larry Grimes and Ed Cook. It was at a lecture by Dell Hymes at Southern Illinois University that I realized how fascinating and important the study of talk was. Though I did not meet him until many years later, it was his lecture that afternoon that changed the direction of my studies.

In 1979, I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, to begin graduate training for a second time, this time in sociolinguistics. It was there that I met and began to study with Allen Grimshaw, Bill Corsaro, Donna Eder, Bonnie Kendall, and Charles Bird. Their influence on my work and on shaping my perspectives on language goes beyond my ability to offer adequate thanks. I continue to come up with ideas I think are new, only later to realize that they are indebted to those excellent and caring teachers. Allen, Bill, and Donna have continued to read drafts and offer encouragement, and I still depend on their wisdom.

I owe perhaps the largest single intellectual debt to Allen Grimshaw, who, for the last 16 years, has continued to bully, cajole, criticize, challenge, and encourage me every step of the way. He serves as my model when I think about being a mentor to students. The Multiple Analysis Project that Allen directed and saw through to publication (Grimshaw, 1989, 1994) provided the data for my dissertation (1985) and has also provided much of the data for this book.

I would also like to thank Anthony Giddens, who, as a visiting scholar at Indiana in 1981, provided the beginnings of my reading of hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophers and my appreciation of their connections to American pragmatism and symbolic interaction.

In the ten years since graduate school, the help of colleagues, students, editors, and the anonymous readers we all depend on to get us into print has been vital for the development of this work. Within my own small college, I owe many thanks to my former chair and close friend, Chris Smith, and to the members of Mount Saint Mary’s Writing Center, Steve Newmann, Carmen Schmersahl, Sarah Sinopoli, and Byron Stay. I am especially grateful to a former member of the Writing Center, as well as a coauthor, Meg Tipper, with whom I collaborated on work discussed here.

In my ten years at Mount Saint Mary’s, I have had too many students to thank individually. But for special help on this project, especially with bibliographic and interlibrary loan work and with copying and all the other mundane tasks of preparing a manuscript, I owe particular thanks to our departmental assistants, Alison Gibbons and Jennifer Tinder. I cannot imagine two more helpful, cheerful, resourceful, and imaginative researchers and feel truly blessed to have had their help.

I would also like to thank our departmental secretary, Rosilee Litz, and the staff of the Hugh Phillips Library, especially Lisa Davis, who handled that necessity of small college libraries, inter-library loans.

Colleagues at a distance are also necessary for survival, and I am grateful for the help of a number of scholars over the years. Jack Spencer, Doug Maynard, and Dede Boden have provided ideas, critiques, and intellectual stimulation. For a long, informative phone call he may not even remember having, I am indebted to Richard Hilbert, who helped me put together a book proposal when I was struggling to get started. Finally I would like to thank Bob Sanders, who, as editor of Research on Language and Social Interaction, devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to helping move an essay from ungainly draft to polished article.

I must also thank Mount Saint Mary’s College for providing many President’s Pride Summer Research Grants and the support of a year-long sabbatical that have made this book possible. I am also grateful for the congenial working environment, our ongoing faculty book discussion groups, and the interdisciplinary delights of a small college.

I am especially grateful to John Thompson of Polity Press, who first accepted the proposal for this book and gave me the time and encouragement to finish it, and to Polity’s anonymous reader who provided me with a very careful reading and critique of the manuscript and excellent suggestions for revision.

Finally, as always, I am more grateful than I can say to my wife Jane, my son Brady, and my daughter Megan for all of our talk and for their years of patience with what seemed like a never ending project that took me out at nights and kept me away on weekends. It’s the talking we do in our families that teaches us what talk is really about and for. It’s in that talk that selves are first formed.

Versions of some of the material in this book appeared in “Small disagreements: character contests and working consensus in informal talk,” Symbolic Interaction, 17 (1994), pp. 107–27; and “How to do things with friends: altercasting and recipient design,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28 (1995), pp. 147–70.

Transcription Conventions

[ – overlapping talk and simultaneous turn beginnings

] – end of overlapping talk

( ) – unintelligible stretch of talk

(.) – each period indicates a pause of one tenth of a second

(3.0, etc.) – length of pause in seconds and tenths of seconds

CAPITALIZATION – stress, increased volume

:::: as in we::::ll – elongated utterance

? – rising inflection, not necessarily a question.

