Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The interaction order, as conceived by Erving Goffman, is constructed around systems of enabling conventions that – without recourse to social contract or social consensus, as often assumed – provide a basis of social order. The interaction order, Goffman insists, is a substantive domain in its own right, engendered by social situations, interactions in which at least two actors are co-bodily present. That is, against the claims of either micro- or macrosociological reductionism, Goffman insists on the analytical distinctness of the interaction order from both the underlying language games and conversational protocols of ethnomethodologists and the various overarching systems of macrostructuralists. For his part, Goffman dismisses the claim that macrostructural properties are epiphenomenal to the interaction order. The influence of Goffman's formulation extends even to theorists who reject the primacy of his analytic focus, as well as to those who embrace different characterizations of interactional dynamics. As Goffman (1983) explains in his summative statement about the interaction order, enabling conventions arise as techniques of social management of the personal risks – both bodily and self-expressive – inherent in interpersonal interaction. These conventions “can be viewed … in the sense of the ground rules of a game” (p. 5); they are the shared base of cognitive and moral ... log in or subscribe to read full text