Chapter1: Introduction: Sociological Theory

Reflexive Action and Interaction

Much interaction sustains a particular vision of reality. For example, ritual activity directed toward the gods sustains the belief that gods influence everyday affairs. Such ritual activity is an example of reflexive action; it maintains a certain vision of reality. Even when intense prayer and ritual activity do not bring forth the desired intervention from the gods, the devout, rather than reject beliefs, proclaim that they did not pray hard enough, that their cause was not just, or that the gods in their wisdom have a greater plan. Such behavior is reflexive: It upholds or reinforces a belief, even in the face of credence that the belief might be incorrect.

Much human interaction is reflexive. Humans interpret cues, gestures, words, and other information from one another in a way that sustains a particular vision of reality. Even contradictory evidence is reflexively interpreted to maintain a body of belief and knowledge. The concept of reflexivity thus focuses attention on bow people in interaction go about maintaining the presumption that they are guided by a particular reality. Much of ethnomethodological inquiry has addressed this question of bow reflexive interaction occurs. That is, what concepts and principles can be developed to explain the conditions under which different reflexive actions among interacting parties are likely to occur?

The Indexicality of Meaning

The gestures, cues, words, and other information sent and received by interacting parties have meaning in a particular context. Without some knowledge of the context--the biographies of the interacting parties, their avowed purpose, their past interactive experiences, and so forth--it would be easy to misinterpret the symbolic communication among interacting individuals. To say that an expression is indexical, then, is to emphasize that the meaning of that expression is tied to a particular context.

This notion of indexicality drew attention to the problem of how actors in a context construct a vision of reality in that context. They develop expressions that invoke their common vision about what is real in their situation. The concept of indexicality thus directs investigators to actual interactive contexts to see how actors go about creating indexical expressions--words, facial and body gestures, and other cues--to sustain the presumption that a particular reality governs their affairs.

With these two key concepts, reflexivity and indexicality, the interactionists' concern with the process of symbolic communication was retained by ethnomethodology, and much of the phenomenological legacy of Schutz was rejuvenated. Concern was with how actors use gestures to construct a lifeworld, body of knowledge, or natural attitude about what is real. The emphasis was not on the content of the lifeworld but on the methods or techniques that actors use to create, maintain, or even alter a vision of reality, As Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood noted, "the ethnomethodological theory of reality constructor is about the procedures that accomplish reality. It is not about any specific reality"

HAROLD GARFINKEL'S EARLY STUDIES

Harold Garfinkd's Studies in Ethnomethodology firmly established ethnomethodolofgy as a distinctive theoretical perspective. Although the book was not a format theoretical statement, the studies and the commentary in it established the domain of ethnomethodological inquiry~ Subsequent ethnomethodological research and theory began with Garfiakel's insights and took them in a variety of directions.

Gaffmkel's work saw ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry that sought to understand the methods people employ to make sense of their world. He placed considerable emphasis~ on language as the vehicle by which this reality construction is done. Indeed, for Garfinkel interacting individuals' efforts to account for their actions--that is, to represent them verbally to others--are the primary method by which a sense of the world is constructed. In Garflnkel's terms, to do interaction is to tell interaction, or, in other words, the primary folk technique used by actors is verbal description, In tiffs way, people use their accounts to construct a sense of reality.

Garfinkel placed enormous emphasis on indexicality--that is, members' accounts are tied to particular contexts and situations. An utterance, Garfinkel noted, indexes much more than it actually says; it also evokes connotations that can be understood only in the context of a situation. Garfinkel's work was thus the first to stress the indexical nature of interpersonal cues and to emphasize that individuals seek accounts to create a sense of reality.

In addition to laying much of the groundwork for ethnomethodology, Garfinkel and his associates conducted several interesting empirical studies to validate their assumptions about what is real, One line of empirical inquiry became known as the breaching experiment, in which the normal course of iuteraction was deliberately interrupted. For example, Garfinkel reported a series of conversations in which student experimenters challenged every statement of selected subjects. The end result was a series of conversations revealing the following pattern:

Subject." 1 had a flat tire.

Experimenter; What do you mean, you had a flat tire?