Lengthy blank spaces within turns occur when square brackets indicate alignments of overlapping talk.

{ } – author’s inserted comments

____ – underscoring is used to highlight a word being discussed, and does not indicate any characteristics of the talk.

1

The Interaction Order and the Self

If indeed “each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations” (Tannen, 1990, p. 13), then it is in the flowing, reciprocal exchange of conversation that the self becomes real. Without such talk, the self would be inconceivable, because it would lack the symbolic medium necessary for self-presentation.

The self is immanently social: an interactional achievement, a “performed character,” a “dramatic effect” (Goffman, 1959, pp. 252–3) that is the result of crafting our behavior so that it makes sense to others. Conversations and selves are both interactional accomplishments requiring trust, dependency, and coordination. They are produced by multiple partners cooperating in the production of social events. Talk is both the machinery and the product of such events. Selves live in the worlds that talk creates.

Talk is the principal way for others to know “who” we are. This book applies Erving Goffman’s insights about the interaction order to our self-presentations in talk.

SELF-PRESENTATION AND TALK

Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and philosophers all devote attention to the nature of the self, the social actor who produces thought, emotions, rational and irrational actions, language, and society. What the self is and does, how it comes about, and its relation to other selves and the society around it are questions basic to all these disciplines. Like most important questions today, their study is not and cannot be confined to a single discipline. Understanding the self requires the integration of many lines of inquiry.

One of sociology’s most serious omissions in its claim to be a “science of society” is the scant attention it has traditionally given to spoken interaction.1 Linguistics has been a little better at recognizing the reciprocal problem – that the complex code it studies is in fact used by people in social situations to achieve real practical goals. However, most mainstream modern linguistics (with the exception of pragmatics) has more in common with mathematics and logic than with any study of how humans communicate.

One would expect that these two fields would tell us about how people communicate with each other in everyday life. But traditional approaches have resulted in a lack of interest in both the theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. Neither traditionally trained sociologists nor linguists are generally prepared to deal with the complexity of conversation, with its multiple meanings, taken-for-granted presuppositions, situational rootedness, and the many other minutiae of interaction which conversation researchers have described over the last 30 years.

One also searches in vain in the psychological literature on the self for a sophisticated treatment of conversation in self-presentation. Two recent works in which one would expect sympathetic treatment of these topics (Berkowitz, 1988; Gergen, 1991) are nearly devoid of interest in conversation. Carl Backman (in the Berkowitz volume) notes the absence of concern with conversation and its dismissal from studies of friendship and courtship, where one might assume that talk played a significant role (pp. 253–4). Talk and conversation are simply nontopics for Gergens study of “identity in contemporary life” (1991).

Contemporary philosophy provides us with useful approaches to the problem, but its own biases toward written as opposed to spoken discourse create a peculiarly distorted picture of the nature of the self. Whether we turn to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (1981), Taylor’s moral philosophy (1989), or Kerby’s semiotic/narrative approach (1991), we find the same underlying assumption that the self is like a written text, worked over and composed like a narrative. Their preference is for language not talk. They ignore the rough-and-tumble of conversation for the more orderly confines of the text. Their work is stimulating and provoking but is not about spoken interaction, the place where selves are created, developed, and reshaped on a daily basis.

The study of conversation stands at an exciting threshold of discovering the connections between informal talk and the meaning of the worlds it creates. It is at this juncture that the reciprocal creation of society and self takes place. But crossing that threshold requires combining insights from a number of disciplines. We are ready to begin to understand how conversational talk constructs a social self. The work must be interdisciplinary. As Geertz has said, the most important, fruitful, and exciting work today is going on between disciplines, not within them (1983).

Theoretical bases

Four sets of related ideas provide the intellectual foundations for this study. Broadly, they come from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, symbolic interactionism, and semiotics.

1Actions are designed for recipients The first assumption, from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, is that social actions are designed to “make sense,” to be “accountable,” to those who are their intended recipients. The meaning of actions is not transparent. Actions must be constructed and performed in such a way that a particular intention is conveyed, based on the actor’s knowledge of “shared background expectancies” (Rawls, 1989a, p. 16).

