Introduction

Social interaction – the actions and responses of people to each other’s activities – fills our everyday lives. The phone rings and we interrupt our conversation with a family member in order to answer it; we get on the bus and quickly scan the area to choose a place to sit – but not just anywhere; we enter an elevator and find the only other occupant is a senior manager where we work and momentarily feel uncomfortable; we invite a friend to lunch and there is a hesitation before she turns us down, proffering a plausible excuse. These instances of social interaction are the stuff of our daily lives, at home and at work, with our friends and with strangers. Two points can be made straightaway. One is that such ordinary face-to-face dealings with one another make up the world of daily life, a world that is for us what Alfred Schutz called a ‘paramount reality’. The world of daily life is paramount in our experience because it provides us with a sure sense of our being in the world – that ‘this’ really is ‘it’ for our own existence and that of others. The second point is that social interaction in everyday life is not haphazard but structured, patterned and orderly. That structure, pattern and orderliness indicates its socially organized character. It is thus not surprising that sociologists have paid close attention to everyday instances of social interaction in order to discover the sources and nature of that orderliness.

Over the past half-century, sociology has accumulated a significant body of knowledge about social interaction. The close sociological understanding of practices of social interaction and the forms and processes assumed by these practices was developed by three traditions of sociological work: symbolic interactionism (as defined by Herbert Blumer and Everett C. Hughes), ethnomethodology (as defined by Harold Garfinkel) and conversation analysis (as defined by Harvey Sacks). We might follow what has become a convention and abbreviate these as the approaches of SI, EM and CA. The important and highly original contributions of Erving Goffman should also be considered alongside these traditions. While Goffman can be regarded as a symbolic interactionist, his ideas also go beyond that approach and impact on how we might understand both spoken interaction and the routine establishment of everyday order and in some respects act as a bridge between these perspectives, revealing their similarities and differences.

We want to alert readers of this book to the scope of these three traditions that make up the core of contemporary sociological approaches to interaction. While sociology’s topics and approaches often seem unduly subject to pressing social issues and current intellectual fads and fashions, the work we have selected seems to us to form a set of robust traditions within which a modest cumulative knowledge can be traced, and upon which the myriad of contemporary interactionist empirical studies rest. In our view, the sociologies this book examines represent one of contemporary academic sociology’s most understated achievements. One of our aims in writing this book is to curate these sociologies, to exhibit exactly what it is that makes them distinctive and productive as traditions of sociological work.

Our book examines, compares and evaluates these leading interactionist approaches to sociology. Each of the three traditions we consider might be regarded as alternate sociologies – that is, alternatives to mainstream, conventional sociological work, especially as it was practised in the second half of the twentieth century in the USA, the land where sociology has been most fully developed and most thoroughly professionalized. Similarly, SI, EM and CA are rooted in US sociology but have become diffused across the world, especially in places where sociology has flourished such as Europe, Australasia and Japan. Sometimes they are situated as arcane specialties. At other times they are claimed as the ‘loyal opposition’. Occasionally it is maintained that the opposition has evaporated and that the interactionist sociologies now have been incorporated by mainstream sociology.

Whatever view is taken of their current status, SI, EM and CA originated as alternate sociologies that, as we shall show, were critical of the analytical and methodological practices of the established orthodoxies of academic sociology. These points of divergence are vital in placing each tradition in the context of debates about the nature of human action and the methods appropriate to its apprehension. Our book discusses these broader methodological issues and seeks to show how they are worked out in empirical studies. Our primary concern in articulating the three sociologies of interaction lies with these wider questions about method rather than with research methods as such. Certainly, we shall discuss questionnaires and interviews, observational and documentary research, but ours is not a research methods book. The interested reader is directed to texts such as ten Have (2007), Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) and Silverman (2011) for more detailed guidance about how to conduct studies in the styles outlined in our text.

We do not want to suggest that the three sociologies of interaction that we have identified are templates for doing studies. Certainly there are shared methodological and analytical precepts. However, there is also much variation and scope for innovation within each approach, as we try to convey in the discussions of specific studies.

We have organized the book into eight chapters. In the first three of these we will introduce the three key traditions outlined above – symbolic interactionism (including a discussion of pragmatism), ethnomethodology (including a discussion of phenomenology) and conversation analysis (including a discussion of the interaction order). Following this, chapters 4 to 8 will discuss specific concerns for all three of these traditions.

In chapter 1, we introduce the sociological perspective known as symbolic interactionism, formulated theoretically by Herbert Blumer and empirically by Everett C. Hughes (and their students). We show how it developed from studies undertaken at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and how it moved beyond these studies’ ethnographic and biographical approaches to create a distinctively interactionist theoretical position and a set of research policies congruent with that theory. We also explain how the philosophical position known as pragmatism – based on the writings of, among others, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead – informed these developments and provided a consistent epistemological basis for the position. The methodological implications of the symbolic interactionist perspective are outlined, in particular its emphasis on fieldwork as a research tool. Finally, some criticisms – both ‘internal’ ones, and those of other interactionists – of the approach are outlined.

Chapter 2 traces ethnomethodology’s roots in phenomenology. Sociology’s appropriation of phenomenology owes much to Alfred Schutz. He showed how the specialist philosophical approach that Husserl developed was of direct relevance to Max Weber’s advocacy of a sociology that was interpretive in scope – i.e., that addressed the meaningful character of social action as its centre piece. Schutz’s constructive critique showed how Weber’s interpretive sociology underestimated the scope and importance of the common-sense cultural knowledge that social actors use in the course of their everyday actions. Yet it remained an essentially philosophical approach to common-sense knowledge and ordinary action. It was Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology that succeeded in transforming Schutz’s philosophical approach into an empirical programme for the investigation of knowledge and social action. On the way, Garfinkel showed how Schutz’s ideas helped to remedy the omissions and shortcomings of the once-influential account of social action offered by his teacher, Talcott Parsons. The chapter charts this episode in the intellectual history, highlighting how these developments led to an analytical understanding of social competence and human action. Garfinkel offered a radically different account of what it meant to be a social being (a ‘member’ of society), and how members orientated to and recreated social rules. The chapter concludes with demonstrations of how this new understanding has been put into productive practice in studies of mental illness, rule-following and professional vision.

In chapter 3, we examine the interactionist approach to understanding everyday life known as conversation analysis. As in the two previous chapters, we begin this chapter with an outline of some philosophical ideas whose sociological appropriation proved highly consequential, including the ordinary language philosophy encouraged by the thought of the later Wittgenstein, which gave a new significance to the use of everyday language in the context in which it operated. We then move on to consider in some detail the work of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and others who pointed to fundamental sequential and organizational features of naturally occurring conversation that both underpin interactional orderliness and invoke, imply, allow persons to infer, and impact on social and personal...