Subject: (appears momentarily stunned and then replies in a hostile mannet): What do you mean, "What do you mean?"A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what 1 meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question

In this situation, the experimenter was apparently violating an implicit rule for this type of interaction (such as "accepting statements at face value") and thereby aroused not only the hostility of the subject but also a negative sanction, "What a crazy question]" Seemingly, in any interaction there are certain background features that everyone should understand and that should not be questioned so that all parties can "conduct their common conversational affairs~ without interference?' Such implicit methods appear to guide a considerable number of everyday affairs and are critical for the construction of at least the perception among interacting humans that an external social order exists. Through breaching, Garfinkel hoped to discover the implicit ethnomethods being used by forcing actor to engage actively in the process of reality reconstruction after the situation had been disrupted.

Other research strategies also yielded insights into the methods parties use in an interaction for constructing a sense of reality. For example, Garfinkel and his associates summarized the "decision rules" jurors employed in ~reaching a verdict. By examining a group such as a jury, which must by the nature of its task develop an interpretation of what really happened, the ethnomethodologist sought to achieve some insight into the generic properties of the processes of constructing a sense of social reality. From the investigators' observations of jurors, it appeared that "a person is 95 percent juror before [coming] near the court," indicating that, through their participation in other social settings and through instructions from the court, they had accepted the "official" rules for reaching a verdict. However, these rules were altered somewhat as participants came together in an actual jury setting and began the "work of assembling the 'corpus' which serves as grounds for inferring the correctness of a verdict" Because the inevitable ambiguities of the cases before them made it difficult for strict conformity to the official rules of jury deliberation, new decision rules were invoked to allow jurors to achieve a "correct" view of "what actually happened." But, in their retrospective reporting to interviewers of how they reached the verdicts, jurors typically invoked the "official line" to justify the correctness of their decisions. When interviewers~ drew attention to discrepancies between the jurors' ideal accounts and their actual practices, jurors became anxious, indicating that somewhat different rules had been used to construct the corpus of what really happened.

In sum, these two examples of Garfinkel's research strategy illustrate the general intent of much early ethnomethodological inquiry: to penetrate natural social settings or to create social settings in which the investigator could observe humans attempting to assert, create, maintain, or change the rules for constructing file appearance of consensus over the structure of the real world. By focusing on the process or methods for constructing a reality rather than on the substance or content of the reality itself, research from the ethnomethodological point of view could potentially provide a more interesting and relevant answer to the question of "how and why society is possible" Garfinkel's studies stimulated a variety of research and theoretical strategies.

CONCLUSION

Etlmomethodology has uncovered a series of interpersonal processes that traditional symbolic interactionists, who tend to follow Mead more than Schutz, have failed to recognize. The implicit methods that people use to communicate a sense of social order are a very crucial dimension of social interaction and organization, and the theoretical goal of ethnomethodology is to specify the generic conditions under which various folk methods are used by individuals. But, despite many interesting findings, this goal still seems far away-even after forty years of research.

In the end, ethnomethodology has become a rather isolated theoretical research program. Its practitioners increasingly focused on conversational analysis--a mode of inquiry initiated by Sacks and carried forward by a number of creative scholars. But their work has not had a great impact on mainstream sociological theory, inside or outside the interactionist tradition,

STATUS AND POWER THEORIES OF EMOTION

Randall Conins's Theory of Interaction Rituals

We encountered Randall Collins's theory of interaction rituals earlier in Chapter 10 on Weberian conflict theory. Attention is now drawn to his microevel theory of emotions. Collins's theory is about the levels of emotional energy that interaction rituals generate rather than about specific types of emotions, although as we will see shortly, he has teamed with Theodore Kemper to address the issue of how power and status produce particular types of emotions (see next section). But the basic theory, as Collins has developed it on his own, borrows from Emile Durkheim's and Erring Goffman's insights about the emotion-generating effects of rituals.

Collins behaves that the micro unit of analysis is the encounter of at least two people who confront each other and interact. What transpires in such encounters is mediated by the exchange of resources and rituals. Rituals contain the following elements:" (1) a physical assembly of co present individuals; (2) mutual awareness of each other; (3) a common focus of attention; (4) a common emotional mood among co-present individuals; (5) a rhythmic coordination and synchronization of conversation and nonverbal gestures; (6) a symbolic representation of this group focus and mood with objects, persons, gestures, words, and ideas among interacting individuals; and (7) a sense of moral righteousness about these symbols marking group membership. Figure 13.2 portrays the dynamics of such rituals that Collins sees as the "emotional energizer" of inter action because, like Durkheim before him, Collins argues that co-presence, mutual awareness, common focus of attention, rhythmic coordination and synchronization of gestures and talk, common mood, and symbolization arouse emotions that, in turn, feed back and heighten people's sense of co-presence, mood, attention, and symbolization.