2Talk is multi-functional The second assumption, from sociolinguistics, as well as speech-act theory, is that talk is multi-functional. Because utterances refer not only to an external world, but also to the person who makes those utterances, talk is always self-referential (cf. Ricoeur, 1981).

3Self-presentation is semiotic The third assumption, from semiotics and also from symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology, is that the self should be understood from a semiotic perspective as an “assemblage of signs” (Perinbanayagam, 1991, p. 12). Because talk is always self-referential and, as such, is metonymic, hearers interpret utterances as signs which stand for a larger self. Similarly Goffman recognizes that the “available repertoire” of “culturally standard displays” used in face-to-face interaction (whether gestures, postures, facial movements, or utterances) is composed of “sign vehicles fabricated from the depictive materials at hand” that actors use to create their presentations (1983b, p. 11).

4The self is the product of a moral order The fourth assumption is basic to both Goffman and ethnomethodology and is also influenced by the work of Charles Taylor (1989). For Goffman, the sacred nature of the self, the respect for the self-presentations of others, the seriousness of presenting and protecting one’s own face, and a commitment to the “involvement obligations” of interaction (1959, 1967) point to interaction as a moral order. For Garfinkel, social life is based on a belief that others are behaving toward us sensibly (accountably) and with goodwill. Social life works not because people follow normative rules, but rather because they follow constitutive rules which make sense of what is going on. Breaches of these rules do not result in chaos (or “anomie”), but rather in insult and anger (1963). For Taylor, “selfhood and morality turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes” (1989, p. 3). Identity is meaningless without connection, without an orientation in a “moral space” (ibid., p. 28) composed of questions about and attachments to valued goods.

These assumptions lead to a theoretical perspective in which it is understood that social actions are designed to make sense to those who participate in them. Self-presentation takes place in encounters, situations of co–presence in which “persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived” (Goffman, 1963a, p. 17). It is these face-to-face interactions that structure our behavior and our need to present our selves. Thus social actors are aware of the need to organize their actions so that they are recognizable tokens of the meanings they intend to convey or the actions they intend to pursue. They are “designed for the recipient,” as Sacks said (1992, vol. 2, p. 230).

Mutual understanding results from a sensitivity to the necessity of making sense to others. Shared assumptions about sense-making lead to an exquisite sensitivity to the self-referential nature of talk. We are always aware that what we say tells as much about us as it does about the external world. For that reason, conversational talk always provides metaphorical information about the self. It offers others signs of who we are. Interactionist approaches to social analysis must be sensitive to this collaborative construction of face-to-face encounters, to the mutuality of conversation; to what Boden calls “the consequentiality of sequence” (1990, p. 254). For both Goffman and Garfinkel, it is this mutuality, this interdependence, that make interaction moral. This morality is not the result of external social organizational features, of norms, or values, or folkways. It is a morality intrinsic to interaction that is constitutive of interaction. Because interaction is meaningful, action is moral, and the self is of necessity a moral creature.

ERVING GOFFMAN AND THE INTERACTION ORDER

Over a period of nearly 30 years, from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the work of Erving Goffman explicated the role of a third order in social life, neither institutional nor individual – what he named “the interaction order” (1983b).2 From his earliest to his final writing, Goffman sought to describe how the interactional demands of situations are the primary source of structure for the social self. Interactional constraints are the product not of social structure, but rather of the needs of self-presentation. They are not the products of such standard sociological forces as race, gender, class, or age. Instead, they are cross-situational demands whose ends are “the creation and maintenance of self and meaning” (Anne Warfield Rawls, 1987, p. 143).

Rawls shows how the work of Erving Goffman, the ethnomethodologists, and conversation analysts converge on the description of “an interaction order sui generis which derives its order from constraints imposed by the needs of a presentational self rather than a social structure” (ibid., p. 136). Their work emphasizes the locally produced nature of the demands of the interaction order: that is, that interaction must satisfy self-presentational demands, while being “constrained by, but not ordered by, institutional frameworks” (Rawls, 1989b, p. 147).

