Interactionism: Challenges and Developments

Interactionism: Meaning and Self as Process

5.3 Interactionism: Challenges and Developments

Importantly, this way to interactionally theo- rize collectivities is slightly suspicious of any talk of “Society” or of “Culture” if they are thought of in an all-encompassing sense.

Meanings do congeal, and aren’t completely mal- leable once they are set. Yet they congeal in spe- ciﬁ c and concrete interactional contexts. The study of small groups, in this reading, is the study of society in miniature (Stolte et al. 2001 ).

The second stream of research, spearheaded by writers such as Tamotsu Shibutani, Anselm Strauss and Howard Becker (all students of Blumer from his Chicago days) takes a different approach.

Rather than beginning with the small group, it starts with the social organization of activity—

with the collective act. As Shibutani ( 1955 ) put it in an early and inﬂ uential article, a social world is

“a universe of regularized mutual response.” That is, it is a plurality of actors organized around a shared activity, where the actions of one set of actors in this world affects, and is expected to affect, others who are engaged in different aspects of the same activity (see also Strauss 1978 ).

The image emerging here is perhaps more amenable to a macro-oriented approach. If the idiocultural approach imagines a world made of the intersection and emergence of a multitude of small groups, the social worlds perspective imagines the world as made of a multitude of actors, through whose actions speciﬁ c arenas of activity emerge. It is a visualization that looks a lot more like a network-image than like the bud- ding idiocultures of Fine’s analysis. This is still, however, a deeply interactionist vision. The focus is on the concrete activity and the ways actors practically affect each other’s actions, and there- fore the way to circumscribe the activity is quite different than the way we usually do so.

Thus, for example, Becker’s ( 1982a ) Art Worlds takes a social worlds perspective to the study of art. In doing so, Becker makes a decep- tively simple point. Usually when people think about art worlds they imagine a world made by the artists, sometimes the consumers of art. But as Becker begins with the collective act of art, a different set of protagonists emerges—these include the artists, but also include the people who install the art in the museum, those who

make and sell the canvases and paints, the guards and cashiers at the museum, etc. By beginning with the concrete activity, then, a social worlds perspective gives one a very different view of life than if we would think about them as “ﬁ elds” or

“professions.” Rather than the rareﬁ ed few, we must, as Becker puts it ( 1982a : 34) incorporate

“all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, deﬁ ne as art.”

5.3 Interactionism: Challenges

Lastly, critiques have also arisen from other micro-sociological traditions, with some phenomenologically- inclined sociologists of the body being wary of what seems to be a deep cognitive bias in interactionism. The gist of the argu- ment here is that the symbolic in symbolic interactionism elevates deliberation and language as the key sites where meanings are made. What, however, of emotion? What of embodiment?

Should sociologists only study purposeful mean- ingful action, or should they also take careful stock of pre-conceptual, embodied, behaviors that also tend to be socially patterned?

I would like to propose that although interactionism has its share of problems, critics have been usually barking at the wrong tree. Thus, to take the set of studies already outlined above, it already becomes clear that the research traditions that stem from interactionism are far from blind to the ways in which the situation is set up. That 911-call dispatchers need to ﬁ ll in a box that tells the police what is the suspect’s race is crucial;

that doctors hold the information and the patient none at all sets up the entire research program on awareness contexts in dying. When laws that mandate disclosure were set the situation deeply changed. Power, in the interactionist tradition, comes from the uneven institutionalization of situations.

Of course, a critic can argue that it is crucial for sociologists to trace how unequal situational footing developed in just these ways. But, interactionists could retort, this is simply not the proj- ect they outlined for themselves. Interactionism never claimed that power did not exist on a macro-level, or that tracing the history of power relations wasn’t important. What it said was that meaning-making in the situation cannot be completely reduced to these structures, and that to understand both stability and change in macro- regimes requires a close attention to the ways in which people make and reshape meaning in the actual world. In fact, there is a provocative—and humanistic—theory of power at play in interactionism. While the situation may be unevenly set, the capacities of actors is treated as equal. It is for this reason that interactionists are loath to put

much emphasis on actors’ ingrained bodily habits or culture.