Intermingled with these emotion-arousing properties of rituals are exchange processes. Collins visualizes two basic types of resources as crucial to understanding exchanges and rituals: (I) cultural capital and (2) emotional energy. Cultural capital consists of such resources as stored memories of previous conversations, vocal styles, special types of knowledge or expertise, the prerogatives to make decisions, and the right to receive honor, The concept of generalized cultural capital denotes those impersonal symbols that mark general closes of resources (for example, knowledge, positions, authority, and groupings),whereas the concept of particularized cultural capital refers~ to the memories that individuals have of the particular identities, reputations, and network or organizational positions of specific persons. Emotional energy is composed of the level and type of affect, feeling, and sentiment that individuals mobilize in a situation.
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Figure 13.2 Collin’s Conceptualization of Ritual

Interaction consists of individuals using their cultural capital and emotional energy to talk with one another. Such conversations involve an investment of capital ~and energy, with each individual attracted to situations that bring the best available payoff in cultural capital and emotional energy Although individuals also seek a profit in the cultural capital that they spend and receive in interaction, Collins appears to emphasize emotional energy as the real driving force of interaction. Humans find positive emotional energy highly rewarding, and though other rewards are not irrelevant, positive emotional energy is the most valuable. Indeed, individual seek to maximize their positive emotional energy by participating in those interaction rituals that generate a clear focus of attention, a common mood, emotional arousal, rhythmic synchronization of mood and arousal, and symbolization of these in terms of moral codes.

In Collins's view, there is a kind of market for interaction rituals: Individuals weigh the costs in time, energy, cultural capital, and other resources that they must spend to participate in the various rituals available to them, then they select those rituals that maximize emotional profits. In this sense, Collins proclaimed emotional energy to be the common denominator of rational choice. Thus, rather than representing an irrational force in human interaction, Collins sees the pursuit of emotions as highly rational: People seek out those interaction rituals in a marketplace of ritual that maximize profits (costs less the positive emotional energy produced by the ritual). The search for emotional energy is, therefore, the criterion by which various alternative encounters are assessed for how much emotional profit they can~ generate.Humans are, in a sense, "emotional junkies," but they are implicitly rational about it. They must constantly balance those encounters where interaction rituals produce high levels of positive emotional energy (such as love making, family activities, religious participation, and gatherings of friends) with those more practical, work activities that give them the material resources to participate in more emotionally amusing encounters. Indeed, those who opt out of these work-practical activities and seek only high-emotion encounters (such as drop-outs in a drug culture) soon lose the material resources to enjoy emotion-arousing encounters. Moreover, within the context of work-practical activity, individuals typically seek out or create encounters that provide increases in emotional energy. For example, workers might create an informal subculture in which social encounters produce emotional energy that makes work more bearable, or as is often the case with professionals, they seek the rituals involved in acquiring power, authority, and status on the job as highly rewarding and as giving them an emotional charge (such is almost always the case, for instance, with "workaholics" who use the work setting as a place to charge up their levels of emotional energy),

Not only are there material costs as well as expenditures of cultural capital in interaction rituals, but emotional energy is, itself, a cost. People spend their emotional energy in interaction rituals, and they are willing to do so as long as they realize an emotional profit--that is, the emotional energy spent is repaid with even more positive emotions flowing from the common focus of attention, mood, arousal, rhythmic synchronization, and symbolization. When interaction rituals require too much emotional energy without sufficient emotional payoff, then individuals gravitate to other interaction rituals where their profits are higher.

What kinds of rituals provide the most positive emotional energy for the costs involved? For Collins. those encounters where individuals can have power (the capacity to tell others what to do) and status (the capacity to receive deference and honor) are the most likely to generate high emotional payoffs. Hence, those who possess the cultural capital to command respect and obedience are likely to receive the most positive emotional energy from interaction rituals. At this point Collins's theory begins to converge with that developed by Kemper, as we now explore.