In one of his earliest essays, “On face-work” (1967, but first published in 1955), Goffman establishes how the interaction order constitutes face-to-face behavior. He defines “face” as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (p. 5). Face is an interactive concept, dependent on the back-and-forth play of actor and audience. In this essay, Goffman describes the interaction order as a set of expectations so designed that “the person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of other participants” (p. 11). Face-to-face interaction is then dependent on a “reciprocity of perspectives” (Schutz, 1970) between interactants, in which each respects the self-presentation of the other in expectation of being accorded the same respect.

This simple reciprocity profoundly structures our everyday dealings, by creating an order based on the demands of self-presentation, not social institutions. The threats which might upset this order, such as revelations of hidden, “stigmatized” information (Goffman, 1963b) or the loss of this respect in “total institutions” such as prisons and insane asylums (Goffman, 1961a), were insightfully scrutinized by Goffman for what they said about normal interactions.

In his introduction to the essays collected in Interaction Ritual, Goffman claims that “the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another (1967, p. 2). The interaction order is “the behavioral order found in all peopled places, whether public, semi-public, or private, and whether under the auspices of an organized social occasion or the flatter constraints of merely a routinized social setting” (ibid.).

In an earlier description of the interaction order, he said that it provided regulation, “the kind that governs a person’s handling of himself and others during, and by virtue of, his immediate physical presence among them” (1963a, p. 8).3 It is like a set of traffic rules, which do not specify where people are going, only how they must treat each other while they are getting there.

Kendon points out that Goffman was at pains in the introductions to his early works to specify that the study of the interaction order was not to be confused with the study of small groups (1961b), the study of psychology (1967), or the study of communication (1969) (Kendon, 1988, pp. 15–17). The interaction order was to be seen as “a separate branch of sociology” (Kendon, 1988, p. 14), one which had not been adequately studied up until this time.

Perhaps the best account of the interaction order can be gleaned from Goffman’s presidential address to the American Sociological Association (1983b), in which he lays out its characteristics, its basic substantive units, and its relations to and differences from the institutional order and social organization. Goffman lists ten characteristics of the interaction order, which can be seen as the essence of face-to-face interaction. First, interaction is relatively circumscribed in time and space (p. 3). Second, the interaction order results from “certain universal preconditions of social life,” such as the need to share equipment, or space, or “access routes” “jointly, adjacently, or sequentially” (ibid.).

Third, is the “promissory or evidential character” (ibid.) of social life. This is what Mannheim (1971) and Garfinkel (1967) refer to as the documentarity of interaction. People treat face-to-face behavior as meaningful and read meanings into both our intended and unintended movements, and we know this and act accordingly. Thus behavior is semiotic; it is a sign vehicle for social meanings and is inevitably multi-functional and polysemic.

Fourth, face-to-face interaction involves a “joint focus of attention,” and hence the “sustained intimate coordination of action” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 3) (see esp. Goffman, 1967). This observation is basic to both the symbolic interactionist concern with how people fit “their respective lines of action to one another” (Blumer, 1969, p. 84), and the conversation-analytic premise that talk is a locally produced sequential accomplishment (Sacks et al., 1974).

Fifth, face-to-face interaction means that people characterize each other both categorically, as members of “one or more social categories,” and individually, in “a uniquely distinguishing identity” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 3). People respond to others in complex ways that may simultaneously reflect their uniqueness and their shared identities.

Sixth, interaction’s spatial dimension means that there are territorial effects – what Goffman calls “personal territory contingencies” (ibid., p. 4) having to do with our vulnerability to both physical and psychic assault, as well as with our ability to inflict such damage. These contingencies mean that all interaction is entered into with an awareness of risks and potentialities in terms of treatment of and by others (see esp. Goffman, 1971, pp. 28–61).

This leads to a seventh characteristic, which is that potentially threatening behaviors are part of “a fundamental duality of use” of behaviors, such that vulnerabilities may be proffered as marks of courtesy or affection (Goffman, 1983b, p. 4). This essentially ethological observation is consistent with our knowledge of dominance and submission behaviors in many species. Human manifestations of deference are ritual resources based on the communicative potential of these behaviors (see esp. Goffman, 1967). This is part of the basis of my emphasis on the multi-functionality and polysemy of conversational talk.