In fact, most ethnographers who draw on interactionism today combine research on the macro-organizational, legal and economic setting of the situation, and the actual interaction they observe—as, in fact, did the early proponents of the Chicago school of sociology from which interactionism emerged. This, for example, is the research strategy used in Forrest Stuart’s ( 2016 ) book, Down, Out and Under Arrest . The book traces the social effects of zero-tolerance policing on the inhabitants of Skid Row, a Los Angeles downtown area that has become the place of last resort for people when they’re down on their luck. Stuart documents an intensive form of policing in which people are at risk for arrest for minor infractions and violations (sitting on the sidewalk, jaywalking).

Setting the stage, Stuart delves deeply into the historical emergence of Skid Row as well as the legal structure that underlies the situations he describes. Once he sets up the macro- environment, however, Stuart shows how the interactional situation is set up in predictable ways. In a poignant move, Stuart shows that this form of intense policing results in men and women on the street policing each other’s actions.

As Stuart writes:

The constant threat of police interference forced the vendors to adopt the gaze of the police and to act as surrogate ofﬁ cers, thus engendering a per- verse mode of privatized enforcement that under- mined the commonly theorized beneﬁ ts of informal control, undercut the possibilities for rehabilita- tion, and worsened the social and economic mar- ginalization of Skid Row residents. (p. 190)

In effect, Stuart depicts an interactionist mechanism: one of the unforeseen effects of intensive policing is that people who constantly get stopped, frisked and arrested, begin to “see like a cop.” That is, as a result of the back and forth between police and Skid Row, citizens change the deﬁ nition of the situation and assume the per- ceptive schemas of police ofﬁ cers. Because this reaction is modeled after repeatedly-observed police actions, residents integrate the contextual aspects typical of police modus operandi: if

police ofﬁ cers stop someone in your vicinity, they are likely to also ticket you for some infrac- tion, real or imagined. Here, then, emerges a second part of the mechanism Stuart describes, where some men and women begin to themselves enact modes of “third party policing” in order to keep their environment safe from police presence.

The irony is not only that third party policing emerges from fear rather than a spirit of collabo- ration, but also that these men and women react to perceived infractions. Thus, for example, since white men (unless they are extremely disheveled) seem out of place, residents police them away;

since women are assumed to be sex-workers, a few men forcefully removed a man from Skid Row who was trying to keep his drug addicted wife with him. When policing the perceived per- ceptions of the police, the men on the street ended up replicating some of the most repressive and unjust forms of such policing.

Stuart’s work, like that of other leading interactionist ethnographers (e.g. Jerolmack 2009 ; Lee 2016 ; Timmermans 1999 ), moves between the situation and the larger social context. It shows both how interactions are shaped by the macro-processes they are embedded in, but also why it is crucial to look at the interactional situation in order to understand these macro-contexts.

Although the way Skid Row citizens interactionally negotiate the meaning of their situation may make sense in hindsight, it is only through paying attention to the situation that some of the most problematic aspects of the policing of Skid Row came to the fore. In sum, then, there is little in interactionism to hinder a macro-analysis of power. Just the opposite seems to be the case, as an analysis of the macro-structure on its own would be blind some of its the most nefarious effects.

Much like the problem of macro-structures and power, aspects of the problem of the body and emotion were somewhat overblown. This is both because, as researchers such as Arlie Hochschild ( 1979 ) and Susan Shott ( 1979 ) have shown, we learn how to feel in certain situations, and these feelings-rules are mediated by interaction (see also Barbalet 2009 ). But, more impor-

tantly, research into the process of embodiment has shown that emotions very often emerge interactionally. Thus, for example, as Jack Katz ( 1999 ) shows in how emotions work , laughter emerges as people align their bodies and selves to others. To show that, Katz has videotaped people going to fun-house mirrors. Rather than ﬁ nding that people laugh as they see themselves distorted, he ﬁ nds that people laughed much more when they walked together. And, by analyzing the vid- eos in painstaking detail, he showed that in order for laughter to emerge, people walking together took great pains to position themselves so that they saw the same thing. It was when people were together, and managed to sustain a shared percep- tual vantage point, that they laughed.