Eighth, these territorial contingencies require a set of “techniques of social management” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 4), in which bodily displays are enacted and read as if part of a “natural theater.” Once again, behavior is treated as meaningful and so must be managed in terms of its “recipient design” features (Sacks et al., 1974).

Goffman’s last two points recognize that extra-situational factors must also be considered in interaction. Goffman introduces the notion of “standing behavior patterns” (1983b, p. 4) to remind us that people bring certain expectations with them to a situation. Finally, he also recognizes that individuals have unique biographies “of prior dealings with the other participants” and a “vast array of cultural assumptions” (ibid.) that they bring to any interactional setting. While Schegloff (1987b) wisely warns that we cannot presume the relevance of contextual features, such as race or gender, if there is not some conversational warrant for so doing, we can at least presume that people come to interaction with a store of experience and assumptions.

These characteristics of face-to-face interaction are a set of fundamental observations on the nature of our everyday dealings with each other. Taken together, they define an order of experience that is constitutive of social life. It is located in time and place, treated as meaningful but potentially (and of course, usefully) ambiguous and threatening, and semi-permeable to external influences. These characteristics are responsible for the orderliness of this order. Most significantly, they are products of social encounters, not of some larger social structural forces.

Goffman defines five “basic substantive units” that comprise the order. His units provide a set of concepts moving from smallest to largest, including actors and events. First are people, who are either “singles” or “withs” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 6) (see esp. Goffman, 1971, pp. 3–27). These are “self-contained units for the purposes of participation in the flow of pedestrian social life” (1983b, p. 6). Second is “contact,” “any occasion when an individual comes into another’s response presence” (ibid.). Third are the encounters “in which persons come together into a small physical circle as ratified participants in a consciously shared, clearly interdependent undertaking” (ibid., p. 7). These may be conversations, card games, service transactions, and so forth (see esp. Goffman, 1964).

Fourth is the “platform format, … in which an activity is set before an audience” (Goffman, 1983b, p. 7). The key feature of this encounter is that there is an audience whose job it is to observe, not to interact. Finally, Goffman calls the largest of interactive events “celebrative social occasions … the foregathering of individuals admitted on a controlled basis, the whole occurring under the auspices of, and in honor of, some jointly appreciated circumstances” (ibid.). Such occasions, which may proceed over a number of days, may be, and probably are multi-focused, containing multiple circles of ratified participants and perhaps multiple platform activities.

This set of interactive units provides a parsimonious way of describing interaction. It defines a very small number of relevant units based on the who and what of interaction (people, contacts, encounters, platform activities, and celebrations) and shows how they combine into the stuff of social life. It is with or within these units that the ten previously noted characteristics of interaction occur.

Finally, Goffman makes clear how the interaction order is connected to the institutional order. The institutional order concerns the basic units of much traditional sociology: gender, age, race, and class. But the interactional order is not the basis from which these macro structures develop. Interactional units are not “prior, fundamental, or constitutive of the shape of macroscopic phenomena” (ibid., p. 9). They are rather the stuff of situations, of encounters, and while they are interpenetrated by the institutional demands of social life, they are part of “an interaction order sui generis” (Rawls, 1987, p. 136) reflecting self-presentational demands. This order is “constrained by, but not ordered by, institutional frameworks” (Rawls, 1989b, p. 147).

Goffman uses a variety of metaphors to describe the connection between the two orders. They are “geared or linked into” each other; there is a “loose coupling,” “a set of transformation rules,” or a “membrane selecting how various externally relevant social distinctions will be managed within the interaction” (1983b, p. 11). The claims of other prominent theorists (Giddens, 1988; Collins, 1989) not withstanding, Goffman is clear in his separation of the two orders. They are not just quantitatively (micro and macro) different. They are qualitatively different. They are about different problems.4

Wilson (1991) provides an ethnomethodological account of this same issue. He makes a distinction between “conventions,” the “culturally variable, historically contingent and negotiable” categories of social structure, and “mechanisms,” “the tools members of society use to construct their interaction” (p. 26). Whereas conventions are subject to change and negotiation, mechanisms are more basic. If they are changed, the very nature of the interaction changes. A change in the turn-taking procedure in mundane conversation – for example, from locally to externally controlled (as in a courtroom) – means that it is no longer conversation, it is something else, such as cross-examination.