What we get out of these studies, then, is a corrective to some of the usual critiques leveled against interactionism. By taking the pre- structured nature of the situation into account, interactionists (both in social psychology and in ethnography) have been able to incorporate the larger macro-context—including contexts of rac- ism or poverty. By looking closely at feeling rules and at the actual processual production of emotion, interactionists have been able to incorporate elements of emotion and embodied behav- ior into their explanation without making them any less interactionist in the process.

5.3.1 The Tricky Problem of Culture But not all questions are so easily answerable.

Both the question of embodiment and the question of macro-structures contain features that are far trickier to approach from an interactionist perspective. The problem in both cases is quite similar—though coming at it from opposite ends. If we think about the macro-patterning of the social world as the multiplication of structurally pre-set situations, we may be able to capture some elements of power, but we will miss more subtle forms of discursive power (Lukes 1974 ). In other worlds, by assuming that the only element that skews situations in predictable ways is structural, we miss the whole realm of ideology and discourse. More generally (and less power-

centered) we miss the sharedness of culture, as it sets people’s anticipations of what they can expect in a given situation, and how to go about muddling through it.

On the other end of culture, the most genera- tive sociological projects that emphasize embodiment argue that what makes the body and emotion so salient is that it precedes the situation and shapes the way that selves are molded over time.

Thus, for example, Bourdieu’s (e.g. 1977 , 2000 ) notion of habitus focuses on the way in which both our bodies, tastes and modes of perception and cognition are shaped by the conditions of existence in which we grow up. Thus, in any actual situation, we are enacting schemas of action and perception that we arrived with. The challenge that this position implies is that interactionism seems to assume that people generally come into the situation with the same capacities and embodied ways of enacting their selves. If we problematize this assumption, some aspects of symbolic interactionism may be treading on shaky ground.

These criticisms are not new, and classical interactionists were well aware of the problem of culture. And yet, there was something a little too facile about their initial responses to this challenge. Thus for example, Howard Becker tried to provide an interactionist’s account of culture by arguing ( 1982b ) that culture was the set of pre- given expectations that actors brought with them into interaction. Taking Jazz musicians as his example, he argued that we can compare “culture”

to the shared repertoire of songs and expected variations that musicians come armed with. It’s an important part of the situation, no doubt, but the more important aspect of the action is the kind of improvisations and unexpected variations that happen when musicians actually work together. In a different vein, Sheldon Stryker ( 1980 ), the most important architect of symbolic interactionist social psychology, attempted to come to terms with larger cultural considerations by producing a structuralist variety of interactionism. In his ver- sion, the theorist takes the position of actors seriously, as each position entails different signiﬁ cant others, and thus different conceptions of self.

These attempts, however, fall short of taking either culture or people’s embodied positions seriously. For Becker, that people come into the situation with a repertoire of action seems too taken for granted. Rather than thinking about the complex relationship between the cultural repertoire that people come armed with and what happens in the situation, he relegates culture to a background characteristic. For Stryker, selves are structurally located as individuals are socialized to appreciate a different “generalized other”

(G. H. Mead’s term for the internalization of the social as such), but the mechanism for such different locations is purely cognitive, and a theory of the interaction of shared culture and interaction is lacking.

To answer these challenges, recent interactionists have moved in two complementary direc- tions. Thus, Eliasoph and Lichterman ( 2003 ) locate this meeting point in the notion of “group style.” As they put it, cultural meanings (such, for example, as “civic action”) are ever present. They are a resource that both constrains and enables social action across a wide variety of settings. We all know what civic action means, at least “sort of.” However, it is this “sort of” that provides a clue to the relationship between culture and interaction. What something like “civic action” actually means is more ambiguous than cultural theorists often acknowledge. People don’t go to the dictionary or to the nearest sociologist to check whether what they are doing is “civic.”

This, for Eliasoph and Lichterman, is where interaction becomes crucial. As people interact with each other, they invest meaning in general cultural concepts. And although there may be a certain family resemblance between the different ways in which groups breath practical meaning into culture, the actual practices they enact are different at every given case, as actors face different practical problems and different group dynamics.

This position may sound a lot like Fine’s “idiocultural” perspective describes above, but there are important theoretical differences between the two. For Fine, the most interesting dynamic is the emergence, from the bottom up, of local forms of

meanings. For Eliasoph and Lichterman, the most interesting location is the medium between the interaction and the wider culture.

A complementary attempt to tie wider notions of culture to interactionism takes a different route. Rather than thinking about the availability of general cultural tropes that actors then mold anew, the new generation of interactionists are increasingly trying to see how actors biographies and notions of the future shape the way they interact. In order to do so, these theorists need to account for actors’ ingrained habits, and see how actors’ locations shape the interaction. This, as we will see, forces us to relax quite a lot of the situational purism of some early interactionists.

But it does so without losing sight of the creative potential of the situation as a locus of meaning-making.

To understand the direction taken by these theorists it is useful to think about the notion of time. For classical interactionists, the most rele- vant temporality is that of the situation. Although they may trace the history that set up the situation in a particular way, once the stage is set the unfolding of the narrative arc of the situation is their primary focus. But if we want to understand how people operate within a wider culture, and why social worlds are structured in predictable ways, it isn’t enough to look at this situational unfolding. In any particular situation, people ori- ent themselves towards other temporalities. They are shaped by their pasts through habits of thought and action—often deeply ingrained in their very bodies—and they are anticipating and coordinating their futures. Since actors extend in time, the situation cannot be understood without such extensions.

One current direction, inspired by the work of Jack Katz, lies in the notion of biography. As Michael DeLand ( frth ) has recently argued, in order to understand a social situation, and espe- cially a recurring social scene, we need to understand where the interaction ﬁ ts in the biographies of actors. The very same activity—in his example, playing pickup basketball at a local park—is very different depending on whether going to the park is a recurring part of one’s everyday life, or whether it is something we do every now and

then; whether it is deﬁ nes our identity in important ways, or considered an appendage to other activities. A scene, in this reading, can be understood as the predictable intertwining of actors’

biographies, and their pragmatic and existential concerns.

Rather than holding the situation as the most important element for interactional analysis, it is the situation as it fi ts into actors’ longer terms textures of life. To understand a party, for example, is not only to understand what happens in the situation, but also at what point of the life course of actors it appears. A party held when partici- pants just turned 21 is going to be markedly different than a party held two years later, when drinking is less of a novelty. The tenor of a party will depend on how the specifi c situation fi ts the trajectories of actors—whether it is something they do every Friday? Every day? Almost never?

Taking a similar tack, the author of this chap- ter and others (Snyder 2016 ; Tavory 2016 ; Tavory and Eliasoph 2013 ; Trouille and Tavory frth ) have argued that in order to understand both actors and social worlds sociologists need to think inter-situationally. That is, not only within the situation, but in the predictable rhythms of situations that make up the social world. Simply put, we can’t completely understand what happens within a situation as an isolated incident, since people live not only in the present situation, but also implicitly compare this situation to other situations that they have experienced, as well as implicitly locating this situation in relation to the situation they expect to ﬁ nd themselves in later.

So, from the point of view of actors’, the focus only on the here and now of the situation misses much of what makes it what it is. This, then, is all the more true for the study of social worlds:

focusing on speciﬁ c situations and aggregating them into a social world, as do writers in the clas- sic social worlds tradition outlined above, ignores the rhythms and patterns of situations and interaction.

In an ethnography of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Tavory ( 2016 ) argues that being an orthodox Jew in that neighborhood was not simply a matter of belief or afﬁ liation. As important as these individual projects were,

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