This distinction draws on the basic phenomenological concept of essences (eidos). Wilson’s mechanisms are the essence of interaction, its “most general, necessary, and invariant features” (Schmitt, 1967, p. 139), without which an interaction would not be that interaction. For example, everyday conversation is locally controlled. The turn-taking procedures of the talk specify that one person talks at a time, that turns are exchanged, and that the next speaker may be chosen by the current speaker or may self-select (Sacks et al., 1974). Any other speaker-selection system – for example, one in which one person controls the floor and single-handedly allocates turns – would not be constitutive of normal everyday conversation. The change in the basic mechanism of the interaction changes what we call that interaction.

By contrast, conventions change on a regular basis. The meaning of conventions such as race, age, or gender, are historically, socially, politically, and economically reconstructed continuously. They are resources to which actors may orient themselves: for example, beliefs about the nature of women or men, or old people, or politicians. These resources are employed in interaction, but they are not the machinery of interaction.

Goffman’s concept of an interaction order provides a semiotic research agenda for investigating how behaviors indicate or signify social arrangements. The focus is on the connective tissue, rather than the organs of society. Here the interest is in how one order is linked to another, and there is a careful recognition that, while there are connections, each has its own ground rules and constraints.

Two readings of Goffman’s interaction order

Kendon’s reading of Goffman emphasizes that “the study of face-to-face interaction should be regarded as a separate branch of sociology” (Kendon, 1988, p. 14), a field, not coincidentally, to which Kendon’s own work has contributed significantly (see esp. Kendon, 1990). As noted earlier, he shows how Goffman was at pains in each of his early books to distinguish the study of interaction from related areas of sociology like small groups, communication, or social psychology.

Kendon provides a brief discussion of Goffman’s intellectual parentage and points to the influences of both Simmel and Mead on the kind of work Goffman undertook. He also distinguishes the sort of quantitative, measurement-oriented interactional observations made by researchers such as Robert Bales (1950) and George Homans (1950) from the more ethological, descriptive work of Goffman. Finally, he notes how influential visual anthropologists like Gregory Bateson and Ray Birdwhistell became in suggesting to Goffman how to look at interaction.

Kendon calls attention to the distinction that Goffman introduces early in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) between giving and giving off expressions, between the intentional and the “symptomatic” (p. 2) in a speaker’s words (e.g. between content and accent).5 While Goffman points out that this distinction “has only an initial validity” (ibid.), since actors are capable of manipulating both informational tracks, it is important to Goffman’s work for at least two reasons. First, it introduces the distinction between the specifically intended and the unintentionally meaningful information in a self-presentation. Second, it introduces a notion to which Goffman returned many years later (1974): how a message is framed by a variety of factors that provide its context. Hence meaning is inextricably tied to situational factors. The significance of framing to meaning will be discussed in the following section.

Both Rawls (1987, 1989b) and Kendon (1988) recognize that Goffman’s conception of the interaction order makes meaning central to face-to-face interaction. Rawls puts a basic phenomenological issue, the “problem of achieving mutual understanding” (Rawls, 1989b, p. 148), at the center of her discussion of the interaction order, and in so doing shows how the work of Harvey Sacks and conversation analysis extends Goffman’s own understanding. For Rawls, self and meaning are parallel accomplishments of the interaction order. Both are emergent, locally produced, sequential achievements of people in interaction. Rawls is critical of Goffman’s inadequate and traditional linguistic theorizing and shows how conversation analysis provides a more appropriate conceptualization of what talk does. In this way she develops a more sophisticated account of the interaction order, one that treats self and meaning as intrinsically connected concepts.

Rawls (1987) provides a critical reading of Goffman’s conception of the interaction order. She shows how Goffman’s work creates a new way of understanding the relation between individual and social structure, an understanding that does not require choosing one or the other, micro or macro, as determinative of social life. She describes four elements of a theory of the interaction order.

First, “the social self needs to be continually achieved in and through interaction” (1987, p. 136). Thus self-presentation is a basic feature of the interaction order. This claim is theoretically important, because it shows how Goffman’s work is tied to Mead (1934) and symbolic interactionism, a fact often minimized in discussions of Goffman’s intellectual heritage.